This brief article was clearly written for an education audience, and can be summed up by the concise conclusion paragraph on page 4: "Goal setting is an integral component of self-regulation. Setting goals is a generic strategy that can be applied in various domains. Effective goal setting requires that people set a long-term goal, break it into short-term, attainable sub-goals, monitor progress and assess capabilities, adjust the strategy and goal as needed, and set a new goal when the present one is attained. This multi-step plan is a key to promoting healthier human functioning, higher motivation and perceived self-efficacy, and self-regulated learning and performance across the life span."

Unpacking this a bit, the author refers to self-regulation as "systematic efforts to direct thoughts, feelings, and actions toward the attainment of one's goals" (1). And a goal reflects "one's purpose and refers to quantity, quality, or rate of performance" (1). In other words, setting reasonable goals can aid self-regulation and motivation in that a person will feel capable, motivated, and satisfied when he completes a goal set for hiim. Since this is written for educators, we can expand this to instructors setting goals for students and leading them to complete these goals for their mutual satisfaction.

As this relates to ecommunities, it stands to reason that admins of sites can set goals of users within a community. For example, a social networking site may ask you to befriend 100 people and respond to 15 posts before you're given extensive capabilities to the site and/or status as a regular user. This sequential ordering (echoing tactics in the Van Maanen article from last week) may motivate users to set personal goals and remain active contributors to the site. Likewise, if a moderator or site buddy urges the user on (as a teacher to a student) the relationship is multiplied to produce positive results. 

This was an incredibly accessible study testing social science theories (specifically social pscyhology) on ecommunities. It is an empirical study testing ideas of motivation within an online community (a movie rating website). To study under-contribution the authors looked at “social loafing,” which happens when people exert less effort on a collective task than on a comparable individual task (1). In the “collective effort model,” factors leading people to loaf less include: believing their effort is important to the group’s performance, believing their contributions are identifiable, liking the group they are working with (2). The largely tested uniqueness and benefit (see Table 2 on page 5) and then later goals (see Table 4 on page 7). They based their design on previous social science theories such as the goal-setting theory which states that high challenge goals stimulate higher task performance than easy goals (5). In the experiment, they confirmed that specific goals are more effective than non-specific goals (7), but did not prove that individual goals are more effective than group goals. The authors state their key finding as: “people will be more likely to contribute to a group task if they think their contribution does not duplicate what others can provide and is thus needed for accomplishing the group’s goal” (8). Of particular notice was the authors’ finding that high goals energize higher performance in three ways: self-efficacy, normative information of expectations, and satisfaction (6). They also showed that as goals get higher, performance may not only plateau but drop (8).

 One minor finding was that even just emailing volunteers within a community seemed to initially pique their interest and cause activity. Since the example of MovieLens was already so good, I'm moving on to think what impact the group/individual dynamic plays on social networking sites where users can see fully disclosed profiles of each other. Does this impact group thinking and possible entitlement to the individual? My guess is that people would be more willing to work in groups when they weren't simple anonymous names, but of course I would need research to back that up.

I didn't understand the methods for the second experiment in the High-Challenge Goal hypothesis group because it appears the methods would still invoke individuality, not commonality.  Specifically, I'm referring to H5: "Individual goals more effective than group goals" in the context of the concluding remark:  "assignment to a group condition in the context of a large anonymous online community seemed to raise contribution levels" (p8)

 Even though the sample group didn't know each other (noted by the paper), their salience among an incomprehensibly large community may make their concept of the task at hand individual by comparison.  Out of 80,000 members, being singled out in a group of 10 - an 8000:1 reduction - may have the same effect on perceptions of uniqueness and individuality as an 800:1 or 800000:1 reduction.  By this I mean that at a certain threshold, it becomes impossible conceive practical differences in group size.  When someone perceives their role in a group of 8000 or 80000, they may experience similar feelings of smallness, impact, etc.

What I enjoyed most about this article was its candid discussion of disconfirmed hypothesisisises (plural of hypothesis?) and the consideration of potential misperceptions that led to their construction.  Perhaps beyond the reasons given for why H2a and H2b weren't supported (defining benefits may constrain the unique motivation per individual), participants were turned off by the explicit description of likely benefits.  People may prefer to think they're acting selflessly - collaborative acts are morally superior to self-interested acts.

