Building Successful Online Communities (Fall 2024)

COMMLD570A/COM597A: Building Successful Online Communities - Department of Communication

Instructor:Benjamin Mako Hill / makohill@uw.edu

Office Hours: By appointment (I'm usually available via chat during "business hours.") You can view out my calendar and/or put yourself on it. If you schedule a meeting, we'll meet in the Jitsi room (makooffice) you'll get a link to through the scheduling app.

Course Meetings: 6-9:50pm Tuesdays in CMU 104

Course Websites:

Canvas: for announcements and turning in assignments
Discord: to discuss, ask questions, and share information related to the course material. (Invitation link is in the Class Setup Checklist)
Case opt-out form: to tell the teaching team if you are not coming to class or don't want to be called upon that day for any reason (remember: you must fill this out at least one hour before class begins)
WikiEdu class page and dashboard for the Wikipedia assignments.
UW COM 481 FAQs for frequently asked questions.

Course Catalog Description of Topics:

Before Wikipedia was created, there were seven very similar attempts to build online collaborative encyclopedias. Before Facebook, there were dozens of very similar social networks. Why did Wikipedia and Facebook take off when so many similar sites struggled? Why do some attempts to build communities online lead to large thriving communities while most struggle to attract even a small group of users?

This class will begin with an introduction to several decades of research on computer-mediated communication and online communities to try and understand the building blocks of successful online communities. With this theoretical background in hand, every student will then apply this new understanding by helping to design, build, and improve a real online community.

Overview and Learning Objectives

Today, online communities are central parts of each of our daily lives and have an important impact on our cultural, social, and economic experience of the world and each other. This course combines an in-depth look into several decades of research into online communities with exercises that aim to give students experience applying this research to the evaluation of and hands-on participation in online communities.

As students of communication in the twenty-first century, I expect that many of you taking this course will work in jobs that involve communicating in, working with, or managing online communities. This class seeks to inform these experiences by helping you learn how to use and contribute to online communities more effectively and construct, improve, or design your online communities.

I will consider the course a complete success if every student can do all of these things at the end of the quarter:

Write and speak fluently about the rules and norms of the Wikipedia community and demonstrate this fluency through successful contributions to Wikipedia and clear reflections on these issues.
Recall, compare, and give examples of key theories that seek to explain why some online communities grow and attract participants while others do not.
Demonstrate an ability to critically apply the theories from the course to evaluate a real online community and a real challenge or set of challenges of your choice.
Engage with the course material and compellingly present your ideas and reflections in writing and orally.

Finally, I want your work in this class to help you in concrete ways. This might be having a great answer in a job interview when it's time to convince the interviewer that you have much to offer. Maybe it's having a piece of work you can share with others. Maybe it's applying ideas from this class to a new assignment at work. Maybe it's seeing your world in a new way that helps you solve a problem. Or maybe it's just having an answer when someone asks skeptical questions about what you got from studying Communication. Although it's not possible to evaluate this objective, and it won't be reflected in your grade, it's the thing I care most about and the reason I'm excited about teaching—both this class and in general.

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Class format and structure

In general, the organization of the course adopts a "flipped" approach where you consume instructional materials on your own or in groups and the teaching team uses synchronous meetings to answer questions, address challenges or concerns, work through solutions, and hold semi-structured discussions in the form of cases—discussed in detail below.

The asynchronous elements of this course include two parts:

All readings, recorded lectures/slides, tutorials, and assignments.
Conversation and discussion that happens in the group Discord server over the course of the week.

I expect you to finish all readings and watch all lectures outside of our class meeting times before the class sessions on which they are assigned. Please note that this means I will not almost never deliver lectures during our class meetings. Please also note that this means you are fully responsible for reading all readings and watching all recorded lecture material before you come to the associated synchronous part of the class.

I expect you to check in and participate in the Discord discussion—if not daily, then at least 3-4 times a week. I plan to check and respond to conversations daily throughout the quarter.

The synchronous elements of the course will be two weekly class meetings and one section meeting on Friday. Class meetings will happen at the normal time and in the normal place unless I communicate otherwise.

The synchronous sections will be conducted as described in the synchronous class setup section of the syllabus. Each session is scheduled to run for a maximum of 110 minutes, although I plan to frequently not use the full class period. I'll try to work in at least one short break if we use the entire time.

Conduct each day's case study discussion involving an instructor-mediated conversation using input from each of you.
Discuss and work through any questions or challenges in the materials assigned for that day.
Discuss and/or answer questions about assignments that have come up.

You also selected a timeslot to attend a quiz section. Your TA will lead section meetings. Section meetings will include:

Short presentations and walk through related to assignments
Time for you to ask your questions
Time to work on your assignments with immediate help at hand

Websites and Technology Expectations

There are a number of expectations that you will be able to connect to certain websites. In order to complete this class, I expect you to be able to access and use the following web resources:

wiki.communitydata.science — This website will host the syllabus for the course. I expect you to be able to visit it regularly. If you're reading this, you have access.
UW's Canvas — We'll be using Canvas for posting announcements, uploading course-restricted files, turning in assignments, and distributing grades, comments, and similar.
UW Library Proxy — I'm going to expect that you can use the UW Libraries proxy to access material that UW subscribes to from off campus. You'll need to use it to get material to read for class.
Discord — We'll use Discord for synchronous communication around the class. When you've got a question about an assignment, this is almost certainly going to be the fastest and best way to get my attention. One benefit of asking a question on Discord is that others in the class will be able to see our answer to you! Instructions on joining the Discord server are in the Class Setup Checklist. You'll see that we've created a few channels. If you don't see an obvious place to ask your question, go ahead and ask it in the #general-discussion channel.
Panopto — UW uses the video hosting service Panopto, which I will use to share all the lectures and recorded parts for this course.
English Wikipedia — Assignments for this course involve contributing to Wikipedia. This means that you will need to have access to Wikipedia.
Google Docs — I'll be using Google Docs to host web forms. This includes the form you'll need to fill out to tell me that you're going to miss class. You will need to be able to access Google to use this.
Various other websites that will likely include Reddit, Stack Exchange, Twitch, TikTok, ChatGPT, and more — We will analyze these communities as part of our case study discussion, and you will be required to visit, create accounts, and spend time on these websites.

These websites, in turn, use various hosting providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft. As a result, participation in this course requires students to access Internet resources that may not be accessible directly in some places outside of the UW campus. Anybody taking the class must ensure they can access all Internet resources required for this course reliably and safely. For students who are off-campus temporarily and are in a situation where direct access to these required resources is not possible, UW-IT recommends that students use the official UW VPN, called Husky OnNet VPN. UW-IT advises students to use the VPN with the “All Internet Traffic” option enabled (see the UW Libraries instructions and UW-IT’s FAQs). Doing so will route all incoming and outgoing Internet through UW servers while it is enabled.

Students who travel outside the US should be aware that they may be subject to laws, policies, and/or technological systems that restrict the use of VPNs. UW does not guarantee students’ access to UW resources when students are off-campus, and students are responsible for their own compliance with all laws regarding the use of Husky OnNet and all other UW resources. Because this course is in-person, I don't expect this to be a big issue.

Note about this Syllabus

You should expect this syllabus to be a dynamic document (not a 'contract'). Although the core expectations for this class are fixed, the details of readings and assignments will shift based on how the class goes, guest speakers that I arrange, my own readings in this area, etc. As a result, there are three important things to keep in mind:

