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Oksana

Derek's Blog: Participation Online - the Four Cs - 0 views

blog.core-ed.net/...icipation_online_the_four.html

participation the_four_cs

shared by Oksana on 21 Sep 07 - Cached
  • ways in which people participate in online communities
  • In particular
  • the different phases people seem to go through
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • My diagram attempts to illustrate how many participants in the online environment move through phases as they gain understanding and confidence.
  • consumer - The first phase is where participants (often referred to as lurkers) simply read and explore the posts of others. Far from being passive as the word lurker suggests, consumers can be very active participants in an online community - just not yet visible to others.
  • commentor - as this label suggests, these people make comments on others posts (either on blogs, or in discussion forums), often seeking clarification, agreeing with a statement, or offering a suggestion or link to something similar.
  • contributor - as this label suggests, contributors are those who have started their own blogs or who initiate new threads on discussion forums. They are confident about putting forth their own ideas etc.
  • commentator - a commentator is someone who frequently takes a 'meta' view of what is going on, providing a level of leadership within the community. Their contributions will often draw attention to the 'bigger picture', making links with other work - analysing and synthesising the contributions of others.
  • it's not intended to suggest that people will operate exclusively within one of these phases - there's plenty of evidence to suggest that contributors also post comments on other people's blogs etc.
  • attempt to illustrate the fact that most people appear to operate predominantly in one or other of the phases in their journey to becoming online citizens, and that there is some sort of progression that characterises this growth.
Oksana

The Lifecycle of Online Community Members « Scott Burkett's Pothole on the In... - 0 views

www.scottburkett.com/...-online-community-members.html

diagram participation

shared by Oksana on 22 Sep 07 - Cached
  • It is important to point out that the success or failure of an online community is usually determined by only a small percentage of the site’s audience. This loosely follows in the tradition of Vilfredo Pareto’s so-called 80/20 rule (also called the Pareto Principle). A study performed by Arthur Andersen found that only 5 percent to 15 percent of all members contributed frequently to the communities they visited. While there are always exceptions to this, the community-owner should strive to support those frequent contributors. This is the fast-track to expanding a membership base. Using the above diagram, you can see the evolution from passers-by all the way through to evangelists. The typical member starts off in the passer-by/stranger quadrant, then moves over to lurker status once they start having repeated visits to the community. Once a lurker comes “out” of the shadows and begins participating they enter into the participant quadrant. This is where they are both showing up and participating. By the time a member reaches the “evangelist” quadrant, they are quite adamant in their support of your community - even fanatical at times. This is a good thing.
  • Why did we experience such a dramatic jump in the 4th and 5th years? That’s how long it took for us to convert enough lurkers to participants, and enough participants to evangelists.
  • Once you hit a critical mass of participants, a certain number of those folks will become evangelists for your community, and will go to some pretty unbelievable extremes to promote it. These evangelists represent that aforementioned small minority that will effectively make or break your community.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • If you build it, they will come?
  • If you build it, they will not necessarily come.
  • Many communities fall by the wayside and close up shop because of this very reason.
  • If you build it, and promote it, they will come, at least once. It is then up to you to give them a positive impression of your community through your content, tools, presentation, and policies. It is of vital importance that these areas be addressed early and often if you want to maximize your ability to attract and retain members, and subsequently, participation.
  • important to understand a bit about the lifecycle of a community
  • When someone first discovers your online community, they are probably nothing more than curiosity seekers.
  • They may take a look around, and if they see enough value there for a possible future visit, they may possibly bookmark it. Future visits will either solidify that value for them, or convince them that there are better places to spend their time.
  • If they decide to visit periodically, they become what we call “lurkers”. These lurkers will rarely, if ever, post or publish anything within the community. Instead, they are content to simply view the musings of other community members. These lurkers are most often seeking a certain type of information, and are content to simply read the opinions of other members.
  • Eventually, some of these “lurkers” may progress into being regular participants. However, do not be fooled into thinking that you will have a meteoric conversion rate. Historically speaking, online communities have always had many more “lurkers” than regular participants.
Oksana

