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Identifying experts is an important part of search quality in online community sites such as forums. A number of wordbased and structure features have been used for the task of expert finding. In this paper, we focus on hierarchical structures in online community sites: posts, threads and thread structures. Through empirical comparisons on two collections, we show that thread structures can be ...

In this paper we describe the ways participants of the Scratch online community, primarily young people, engage in remixing of each others’ shared animations, games, and interactive projects. In particular, we try to answer the following questions: How do users respond to remixing in a social media environment where remixing is explicitly permitted? What qualities of originators and their proje...

In the search for techniques that support participation in online communities, in this poster we present a visualization tool for a collaborative learning environment which aims at motivating students to engage in online discussions taking place during learning activities. Grounded on social comparison theory, we propose a graph-based visualization that shows communication patterns between user...

Professional development for distance tutors is traditionally delivered through texts or websites, supplemented by face to face workshops. However, one of the major challenges is to ensure that they engage with the materials and carry away something which is of value to their practice. At the Open University (UK) our 8000 tutors work from home, and have few opportunities to meet fellow tutors o...

“Trolls” individuals who engage in malicious behavior are a common occurrence within online communities. Yet simply banning accounts associated with trolls is often ineffective as individuals may register new accounts under pseudonyms and resume their activity. In this paper, we demonstrate how this can be addressed through a behavioral trace. Specifically, we show that by analyzing the posts o...

In this paper we argue that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality in online communities that support open collaboration. We build on foundational theoretical work in peer production to formulate and test a series of hypotheses suggesting that the generativity of creative works is associated with moderate complexity, prominent authors, and cumulativeness. We also formulate an...

Fuelled by increased interest among organisations to team up with customers and partners, software for supporting open innovation is emerging. In this paper, we explore how current open innovation software are designed, by whom they are used and reflect on their potential to support open innovation processes. We classified a sample of 51 systems and found, based on a correlation analysis, that ...

Although successful online communities have engaged thousands of users, designers still struggle to recruit newcomers and increase current contribution rates. Related work on encouraging contributions has drawn from Social Psychology, Sociology and Economics theories. Engagement mechanisms embed the principles of these theories, and experimental studies evaluate the impact of different mechanis...

Knowing which users are likely to churn (i.e. leave) a service enables service providers to offer retention incentives for users to remain. To date, the prediction of churners has been largely performed through the examination of users’ social network features; in order to see how churners and non-churners differ. In this paper we examine the social and lexical development of churners and non-c...