CS 6470: Design of Online Communities

• Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital by Robert Putnam
• "Virtual Communites as Communites: Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone" by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia (in Smith & Kollock)
• A New Perspective on "Community" and its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems by Amy Bruckman. Works in Progress, CHI 2006.

• Still Bowling Alone? The Post-9/11 Split by Thomas Sander and Robert Putnam, Journal of Democracy 2010, 21:1, pp 9-16.

• Meetup
• Decatur Metro

• The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, chapters one and two. (in book store)
• Introduction and The Heart of the Well, in The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold.
• "And Now?" in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 1-11. (electronic reserve)

• Reddit, especially smaller subreddits like the Georgia Tech subreddit

• Short paper on best and worst experiences

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman, chapters 1, 4, and 6
• Interviewing equipment guide
• Just Awful Enough: the functional dysfunction of the something awful forums by Pater et al, proceedings of CHI 2014 (revised version of community study paper for this class)

• Methodology Matters by Joseph E. McGrath

• Habbo
• How to be popular on Habbo Hotel

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman, chapter 5
• Teaching Students to Study Online Communities Ethically by Amy Bruckman. Journal of Information Ethics 15:2, 82-98, fall 2006.
• Ethics for community study projects summary

• "Go Away":Participants Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research by Jim Hudson and Amy Bruckman. The Information Society, 20:127-139, 2004
• The Belmont Report
• US Title 45 Regulations
• Psychological Research Online: Opportunities and Challenges, by Bob Kraut et al

• Georgia Tech IRB training
• Snopes
• Twitter

• Studying the Amateur Artist by Amy Bruckman
• Georgia Tech's IRB information (browse)
• "Interviewing Members of Online Communities: a Practical Guide to Recruiting Participants" by Amy Bruckman (draft is a resource on t-square, bruckman-recruiting-may18-2010.doc)

• Next Door

• Obtain ethics certification via the online course, if you do not already have certification.

• Finding One's Own Space in Cyberspace, by Amy Bruckman
• Communicative Subtlety in Multimedia Chat by John Suler
• Design Principles for Online Communities by Peter Kollock
• Nine Principles of Community Design by Amy Jo Kim
• Understanding the Internet's Present, and Values-Based Design of its Future by Amy Bruckman

• Patients Like Me

• Project proposals

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman. Pages 1-58, intro & most of chapter 1.
• The Kid With All the News About the TV News New York Times article

• Dooce (Warning: site is known for being irreverent and using strong language.)
• TVNewser

• Aspects of the Self," in Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (chapter 7)
• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community by Judith Donath

• Optional: Pro Ana Tumblr. Go to Tumblr search and supply keywords "pro ana". (If you have tendancies towards eating disorders, please avoid.)

• HW: Interview with a classmate

• The Strange Case of the Lectronic Lover by Lindsay Van Gelder
• "Boyz and Gurlz" in Cyberville by Stacy Horn (electronic reserve)
• "TinySex and Gender Trouble", in Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (chapter 8)
• Gender Swapping on the Internet by Amy Bruckman

• Rookie Mag
• You Be Mom

• We need online alter egos now more than ever by Judith Donath, Wired Magazine
• 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community by Michael Bernstein, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, et. al.

• The Politics of 'Real Names': Power, Context, and Controling Networked Publics by danah boyd

• Yik Yak
• Whisper

• HW: Field notes

• Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Use library web localizer to get free access). by Langdon Winner. (in The Whale and The Reactor)
• Code v2.0 by Lawrence Lessig. Chapters 3, 6, & 7. (Available free online, but you may wish to buy it anyway.)

