It design for Amateur Communities Cristian Bogdan Stockholm 2003 Doctoral Dissertation Royal Institute of Technology Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science
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- 1.8.1.1Community networks
- 1.8.1.2Network communities
- 1.8.1.3Community visualisation, awareness and navigation
- 1.8.2CMC and communities
- 1.8.2.1Motivations for voluntary contribution
- 1.8.2.2Other research questions related to electronic communities
1.8Related work1.8.1HCI/CSCW and ‘community’The interests of CSCW in various understandings of ‘community’ mark a shift of the understandings of ‘cooperation’ and ‘work’ in CSCW as a research field. Whereas the early years of CSCW focused largely on cooperation at the ‘workplace’, which was usually understood as ‘group in industrial organization’ or ‘group in research laboratory’ (often the one of the researcher), since the mid-1990s CSCW conferences (e.g. 1996) included workshops on cooperation in CMC systems like MUDs, and “the explosion of participation in the Internet” (Mynatt et al. 1999) was indicated as an argument for paying more attention to what goes on outside the ‘nine-to-five’ understanding of work and cooperation. This interest in HCI/CSCW fields concretised in two directions known as ‘community network’ and ‘network community’. These directions will be reviewed below, along with other alternatives that emerged. CSCW sometimes uses the term ‘non-work’ to denote ‘cooperation outside the workplace’ (e.g. Muramatsu and Ackerman 1998). Many such ‘non-work’ studies have been at pains emphasizing that their informants ‘do work’ (e.g. Mynatt et al. 1999 pp. 222). With its interest in voluntary work, this thesis will concur with these efforts of ‘promoting’ non-employed work in CSCW. Its approach to work was described in the Methods section. 1.8.1.1Community networksDoug Schuler is among the initiators of the “community network” movement (Schuler 1994, 1996), started from the alarming signs of decrease in social interaction and participation in American society (Putnam 1993). Networks built for inhabitants of certain geographical areas, mostly using Internet infrastructure, are seen as a “participatory” medium, as different from media that are less open to participation by society members (radio, TV, print). This medium is used to foster conviviality and culture, education, democracy, health, economic equity, opportunity and sustainability, information and communication in the respective geographical area. The network is thus an alternative to the “great good (public) place” (Oldenberg 1991), less and less apparent in the American life. The software at the basis of community networks is referred to as “public software” and later, in the dedicated CSCW conference workshops and tutorials (Schuler 1998), as “public CSCW”. The researcher is both a designer and a social activist, and many research considerations are followed by agenda for action. Participatory Design (reviewed in the Methods section) and techniques of strong user participation are recommended for the design of the public software. Experiences along the lines of community networks are described by Carroll, Rosson and their colleagues (1995, 1996, 2000). They are specifically looking at how participatory design was applied in one of their community projects (2000), discussing the learning process and evolution of the participants through various roles in design. Evaluation of community software is also on their agenda (Carroll and Rosson 2001).
Network communities are technologically-mediated, and techno-social constructs. Among their “affordances” are: persistence, periodicity, boundaries, engagement, and authoring. The questions studied by Mynatt et al. are related to the physical-virtual boundary negotiations, support for social rhythms, the emergence and development of community. They draw design implications for network communities based on their experiences with several such settings. O’Day and her colleagues (1996, 1998) augment the network community discussion by their description of participatory design experiences in a school-oriented MUD where “distinctions between users, developers and designers are blurred”. They analyse the social-technical design circle given by their design experience and emphasize four aspects of the social-technical interdependence: relying on a social practice to simplify technical implementation, designing technical mechanisms to achieve a social objective, similar tools with different social effects, co-evolutions of social and technical mechanisms. They conclude that designers should not attempt local optimisations, but “balance” the whole socio-technical system. Like many other authors (e.g. Kollock 1996, Andrews 2002, Goodwin 1994) some Network Community proponents are oriented towards designing online communities (e.g. Mynatt et al. 1998 view Network Community as “a goal for design”), rather than studying activity within and designing for existing communities, as in this thesis and in e.g. O’Day et al. (1996). 1.8.1.3Community visualisation, awareness and navigationErickson (1997) observes that “virtual community” has been applied to a large variety of systems: synchronous chat systems (IRC) asynchronous conferencing systems, usenet news, MUDs and MOOs, etc. He argues that the framework of community offers little guidance to the interested researchers. Instead, he proposes “genre”, a notion that is not so much focused on the nature and degree of relationship among community members, but on the purpose of communication, its regularities of form and substance, and the institutional, social and technological forces underlying these regularities. As an application of this concept, Erickson and colleagues (e.g. 2002) present a tool based on “Social translucence”, which makes “collective activity visible”. Other tools for visualising presence and supporting navigation in large online communities are presented by Donath (2002) and Smith (2002). 1.8.2CMC and communitiesAlthough most the questions addressed by research on Computer Mediated Communication in various disciplines are not directly related to the objectives stated here, it is important to mention research of CMC systems conducted within various disciplines for reasons of historical precedent in areas such as “online communication” and “virtual community”. Hiltz and Turroff (1978) were CMC experts long before CMC gained wide prominence, and could foresee its future spreading in The Network Nation. While they later writings (1993) characterized their early predictions as over-optimistic, their work can be read as suggesting the emergence of yet another set of ‘spanning technologies’ that would enable daily community life. Rheingold (1993) provides a widely-cited participant observer account of life in the CMC-based community called “WELL”, suggesting, for the first time, a community based almost exclusively on CMC; “the virtual community”. Rheingold reviews successful CMC systems, along with the military research, grassroots movements and other historical accidents that lead to milestone CMC developments such as computer conferencing (technical infrastructure of the WELL), usenet (known today as “news”), Arpanet (the precursor of Internet), BBS (bulletin board system), IRC (Internet relay chat), MUD (multi-user dungeons, see also e.g. Curtis 1992), and even the French Minitel, which provided widely-used Internet-like services like chat over France Telecom phone lines well ahead of the Internet gaining prominence. Among the CMC systems mentioned, MUDs attracted a large part of research. Taking MUDs out of their original gaming realm and transforming them into learning places and otherwise putting them to use in real-world activities (Bruckman 1998, O’Day et al. 1998) are efforts worth mentioning in our voluntary-work-oriented context.
