People will believe an action or outcome is valuable when they are led to believe that other people are doing it (or believe so)

Social proof

The application of engagement-based design ideas found in games, specifically focusing on how games can engage and motivate participants to return to the medium.

Gamification

When members self-set or are assigned highly challenging goals their contribution increases (DC 13 CH2)
Although many people use self-imposed goals as a source of self-regulation, research has shown that the goals people develop for themselves are not necessarily more powerful than goals assigned to them by an outside agent

Goal setting and contribution in online communities

Integrating assessment into learning by having not just the instructor, but the students' peers evaluate their work. This incorporates and fosters several key learning behaviors, such as self-assessment, collaboration, and peer honesty.

Peer Assessment

When leadership is shared amongst the community and authoritative demands are feasible for any member, contribution tends to increase when leadership-like messages are sent by non-administrators/leaders. Allowing non-admin to send leadership-based messages may increase contribution from other members of the community through increased motivation.

Encouraging Contribution in Online Communities through Shared Leadership

Implementing transactional and person-based rather than aversive leadership styles is beneficial to the contributions of other non-leaders. When they feel a sense of support, connection positive encouragement from their leader, they are more likely to contribute than with negative, punishment-based leadership styles.

Encouraging Contributions in Online Communities through Leadership Type

- gamification systems
- social proof/influence
- social presence
- peer assessment
- goal setting
- comment/voting systems
- leadership type
- shared leadership

New York University

Incentivizing or convincing users to contribute content on the platform. This can be showing them that the utility of adding content is greater than the cost of having to create it.

Encouraging contributions in online communities

Kraut, Robert E., and Paul Resnick. Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. MIT Press, 2012.

Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design (Kraut and Resnick)

Zhu, H., Kraut, R., & Kittur, A. (2012, February). Effectiveness of shared leadership in online communities. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work (pp. 407-416).

Effectiveness of shared leadership in online communities

Motivators of individual effort path diagram

Easy to use tools that helps users find and track work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done. (DC 2 CH2)

Providing tools for finding and tracking work

Online communities can request specific contributions from their community members

Requesting contributions from community members

Posits that behaviors and actions are controlled by three main factors, Motivation, Ability, and Triggers. The theory suggests that the lack of any one of the three factors will hamper action.

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