Dealing with Newcomers
Robert Kraut, Moira Burke, John Riedl, Sara Drenner
1. The challenges of dealing with newcomers
In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive
generations of newcomers to survive. At a minimum, without replacing members who
leave, a community will eventually wither away. Newcomers can also be a source of
innovation, new ideas, ways of working or other resources that the group needs.
However, attracting newcomers and incorporating them into an existing community can
be a difficult endeavor. Newcomers have not yet developed the commitment to the group
felt by old-timers. As a result, they are very sensitive to the public image a community
has and to their own early experiences in it. As a result, they may not join or are likely to
leave in the face of even minor adversity. They have less motivation to be helpful to the
group or to display good organizational citizenship characteristic of many old-timers
(Organ & Ryan, 1995). In addition, for reasons of either ignorance or maliciousness, they
may behave in ways that can be harmful to the group. They do not yet know the norms
guiding behavior in the group and in their ignorance, may perform actions that offend
other group members or otherwise undercut the smooth functioning of the group. For
example, when participating in Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia, new editors
may fail to follow the policy of writing with a neutral point of view, or they may add
content that has already been determined by a consensus of more experienced editors to
belong in another article. Because they lack experience, when newcomers try to
participate, they imperil the work that other community members have already
performed. For example, they may introduce bugs in an open-source development
project, cause the (virtual) death of fellow guild members in an online role-playing game,
or ask redundant questions in discussion groups. Finally, their mere presence increases
diversity in the group and may in itself be off-putting to more experienced members of
the community, who prefer the people and routines they were familiar with.
When dealing with newcomers, online communities must solve five basic problems
that are less important when dealing with established members.
1. Recruitment: First, communities need to advertise to and recruit members, to
ensure a supply of newcomers.
2. Selection: Second, among those members who do show up, communities need to
decide which ones to select for membership so that the people who do join will
ultimately be valuable to the community as a whole.
3. Retention: Third, both theory and experience suggest that newcomers’ ties to the
community are especially fragile. As a result, the community needs to engage in
tactics that keep potentially valuable newcomers around until they can develop
Newcomers
more permanent bonds to the community or learn how the group operates.
4. Socialization: Fourth, the group needs to socialize the newcomers, teaching them
how to behave in ways appropriate to the group. We discuss many techniques for
socializing members of an online community and encouraging them to behave
appropriately in Chapter N, on regulating behavior. In the current chapter we
focus on socialization strategies that are of particular relevance to newcomers.
5. Protection: Finally, throughout its interactions with prospective members, visitors
and newcomers in their early interactions, the group needs to protect itself from
the potentially damaging effects of the actions of those who either has little
knowledge of appropriate group behavior or little motivation to behave
appropriately.
These problems reflect two perspectives— that of the newcomer’s and that of the online
community and its existing members. The recruiting process, for example, consists both
of the activities that potential members might perform in investigating different
communities and weighting alternatives and the activities that communities and their
members might perform in soliciting new recruits and interacting with them. In this
chapter we consider the perspective of the newcomer in so far as it has implications for
how the online community needs to be designed to accommodate them. For example, as
we discuss below, newcomers are happier in a community and contribute more
effectively if they have a complete and accurate impression about the nature of the
community before they join it. To collect the information they need to form this
impression, they may lurk in the community, silent observing, or may try to participate,
to gauge the community’s reaction to them. This chapter doesn’t not address the moves
that newcomers should make in order to gain an accurate view of the community, but
concentrates on how the community should be designed to respond to the common moves
that newcomers are likely to make to form impressions. For example, if communities
create FAQ (frequently asked question) pages to make policies visible and publishes
archives of conversation among members to allow members to see the nature of the
interaction, then prospective members should gain a more accurate view of the
community. However, some communities may decide not to make these resources
available to outsiders. For example, the managers of cancer support groups hosted at the
Association of Cancer Online Resources (acor.org) believe that the privacy needs of
current members out weight the investigatory needs of prospective members. Therefore,
prospective members must register to become a member of a support group before they
can see any of the interactions that have occurred in them.
Figure N provides a roadmap of the phases that newcomers and online communities go
through as they make decisions about each other, in some cases involving a transition
whereby the what were once newcomers become established group members or at other
times rejection of one party by the other. At each phase, we discuss the major challenges
that the community phases — recruitment, selection, retention, socialization, and selfprotection — and subproblems associated with each. [Show the figure & any other
commentary we want to make.]
