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Utilizing Geographical Maps for Social Visualization to Foster Awareness in Online Communities of Practice
Abstract
Finding information in online communities is crucial, as the content gives users of a community value to use and participate in it. However, information retrieval can be hindering, as the amount of information can be overwhelming for users or stay undiscovered. To support the exploration of communities and foster the awareness about the activity inside a community, social visualization is applied by creating five different mashups utilizing geographical maps paired with additional data of an online Community of Practice (CoP) for Public Employment Services (PES). The visualizations focus on different aspects of the community and associate it with the locations of members to raise awareness inside the community. The views display data that focuses on the own participation of members, the most prominent tags for topics per location, an egocentric visualization of the own social network, the overall activity inside the community, and the participation in groups and topics. To evaluate the visualizations, an expert evaluation was conducted with five participants in a Thinking Aloud test. Results show that the tool motivates to explore the online community and raises awareness about the activity inside the community as well as the topics that are being discussed.
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Visualizations have played an important role in generating new insights in social network analysis. We suggest that such visualizations can be of interest not only to analysts and researchers but also to the people whose data is being analyzed. In this paper we briefly talk about two visualizations of email that we developed to give people a better sense of their email archives and social networks. One visualization shows a traditional network graph with email contacts as nodes. The second visualization depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions in dyadic relationships between ego and individual contacts. While observing and interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that, when used in tandem, these visualizations complemented and clarified each other's depiction of a person's social network. Based on our experience with these two systems, we propose that visualizations of social networks that are aimed at end users ought to go beyond the graph paradigm. We posit that basic cartographic principles – such as adaptive zooming and multiple viewing modes – provide system designers with useful visual solutions to the depiction of social networks.
Although the archive of text generated by a persistent conversation (i.e. newsgroup, mailing list, recorded chat, etc.) is searchable, it is not very expressive of the underlying social patterns. In this paper we will discuss the design of graphical interfaces that reveal the social structure of the conversation by visualizing patterns such as bursts of activity, the arrival of new members, or the evolution of conversational topics. Our focus is on two projects: Chat Circles, a graphical interface for synchronous conversation and Loom, a visualization of threaded discussion. Through these examples we will explore key issues in the generation, design and use of graphical interfaces for persistent conversations.
Researchers and users of Information Visualization are convinced that it has value. This value can easily be communicated
to others in a face-to-face setting, such that this value is experienced in practice. To convince broader audiences, and also,
to understand the intrinsic qualities of visualization is more difficult, however. In this paper we consider information visualization
from different points of view, and gather arguments to explain the value of our field.
In this paper we argue that social visualization can motivate contributors to social production projects, such as Wikipedia and open source development. As evidence, we present CodeSaw, a social visualization of open source software development that we studied with real open source communities. CodeSaw mines open source archives to visualize group dynamics that currently lie buried in textual databases. Furthermore, CodeSaw becomes an active social space itself by supporting comments directly inside the visualization. To demonstrate CodeSaw, we apply it to a popular open source project, showing how the visualization reveals group dynamics and individual roles. The paper concludes by presenting evidence that CodeSaw, and social visualization more generally, can motivate contributors to social production projects if the visualization leaves the laboratory and makes it to the community visualized.
In order to encourage users to participate more actively and bring more contributions to peer-to-peer (p2p) online communities, we propose to create a motivational community visualization based on the social comparison theory. This paper describes the design of static version and a dynamic version of this visualization developed in our lab, explains the advantages and the disadvantages of the static version and the reason why we decided to develop the dynamic version. This paper also gives a detailed evaluation on the dynamic version.
Recent years have witnessed the dramatic popularity of online social networking services, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual "friendship" relations. Guided by ethnographic research of these online communities, we have designed and implemented a visualization system for playful end-user exploration and navigation of large scale online social networks. Our design builds upon familiar node link network layouts to contribute customized techniques for exploring connectivity in large graph structures, supporting visual search and analysis, and automatically identifying and visualizing community structures. Both public installation and controlled studies of the system provide evidence of the system's usability, capacity for facilitating discovery, and potential for fun and engaged social activity
Over the past decade, knowledge and learning have emerged as the keys to economic success and as a focus for thinking about organizational effectiveness and innovation. An overwhelming majority of large organizations now engage in a wide range of knowledge and learning activities and nearly all have programs and personnel explicitly dedicated to these tasks. The volume is targeted at those new to knowledge and learning, and is filled with practical examples and focuses on the most critical issues, featuring seminal contributions from leading authorities including: * Thomas Davenport, * Dorothy Leonard, * John Seely Brown, * Sidney Winter, * W. Chan Kim, * Peter Druckard. The book is organized around the three key steps in managing knowledge: development, retention, and transfer. These sections are preceded by a section creating the strategic context for knowledge and followed by a section on the social dimensions that are often overlooked. Finally, the book looks to the future of knowledge and learning. This Reader is an accessible way for executives and students taking advanced Management Studies and executive courses to learn from the latest examples on this topic.
