Workshop on the Role of Online Community Spaces in Shaping Virtual Community Interactions International Conference on Communities and Technologies September 19th, 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. http://www-winfo.uni-siegen.de/wulf/CT2003/ Important Information: Submissions to: qgjones@acm.org Deadline for submission: June 16, 2003 Notification of Acceptance: by June 30, 2003 Further Workshop Information: http://modiin.njit.edu/workshops/CC&T2003 WORKSHOP AIMS Modern communication technologies increasingly situate interpersonal interactions virtually; often in online community spaces that enable shared inter-personal interactions. Researchers are still trying to understand basic usability issues associated with these community spaces. Further complicating matters, new types of online spaces are emerging that link community systems to aspects of the physical environment or user mobility. This workshop aims to examine the connection between community space design and community interactions. This will be achieved through a diverse group of participants exploring together from a wide variety of perspectives the significance of various features of online communities spaces. THEME The online spaces where virtual community members interact are referred to by a wide variety of labels including chat rooms (Read 1991), cyber-inns (Coate 1992), virtual settlements (Jones 1997), commons (Kollock and Smith 1994), and conferences (Hiltz and Turoff 1981). Some systems are completely open to the public, such as LambdaMoo (Schiano and White 1998), others are restricted to a membership (Schlager and Schank 1997), or a specific task or purpose (Erickson 1999). The diversity of online community space designs and labels highlights how system features provide a context for community interactions. This workshop aims to explore the role of online community spaces in supporting virtual community interactions. Among the questions we plan to address are: * Which features of online community spaces help shape discourse and social networks? * What critical factors are necessary to evolve an online space into a community place? * What are the links between features of client communication software and online community interactions? For example, what is the significance of push-versus-pull and synchronous-versus-asynchronous message exchange? * What is the significance of an online community space having a hybrid (Harrison and Dourish 1996), location linked (Espinoza et al. 2001), or wearable (Kortuem, and Segall 2003) design? * How can we extend our understanding of the nature and utility of online community spaces to incorporate changes resulting from the adoption of pervasive computing technologies? When and what theoretical constructs are useful to understanding how to enhance interactions in community spaces? For example, social presence (see Whittaker in press) and media richness (see Whittaker in press) have all been put forward as ways to understand virtual community interactions, but it is not clear that they are of significant value to designers of online spaces. An important question is how do they help us understand how to support sustainable discourse dynamics and build cyber-commons where diverse egocentric social networks can coalesce? A variety of disciplines are pertinent to these explorations, including psychology, sociology, architecture, linguistic and discourse analyses. Each one approaches the notions of space and common ground for interaction from a slightly different perspective, and level of detail. Other disciplines may have pertinent insights and approaches. We would like to encourage them all. Important perspectives and issues include the notions of space and place (Harrison and Dourish 1996), common information space (Bannon and Bodker 1997), common ground in discourse (Clark 1992), discourse architecture (Jones and Rafaeli 2000), genre theory (Erickson 2000), and other detailed aspects of linguistics (Brennan and Ohaeri 1999). There have been a number of past community workshops, covering formation of communities, construction of infrastructures and understanding aspects of group formation and vitality. We would like to expand this to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved as they relate to online community space. ACTIVITIES AND GOALS If participants agree, activities will start with dinner at a local restaurant the night preceding the full day workshop[1]. Before ordering dinner a general orientation of the workshop will be given by the organizers, along with introductions. During dinner participants will present their submissions. They will be given a maximum of 3 minutes to speak. This dinner meeting will enable us to maximize the full day workshop. Accepted participants will be expected to have read the positions papers before attending the dinner and the workshop. The full day will be divided into a number of interactive sessions, rather than just presentation of position papers. The exact details will depend upon the position papers received, however we hope to: 1) Explore participants’ examples of how the design of virtual space provides common ground for user interactions; 2) Examine how communities use public interactions in virtual spaces to create shared meaning; and 3) Look at the impact of online behavior on community development and maintenance. By the end of the workshop participants will have catalogued design differences, cues, and behaviors in various virtual settings, and explored how they support behavior in work related spaces. If attendance is high we may break into subgroups for more intense discussion. If this is the case then each smaller group will report back with their key ideas PARTICIPATION Participants will be selected on the basis of position papers submitted prior to the workshop. Proposals should be no longer than 6 pages and should include description of the following aspects. 