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Figure X: Challenges in newcomer recruitment and socialization
The role of fit
Insuring a good fit between the newcomers and the community is a major challenge in
the early phases of newcomer socialization, when communities are recruiting prospective
members, selecting among them and encouraging the desirable ones to stick around, and
newcomers are investigating communities and deciding which ones to participate in.
Communities’ decisions about the pools of prospective members to recruit from, ways to
select desirable members the information they make public and the early experiences they
provide newcomers all influence fit. A substantial amount of empirical research shows
that good things happen when newcomers to a group or organization perceive themselves
as having a good fit to it on a number of dimensions. These dimensions include the
interests, attitudes and values they and the group share and the knowledge, skill and
motivations they possess and that the organization desires. When potential recruits see
that they share a good fit with a group or organization, they are more likely to be attracted
to it, more likely to pursue membership in it, more likely to join it if given a chance (e.g.,
by accepting a job offer), and, if they do join, are more likely to be satisfied with their
membership and to remain in the group or organization for longer periods (Chapman et
al). After joining, during the first few months of membership, when newcomers perceive
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that they have a good fit with the group or organization as a whole, with their work
group, with their job or with their supervisor they subsequently report having greater
satisfaction with jobs that they take in the organization and the people they work with,
greater organizational commitment and identification, lower intention to quit, less
turnover and lower stress (Kristof-Brown).
While most of the research on the benefits of fit has been done in the context of job
candidates and employees in conventional organizations, the same phenomenon also
applies in the context of volunteers to voluntary organizations, which are similar in many
ways to membership in an online community. Just as people have a variety of motives to
participate in an online community, so too do volunteers to organizations like
BigBrothers/Big Sisters or the American Red Cross. Some may participate out of
altruism or because they share the organization’s goals. Others may participate for the
social experiences they get when working with similar others, to learn new skills or to
exercise skills and abilities that might otherwise go unpracticed, to obtain credentials or
experiences relevant to a new career or to make themselves feel good. When they
participate in volunteer activities that match the motivations they consider important, they
are more satisfied with their volunteerism and are more likely to volunteer again (Clary et
al, 1998). In addition, volunteer organizations can take advantage of this variability in
volunteers’ motivation to attract those with different motives by varying the wording in
their advertising. For example, brochures that highlight the way in which volunteering
helps one explore career options, develop a strong resume and network to make career
contacts were especially likely to appeal to recruits with career-related motivations (Clary
et al, 1998).
The importance of fit also applies to online communities. Our own research (Choi et al)
shows that new recruits to World of Warcraft guilds who prefer the style of play the guild
values remain in their guild substantially longer than players for whom there is a style of
play mismatch. In addition, different recruiting methods lead to different degrees of
player-guild fit. In particular, both players and guilds differ on the degree to which they
value the social aspects of the game (e.g., chatting with other players between raids) and
accomplishing the difficult tasks defined by the game (e.g., killing the most powerful
monsters and collecting powerful weapons). More specifically, when players with a
stronger social-orientation join more socially oriented guilds they perceive their fit with
the guild as being higher and stay in the guild longer. Similar results occur when the
players and guild are matched on their task-orientation. Because it is easier to assess taskoriented play, task-oriented guilds that recruit new members by looking over their
credentials (e.g., level and weapon inventory as recorded in the game) and play briefly
with them tend to recruit players with good fit. However, assessing personality and other
characteristics of players that determine whether they will be socially compatible with the
guild is more difficult. Therefore, socially-oriented guilds that recruit new members via
referrals from existing members tend to recruit players with good fit, while recruiting via
credentials or brief play does not lead to good fit.
Design claim: Instituting designs and policies to increase the fit between newcomers and
the community will lead to members will stick around longer and be more successful
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members of the community.
We will discuss more concretely the types designs and policies communities can use to
implement this over arching goal in the sections below.
Problem 1: Recruiting newcomers
In the face of turnover in their membership, online communities will inevitably die
without a constant supply of newcomers. Thus it is important to consider the processes by
which online communities advertise their existence and recruit newcomers. These
processes determine whether the community will have enough members to accomplish its
goals. In addition, the processes of recruitment may have direct consequences for later
problems that the community must solve, such as selection, retention and commitment.
