Share and enjoy - Patterns for Successful Knowledge Sharing in Large Online Communities

Many online community sites have been created in recent years to better harness the information sharing power of the Internet, calling on community members to provide both content and commentary. Unfortunately, relatively few have prospered in the nebulous web environment. Some communities lacked momentum and could not draw in enough members. Perhaps more tragically, however, many were unable to maintain their community environment once initial success brought flocks of new members from all corners of the web. This paper provides a small collection of patterns on how to implement community design that better supports optimal collaboration, cohesiveness, and enjoyment in large, collaborative online communities. Introduction “I am doing it ‘cause I wanted an online community that does not suck” Rusty of Kuro5hin.org Online collaborative community sites propagate useful information to a community, and usually provide space for discussion of related issues. These communities depend on members to collect relevant information, and to present it to others in a readable form. A prime example of such a community is Slashdot.org, where users submit and comment on technology news items. When these communities become large, however, the increasing number and variety of members and member contributions can create problems. Without controlling measures, certain users can disrupt the smooth running of the community: by wasting time and space with irrelevant contributions; by misleading others with misinformation; and/or by degrading the community environment with overly emotional or contentious content. Another issue is the sheer amount of information available to users. To avoid information overload and promote readability, the community needs to decide what information should be displayed and how. In addition, large online communities are trying to foster a community based on sharing and trust in the transient web environment. The patterns in this paper propose software features that will facilitate successful online communities, and help manage scale and quality issues. In order to develop and sustain themselves, collaborative online communities need to encourage members to become involved and contribute to the community in useful ways. They need to provide useful resources and ways for users to easily access the resources they are interested in. Finally, as places where members want to connect intellectually and often socially with others, online communities need to provide a safe and enjoyable interaction environment. Since virtual environments strongly influence community development by controlling what actions can and cannot be taken, the needs of the community should be carefully considered when creating software to support social and collaborative interaction. Our patterns identify common problems and known solutions to issues dealt with in the development and organization of self-sustaining online communities. Social and technical issues are inexplicably entwined in online communities (Shirky, 2003). Our patterns aim to help reduce the social-technical gap (Whitworth, 2004); the difference between social needs or expectations and the capability of the software system that is present in many online communities today The patterns were identified by studying the tactics of long-standing and successful communities. The underlying context for all the patterns will be online collaborative communities with relatively open membership, and where the community depends on members or visitors for some or all of its content. Note that rather than focusing on individuals and interpersonal relationships as in related pattern collections (e.g. Schümmer, 2004), the patterns in this paper focus on long-term sustainability of a community as a whole. Pattern Summary My Way or the Highway allows members to customize their view of community information. Community Watch regulates the community using member feedback. Hot or Not displays whether information is considered good or useful by members of the community. Valued Member encourages members who add value to the community by visibly enhancing their status. A Community of Individuals encourages the creation and long term use of a community identity. Forces The key forces involved are as follows: Time: time, or lack thereof, is integral to the running of any collaborative online community. Community creators or leaders don’t have the time to personally regulate all members or member contributions, and most members don’t have time to sift through useless information to find what they need. Patterns that resolve this force will help reduce the amount of time individuals spend both regulating the community and utilizing community resources. Quality: the quality of the members of the community, as well as the quality of their contributions, will dictate the success of the community. Patterns that resolve this issue will attract and cultivate quality members who add value to the community, and will encourage high quality contributions. Scale: communities change in nature as they become larger or smaller in member size or amount of information. Patterns that resolve this force will: help better organize community resources; distribute the work of running the community among members; and provide ways for communities to deal with more variability in member capabilities and goals. Motivation: members need to be motivated to contribute to a better community environment. This motivation relies on things such as identification with the community, enjoyment in participating in the community, and/or the usefulness of the community to members. Patterns that resolve this force will increase member motivation to actively participate in and add value to the community. Diversity: the World Wide Web is traversed by a hugely diverse population of individuals, each with different interests, opinions, goals, needs, and talents. Patterns that resolve this force will provide ways to avoid conflict, maintain community goals, and provide useful resources to users in the face of this diversity. Optimal patterns will capitalize on member differences. Transience: while there will likely be a stable group of core community members, online communities deal with many new or casual users on a regular basis. Patterns that resolve this force will help online communities deal with shifting membership and help cultivate long term members. Freedom: the actions of community members within the software environment can be restricted to varying degrees. Allowing more freedom increases