Exploring reflection in online communities

Abstract

Commons-based Peer Production is the process by which internet communities create media and software artefacts. Learning is integral to the success of these communities as it encourages contribution on an individual level, helps to build and sustain commitment on a group level and provides a means for adaption at an organisational level. While some communities have established ways to support organisational learning -- through a forum or thread reserved for community discussion -- few have investigated how more in-depth visual and analytic interfaces could help formalise this process. In this paper, we explore how social network visualisation can be used to encourage reflection and thus support organisational learning in online communities. We make the following contributions: First, we describe Commons-Based Peer Production, in terms of a socio-technical learning system that includes individual, group and organisational learning. Second, we present a novel visualisation environment that embeds social network visualisation in an asynchronous collaborative architecture. Third, we present results from an evaluation and discuss the potential for visualisation to support the process of organisational reflection in online communities.