Although details on this syllabus will change, I will try to ensure that I never change readings more than six days before they are due. This means that if I don't fill in a reading marked "[To Be Decided]" six days before it's due, it is dropped. If I don't change something marked "[Tentative]" before the deadline, then it is assigned. This also means that if you plan to read more than six days ahead, contact me first.
Because this syllabus is a wiki, you will be able to track every change by clicking the history button on this page when I make changes. I will summarize these changes in the weekly announcement on Canvas sent that will be emailed to everybody in the class. Closely monitor your email or the announcements section on the course website on Canvas to make sure you don't miss these announcements.
I will ask the class for voluntary anonymous feedback frequently — especially toward the beginning of the quarter. Please let me know what is working and what can be improved. In the past, I have made many adjustments to courses that I teach while the quarter progressed based on this feedback.
Many readings are marked as "[Available through UW libraries]". Most of these will be accessible to anybody who connects from the UW network. This means that if you're on campus, it will likely work. Although you can go through the UW libraries website to get most of these, the easiest way to get things using the UW library proxy bookmarklet. This is a little button you can drag-and-drop onto your bookmarks toolbar on your browser. When you press the button, it will ask you to log in using your UW NetID and then will automatically send your traffic through UW libraries. You can also use the other tools on this UW libraries webpage.

Organization

This course is organized into two components that roughly span the first and second "halves" of the quarter.

Component 1: The Theory and Practice of Online Communities

After an introductory session, most of the class (through Week 7) will be focused on helping you learn fundamental social scientific ideas that drive our understanding of online communities and questions about how and why online communities thrive or flounder, succeed or fail, and grow or shrink.

To do this, the course is organized to introduce you to a range of social scientific work. Because this body of work is vast, I'm dividing it into three major "levels" of analysis. We'll focus on each level for about two weeks:

Micro-level (personal, individual) — Why do individuals participate in online communities? How do they build relationships with each other and communities? How do online communities incentivize participation?
Meso (group, organization) — How do groups build group identities, construct norms, create rules, and govern themselves? How do communities socialize newcomers?
Macro (ecosystem, culture, society) — How do online communities create niches? How do they affect or interact with other online communities? How do cultures, politics, and societies shape online communities?

The bulk of the reading in the course—and most of the most difficult material—will be front-loaded in this first six-week period. The goal is to make sure that you have a strong set of analytical tools and understand the theories you'll need by Week 7 so that you can use this material to focus on your projects.

Component 2: Examples and Challenges

In the second part of the course, I will focus less on theory and more on examples of online communities and applications, examples, and associated challenges.

Our reading during the second part of the quarter will focus on case studies. We will focus on in-class discussions and exercises that prompt critical consideration of how online communities occur in different domains and the challenges associated with using online communities. I will try to help you all build an ability to critically understand these communities using the theory we covered earlier.

In general, readings during these weeks will be on the lighter side, and there will be no weekly assignments other than preparing for case discussions. The readings are lighter during this component because I'm expecting you to be spending time outside of class working on your final projects.

Readings

Because I understand and remember the financial challenges of being a student, I've structured this course so there is no textbook for this class. There is nothing you will need to purchase. Everything we'll read in this class will either be freely available online or available through UW libraries.

That said, we will end up reading a big chunk of this book: Kraut et al.'s Building Successful Online Communities which I will refer to as “BSOC” in the syllabus. Here is the citation:

Kraut, Robert E., and Paul Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. The MIT Press, 2012. [Available from UW libraries]

A digital version of the book is available to UW students through UW libraries and ProQuest Ebook Central.

If you would like a paper copy, MIT Press sells the book for $35 as a paperback. Amazon has a limited number of hardcover copies available, starting at $13 as of December 2021. They also have paperbacks starting at $15 and the Kindle version is $26. Wikipedia has this long list of possible book sources.

Assignments

The assignments in this class are designed to give you an opportunity to try your hand at using the conceptual material taught in the class. There will be no exams or quizzes.

Unless otherwise noted, all assignments are due at the end of the day (i.e., 11:59pm on the day they are listed as being due). All times given are local time in Seattle.

Case discussion

The course relies heavily on the case study method which describes a particular form of instructor-mediated discussion. A standard "case" usually involves reading an example—perhaps up to 20-35 pages of background about an organization or group facing an ambiguous or difficult challenge. I will mark certain readings as "[Case]" in the syllabus, and I expect you to read them particularly closely. It is important to realize that I will not summarize case material in class, and I will not cover it in the lectures. I expect you all to have read it, and we will jump in and start discussing it.

