Jenny Preece
Professor and Chair, Information Systems, University of Maryland-Baltimore
Jean Gasen
Associate Professor, Information Systems, Virginia Commonwealth University
Jonathan Lazar
Assistant Professor, Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University
Objectives
Format for the day
This workshop will be informal, but we will strive to reach consensus on key issues, summarize and report our ideas. These activities are proposed:
| AM Introductions: Finding out a little bit about the workshop participants |
| AM: Session 1: Case Studies The session will begin with a look at existing examples of successful and unsuccessful on-line communities. The purpose will be to generate discussion of key issues important to the design of these communities, with particular attention to the usability and social issues. Individuals should bring an example of at least one successful and one unsuccessful on-line community. Groups coming together may want to synthesize their ideas prior to the workshop as a way of stimulating discussion. |
| AM Session 2: Reflection and Synthesis A brief summary and synthesis of what has been learned through case examples and a reflection on other design issues that may have been missed. |
| AM/PM Session 3: Summary of Research. We invite participants to present a summary of their work on the topic. We hope
that this will attract Ph.D. students working on this important topic as well as faculty and commercial developers.
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| PM Session 4: Reflection, Synthesis and Next Steps. The group will reflect upon what has been learned through the research presentations. Recommendations for future research direction will also be summarized. Time slots will be determined when we know who is attending and who is interested in making presentations. |
We invite both individual presentations and group presentations. For a group presentation we suggest the following format:
The group leader (probably the Ph.D. mentor) will give a five-minute overview of the work of the group, indicating the group's discipline (e.g. communications science, information systems, sociology, political science, computer science, etc.). Each member of the group will then give a brief 10 minute presentation on her/his work. This presentation should describe the topic of interest (state research questions if possible), describe findings (including observations, and point out links between usability and social considerations of online community design.
Individual presenters will be given 10 minutes to do the same thing.
We expect these presentations to be highly informative as we hope there will be participants from different disciplines who view the issues from different perspectives. For example, we could anticipate the information systems people will focus on usability; communications people may focus on the role of different media; sociologists may focus on 'what is a community on line'; and political scientists might be most interested in civil laws and democracy. This tapestry of perspectives should provide a good basis for relating key concepts across fields in interesting and new ways.
While the talks are going on we hope that group leaders will note key issues which they will present at the end of the talk. A participant from the workshop will do this for the individual talks. We'll call this reporting. After each talk the reporters will summarize their comments in five minutes or less and then lead a 15 minute discussion of other issues. These comments will be collected on large sheets of paper as a record of the afternoon discussion.
By the end of the day we should have a discussion document mapped out with volunteers identified who will lead us to develop a publishable report or paper.
Next steps: