Persuading Collaboration: Analysing Participation in Online Collaboration Projects :
“The growth of worldwide internet usage has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘open movements’. These are communities that evolve based around the collaborative production of common resources, to which free access is typically provided to all who choose to use it. Such communities and the resources they create have developed rapidly over the past 10-20 years and are the cause for major scholarly interest. This study takes the step of applying the lens of Persuasive Design to the study of open movements in order to show how site design can play a role in increasing participant activity and longevity. For this purpose it looks at two ‘open movement’ resources, the collaboratively edited map OpenStreetMap and The Pirate Bay, a tracker for torrents uploaded by the le-sharing community. The analysis is two-fold: first, it uses quantitative data of user participation in the systems, derived from downloads of system-generated user-histories to generate an overall picture of user-participation in each of the systems. Second, it applies a set of heuristics to evaluate the persuasive design of the systems in question. It then connects the results of the quantitative analysis with the heuristic analysis in order to see how the persuasive design of the systems impact on user participation. This thesis will primarily be of value to researchers of online collaboration, although it may also be of interest to researchers in the field of Persuasive Design.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19155/