How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities
Publication Type  Conference Paper
Year of Publication  2005
Authors  Cosley, D.; Frankowski, D.; Kiesler, S.; Terveen, L.; Riedl, J.
Conference Name  Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Conference Location  Portland OR
Publisher  ACM
Abstract  Online communities (OLCs) are gatherings of like -minded people, brought together in cyberspace by shared interests. Creating such communities is not a big challenge; sustaining members' participation is. In this paper, we describe a technique for presenting members' photos and evaluate how it affects member participation in the community. We compare three different policies for presenting peer photos on the home page of the web site. Our results show that explicit requests in the form of simple and short messages on the home page of a community can induce participation. We show that we were able to motivate members to (a) log into the system to see photos of fellow members, and (b) upload their personal photos.
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