Browsing by Subject "online communities"
Item Engaging Gaming Communities For Human Rights: An NGO Toolkit(2024-05-01) Hassan, WajihThis paper explores everything nonprofit organizations (NGOs) need to know about when engaging online gaming communities for human rights purposes. The research employs qualitative methods such as interviews with gaming community influencers; digital ethnography such as participant observation and engagement with several online gaming communities and some content analysis over different social media platforms; and a literature review. This paper focuses on understanding humanitarian work within gaming communities, tools and methods that NGOs need to use and be aware of in online gaming spaces, and provides a toolkit that encapsulates the information from this research into a practical and easily digestible guidance for NGOs hoping to utilize online gaming communities for human rights.Item Newcomer Retention and Productivity in Online Peer-Production Communities(2018-07) Karumur, Raghav Pavan SrivatsavOnline communities are online interaction spaces for people that break the barriers of time, space, and scale and provide opportunities for companionship and social support, information exchange, retail, and entertainment. Among them are online peer production communities that have a fantastic business model where volunteers come together to produce content and drive traffic to these sites. Although as a class these communities are successful, the success of individual communities greatly varies. To become and remain successful, these communities must meet a number of challenges related to starting communities, retention of members, encouraging commitment, and contribution from their members, regulating the behavior of members and so on. This dissertation focuses on the specific challenge of newcomer retention and productivity in the context of online peer-production communities. Exploring three different communities with entirely different structures and compositions – MovieLens, GitHub, and Wikipedia and building upon prior work in this space, this dissertation offers a number of important predictors of retention and productivity of newcomers. First, this dissertation explores the value of early activity diversity in the presence of the amount of early activity as a predictor of newcomer retention. Second, this dissertation digs into more fundamental psychological traits of newcomers such as personality and presents findings on relationships between personality and newcomer retention, preferences, and productivity. Third, this dissertation explores and presents results on the relationship between community interactions (apart from norms, policies and rigid structures) and newcomer retention. Fourth, this dissertation studies and presents the effects of various kinds of prior experience of newcomers on retention and productivity in a new group they join. This dissertation concludes by offering a number of directions for future research.Item Understanding and facilitating peer communication in online health communities(2022-07) Levonian, ZacharyWhen a person has a health crisis, the availability of social support affects both their physical and mental health. Online communities can make support available by providing a place to connect with peers who have had similar experiences. However, finding relevant peers to talk to and learn from is challenging. Algorithmic systems for peer matching could help people find relevant peers, but designing such systems requires an understanding of how people use online communities for support—when, how, and to whom they connect. I collaborated with a large existing online community—CaringBridge.org—to understand how patients experiencing a health crisis and their non-professional caregivers use CaringBridge to seek and receive support. Based on this understanding, I created a recommendation system to facilitate peer connections on CaringBridge. CaringBridge users of my system received email recommendations for peer users they may wish to connect with. By collecting survey and usage feedback, I advance an understanding of when support seekers and providers connect with potentially-supportive peers. Taken together, my work describes quantitatively and qualitatively the use of health-related online communities for receiving and providing social support. My work has implications for the deployment of peer-matching systems that facilitate supportive communication.