Wikis, Blogs und Social Networks beruhen auf der Interaktion zwischen den Besuchern einer Website und fördern die Bildung von Gemeinschaften – eine in den Massenmedien bisher nicht erreichte Partizipation. Ausgehend von der Geschichte des Internets und einer Definition des »Social Webs« werden zunächst dessen Erscheinungsformen vorgestellt, verglichen und eingeordnet. Darauf folgt eine Beschreibung der technischen Grundlagen sowie der auftretenden Gruppenprozesse und der gesellschaftlichen Bedeutung des »Social Webs«.
How insights from the social sciences, including social psychology and economics, can improve the design of online communities.
Online communities are among the most popular destinations on the Internet, but not all online communities are equally successful. For every flourishing Facebook, there is a moribund Friendster—not to mention the scores of smaller social networking sites that never attracted enough members to be viable. This book offers lessons from theory and empirical research in the social sciences that can help improve the design of online communities.
The authors draw on the literature in psychology, economics, and other social sciences, as well as their own research, translating general findings into useful design claims. They explain, for example, how to encourage information contributions based on the theory of public goods, and how to build members' commitment based on theories of interpersonal bond formation. For each design claim, they offer supporting evidence from theory, experiments, or observational studies.
John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design.
Difficult to learn and awkward to use, today's information systems often change our activities in ways that we do not need or want. The problem lies in the software development process. In this book John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Traditional textbook approaches manage the complexity of the design process via abstraction, treating design problems as if they were composites of puzzles. Scenario-based design uses concretization. A scenario is a concrete story about use. For example: "A person turned on a computer; the screen displayed a button labeled Start; the person used the mouse to select the button." Scenarios are a vocabulary for coordinating the central tasks of system development—understanding people's needs, envisioning new activities and technologies, designing effective systems and software, and drawing general lessons from systems as they are developed and used. Instead of designing software by listing requirements, functions, and code modules, the designer focuses first on the activities that need to be supported and then allows descriptions of those activities to drive everything else. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the principles of scenario-based design, the book includes in-depth examples of its application.
The amount of digitized information available on the Internet, in digital libraries, and other forms of information systems grows at an exponential rate, while becoming more complex and more dynamic. As a consequence, information organization, information retrieval and the presentation of retrieval results have become more and more difficult.
Information visualization offers a unique method to reveal hidden patterns and contextual information in a visual presentation and allows users to seek information in an intuitive way. Jin Zhang provides a systematic explanation of the latest advancements in information retrieval visualization from both theoretical and practical perspectives. He reviews the main approaches and techniques available in the field, explains theoretical relationships between information retrieval and information visualization, and presents major information retrieval visualization algorithms and models. He then takes a detailed look at the theory and applications of information retrieval visualization for Internet traffic analysis, and Internet information searching and browsing. The author also addresses challenges such as ambiguity, metaphorical applications, and system evaluation in information retrieval visualization environments. Finally, he compares these information retrieval visualization models from the perspectives of visual spaces, semantic frameworks, projection algorithms, ambiguity, and information retrieval, and discusses important issues of information retrieval visualization and research directions for future exploration.
Readers of this book will gain an in-depth understanding of the current state of information retrieval visualization. They will be introduced to existing problems for researchers and professionals, along with technical and theoretical findings and advances made by leading researchers. The book also provides practical details for the implementation of an information retrieval visualization system.
Commons-based Peer Production is the process by which internet communities create media and software artefacts. Learning is integral to the success of these communities as it encourages contribution on an individual level, helps to build and sustain commitment on a group level and provides a means for adaption at an organisational level. While some communities have established ways to support organisational learning -- through a forum or thread reserved for community discussion -- few have investigated how more in-depth visual and analytic interfaces could help formalise this process. In this paper, we explore how social network visualisation can be used to encourage reflection and thus support organisational learning in online communities. We make the following contributions: First, we describe Commons-Based Peer Production, in terms of a socio-technical learning system that includes individual, group and organisational learning. Second, we present a novel visualisation environment that embeds social network visualisation in an asynchronous collaborative architecture. Third, we present results from an evaluation and discuss the potential for visualisation to support the process of organisational reflection in online communities.
The term "community of practice" is of relatively recent coinage, even though the phenomenon it refers to is age-old. The concept has turned out to provide a useful perspective on knowing and learning. A growing number of people and organizations in various sectors are now focusing on communities of practice as a key to improving their performance. This brief and general introduction examines what communities of practice are and why researchers and practitioners in so many different contexts find them useful as an approach to knowing and learning.
