1Cademy - Motivating Contributions in Online communities

Concept

Motivating Contributions in Online communities

Many online communities fail due to low contribution
While not every member needs to contribute to a community to be successful, it is difficult for online communities to provide needed services if contribution levels are really low
Social science theories have helped CSCW designers and developers try and make plans to overcome difficulties in a system’s design
Aim of this paper is to build an even stronger link between social science theories and CSCW design
The studies in this paper focus on social loafing, where people tend to exert less effort on a collective task than they do on a comparable individual task
The studies focus on trying to improve an online community called MovieLens. This is a web-based movie recommender community where members can rate movies, write movie reviews, and receive recommendations for movies