I watched a live Ben Shneiderman [1] talk today and he mentioned some research he recently did on online community participation - he studied wikipedia specifically. One of the diagrams he showed about the progression from consumer to contributor reminded me a lot about Fedora. Pages 6, 9, and 11 have these tables that suggest usability & sociability factors they found in their study of wikipedia that helped influence folks to make the leap from consumer to contributor: http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/ The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation Jennifer Preece, University of Maryland Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland "Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of user-generated content by writing consumer product reviews, uploading travel photos, or expressing political opinions. Some users move beyond such individual efforts to become collaborators, forming tightly connected groups with lively discussions whose outcome might be a Wikipedia article or a carefully edited YouTube video. A small fraction of users becomes leaders, who participate in governance by setting and upholding policies, repairing vandalized materials, or mentoring novices. We analyze these activities and offer the Reader-to-Leader Framework with the goal of helping researchers, designers, and managers understand what motivates technology-mediated social participation. This will enable them to improve interface design and social support for their companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. These improvements could reduce the number of failed projects, while accelerating the application of social media for national priorities such as healthcare, energy sustainability, emergency response, economic development, education, and more." Thought it might be of interest to the list. The paper is free to download at the link above. ~m _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