Strategies - Schunk didn't touch on renegotiation.  When people don't attain goals, they often renegotiate a new measure of success that reconciles immediate self-worth with long-term ambitions.  For example, say you signed up for the Ann Arbor 5K but had too much work to train.  Rather than give up, you may sign up for another 5K at some point in the future.

 Multiple Goals - I appreciate Schunk's terse writing style, but was left wanting more depth.  How does quantity, difficulty, and multi-tasking effect progress?

Self-Evaluation - People aren't good at objectively evaluating their performance because they often don't have or neglect information that would allow them to make accurate self-assessments.  Feedback is critical because it fills in information gaps for actual skills and risks, reduces overconfidence, and rapid error-correction expedites competency and sustainable self-efficacy.  Flawed understandings perceived as correct understandings are ultimately destined for exposure and correction when demonstrated.  Schunk's recommendation for verbal encouragement - "You can do this" is too general to support meaningful motivation.  Specific evidence of past success that relates to a current goal would reify the sentiment. 

I haven't read these yet, but you guys realize that you're only required one comment per grouping, right?  so pick your favorite reading, or synthesize, would be my vote.  Just a thought, since you're making more for us to have to read.  I wouldn't mind if I weren't horribly swamped, but I guess I'm just going to gloss over other's comments this week anyhow since the rest of my life needs attention.

One question the Schunk reading brought to mind was how to get people on board for a goal. He mentions at the beginning that "Initially people must make a commitment to attain a goal because it will not affect performance without this commitment." So as a community manager, how can you promote community goals while maximizing individual buy-in to those goals?

Schunk offers one design claim: "initially assign goals while simultaneously teaching goal-setting strategies". So by initially assigning some goals to the community and giving people feature to help them set their own goals, you can achieve a standard of goal-setting and goal-keeping in your community.

Thoughts?

Movielen's field experiment provides a very good example for e-community studies of integrating social science theories and system designs. I was attracted by it when I first time heard about it in the last i-school conference by Yan Chen.
However, one issue has risen up to me: even if we have tested some design claim/as treatment in experience to be significant; however, I suspect how salient it would be in motivate peoples' contribution in e-community for a relatively long round. For example, when sending the invitation, people were motivated to rate more movies for a while but the rate dropped after a while. suppose we keep doing this kind of invitation things, people would just get used of it and it would do not work so well any more. In addition, emails, system messages...anything people use for encouraging contribution/participation online, are kind of cold-thing, like the welcome message when logging onto Amazon. People would later ignore it, especially when most systems have provides similar things.
As I feel, those relatively "small" motivations don't really count very much, compared with those more salient on the website, for example, good recommended movies or interesting group features...we might need to really think about what is the core competence of the website in terms of incentive. For example, even there is a set goal there, like in some QA websites people will get some badge when reaching some point level, people would lose interest for continuing if the point and title are going to be only the point and title. To compare the two huge QA websites: Yahoo!Answer and Baidu, it seems the latter is more successful than the former, as it has the mechanism where people can spend their earned points to buy others' answer. In addition, the website invites some of high points to setup "studio" for consulting service.

The shorter, Schunk piece offers a brief summary of research on the role that goals play in the process of self-regulation, or the 'systematic efforts to direct thoughts, feelings, and actions toward the attainment of one's goals'. Goals in themselves do not directly enhance the self-regulation--rather, they influence it through their effects on motivation, learning, self-efficacy, and self evaluation. Some of the goal properties that are mentioned in the article:

• specificity - specific performance standards as opposed to general standards will elicit greater effort.
  goals must be challenging for this to work. if they are easy, a general goal is better.
• proximity - short-term goals give higher motivation
  allow clear, frequent self-evaluations of progress.
• difficulty - tails do not motivate (too hard, too easy). moderately difficult have best effect on motivation and performance.
• self-set goals enhance motivation and self-regulation. if people accept legitimacy of assigned goals, there is no difference from self-set goals.