cop21.jpg (JPEG-Grafik, 444x300 Pixel) - 0 views

tn20.com/...cop21.jpg

levels_of_participation participation

shared by Oksana on 21 Sep 07 - No Cached
  • Oksana on 21 Sep 07
     

Oksana

Mozilla Firefox - 0 views

www.helsinki.fi/...king.txt

virtual_community

shared by Oksana on 20 Sep 07 - Cached
  • Oksana on 20 Sep 07
     

Oksana

Managing the Virtual Commons: Kollock and Smith - 0 views

www.sscnet.ucla.edu/...vcommons.htm

free-rider lurking public_good

shared by Oksana on 19 Sep 07 - Cached
  • public goods
  • The temptation is to enjoy a public good without contributing to its production, but if all reach this decision, the good is never created and all suffer.
  • free-rider problem
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Whenever one person cannot be excluded from the benefits that others provide, each person is motivated not to contribute to the joint effort, but to free-ride on the efforts of others. If all participants choose to free-ride, the collective benefit will not be produced. The temptation to free-ride, however, may dominate the decision process and thus all will end up where no one wanted to be.
  • Overusing bandwidth is not the only social dilemma members of the Usenet face. Whatever the goal of the newsgroup, it's success depends on the active and ongoing contributions of those who choose to participate in it. If the goal of the newsgroup is to exchange information and answer questions about a particular topic (e.g., alt.comp.sys.gateway-2000), participants must be willing to answer questions raised by others, summarize and post replies to queries they have made themselves, and pass along information that is relevant to the group. If the goal of the newsgroup is to discuss a current event or social issue (e.g., soc.veterans), participants need to contribute to the discussion and to encourage its development. Once again there is the temptation to free-ride: asking question but not answering them; gathering information but not distributing it; or reading ongoing discussions without contributing to them (termed lurking). Some newsgroups successfully meet these challenges, others start well and then degrade, and still other newsgroups fail at the beginning of their existence, never managing to attract a critical mass of participants.
Oksana

Slashdot | Luring the Lurkers - 0 views

slashdot.org/...1745252.shtml

lurking

shared by Oksana on 18 Sep 07 - Cached
  • Lurkers are one of the Net's biggest disenfranchised groups, unseen or heard. Although there are many more Lurkers than posters by far on sites like this, they get almost none of the attention. This distorts agendas and skews perceptions. As newcomers come onto the Web in record numbers, Lurking is growing -- you should see my e-mail. So are the reasons for websites to take Lurkers more seriously and get them to come out.
  • A recent survey by a computer consulting firm in Chicago found that 98 per cent of the visitors to large sites with open forums - from AOL and MSN to sites like Slashdot - never submit ideas or articles and never post opinions or participate in arguments.
  • Sites like Slashdot should offer special welcome areas for Lurkers, newcomers and newbies, not to mention immigrants, the elderly, the technically challenged or the shy. I can testify from personal experience that there are hundreds of people on this site who would be happy to help if they were asked, and would warmly greet newcomers.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Established sites like the Well have long provided moderated areas where people can identify themselves, be welcomed, and ask questions about the site, and the different topics and discussion areas. There is no debate or arguments on welcome sites, simply the chance for people to say who they are, why they're here, and what they are interested in, and for the site - usually volunteers -- to help guide them.
  • One of the best things about the Web, as many Lurkers point out, is, in fact, one of the worst - a tolerance for open discussion that makes the Internet the freest culture in the world. For me, this is a fair trade-off.
Oksana