In his parallel between the virtual and the traditional rural community, Rheingold (1993) talks about “barn raising” when referring to collective action taken by the members of communities such as buying a new server for the WELL (page 27). He also wonders what makes the members contribute to such activities, and what makes them contribute responses to everyday requests for information, which, suggesting an answer, he calls “horse trading” in a “social contract” based on reciprocity: if one member contributes good answers or posts interesting information, an eventual question asked by the member will be replied with similar quality. Rheingold thus views voluntary online cooperation as a “gift economy”, where the reciprocity characteristic for any market takes a form of building something “between” members, rather than a calculated “quid pro quo” (page 59). Kollock (1999) takes Rheingold’s thoughts further. Kollock starts by wondering why e.g. professionals contribute ideas in online conferences with peers when they could charge high fees for such contributions on the consulting market. Kollock works against the framework of “social dilemmas” illustrated e.g. by cooperation theories like Axelrod’s (1984). The dilemma comes from possibility that “free riders” or “lurkers” use the contributions of others without ever contributing themselves. The social dilemma comes from the fact that if everyone tends to free ride, there are no more contributions, and no more community. In what Kollock calls “the economies of online cooperation” he uses the term “public good” to denote what is built “between” the community members. He argues that the costs of producing public goods are lower in digital media due to sending being quasi-free, while the benefits are higher due to having a large number of recipients, thus “digital goods” are a privileged sort of public goods. Kollock later illustrates such a digital good with the example of the “impossible public good”: the Linux operating system, which today rivals commercial products. Linux is developed and distributed for free by a community of programmers since 1991. Kollock exemplifies the temptations to free-ride by using Linux without contributing to it. When it comes to motivations to contribute to the public good, Kollock enumerates several motivation components: (i) the likelihood of meeting in the future (drawing from Axelrod’s theory of cooperation) resulting from well-defined community boundaries (drawing from Ostrom, 1990), (ii) the effect that a good contribution has on personal reputation, (iii) a sense of efficacy, of positively affecting one’s environment (drawing from Bandura 1995) (iv) that the group or another person has a need for the contribution, i.e. altruism of the contributor, which is thought to be very rare (Kollock gives an example from Rheingold where programmers contribute software to the WELL after the need for the software was discussed) and (v) the attachment that the member has towards the group (“individual and collective outcomes are merged and there is no social dilemma”). He emphasizes his belief that literal altruists are extremely rare cases, hence his whole list of voluntary motivation components can be read as an alternative to an altruism-based explanation. In related research, this time focused on usenet cooperation, also framed by “prisoner dilemma” and “tragedy of the commons” theories, Kollock and Smith (1996) conclude that it is “amazing” that the Usenet works at all. Conclusions drawn by Smith and Kollock are discussed by Nonnecke and Preece (2000) after a demographic study of lurkers in email distribution lists. One of their conclusions is that in high-membership mailing lists, abstaining from contribution (posting) is a matter of sparing resources (e.g. the time and attention of the readers). They assert that “a resource-constrained model (like the model used by Smith and Kollock) may not apply to online groups”. 1.8.2.2Other research questions related to electronic communitiesA large part of the CMC research is only tangentially related to the communities based on voluntary work that this thesis will be focused on. This is mostly due to a predominant interest in “immersion” into a “cyberspace-like” system based on a “consensual hallucination” (Gibson 1984) that takes participants away from the real world, into a virtual world where game-playing and experimentation with alternate identities are the norm. While such issues may present novel questions to psychology and sociology, this thesis is interested in voluntary work taking place in the real world, and the support that IT systems including CMC can provide for it. CMC systems captured the attention of psychologists (like Rheingold himself) and sociologists. Perhaps the best-known psychological investigations of online behaviour are the works of Turkle (1984, 1995). The issue of “alternate identities” (see also Rheingold 1993, chapter 5) is among the favourite questions of CMC-interested psychologists. While defining and maintaining more identities, some CMC users are deceiving others about their real identity including e.g. their real gender. Also important, and related, is the amount of time spent by the CMC enthusiasts in interacting with others over CMC systems, leading to a “digital life”, also referred to as “boundary crossing behaviour”. Issues of on-line ethnic and gender “identity and deception” are also addressed by the sociological studies of CMC, of which representative examples can be found in the collection by Smith and Kollock (1999). Other questions addressed are power (social order and control), social structure and dynamics, and collective action took by members of computer-mediated communities.
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