Speakers: Gilly Leshed, PhD Student, Information Science, Cornell University

Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 4:15-5:15p

Location: 301 College Avenue, Seminar Room

In a special series, the next two IS Seminars will feature Information Science’s first class of graduate students, Jofish Kaye, Gilly Leshed, Lori Lorigo, and Sadat Shami. They will be presenting their recent research on a wide variety of Information Science topics, from the notion of context in knowledge networks to issues of anonymity, affect and collaboration in online communication. Each student will present their work for 20 minutes and take questions for 10 minutes.

This will be an excellent opportunity to see current work by our graduate students. Please make every effort to attend.

Abstract -

Existing research divides participants of online communities into two separate groups: posters and lurkers. The current study expands the concept of participation patterns in online communities, proposing two continuous dimensions: intensity, indicating the frequency of activities performed by participants, and publicity, representing the degree of exposure in participants' activities. We examined an intra-corporate online community with discussion groups on general non-work-related topics. In October 2003 the management decided to turn participation in the discussion groups from anonymous to identifiable. Several methodologies were applied to analyze the effects of the anonymity removal: calculating posting and visiting frequencies before and after the change; analyzing threads' discourses, and; open-ended questionnaires to community participants and key informants. The findings suggest that the change had a crucial impact on shaping participation patterns in the community, both in the publicity and intensity dimensions. Additional effects refer to workers attitudes: while few participants supported the change, others deciphered the act as a means to restrain access to the community. The complex effect of the change would not have been possible to be depicted with a simple binary model, demonstrating the value of a richer behavior representation.

Bio -

Gilly Leshed is a PhD student in the Information Science program at Cornell University, concentrating on human computer interaction under the supervision of Prof. Gay. She is interested in designing user interfaces that facilitate collaboration among users and augment community development, without compromising usability and user experience factors. She has an industrial engineering Bachelor’s degree and an information management engineering Master’s degree from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she concentrated on cognitive processes in technology use. In 1996-1998 Gilly worked in Avionitek Ltd. Where she designed and evaluated the user interface of an integrated crew information system for commercial aircraft cockpits. In 2000-2004 she worked in Rafael Ltd., where she designed and developed user interfaces for C4I systems, data fusion systems, interactive maps, and other military systems. In her work she was interested in reducing cognitive load of users and enhancing distributed collaboration among users of the systems.

For more information please contact Jeff Hancock.