Building Successful Online Communities (Fall 2016)

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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:

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 online communities.

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. You will only need to complete the Basics modules. That said, if you plan to do something covered by the special topics (e.g., work on an article related to medical information, share images and/or media files, or translate an article) you will also be responsible for the material in those sections as well.
  • 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 students 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 your "Report to Wikipedia"
Due Date
Sunday November 4
Deliverables
Finish article in Wikipedia and turn in link to article in Canvas. Turn in report as subpage of your Wikipedia userpage and turn in link in Canvas.
Post 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, ou 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 "/Report" 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 report
1000 words (~4 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 a report reflecting on your experience contributing to Wikipedia in light of your experience and the course material and, most importantly, offering advice to the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia Community on how to improve their community. I want you all to treat this as a dress rehearsal for your final projects.

Your report will be evaluated, first and foremost, on the degree to which it provides useful, informed, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will also 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:

  1. Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. What should Wikipedia think about doing? What should they think about changing?
  2. Comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. What did you do and what did you learn?
  3. Connect your experience in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered. Justify your recommendations in terms of the theories and principles we've covered. Why should your recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from one new user?
  4. If possible, reflect on what parts of the theories or concepts we covered applied or didn't. You don't have to take everything taught in the course for granted. What would you change or add based on your experience? What is unique or different about Wikipedia?

I will give everybody in the course feedback on their assignment. The basic structure is shorter, but extremely 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.

Project 2: Report on building/improving an online community

For the final assignment, I want you to take what you've learned in the class and apply it to a real online community in a consultant/client model. I'm going to ask everybody to work with a real organization in one of the two situations:

  1. Designing a new online community.
  2. Improving or expanding an existing community.

My strong preference will be for every student to work on these projects alone. That said, if there's a very compelling reason for 2 or more students to work in a group, I'm willing to discuss it.

Community Identification and Signed MOU

Maximum Length
750 words (~3 pages double spaced)
Deliverables
  • Community identification essay (Turn in to Canvas)
  • Signed copy of MOU (Turn in to me in class)
Due Date
October 31

In this assignment, you should identify and the community you will be working with for your final project. In the essay part of this assignment, I am asking you to write several paragraphs explaining which community you will be working with and why you think it will be an appropriate site for applying the course material. If relevant or possible, it might be useful to also provide a link to any existing community or to the organization.

I am hoping that each of you will pick a community that you are intellectually interested and invested in. If you want to the community something you are involved in your personal and professional life, that's ideal. Although I'm encouraging you to connect to your work lives, you should also keep in mind that you will be presenting this publicly to the class. If you don't know of such a community, Molly Schachter should be able to help connect you to businesses that are interested in advice on growing, improving, or starting an online community.

Second, I want to make sure that the organizations you are going to be working with are on board. As a result, I'm asking you all to bring a signed copy of the course memorandum of understanding in. You should read that document as soon as possible to get a sense of what you'll be asking organizations to agree to.

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 using the concepts we have covered in the class. 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 Projects: Report about creating or improveing an online community

Presentation Date
December 12
Paper Due Date
December 16
Maximum paper length
4500 words (~18 pages)
Deliverables
Turn in in Canvas

For your final project, I expect students to build on the community identification assignment and to complete a report. I expect every student to produce a written report that will be shared with the client organization. I also expect each student to prepare a formal presentation that they give during the final class session:

  • A short presentation to the class (length TBD)
  • A final report that is not more than 4,500 words

I will invite representative of client organizations that are interested to visit the final class to hear presentations. If clients cannot attend, I expect that students will give their presentation at another time after the final presentation that is convenient to the client organization.

Each report should include the description of the community you have identified (you are welcome to borrow from your Community Identification assignment), and a description of how you would use the course concepts to change and improve the community.

Once again, your report will be evaluated on the degree to which it provides useful, informed, and actionable advice to the client organization and on the degree to which you engage with the course material. Please make sure you do the following things:

  1. Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the client organization. For example, what are they doing right? What should they change?
  2. Justify your recommendations in terms of the theories and principles we've covered and include references for your readers who won't have your background. Why should your recommendations be taken seriously?
  3. Remember that you don't have to take everything taught in the course for granted. What is unique or different about the client organization that causes you to have to think and read beyond the course material we've covered? What are the big open questions and risks they will be facing?

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 or the content of your advice.

A successful project will provide good advice that a client would be happy to have paid 1a consultant for, tell a compelling story, be clearly written, and will engage with, and improve upon, the course material to teach an audience that includes not only the client but me, your classmates, and students taking this class in future years on 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 the way I teach some portion of this course in the future.

Grading

I have put together a very detailed page that describes the grading rubric we will be using in this course. Please read it carefully I will assign grades for each of following items on the UW 4.0 grade scale according to the weights below:

  • Participation: 20%
  • Wikipedia assignments: 15%
  • Wikipedia reflection essay: 10%
  • Community identification: 5%
  • Final Presentation: 10%
  • Final Paper: 40%

Schedule

October 3: Introduction & the Origins of Online Communities

Required Readings:

Optional Readings:

  • Hauben, Michael, Ronda Hauben, and Thomas Truscott. (1997) Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos, Calif: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. [Chapter 2 and Chapter 3]

Optional Video:

October 10: Motivation

Required Reading:

Optional:

October 17: Commitment

Required Readings:

  • BSOC, Chapter 3, pg 77-115

In some of these cases, there is an enormous amount of material on this page and its subpages. Poke around for 10 minutes or so on each one until you get a strong sense for who is participating and how and why people build commitment to the site and are comfortable talking about this in class:

Several pieces about Facebook and lock-in:

October 24: Rules and Governance

Required Readings:

  • BSOC, Chapter 4, pg 125-170

Our first case will involve a comparison of Codes of Conduct:

Our second case will talk about Slashdot:

  • [Case] Slashdot: Spend 5-10 minutes to visit the homepage, look at a story you think is interesting, and read several of the comments, paying specific attention to the rating system.
  • [Case] Slashdot Moderation FAQ, 2014
  • [Case] Lampe, Cliff, and Paul Resnick. “Slash(Dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 543–50. CHI ’04. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2004. doi:10.1145/985692.985761. [Official Link (available through UW libraries)] [Author Website (available for free)]

Optional Readings:

October 31: Newcomers

Required Readings:

Optional Readings:


Today we'll be visited by Jonathan Morgan, an expert on newcomers in Wikipedia, a PhD graduate from UW, currently an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the first author of the paper we'll be reading as our case today.

  • [Case] Morgan et al., "Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on Wikipedia" Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '13), Pages 839-848, ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. [Official Link (Available through UW libraries)] [Author's Website (Free Online)]
  • [Case] Visit 'the Teahouse on Wikipedia. In particular, spend time on these three pages and associated sub-questions:
    • Teahouse questions forum: What do the questions here tell you about the kinds of challenges that new editors face? How does this jibe with your own experience as a new Wikipedian?
    • Teahouse host profiles: What do the profiles on this page tell you about the demographics and motivations of Teahouse Hosts? Does anything about the Teahouse host characteristics and motivations you read in these profiles surprise you? Why or why not?
    • Teahouse guest profiles and Guest book: What do the profiles on this page tell you about the demographics and motivations of Teahouse visitors? Does anything about the Teahouse guest characteristics and motivations you read in these profiles surprise you? Why or why not?

November 7: Creating New Communities

November 14: NO CLASS

November 21: Free/Open Source and Peer Production (Topic Tentative)

November 28: Hackers and Transgressive Communities (Topic Tentative)

December 5: Innovation Communities (Topic Tentative)

December 12: Final Presentations

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