Although there are many differences between an online community and a conventional
organization with employees, especially in terms of the formality of the recruiting and
acceptance process, we follow the tradition in research on employee recruiting and
consider recruiting to be “those organizational activities that (1) influence the number
and/or types of applicants who apply for a position and/or (2) affect whether a job offer is
accepted” (Breaugh, 1992, p. 4).
Many volunteer online communities do little active recruiting for new members. This
lack of attention to recruiting characterizes most Usenet groups and the open source
software development projects represented in SourceForge. This may be sufficient if
random web searching and word of mouth endorsements from current members provides
a sufficient supply of recruits to replace losses and meet the community’s needs for
growth. Active recruitment is likely to be necessary if a laissez faire approach is
insufficient. Some online communities explicitly recruit new members. For example,
nytimes.com provides links that allow readers to send by email an article they read to
other people or to share the article to the contacts on their social networking sites. Many
social networking sites, like Facebook and Linked-In, solicit new members by
encouraging existing members to send invitations automatically to everyone on their
email lists. The social networking site tagged.com received thousands of complains for
‘contact scrapping,’ when, according to the company’s founder, a software glitch sent
accidentally sent invitations to people on one’s email list without the list owners’
permission or knowledge {Tugend, 2009 #4472}. Many smaller online groups, including
guilds in World of Warcraft and projects in Wikipedia, recruit new members informally
through their connections with existing members. By exploiting their prior relationships,
the groups are more likely to recruit new members who are knowledgeable about the
community and fit with its mission. They are more likely to stick around than are
members who are recruited by other methods.
Design claim: Compared to laissez faire approaches, in which prospect members seek
out or stumble upon a community, active recruiting will lead to the community having
accesses to a larger pool of prospective members.
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McGuire (1978) identified five components of persuasive communication: source,
message, channel, receiver and object of the persuasive attempt. Those attempting to
recruit members to an online community have moderate control over each of these
components. They can craft a message about the community that the public is likely to
see, both in terms of the information that is easily about the community on the
community’s homepage, on paid advertisements they place with search engine services or
social networking sites or information they post about the community themselves or
through surrogates on web forums, blogs and other online sites. Messages recruiting for
the community can come from highly credible sources, as when the eminent biologists E.
O. Wilson used his
acceptance speech at
the 2007 TED award
to pitch participant in
the community
creating the
Figure X: Credible endorsement for the Encyclopedia of life
Encyclopedia of
at http://www.eol.org
Life1or endorses it on
the encyclopedia’s home page (see Figure X), or from less credible sources. They can
embed their message in text messages, video on YouTube and related sites or use
interpersonal word of mouth to get their message across. They can target their message
to receivers with particular attributes or post it to general audiences.
The detailed ways in which these factors operate and their effectiveness depend upon the
underlying psychological processes through which people attend to, process and
remember the information, make decisions based on it and convert those decisions into
actions. A major variable that influences how these persuasion variables influence
persuasive attempts is their involvement in the issue under discussion. In many cases,
potential recruits who are making judgment of a community are not highly involved in
evaluating it nor actively investigating whether to join it. Instead, they are forming an
evaluation casually based on information and persuasive attempts they are peripherally
exposed to. In these cases, they are using heuristic processing, in which they don’t think
and evaluate deeply the information they are exposed to, and as a result can be influenced
by very superficial features of the attitude object or persuasive message (Petty; Chaiken).
Heuristic processing and cognitive shortcuts are likely to occur when a potential recruit is
merely browsing the web and comes across websites and communities relevant to an
underlying interest. It is less likely to occur when the potential recruit is highly involved
in the choice, such as when a patient with a life threatening disease is choosing an online
support group. Then the potential recruits are likely to use effortful, systemic processing
of the quality of the information they are exposed to, the consistency of the arguments
and the credibility of the source.
Design claim: Compared to cases when potential recruits are highly involved in
choosing an appropriate online community, when they are less involved they will be
influenced by superficial features of the community and persuasive messages about it.