Cases ask students to put themselves in the positions of individuals facing difficult situations to tease out the tensions and forces at play in the case and to construct — through group discussion — the broader lessons and takeaways. Cases are a wonderful way to connect the sometimes abstract concepts taught in many academic courses to real examples of the type of ambiguous situations that you will likely encounter in your career. Generally speaking, there are no right or wrong answers in cases.

Cold Calling

Cases rely roughly on the socratic method where instructors teaching cases cold call on students—i.e., instructors call on people without asking for volunteers first. I will be doing this for the majority of our class sessions.

Because I understand that cold calling can be terrifying for some students, I will be circulating a list of questions (labeled "Reading Note" in the syllabus) that describe the kinds of questions I am likely to ask each week along with the weekly announcements (i.e., at least 6 days in advance). Although it is a very good idea to take notes guided by these questions or to write out answers to these questions in advance, we will not be collecting these answers. You are welcome to work with other students to brainstorm possible answers. Although I will also ask questions I do not distribute ahead of time, these questions will give you a good sense of where to focus your reading and note-taking.

I have written a computer program that will generate a random list of students each day, and I will use this list to randomly cold call students in the class. To try to maintain participation balance, the program will try to ensure that everybody is cold called a similar number of times during the quarter. Although there is always some chance that you will called upon next, you will become less likely to be called upon relative to your classmates each time you are called upon.

Assessment for case study discussion

I have placed detailed information on case study-based discussion on the case discussion section of my assessment page. This describes both the rubrics I will use to assess your case discussion and how I will compute the final grades in the course.

Papers

You will hand in two papers in this class. In both cases, I will ask you to connect something you have experience or knowledge about to course material. The "Writing Rubric" section of the detailed page on assessment gives the rubric I will use to evaluate these papers.

Project 1: Contributing to Wikipedia

Because this course is going to cover an enormous number of different online communities, I've found that it's helpful to have one online community that can serve as a sort of common object to think about and engage with. In this course, that community is going to be Wikipedia.

In the first component of the class, you will be asked to learn about Wikipedia, its norms, rules, and processes. With this knowledge, you will all be asked to research and substantially extend an encyclopedia article on Wikipedia. To do this, I will use material from the Wiki Education Foundation (WikiEdu) to help you learn how to participate in Wikipedia. As part of this process, you will interact with other community members who are not part of the class.

You will need to participate in Wikipedia each week during the first compontent of the class. The teaching team will be able to see this activity and help you.

Every Friday during this first component of this class, there will be an assignment due that corresponds to one step in the process of getting involved in Wikipedia. Most weeks, this will involve completing learning modules and assignments on a website put together by WikiEdu. These Wikipedia participation assignments won't be synced up with the theory, but they will provide you with lots of opportunities to reflect on the theoretical work we are covering.

I plan to take time to discuss our progress and experience with Wikipedia and to connect it explicitly to the theoretical concepts we are covering. As we finish the micro, meso, and macro sections of the first component of the course, we will read about Wikipedia and have three case discussions about it.

Finally, as a dress rehearsal for the final project, I will ask you all to think through a major problem facing Wikipedia.

Although this means we'll be spending a lot of time talking about Wikipedia, the goal here is to build and apply critical skills about online communities in general. Wikipedia's incredible openness and impact make it an excellent place to learn and explore the ideas of the course, but the goal is always to engage with the broader principles and underlying concepts and practice their applications.

Wikipedia Task #1

Task: Get started on Wikipedia!
Due: Friday October 4
Deliverables: Following the instructions in the training, make contributions in Wikipedia and the class WikiEdu dashboard

Complete the WikiEdu trainings for Week 1.
During this training, you will create an account. After you have created an account, you must enroll in the course so that your account on Wikipedia is associated with the course and so that I can track your activity on Wikipedia. click this link and then click "Join" to enroll in the course. If you are asked for a passcode, you can enter evyuwzoc.
Once you are enrolled in the course, you should begin the training modules and complete the first two, Wikipedia policies and Sandboxes, talk pages, and watchlists, and Communicating with others on Wikipedia.
Finally, practice communicating on Wikipedia by introducing yourself to a member of the teaching team and at least one classmate on Wikipedia (it can be anybody) using their talk page (not your own talk page!). Ellie's username is Roller steaks and I am Benjamin Mako Hill. You can find a list of all of your classmates on the WikiEdu class page.

