[Colloq] Hiring Talk - Dan Cosley - Friday, April 21

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents:
Faculty Hiring Talk

Dan Cosley
GroupLens Research Project
University of Minnesota
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~cosley

Date: Friday, April 21, 2006
Time: 12:00 noon
Place: 366 WVH

Title:
Helping hands: Design for member-maintained online communities


Abstract:
 >From finding friends on mySpace to finding support for cancer
survivors, millions of people turn to online communities every day for
information, companionship, support, and fun. These communities need 
regular
maintenance: welcoming and mentoring new members, reviewing
contributions, and building community-specific databases, for example.
Typically, a dedicated few perform these tasks, leaving the community
vulnerable to their goodwill and unable to respond to rapid growth.

Rather than rely on a few, communities might allow all members to
participate in maintenance.  Wikipedia and Slashdot highlight the
potential and the problems of this approach.  The English language
Wikipedia has over 1 million articles.  Yet quality and process disputes 
have
founders Jim Wales and Larry Sanger deeply divided over how to proceed.

In this talk we will address two fundamental challenges facing
member-maintained communities: motivating people to contribute, and
ensuring that contributions are valuable.  We develop and deploy
algorithms for matching people with tasks in a large online
community.  Effective algorithms far outperform schemes commonly used
in online communities.  We also investigate the design of
interfaces for reviewing contributions, asking two questions inspired
by Wikipedia: can peers review as well as experts, and does review
before accepting a contribution improve quality?  Empirical results
and mathematical models of quality suggest that the answers are yes, and 
no.
For more details, please come to the talk.

Host: Carole Hafner
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