Building Successful Online Communities (Fall 2016)

Building Successful Online Communities

COM597 A - Masters of Communication in Communities and Networks (MCCN) Elective, Department of Communication

Instructor: Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)

Course Websites:

We will use Canvas for announcements, turning in assignments, and discussion
For coordinating Wikipedia assignments, it will be helpful to refer to the WikiEdu class page and dashboard.
Everything else will be linked on this page.

Overview and Learning Objectives

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.

This course combines an in-depth look into several decades of research into online communities and computer-mediated communication with real-world experience applying this research to the evaluation of, hands-on participation in, and the critique and design of successful online communities. As students of communication and leadership in the twenty-first century, I expect that many of you taking this course will, after graduation, work in jobs that involve communicating, 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 how to construct, improve, or design your own online communities.

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

Recall, compare, and give examples of key theories that can explain why some online communities grow and attract participants while others do not.
Write and speak with a fluency about the rules and norms of the Wikipedia community and demonstrate this fluency through successful contributions to Wikipedia.
Engage with the course material and compellingly present your own ideas and reflections in writing and orally.
Demonstrate an ability to critically apply the theories by critiqueing and/or helping design a real online community of your choice in a consultant/client-based model.

Notes About This Syllabus

You should expect this syllabus to be a dynamic document. Although the core expectations for this class are fixed, the details of readings and assignments will shift based on how the class goes, changes or updates with 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 "To Be Determined" one week before it's due, it is dropped. This also means that if you plan to read more than one week ahead, contact me first or you'll risk reading things that might not stick around on the syllabus.
Closely monitor your email or the announcements section on the course website on Canvas. Because this syllabus is a wiki page, 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 an announcement on Canvas once week that will be emailed to everybody in the class.
I will ask the class for voluntary anonymous feedback weekly — 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.

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

In the first half of the class (Weeks 1-6), the readings will look to theories that can help explain how and why online communities succeed and fail and how and why they grow or shrink. In each of the weeks in this period, we will read from the book we'll be using as a textbook: Kraut et al.'s Building Successful Online Communities (BSOC). Here is the citation:

Kraut, Robert E., and Paul Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. The MIT Press, 2012.

MIT Press sells the book for $22.00 in a digital format, $31.00 in paperback, and $41.00 in hardcover. Amazon sells the book for $35.00 in hardcover and $17 for the Kindle version. Wikipedia has this long list of possible book sources.

More or less following the organizations of BSOC, we will focus on these key drivers of participation in online communities:

Motivation: How do online communities incentivize participation?
Commitment: How do online communities build relationships to keep individuals involved?
Rules and Governance: How do online communities create norms, rules, and governance?
Newcomers: How do online communities attract — or fail to attract — newcomers?
Creation: How should one start a new online community?

In order to ground the theoretical readings during the first half of the quarter, there will be weekly assignments that provide a structured opportunity to learn about and become involved in Wikipedia.

You should keep in mind that the bulk of the reading in the course — and most of the most difficult material — will be front-loaded in this first five week period. The goal is to make sure that you have all the tools you'll need by the end of Week 5 so that you can use this material to focus on your projects in earnest.

Component 2: Examples and Challenges

In the second half of the course, we will focus less on theory and more on examples of online communities and on applications, examples, and challenges, associated with interpersonal media and computer-mediated communication.

Our reading during the second part of the quarter will be focused on cases studies. We will also focus on in-class discussions and exercises that prompt critical consideration of how online communities take place in different domains as well as the challenges associated with using online communities. Our goal here is to build up the ability to critically understand these communities in terms of the theory we covered earlier.

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

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. My classes never involve exams or quizzes. I want to see you use, apply, and critically engage with the course material, not just regurgitate it.

Unless otherwise noted, all assignments are due at the end of the day (i.e., 11:59pm on the day they are due).

Participation and Cases

The course relies heavily on participation, discussion, and the case study method. 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 "[Cases]" in the syllabus and I will expect you to read these particularly closely. It is important to realize that we will not summarize case material in class and I will not cover it in lecture. 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 not right and wrong answers in cases.

Typically, professors teaching cases cold call on students in rooms of hundred students. Since our class will be smaller than a typical case-based class, cold calling might not be necessary very often although I will sometimes use it and you should always be ready to answer every question I pose. That said, I expect every student to be in class every week and to be prepared to discuss the cases and the readings. If you have not spoken all class, I may cold call on you.

The "Participation Rubric" section of my detailed page on assessment gives the rubric I will use in evaluating participation. I re-read this participation rubric every quarter when it comes to assess participation.

Papers

You will hand in two papers in this class. In both cases, I will ask you to connect the knowledge about our course material that you are building with your experience of a real online community. The "Writing Rubric" section of my detailed page on assessment gives the rubric I will use to evaluate these papers.

Project 1: Contributing to Wikipedia

In the first project, you will be asked to learn about Wikipedia, its norms, rules, and processes. With this knowledge, you will all be asked to research and write a new article in Wikipedia on a topic of your choice and to publish this article in the encyclopedia. As part of this process, you will interact with other community members who are not part of the class. Afterward, you will be asked to write a short essay to reflect on this process and to connect your experience to the conceptual course material where appropriate.

Every Friday during this first component of this class, there will be a assignment due that corresponds to one step in the process of getting involved in Wikipedia. These Wikipedia participation assignments won't be synced up the the theory, but they will provide with you lots of opportunity to reflect on the theoretical work we are covering.

Although only Task #6 includes anything that you will need to turn in, you will need to participate in Wikipedia each week. All quarter long, I will be able to see this activity and help you. We will take time each week to discuss our progress and experience with Wikipedia and to connect it explicitly to the theoretical concepts we are covering.

Wikipedia Task #1

Task: Create an account and start orientation
Due: Friday September 30
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia

Start the online student orientation
During this training, you will create an account, make edits in a sandbox, and learn the basic rules of the Wikipedia community.
Once 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 to enroll in the course. If you are asked for a passcode, you can enter fiwotjvu.

Wikipedia Task #2

Task: Complete Wikipedia orientation and choose article topic
Due Date: Friday October 7
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia

Complete the online training for students.
Create a user page, and sign up on the list of students on the course page.
To practice editing and communicating on Wikipedia, introduce yourself to me and at least one classmate on Wikipedia. My username is Benjamin Mako Hill. You can find a list of all of your classmates on the WikiEdu class page.
Decide on an article you would like to create or a stub article you would like to significantly expand and improve (see below).
Tell me what article you want by leaving a message on my user talk page.

If there is a topic you know are interested in writing about that doesn't have an article, go ahead and suggest it. If you are having trouble coming up with a specific topic on your own, there are a few resources you might find helpful:

Requested Articles — This is a list of articles that others have asked to be created. It is sorted into categories and sub-categories. When you're looking at the list, remember that it's possible that somebody else has "gotten" to them first and forgot to remove it. Remember that a red link indicates that there is no page with that name.
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.

Wikipedia Task #3

Task: Compile research and write draft
Due Date: Sunday October 14
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia

Compile a bibliography of relevant research.
Write a 2-3 paragraph summary version of your article—with citations—in your Wikipedia sandbox.
Add the URL For your sandboxed article to yourself on the course WikiEdu page by clicking the assign article button next to your name and assigning the URL for your sandbox to yourself.

Wikipedia Task #4

Task: Make article "live" and choose articles to review
Due Date: Monday October 21
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia

Begin polishing your article.
Move sandbox articles into the "(Article)" name space by using the "Move" tab, by setting the namespace to "(Article)" and by setting the page title to be whatever you want the article to be named.
- Once you have moved the article, visit the list of students in the WikiEdu dashboard and (a) assign the new URL to yourself and (b) remove the old one by clicking the "+" button to open the menu and using the "-" button next to the old "sandbox" copy of your article. You need to press "Save" at the top of the page once you are done.
Select two classmates’ articles that you will peer review and copy-edit. (You don't need to start reviewing yet.) To sign up, you can mark this in the the dashboard by using the Assign a review' button. Try to pick articles that other students are not yet reviewing.

Wikipedia Task #5

Task: Peer review other students' articles
Due Date: Friday October 28
Deliverables: Make contributions in Wikipedia

Peer review two of your classmates’ articles. Leave suggestions on the article talk pages for how to improve them.
Improve and copy-edit the two reviewed articles to help fix issues, improve sourcing, create a more neutral or encyclopedic tone, etc.

Wikipedia Task #6

Task: Finalize article and turn in reflection essay
Due Date: Sunday November 4
Deliverables: Finish article in Wikipedia and turn in link to article in Canvas. Turn in reflection essay as subpage of your Wikipedia userpage and turn in link in Canvas.; Post your reflection as a subpage of your userpage. For example, I would create mine with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill/Reflections as the URL. You should replace "Benjamin_Mako_Hill" with your Wikipedia username. You can also just go to your userpage by clicking on your username on Wikipedia and then adding "/Reflections" at the end of the 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.
Maximum length for reflection essay: 750 words (~3 pages double spaced)

Your Wikipedia article will be evaluated based on your demonstrated understanding of Wikipedia rules and policies. Is it a good article by Wikipedia's standards?

In addition to finishing up your Wikipedia article, everybody should turn in an essay reflecting on your experience contributing to Wikipedia in light of your experience and the course material.

Your essay will be evaluated on the degree to which you engage with the course material. See the writing rubric for details on my expectations in terms of the content of the papers. A successful essay will do the following three things:

Comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. What did you do and what did you learn?
Connect your experience in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered. Which topics or issues were relevant or important? Why?
Reflect on what parts of the theories or concepts we covered applied or didn't? What would you change or add based on your experience?

I will give everybody in the course feedback on their assignment. The basic structure is similar to what you will be doing in the final project. As a result, you can treat this as a "mid-term" and make adjustments based on feedback.