Tips: The biggest pitfall in the past has been failing to enroll in the course. Make sure that you have created an account on https://en.wikipedia.org/ and are logged in. Then follow this link and click "Join".

Wikipedia Task #2

Tasks: Choose and evaluate an article
Due Date: Friday October 11
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia and the class WikiEdu dashboard

(1) First, complete the online training topics for Week 2 in the the class WikiEdu dashboard.

(2) Second, choose 3-5 possible articles in Wikipedia that you would like to significantly expand and improve. The WikiEdu module will walk you through sketching some brief notes on changes you might make; the next step will have you dig more deeply into a single article.

Choose articles that are as short and simple as possible and I strongly recommend that you choose a stub article on Wikipedia. Because some people are going to start with articles that are better than others, we're going to assess you on the amount to which you can improve the article—not on the final state of the article.

You can find a list of stub articles arranged by topic here (there are literally millions):

List of Stubs — This is an extremely long list of articles that are currently stubs and which is also sorted into categories and then subcategories. It might be a little bit out of date so be sure to click through before you decide on an article.

When you're done looking at possible articles, you'll see that there is a "Choose your article" exercise on the WikiEdu dashboard that will end with you being prompted to fill out a page on Wikipedia with a list of articles you want to work on. The page will ask for "Evaluation" and "Sources" -- jot down a few thoughts here. You'll do a comprehensive evaluation of one article in the next part of this task.

(3) Third, you should evaluate an article. I recommend that you evaluate an article you plan to improve! After following the tutorial material on WikiEd about how to do an evaluation, you'll see that there is a corresponding exercise called "Evaluate Wikipedia" in the WikiEdu dashboard that you should complete.

If you run into any trouble, find the teaching team in the Discord well in advance of the deadline!

Wikipedia Task #3

Task: Compile research and start editing
Due Date: Friday October 18
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia and the class WikiEdu dashboard

Complete online trainings for Week 3
Finalize your topic/article.
Make a small edit to Wikipedia (e.g., by adding citations).
Gather notes and links into an informal bibliography of relevant research.

In order to do these, you will need to make sure you have assigned your article to yourself in the dashboard. If you have not don this yet, you'll have to do it before you can proceed. You can do so by (a) going to the WikiEdu course homepage, (b) finding the section entitled My Articles, (c) clicking on Assign myself an article, and (d) entering the article title as shown in Wikipedia and click Assign.

Once you have selected an article to work on, the "My Articles" section will show you a number of steps and links. The two links to focus on right now are collecting your bibliography notes and editing your article in your sandbox, which correspond to the two key tasks above. You will need to:

Add the sources that you've found to the bibliography page which will be created when you click on the "bibliography" link. These are your notes about sources. As a reminder, while academic sources are the "gold standard", match your citations with the content. If your article is about a movie star, you will likely be citing interviews that were published in magazines or on the radio. Try to vary the types of sources and select the more notable ones. Additionally, if you are having difficulty finding sources, reach out to a reference librarian. they are a great resource!

In general, you should refer to the WikiEd Foundation's guide to editing which I've found extremely useful.

Wikipedia Task #4

Task: Finish the bulk of your edits
Due Date: Friday October 25
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia and the class WikiEdu dashboard

Complete online trainings for Week 4
Make the bulk of the changes you hope to make to you articles. In general, I expect a minimum of 2-3 new paragraphs of content with a range of new references.

