Newcomer Retention and Productivity in Online Peer-Production Communities

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2018. Major: Computer Science. Advisor: Joseph Konstan. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 159 pages.Online communities are online interaction spaces for people that break the barriers of time, space, and scale and provide opportunities for companionship and social support, information exchange, retail, and entertainment. Among them are online peer production communities that have a fantastic business model where volunteers come together to produce content and drive traffic to these sites. Although as a class these communities are successful, the success of individual communities greatly varies. To become and remain successful, these communities must meet a number of challenges related to starting communities, retention of members, encouraging commitment, and contribution from their members, regulating the behavior of members and so on. This dissertation focuses on the specific challenge of newcomer retention and productivity in the context of online peer-production communities. Exploring three different communities with entirely different structures and compositions – MovieLens, GitHub, and Wikipedia and building upon prior work in this space, this dissertation offers a number of important predictors of retention and productivity of newcomers. First, this dissertation explores the value of early activity diversity in the presence of the amount of early activity as a predictor of newcomer retention. Second, this dissertation digs into more fundamental psychological traits of newcomers such as personality and presents findings on relationships between personality and newcomer retention, preferences, and productivity. Third, this dissertation explores and presents results on the relationship between community interactions (apart from norms, policies and rigid structures) and newcomer retention. Fourth, this dissertation studies and presents the effects of various kinds of prior experience of newcomers on retention and productivity in a new group they join. This dissertation concludes by offering a number of directions for future research

Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

The appraisal of Facebook online community: An exposition of mobile commerce in social media reviews

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Supporting Members of Online Communities Through the Use of Visualisations

Growing numbers of people around the world are using online communities to stay in touch with each other. Online communities are now widespread, enabling meaningful communication, around various domains of interest, between users who are separated by time and distance. Despite the increasing numbers of people using online communities, there are many examples of communities which suffer from problems of falling levels of contributions from members. This thesis investigates the main principles involved in creating successful online communities. It develops a taxonomy of community interactions that provides a framework for investigating techniques that have the potential to encourage member participation. Within standard text-based online communities, problems of information overload can be prevalent, with extensive user participation often required in order to get an overview of the interaction environment and context. This thesis proposes the use of facilitation techniques, in the form of visualisations, as a means of helping users get a better understanding of the interaction context, reducing the amount of time spent by users in the information-discovery phase. A range of new, complementary visualisations are developed and tested in order to assess their efficacy in helping users to complete tasks that they would be likely to undertake during their information-discovery phase. The results of the experiments show that not only do visualisations help users achieve more accurate results in conducting simple information-discovery tasks, but they also help in completing such tasks in a more efficient manner, shrinking the amount of time spent in the information-discovery phase. Different visualisations are also shown to be more useful in different circumstances, pointing to the fact that the needs and requirements of users, and the tasks they undertake, should be considered when designing the exact nature of any potential visualisation intended to support users of online communities

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Decision Making and Behavioral Strategy: The role of regulatory focus in corporate innovation processes

__Abstract__ This dissertation makes use of the behavioral strategy perspective in order to examine a number of constructs pertaining to innovation in corporate settings. In particular, the dissertation consists of four studies; one conceptual and three empirical. The conceptual paper introduces the regulatory focus theory and forms a linkage between an individual’s regulatory focus and motivation towards exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, by means of the Motivation-Ability-Opportunity (MAO) schema, this study also provides insight into the concepts moderating this relationship. The first empirical paper tests the relationship between an individual’s (i.e. manager’s) regulatory focus and activities of exploration and exploitation. Moreover, it takes an initial step in understanding the organizational and contextual antecedents of regulatory focus, and thus, of exploration and exploitation at the individual level. The second empirical study, examines the collective regulatory focus of a management team, and its effects on the exploratory innovation level of the organization unit. Moreover, it investigates three primary organizational coordination mechanisms (i.e. centralization, formalization and connectedness) as a mediator of this relationship. Finally, the last study addresses the gap regarding the lack of knowledge about the positive effects of prevention focus in organizational settings. All in all, the contributions and findings of this study have a number of implications for behavioral strategy theory and practice, and presents areas of future research