The degree to which goal setting behavior is effective in boosting self-regulation depends upon how well the goal is specified (specificity), how immediate its results will be evident (proximity), and how reasonable of a challenge it poses (difficulty). Schunk points out some factors for goals to improve self-regulation:

1. Goals must be based around specific performance metrics; this is supported by Ling's findings in experiment 4, in which participants responded more favorably when given an explicit number to attain rather than "do your best"
2. Goals should focus on the short term, or should be divisible into smaller subgoals to provide some result in the short term
3. Goal attainment should be moderately difficult, but not overly so
4. Over time, users should be encouraged to set their own goals; this encourages commitment and engagement
5. Multiple goals being attained at the same time should not conflict with one another

For online communities, this means that incorporating goal-setting into participation can help keep members in line and can sustain a shared understanding of how the community as a whole should perform. This includes goals such as participating the appropriate number of times, staying on topic, or avoiding deviant behavior. In turn, this may reduce the need for more official means of policing such as moderators and hard-set rules.

John Blair

This was one of the more useful readings to date.  The approach, rationale, hypothesis, and results were all presented very clearly and in a useful format (tables 1-4).  It was to see the work presented utilzing hypothesis, as this allows the reader to understand what you expect to see and perhaps also, an indication as to why a particular result is expeted.

 Application to ecommunities I think is somewhat less clear (dependent entirely upon the type of community), but there is obvious lessons to be employed in the design of ecommunities, especially where the community focus is recommender driven.  Applications are also pertinent to communties where members drive the output (which is nearly all of them), but it is a little more difficult.  This work focused on those people who already contributed to the rating rare movies and attempting to get them to rate more movies of this type.  I think this is the core member group and while they can rate more rare movies, I wonder if this is the group to target.  Wouldn't it be beneficial to get this group involved with generating more interest in other group members, thus expanding the core group based on their experience and knowledge?  Wouldn't other non-core group members compare themselves to this group and want to set goals that would make them a part of the core group?

I appreciated the fact that the Beenan article discussed the success of using social science theory to motivate the design of online communities. This stuff really works! Well, sometimes. The MovieLens study was also an example of the challenges that may arise in going from theory to design, such as effective implementation or unexpected results.

I think goal setting is a very useful tool for encouraging contributions in an online community -- one of the better examples I've seen of this phenomenon is the "Quest" system that PerlMonks and Everything2 employs.  These set strict parameters for specific tasks (Q&A cleanup, writing tutorials, contribution of specific types of content) and rewards of XP in the Voting/Reputation system each site employs.

As per Schunk, these tend to be sub-goals of the site administration -- so the administrator does the subdividing of more macro-level long term goals.  They are attainable, since they typically deal with tasks regular users engage in routinely, and users get immediate feedback on their progress in the form of an XP reward.  (I may be leaking into next weeks subject already)

The Beenen paper I think contributes some very valuable insights particularly in the area of how to frame goals to users.  Setting goals may be particularly easy ("Rate More!"), but how you introduce those goals to users can be important.  I think Quests in particular follows the significant findings by making specific attainable goals, and by framing them that they are for the good of the site as a whole more than for specific users.

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oostendo@umich.edu

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"initially assign goals while simultaneously teaching goal-setting
strategies... So by initially assigning some goals to the community and
giving people features to help them set their own goals, you can achieve
a standard of goal-setting and goal-keeping in your community."-Erin

In reading the above quote i thought of last week's article on Wikipedia adopters and adoptees.   specifically, I began to think that although a community manager (adopter) may have a very clear vision of the goals and aims that he or she needs/wants to attain for their specific community does not equal results and by extension achieve a "standard of goal-setting and goal-keeping in the community."  An adoptee's initial impetus for wanting to contribute may soon wane despite having specified goals and perhaps even clear assignments with deadlines tied to them.  Why?  I don't think that you can discount the immense importance of SCREENING human capital.  Yes, you can have goals, quantifiable and measured incentives with metrics attached to them, etc. but if you don't really have an individual that knows how to find the very best help, those diamonds, that "10% that will provide 87% of all music" as an example (in Beenen's et. al example of Gnutella) i don't feel goals and goal setting have much validity. Which is to say that though goal setting is absolutely key as a motivational factor to the longevity and pulse of a community I think an HR equivalent within online communities is perhaps ever more important.

thoughts? 

I thought the point that was made on how online communities rarely, if ever, mirror on air fundraising drives where current/potential contributors are asked to reach specific goals was a great point to make.  I guess this goes along with the old adage of "ask for what you want.  Always"  As this article clearly states, "specific goals lead to higher contribution rates than non-specific ones."

