Exploring the Relationship Between a ‘Facebook Group’ and Face-to-Face Interactions in ‘Weak-Tie’ Residential Communities

Using Facebook Groups to connect otherwise anonymous people that live in a single urban development is a relatively new phenomenon. Within residential developments there are a number of common management and performance issues experienced by many isolated inhabitants that are identified through building performance evaluation studies. Facebook is a ubiquitous social network tool and powerful communication platform, particularly popular among young adults. This paper explores the use of Facebook in relation to management and performance issues in two cases of Facebook Group usage within residential communities in the UK. Data was collected through longitudinal digital and physical visits to the residential communities and to the Facebook Group sites. Findings are presented in relation to home learning, site/neighbourhood and self-organising initiatives. We propose that weak-tie residential communities can develop collective efficacy and work together for the overall good of the residential development through communicating on a Facebook Group. This helps to improve the physical environment, facilitating further collective action. There is a clear overlap between social media narrative and the physical experience of daily life, which can help to empower residents

The Size Conundrum: Why Online Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale

In this paper, we interpret the community question answering websites on the StackExchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. A knowledge market framing allows site operators to reason about market failures, and to design policies to prevent them. Our goal is to provide insights on large-scale knowledge market failures through an interpretable model. We explore a set of interpretable economic production models on a large empirical dataset to analyze the dynamics of content generation in knowledge markets. Amongst these, the Cobb-Douglas model best explains empirical data and provides an intuitive explanation for content generation through concepts of elasticity and diminishing returns. Content generation depends on user participation and also on how specific types of content (e.g. answers) depends on other types (e.g. questions). We show that these factors of content generation have constant elasticity---a percentage increase in any of the inputs leads to a constant percentage increase in the output. Furthermore, markets exhibit diminishing returns---the marginal output decreases as the input is incrementally increased. Knowledge markets also vary on their returns to scale---the increase in output resulting from a proportionate increase in all inputs. Importantly, many knowledge markets exhibit diseconomies of scale---measures of market health (e.g., the percentage of questions with an accepted answer) decrease as a function of number of participants. The implications of our work are two-fold: site operators ought to design incentives as a function of system size (number of participants); the market lens should shed insight into complex dependencies amongst different content types and participant actions in general social networks.Comment: The 27th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 201

Are All Successful Communities Alike? Characterizing and Predicting the Success of Online Communities

The proliferation of online communities has created exciting opportunities to study the mechanisms that explain group success. While a growing body of research investigates community success through a single measure -- typically, the number of members -- we argue that there are multiple ways of measuring success. Here, we present a systematic study to understand the relations between these success definitions and test how well they can be predicted based on community properties and behaviors from the earliest period of a community's lifetime. We identify four success measures that are desirable for most communities: (i) growth in the number of members; (ii) retention of members; (iii) long term survival of the community; and (iv) volume of activities within the community. Surprisingly, we find that our measures do not exhibit very high correlations, suggesting that they capture different types of success. Additionally, we find that different success measures are predicted by different attributes of online communities, suggesting that success can be achieved through different behaviors. Our work sheds light on the basic understanding of what success represents in online communities and what predicts it. Our results suggest that success is multi-faceted and cannot be measured nor predicted by a single measurement. This insight has practical implications for the creation of new online communities and the design of platforms that facilitate such communities.Comment: To appear at The Web Conference 201

Exploring the efficacy of Facebook groups for collective occupant learning about using their homes

The need for quality learning about how to use a home has been an issue gradually emerging from building performance evaluation (BPE) studies carried out in occupied energy efficient homes (Brown & Cole, 2009; Day & Gunderson, 2014). The BPE gap between the internal environment control as intended by designers and the actual inhabitant practices is associated with unpredicted energy consumption and poor indoor air quality (Balvers et al., 2012). The key inhabitant related causes of the ‘performance gap’ are a discrepancy between user needs and design intentions, lack of user understanding and skills to interact with the available controls and insufficient maintenance. These findings indicate that modifying tacit home use practices, adjusting them to new, more technically advanced contexts, is still not sufficiently addressed by the current learning opportunities offered by the professional actors. This paper explores how self-organised closed Facebook Groups set up independently by the residents of two UK case study urban developments have become supportive environments for such learning

Anonymity Interacting with Participation on a Q&A site

International audienceThis article presents a study that investigates how anonymity influences user participation in an on-line question-and-answer platform (Quora 1). The study is one step in identifying hypotheses that can be used to address a research and design issue concerning the role of anonymity in online participation, particularly in sensitive situations where people are seeking social support. Based on the literature, we present a model that describes the factors that influence participation. These factors were used when analyzing the answers to questions in the health category on Quora. The results of this study were completed by a survey asking Quora users about their use of the anonymity feature. The main result is that the only significant difference between anonymous and non-anonymous answers is that: with anonymous answers, social appreciation correlated with the an-swer's length

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationAccording to the Office of Rare Diseases Research (ORDR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), rare diseases affect more than 25 million Americans. The scarcity of information, poor prognosis, and lack of viable treatment options for many conditions causes significant anxiety for rare disease patients and their families. Increasingly, rare disease populations are going online to acquire the support necessary to cope with their health challenges. This dissertation builds upon earlier work by answering a question left largely unaddressed to date: what roles do social support and online support environments play for patients affected by rare disease? This dissertation follows the three article format. In the first article, the author provides a review of important literature from three main areas of research; social support, online support groups/social media, and rare disease. The author also discusses implications of computerized health care services for the field of health promotion and education. In the second article, the author reports the results of a recent study in which a conventional approach to qualitative content analysis was utilized to characterize the followers, focus, founders and formation of sarcoma related Facebook groups. Three different coding schemes for classifying online support groups were identified: group focus or orientation (person vs. population), founder treatment status (patient or nonpatient) and founder disease affiliation status (active treatment, survivor, in memoriam, or external organization). This study suggests that Facebook groups provide a mechanism not only for identifying disease specific groups, but also for facilitating connections between individuals with similar backgrounds or states of disease progression. The third article reports the results of an additional qualitative study examining the online social support experiences of patients in active treatment for Osteosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Evidence of seven distinct types of social support were observed: appraisal, emotional, informational, spiritual, esteem, network and tangible. This study suggests that appraisal and spiritual support may play a bigger role in online support communities than has been previously suggested. It is hoped that this dissertation will serve as a call to action for other researchers. Additional research is needed to adequately address and understand the needs of those affected by rare disease