What role can online communities play in meeting the informal learning needs of a professional association? This article presents the results of an interpretive study of the experiences of coordinators of Alberta Community Adult Learning Councils who participated in an online community of practice designed to support informal workplace learning. Through active participation and peripheral "lurking," new-comers were oriented into the skills and culture of the practice, and experienced practitioners gained new insights into their own professional identities and the meaning of their work. Telling their stories helped to develop not only identity as individual practitioners, but also served to reconstruct the identity of the collective community on an ongoing basis. Motivations to participate included an opportuni-ty to learn new skills and work practices, a means of social and professional connection to colleagues, and a mechanism to reduce the isolation that was in-herent in the job function and geographical location. The role of the online moderator was identified as critical in sustaining the online community over an extended period and enhancing the learning function. Résumé Quels rôles les communautés de pratique en ligne peuvent-elles jouer pour répon-dre aux besoins d'apprentissage informel d'une association professionnelle? L'arti-cle présente les résultats d'une étude basée sur les expériences de coordonnateurs des Conseils de l'apprentissage adulte communautaire d'Alberta (Alberta Commu-nity Adult Learning Councils) qui ont participé à une communauté de pratique en ligne conçue pour soutenir l'apprentissage informel en milieu de travail. Par le biais de la communauté virtuelle, les nouveaux arrivants, grâce à leur participation active et à l'observation, ont acquis des compétences et des connaissances sur la culture de la pratique, alors que les praticiens d'expérience y ont acquis de nou-velles perspectives sur leur propre identité professionnelle et sur la signification de leur travail. Pour ces derniers, le fait de raconter leur histoire a aidé non seulement à développer leur identité individuelle en tant que praticiens, mais a aussi servi à reconstruire l'identité collective de la communauté sur une base continue. Les participants étaient motivés à participer à la communauté, car elle était une occa-sion d'apprendre de nouvelles compétences et de nouvelles pratiques de travail, un moyen d'entrer en contact socialement et professionnellement avec les collè-gues et un mécanisme pour diminuer l'isolation inhérente à la fonction du travail et à la localisation géographique. Le rôle du modérateur en ligne s'est avéré critique pour maintenir la communauté sur une longue période et pour favoriser la fonction d'apprentissage.
When a computer network connects people or organizations, it is a social network. Yet the study of such computer-supported social networks has not received as much attention as studies of human-computer interaction, online person-to-person interaction, and computer-supported communication within small groups. We argue the usefulness of a social network approach for the study of computer-mediated communication. We review some basic concepts of social network analysis, describe how to collect and analyze social network data, and demonstrate where social network data can be, and have been, used to study computer-mediated communication. Throughout, we show the utility of the social network approach for studying computer-mediated communication, be it in computer-supported cooperative work, in virtual community, or in more diffuse interactions over less bounded systems such as the Internet.
In order to study online communities, researchers have had to adapt methodologies for use online. Ethnography was used by many early researchers (Baym, 1993, 2000; Hine, 2000) to try to understand issues such as what people do in online spaces, how they express themselves, what motivates them, how they govern themselves, what attracts people to participate, and why some people prefer to observe rather than contribute. Ethnography was an obvious candidate for developing a broad understanding of online behavior within particular contexts. Content and linguistic analysis techniques were modified for analyzing computer-mediated communication (Herring, 1992, 2004) and social network analysis (Wellman & Gulia, 1999a, 1999b) was also applied to online populations, often supported by visualizations that enable researchers to view the network from different perspectives (Sack, 2000). A variety of other creative and innovative visualization techniques have emerged more recently that enable researchers to see and explore community activity at a glance, such as a tool called history flow which reveals the chronology of authorship in wikipedia (Viégas, Wattenberg, & Dave, 2004). Online interviews and questionnaires are also fundamental tools for online community research, despite problems associated with drawing scientific samples and low response rates (Andrews, Nonnecke, & Preece, 2003). Data logging has also been popular.
Today’s economy runs on knowledge, and most companies work assiduously to capitalize on that fact. They use cross-functional teams, customer- or product-focused business units, and work groups—to name just a few organizational forms—to capture and spread ideas and know-how. In many cases, these ways of organizing are very effective, and no one would argue for their demise. But a new organizational form is emerging that promises to complement existing structures and radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change. It’s called the community of practice.
What are communities of practice? In brief, they’re groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise—engineers engaged in deep-water drilling, for example, consultants who specialize in strategic marketing, or frontline managers in charge of check processing at a large commercial bank. Some communities of practice meet regularly—for lunch on Thursdays, say. Others are connected primarily by e-mail networks. A community of practice may or may not have an explicit agenda on a given week, and even if it does, it may not follow the agenda closely. Inevitably, however, people in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems.
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