Danyel Fisher

Toward Articulating Social Roles in Online Spaces

Biography
Danyel Fisher joined MSR in November 2004, when he started a course of research centering on online behavior centering on Usenet newsgroups. His disciplinary background has applied social network analysis to a variety of online spaces, centering on email archives. He earned his PhD in 2004 from the Informatics department at UC Irvine, working with Paul Dourish.

Position Paper
Community organizers are very aware of the different sorts of roles that seem to appear in online spaces: a long bibliography of work about online community talks about roles like “central contributors”, “flamers”, and “lurkers.” While these labels are easy to attach on an ad-hoc basis, there has been little work attempting to systematize what sorts of people occur in different online spaces, or how their interactions might be matched to these roles. My recent research at Microsoft’s Community Technologies Group attempts to use structural and social network information—social metadata—about messages in Usenet Newsgroups to help identify both the sorts of roles that occur in a space, and to try to understand what is the shape of the space around these people.

There are obvious values to this information to community organizers, who have good reason to want to know who is in their space and what they are doing; there are longer-term implications for providing feedback to users that helps give them more information about to whom they are talking and what they might want. Imagine a group interface, for example, that could give information about whether a group is filled with discussion, consumed by flame wars, or centered on questions and answers.

There are other, troubling implications to this work: this is a finer-grained version of reputation, with much richer information about behavior than the standard good/bad (e.g. eBay)’s reputation. There are interesting challenges to what it means when an online system actually remembers that a person likes to be involved in flame wars: like the boy who cried wolf, will that person now be unable to get a straight answer?

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