ItalyScotland

I am about to hit the road to present some research results.

Rosta Farzan, the PhD student intern who worked with our team last summer, has two papers on the incentive mechanism she deployed on Beehive. Rosta implemented a basic point system on the site where users earn points and move up through status levels as they contribute content to our social networking site. The results have been pretty dramatic! First, users added more content. Then users objected to the system. Then users started to game the system. Then users opt-outed of the system. Then users discussed the merits and weaknesses of the system. The list of our lessons learned grows by the week, which has made this research project extremely interesting. I can’t wait for Rosta to return to IBM this summer and implement a new type of incentive system, so we can see what drama unfolds when the rules of the game change.

Rosta (and she’s kindly sharing some of her presentation time with me) will be presenting the initial results of deploying the points system at the annual CHI conference. This year it is in Florence, Italy, yahoo!

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "Results from Deploying a Participation Incentive Mechanism within the Enterprise." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And prior to that, I will be in Aberdeen, Scotland, presenting the follow-up paper describing what happened after the initial experiment. This paper will be published at the Symposium on Persuasive Technology that is being held in conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention on Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users." Symposium on Persuasive Technology, In conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention, Aberdeen, Scotland, April 2008.

And it isn’t all about the point systems, either. I’m going to be participating in a CHI workshop on Sensemaking, to talk about “people sensemaking” with David Millen:

JM DiMicco, DR Millen. (2008) "People Sensemaking with Social Networking Sites." Sensemaking Workshop,Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And Werner Geyer will be presenting another paper on Beehive that discusses everyone’s favorite social content type the “hive five”!

W Geyer, C Dugan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, M Muller. (2008) "Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.