Wikipedia Task #5

Task: Conduct peer reviews
Due Date: Friday November 1
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia and the class WikiEdu dashboard

Select two classmates’ articles that you will peer review and copy-edit. To sign up, you can mark this in the dashboard by using the Assign a review button. Try to pick articles that other students are not yet reviewing.
Peer review two of your classmates’ articles and produce a written peer review. If you click on the "Peer review" link next to the assigned review article on your student page in the WikiEd dashboard, you'll see that it pops up a template that will create a sub-page on your classmate's sandbox and prompts you with a bunch of questions. If you do fill out that template, be sure to leave a message on the users talk page so that they know you created the sub-page with your peer review! Using that template will probably be useful but it's not required. What's important is that you engage in the peer review and get your classmate useful feedback. I don't care too much about how you do it.
Improve and copy-edit the two reviewed articles by editing them directly to help fix issues, improve sourcing, create a more neutral or encyclopedic tone, etc. Where you see an opportunity to help out, be bold!

Wikipedia Task #6

Task: Incorporate changes based on peer reviews and polish article
Due Date: Friday November 8
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia and the class WikiEdu dashboard

Complete online trainings for Week 6
Respond to your peer review. Consider their suggestions and decide whether they make your work more accurate and complete.
Continue improving your article. Refine your text, do more research, make sure things are well organized, think about adding images, infoboxes, and templates. If you add images be sure to complete the WikiEd material on images and media.
Polish your article, it should be ready for public consumption. There are some general suggestions on polishing in /Wikipedia task 6 [Forthcoming].

Wikipedia Task #7-A

Task: Finalize your article
Due Date: Sunday Novemer 15
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia

Read the material in the class WikiEdu dashboard and make final checks on your article.
Check to ensure that the changes you've made match our expectations.
...otherwise, that should be it!

Assessment: Wikipedia Assignment

I will use the following criteria as a rubric for assessing your work on the contributions made to Wikipedia:

Substantial new article text shows fluency in Wikipedia norms — A student fluent in Wikipedia norms will have created an substantial article or brought an existing article at least one quality class to a higher one in the eyes of most Wikipedia members by adding new encyclopedic text, adhering to policies on tone, adding references for statements from reliable third party sources, and so on.
Peer reviews of other student were thoughtful, critical, and constructive.
Deadlines for tasks #1-7 were met in a way that allowed for the interactive and collaborative aspects of the class (e.g., draft was published to allow for reviews, peer reviews were made on time, article was published live on time, and so on).

Wikipedia Task #7-B

Task

Turn in your Wikipedia advising report

Due Date

Sunday Novemer 15

Deliverables

Turn in report as subpage of your Wikipedia userpage and turn in the URL in Canvas.
Maximum length for report: 1000 words (~4 pages double spaced)

Your report should provide advice to the Wikimedia Foundation and/or the Wikipedia community on a challenge that I identify. Details on the challenge are still [To Be Decided] and [Forthcoming]. See the assessment section of this page for details on what I will be grading for.

Turn your report as a subpage of your userpage. For example, I would create mine with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill/Report as the URL. Of course, you should replace "Benhjamin_Mako_Hill" with your Wikipedia username. You can also just go to your userpage by clicking on your username on Wikipedia and then adding "/Report" at the end of the URL. When you go that page, it will say Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact name. You can create the new page by just clicking the "Create" tab on that page. When you're done, you can paste the URL into Canvas.

Project 2: Final Project

For the final assignment, I want you to take what you've learned in the class and apply it. Because this class is being taught in both the Communication Leadership and the Department of Communication MA/PhD, I'm going to offer two options for final projects:

(Option 1) Community Advising Project: Serve as an expert advisor to the leaders and members of an online community to provide evidence-based insights into how to better address a specific challenge they face. This will be a client based project. In most cases, you can bring your own client (e.g., your workplace, a community you participate in) but I'm also happy to work with Commlead to help pair you with a community. I expect that most Commlead students in the course will choose this option.

(Option 2) Original research project: Complete an original research project that takes the form of (1) a detailed research plan/proposal; (2) a replication/revisit of an important and influential study; (3) a completed original research manuscript (i.e., a "submission-ready" draft of a journal article or conference paper). I expect that most students in the course doing research degrees will choose this option.