1)An existing online community space; 2)An examination of how the space/s under consideration provides cues and common ground for user interactions, and ; 3)Theoretical ideas or approaches that help you understand context and social interaction, or; 4)Analysis of different types of online communities (e.g. hybrid and purely virtual spaces). Position papers should explain how the author’s work relates to the workshop theme. We are particularly interested in seeing perspectives at a variety of levels, ranging from meta to micro-scale analyses. Submissions should be sent to qgjones@acm.org by June 16, 2003. Position papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and notification of acceptance will be by June 30, 2003. We look for a wide range of participants although the focus is primarily on researchers concerned with the notion of space. This includes, but is not limited to system architects and designers who have thought about and implemented supports for social interaction, social psychologists, linguists and sociologists who have studied online interactions. ORGANIZERS Quentin (Gad) Jones is an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to his current position, Quentin was a researcher at AT&T labs research, New Jersey. Before living in the United States he was a doctoral student in Information Systems at Hebrew and Haifa Universities Israel. Quentin’s research focus is on understanding mass interaction ecologies that result in thriving virtual communities. His current online community research projects include Cyber-Archaeology, ContactMap, and GeoMemory. Christine Halverson is a researcher at IBM Research. She is involved with the development and analysis of systems to help work groups interact collaboratively over networks. Her analytic approaches have included visualizations, linguistic analysis, online participation and observations among others. Her research group has designed and deployed a number of online systems including BABBLE & Loops. http://www.research.ibm.com/SocialComputing/ RELATED PAST WORKSHOPS Jones, Q. and Halverson, C. The Role of Place in Shaping Virtual Community, CSCW 2002.Erickson T., Herring S., Sack W., Discourse Architectures: The Design and Analysis of Computer-Mediated Conversation. CHI 2002. Erickson T., and Herring S., "Persistent Conversation" workshops at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) from 1999-2002. Farnham S., Smith M., et. al. Integrating Diverse Research and Development Approaches to the Construction of Social Cyberspaces. CHI 2001 Bruckman A., Erickson T., et. al. Dealing with Community Data, CSCW 2000 Muller M., and Friedman J., Electronic Communities: Places and Spaces, Contents and Boundaries. CHI 2000 Barbesino et. al. Designing Across Borders: The Community Design of Community Networks. CSCW 1998. Toomey L., Tang J., Adams L., and Gloria Mark Designing Virtual Communities for Work. CSCW 1998 Bruckman A., Erickson T., et. al. Workshop on Research Issues in the Design of Online Communities. CHI 1999 REFERENCES Bannon, L., and Bodker, S. Constructing Common Information Space. Proceedings of the Fifth ECSCW. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 1997. Brennan, S.E. and J.O. Ohaeri. Why do electronic conversations seem less polite: the costs and benefits of hedging. in WACC '99. 1999. San Francisco, CA: ACM. Clark, H. Arenas of language use. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992. Coate, J., 1992. Innkeeping in Cyberspace, In: Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC-92), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Palo Alto, CA. http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Community/innkeeping. Erickson, T. Making Sense of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Conversations as Genres, CMC Systems as Genre Ecologies. In the Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. January, 2000. IEEE Press. Erickson, T., et al. Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of Babble. in Human Factors in Computing: The Proceedings of CHI 99. 1999. Pittsburgh, PA: ACM Press. Espinoza, F., Persson, P., Sandin, A., Nyström, H., Cacciatore. E. & Bylund, M. (2001) GeoNotes: Social and Navigational Aspects of Location-Based Information Systems, in Abowd, Brumitt & Shafer (eds.) Ubicomp 2001: Ubiquitous Computing, International Conference Atlanta, Georgia, September 30 - October 2, Berlin: Springer, p. 2-17. Kortuem G. Segall G., Wearable Communities: Augmenting Social Networks with Wearable Computers, Pervasive Computing, pp. 71-78, January-March 2003 (Vol. 2, No. 1), IEEE Press. Harrison, S. and P. Dourish, 1996. Re-place-ing space: The roles of place and space in collaborative systems, In: Computer Supported Collaborative Work, ACM, Cambridge, MA pp. 67-76. Hiltz, S.R. and M. Turoff, 1981. The evolution of user behavior in a computerized conferencing system, Communications of the ACM, 24 (11 November): 739-751. Jones Q. 1997. Virtual-communities, virtual-settlements & cyber-archaeology: A theoretical outline. J of Comp Mediated Communication 3(3). Jones Q., and S. Rafaeli 2000. Time to Split, Virtually: ‘Discourse Architecture’ and ‘Community Building’ as means to Creating Vibrant Virtual Publics. Electronic Markets: The International Journal of Electronic Commerce and Business Media. 10(4) 214-223. Kollock, P. and M. Smith, 1994. Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In: Computer-Mediated Communication, (Ed. S. Herring), John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Meyrowitz, J., 1985. No sense of place, Oxford University Press Inc., New York. Oldenburg, R., 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through The Day., Paragon House, New York. Reid, E. M., 1991. Electropolis: Communications and community on Internet Relay Chat, Honors, History, University of Melbourne. http://www.ee.mu.oz.au/papers/emr/work.html. Rheingold, H., 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Schiano, D.J. and S. White. The first noble truth of CyberSpace: People are People (even when they MOO). in CHI 98. 1998. Los Angeles CA: ACM. Schlager, M. and P. Schank. TAPPED IN: A New On-line Teacher Community Concept for the Next Generation of Internet Technology. in CSCL '97, The Second International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning. 1997. Toronto: ACM. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] We did this at the CSCW02 workshop and found that this worked well for all but those who flew in too late to join us (2 out of 12).It gave a chance for people to get to know each other before they take the workshop, and engages them early in understanding each other's positions