Lastly, I was fascinated to find that "people will contribute less when they think their contributions are pooled with those of a group"  I would have never expected this. This certainly doesn't apply to American Idol, though it should and then maybe we might have  space for perhaps more edifying content (i.e. Planet Earth???)

Equally facinating to me was that though the traditional collective effort model highlights the incentive to contribute when it has benefit, benefit for benefits sake is not good enough.  Instead, being reminded that your contribution is benefitting/impacting you and a larger community is the true incentive and motivator .

Lastly, though there are some great empirical insights within this article there is something to be desired about the MovieLens' recommendation algorithm.  So, I entered relatively obscure films (of course it depends who is asking) and this is what i got:

Entered: Ordinary People (Drama. Great film about the familial nucleus and how delicate it really is when trauma enters into the picture.  Directed by Robert Redford w/ a young Timothy Hutton and a younger Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland)  

Recommendation: The Departed (gangster film),Lives of Others(about the German Stasi?????), Last King of Scotland)(are you serious???)

Entered: Indochine (Drama. Fabulous French period film with Catherine Deneuve)

Recommendation: Disturbia (are you kidding me???), Il Mostro (Early 90's hilarious Italian comedy). 

hello????? 

It is interesting to see how community managers have to balance between giving members freedom in level of participation (Wenger Ch2) and designs to increase member participation. On one side, members should be allowed to observe the community from the sidelines with little or no participation. We know that communities which restricts access only to members, have a higher chances of failing. At same time under-contribution can reduce the longevity of the community. I don't think these characteristics are at odds with each other, but they seem to be having an intriguing connection.

In the Beenen et. Al paper, I was surprised to find that the hypothesis 2 was not supported by the results of the experiment. The hypothesis was - when members were informed about the benefit of their contribution to community, self or both they will contribute more. The hypothesis was tested on the MovieLens community. Interestingly users rated more only when the benefits to both the community and user was made salient. When users knew the benefit to only either themselves or the community they rated lesser movies!

Authors have explained the potential causes as: problems with implementation, mismatch between goals of sociology and online communities related disciplines like HCI and CSCW, or incomplete social theory. This explanation is also valuable pitfalls to avoid for community managers who are borrowing design ideas from other disciplines to improve the goal setting behavior in their community.

I would characterize MovieLens as a identity based community. I'm curious to know if this characteristic had any impact on the result. Do you the results could have been different in for the same experiment in a community like cancer support group?

The Schunk paper reminded me of Nanowrimo community which are explicitly based around individuals goals. NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month competition. Each year people from around the globe participate to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. Quantity is given precedence over quality. So it doesn't matter what you write as long as you write enough. Participants forms groups to set goals and motivate each other. The goal properties given by Schunk: specificity, proximity, difficulty, self-set goals can be applied to the goals in the community. However, I don't think multiple goals can be applied. I think the community will benefit if the participants are allowed to set goals along with the attributes specified above.

As state in the Beenen-et-al paper Reminding people of the uniqueness of their contributions and the benefits that follow from them can be a useful way to encourage their contribution to the community. I think the one common thread between the Schunk reading and the Beenen paper was the usefulness of regular and meaningful feedback.

1.       Regular because regular feedback provides a stimulus and an opportunity for agents to self regulate their behavior. Regular feedback also allows possibility for incremental changes of behavior in the short term which lead to better long term behavior.

2.        Meaningful because with all the information overload in today’s world information that is in some way perceived to be not personally meaningful will be ignored. Personalization of messages and reminding people of their uniqueness and its benefits make information more meaningful and people are more likely to react to it.
An interesting aspect is that this regular and meaningful feedback can come from either the people managing the site or from the community itself. The first case is obvious- the second case a little more interesting. Designing features which encourage feedback to users’ posts besides serving other purposes such as data for recommendation algorithms etc. also serve an important purpose of reminding the users of the importance and uniqueness of their posts. Similarly number of people who subscribe to your feed may be motivators for people to post more often.

My takeaway from Schunk is not unlike those that have been posted here; that is about disciplining oneself to attain goals, that the goals need to have the conducive attributes, and that we are better motivated to meet self-determined goals. I just want to offer an alternative criteria for goals that I learned at work, traceable back to Drucker, which is that goals should be SMART. (Admittedly some overlap with Schunk).