1
http://www.ted.com/talks/e_o_wilson_on_saving_life_on_earth.html
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Research on attitudes, attitude change and the influence of both interpersonal and mass
communication is a massive topic. Although we consider persuasion at several point in
this book, including our discussion of recruiting and socializing newcomers, encouraging
contributions and starting a community from scratch, a complete review is beyond the
scope of this book. Instead we sample some highlights in this book and refer the reader
to relevant reviews for more detail on persuasion in general (McGure, 1985; Childini &
Goldstein, 2004; Petty & Wegener, 1998).
Recipients: Community managers can target the information they provide about the
community narrowly just to people are are likely to be interested or more broadly.
Community mangers can advertise their site in public places, without much regard to the
people who are likely to attend, much as billboard advertisements indiscriminately target
anyone passing by. When World of Warcraft guilds post videos of raids to YouTube, for
example, they are following this strategy. Alternatively, they can target potential
members more directly, by advertising where potential members are especially likely to
visit, just a commercial advertisers place advertisements for products in the magazines
and TV shows that their target demographic groups are likely to view. . Thus, for
example, guilds recruiting in World of Warcraft often make use of the recruiting forums
especially tailored to recruiting for Horde1 or Alliance2 players. Third, they can attempt
to particular individuals who have already shown interest or competence in a domain
relevant to the community, just a charities use direct mail to target a potential
contributors who contributed in the past or contributed to a related cause or Google
targets web advertising based on a consumer’s search terms. Project leaders in Wikipedia
often use this technique by sending personalized invitations to non-members who have
previously edited articles within the project’s scope. Viral marketing or personalized
word of mouth, are an example of targeting, in which existing community members reach
out to potential members whom they identify as likely candidates, as when churches,
theaters, doctors and car mechanics all use word of mouth marketing from current patrons
to recruit new ones. Recently the car manufacture Hyundai has formalized this idea by
reposition their manufacturer’s rebate to customers as a payment for these new customers
to talk up their products to family, friends and neighbors. The research literature and
Google’s financial success strongly indicate that targeting advertisements are more
effective than indiscriminant ones
Design claim: Targeted appeals are more persuasive in influencing attitudes and
recruitment than are indiscriminant appeals, which do not target .
Modality: A long research tradition starting with Katz and Lazerfeld and Coleman
indicates that interpersonal appeals, in which the persuasion attempt comes from people
whom the target knows, are more effective at influencing attitudes and adoption than are
impersonal appeals from the mass media. Later in this chapter we will review relevant
research on viral marketing and interpersonal appeals. Interpersonal recruiting is more
effective than mass communication (Green et al, 2008). Depite this overall trend,
research indicates that advertising works (Assmus et al, 1984). These impersonal
1
2
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=7244844&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=7244843&sid=1
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techniques can influence targets’ beliefs about an attitude object, such as a a consumer
product, a health intervention, political candidate or an online community, their affect
towards the attitude object, and the likelihood that targets with compatible beliefs and
attitudes will act on them, for example by attempting to join the community, buy a
project or turn out to vote for a candidate. (Roberts & Maccoby, 1985). The direct
effects of the mass media are weaker than many advertisers would like and Orwellian
critiques fear (see Klapper, 1960). For example, as studies of political advertisements
demonstrate, it is often easier to activate people with pre-existing believe and attitudes
compatible to vote than it is to change those beliefs or attitudes, especially in a world
where many competing persuasive messages are available. Thus studies of selective
exposure show that people are more likely to be exposed to opinions that they already
agree with. People differentially interpret persuasive messages based on their prior
beliefs. For example, among people who watch presidential debates, viewers strongly
believe that the candidate whom they initially supported won the debate (ref). However,
the debates can increase viewers’ knowledge of the issues and the ones they consider
important in a candidate, and despite viewers biases, can influence vote preference
(Benoit et al, 2003).
Granted that advertising is not a panacea for recruitment, some rules about what works in
advertising can be applied to the case of recruiting potential members for online
communities.
For example, people tend to like objects they are familiar with (Zajonc, ref). It is for this
reason in part that name recognitions does wonders in politics and incumbents are
overwhelming reelected in congressional and local elections (Mann & Wolfinger, 1980)
and movie stars regularly win elected offices. The implication is that managers of online
communities should simply get the name of their community in front of the relevant
population, to increase their liking of the community and .
Other superficial aspects of persuasion (e.g., attractive spokesman).
