CSSE Seminar Series (CSSESS)
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Seminar
Participation, lurking and successful online communities.
Speaker: Professor Jenny Preece.
Institute: Information Systems Department, University of Maryland; USA.
Time/Place: 10:00 AM, Wed, 12 Mar, in Room 031, Erskine Building.
Abstract
Online community developers and managers are always worried about lurkers. They want them to 'actively' participate by posting messages and chatting. Even the term 'lurker' carries strong pejorative connotations. Yet many lurkers view themselves as community members who have altruistic motives for their behaviour. In this talk I will discuss a study in which we examined lurking behaviour in 100 online health support and technical support communities. We collected data using in-depth interviews and by logging the activity of the communities over a three-month period. I will also present some preliminary findings from a study in progress in which we used online questionnaires to study over 350 online communities from four different categories of communities. Together these studies present a rich picture of participation and lurking online. The findings pose some interesting challenges for those designing software for online communities and for those managing activity in online communities. The talk will end with a brief discussion of criteria for judging the success of online communities. Participants' concepts of success often differ from those of developers.
Biography
Jenny Preece is professor of information systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on online communities. She is particularly interested in understanding the community's social needs and how best to support them though software design and social management. Jenny is author of a number of books including: 'Online Communities: Designing sociability, supporting sociability, 2000 (www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities) and 'Interaction Design: Beyond human-computer interaction, 2002, (www.id-book.com) which is coauthored with Yvonne Rogers and Helen Sharp. Both books are published by John Wiley & Sons. She has written extensively on online communities and some of these papers are available on her personal website, www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece.
View past or future seminars; or view the CSSESS Home Page.