the chance of actions that will harm the community, while decreasing freedom can stifle member enjoyment, innovation, and creativity. Patterns that resolve this force will provide structure to the community without unnecessarily restricting members. Sense of Community: this refers to a social environment that members can feel a part of. Patterns that resolve this force will increase the sense of community felt by members so that they are willing to invest their time and effort into the community. Community Goals and Culture: the importance of each of the other forces will be ultimately influenced by the nature of each community, comprised of the communities own vision, goals, rules of operation, and member base. The underlying community goals and culture define what is “good”, “useful,” and “valuable” for each specific community. Pattern: My Way or the Highway Intent: Allow members to customize their view of community information. Context: An online community with a lot of content, and many members with diverse needs and abilities. Problem: A single view of community content may not suffice for a broad base of users with a variety of differing needs, interests, and time constraints. Forces: Individual members of a community have a variety of different needs and interests. One person’s trash may be another person’s treasure (diversity, quality). Large numbers of contributions will result in information overload for members, meaning they will be less likely to find what they need within the community (scale, motivation). Some members have limited time to browse community contributions, while others have a lot of time to browse community contributions (time). Therefore: Provide ways for members to customize their views of community resources. The point of this pattern is to increase viewability and accessibility of community resources, catering to a range of user needs and interests. This will increase access to community content and member enjoyment, as well as member willingness to participate in the community. Customizable views allow members to more easily access information that is personally useful and interesting to them. Customization could involve simple personal choices regarding the colour or layout of the community user interface, or be available based on category, date, author, or some other piece of meta-information inherent in most community contributions. More complex customization would involve advanced information collected on community content, such as the ratings and moderations collected in Hot or Not and Community Watch. Resulting Context: A community where each member can access the information and resources that are optimally useful and relevant to their needs. This will save time and effort for members, and increase enjoyment and participation in the community. Implementation: In deciding what kind of customization will be most useful, consider your specific member base and community, and which choices will be the most important to them. The type of information that you have or collect on each contribution will determine what kind of customized views can be created. A simple number rating provides information on the perceived quality of a community resource, but you could collect more in depth information on whether members found the resource “Funny,” “Insightful,” or “Useful,” etc., allowing users to customize their view based on these categories. Be careful when designing custom views based on ratings that good resources are not inadvertently lost to the community because they are not being viewed. Customized views based on member ratings depend on the fact that at least some members will be viewing each contribution as it comes in, and that they will rate useful information highly to move it up the viewing chain. It is best to provide a specific area on the community site where the newest contributions always appear, and users with time on their hands can view and rate them as they come in. Known Uses: Slashdot.com: Slashdot allows users to customize their view of the community based on a “threshold,” or minimum score that a comment needs to have if it is to be displayed. Comments have a score ranging from -1 to 5 based on member input, and members can set their threshold at any score within that range. If they set their threshold at 3, only comments with a score of 3 or above appear in their view. Slashdot – viewing preferences Freshnews.org: Freshnews.org delivers tech news headlines from across the web. The site allows users to customize content based on user interface (colour theme), content (which sites headlines will appear on the page), and type of interactivity (do links appear in the parent window or a new window). Kuro5hin.org: Kuro5hin is a collaborative site featuring articles and commentary on technology and culture. The site allows detailed user customization of its interface, including choices about the appearance of text on the page, the position of page elements, and how categories of links will behave, and the default page when users enter the site. Kuro5hin interface preferences Related Patterns: This pattern requires members to login as suggested in A Community of Individuals Information collected in Hot or Not and Community Watch can be used to inform customization. One way of implementing customization is through the Attention Screen (Schümmer, 2004. The Public Privacy), in which users distinguish important information and less relevant information according to certain criteria in order to filter the information that reaches them. Pattern: Community Watch Intent: Regulate the community using member feedback. Context: A large online community with changing and active membership. There is a large amount of user provided content, and maintaining good community environment is important to members and to the running of the community. Problem: It’s difficult to maintain the quality of the community environment and resources in a large community. Forces: A significant portion of the membership of any open online community will be new or casual members. Newcomers to communities are often unaware of unwritten (or written) rules or cultural norms that help the community run smoothly, and users who are unconcerned with the goals and wellbeing of the community can have strong negative effects on the community (transience, diversity, quality). Unduly restricting membership or member actions can have negative effects on the community (freedom, sense of community). Members like to contribute to the community and to get feedback on their contributions (motivation, sense of community) It takes a lot of manpower to