Playing for Real: Designing Alternate Reality Games in Learning Contexts

Alternate Reality Game (ARG) represent a new genre of transmedia practice where players hunt for scattered clues, make sense of disparate information, and solve puzzles to advance an ever-evolving storyline. Players participate in ARGs using multiple communications technologies, ranging from print materials to mobile devices. However, many interaction design challenges must be addressed to weave these everyday communication tools together into an immersive, participatory experience. Transmedia design is not an everyday process. Designers must create and connect story bits across multiple media (video, audio, text) and multiple platforms (phones, computers, physical spaces). Furthermore, they must engage with players of varying skill levels. Few studies to-date have explored the design process of ARGs in learning contexts. Fewer still have focused on challenges involved in designing for youth (13-17 years old). In this study, I explore the process of designing ARGs as vehicles for promoting information literacy and participatory culture for adolescents (13-17 years old). Two ARG design scenarios, distinguished by target learning environment (formal and informal context) and target audience (adolescents), comprise the two cases that I examine. Through my analysis of these two design cases, I articulate several unique challenges faced by designers who create interactive, transmedia stories for – and with – youth. Drawing from these design challenges, I derive a repertoire of design strategies that future designers and researchers may use to create and implement ARGs for teens in learning contexts. In particular, I propose a narrative design framework that allows for the categorization of ARGs as storytelling constructs that lie along a continuum of participation and interaction. The framework can serve as an analytic tool for researchers and a guide for designers. In addition, I establish a framework of social roles that designers may employ to craft transmedia narratives before live launch and to promote and scaffold player participation after play begins. Overall, the contributions of my study include theoretical insights that may advance our understanding of narrative design and analysis as well as more practical design implications for designers and practitioners seeking to incorporate transmedia features into learning experiences that target youth

Modeling the successes and failures of content-based platforms

Online platforms, such as Quora, Reddit, and Stack Exchange, provide substantial value to society through their original content. Content from these platforms informs many spheres of life—software development, finance, and academic research, among many others. Motivated by their content's powerful applications, we refer to these platforms as content-based platforms and study their successes and failures. The most common avenue of studying online platforms' successes and failures is to examine user growth. However, growth can be misleading. While many platforms initially attract a massive user base, a large fraction later exhibit post-growth failures. For example, despite their enormous growth, content-based platforms like Stack Exchange and Reddit have struggled with retaining users and generating high-quality content. Motivated by these post-growth failures, we ask: when are content-based platforms sustainable? This thesis aims to develop explanatory models that can shed light on the long-term successes and failures of content-based platforms. To this end, we conduct a series of large-scale empirical studies by developing explanatory and causal models. In the first study, we analyze the community question answering websites in Stack Exchange through the economic lens of a "market". We discover a curious phenomenon: in many Stack Exchange sites, platform success measures, such as the percentage of the answered questions, decline with an increase in the number of users. In the second study, we identify the causal factors that contribute to this decline. Specifically, we show that impression signals such as contributing user's reputation, aggregate vote thus far, and position of content significantly affect the votes on content in Stack Exchange sites. These unintended effects are known as voter biases, which in turn affect the future participation of users. In the third study, we develop a methodology for reasoning about alternative voting norms, specifically how they impact user retention. We show that if the Stack Exchange community members had voted based upon content-based criteria, such as length, readability, objectivity, and polarity, the platform would have attained higher user retention. In the fourth study, we examine the effect of user roles on the health of content-based platforms. We reveal that the composition of Stack Exchange communities (based on user roles) varies across topical categories. Further, these communities exhibit statistically significant differences in health metrics. Altogether, this thesis offers some fresh insights into understanding the successes and failures of content-based platforms

Modeling Sustainability of Participatory Information Systems for Urban Communities: A Mixed-Method Approach

In the face of the growing challenge of low civic participation, various technology-based endeav- ors, such as hyper-local social media and open government initiatives, have emerged to facilitate citizens’ involvement with their local communities. However, evidence-based guidelines about how to start and maintain viable information systems for urban communities are scarce and in- conclusive. My dissertation aims to identify factors that affect the sustainability of these systems by conducting a mixed-method empirical investigation of the E-Democracy platform, a pioneer platforms of its kind. With this goal, I proposed a framework to model the influence of offline characteristics of the target urban communities, system design, and residents’ online behaviors on the sustainability of participatory information systems for urban communities. Guided by this framework, I conducted analyses of urban communities’ public data; longitudinal studies, con- tent classification and social network analysis of archival data of the system; and a cross-sectional study of user surveys. The results indicate that (1) certain community characteristics, such as neighborhood instability, play a crucial role in the sustainability of these information systems, (2) both on-site and off-site communication among residents is key for the systems to have an impact on community involvement, and (3) particular design decisions can foster participation of under- represented populations. My work bridges the gap between research on social computing and community informatics by providing a framework to analyze the sustainability of participatory in- formation systems for urban communities. The findings have implications for information experts and technology developers seeking to study or design technologies for local communities