Helping Hands: Computer Support for Community-Maintained Artifacts of Lasting Value

This project explores the nature of computer systems to support the building of high-quality community-maintained artifacts of lasting value (CALVs). CALVs are distinguished from ephemeral activities of communities through three key properties: (1) The community must be focused around a valuable persistent computer artifact; (2) the artifact must be maintained over time; and (3) the quality of the artifact must be important to the community. The artifact must be valued by its maintaining community; it may in addition also be of value to a larger community who does not participate in maintenance. CALVs are of special importance on the Internet because they represent powerful free resources that can be created by volunteer communities. They have the potential to revolutionize access to many types of information, opening free access to millions of people. In much the same way that open source software frees software, CALVs free repositories of information.

But, just as most open source software projects fail, most CALVs fail. Their creators get busy or bored, and they fail to attract a community that is interested enough to do the essential work of maintaining the artifact for future users. In many cases, failure may be appropriate. Perhaps the artifact just is not valuable enough to be worth maintaining. In many other cases, however, important resources are lost because a community disbands through disillusionment, conflict, or ineffective organization. This project is an investigation of principles and computer tools that embody those principles to improve the success rate for valuable CALVs, making it possible for people everywhere to create and maintain valuable resources on the Internet.

This project seeks tools in three areas: (1) Eliciting Valuable Contributions. Computer tools to help users find work a) they are able to do, b) will find interesting, and c) that will develop the artifact in ways that are valuable to the community. (2) Maintaining the Health of the CALV and its Community. Computer tools to measure the local and global health of the CALV to help users make decisions that are in the best interests of the community. (3) Providing Value to Community Members. Recommender tools to help a user find specific items he or she values from among the many parts of a CALV.

This research will involve three communities: MovieLens, a distributed, anonymous, recreational community of thousands of active members; Galactic Gopher, a geographically co-located, pseudonymous, small graduate student community; and the Bioethics of Stem Cell Research repository, a distributed, identified, professional and academic community. For each of these communities the project will develop computer tools that embody the best practices for enhancing the ability of the community to maintain its artifact without external support. In each of these communities, researchers will conduct controlled, random-assignment experiments with subgroups of the community and develop tools to computationally assess the overall health of the community, and the contribution of each member.

This project will develop principles to enable people to create and maintain valuable CALVs for communities that can use them. Based on the principles, the project will develop practical computer tools for CALVs. These computer tools will be created under open source licenses and distributed to people who wish to use them everywhere. To increase the impact, the research will: (1) work with multiple communities (MovieLens, Galactic Gopher, Bioethics) to apply the principles; (2) work with communities independent of the research group on pressing problems of society (the bioethics of stem cell research); and (3) develop a cadre of graduate students with research experience, interest and ability in strengthening Community-maintained Artifacts of Lasting Value.