Managing Sustained Online Engagement to Solve Community Problems: An Exploration of Virtual Town Hall Meeting Systems

社交网络技术为公共和私营部门实体提供了前所未有的机会，以利用远程连接的在线参与者的集体力量来解决共同的问题。然而，实践者和研究人员都报告说，开放式参与式问题解决举措中最具挑战性的问题是让在线参与者持续参与特定项目，并在整个项目周期中保持兴趣。考虑到参与式在线问题解决的机遇和挑战，本研究旨在实现两个研究目标：首先，基于对持续参与式参与的理论理解，我们探索利用社交网络技术来促进在线参与者对共享问题解决项目的持续参与的管理和技术创新。其次，我们开发干预技术来加速和维持集体思考过程，以提高从参与者持续贡献的资源中有效和持续地收集真正有创意和有用的解决问题的想法的可能性。为了实现这些目标，该项目进行了三个阶段的研究计划：在第一阶段，我们寻求确定信息呈现形式，以提高在线访问者转化为贡献者的比率。在第二阶段，我们寻求确定用户界面设计，以促进面向目标的人机交互，并随着时间的推移保持参与者的参与度。在第三阶段，我们寻求开发和现场测试集思广益技术，利用社交网络界面来促进协作思维过程。我们提出的研究促进了对参与在线协作以解决共享问题的实践和理论理解。我们与一家领先的众包公司建立了密切的合作伙伴关系，该公司提供了一个参与式技术平台，以促进城市、学区、大学、分布式研究社区等的集体问题解决。该组织提供了250多个现实世界问题解决项目的数据，供我们分析。此外，本组织已同意在一系列经验性比较实地测试中实施我们提议的技术和流程干预措施。这些调查将使我们能够开发一个理论驱动和以证据为基础的综合在线参与式决策管理系统，该系统将利用社会计算的支持，支持所有类型的虚拟组织最大限度地让参与者参与创造性的协作审议和解决问题。

Social web technologies have opened unprecedented opportunities for public- and private-sector entities to leverage the collective power of remotely-connected online participants to solve shared problems. However, both practitioners and researchers report that the most challenging issue in open participatory problem-solving initiatives is keeping online participants continuously engaged in a specific project, with sustained interest throughout the entire project cycle. Mindful of the opportunities and challenges of participatory online problem-solving, this study aims to accomplish two research goals: First, based on a theoretical understanding of sustained participatory engagement, we explore managerial and technological innovations that use social web technologies to foster online participants' continuous engagement in shared problem-solving projects. Second, we develop intervention techniques to expedite and sustain the collective ideation process, to enhance the likelihood that genuinely creative and useful problem-solving ideas can be effectively and continuously gathered from participants' ongoing contributions. To achieve these goals, the project pursues a three phased research plan: In the first phase, we seek to identify message-presentation formats that increase the conversion rate of online visitors into contributing participants. In the second phase, we seek to identify user-interface designs that facilitate goal-oriented human-computer interaction and sustain participant engagement over time. In the third phase, we seek to develop and field test brainstorming techniques that leverage social-web interfaces to promote the collaborative ideation process. Our proposed study advances practical and theoretical understanding of engagement in online collaboration to solve shared problems. We have built a close partnership with a leading crowdsourcing firm, which provides a participatory technological platform to facilitate collective problem solving in cities, school districts, universities, distributed research communities, etc. This organization has made available data from over 250 real-world problem-solving projects for our analysis. Moreover, the organization has agreed to implement our proposed technological and process interventions in a series of empirical comparative field-tests. These investigations will allow us to develop a theory-driven and evidence-based comprehensive online participatory decision management system that will employ the affordances of social computing to support virtual organizations of all types in maximizing participant engagement in creative collaborative deliberation and problem-solving.