Building successful online communities: evidence-based social design

323 Pages·2012·7.646 MB·English

by  Kiesler, Sara;Kraut, Robert E.;Resnick, Paul

Building Successful Online Communities

Building Successful Online Communities
Evidence-Based Social Design
Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick
with Sara Kiesler, Moira Burke, Yan Chen, Niki Kittur, Joseph Konstan,
Yuqing Ren, and John Riedl
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2 011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed
and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kraut, Robert E.
Building successful online communities : Evidence-Based Social Design / Robert E. Kraut and
Paul Resnick with Sara Kiesler ... [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01657-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Online social networks— Planning. 2. Computer networks— Social aspects— Planning.
3. Internet— Social aspects. 4. Social psychology. I. Resnick, Paul. II. Kiesler, Sara, 1940–
III. Title.
HM742.K73 2012
302.30285— dc22
2011010842
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“ There is nothing so practical as a good theory.”
“ If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.”
— Kurt Lewin

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
Paul Resnick and Robert E. Kraut
2 Encouraging Contribution to Online Communities 21
Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick
3 Encouraging Commitment in Online Communities 77
Yuqing Ren, Robert E. Kraut, Sara Kiesler, and Paul Resnick
4 Regulating Behavior in Online Communities 125
Sara Kiesler, Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, and Aniket Kittur
5 The Challenges of Dealing with Newcomers 179
Robert E. Kraut, Moira Burke, John Riedl, and Paul Resnick
6 Starting New Online Communities 231
Paul Resnick, Joseph Konstan, Yan Chen, and Robert E. Kraut
Contributors 281
Index 283

Acknowledgments
This book grew out of the CommunityLab research project, a five-year grant from the
National Science Foundation, involving seven professors and myriad graduate stu-
dents from Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Michigan, and the Univer-
sity of Minnesota. We conducted experiments testing alternative ways to elicit
participation in online communities, and we published those results, replete with
careful statistical analyses, in journals and conference proceedings. More broadly, we
spoke at research-oriented venues, arguing that insights from social science theories
could directly inform online community design and management, if only we took
seriously the task of mining that theory.
By 2006, we thought that message should reach a broader audience, including
practitioners and students. There was an emerging cadre of practitioners whose primary
professional identity was as online community designers and managers. They worked
as consultants or ran big online communities like ePinions or the Microsoft Developer
Network. In addition, many more people were becoming “ accidental community
managers,” managing the installation of enterprise social-computing platforms within
their companies or creating communities of practice curating knowledge on particular
topics or launching health-support communities. And professors were starting to teach
courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels that devoted all or part of a semester
to questions of how best to organize online interactions.
Two consultants, Amy Jo Kim and Derek Powazek, had written excellent books filled
with examples and guidelines of what to do and what not to do. Jenny Preece, one
of the pioneers of research on online communities, had written a nice textbook that
summarized much of the research relevant to online communities, organized around
the themes of usability and sociability. However, these texts were showing their age
in a fast-moving field (they were all written well before the rise of Wikipedia or Face-
book), and none of the existing books articulated our vision of generating specific