Unedited Notes from Day 1 OCS2007

Onlien Community Summit 2007 in Sonoma, California

social good session

freshbrain
– educational online kids
– sun project

Cal Joy
– George Lucas Education

kaboom
– help communities make playgrounds

changemakers – platform for social good via contests

social edge – social entrepreneur resources
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books:
– digital korea
– rainbows end
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Crowdsourcing
Description: The Internet offers astounding opportunities to tackle enormous challenges by using large numbers of workers (think Wikipedia). We’ll discuss opportunities with two leaders in the field.

Peter Cohen / Amazon.com

what problems would i solve if i could have ten of thousands of people to help with that task.

Mechanical Turk
– http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
– Amazon’s “Artificial Artifical Intelligence”
– pay users to help computers/search
– around for 4 years now

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What Works? A Report from the Front Edge of Community Research
Description: What does current research tell us about effective strategies in the design and management of online Communities?

Neel Sundaresan / eBay Research Labs
Paul Resnick / University of Michigan

Paul developing a handbook for online community development

Community Lab
– Carnegie Mellon, Univ of Mich, Univ of Minn
– mine the findings from social science with practical insights
– how do we get particpants in online communities to participate mor and better

Online Handbook
– systematized approach
– if then, with case studies
– roi strategies

Examples:
Social cost of cheap pseudonyms
– if too easy to change name, no “new comer” status
– voting, ranking, rating systems are affected
– barriers to entry or levels of member to make these systems work better

how to get people to do what you want (rating)
– set a specific goal
– the higher the goal the better, as long as its possible
– based on npr data from pledge drives
– pack mentality/collective effort does not works well
– give feedback on how unique their feedback is

Score keeping mechanisms
– if you tell the person below the medium, they will perform more, the ones above with perform less

Create group identities
– around things that are not real or are arbitrary
– also phrasing things in terms of a more localized group got better results

Newcomers
– looked at what happens to the fist post to a group
– whetehr you get responded to does make a difference
– emotional tone dosn’t matter
– whether the response answered the question didn’t matter
– just being noticed was the most impactful
– Hawthorne affect – factory where increasing lighting increasing productivity as did decreasing the lighting – just change matters

Psychologists and economists both doing the experiments
– psychologists decieve, economists won’t 🙂
– we made sure everything we told them was true, just not ness the whole truth

ebay research labs: communities and commerce

3 ebay subsidaries – ebay, paypal, skype

stickiness – do they go back to the same person again

had a problem measuring serendipity

measured relationships between searches
– algorithms only go so far
– need to use the community as well

acquistion
activation

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technorati tags:ocs2007, sonoma, forum-one, mechanical-turk, online-community, metrics, stats

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