Problem 2: Selecting the right newcomers
Newcomers to a community differ in the potential value they could bring if they were to
become full members. In an open-source software development community, for
example, some newcomers may be highly skilled software developers with deep
knowledge of the application domain, some may be novice developers or ignorant of the
domain, having little knowledge or skill to bring to the project, and others may have the
malicious intent of introducing bugs or Trojan horses. Analogously, in an online support
group for abused women, valuable members might be the survivors who have experience,
wisdom, and support to offer to others or women who are themselves currently the
victims of abuse. In contrast, spectators or stalking husbands are highly undesirable. How
do existing community members distinguish the potential quality of newcomers from the
limited information available when they first present themselves?
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The problem of selecting applicants for membership is common to all groups, but it may
be especially problematic in online communities because of the relative anonymity of the
interaction in them and the ease of creating new identities online. For example, one of
Wikipedia’s administrators who had presented himself as a professor with degrees in
theology and canon law was forced to resign when a magazine revealed that he had no
advanced degrees. He "used texts such as 'Catholicism for Dummies' to help him correct
articles on the penitential rite or transubstantiation" [1]. In eBay, legitimate sellers would
like to weed out scammers who sell used goods as new, or copies as originals, or those
who collude to inflate bids [2,3]. [1] http://www.nysun.com/article/49955
[2] http://www.truetex.com/ebayfraud.htm
[3] http://reviews.ebay.com/Scam-Watch-The-Most-Popular-Scams-onEbay_W0QQugidZ10000000000025238
Problem 3: Keeping newcomers around
For newcomers to gain benefits from an online group and to eventually become
committed members who take on core responsibilities, they must stick around long
enough to learn the ropes, form relationships with other group members, and begin to
identify with the group as a whole. However, the research on online communities also
shows that these groups experience a substantial amount of turnover and that this
turnover is especially high among newcomers. For example, 68% of newcomers to
Usenet groups were never seen after their first post; in contrast, those who have
participated even once in the past are much more likely to return (Arguello et al., 2006).
Fifty-four percent of developers who registered to participate in the Perl open-source
development project never returned after posting a single message (Ducheneaut, 2005).
Forty-six percent of the members of guilds in the massive multiple-player game, World
of Warcraft, leave their group within one month, generally migrating to other groups
rather than abandoning the game itself (Ducheneaut et al., 2006).
What can a community designer do to keep newcomers around long enough for them to
start to understand the benefits they could derive from group membership and start to
learn how to behave appropriately in the group?
Problem 4: Teaching the newcomers the ropes
Different communities have standards and norms that shape and constrain the behavior of
their members. Some of these norms are broad and open to different interpretations. In
Wikipedia, for example, a series of guidelines and policies remind members to adopt a
neutral point of view in the articles they write [1] and that they should not use their
personal talkpages to discuss personal topics and promote relationships with other
Wikipedians [2]. Others are more narrowly targeted, such as the Wikipedia copyright
policy [3] or formatting guidelines [4]. Although many of the norms and behavioral
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standards are explicitly described in Wikipedia, in many other online communities norms
that prescribe how members should behavior are implicit and must be learned by
observation.
