For my final project, I am working on Mendeley groups, a community for Mendeley software ("a combination of a desktop application and a website which helps you manage, share and discover both content and contacts in research"). It is similar to EndNote, Zotero, and WizFolio.
According to Grimes, Jaeger, & Fleischmann (2008), there are 4 types of documents governing online community: software license agreement, user agreement, privacy policy, and community standards & practices. On Mendeley's website, a couple of the documents/rules can be found easily at the bottom of their homepage:
Terms of Use (http://www.mendeley.com/terms/)
Privacy Policy (http://www.mendeley.com/privacy/)
Meanwhile, in the FAQ section, registered users can 'learn more about groups' here
http://www.mendeley.com/faq/#what-are-groups
There are three types of groups:
- Private groups - These private groups are visible only to members, who can share papers and notes. These work like the shared collections in previous versions of Mendeley.
- Invite-only groups - These groups are visible to the public, but each has an owner who administers the group. These work like the public collections in previous versions of Mendeley with one major change - now any member can add documents.
- Open groups - Anyone can join and contribute to these groups. We think they’ll be a great way to build community-driven collections of literature around a subject.
"Groups allow you to collaborate with your contacts or with any member of the Mendeley community. In private groups, you may share and annotate a list of documents with your collaborators from right within your PDF organizer, instead of emailing notes and ideas back-and-forth. In public groups, you may create a reading list with your colleagues and make it accessible to anyone on the web. Interested people may subscribe to the list so they get notified of new additions. Groups now also have an activity feed on Mendeley Web and in Mendeley Desktop, allowing you to keep up to date on new additions and discussions within the group."
Three examples on the site where one or more rules have been broken:
Got Collaboration?
The first thing that struck me was the low level of interaction, yet alone collaboration in the groups I have explored within Mendeley groups. Trust me, I ventured to many groups across disciplines. For example, social media related groups normally have huge followings and many members. However, ironically, they don't seem eager to 'socialize', let alone collaborate with others. Some members tried to engage by posting a question or just saying 'hi!' briefly after joining but in many cases, those attempt to engage were met with nothing.
To analyze from the provider side, i.e. Mendeley, there are not much information on collaboration. The only information provided was in the FAQ section as discussed earlier. When people join a group, they can upload or download articles that are curated to be in the group holdings. The community exist in Mendeley, however the quality of interaction and member self awareness is perhaps very low (Gazan, 2009).
1% Active Membership a.k.a. lurking or social loafing
I browsed many groups with at least 80-100 members and realized that many members are passive. They joined and then do nothing. I begin to wonder why would they even join at the first place. I would hesitate in joining a group where the newsfeed is just about others joining and nothing else. There would be some papers uploaded when the group was established and perhaps a few more after but nothing much would happen after. And this is a typical description for the groups. We've read about lurking, social loafing, and free-riding in previous sessions and Kollock & Smith (1994) in this session. This is a good example of the concepts.
Lack of Rules and Guidelines
I struggled to find the examples for this entry as many of the groups virtually have no collaboration and about 1% active membership. I trace this back to when I first joined the groups. My initial reaction was of curiosity as there were not much guidelines or anything written down. You just click the join button and you're in. Once inside, not much else is offered. Perhaps a brief description of the group is available but that's about it. This is contrast to when you join a bulletin board or many online community where there are official rules and sticky posts at the top of each thread/topic reminding you of the rules and regulations. There are active moderators and contributors to keep things lively. But not here in Mendeley, perhaps not yet.
Reaction & Response as administrator
Perhaps the groups feature of Mendeley were not a top priority for them to consider.
Implement oversight i.e. a review/rating system (Cosley et al, 2005) to adjudicate relevancy of topic, comment, or paper entry in a group just like in any standard online community. Perhaps a star rating system with flagging capability and other features that would fit the academic and scientific setting of the groups in Mendeley. Furthemore, implementation of tiered user system might also be a good way to go. 'Gamifying' the group experience has been proven positive in other OCs and it is quickly becoming a buzz word too [gamification]. This will invoke competitive nature in the users mind where they always have something to look forward to i.e. 'level up', more features, etc. In addition, features of groups should be displayed prominently on the group page with easy to access explanation as a mouse over feature (as supposed to now, explanation for features of a group could only be found in the FAQ section).
