HCC: Informing Social Translucence with Open Composable Online Reputation Systems

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Large, distributed, user-contributed content sites like blogs, web forums, Slashdot and Wikipedia, have significantly changed the character of mass social interaction online. As individuals participate, their actions are visible to other participants. Examining the work of both preparing content and maintaining the community is key to understanding the nature of these systems. Social translucence is a conceptual framework for thinking about how social actions in an online community facilitate future social interaction. Reputation systems, systems that represent the reputation of participants in an online community, have been well studied in the domain of e-commerce. However, theoretical principles or guidelines to designing and developing generalized reputation systems have not emerged. The proposed research will answer four critical questions about the relationship between reputation systems and the existing framework of social translucence: How can social translucence frame the development of reflective social systems? What methods unpack the components of "reputation" to reflect the full range of valued activities in an online community? What technical methods effectively collect, mine or elicit data related to specific dimensions of an individual's reputation? How can systems be built that enable individuals to understand their reputation as it is collected and interpreted by other members of the community? Until recently developing a reputation system to elaborate the framework of social translucence was prohibitively difficult. But the accessibility of large community datasets, like that of Wikipedia, has mitigated one major stumbling block, the availability of data. Intellectual merit: The proposed research will extend social translucence as a framework for the design and development of social and collaborative systems. The ability of developers of distributed contributor communities to build reputation systems that can be appropriated by the community will be illustrated through the use of social translucence. Lastly, these results will develop a situated model of reputation in distributed contributor communities - one that sees a majority of online work activity as part of a community member's reputation. Broader impacts: The primary contribution will be an improvement in the interaction, contribution and sense-making of the ever growing diversity of distributed contributors to online communities. As more people participate in online communities, the level of interaction and trust is limited by the amount of information that participants have about one another. Effectively supporting these communities is an important challenge of social computing. The proposed approach puts socially translucent tools in the hands of the community - those who are in the best position to create, reflect, debate and refine socially translucent representations of behavior.