1. Lecture 4
Building a Thriving Online
Community Ecosystem

2. Recall  “We want a growing and
thriving community!”

3. Questions?
• How to get a community started?
• How to motivate contributions?
• How to coordinate those contributions?
• How to make thriving online communities?

4. Critical Challenges
• Carving out a niche
• Dealing with the competition
• Starting a new community (critical mass)
• Encouraging commitment
– Commitment means feelings of attachment or connection to the
group, organization, or community
– Leave/join is quite easy: no contracts; no space/time boundaries;
• Encouraging contribution
– Inequality: power-law distribution of contribution
• Regulating behavior
– How to prevent negative behavior (e.g., trolling, spamming)
– Challenging due to anonymity, textual communication, easiness of
join/leave
– Can overcome challenges since interaction archival, access control, and
analysis (reputation, ranking) are possible

5. Overcoming the challenges
• Community start-up
• Recruit, select and socialize members
• Encourage commitment
• Elicit contribution
• Regulate behavior
• Coordinate activity
But anonymity, weak ties, high turnover, & lack of institutionalization make challenges
more daunting online

6. Extrinsic and Intrinsic
Motivations
• Individual motivation influences behavior through external
motivators (e.g., rewards, incentives, reputation) and intrinsic
motivators (e.g., fun & curiosity)
Increase contributions by manipulating extrinsic incentives & intrinsic
motivations
– Extrinsic motivators: Offer rewards as incentive
(e.g., money, reputation, perks, grades)
• Larger rewards induce more contribution than smaller rewards.
• Luxury goods create better incentives than money as rewards for
more difficult tasks.
• Rewards of status, privileges, money, or prizes that are task-
contingent but not performance-contingent will lead to gaming by
performing the tasks with low effort.
• People won't game the system for private verbal reward
– Intrinsic motivators: Make the task fun or intrinsically interesting

7. How would you make a contribution
task more fun?

8. What Makes a Contribution Fun?
Lessons from game design
Flow Criteria Principles of game design
Concentration Games should require concentration and the player should be able to concentrate on the game
Challenge Be sufficiently challenging and match the player’s skill level
Skills Support player skill development and mastery
Control Support players sense of control over their actions
Clear Goals Provide the player with clear goals at appropriate time
Feedback Provide appropriate feedback at appropriate times
Immersion Players should experience deep but effortless involvement in the game
Social Interaction Games should support and create opportunities for social interaction
Mapping flow to principles of game design (from Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005)

9. Support Opportunities for Social Interaction
Make tedious tasks fun via social interaction

10. Gamification
• Applying game-design thinking to non-game applications
• Is the effect via fun (internal motivation) or incentives (external motivations)?

11. Design Claims Re: Trade-offs Btw
Intrinsic & Extrinsic Motivation
• Adding a reward to an already interesting task
will cause people to be less interested in the
task and to perform it less often.
• While tangible rewards reduce intrinsic
motivations for interesting activities, verbal
rewards enhance intrinsic motivation.
• Verbal rewards will not enhance intrinsic
motivation and may undermine it if they are
judged as controlling.
• Verbal rewards enhance intrinsic motivations
most when they enhance the target’s
perceptions of competence

12. So, how can we encourage
behaviours such as
• Finding new users
• Move users around online community cycle
• Looking after and nurturing existing users
• Retaining users
• Word-of-mouth promotion by users
• Keeping users busy and discourage lurking
• Prevent undesirable behaviours
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13. Gaining Critical Mass
• Providing access to professionally generated
content
• Providing access to syndicated data
• Participation by professional staff
• Starting with limited scope and expand later
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14. Lurkers

15. 15

16. how do you ...

17. ... look after them?

18. ... retain them?

19. ... keep them busy?

20. ... discourage lurking?

21. what can we do to
encourage these
behaviours?

22. In groups, please do these:
1. Go to the Wiki and navigate to class 4
2. Analyse the series of images provided under
work slides by:
a) Identifying a consideration, issue or strategy for
managing users from each of the images.
b) Specifying a solution or implementation for the
identified images in a).

23. Your job: Construct a user community
strategy
1. Get into your groups at one table
2. Go to the Wiki and navigate to today’s class
3. Examine the images on the slides:
a) Suggest a possible problem or behaviour
represented by the image
b) Suggest an action(s) to mitigate (if bad) or
encourage (if good)
4. You have 40 minutes

24. Happy user strategies

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45. Time for a short commercial break
Go on, get outside!

46. CLASS DISCUSSION
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