The groups can use more in terms of rules and regulations to encourage more active contribution from the members and followers. A clear definition and distinction between the two would also be a good start. Moderators or groups creators should be demanded more before they can create a group. Low barrier to creation means easy way out or not contributing by the moderators or group creator. If we make them invest more time, they would be more incline to be active as they have their time and effort invested in them. They would want to take better care of the group.
There should be moderators who also keeps an eye on the moderators of groups. Perhaps these people can be from Mendeley, or users, or a mix of both. This can provide grievance channel if a user/group member feel has been treated unfairly by moderators. Perhaps also, keep provide incentive for moderators and moderators' moderator, Mendeley can implement a FourSquare like deal for mayors. Give them discount for premium subscription would be a nice one.
A combination of improvements, new features, and better rules and regulations would address the three issues discussed above.
Unwritten rules
- Group members should contribute regularly, don't be a leech
- Moderators should be actively monitoring the group and contributing to the discussion (or create one)
- Mendeley aims to be the social network for academics based on their research and work
- Members, via groups, can discuss academic topics or papers in a rather informal setting vs. writing a review or reaction to an article or book
- Some groups are more active and vibrant than others
I found your three examples to be interesting! In your first example, I noticed that you were indicating that collaboration is minimal among groups. However, I do not think that rules were broken here. I would guess that the users were not following with the “spirit” of the OC and collaborating with each other. In this sense, it may be difficult to collaborate with others that you do not know personally, as another user may use the idea and call it their own. Therefore, I am wondering about the best methods to promote collaboration, among these different users. In response to your administrator reaction/response, I see how gamification can help OCs. However, based on the potential user-base it may be difficult to implement.
ReplyDeleteYour second example is also an interesting problem to consider, as many OCs have a low level of “power users” and a high level of “lurkers.” In this sense, there is no specific rule about lurking. However, I wonder how many users continuously lurk after initially creating their accounts to see what Mendeley is about. I do believe that this point is also a derivative of your initial point that the users are not collaborating and are being passive in nature. In response to your administrator reaction/response, I like the idea of holding users more accountable. However, it may be more difficult to hold users accountable, as it may become a barrier to entry and lower participation. If this is the case, a balance between the two may be a good fit.
Regarding your third example, lack of rules and guidelines, I believe these are within the terms of service and privacy policies that you listed earlier in your post. However, I would also add the Copyright policy page (http://www.mendeley.com/copyright/) to their list of rules, as I would guess (I do not know for sure) that some users may post PDF content that is available at their library without permission to reproduce or distribute. In response to your administrator reaction/response, I think having moderators can help to move Mendeley in the right direction. However, one must consider the methods of implementing such a system (who chooses them, what is the criteria, what community input exists).
Based on your description of Mendeley, I think that you have interesting unwritten rules, as the first three appear to be aims of Mendeley. The last two appear to be current themes for groups are very interesting.
Maybe it is the nature of the community that breeds the apathy to contribute socially.
ReplyDeleteA group for academics is probably populated with people who are very busy pursuing their academic goals. I would guess that most of these members are probably members of other social networks (i.e . facebook), and they probably do most of their socializing there.
I think gamification is generally a good way to motivate more participation. It doesn't take much - maybe just recognizing the top 5% or so of contributing users within a group so they have something to strive for and somebody to beat. I haven't used Mendeley's social features, I just use the Desktop client, but it seems like this is something that would fit in.
ReplyDeleteI do use LinkedIn and the groups there have the same problem. From what I have seen, most people never interact with the groups that they join. Personally I find that I join groups mainly so that they appear on my profile. I don't really care what other alumni from my old university or workplace are talking about, I just want to be recognized as one of them. I also like that the groups are used to drive the recommendations LinkedIn gives me for new connections.
I agree with you that creating a new group should require at least some amount of work to make sure the administrators are motivated enough to keep it going. Especially here, where groups are meant to be constructive. General users of the group shouldn't have any extra steps added, but I think you would be justified to expect more from the group creator.
I really like the concept of this site but your review almost makes it sound like you walked into an empty room. I agree with Mernie's comment about academics looking else where to do their socializing. I wonder if there are ways to add aggregation to this site similar to FourSquare where the action becomes the commodity. Plus reading an article is an accomplishment in and of itself and maybe should be reward through some sort of gamification.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they also should look into doing a bit more advertising on college campuses to help show potential users what the benefit to using the site would be.
