Global Redirective Practices: an online workshop for a client

- Designing a redirective workshop for redirective designers.

i561 - Team 2. Adam Williams, Eugene Chang, Kshitiz Anand, Sean Connolly

From the highest perspective, in the grandest terms, our client asked us to design an online workshop for his new course - and new discipline - of global redirective practices.

Big Picture

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chelmsfordpubliclibrary/2210233729/

The workshop to be designed, should be “an electronic facility to be created in order to encourage graduate research students world-wide to tell each other about their projects, exchange information, make their research available to their peers, share problems, issue invitations to comment or collaborate.” - Tony Fry 2008

The Request

Note: The entire ‘workshop’ desired is described in experiential terms.

The Request

Our client was proactive and delivered the following request for features:

User Profiles Forums Login / Registration Moderator Controls Ability to Scale Chat

Technical Features Requested

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakob/83393263/

Our client was proactive and delivered the following request for features:

User Profiles Forums Login / Registration Moderator Controls Ability to Scale Chat

But note: do the above specs really deliver an ‘environment that encourages users to exchange information, share information, and collaborate?’ Or do the above just make it technically possible?



Given the skillset of our team, we could build such a workshop from scratch, appropriate and integrate a variety of available tools, or, grab a fully developed online tool that delivers this function.

The question is, which approach? And, why?



When many viable options are available; how do we decide which option most completely satisfies our particular client, at this particular time, with these particular immediate needs, and this particular vision for the future?

The design question

When many viable options are available; how do we decide which option most completely satisfies our particular client, at this particular time, with these particular immediate needs, and this particular vision for the future?

Note: our particular client has no technical ability – not to implement, develop, or upgrade – and has no staff, and, no money.

The design question

For there is no dominant online collaborative tool to suit this purpose.

No iPod No Microsoft Word No Google Search No Facebook

Collaborative Tools

Highly successful communities exist.

Yet technically similar communities fail to gain traction.

“At the time of this conference, the tendency of those involved in building graphical virtual worlds is to create visually compelling worlds that look good, but do a poor job of fostering social interaction. Many of these systems have more in common with lonely museums than with the vibrant communities they set out to create.” (Kollock 1997)

Online Communities

Peter Kollock et al,1997

“The key challenges the Internet community will face in the future are not technological, but rather sociological… This is not to diminish the difficulties of creating new technologies, but rather to emphasize that even these tasks will pale besides the problems of facilitating and encouraging successful online interaction and online communities.”

Design Principles for Online Communities

“If information about individuals and their behavior is shared among the group, this encourages the development of reputations, which can be a vital source of social information and control (institutional memory).” (Kollock 1997)

Design Principles of Cooperation between individuals

“If information about individuals and their behavior is shared among the group, this encourages the development of reputations, which can be a vital source of social information and control (institutional memory).” (Kollock 1997)

Note: So, instead of approaching this project with its technical needs in mind, we approached from a more sociological / psychological direction.


EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION (Axelrod 1984)

1ST - Must be the potential that interacting individuals will meet again

2ND - Individuals must be able to identify each other

3RD - Have information about how the others have behaved till now


GOVERNING THE COMMONS (Ostrom 1990)

1ST - Group identity is clearly defined

2ND - Most individuals in community can participate in modifying rules

3RD - The right of individuals to create new rules is respected

4TH - The members particpate in moderating group behaviors

5TH - A graduated system of sanctions are used

6TH - Focus community on a particular interest group

7TH - Confront members with a specific crisis to build union

Design Principles of Successful Communities

(Kelly, Sung & Farnham 2002)

“There are 3 major questions facing designers of on-line communities: how to get users to behave well, how to get users to contribute quality content, and how to get users to return and contribute on an ongoing basis”

Encouraging Positive Actions from the Using Audience

“While providing most of the standard services one expects from an on-line community (such as discussion forums, homepage building, chat, user reviews, etc) these [highly successful] sites feature custom tools that have contributed greatly to the success of the sites in a largely un-moderated capacity.

These tools include a built-in member status/reputation system, a navigable member contribution history, tracking tools for members usually only available to moderators… and a popularity ranking system for all member-contributed lesson material.”

Encouraging Positive and Return Interactions from the Audience

USE DATA THAT ENCOURAGES PROPER PROTOCOL “Community data is used to encourage its users to act in accordance with accepted community norms, to make the community environment self-policing, and to correctly identify continually deviant users.”

Member identity: members are asked for real first & last name

Identity in Context: the absence of role playing and anonymity within the community is a hugely important factor in creating accountability, real social consciousness, and behavioral norms.

User Control of Resources: invested members tend to protect, promote, and update their specific contributed resources in the community, look for feedback, and ensure that the experience for their public audience is a rewarding one

Repurposing Data Collection to promote sustainable community

“Community data is fed back into the site for three distinct purposes: to increase social consciousness, to encourage and reward user participation, and to increase the navigability of the site.” (Sung, Kelly, Farnham 2002)

Status Metrics

WITH STATUS METRICS

Members become aware of what counts as positive contribution

Low level point-rewards encourage newcomer use and return

High level point rewards encourage valuable user added content

Influence and prestige accord to most valued members

Since sites pays no one, sites take pains to let users know where and how their content is being appreciated

Status Metrics – outcomes

WITH STATUS METRICS

Status metrics emerged as an entry point for new user engagement

Proper users add more content because the see how others value viewpoint

Users provide answers because it is “their job” not because of personal connection to the inquirers.

