Kraut’s at it again

Robert Kraut and colleagues of “Internet loneliness” fame have been hacking at a research agenda focusing on stable and self-maintaining communities for some time. I ran into them looking for literature on how knowing more about your electronic environments can help you interact better with that environment. They have started publishing a number o interesting papers, most of which can be found here:

Project Abstract | Community Lab
Despite extensive experience, eliciting contributions in an on-line community is still largely a matter of trial and error. This project will develop theory to predict contribution behavior in on-line communities and will help transfer that theory into practice by using it to develop a set of on-line community design guidelines. The project brings together three teams of researchers (from the University of Michigan, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Minnesota) with diverse areas of expertise (including economics, social psychology, and on-line recommender systems).

The research team will start with existing theories of voluntary contribution to collective efforts, conduct a set of experiments to test the validity of these theories in the domain of on-line communities, and develop a new, synthesized theory. The experiments will be conducted in the MovieLens community with thousands of active users and an average of 30 new users joining each day. The key scientific significance of this work lies in using Social Science theory to guide design. An interesting broader impact of that approach is the development of a cadre of graduate students with interdisciplinary research experience who will be ready to guide the next generation of on-line community research.