Leveraging Micro Blogging to Build Trust by Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Pioneers in China

Similar to regions which undergo transformation from developing to developed economy, China has been facing various problems during the rapid urbanization process: loss of agricultural land, threatened food safety, and problems caused by migrant work force. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a possible solution to some of the problems. CSA is a sustainable agriculture model, and emphasizes partnership between farmers and members – citizens who are willing to become part of the farming community. In CSA model, members support the farm through advance payment or working on the farm and they share risks with farmers. In risk sharing, it is crucial to build trust between farmers and members. However, most members do not have enough information to evaluate farmers’ trustworthiness as they cannot visit farms frequently. Micro blogging technology offers farmers a new channel to communicate and interact with members. Since micro blogging platform is open, and various mobile devices make micro blogging convenient, farmers can easily keep members updated and address members’ problems timely. The embedded social networking feature also enables farmers to facilitate interactions among CSA members. In this study, we investigate how the CSA pioneers in China adopt micro bogging technology to engage their members and develop the CSA community. We analyze micro blog posts of the first CSA farm in China and we share our finding

HOW DO EXPLICITLY EXPRESSED EMOTIONS INFLUENCE INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION DISSEMINATION? A FIELD STUDY OF EMOJI’S EFFECTS ON COMMENTING AND RETWEETING ON A MICROBLOG PLATFORM

The proliferation of microblogs greatly facilitated interpersonal communication and information diffusion. Prior studies mainly examined effects of user and network characteristics on information diffusion. In this study, we examine how explicitly expressed emotions through emojis influence commenting and retweeting, two types of interactions enabled by microblogging platforms. While existent research largely focused on retweeting, we also take commenting into consideration. A distinction is made between commenting and retweeting, since commenting is more related to interpersonal communication, and retweeting is more related to information diffusion. Hypotheses are tested using data from a leading microblogging platform in China. The results show clear differences between emoji’s effects on commenting and retweeting. Overall speaking, messages with more emojis receive more comments but less retweets. Specifically, positive emojis increase the number of comments, but decrease the numbers of retweets. Similarly, negative emojis increase the number of comments, but decrease the numbers of retweets. Our findings suggest explicitly expressed emotions have different influences on interpersonal communication and information diffusion. Hence, the use of emojis in social media communication shall be catered in order to achieve desired effects

Attention Trade-off between Two Types of User Contributions: Effects of Pinterest-Style Infinite Scroll Layouts on Creating Original Sharing and Appreciating Others’ Sharing

User contributions are critical to social commerce sites. Prior studies mainly examined motivational factors influencing user contributions. In the current study, we examine effects of interface layouts on user contributions, from the perspective of attention allocation. We also distinguish between the two types of user contributions: creating original sharing and appreciating others’ sharing. Since attention is a limited resource, we argue that interface layouts may lead to attention trade-off between the two types of user contributions. Leveraging an opportunity of a popular social commerce site’s transformation to Pinterest-style infinite scrolling layouts, we collected panel data. Empirical findings show that the new layouts design has opposite effects on the two types of user contribution: a positive effect on users’ appreciation of others’ sharing, but a negative effect on users’ original sharing. Some user characteristics moderate the effects. The findings yield important implications for research and websites design practice

TRANSFORM FARMING WITH THE HELP OF SOCIAL MEDIA A PIONEERING CHINESE COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE (CSA) FARM AND ITS MICRO BLOG USA

This study explores the role of social media technology, especially micro blogging technology in the introduction of a new agricultural business model in China. As the rapid urbanization process brings challenges such as loss of agricultural land and food safety problems, some people try to address the challenges through transforming farming with a new business model, i.e. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The CSA model emphasizes risk sharing, and requires significant trust between farmers and consumers. Yet the general public lack awareness of the model when it was first introduced, and trust among each other is quite low in the general public. Social media tools, such as the micro blogging technology, are adopted by the young CSA farmers to develop public awareness of the CSA model and cultivate consumers’ trust toward the farm. Through content analysis of micro blog posts of the CSA pioneers in China, the study contributes to our understanding of the role of micro blogging technology in transforming farming and addressing complex societal problems

