[Air-l] CFPs Workshop on Online Community Spaces

[Quentin (Gad) Jones]

Workshop on the Role of Online Community Spaces in Shaping Virtual 
Community Interactions

International Conference on Communities and Technologies
September 19th, 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
http://www-winfo.uni-siegen.de/wulf/CT2003/

Important Information:
Submissions to: qgjones at acm.org
Deadline for submission: June 16, 2003
Notification of Acceptance: by June 30, 2003
Further Workshop Information: http://modiin.njit.edu/workshops/CC&T2003

WORKSHOP AIMS
Modern communication technologies increasingly situate interpersonal 
interactions virtually; often in online community spaces that enable 
shared inter-personal interactions. Researchers are still trying to 
understand basic usability issues associated with these community 
spaces. Further complicating matters, new types of online spaces are 
emerging that link community systems to aspects of the physical 
environment or user mobility.

This workshop aims to examine the connection between community space 
design and community interactions.  This will be achieved through a 
diverse group of participants exploring together from a wide variety of 
perspectives the significance of various features of online communities 
spaces.

THEME
The online spaces where virtual community members interact are referred 
to by a wide variety of labels including chat rooms (Read 1991), 
cyber-inns (Coate 1992), virtual settlements (Jones 1997), commons 
(Kollock and Smith 1994), and conferences (Hiltz and Turoff 1981). Some 
systems are completely open to the public, such as LambdaMoo (Schiano 
and White 1998), others are restricted to a membership (Schlager and 
Schank 1997), or a specific task or purpose (Erickson 1999).  The 
diversity of online community space designs and labels highlights how 
system features provide a context for community interactions.

This workshop aims to explore the role of online community spaces in 
supporting virtual community interactions. Among the questions we plan 
to address are:
* Which features of online community spaces help shape discourse and 
social networks?
* What critical factors are necessary to evolve an online space into a 
community place?
* What are the links between features of client communication software 
and online community interactions? For example, what is the significance 
of push-versus-pull and synchronous-versus-asynchronous message exchange?
* What is the significance of an online community space having a hybrid 
(Harrison and Dourish 1996), location linked (Espinoza et al. 2001), or 
wearable (Kortuem, and Segall 2003) design?
* How can we extend our understanding of the nature and utility of 
online community spaces to incorporate changes resulting from the 
adoption of pervasive computing technologies?

When and what theoretical constructs are useful to understanding how to 
enhance interactions in community spaces? For example, social presence 
(see Whittaker in press) and media richness (see Whittaker in press) 
have all been put forward as ways to understand virtual community 
interactions, but it is not clear that they are of significant value to 
designers of online spaces.  An important question is how do they help 
us understand how to support sustainable discourse dynamics and build 
cyber-commons where diverse egocentric social networks can coalesce?

A variety of disciplines are pertinent to these explorations, including 
psychology, sociology, architecture, linguistic and discourse analyses. 
  Each one approaches the notions of space and common ground for 
interaction from a slightly different perspective, and level of detail. 
  Other disciplines may have pertinent insights and approaches.  We 
would like to encourage them all. Important perspectives and issues 
include the notions of space and place (Harrison and Dourish 1996), 
common information space (Bannon and Bodker 1997), common ground in 
discourse (Clark 1992), discourse architecture (Jones and Rafaeli 2000), 
genre theory (Erickson 2000), and other detailed aspects of linguistics 
(Brennan and Ohaeri 1999).

There have been a number of past community workshops, covering formation 
of communities, construction of infrastructures and understanding 
aspects of group formation and vitality. We would like to expand this to 
a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved as they relate to 
online community space.

ACTIVITIES AND GOALS
If participants agree, activities will start with dinner at a local 
restaurant the night preceding the full day workshop[1].  Before 
ordering dinner a general orientation of the workshop will be given by 
the organizers, along with introductions.  During dinner participants 
will present their submissions. They will be given a maximum of 3 
minutes to speak. This dinner meeting will enable us to maximize the 
full day workshop. Accepted participants will be expected to have read 
the positions papers before attending the dinner and the workshop.

The full day will be divided into a number of interactive sessions, 
rather than just presentation of position papers. The exact details will 
depend upon the position papers received, however we hope to: 1) Explore 
participants’ examples of how the design of virtual space provides 
common ground for user interactions; 2) Examine how communities use 
public interactions in virtual spaces to create shared meaning; and 3) 
Look at the impact of online behavior on community development and 
maintenance.

By the end of the workshop participants will have catalogued design 
differences, cues, and behaviors in various virtual settings, and 
explored how they support behavior in work related spaces. If attendance 
is high we may break into subgroups for more intense discussion.  If 
this is the case then each smaller group will report back with their key 
ideas

PARTICIPATION

Participants will be selected on the basis of position papers submitted 
prior to the workshop.  Proposals should be no longer than 6 pages and 
should include description of the following aspects.

1)An existing online community space;
2)An examination of how the space/s under consideration provides cues 
and common ground for user interactions, and ;
3)Theoretical ideas or approaches that help you understand context and 
social interaction, or;
4)Analysis of different types of  online communities (e.g. hybrid and 
purely virtual spaces).

Position papers should explain how the author’s work relates to the 
workshop theme. We are particularly interested in seeing perspectives at 
a variety of levels, ranging from meta to micro-scale analyses.

Submissions should be sent to qgjones at acm.org by June 16, 2003. Position 
papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and notification of 
acceptance will be by June 30, 2003.

We look for a wide range of participants although the focus is primarily 
on researchers concerned with the notion of space.  This includes, but 
is not limited to system architects and designers who have thought about 
and implemented supports for social interaction, social psychologists, 
linguists and sociologists who have studied online interactions.

