MoodBar: Increasing new user retention in Wikipedia through lightweight socialization

Socialization in online communities allows existing members to welcome and recruit newcomers, introduce them to community norms and practices, and sustain their early participation. However, socializing newcomers does not come for free: in large communities, socialization can result in a significant workload for mentors and is hard to scale. In this study we present results from an experiment that measured the effect of a lightweight socialization tool on the activity and retention of newly registered users attempting to edit for the first time Wikipedia. Wikipedia is struggling with the retention of newcomers and our results indicate that a mechanism to elicit lightweight feedback and to provide early mentoring to newcomers improves their chances of becoming long-term contributors.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for presentation at CSCW'1

Division of labour and sharing of knowledge for synchronous collaborative information retrieval

Synchronous collaborative information retrieval (SCIR) is concerned with supporting two or more users who search together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need. SCIR systems represent a paradigmatic shift in the way we view information retrieval, moving from an individual to a group process and as such the development of novel IR techniques is needed to support this. In this article we present what we believe are two key concepts for the development of effective SCIR namely division of labour (DoL) and sharing of knowledge (SoK). Together these concepts enable coordinated SCIR such that redundancy across group members is reduced whilst enabling each group member to benefit from the discoveries of their collaborators. In this article we outline techniques from state-of-the-art SCIR systems which support these two concepts, primarily through the provision of awareness widgets. We then outline some of our own work into system-mediated techniques for division of labour and sharing of knowledge in SCIR. Finally we conclude with a discussion on some possible future trends for these two coordination techniques

Fostering Cross-institutional Collaboration for Open Educational Resources Production

An editable version of this resource is available at http://open.umich.edu/education/med/oernetwork/reports/oer-collab-report/2010.Although there are over a quarter of a million open courses published by an increasing number of universities, it remains unclear whether Open Educational Resources (OER) is scalable and productively sustainable. The challenge is compounded when OER is examined in the light of its potential to allow both educators and learners in developing countries to contribute geographically bound learning resources in the context of varied infrastructural, technological and skill constraints. Between October and December 2009, 52 participants involved in various roles related to Health OER from five universities (one in the USA, two in Ghana and two in South Africa) were interviewed. The aim of the study was to investigate sustainability of OER based on possible cross-institutional collaboration as well as social and technical challenges in creating and sharing OER materials. The analytical framework was adopted from prior research in related areas: distributed scientific collaboration; cyber infrastructure; open source development; and Wikipedia. We adopted a qualitative approach for data collection, which included semi structured interviews and document analysis. The findings were analyzed and reported with many direct quotations included. The outcome of the data analysis is a model for productive, scalable, and sustainable OER based on cross-institutional collaboration. The report concludes with practical recommendations on how to the model can be operationalized.William and Flora Hewlett Foundationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94546/1/2010.12.08_oer_collaboration_report-final_0.pd

A Collaborative Writing Mode for Avoiding Blind Modifications

International audienceExisting collaborative environments such as Wiki or version control systems allow users to work in isolation, but they do not prevent blind modifications. For instance, users may concurrently perform the same task or they might work on obsolete versions of shared documents. We propose a novel writing mode for avoiding blind modifications by providing real-time information about group activities. Changes performed concurrently are filtered according to user privacy preferences and depicted in their local documents

Improving Textual Merge Result

International audienceIn asynchronous collaborative systems, merging is an essential component. It allows to reconcile modifications made concurrently as well as managing software change through branching. The collaborative system is in charge to propose a merge result that includes user's modifications. The users now have to check and adapt this result. The adaptation should be as effort-less as possible, otherwise, the users may get frustrated and will quit the collaboration. The objective of this paper is to improve the result quality of the textual merge tool that constitutes the default merge tool of distributed version control systems. The basic idea is to study the behavior of the concurrent modifications during merge procedure. We identified when the existing merge techniques under-perform, and we propose solutions to improve the quality of the merge. We finally compare with the traditional merge tool through a large corpus of collaborative editing

XWiki Concerto: A P2P Wiki System Supporting Disconnected Work

International audienceThis paper presents the XWiki Concerto system, the P2P version of the XWiki server. This system is based on replicating wiki pages on a network of wiki servers. The approach, based on the Woot algorithm, has been designed to be scalable, to support the dynamic aspect of P2P networks and network partitions. These characteristics make our system capable of supporting disconnected edition and sub-groups, making it very flexible and usable