CAREER: Mental Models and Critical Mass: Shaping the Success of Online Communities

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

As new computing and communication technologies become mainstream, online communities are transforming journalism and other industries to support more interactive, community-driven work. This project will study how mental models of online communities are formed, how they shape expectations about the future of the community, how they co-evolve with the community over time, and how they aggregate to form a critical mass that is essential for successful work and community survival. In many such online communities, participation is voluntary: each person must look at the community, develop a mental model of what that community is, how it works, and what it means for them to join, and then make a decision about whether they want to participate. And then, as the community evolves and changes, they need to continually decide whether and how to participate. This research will triangulate three research methods to understand how individuals form mental models of online communities, and how mental models of multiple individuals interact and aggregate to form a larger community. First, it will use qualitative interviews to understand how individuals make sense of a new online community and how they make continuing participation decisions in communities they are already part of. Second, it will use a series of human subjects lab experiments to characterize how people form mental models of both the content available in an online community, and the other users of an online community. These experiments will also help to understand how a user's mental model helps her interpret the community's reactions to her participation. Finally, this project will use statistical analysis and formal mathematical modeling of existing online communities to understand how online communities grow over time and when people choose to leave online communities. Results of this research will be of general value in designing, managing, and participating in many kinds of online communities, as well as contributing to education in the information, cognitive, and social sciences. A unique, cross-disciplinary education program will be created that trains students to use this research to build special-purpose online communities. This program will include a joint class linking a School of Journalism with a department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. This class will form cross-disciplinary teams who spend the semester creating and growing an online community. This partnership will teach students to apply social science and computer science research for real-world applications, and work on collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams that include technical people, creative people, and topic experts. It represents a new type of education in journalism that will bring students into new, community-driven methods of doing journalism, based more on curating content and facilitating discussion than on original, unidirectional reporting.