Technology Features, Empowering Perceptions, and Voicing Behavior on Microblog

Recently, we have observed rapid growth of individual daily technologies such as microblogs, and the technology’s influence on people’s social life. To investigate such self-determined technology usage, we choose an empowerment perspective as our theoretical lens, because the empowerment concept highlights human beings’ proactive nature. We investigate a specific microblog usage, i.e. publicly voicing personal views on social affairs, which is an initial yet fundamental step in citizen participation. The study reveals that microblog features have transformed the way social news disseminate, and hence influence information quality and users’ social network building. These changes further influence users’ empowerment perceptions through raising users’ perceptions of internal political self-efficacy, autonomy, meaning, and impact. The more empowered users are, the more likely users will voice on microblog. We integrate context into our theorizing, and the empowerment framework allow us to uncover the psychological mechanism through which microblog technology features enable voicing, a specific technology usage

Online Community Citizenship Behaviors (OCCB) and Community Sustainability: An Examination of Benefit Creating Behaviors in Online Communities

Online communities now reach various aspects of people’s work and life; and both practitioners and researchers have recognized their importance. However, among the tens of thousands of online communities, a considerable portion of them gradually become lifeless, with little ongoing conversation and few active members. Since online communities largely rely on members’ participations to generate benefits, it is important to identify the behaviors that contribute to community sustainability. Specifically, the research questions are: 1) Besides knowledge contribution, what are the behaviors contributing to online community sustainability? 2) What is the nature of these behaviors? How do they benefit communities? Comparing online communities with organizations and referring to Organization Citizenship Behaviors (OCB), we conceptualize the benefiting creation behaviors as Online Community Citizenship Behaviors (OCCB), which have the following characteristics: 3) Discretionary 4) Beyond personal needs gratification 5) Promote the effective functioning of the online community We then identify the dimensions of OCCB, viewing online communities as complicated social entities which people go to with various needs to be fulfilled. Previous IS research mainly focuses on people’s information needs and examine knowledge sharing. Referring to social psychology studies on human needs and small group interaction analysis, we highlight that people also have social emotional needs, and argue for the importance of social emotional support on community sustainability. Behaviors offering social emotional support contribute to community relationship building, help to attract new members, and attract posts asking for social emotional support. We also examine behaviors related with community norm development and maintenance, such as recognizing other’s contribution, discouraging inappropriate behaviors. These behaviors cultivate community reciprocity norm and a friendly social atmosphere. They create strong bonding among members, retain members, and encourage members to contribute. We also note community participants may leverage other Internet platforms, such as personal blogs, to promote the community. Specifically, members’ recommendations on other platforms may generate publicity for the community and help the community to attract new users, hence we include cross platform community promotion in OCCB. Overall speaking, how to make online community sustainable is a question of both practical and theoretical interest. We address this question through investigating the benefit creating behaviors, i.e. OCCB. The study goes beyond knowledge contribution, and highlights behaviors related with social emotional needs gratifying, group norms forming, and group publicity. We propose that OCCB have positive influence on membership size, attracting posts seeking knowledge and social support, and hence make the community more influential and sustainable in the topical area; and we suggest ways to help community develop sustainably

The Faster the Better? Innovation Speed and User Interest in Open Source Software

It is often believed that for open source software (OSS) projects the faster the release, the better for attracting user interest in the software. Whether this is true, however, is still open to question. There is considerable information asymmetry between OSS projects and potential users as project quality is unobservable to users. We suggest that innovation speed of OSS project can signal the unobservable project quality and attract users’ interest in downloading and using the software. We contextualize innovation speed of OSS projects as initial release speed and update speed and examine their impacts on user interest. Drawing on the signaling theory, we propose a signaling effect through which a higher initial release speed or update speed increases user interest, while the effect diminishes as initial release or update speed increases. Using a large-scale panel data set from 7442 OSS projects on SourceForge between 2007 and 2010, our results corroborate the inverted U-shaped relationships between initial release speed and user downloads and between update speed and user downloads

Detecting Beneficial Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems

Feature interactions are essential for achieving high accuracy in recommender systems. Many studies take into account the interaction between every pair of features. However, this is suboptimal because some feature interactions may not be that relevant to the recommendation result, and taking them into account may introduce noise and decrease recommendation accuracy. To make the best out of feature interactions, we propose a graph neural network approach to effectively model them, together with a novel technique to automatically detect those feature interactions that are beneficial in terms of recommendation accuracy. The automatic feature interaction detection is achieved via edge prediction with an L0 activation regularization. Our proposed model is proved to be effective through the information bottleneck principle and statistical interaction theory. Experimental results show that our model (i) outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, and (ii) automatically identifies beneficial feature interactions.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 5 table