Invisible Participants: How Cultural Capital Relates to Lurking Behavior - 0 views

www2006.org/...p1018-soroka-xhtml.html

lurking

shared by Oksana on 11 Sep 07 - Cached
  • While participation in the activities of virtual communities is crucial for a community's survival and development, many people prefer lurking, that is passive attention over active participation.
  • This work investigates the concept of cultural capital as situational antecedent of lurking and de-lurking (the decision to start posting after a certain amount of lurking time).
  • Cultural capital is defined as the knowledge that enables an individual to interpret various cultural codes.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The main hypothesis states that a user's cultural capital affects her level of activity in a community and her decision to de-lurk and cease to exist in very active communities because of information overload.
  • The hypotheses verified here make it clear that fostering receptive participation may be as important and constructive as encouraging active contributions in online communities.
  • Lurking has been studied in the past [37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 62].
  • Identifying lurkers constitutes a difficult methodological problem: Lurkers do not leave visible traces. Even if lurkers can be identified, it is difficult to approach them directly, because their identity is often disguised. This is why lurking research is interesting and challenging.
  • The main goal of this research is to study the triggers to active participation
  • We built a framework for analyzing passive and active Internet behavior based on Social Capital Theory [47] and Cultural Capital Theory [8].
  • The Social Capital aspect of our research has been described elsewhere [51].
  • This paper concentrates on the Cultural Capital and its relation to the lurking phenomenon.
  • A somewhat deeper semantic examination reveals that the English verb "to lurk" usually means "lying in wait", often with malicious intent.
  • Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of the verb "lurk" offers an additional unexpected meaning - "to persist in staying" [38]
  • To summarize, lurking is an integral and normal part of Internet behavior. It may be perceived as negative and harmful or as positive and useful. However, lurkers are present en masse. Some report the level of lurking to be 50-60% [42, 62], while others estimate it at 90% [29, 37]. This fact alone is strong enough to make research on lurkers worthwhile. Accordingly, many researchers have noted that lurkers are a major part of the Web community and should be studied [29, 31, 52, 53, 63, 78].
  • Nonnecke [42], Nonnecke and Preece [43] and Preece et al. [45] interviewed several users and classified different reasons for lurking behavior. Only the most relevant and interesting to this study will be pointed out (selected in bold in the table), not necessarily in order of importance.
  • One often stated reason for lurking is to learn about the community
  • Kraut et al. [31] point out that silent observation is an important way for novices to learn about a new topic
  • Whittaker et al. [78] define lurking-as-surveillance as peripheral participation that continues until a topic of direct interest is spotted. Donath [14] proposes that people often try to find out about other participants from the content of their postings. Nonnecke and Preece [43] define learning about the community culture as a central lurker activity - 70% of the users they interviewed stated they lurked to get to know the group better.
  • Another reason for lurking that is of special interest to this project is a sense of belonging to a group.
  • This means that in the course of the ostensibly passive activities of watching other people talk and getting familiar with the content and style of the community people feel that they belong to the community. The sense of belonging to an online community has also been reported by Beaudouin and Velkovska [5].
  • Another frequent explanation of lurking is free-riding.
  • Free-riding is defined as a use of common good without contributing to it [11, 65]. As information is frequently considered a public good [50], lurkers can be perceived as free riders. Kollock and Smith [30], Wellman and Gulia [76] and Morris and Ogan [41] discuss lurkers as free riders, referring to non active participation
  • Nevertheless, free riding connotes negative activity.
  • Another reason for lurking is information overload [25, 26].
  • This observation is related to the cognitive abilities of people to digest huge amounts of information.
  • but they do have to deal with all the messages flying around. So it is not surprising that people find it hard to keep up with very busy communities and prefer lurking there and sometimes even dropping off entirely [42].
  • He concludes that the main reason for lurking is a violent atmosphere in computer forums, dominated by young and not so well-behaved people.
  • Finally, the last reason of interest is the reaction of the community to de-lurking. In his SlashDot.com article, Katz [29]
  • Nonnecke [42] also points out that the reaction of the community to de-lurking and flaming (violent Internet behavior, see [23]) are possible reasons for lurking.
  • Soroka et al. [62] found a clear correlation between a positive first posting experience and subsequent active participation in the community.
  • If the general atmosphere in the community is bad, the reaction to newcomers is non-welcoming or an attitude to user's subjects of interest is negative, people might choose to stay silent or drop off.
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