Goals should be Specific (“increase alumni membership by 5% in the next month”), Measurable (“Did we get 5 new members to add the current 100 members?”), Actionable (“Can you get people to join? Yes, we can!”), Reasonable (“5 members in a month is doable – but whether it is too low or too high depends on the community circumstances and individual’s ability”), and Timely (“A timeframe of one month will coincide with the reunion, rather than six months which does not coincide with anything”).

From Beenen, I’m taking away that since the membership drive (above) is a community goal, individuals will likely to give less effort than if each member was assigned a personal goal to get one new member each. The goal as mentioned earlier is specific enough. Since the goal is not that difficult (it is a SMART goal, remember), there should not be any convex effect of new membership dropping after reaching that 5 members goalpost.

In terms of motivating people, from Beenen, my campaign should place importance on stressing the benefit of getting more members to the individual rather than the community (e.g. for a stockbroker in the community, getting more members will potentially increase business; for a volunteer leader, getting more members can mean more help). In these examples, the uniqueness of the member is recognized (Maanen’s investment, again?).

Reading Beenen et al was a freshing exercise this week. I think I finally caught the vision of what should eventually be the product of the assignments we are working on (at least in the PhD shadow course).

This field experiment on the MovieLens site is a terrific example of testing theories from social psychology, economics or other disciplines on a real world eCommunity – in this case, the theories tested were primarily from social psychology. I was quite surprised by the findings, especially considering the care of the experimental setup. Having read Karau and Williams work on social loafing, I found the results of hypothesis H2a and H2b to interesting. It appears to fly in the face of the collective effort model.

Though the outcome was not what would be predicted by the model, the authors' discussion of possibly problematic design decisions was clear and even probable. It does seems, however, the authors put a lot of stock in the theories. That is, when the experimental results didn't confirm what theory should predict, the authors seemed to primarily look at design problems that might have led to the counter-intuitive results. This seems to be a gracious thing to do, particularly since the Karau and Williams collective effort model is fairly widely cited.

But one wonders: what if further experimentation simply proved that people don't actually behave that way in social situations? This definitely requires more research, but if further experiments show counter-theoretic results, have the mythbusters won?

I agree that goals can motivate people to exert effort necessary to meet task demands and persist over time (Schunk, p1). Also, these five properties of goal are useful for me to consider once goals has been set, some goals may be reached more effectively than others due to different properties.

However, I wonder if there are other properties/factors that may influence how effective a goal can be reached. For example, I would add that if a goal is easily to be set but harder to be accomplished, the rate of accomplishing the goal could be low. One example is that it’s easy to sign up to be a volunteer for a non-profit organization on Sunday morning, but the person might not show up since he/she wants to sleep more or whatever. Showing up in the volunteer event and devoting for three hours is more difficult than spending five seconds on click on a button to sign up. Thus, there is an inconsistence between how easy to set up a goal and accomplish a task.

These two observations from the "success in applying social science theory to design" section of Beenan et al (2004) stuck out as particularly pertinent to our course themes:

1. "We know of no online community that provides feedback to contributors about the uniqueness of their contributions (Section 4.1)"

Reflection: This trend seems counter-intuitive considering how many of our readings have suggested that providing feedback and recognition is shown to have a powerful impact on users.  The nonprofit sector has some interesting insight to offer here, where good systems of donor recognition and feedback are commonly seen in successful nonprofits.  There they do things like creating "silver" and "gold" patron status systems to award donors as incentive to continue to contribute as well as recognition of past contributions.  Paying careful individual attention to big-money donors is especially important to the health of the nonprofit.  Successful fundraisers often send the donor articles of interest, or take special time to ensure they receive information about initiatives specific to their interests.  Since we've seen that in many e-communities, a few power-users often do the bulk of the grunt work that keeps communities vital, it seems the same principals and need for recognition and special treatment apply here.

2. " A simple email message making salient the uniqueness of potential contributions caused recipients to rate more movies than a comparable message that emphasized commonality (Section 4.1)."