Violation of the behavioral norms can be harmful to existing groups for
several reasons. First, norms are often set up because they are functional,
helping the group to achieve desired goals or to operate efficiently. Thus, the
norm in Wikipedia of citing sources helps the group achieve its goals of
becoming an authoritative encyclopedia. Similarly, norms to hold all
discussion via public distribution lists in open-source development projects
help the group capture its design rationale and supports coordination among a
distributed workforce. Violating these norms interferes with valued group
goals and smooth operation. Standards of behavior often form part of the
identity of the group’s members. Thus, when people act in non-normative
ways, the group may start to lose some of its defining features. Violations of
norms may also drive away old-timers. [point to Norms chapter here]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_blo
g.2C_webspace_provider.2C_social_networking.2C_or_memorial_site
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style
Problem 5: Protecting the group from newcomers
Although newcomers are essential to the survival of online communities, they also pose
real threats. Because newcomers have no history in the community, existing group
members do not know how much to trust them. Those established community members
need to ask whether to allow a new member of a guild in World of Warcraft to participate
in a high-stakes raid, to buy an expensive item from a new seller on eBay, or whether to
allow a new developer to commit code to the Apache server build. Empirical evidence
suggests that established members indeed distrust newcomers. For example, Resnick et
al. (2006) showed experimentally that buyers paid less for comparable items on eBay
when purchasing from newcomers (i.e., those with no prior transactions) than old-timers,
distrusting them because of their lack of history. Because newcomers have not yet
developed much commitment to the group and have not yet learned how the group
operates, it is rational for established group members to actively distrust them. Because
they don't yet identify with the group, they are less likely to have the best interests of the
group at heart in deciding courses of action. In addition, because they are relatively
unsophisticated in how the group operates, they may not have the skill or knowledge to
operate in the group's best interest, even if they cared to. For example, in Wikipedia,
newcomers (including those who have not registered and those who have not yet edited
extensively) are more likely to vandalize pages or offer changes that other, more
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experienced Wikipedians will later delete (Adler, 2007). As a result of this lack of history
and potential lack of goodwill and relevant skills, groups need to protect themselves
against possible damage that newcomers can cause. Even if newcomers are not actively
behaving inappropriately, the mere fact that they are different from the old timers may
change the environment to make the community less desirable for old timers. An influx
of new members to social networking sites may change the culture for old-timers, such as
when MySpace transitioned from a promotion platform for small bands to a crowded
venue for any teenager to post mp3s. [Transition of the Systers list, as more new women
in computer science joined & what this did to the existing culture.]
2a. Provide realistic information about the community to outsiders
If perceptions of fit are so important to recruiting and retaining members of an online
community, what are the lessons from the social science literature on ways to increase
fit? Figure X is an adaptation to online communities of Breaugh and Starke’s 2000 model
of the formation of job expectation. Like the models of group and organizational
socialization we review below, it explicitly recognizes the bi-directional nature of
recruiting, with the potential recruit (left side of the figure) and the community (right side
of the figure) making interdependent moves, which in this case influence the likelihood
that potential recruits consider joining an organization, actually join it and remain in it
once they become a member.
Of course characteristics of the online community itself will have direct effects on
whether newcomers are willing to join and stay, just as the compensation, type of work,
work environment, and positive organizational image have powerful effects on whether
potential recruits apply for, accept positions and stay in them in conventional
organizations (Chapman et al, 20005). We consider some of these characteristics of the
online community in the discussion of starting new communities in Chapter X. However,
over and above these essential characteristics of the community, the processes by which a
community reaches out to potential recruits, letting them know about the community and
the benefits it can provide, and the initial interactions it has with these potential recruits
can influence both fit and other causes of outcomes associated with recruiting new
members.
Design claim: To increase the fit between a community and the members they recruit,
provide potential new members an accurate and complete picture of what the members’
experience will be once they join.
As indicated in Figure 0-1, empirical research shows that conventional organizations that
provide recruits accurate and complete information about the organization help them to
form accurate expectations about it, which will influence their decisions to seek
employment, to join if employment is offered and to have realistic expectations once they
become organizational members. In the context of conventional organizations, this
accurate information often is conveyed in the form of realistic job previews, in which
recruiters and other members of the organization present both favorable and unfavorable
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job-related information to job candidates (Rynes, 1991). Realistic job previews are
associated with recruits’ lower expectations about the nature of the job, lower levels of
attrition from the recruitment process, and lower turnover, if recruits are offered a job.
Although the effects are small, they are reliably larger if the realistic preview is delivered
verbally than via a written document or video (Philips, 1998). Realistic job previews
seem to have beneficial effects on recruiting success through two separable routes. First,
they selectively attract people who have characteristics, including motives, skills and
attitudes that better fit the existing community. Second, they lower expectations that
newcomers have when they actually join the community, reducing the chances that the
reality newcomers experience once they become organizational members will clash with
unrealistic idealizations.
Online communities can use the methods typical of conventional organizations to give off
realistic information about the community — websites, online recruiting brochures and
other documents, videos, direct contact with recruiters or other formal representatives of
the community, and informal contact with community members. For example, when
soliciting new members, World of Warcraft guilds often post recruiting statements, with
information about their mission and style of play, at forums such as
www.lookingforguild.net or similar recruiting sites. (See Figure 0-3 for examples.)
