Effects of community size and contact rate in synchronous social q&a

Social question-and-answer (Q&A) involves the location of answers to questions through communication with people. Social Q&A systems, such as mailing lists and Web forums are popular, but their asynchronous nature can lead to high answer latency. Synchronous Q&A systems facilitate real-time dialog, usually via instant messaging, but face challenges with interruption costs and the availability of knowledgeable answerers at question time. We ran a longitudinal study of a synchronous social Q&A system to investigate the effects of the rate with which potential answerers were contacted (trading off time-to-answer against interruption cost) and community size (varying total number of members). We found important differences in subjective and objective measures of system performance with these variations. Our findings help us understand the costs and benefits of varying contact rate and community size in synchronous social Q&A, and inform system design for social Q&A.

[1]  Julita Vassileva,et al.  The Intelligent Helpdesk: Supporting Peer-Help in a University Course , 1998, Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

[2]  Loren Terveen,et al.  PHOAKS: a system for sharing recommendations , 1997, CACM.

[3]  D. Hindman.  The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier , 1996 .

[4]  David W. McDonald,et al.  Social matching: A framework and research agenda , 2005, TCHI.

[5]  Karen Sparck Jones.  A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval , 1972 .

[6]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis, and directions , 2007, CHI.

[7]  Steve Whittaker,et al.  Talking to strangers: an evaluation of the factors affecting electronic collaboration , 1996, CSCW '96.

[8]  Michal Jacovi,et al.  "Ask before you search": peer support and community building with reachout , 2002, CSCW '02.

[9]  Steve Whittaker,et al.  The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace , 2002, CSCW '02.

[10]  Steven M. Drucker,et al.  The effect of communication modality on cooperation in online environments , 2000, CHI.

[11]  Bart Selman,et al.  Referral Web: combining social networks and collaborative filtering , 1997, CACM.

[12]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Just talk to me: a field study of expertise location , 1998, CSCW '98.

[13]  Loren G. Terveen,et al.  Living Design Memory: Framework, Implementation, Lessons Learned , 1995, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[14]  Thomas W. Malone,et al.  Intelligent Information Sharing Systems , 1986 .

[15]  Dan Cosley,et al.  Think different: increasing online community participation using uniqueness and group dissimilarity , 2004, CHI.

[16]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Answer Garden 2: merging organizational memory with collaborative help , 1996, CSCW '96.

[17]  Gloria Mark,et al.  Why distance matters: effects on cooperation, persuasion and deception , 2002, CSCW '02.

[18]  S. Karau,et al.  Social loafing and social compensation: the effects of expectations of co-worker performance. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  G. Marwell,et al.  THE PARADOX OF GROUP SIZE IN COLLECTIVE ACTION: A THEORY OF THE CRITICAL MASS. II. * , 1988 .

[20]  Karen Spärck Jones.  A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval , 2021, J. Documentation.

[21]  Mark Apperley,et al.  The effect of group size and communication modes in CSCW environments , 1996, Proceedings Sixth Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction.

[22]  Susan R. Fussell,et al.  IM waiting: timing and responsiveness in semi-synchronous communication , 2008, CSCW.

[23]  Scott Counts,et al.  mimir: a market-based real-time question and answer service , 2009, CHI.

[24]  Sheizaf Rafaeli,et al.  Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites , 2008, CHI.

[25]  Wendy A. Kellogg,et al.  The adoption and use of BABBLE: A field study of chat in the workplace , 1999, ECSCW.

[26]  M. de Rijke,et al.  Formal models for expert finding in enterprise corpora , 2006, SIGIR.

[27]  Lei Kuang,et al.  Bluereach: harnessing synchronous chat to support expertise sharing in a large organization , 2008, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[28]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance , 2000 .

[29]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Expertise recommender: a flexible recommendation system and architecture , 2000, CSCW '00.

[30]  Damon Horowitz,et al.  The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine , 2010, WWW '10.

[31]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Running Out of Space: Models of Information Navigation , 1999 .

[32]  Bonnie A. Nardi,et al.  Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action , 2000, CSCW '00.

[33]  Xin Li,et al.  Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities , 2005, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..