As one of the most significant and visible examples of collective intelligence, online peer production communities, such as Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, have become critical to the Web’s knowledge infrastructure. The popularity of these communities has led to a growing body of literature regarding issues of how to encourage commitments and contributions, regulate members’ behavior, or control the quality of community outputs. However, in reality many peer production communities didn’t survive until that stage they need to deal with the above challenges—they never really get off the ground. To build successful online peer production communities, it is essential to have a good understanding of how online peer production communities are self-developed to survive the initial growing pains at startup stage, and how new communities failed, especially comparing to those successful ones. This study employed a mixed methods case study design with content analysis, social network analysis, and semi-structured interviews to examine differences between one successful and one unsuccessful online social Q&A community in the startup stage on Stack Exchange. In particular, the study examined and contrasted the two communities on how they defined their communities’ objectives and scopes; how they recruited, selected, and retained their community members; how they motivated members’ contribution, decided the community structures, and maintained the quality of community outputs. The findings indicated that compared to the failed community Q&A community, the successful Q&A community devoted more efforts to activities of quality assurance, user management, tool development, promotion, and communication between members. It also set clear rules regarding community scope management and user moderation, as well as documented instructions to implement those rules. Besides content creators and moderators, the successful Q&A community had unique user groups who were responsible for quality control, meta-content, and other community supporting work. The successful community also engaged in developing tools for question answering, content editing, searching and browsing, computation, graphic design, program, communication, moderation, and user education. The user network of the successful community was also connected and expanded largely by high-profile users such as moderators and high-reputation content contributors. Implications of this study are twofold. First, it could advance our theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms of successful peer production systems (especially theoretical claims of early stage community ecology and developing strategies), for example in mixed scope setting, user selection and recruitment, motivating contributions, etc. This study may also provide practical guidelines to designers of existing peer production communities and those who want to start a new one regarding policy, reputation, incentive system design as well as how socio-technical features could facilitate useful community building activities such as quality assurance, meta-content work, copy-editing, communication, user education, moderation, etc. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Information in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 8, 2019. / community survival, computer supported cooperative work, peer production, social computing, social Q&A, socio-technical systems / Includes bibliographical references. / Besiki Stvilia, Professor Directing Dissertation; Xinlin Tang, University Representative; Michelle Kazmer, Committee Member; Zhe He, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_709754 |
| Contributors | Fu, Hengyi (author), Stvilia, Besiki (Professor Directing Dissertation), Tang, Xinlin (University Representative), Kazmer, Michelle M. (Committee Member), He, Zhe (Committee Member), Florida State University (degree granting institution), College of Communication and Information (degree granting college), School of Information (degree granting departmentdgg) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text, doctoral thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (251 pages), computer, application/pdf |
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