It is a unique opportunity to read this proposal. As a new researcher, I would like to know more inside stories during this collaborative work. First I am curious about how Paul and Yan find such a good chance to work with researchers from other universities. Second, how do researchers from different background build common language for this big project and allocate their tasks for this joint work as it is also a practical problem for group work? Third, how do researchers from different universities communicate with each other efficiently as “Distance matters”(Olson&Olson).

As I am particularly interested in the function of social identity, I look forward to knowing more research details about the effect of social identity on online communities as the paper I read before in Yan’s class only discusses social comparison effect on Movielense.

This is an incredibly useful document. It is always important to tell not only WHY the work needs to be done, but why YOU are the best person to do it, and of course HOW you are going to do it.

Frankly, I didn't realize you could get a grant to implement new features in an online community and then study them. I have communities of my own that I would love to do that in.

The parallel structure of experiment and design implications provides clarity.

main questions:
budget? how did you arrive at the asking amount?
how long did it take to write?

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

This document not only provides a comprehensive guide for grand proposal writing; but more importantly, we can learn a lot about how to develop research ideas into two ends: one is the high level of the meaning of th research question would give, and the other end is how to specifically tackle them into executable processes.
So a good proposal (research design) is determined by how we implement this middle-bridge (like the mid-level theory as the medium between theory and practical issues). The problems we often face, either the difficulties to implement the research design, or how we interpret the interesting results in a meaningful way. For the first, this proposal employs the famous social capital concept to address the importance of emerging online communities; on the other hand, the detailed break-down research question/concept under this general topic has conceptually transformed the complicity into approachable designs.

Also, I would be curious how much time this proposal can be completed collaboratively? 

It's interesting to see the proposal for a project after you've seen the work that came out of the proposal. One of the things that struck me was how closely the ideas were fleshed out in the proposal before the grant was funded. In particular, the presentations I have seen Yan give on the MovieLens experiments are nearly exactly as they were outlined in the proposal.

Now this shouldn't be too surprising, I suppose, but it demonstrates how important it is to have a well-developed idea with very concrete research questions when applying for NSF grants.

Like Greg, I was impressed with the plan and how well it seems to have been executed. I hope that we'll have some time in class on Monday to address some questions that it prompts:

• what were the biggest barriers to getting the proposal together? (other students have suggested the geographical distance as a potentai one)
• what was the process used to put the proposal together?
• what were the biggest surprises after being given the grant? Where did the CommunityLab group have to deivate from the plan?

This is my first time ever read a real successful NSF grant proposal, and I learned a lot from it: not only the literature review (which summarizes some very interesting domain knowledge) and the reference list, but also the way to write a good proposal.

In addition to the question asked by my classmates, I'd like to ask some more questions:

• What if a grant proposal fails? Does that mean all the work would be wasted because of the lack of funding?
• Where can we find the results of the proposal? Is there going to be a summary report?
• Is there going to be a related subsequent research proposal?
• (Just out of curiosity) What would happen to the residual grant money when the project ends?

John Blair

Very interesting reading, having never read a research proposal before, I found the depth of information to surprising, leaving one to think that all that was left was to execute the plan.  This proposal demonstrates some of the concepts from other readings that preparation is where most of the work lies, not in the actual work itself.  Clearly, the proposers of this paper have thought out exactly what they will research and test, explained their rationale and relavance to their topic for doing so, and how they will measure the results.  This type of document is very helpful in other areas as well, for instance in making a business case to start a big project.