Others post videos of their exploits on youtube.com, www.warcraftmovies.com and other
media sharing sites. One famous clip is the saga of Leeroy Jenkins, a dramatic
recreation by the guild Pals for Life of
one of their encounters (see Figure
0-2)1. Leeroy Jenkins, one of their
members, misses the detailed planning
the guild engaged in before raiding a
monster’s cave because he is away
from his computer frying some
chicken. Their plan is ruined when
Leeroy returns and rushes into the cave
shouting his own name as a battle cry.
When the others follow him in, all die.
While this video was originally
produced as a parody, to contrast the
passion of play, with the calculated
nerdiness some guilds engage in, one
of its consequences was that the guild
Figure 0-2: Leeroy Jenkins leading the Pals
was barraged by requests for
for Life guild into disaster. [too fuzzy to be
membership from applicants interested
legible.]
in their strategic style of play.
Figure 0-2
:
While these types of deliberate self-descriptions
occur, they are rare compared to the
recruiting activities conducted in conventional organizations. More typical are the
frequently asked questions (FAQs) listed in many online communities, in which leaders
1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU
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of the community post a mission statement or goals, but not realistic previews of life
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inside (see http://www.faqs.org/ for an index to many FAQs for Usenet newsgroups and
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Newcomers
Websites. For example, the FAQ for a stop smoking support group lists its policies
Page 15
Newcomers
Premonition> WotLK Cleared! Recruiting hardcore players!!
We are Premonition --- a mature Alliance PvE raiding guild on the Windrunner PST
server. Please visit us at http://premonitionwow.guildlaunch.com to learn more. We are
recruiting hard core, geared players for WotLK. … We have completed Malygos 25
man/10 man, Sartharion 25 man/10 man, and Naxxramas 25 man/10 man. We are currently
working on Obsidian Sanctum with three adds up and will probably be completed in the
next day or two…
Here’s some key information about the guild and our expectations.
1. Raiding schedule is Sunday-Thursday 8:00pm -11:30pm PST (server time). You are
REQUIRED to attend 4/5 raids each week.
2. We have vent and EPGP.
3 . *Most* gear will be EPGP based, but there will be some pieces that will go to the
class/spec it will suit the most to help progression of the guild. Very few pieces will be
decided in this manner but the best interests of the guild and its progression will be
considered first and always. We’re a team and will be most happy when we are downing
new content consistently. To maintain progression this is necessary .
4. We’re very serious about having the most optimal raid composition and most potential
while raiding. To maintain that we’ll require you to have:
a. PvE spec when you come to raids.
b. You will show up on time and ready and you will have consumables to last the
entire raid.
…
g. You will know encounters having read strategies, watched videos, read forums
before we engage those encounters.
[A-PvP] 5/6 SW <Damage Networks> - LF Warlock, SPriest, HPriest, Ele
Shaman, Paladin
… Damage Networks is currently looking to add a few more people to our family. We're a
PvE/PvP guild that spends way too much time on ventrilo, and not nearly enough time
raiding. As a guild, we've been around for a long time (completing MC and BWL in their
primes, and landing a top 20 US Kel'Thuzad kill). We're not going anywhere. Damage
Networks began as a porn site, then an NS team, and now it's a wow squad. So if you're
interested in more than just a raiding guild, we're probably right for you.
What are we looking for? Players are expected to hold at least 75% raid attendance. Drama
bombs, Loot %%#!*s, ego-maniacs, self-centered retards, incessant whiners, immature
babies and idiots in general should not apply (we have plenty of those already, they give us
''flavor''). …
banning
commercial
posts,ofbut
provides
little information
about the
Figure
0-3:
Sample World
Warcraft
recruiting
announcements
at frequency of this
www.lookingforguild.net (downloaded 12/31/2008)
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Newcomers
practice.1 While comparatively few online communities explicitly create realistic
membership previews for recruiting purposes, the archival nature of the Internet means
that complete records of prior interactions among community members are available for
newcomers to examine and in this way get an unedited, realistic view of life in the
community.
Design claim: To increase the fit between a community and the members they recruit,
allow potential new members to see archives of communication within the community.
