Motivating Participation in Virtual Communities

Julita Vassileva

MADMUC Lab – Part I

I-Help deployment results

Deployed for 2 years, 2000+ users, all undergrad CS classes, in the UK, France and Colombia

Lessons learned: Usage / participation varies greatly Should be perceived as adding value

After reaching a “critical mass” becomes self-feeding

Encouraging students to participate is crucial

Greer J., McCalla G., Vassileva J., Deters R., Bull S., Kettel L. (2001) Lessons Learned in Deploying a Multi-Agent Learning Support System, Proceedings AIED'2001, 410-421.

(socially motivated)

Why do people offer their time and resources? Different people have different motivations:

(extrinsically motivated)

Some are altruists (intrinsically motivated)

Some would help their friends and hope to make new friends through helping

Some seek glory

Some seek high marks

or money…

How to motivate participation?

Appealing to the materialistic

Human help has costs (time, effort)! It shouldn’t be misused!

Agent economy

Market regulates the supply and demand

help in exchange for currency rate of pay negotiable (by agents) users can set parameters of agents pay a penalty if agent’s deals are ignored

Virtual currency regulates the help market

Agents negotiate• So the user’s attention remains focused on

their tasks • Each agent decides to counter-offer or

accept an offer by calculating a utility function with factors:– money importance (greediness, stinginess)– importance of the current goal– importance of the relationship between users– user’s risk attitude– perceived utility function and factors of the other

agent agents model each other

– extending the bargaining protocol

Chhaya Mudgal, J. Vassileva (2000) Multi-agent negotiation to support an economy for online help andtutoring, Proceedings of ITS'2000, Springer LNCS 1839, 83-92.

Pinata Winoto,Ph.D. Work, in progress

But how to cash the money?• Depends on the values of the community

– Real money – in a workplace / distance education – Marks – in a classroom setting

• In the case of I-Help students said:– Souvenirs – not stimulating at all– Marks – would be very good!– Money – would be good too, esp. for paid tutors

Motivation by social standing

– Reputation ranking (top-10 list) – seems useful

• I-Help PDF users report social visibility as a motivator

– More subtle ways: visibility in the community is based on reputation

Visualizing the community• Users as stars in the night sky

– Proximity and brightness indicate closeness of interests among users and their importance for the community

• Context: a P2P file-sharing community

Helen Bretzke, CRA-W –NSERC Summer’2002 Tech report

Frie nd s Fo re ve r

Appealing to the socially motivated users

• Agents can take into account interpersonal relationships and buildsocial capital – In seeking help– In negotiation

• Forming agent groups– Agent coalition formation– Trust-based mechanism

• But building user groups?

Silvia Breban, Vassileva J.(2002)Long-Term Coalitions for the ElectronicMarketplace,Proc.E-commerceWorkshop,Canadian AIConference, Calgary.

Building a community

• Evolution of trust networks– Agent specialization – Integrating subjective trust (from

own experience) and objective reputation (from other agents)

Distributed User Modelling!

Yamini Upadrashta,M.Sc. Work, in progress

Yao Wang,M.Sc. Work, in progress

Xiaolin Niu,M.Sc. Work, in progress

• Animated, believable interface Agents • Personal agent as a persona• Goal:

– to invoke emotion (compassion) in the user– to persuade user to help / provide resources– to invoke reflection in the user over her behaviour

• Study: – the persuasive power of an “emotional” agent

Appealing to the compassionate

Emotional engine in the personaEmotional Reaction To

Consequences of Events (Pleased,

Displeased etc.)

Actions of Agents

(Approving, Disapproving

etc.)

Aspects of Objects (Liking, disliking

etc.)Emotion States

Happy Sad Pleased Surprised Neutral Angry

Facial expression for six major emotional states (Ortony,1988)

Preliminary results• Small study with an agent tutor (C++)• All 12 participants preferred the

emotional persona• No significant difference in

student performance• Girls felt a need to perform better in

order to please the persona!

• So, an emotional agent could helpto motivate some users

Chioma Okonkwo, Vassileva, J. (2001) Affective Pedagogical Agents and User Persuasion, C. Stephanidis (ed.) Proc. "Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (UAHCI)", HCI International,New Orleans, 397-401.

More recently

• Using an animated persona to evoke user reflection over her social behaviour

• “The Picture of Dorian Grey” effect

Helen Bretzke, CRA-W –NSERC Summer’2002 project report

Application

• A P2P (Gnutella based) system for file sharing users share academic papers

• A variety of motivation and community-building techniques:– Modelling social networks (relationships

among users)– Social structure visualization– Persuasive interface (layout, icons, faces)

• Experiment – in the end of the summer

Christopher CoxNSERC Summer’2002 project report