Fixes, Logs, Tags

  • Nov 08, 2012
  • 2 Comments

 

There’s a strong indication that being involved or identifying with a subgroup within an online community increases the chances that a member will stay active within that community, and contribute to the community as a whole (fun readings: Ren, Y., Kraut, R. E., Kiesler, S., & Resnick, P. (In press). Developing commitment in online communities. In R. E. Kraut & P. Resnick (Eds.), Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Cambridge MA: MIT Press; Zhu, H., Kraut, R. E., & Kittur, A. (2012). Organizing without formal organization: Group Identification, Goal Setting and Social Modeling in Directing Online Production CSCW 2011: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM).  While the Looking Glass Community does not directly support groups in the traditional sense right now (“traditional” being dictated by online communities such as Facebook), we can still try to design our current features to help unite members with similar likes and interests.

Over the summer, Mary worked on implementing a following system between users that allowed one user to track the activities and submissions of another. Following a similar thread, I am currently expanding the notion of following to include tags. Tag pages could theoretically be treated as group pages in their own way, as users who submit worlds with similar tags are likely to be interested in similar world themes. Users who are especially into a certain project topic – let’s say cats – could then follow the “cat” tag, which would provide them a link to that tag on their home page, and notifications whenever a new world with a cat tag starts to accrue positive feedback. There’s still some flexibility in the design here, but that is basically the direction I’m going, and I’m excited to see what comes of it.  

In other news, progress for setting up my study is nearing the final stages. I’ve added a log in the study-based challenges IDE to track when users open a challenge or template, use the scene editor, play with remixing/tutorials, and share their projects. I might want to add a few more trackers, such as what methods and other boxes they drag into the scene, or delete.

Last, Kyle helped me fix a bug with recaptcha at sign up, with was being flagged by several browsers as an unsafe operation and thus hidden. Hopefully, this problem should now be fixed, and everyone should be able to successfully create accounts again!

Comments

  • kyle

    kyle said:

    <p>Yeah! for the accounts problem!</p> <p>I've often thought that our strict no-communication policies on the community really break the since of belonging that I know that I like about online communities. I understand and support this decision. So I'm really excited to see that you feel that belonging is important and are starting to explore how to make this happen in our non-traditional online community.</p>

    Posted on Nov 09, 2012
  • caitlin

    caitlin said:

    <p>I'm really curious to see how this feels in practice. I especially like that someone else tagging your world can become an implicit invitation into a group.</p>

    Posted on Nov 09, 2012

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