The Design and Analysis of Open Content Communities

The internet has enabled a new class of applications where users -- rather than designers or owners or managers - produce much of the value of the application. Social filtering systems -- as pioneered by sites like MovieLens and popularized in sites like Amazon.com -- took one step on this path. While site owners are responsible for entering the items of interest (movies, books, etc.), users add value by entering ratings, tags, reviews, etc. Other systems like wikis and open source software take user creation of content to a radical extreme: users produce all content. This idea might seem unlikely to work, but the success of systems like Wikipedia and Linux is proof to the contrary. I will report on several research projects that explore key issues in communities where users create content:

• Who creates the value in these communities? How is work distributed across different types of users?
• How can these communities get their members to work more effectively, e.g, to do more tasks and do them better?
• How can open content communities concept be extended with geographic information to support local knowledge sharing systems?

My collaborators and I have investigated these issues in Wikipedia, the MovieLens film recommender community, and the Cyclopath geowiki for bicyclists.