paper: Fostering Social Interaction in Online Spaces

Authors: Alison Lee, Catalina Danis, Todd Miller, and Younghee Jung

This paper discusses how one might seed online environments to be rich in social interaction. They present 4 elements that may contribute towards for fostering interaction among team members and the techniques that may be used to give expression to these factors in online environment.

This paper 4 elements which that may foster social interaction in online environment. It then computational techniques that can be used to give expression to these four elements in online spaces.

4 important elements for fostering social interaction are:

• Place Making

The importance of the notion of place is its role in encoding the cultural and social understanding of the behavior and actions appropriate to an environment. In online worlds, where newcomers and regular frequent, a sense of place could be a powerful agent for enabling new participants to appreciate an online environment.

• Common Ground

Common ground refer to the shared understanding that collaborators posses which enables interactions to proceed smoothly. In group-work, it is important for building and sustaining group identity, for establishing cooperation, and for promoting successful interactions that support group work among team members. In online worlds like those supporting communities of practice, a significant amount of common ground exists because of common professional background and interests.

• Awareness

Awareness refers to the knowledge of the presence of other people, including their interactions and other activities. Awareness tools provide knowledge about when people are around documents or if documents have been modified. This knowledge provides people with a context for their own actions, which they may use to guide their actions in situations related to group work.

This concept plays many of the same roles in the online world that it does in the world of distributed work group. Since people in an online space are stranger to each other, some tools attempt to address this problem by providing personal profiles. However in an online space, presenting all the people at the site can be overwhelming and not useful. Furthermore, one may be more interested in individuals not because of their profiles but perhaps because of a common context inferred from similar activities.

• Interaction Mechanism

Studies of work group have noted the importance of the social aspects of work for maintaining the integrity of a group. Much of the social interaction occurs through informal encounters rather than planed, formal encounters such as meeting. Consequently, interaction mechanisms that support spontaneous interactions are important elements in a shared environment.
Sowing Online Places

The authors proceed to take four elements to create an online social interactions environment by proposing “seeds for sowing”. Exploit spatial metaphors to frame and interpret social information and exploit spatial properties to guide social interactions in the online space. Expose the spatial, semantic, and sharable elements of a context to foster common ground. Render social information visually to enable participants to become aware of the social activity occurring in the online space. Include enablers and mechanisms for people to choose when and how to interact with others. The authors have informally evaluated the ShopIBM implementation with a large number of colleagues. The result shows that people were generally very positive about the basic idea of being able to see other visitors to the same Web site.

ePlace
The paper then proposes ePlace. The system represents a design realization of an online social interaction environment based on the described four elements that support social interaction.
For the future of the paper, the goal is to deploy the ePlace tool on an existing Web site. The authors have considered 2 points:
(1) Exploring under what circumstance people would find social interaction in online environments compelling.
(2) The usability of the ePlace representation and the functionality it make available.

Thank you very much for the authors for providing the guidance of fostering social interaction in online spaces. The paper can be found here.