Metrics allow multiple viewpoints of same types of data, and have thus become major facets of the emergent navigation scheme of users.

Status Metrics – outcomes

Focus Group discussion on Online Collaborative work spaces

7 Graduate students Experience in online collaboration

No standard method of tool use

No standard performance measure

Being forced to participate

No useful profile information

Real interaction has social cues and allows for informal interaction

Asynchronous content management

Online Collaborative work spaces - Dislikes

Searching through time (Eg Google Groups)

Organization of threads

Update emails / RSS

Usage history

User has a role in the process

Rate quality of posts

Quantity of posts

Online Collaborative work spaces - Likes

Provides a common ground for discussion

Contextual relativity – tools by need, finding contextually appropriate solutions.

Having a task to perform

Easy access

Visible presentation of the dialogue

Sticky like (having a closure to a discussion, summarizing it and putting in the lifecycle of the discussions.)

Online Collaborative work spaces - Likes

Comparative Analysis of Online Collaborative Tools

Note: After our research into the literature and after focus group with appropriate high-level students in the niche field of question, we now felt we were finally able to look into the available tools and begin to assess what might fit our client’s needs. So did a competitive analysis of…

Well, everything.

Google Groups

Joomla

Wordpress

Blogger

Media WIKI

phpBB

IRC

AIM

Basecamp

Twitter

Ning

Facebook

List-serves

Drupal

After collecting 39 different online social tools, and, distilling those into 19 exemplar tools, we matched those 19 tools up against the pre-determined criteria that we extracted from both the research and the focus group and the needs of our client.

The number of current online research tools that addressed the needs of this collaborative workshop was…

Comparing the collected online tools

None


Note:

No tool currently available on the web satisfied all the wishes and requirements of our focus group and research. We take inspiration from this and understand that there is a market opportunity for a concept that does accomplish this.


[Note:] However, a concept will not suffice in this project. An additional constraint for our team is that our particular client at this particular time needs a working prototype to move forward with his endeavor. We have to make a choice to satisfy his short term needs, but, to fully satisfy his desires, it is also incumbent upon us to provide our client with a vision for the long term, so that he can make his own decisions over time as the technology tends to improve and to achieve the full collaborative functionality he desires for his students, his discipline, and his class.


[Note:] Because we realize that the future direction of our client’s vision will also impact what is the proper technology and support he needs now, it was important for us to manifest that future vision - that potential future artifact that can unify all the requirements of a rich collaborative artifact - and utilize that as an additional constraint to the more precisely define what is the proper technology to deliver to our client in the now.

These were our insights into defining that future object.

To build collaboration, one must first have community

Primary function is an online collaboration tool

Must encourage coherent, asynchronous debate

Must encourage a ‘sticky’ final result of debate

Data collection of use must be reflected back to the audience

Collaborative Tool Requirements

Note:

1)  The research shows that even real world collaboration is first built on trust and that trust is the result of knowing about your potential collaborators

2) The first requirement is that the tools primary function is that it is a tool for online collaboration. Of all the tools studied, none seem to be primarily built just for fostering a collaborative environment. Even the best tools are really project management tools, focused on delivery and timetables versus pure collaboration, or, they are social networks with forum pages, or, content management systems appropriated into a method of collecting content. The artifact itself can be PART of these larger systems, and, that is likely. But to encourage collaboration, the core of the artifact itself must be to encourage collaboration. Nothing else.


Note:

If you notice, points 1, 3, and, 4 are reminiscent of a 1) a social network, 2) a forum, and 3) a wiki. And because some of the social networking communities out there are already so strong, we can focus on unifying these last two --


Concept Discussion

WikisForums

Fikis

GoogleDocs

Blogs SocialNetworks

Increasingorderofabilitytochangecontentononlinecollabora>ontools

Legend

Fiki Brainstorming

Fiki Concept

Fiki facets breakdown

FIKI

The union of a "forum" and a "wiki", a Fiki is online collaborative tool that encourages the nonlinear flexibility of collective debate and brainstorming while simultaneously tracking, developing, and organizing a temporally 'final' representation of the aggregate debate.

NONLINEAR FLEXIBILITY

Design is not always logical.

A collaborative tool that encourages nonlinear flexibility is one that accepts, tracks, tags, and coherently stores the wandering, chaotic thoughts that enable the discovery of new insight and creation of new artifacts.


TEMPORAL FINAL

There is no final 'answer' to any Fiki debates.

However, there is at all times ("temporally") a coherent representation of the aggregated, valuated pieces-of-debate that can be presented as a linear fashion to the participating audience.



VALUATED

In the Fiki, "valuated" refers to the ability of the community to choose for itself that which is expressed in the final temporal representation of any debate.