Final Project Identification

Due Date: November 22
Deliverables: Turn in through Canvas
Maximum Length: 500 words (~1 page double spaced)

(Option 1) Community & Challenge Identification

For students conducting a community advising project, you should identify a community you are interested in and the challenge you hope to address in your final project and report. I encourage you to choose a community in which you are a member or leader and where you could, even if only in theory, deliver your recommendations to other members/leaders and have some chance of seeing the recommendations debated or adopted. I expect you to draw on sources and evidence from the course and any additional materials you deem relevant or useful.

For this initial assignment, I am asking you to write 1-2 paragraphs explaining what community you want to study, why you care about it, and to identify a challenge you think the community is facing or could be facing. If relevant or possible, it might be useful to also provide a link.

I hope each of you will pick a community that you are intellectually committed to and invested in your personal or work life. You should also remember that you will be presenting this publicly to the class. You will be successful in this assignment if you identify a community and clearly explain why you think it would be a useful community to study, if you identify a challenge that the community is facing, and if you outline why you think the conceptual tools taught in the class will give you an angle on this challenge.

(Option 2) Abstract/proposal

For students following the original research project path, you are also required to submit an extended abstract and/or proposal for the project. Because I understand that the most useful specific shape of this might vary, I'm happy to go back-and-forth with you on the details if you believe that a 500 word extended abstract that lays out the proposed work is not going to be sufficient or appropriate.

In either case, I will give you feedback on these write-ups and will let you each know if I think you have identified a project that might be too ambitious, too trivial, too broad, too narrow, etc.

Final Deliverables

Final Presentation Dates

Tuesday December 36

Paper Due Date

Friday December 13 @ 11:59pm

Maximum paper length

4,000 words

Deliverables

Details on final presentations including due dates, instructions, and dropboxes will be posted to /Final presentations [Forthcoming]
Turn in a copy of the paper in Canvas

For your final project, I expect students to build on the final project identification assignment to describe what they have done and found. I'll expect every student to give both:

A final presentation (see instructions on /Final presentations) [Forthcoming]
A final report that is not more than 4,000 words.

Each project should include: (a) the description of the community and challenge you have identified (you are welcome to borrow from your Final Project Identification assignment), (b) a description of how you would use the course concepts to address the challenge in question.

You will be evaluated on the degree to which you have demonstrated that you understand and have engaged with the course material and not on specifics of your community. Your audience is people who are interested in the community and the general public. A successful project will tell a compelling story and will engage with and improve upon the course material to teach all of us—that is, an audience that includes me, your classmates, and students taking this class in future years, how to take advantage of online communities more effectively. The very best papers will give us all a new understanding of some aspect of course material and change how I teach some portion of this course in the future.

Grading

Case discussion: 30%
Wikipedia assignments: 15%
Wikipedia advising report: 10%
Final project identification: 5%
Final presentation: 10%
Final project: 30%

Schedule

October 1 (Tuesday):

Goals for the day:

Collect some basic information from you all.
Provide an introduction and some context for the course (and hopefully get you excited about the rest of the quarter).
Review the course objectives and requirements.
Answer your questions about the class.
Work through any issues with the setup checklist (if there's time).

Resources:

[Lecture slides for course overview] (Requires Canvas Access) [Forthcoming]
[Lecture slides for introduction and pitch] (Requires Canvas Access) [Forthcoming]

Optional Readings:

Oldenburg, Ray. 1989. The great good place: Cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. Paragon House Publishers. Chapter 1 ("The Problem of Place in America") and Chapter 2 ("The Character of Third Places"). [Available in Canvas]
Bruckman, Amy. 2006. "A new perspective on ‘community’ and its implications for computer-mediated communication systems." In Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 616-621. [Available free online]

Friday October 4: DUE: Class Checklist & Wikipedia Task #1

Required Tasks:

Complete #Wikipedia Task #1
Complete the class setup checklist

I won't mention this each week but, as a reminder, you must complete these tasks by 11:59pm Seattle time.