ORGANIZERS

Quentin (Gad) Jones is an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey 
Institute of Technology. Prior to his current position, Quentin was a 
researcher at AT&T labs research, New Jersey.  Before living in the 
United States he was a doctoral student in Information Systems at Hebrew 
and Haifa Universities Israel. Quentin’s research focus is on 
understanding mass interaction ecologies that result in thriving virtual 
communities. His current online community research projects include 
Cyber-Archaeology, ContactMap, and GeoMemory.

Christine Halverson is a researcher at IBM Research.  She is involved 
with the development and analysis of systems to help work groups 
interact collaboratively over networks. Her analytic approaches have 
included visualizations, linguistic analysis, online participation and 
observations among others.  Her research group has designed and deployed 
a number of online systems including BABBLE & Loops. 
http://www.research.ibm.com/SocialComputing/

RELATED PAST WORKSHOPS

Jones, Q. and Halverson, C. The Role of Place in Shaping Virtual 
Community, CSCW 2002.Erickson T., Herring S., Sack W., Discourse 
Architectures: The Design and Analysis of Computer-Mediated 
Conversation. CHI 2002.

Erickson T., and Herring S., "Persistent Conversation" workshops at the 
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) from 1999-2002.

Farnham S., Smith M., et. al. Integrating Diverse Research and 
Development Approaches to the Construction of Social Cyberspaces. CHI 2001

Bruckman A., Erickson T., et. al. Dealing with Community Data,  CSCW 2000

Muller M., and Friedman J., Electronic Communities: Places and Spaces, 
Contents and Boundaries. CHI 2000

Barbesino et. al. Designing Across Borders: The Community Design of 
Community Networks. CSCW 1998.

Toomey L., Tang J., Adams L., and Gloria Mark Designing Virtual 
Communities for Work. CSCW 1998

Bruckman A., Erickson T., et. al. Workshop on Research Issues in the 
Design of Online Communities. CHI 1999

REFERENCES

Bannon, L., and Bodker, S. Constructing Common Information Space. 
Proceedings of the Fifth ECSCW. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, 
1997.

Brennan, S.E. and J.O. Ohaeri. Why do electronic conversations seem less 
polite: the costs and benefits of hedging. in WACC '99. 1999. San 
Francisco, CA: ACM.

Clark, H. Arenas of language use. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 
1992.

Coate, J., 1992. Innkeeping in Cyberspace, In: Directions and 
Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC-92), Computer Professionals for 
Social Responsibility, Palo Alto, CA. 
http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Community/innkeeping.

Erickson, T. Making Sense of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): 
Conversations as Genres, CMC Systems as Genre Ecologies. In the 
Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Hawaii International Conference on 
Systems Science. January, 2000. IEEE Press.

Erickson, T., et al. Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, 
Persistent Conversation, and the Design of Babble. in Human Factors in 
Computing: The Proceedings of CHI 99. 1999. Pittsburgh, PA: ACM Press.

Espinoza, F., Persson, P., Sandin, A., Nyström, H., Cacciatore. E. & 
Bylund, M. (2001) GeoNotes: Social and Navigational Aspects of 
Location-Based Information Systems, in Abowd, Brumitt & Shafer (eds.) 
Ubicomp 2001: Ubiquitous Computing, International Conference Atlanta, 
Georgia, September 30 - October 2, Berlin: Springer, p. 2-17.

Kortuem G. Segall G., Wearable Communities: Augmenting Social Networks 
with Wearable Computers, Pervasive Computing, pp.  71-78, January-March 
2003 (Vol. 2, No. 1), IEEE Press.

Harrison, S. and P. Dourish, 1996. Re-place-ing space: The roles of 
place and space in collaborative systems, In: Computer Supported 
Collaborative Work, ACM, Cambridge, MA pp. 67-76.

Hiltz, S.R. and M. Turoff, 1981. The evolution of user behavior in a 
computerized conferencing system, Communications of the ACM, 24 (11 
November): 739-751.

Jones Q. 1997. Virtual-communities, virtual-settlements & 
cyber-archaeology: A theoretical outline. J of Comp Mediated 
Communication 3(3).

Jones Q., and S. Rafaeli 2000. Time to Split, Virtually: ‘Discourse 
Architecture’ and ‘Community Building’ as means to Creating Vibrant 
Virtual Publics. Electronic Markets: The International Journal of 
Electronic Commerce and Business Media. 10(4) 214-223.

Kollock, P. and M. Smith, 1994. Managing the virtual commons: 
Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In: Computer-Mediated 
Communication, (Ed. S. Herring), John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Meyrowitz, J., 1985. No sense of place, Oxford University Press Inc., 
New York.

Oldenburg, R., 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, 
Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and 
How They Get You Through The Day., Paragon House, New York.

Reid, E. M., 1991. Electropolis: Communications and community on 
Internet Relay Chat, Honors, History, University of Melbourne. 
http://www.ee.mu.oz.au/papers/emr/work.html.

Rheingold, H., 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the 
electronic frontier, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

Schiano, D.J. and S. White. The first noble truth of CyberSpace: People 
are People (even when they MOO). in CHI 98. 1998. Los Angeles CA: ACM.

Schlager, M. and P. Schank. TAPPED IN: A New On-line Teacher Community 
Concept for the Next Generation of Internet Technology. in CSCL '97, The 
Second International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative 
Learning. 1997. Toronto: ACM.


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[1] We did this at the CSCW02 workshop and found that this worked well 
for all but those who flew in too late to join us (2 out of 12).It gave 
a chance for people to get to know each other before they take the 
workshop, and engages them early in understanding each other's positions