The community ranks highly those pieces-of-debate which it believes most fully accords with its own values and beliefs.

Individuals, too; receive rankings from their peers, their activities, and their contributions to the community


PIECES-OF-DEBATE

Any text added to the community through debate may be parsed into smaller pieces by any other users. Paragraphs may be parsed into sentences. Sentences may be parsed into phrases. Phrases may be parsed into words.

Similarly, smaller pieces-of-debate may be refashioned into larger semantic structure.

Both the micro and macro pieces may have their own individual identity and valuation, as well as the complex identity and valuation born of their union.

Fiki Concept

No cost / low cost

Community of technical developers

Low technical requirement for the client

Three Additional Constraints for deployment

Potential Technology: Features and Assessments

Potential Technology: the winners

Ease of Entry

Ease of Moderation

Collaboration Orientation

Transience of Records

Technologies assessment

Technologies assessment – positioning graph

Technologies assessment – positioning graph

Ning

The Winner

Set up a mock Ning group ourselves

Redefined the interface to make it a forum focused community

Redefined the interface according to usability

Still allow flexibility of the client

Still allow flexibility of individual users.

Deliverable

Login Screen for network

Home Page Screen

Personal Page

Forum Page

Layered Discussions

Most Active Groups Screen

Individual Group Screen

Features Customization Interface

What do We Deliver?

A list of the available technologies

A list of the modern literature

A strategic design vision for the future experience

A working prototype for the client

A working, functional prototype that is the best deliverable for this particular client, with these particular needs, at this particular time, and with this particular vision for the future

Global Redirective Practices

Any questions?

APPENDIX A - LITERATURE REVIEW

ON BUILDING VIRUTAL COMMUNITIES AND ON ONLINE COLLABORATION

Kollock, P., University of California, Los Angeles. Design Principles for Online Communities 1996

Kelly, S., Sung, C., & Farnham S. (2002). Designing for Improved Social Responsibility and Content in On-Line Communities. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, April 2002.

Jensen, C., Davis, J., & Farnham, S. (2002). Finding Others Online: Reputation Systems for Social Online Spaces. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, April 2002.

Farnham, S. (2002). Predicting Active Participation in MSN Communities. Its All in the Conversation. Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-36.

Davis, J., Farnham, S., Jensen, C. (2002). Decreasing Online Bad Behavior. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2002, Minneapolis, April 2002.

Davis, J. P. (2002). The experience of bad behavior in online social spaces: A survey of online users. Internal paper.

Swinth, K., Farnham, S., & Davis, J. (2002). Sharing Personal Information in Online Community Member Profiles. Internal paper.

Farnham, S. D., Chesley, H. McGhee, D., & Kawal, R. (2000). Structured On-line Interactions: Improving the Decision-making of Small Discussion Groups. In Proceedings of CSCW 2000, Philadelphia, December.



Davis, J. P., Zaner, M., Farnham, S., Marcjan, C., & McCarthy, B. P. (2002). Wireless brainstorming: Overcoming status effects in small group decisions. Paper submitted to journal Computers in Human Interaction.

Grudin, J., Tallarico, S, and Counts, S. (2005). As Technophobia Disappears: Implications for Design. Group 2005.

Farnham, S., & Turski, A. (2002) Social Network Project: Applications for Online Communication and Information Navigation. Internal paper.

Farnham, S. (2002). Visualizing Discourse Architectures with Automatically Generated Person-Centric Social Networks Paper presented at CHI Workshop 2002: Discource Architectures.

Farnham, S. D., Chesley, H. McGhee, D., & Kawal, R. Structured On-line Interactions: Improving the Decision-making of Small Discussion Groups. In Proceedings of CSCW 2000, Philadelphia, December 2000.

Jensen, C., Farnham, S., Drucker, S., & Kollock, P. The Effect of Communication Modality on Cooperation in Online Environments. In Proceedings of CHI 2000, The Hague, Netherlands March 2000.

Smith, M., Farnham, S., & Drucker S. The Social Life of Small Graphical Chat Spaces. In Proceedings of CHI 2000, The Hague, Netherlands March 2000.



White, S, Gupta, A., Grudin, J., Chesley, H., Kimberly, G., Sanocki, E. Evolving Use of a System for Education at a Distance. 1999

Kollock, P., Smith, M., University of California, Los Angeles. What Do People Do in Virtual Worlds? An Anlalysis of V-Chat Log File Data 1998

Kollock, P., Smith, M., University of California, Los Angeles. Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities 1996

Eighmey, J., & McCord L. (1998). Adding value in the information age: Uses and gratifications of sites on the world-wide web. Journal of Business Research, 41(3), 187-194.

Rafaeli, S. (1986). The electronic bulletin board: A computer-driven mass medium. Computers and the Social Sciences, 2

Braina, M. (2001, August). The uses and gratifications of the Internet among African American college students. Paper presented to the Minorities and Communication Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Washington, DC.

Angleman, S. (2000, December). Uses and gratifications and Internet profiles: A factor analysis. Is Internet use and travel to cyberspace reinforced by unrealized gratifications? Paper presented to the

Western Science Social Association 2001 Conference