• Kiva

• "Roles: from Newcomer to Old-Timer," Chapters 4 in Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim (electronic reserve)
• Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard Bartle
• A Conceptual and Operational Definition of 'Social Role' in Online Community by Eric Gleave, Howard Welser, Thomas Lento, and Marc Smith

• Stack Overflow

• HW: First interview transcript

• A Rape in Cyberspace (or chapter 1 of "My Tiny Life") by Julian Dibbell
• Regulating Behavior in Online Communities by Sara Kiesler, Robert Kraut, Paul Resnick, & Aniket Kittur

• Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities, panel, CHI 94, by Amy Bruckman, Pavel Curtis, Cliff Figallo, and Brenda Laurel
• Managing Deviant Behavior in Online Communities., panel, CHI 2006. Amy Bruckman, Catalina Danis, Cliff Lampe, Janet Sternberg, and Chris Waldron.
• "The Purple Guest" (Chapter 3) in "My Tiny Life" by Julian Dibbell
• "Banished!" and "Who Let the Nazi In?" (chapters 7 and 8) in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 157-220.

• LambdaMOO, following these instructions.
• Project Misery (just read web page)
• Cave Your Trolls (just read web page)

• LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction (LTAND)
• Governance, chapter 9 of Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova (electronic reserve)
• Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance

• Lessons from LucasFilm's Habitat, by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. (In Cyberspace, First Steps.)

• Wikipedia Village Pump: Policy (skim/get general idea of how policy is made)
• Lamest edit wars on Wikipedia (skim, pick one and explore in detail)

• HW: Second interview transcript

• "Lurker demographics: counting the silent" by Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece. Proceedings of CHI 2000, April 1 - 6, 2000, The Hague, Netherlands, pp. 73-80. (ACM DL)
• Alone together? Exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games by Nicolas Ducheneaut et al. Proceedings of CHI 2006.
• Understandng Deja Reviewers by Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios

Recommended:

• Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space by Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick

• Slashdot

• HW: Third interview transcript

• Privacy and human behavior in the age of information, Alessandro Acquisti et al, Science 347, 509 (2015) (use library's web localizer to get free access)
• "Anonymized" data really isn't
• Puppy Poo Girl
• Behind The Alarming Rise Of The Online Vigilante Detective
• How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life, New York Times, February 2015

• Best Data Practices for Online Service Providers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• "Privacy policies as decision-making tools, an evaluation of online privacy notices." by Carlos Jensen and Colin Potts. Proceedings of CHI 2004. (ACM DL)
• Wikipedia article on Internet Vigilantism

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Privacy (browse)
• Read the privacy policies of two online sites you use. List your sites on the wiki, making sure no one else in the class has picked your sites. Come to class prepared to discuss those policies.

• Community Support for Constructionist Learning by Amy Bruckman (use library web localizer to get access.)
• "Battle Lessons: What the Generals Don't Know" by Dan Baum in The New Yorker Magazine - Jan 17, 2005, pg 42-48 (electronic reserve)

• Cyberspace is Not Disneyland
• The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and Professional Community

• Scratch

• The Polymath Project: Lessons from a Successful Online Collaboration in Mathematics by Justin Cranshaw and Aniket Kittur
• Hanny's Voorwerp
• Listen: Dutch Teacher Stumbles Upon A Space 'Ghost' (NPR). Interview with Hanny van Arkel
• Algorithm discovery by protein folding game playersby Khatib, Cooper et al

• Zooniverse (Pick a project (like Galaxy Zoo) and label at least two items).
• Fold It (Download and play.)

• Community Study Papers

• Understanding Copyright Law in Online Creative Communities by Fiesler, Feuston, and Bruckman, Proceedings of CSCW 2015
• FAQ: Copyright Basics
• FAQ: Fair Use

• Archive of Our Own (warning: adult content)

• Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk by Irani & Silberman

• Mechanical Turk (Do at least two tasks.)
• Turkopticon

• Design Papers

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond
• Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm by Yochai Benkler
(Read the introduction carefully. Rest of the text is recommended but optional. Footnotes are optional.)

• GitHub
• Creative Commons

• Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia. by Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. Proceedings of Group 2005.
• Can History be Open Source? by Roy Rosenzweig

• Wikipedia
• Everything2