CS 4472/6470: Design of Online Communities

• "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" by Robert Putnam (electronic reserve)
• "Virtual Communites are Communites: Web Surfers Don't Ride Alone" by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia (in Smith & Kollock)
• A New Perspective on "Community" and its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems by Amy Bruckman. Works in Progress, CHI 2006.

• Meetup

• The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, chapters one and two. (in book store)
• Introduction and The Heart of the Well, in The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold.
• "And Now?" in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 1-11. (electronic reserve)

• Puzzle Pirates

• Short paper on best and worst experiences

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman, chapters 1, 4, and 6
• Interviewing equipment guide

• Habbo

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman, chapter 5
• Teaching Students to Study Online Communities Ethically by Amy Bruckman. Journal of Information Ethics 15:2, 82-98, fall 2006.
• Ethics for community study projects summary

• "Go Away":Participants Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research by Jim Hudson and Amy Bruckman. The Information Society, 20:127-139, 2004
• The Belmont Report
• US Title 45 Regulations
• Psychological Research Online: Opportunities and Challenges, by Bob Kraut et al

• Twitter
• Georgia Tech IRB training

• Studying the Amateur Artist by Amy Bruckman
• Georgia Tech's IRB information (browse)
• "Interviewing Members of Online Communities: a Practical Guide to Recruiting Participants" by Amy Bruckman (draft, handout)

• Obtain ethics certification via the online course, if you do not already have certification.

• Finding One's Own Space in Cyberspace, by Amy Bruckman
• Communicative Subtlety in Multimedia Chat by John Suler
• Design Principles for Online Communities by Peter Kollock
• Nine Principles of Community Design by Amy Jo Kim
• Understanding the Internet’s Present, and Values-Based Design of its Future by Amy Bruckman

• ThirdAge

• Project proposals

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman. Pages 1-58, intro & most of chapter 1.
• The Kid With All the News About the TV News New York Times article

• Dooce (Warning: site is known for being irreverent and using strong language.)
• TVNewser

• Aspects of the Self," in Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (chapter 7)
• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community by Judith Donath

• Second Life
  Note: it takes a while to 'understand' this site. Please reserve at least 2-3 hours for exploring it.

• HW: Interview with a classmate

• "The Strange Case of the Lectronic Lover," by Lindsay Van Gelder (electronic reserve)
• "Boyz and Gurlz" in Cyberville by Stacy Horn (electronic reserve)
• "TinySex and Gender Trouble", in Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (chapter 8)
• Gender Swapping on the Internet by Amy Bruckman

• iVillage

• Papers by Amy Bruckman:
  • Cyberspace is Not Disneyland
  • The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and Professional Community
  • Community Support for Constructionist Learning
  • "Battle Lessons: What the Generals Don't Know" by Dan Baum in The New Yorker Magazine - Jan 17, 2005, pg 42-48 (electronic reserve)
  Online Site:
  • Scratch
  Due:
  • HW: Field notes

• A Rape in Cyberspace (or chapter 1 of "My Tiny Life") by Julian Dibbell
• Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities, panel, CHI 94, by Amy Bruckman, Pavel Curtis, Cliff Figallo, and Brenda Laurel
• Managing Deviant Behavior in Online Communities., panel, CHI 2006. Amy Bruckman, Catalina Danis, Cliff Lampe, Janet Sternberg, and Chris Waldron.

• "Banished!" and "Who Let the Nazi In?" (chapters 7 and 8) in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 157-220. (electronic reserve)
• "The Purple Guest" (Chapter 3) in "My Tiny Life" by Julian Dibbell
• AOL Terms of Service (skim)
  • AOL vulgarity guidelines (1995) (Just glance--you'll get the idea.) (warning: vulgar)
  • AOL's Secret Dirty Words List by Jordanne Holyoak (warning: vulgar)
  • AOL Agreement to rules of user conduct
  Online Site:
  • LambdaMOO, following these instructions.

• LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction (LTAND)
• Governance, chapter 9 of Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova (electronic reserve)
• Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance

• Lessons from LucasFilm's Habitat, by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. (In Cyberspace, First Steps.)

• Wikipedia Village Pump: Policy (skim/get general idea of how policy is made)
• Lame edit wars on Wikipedia (skim, pick one and explore in detail)

• HW: First interview transcript

• "Roles: from Newcomer to Old-Timer," Chapters 4 in Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim (electronic reserve)
• Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard Bartle

• Etsy

• HW: Second interview transcript

• "Lurker demographics: counting the silent" by Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece. Proceedings of CHI 2000, April 1 - 6, 2000, The Hague, Netherlands, pp. 73-80.
• "Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games by Nicolas Ducheneaut et al. Proceedings of CHI 2006. (electronic reserve)

Recommended:

• Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space by Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick

• Slashdot

• "Leadership: The Buck Stops Here." Chapter 5 in Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim (electronic reserve)
• "Leadership in Online Creative Collaboration" by Kurt Luther and Amy Bruckman, Proceedings of CSCW 2008

• The WELL Hosts manual (Section 2)
• The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online by Howard Rheingold

• Newgrounds

• HW: Third interview transcript

• "Cybrid principles: guidelines for merging phyisical and cyberspaces" by Peter Anders (available in GT library online db, or on t-square as a resource)
• Read "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace" (electronic reserve). Skim beginning. Read carefully from page 248 to the end.

• "How did My Garden Grow" (Chapter 5) in "My Tiny Life" by Julian Dibbell

• SF0
  Note: Actually signing up for the site and trying it is optional. If you do so, pease do not do anything unethical, illegal, or that defaces property. Use good judgement.

• Activeworlds (PC Only)

• Best Data Practices for Online Service Providers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• "Anonymized" data really isn't
• Puppy Poo Girl
• Internet Vigilantism
  Extra credit: improve this article. Email instructor and TA with link to your changes for extra credit.

• "Privacy policies as decision-making tools, an evaluation of online privacy notices." by Carlos Jensen and Colin Potts. Proceedings of CHI 2004. (electronic reserve)

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Privacy (browse)
• Read the privacy policies of two online sites you use. List your sites on the wiki, making sure no one else in the class has picked your sites. Come to class prepared to discuss those policies.

• Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner. (in The Whale and The Reactor) (electronic reserve)
• Code v2.0 by Lawrence Lessig. Chapters 3, 6, & 7. (Available free online, but you may wish to buy it anyway.)

Online Site:

• Many Eyes

• ALA statement on Internet filtering
• Pew report on Cyberbullying and Online Teens
• "Bullying of teenagers online is common"

• NetSmartz.org
• From this list of Internet filters, pick two filters and see if you can use the developer's website to figure out how they work and what criteria they use for filtering.
• Club Penguin

• The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites
• The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network

• Community papers

• Fusion Fall
• Cartoon Network

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond
• Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm by Yochai Benkler
(Read the introduction carefully. Rest of the text is recommended but optional. Footnotes are optional.)

• SourceForge
• Creative Commons

• Design Papers

• Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia. by Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. Proceedings of Group 2005.
• Can History be Open Source? by Roy Rosenzweig

• Wikipedia
• Everything2