October 8 (Tuesday) Micro: Motivation and Incentives

Lectures: (watch before class)

[Motivation and Incentives I (1/5): Introduction and framing] [18m41s] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives I (2/5): Theoretical models of motivation] [7m52s] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives I (3/5): Persuasive incentives] [10m39s] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives I (4/5): Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators] [24m] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives I (5/5): Wrapup and Takeaways] [5m43s] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives II (1/3): Introduction and gaming the system] [21m02s] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives II (2/3): Motivation crowding and group dynamics] [18m12s] [Forthcoming]
[Motivation and Incentives II (3/3): Takeaways] [4m01s] [Forthcoming]

Resources:

[Reading Note #1] (Requires Canvas access) [Forthcoming]
[Lecture Slides for Motivations and Incentives I] (Requires Canvas access) [Forthcoming]
[Lecture Slides for Motivations and Incentives II] (Requires Canvas access) [Forthcoming]
[Case Boards (Yelp)] (Requires Canvas access) [Forthcoming]
[Case Boards (Twitch)] (Requires Canvas access) [Forthcoming]

Required background reading: (read before class)

BSOC, Chapter 2, pg 21-70

Case Readings for Case #1 on Yelp:

[Case] Modi, Maulik. 2019. “Yelp — What Happened!!” Medium. December 1, 2019. [Available free online]
[Case] Parikh, Anish A., Carl Behnke, Doug Nelson, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, and Barbara Almanza. 2015. “A Qualitative Assessment of Yelp.Com Users’ Motivations to Submit and Read Restaurant Reviews.” Journal of Culinary Science & Technology 13 (1): 1–18. [Forthcoming]
[Case] Stone, Madeline. 2014. “Elite Yelpers Hold Immense Power, and They Get Treated like Kings by Bars and Restaurants Trying to Curry Favor.” Business Insider. August 22, 2014. [Available free online]
[Case] Ha, Anthony. 2017. “Yelp Launches New Feature for Asking and Answering Questions about Any Business.” TechCrunch (blog). February 14, 2017. [Available free online]
[Case] Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. “Algorithms and Invisibility: My Interview with Kandis.” In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Illustrated edition, 172–79. New York: NYU Press. [Forthcoming]

Reasings for Case #2 on Twitch:

[Case] Shear, Emmett. 2019. "What Streaming Means for the Future of Entertainment." TED. [Available free online] [14m46s]
[Case] Clark, Taylor. 2017. “How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online.” New Yorker, November 13, 2017. [Available free online]
[Case] Hernandez, Patricia. 2018. “The Twitch Streamers Who Spend Years Broadcasting to No One.” The Verge. July 16, 2018. [Available free online]
[Case] “The Differences Between Twitch Partner and Affiliate Programs.” 2019. GameOnAire (blog). April 5, 2019. [Available free online]
[Case] “Achievements.” n.d. Twitch. [Available free online]
[Case] Grayson, Nathan. 2018. “Twitch Partners Feeling Burned After Affiliates Receive Features That Took Them Years To Earn.” Kotaku. June 14, 2018. [Available free online]
[Case] "AI sponge." n.d. English Wikipedia. [Available from Wikipedia]
[Case] "Neuro-sama." n.d. English Wikipedia. [Available from Wikipedia]

Optional Reading:

BSOC, Chapter 1, pg 1-17
[Case] Herskowitz, Matthew. 2024. “Meet One of the Most Prolific People on Yelp.” Eater. July 18, 2024. [Available free online]
Kerr, Steven. 1975. “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” The Academy of Management Journal 18 (4): 769–83. [Available free online]
Gneezy, U., and A. Rustichini. 2000. “A Fine Is a Price.” The Journal of Legal Studies 29 (1): 1–17. [Available from UW libraries]
Willer, Robb. 2009. “Groups Reward Individual Sacrifice: The Status Solution to the Collective Action Problem.” American Sociological Review 74 (1): 23–43. [Available from UW libraries]
"Motivation crowding theory." n.d. English Wikipedia. [Available from Wikipedia]