Course 1B: Supporting Community with Social Media -
CourseContribution & Benefit: Discusses how to support communities through information and communication technologies. Shows the various technical and social considerations in designing social computing systems to support community-scale interactions.
Abstract » An aspect of social computing is to use information and communication technologies to support the formation and collective work of communities, whether they be enacted mostly offline or online. Supporting communities through computing technologies can help to facilitate a wide range of collective outcomes, ranging from engaged citizenship, knowledge management, health support and more. However, creating social computing platforms that support communities is also difficult, with points of potential collapse at any point in the lifestyle of a project.
In this course, we will mix discussion of the research in this area with exercises designed to help attendees become aware of the opportunities in designing social computing platforms to support communities, as well as the complexities involved when those technologies intersect with multiple levels of human social systems. In the discussions, we’ll discuss conceptions of community from sociology, psychology and other social sciences. We’ll describe how using technology changes the traditional processes by how communities are formed and supported. We’ll describe the lifecycle of the social computing for community process, from goals to outcomes. Finally, we’ll discuss different generations of thought regarding technology-supported communities, and how the next generation of socio-technical design is likely to unfold. Exercises will include reading and discussion questions of several “real-life” examples of community design projects. In addition, attendees will work in groups with instructors to create a design proposal for an online community, using course concepts to define all stages of the creation of the project.
At the end of this course, students should be able to define the goals of using technology to support communities, have an understanding of some best practices in approaching this overall issue, and be able to articulate (and avoid) common stumbling blocks in creating technology-enabled communities.