This project will develop a design-oriented science of online volunteer communities (OLVCs) such as Wikipedia, SourceForge, and TripAdvisor. These web sites attract hundreds of thousands of people - not to play games or socialize - but to produce content. The content produced by OLVCs is valuable. Wikipedia is among the ten most popular sites on the Web. SourceForge is the hub of the open source software movement, used by thousands of projects to organize their work. TripAdvisor brings together travelers whose reviews help each other find and vet hotels and services. Despite these successes, OLVCs face real challenges. Most fail quickly, and even the most successful have problems. Over two-thirds of SourceForge projects become inactive fairly quickly. Even Wikipedia struggles: vandalism is a constant problem, two thirds of the articles are stubs - the lowest quality article, which are too short to provide encyclopedic coverage - and recent data suggests that Wikipedia's constant growth may have halted and even reversed.
A design-oriented science of OLVCs could help solve these problems. Four specific research activities will be carried out to produce this science. First, the project will mine results from prior research to create models, formulate hypotheses, and define key success metrics. Second, it will develop algorithms and interfaces to help OLVCs function better. Third, it will evaluate the mechanisms in real OLVCs, for example, with experiments that measure the extent to which different social comparison interfaces motivate volunteers to step up their activity. Finally, the project will abstract the results to develop generalizable design principles for online volunteer communities.
This project will develop a broad set of software mechanisms to solve important and general problems of online volunteer communities. The algorithms and interfaces will be evaluated systematically in real OLVCs, thus providing an empirically grounded body of knowledge about their effectiveness. In addition, the results of this project can feed back to advance social science theories originally developed for offline volunteering.