regulate or moderate large collaborative communities (time, scale). Therefore: Allow members of the community to provide feedback and help regulate the contributions and actions of others. The point of this pattern is to utilize the community member base to help organize community resources, and to restrict the negative effects of new or casual users – users who do not know how to create value in the community, or who do not have the community’s best interests at heart. This pattern is not meant to impose a totalitarian regulation force on the community, but rather provide necessary regulation to teach members what is and is not acceptable in the community, create a better environment for members to interact in, and encourage high quality contributions. Members of a community provide a large and often willing source of manpower to regulate others. Regulation can involve some kind of some kind of rating on a scale, or a +/ – choice that will add to or take away from an average score. Regulation of member contributions can help other users decide whether they want to view the contribution or not, and can effect things like where contributions appear on the site, or whether they are displayed at all. Member ratings or scores can occur through their association with the ratings of their contributions, or through other members rating them directly. Regulation can be useful in determining things like the base rating of future contributions from that member, or whether the member is given appreciation or rights within the community. Resulting Context: A community that regulates or runs itself from the bottom up. The resources provided on the site are of high quality, and new or casual members are minimally disruptive and can learn quickly from the feedback of other members. Content can be better organized and delivered to users based on member ratings. Implementation: The ability to rate others and therefore effect how they can interact or are perceived within the community is a power and a responsibility. Rating systems should be well thought out. The rating system itself can be based on a score that can be raised or lowered, a base score that can only increase, or some kind of qualitative rating such as a single descriptive word or full-fledged review. The type of rating used may have surprisingly significant effects on community dynamics. For example, if you use a rating scale that can only increase, then members will likely turn collecting rating points into a kind of a game, where the winner is the one with the most points. Another consideration is whether ratings are persistent or should degrade with time. Persistent ratings may mean that older information gets more consideration than it should, but ratings that reduce with time may be discourage members as the “value” or appreciation of their contribution fades away. Avoid allowing a small number of ratings to strongly effect regulation results. For example, if there are only 2 ratings, and both are negative, this doesn’t necessarily mean that that contribution will not be useful to other members of the community. In addition, there need to be measures to make sure that a small number of individuals can’t strongly influence regulation. You can do this by allowing only one rating per member, member interaction, or member contribution. Depending on the nature and dynamics of your community, you should also consider issues such as whether members can to change their ratings once they have been submitted. Some users may take advantage of a regulation system to forward personal, rather than community goals, or may not be qualified provide a proper or useful rating. A possible solution to this is to restrict rating capabilities to certain members of the community. For example, rating capabilities may be restricted to people who are longstanding members, or to people who have high ratings themselves. Known Uses: Slashdot.org: In Slashdot’s comment moderation system, members of the community who meet certain requirements are given a number of points of influence which they can use to moderate any comments on the site. Moderation involves selecting an adjective (e.g. 'Flamebait' or 'Insightful') from a drop down list. Negative words reduce the comments score by one point, while positive words increase the comments score by one point. Moderation scores affect whether comments are displayed to the community or not. Meta-moderation is then utilized by Slashdot, where selected users can moderate the moderations of other users. This meta-moderation effects user “karma,” which affects the initial rating of comments posted by each user as well as whether they will be eligible to moderate. Slashdot moderation is only available to long time members of the community who log on frequently to the site and who have good “karma” (based on contributions and moderations in the past). It’s interesting to note how the creators of Slashdot changed their measure of karma from a point system to a limited set of descriptive adjectives: "Terrible, Bad, Neutral, Positive, Good, and Excellent." The reason given was that users turned karma scores into a kind of a game in which the winner was the one with the most karma. In contrast, the creators wanted to emphasize that karma was simply a means to regulate their community. Kuro5hin.org: Beyond Slashdot’s member moderation of comments, Kuro5hin utilizes members of the community in editing and moderating the actual articles provided on the site. When members first submit an article to be displayed on the site it goes into the “edit queue.” In this queue, the article is viewed by members who can post comments and suggestions for improving the article. After 24 hours, or at the authors request, the article is then moved in to the “voting queue.” In this queue members of the community can vote to have the article posted on the front page, on the articles topic or section page, or not to have it posted at all. Once the votes for an article reach certain thresholds, the article is either dropped from the queue without being posted on the site, or posted on the page suggested by most members. Kuro5hin moderation choices Related Patterns Use to inform customization in My Way or the Highway. A Community of Individuals can be used to identify community members to regulate others. Hot or Not can be used as a regulation technique. Valued Member can be used to reward participation in regulation activities. Similar to Letter of Recommendation (Schümmer, 2004. Patterns for Building Communities), where users rate interactions with artifacts, and combined user ratings are displayed alongside the artifacts.