Reflection: This just reiterates the same notion that individual contributors like to feel that they are not just random, anonymous lemmings contributing to a large, impersonal system....a desire for community is not necessarily equatable to a desire to be part of a homogeneous whole.   

Lisa McLaughlin

The Schunk piece was practical and accessible, outlining simple strategies that guide the utility of goal-setting processes.  

In terms of applying  the reading to the other works we read this week, it clearly ties in to a lot of the other material that ties in to motivation and incentives for participation, specifically to guidelines for structuring how users can develop deeper levels of participation.

Creating ways for users to meet goals in their development as a community member that are specific, challenging, self-determined, with a relatively short-term focus.  In order to avoid social loafing on your e-community, its important to provide mechanisms that facilitate change in what the user is able to accomplish on the site.

Lisa McLaughlin

I read the MovieLens paper first, and wanted to challenge the idea in the literature review that peformance will plateau (but not decrease) (Locke and Latham 1990). This struck me as inconsistent with Csíkszentmihályi's work on Flow (which it looks like we'll be talking about in a few weeks), which seemed to find that there is an ideal level of challenge above too easy and below too difficult for any given person's skill level. While there are good reasons the researchers did not base their hypothesis on the work with this work (it seems reasonable to think that there is a gap between a task that is difficult because it is above someone's skill level (what flow seems concerned with) and one that is unachievable because of limits that are not related to ability (such as rate more movies than you have time to rate), the results appear to possibly be more consistent with flow rather than Lock and Latham's results. Schunk's 1995 work also appears to be more consistent with the MovieLens results for people asked to rate 64 movies.

The short section on mismatches between engineering and scientific disciplines also prompted a bit of self-reflection for me (I am/was an engineer). Since this topic seems quite pertinent to all of us (and something we are likely to run into as we try to formulate design claims from theory), it might be worth unpacking this idea a bit in class. Given the range of disciplinary training represented among the paper's authors, I am imagining that these paragraphs may have been prompted by some interesting conversations.

Turning to the Schunk paper, I was particularly interested in the results about specificity. The result that specific goals generally motivate better than ambiguous goals (a theory confirmed in the MovieLens example). This conflicts with my experience (and anecdotally, others' as well) in academic settings, where ambiguous but high expectations often seem to work very well. Is is that in academic settings, ambiguous expectations from faculty encourage students to set their own goals?

The Schunk paper also made me wonder how self-set goals would have changed the results in MovieLens. Would they have rated more movies if some people got an email asking them to do their best and specify, at the start, what they thought would be a reasonable goal for their best?

Combining the the goal setting and social comparison readings, I am also curious how the results would change if the members of the group were psychologically close -- imagine reproducing this experiment where people are grouped either with others who rate similarly, or with people on their friends lists. In the text, it is unclear how/why people are grouped.

Schunk addresses self-regulation and goals, as well as the "goal properties of specificity, proximity, and difficulty."

He notes that "allowing individuals to set their goals enhances motivation and self-regulation, perhaps becauseself-set goals produce higher goal commitment (Schunk, 1995)" which immediately brought to mind the success of recent activities in which "self selection" of tasking plays an important role (open source software, google work practices, etc.).

The Beenen, et al, paper gives an excellent structural overview of how to carry out research that could be drawn from concepts from the other papers.

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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser

Goal setting is an important milestone in achieving the objectives.
Human beings like to be challenged but dislike to be demoralized. I
agree with Schunk that moderately challenging goals might provide the
best incentive for ehnaced performance. Self-selection of the goals
leads to 2 important things: 1) Individual can assess his/her
capabilities and choose accordingly 2) Individual himself/herself
decides to bind into the contract (goal) and therefore is more
motivated to achieving them (vs the case when someone else sets the
goals).

Interesting things come up when we mix Schunk and Beenen. Beenen
provided a mechanism by which interaction in the online communities was
measured. What would be the impact if online community members were
required to publicly announce their goals (for self or for the
community)? Will it break the system and allow less participation or
will it boost the participation in the community? As per Schunk, if
these goals are moderately challenging, then maybe we would see an
increased participation but if they are very challenging or if they are
very simple, then we might see a decrease in the activity.
Interestingly, this would act as the barrier to entry as well. So, only
those people who are very interested in the community topics/agenda
will participate and therefore we might see more % of active members
(however the total # of members might drop).