I agree with what Philip say. I feel walk into an empty room when I try to join groups on Mendeley. Mostly, the group administrator or creator doesn't really pay attention on updating information on the group they created. In my opinion, Groups function is important and potential, but it need some improvement. That's why I am so glad that Erenst could help me on analyzing this OC. We will try to look at its potential and analyzing its limitation. Great and thanks for your suggestion folks. Special thanks to mernie, mbco, Philip, and Andrea. Your comment here help us a lot on finishing this final project.
ReplyDeleteLow interaction within members is a big threat to many online communities. I like your idea about gamifying members’ online experience. To be honest, I seldom do an online survey which has me engaged deeply while answering. Few people will want to reject having fun, so this idea should be highlighted and applied to many online communities, especially those who have a nature of gravity, such as online academic communities. As I reflect on my final project, I’m thinking if online teachers want to elicit students’ motivation in an effective way, gamification is a possible way. For example, how to teach vocabulary? Can teachers design a fun learning method to help students look up the vocabulary and learn the meaning of the words better than the look-up of the traditional paper-based dictionary?
ReplyDeletethank you all for the comments and feedback.
ReplyDeleteMendeley is a great reference manager tool/software. Now, their groups feature, I think it is still in its early development. As I mentioned, perhaps it originally came as an afterthought as the emphasis of Mendeley is about reference citation, management, etc, and not so much in creating a SNS for academics. For that specific purpose, we have academia.edu or LinkedIN. We (Hery and I)are interested in this academic based SNS that focuses on the product of the field i.e. papers and publications and how the community could/would communicate and collaborate within the academic context (the original purpose). As we've seen throughout the semester, some OCs started with very niche ideas (i.e. pet grooming or superhero citizens) but they developed it to go beyond the original purpose and users got involved in discussions/interactions other than the original. All of your feedback are very useful input for our final project.
Another great post! - yes I agree with others that users are probably more drawn to the other features of the site than the forums.. perhaps it is the nature of academics. You know, one of my professors was saying that academics from different universities in the same discipline don't read each others books -- that is just absurd. This reminds me of that - maybe they are just too worried about someone taking their ideas and publishing them (and getting tenure) to share any tid bits of wisdom.
ReplyDeleteVery good analysis and comments all around. Passive participation may take the form of joining a group just to receive update notifications, or to give the impression of participation, either to others or to one's own conscience ;).
ReplyDeleteThe idea of making a game of participation requires a critical mass of people who are open to interacting with others for mutual advancement in the game. Some social Q&A sites have taken a similar approach to motivating participation--you have to post a certain number of answers, or receive a certain number of rating points, to earn the right to post questions. Gamifying Mendeley is an interesting idea, but doing it in a gratuitous way could be a time sink (not that academics are immune to those!) that goes against the original attraction of joining the OC.
Great post! I really like that you include the point of "contribute regularly" in your unwritten rules, and also "moderators should be actively monitoring". In general, I think this might work as the most important rule in any kind of forum. Can't imagine a forum without consistent members and posts...
ReplyDeleteYour comment about the SNS being an afterthought reminded me of an idea I had a year ago. My previous school required us to use the web service turnitin.com to evaluate if we have plagiarized in our papers. If you are not familiar, on this site you upload a term paper and a report is generated telling you how much of your paper resembled other papers in the database. So a score of 10% means that 10% of the paper directly matches portions of other papers so in theory that would mean that 10% of your paper are direct quotes. A score of 90% means a student is just copying a document word for word. A nice side effect of this service was that the site listed resources where it matched up. Basically this became a gold mine for bulking up my bibliography or maybe finding another POV.
ReplyDeleteturnitin.com is not a SNS or at least it was not when I was using it. Mendeley Groups could incorporate a more social version of this. Imagine being able to upload a term paper and then getting the names of four or five students from other various universities working on a very similar topic and then being able to connect with each other and bounce ideas off of one another.
Just a thought for future considerations and conversations!
I agree with this post and Bug's comment about passive OC participants. All users are encouraged to comtribute rather than lurking, loafing and free-riding. It is, however, hard if not impossible to prevent this from happending though. In my opinion, this can hardly be made into a rule. Usually, the OC administrator can “punish” users by removing inappropriate comments, but he can do very little to “punish” inactive users.
ReplyDelete