ITR: Collaborative Research: Designing On-Line Communities to Enhance Participation -- Bridging Theory and Practice

尽管有着广泛的经验，但在网上社区征求意见在很大程度上仍然是一个试验和错误的问题。这个项目将发展理论来预测在线社区的贡献行为，并将通过使用它来发展一套在线社区设计指南，帮助将理论转化为实践。该项目汇集了三个研究团队（来自密歇根大学，密歇根梅隆大学和明尼苏达大学），他们拥有不同领域的专业知识（包括经济学，社会心理学和在线推荐系统）。研究小组将从现有的自愿贡献集体努力的理论出发，进行一系列实验，以测试这些理论在在线社区领域的有效性，并开发一个新的综合理论。实验将在MovieLens社区进行，该社区有数千名活跃用户，平均每天有30名新用户加入。本研究的科学意义在于运用社会科学理论指导设计。这种方法的一个有趣的更广泛的影响是发展了一批具有跨学科研究经验的研究生，他们将准备好指导下一代在线社区研究。

Despite extensive experience, eliciting contributions in an on-line community is still largely a matter of trial and error. This project will develop theory to predict contribution behavior in on-line communities and will help transfer that theory into practice by using it to develop a set of on-line community design guidelines. The project brings together three teams of researchers (from the University of Michigan, Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Minnesota) with diverse areas of expertise (including economics, social psychology, and on-line recommender systems). The research team will start with existing theories of voluntary contribution to collective efforts, conduct a set of experiments to test the validity of these theories in the domain of on-line communities, and develop a new, synthesized theory. The experiments will be conducted in the MovieLens community with thousands of active users and an average of 30 new users joining each day. The key scientific significance of this work lies in using Social Science theory to guide design. An interesting broader impact of that approach is the development of a cadre of graduate students with interdisciplinary research experience who will be ready to guide the next generation of on-line community research.