photo by Ed Schipul

The first keynote on Thursday night was by Marc Smith of Microsoft Research, who shared some of his insights based on the analysis of newsgroups. What I found most striking was the fact that only 2% of that community supplies all the answers (what he calls the “answer persons”) and 66% only posts once. So a very small group of people actually defines such a community.

The keynote on Friday was a hilarious presentation by Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, the founders of Slashdot. The quote I take away from their story is: give people a number, and they will try to maximize it. In their case, this relates to a reputation score, but this principle was a recurring theme in many of the other presentations: a lot of things can (and will) be treated as a game.

Another thread that ran through the conference was that of social network analysis. One impressive visualization followed the other, often involving enormous data sets. A much needed word of caution was presented by Marleen Huysman and her colleagues. We have left a period behind us where we thought we could store and transfer knowledge by means of information technology. The danger is that we will now use that same instrumental approach for social networks: managers trying to create and optimize networks for knowledge sharing that are not properly embedded in the work practices.

The keynote this morning was by Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab, who gave an interesting talk about signaling. In biology, signals are a way to indicate qualities that are not directly observable. However, humans are able to manipulate these signals. I can rent an expensive sports car for a day to signal that I am rich, even though in reality I am not. In a computer-mediated context, this becomes an even bigger issue. I can create a very desirable avatar in Second Life that has very little to do with what I really look like. One of the keys here seems to be cost: an avatar in Second Life takes maybe fifteen minutes to create, a level-70 character in World of Warcraft takes months. The latter signal is therefore much more reliable.

Here is the presentation I gave yesterday during the workshop on Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings, as part of the Third International Conference on Communities & Technologies at Michigan State University. Volker Wulf and Aditya Johri were able to assemble a diverse group of people for the workshop, which led to many interesting avenues of discussion throughout the day.

With regards to my presentation, I was happy to receive a lot of positive feedback on my research perspective. The timeliness and relevance of studying virtual worlds as a test bed for possible new ways of working in organizations was acknowledged. The theoretical foundation seems to be fairly solid, as well. But as before in Finland, the group struggled with the tension between work and play (as do I).

The most interesting element of that discussion was a contribution by Karsten Wolf (who also presented a paper on his own World of Warcraft research during this conference). He argued that perhaps the tasks that are being performed in a virtual world (he used “killing a dragon” as an example) are much simpler than the tasks performed in a work context. Maybe simpler is not the right word, but at least they are not ambiguous or polluted by politics, which makes collaboration easier.

We also discussed possible reasons for the fact that these virtual world communities thrive without face-to-face contact (as do many open source communities) and came up with a “technology expectancy” theory: if you expect to be able to communicate face to face at some point, you will see computer-mediated communication as a hindrance. If you do not anticipate to communicate face-to-face, you will see the same technology as an enabler.

I will post some more comments about the conference tomorrow.

I was very encouraged by this study, since it starts from a perspective that I wholeheartedly support: there are practices taking place in virtual worlds that foreshadow new ways of working in enterprises. Reeves and Malone focus on leadership, applying the Sloan Leadership Model to online games, but they acknowledge that it applies more broadly to the areas of collaboration, innovation and business processes.

The most interesting conclusion from the study is that it is the environment that makes leadership easier in virtual worlds. Specifically, they say it’s the virtual economies, the transparency of metrics, and the connection methods for inter-group communication. The implication may be that changing the “game” may be as important as selecting and training the players. What they are basically saying is that enterprises should try to mimic certain aspects of virtual worlds, so as to make new ways of leadership (and collaboration, and knowledge sharing, etc.) possible. That is a very encouraging perspective, as far as I’m concerned. Let’s see what I can contribute to the discussion.

This coming week, I’ll be off to Michigan State University to participate in the Communities & Technologies Conference. I’m looking forward to a stimulating discussion in the workshop I’ll be part of, and to interesting exchanges with other researchers in the field. I’ll post the presentation I’ll be giving and some impressions of the conference in the course of next week.

Positive elements in the comments where the acknowledgement that this is a timely topic and that the paper did a good job of explaining what drives the popularity of virtual worlds. The paper was also credited with giving insight into the way virtual worlds might encourage new ways of information transfer and trust building that are lacking in other forms of computer mediated communication. The motivational attributes that are identified in the paper (see my recent presentation in Finland for more on that) offer a good basis for further research.

The biggest problem with the paper is of course that it is a purely intellectual exercise and not a report on new research. In that sense it was considered premature by the reviewers, who would have liked to see some ethnographic evidence of the practices described in the paper. No argument there, but that will be something I will be working on in the coming months.

On the whole, I am encouraged by the comments. I guess a rejection for this particular conference was inevitable because of the lack of empirical evidence I supply.

On a further note, my contribution has been accepted to the workshop on Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings, which is organized as part of the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies at Michigan State University. That promises to be an interesting exchange of ideas.