Building Successful Online Communities Building Successful Online Communities Evidence-Based Social Design Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick with Sara Kiesler, Moira Burke, Yan Chen, Niki Kittur, Joseph Konstan, Yuqing Ren, and John Riedl The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2 011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please email [email protected] This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kraut, Robert E. Building successful online communities : Evidence-Based Social Design / Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick with Sara Kiesler ... [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01657-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Online social networks— Planning. 2. Computer networks— Social aspects— Planning. 3. Internet— Social aspects. 4. Social psychology. I. Resnick, Paul. II. Kiesler, Sara, 1940– III. Title. HM742.K73 2012 302.30285— dc22 2011010842 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 “ There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” “ If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.” — Kurt Lewin Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction 1 Paul Resnick and Robert E. Kraut 2 Encouraging Contribution to Online Communities 21 Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick 3 Encouraging Commitment in Online Communities 77 Yuqing Ren, Robert E. Kraut, Sara Kiesler, and Paul Resnick 4 Regulating Behavior in Online Communities 125 Sara Kiesler, Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, and Aniket Kittur 5 The Challenges of Dealing with Newcomers 179 Robert E. Kraut, Moira Burke, John Riedl, and Paul Resnick 6 Starting New Online Communities 231 Paul Resnick, Joseph Konstan, Yan Chen, and Robert E. Kraut Contributors 281 Index 283 Acknowledgments This book grew out of the CommunityLab research project, a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, involving seven professors and myriad graduate stu- dents from Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Michigan, and the Univer- sity of Minnesota. We conducted experiments testing alternative ways to elicit participation in online communities, and we published those results, replete with careful statistical analyses, in journals and conference proceedings. More broadly, we spoke at research-oriented venues, arguing that insights from social science theories could directly inform online community design and management, if only we took seriously the task of mining that theory. By 2006, we thought that message should reach a broader audience, including practitioners and students. There was an emerging cadre of practitioners whose primary professional identity was as online community designers and managers. They worked as consultants or ran big online communities like ePinions or the Microsoft Developer Network. In addition, many more people were becoming “ accidental community managers,” managing the installation of enterprise social-computing platforms within their companies or creating communities of practice curating knowledge on particular topics or launching health-support communities. And professors were starting to teach courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels that devoted all or part of a semester to questions of how best to organize online interactions. Two consultants, Amy Jo Kim and Derek Powazek, had written excellent books filled with examples and guidelines of what to do and what not to do. Jenny Preece, one of the pioneers of research on online communities, had written a nice textbook that summarized much of the research relevant to online communities, organized around the themes of usability and sociability. However, these texts were showing their age in a fast-moving field (they were all written well before the rise of Wikipedia or Face- book), and none of the existing books articulated our vision of generating specific