Even though online communities can use the same recruiting mechanisms as
conventional organizations, they have the potentially unique advantage that much of the
communication and production work in the community is archived automatically. While
in a conventional organization a new recruit must rely on the organization’s explicit
descriptions via brochure and similar sources or rely upon word of mouth form current
and former organizational members, with an online community they can see the
interactions on which these impressions are based. They see how members treat each on
various online forums and can see how team members work together in creating
Wikipedia articles by examining the histories and talk pages associated with each article.
However, not all communities provide public archives. In the online cancer support
group ACOR.org, readers cannot search or browse archived messages without a
subscription. Though subscribing is free, prospective subscribers are vetted by the list
owners, which delays the newcomer's opportunity to evaluate the group and his or her
expected fit. Furthermore, the archives are hidden from search engines. Though this
protects the privacy of existing members, it also reduces the likelihood that desirable
members will find the group.
Other, non-fit design claim re recruiting.


Recruiting as communication  identify what type of member you are seeking &
get message to them
Standard advice abt persuasive communication, reviewed for the case of
contribution, in Chapter X, and starting a community, in Chapter X: celebrity,
credibility, similarity of communicator to target, likeability of the communicator
2b. Provide opportunities for evaluation
In many real-life situations, individuals often have information relevant to a selection
decision but fail to reveal this during the selection process. Job candidates may have
poor work performance or criminal backgrounds they wish to conceal from potential
employers. This information asymmetry leads to what is known as “adverse selection,” in
both the insurance industry, where these types of problems were first identified, and in
1
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/support/stop-smoking/compost/part1/
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Newcomers
economics, where theories of adverse selection have been elaborated. If an insurance
company sets a single premium for life insurance, then smokers, intravenous drug users
or others who have lifestyles leading to poor heath could differentially benefit from the
insurance. People with these poor health risks are more likely to apply for the insurance
than healthy consumers, and as a result, companies will end up disproportionately
insuring them. As in the case of health risks, it is sometime in people’s self-interest to
withhold private information when an online group is making a decision about accepting
them for membership. This phenomenon occurs in the online world of multi-players
games. For example, in World of Warcraft, players may apply to become a member of a
guild with the intention of staying only a short time, merely to “level-up” (i.e., gain
experience points) before moving to a superior guild (Ducheneaut, et al., 2007).
However, it is not in the guild’s interest to recruit players who have intentions to leave as
soon as they have accumulated the appropriate amount of experience.
In other cases, it is in individuals’ interest to reveal private information about themselves,
but the organization has difficulty distinguishing truthful from less truthful reports. In
conventional work organizations, it would be beneficial to strong applicants for a
software engineering position to be able to demonstrate their work ethic and skill at
software development to distinguish them from pretenders who are less dedicated or less
able. The same dilemma occurs for applicants for admissions to many online groups. For
example, applicants to an open-source software development site like Apache who are
very skillful at software-relevant tasks or who have been conscientious in the past in
turning in assignments on time would want to let the powerful people in the site know
this. However, less skillful and conscientious applicants would want to give off a similar
impression. As a result, when experienced software engineers tell of their software
experience in their day jobs, the community tends to ignore these self-reports as merely
"cheap talk" (Ducheneaut, 2005; Lakhani & Hippel, 2003). In World of Warcraft, many
guilds seek new players with a style of play and social relationships that fit with existing
group members. New recruits may honestly describe themselves for example, saying they
are extroverted and friendly and are seeking a relaxed style of play. However, guild
masters or recruiters have little way to distinguish recruits who will be difficult to get
along with from those who are easy to get along with. Economists often refer to these
cases as signaling problems, because one party is attempting to signal their true qualities
to perceivers using imperfect signals.
In the case of selection, decision-makers are looking for visible signals that are correlated
with the attribute they desire and which would be difficult for people without that
attribute to fake. In trying to select quality childcare for their children, parents should not
pay much attention to the cleanness of the reception area, which is an attribute that is
easy to fake and is often associated with lower child care quality, but should pay attention
to whether the center is for profit (often associated with poorer quality), whether it is part
of a national chain (often associated with high quality) or is regulated by the government
(often associated with higher quality) (Mocan, 2001). In open-source software
development projects, the community seems to rely more upon participation in technical
discussions and contributions of bug patches and software enhancements to make such
decisions. Communities that provide free email accounts or server space also operate on
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Newcomers
the same principles of selection when they use CAPTCHAs to prevent bots from
automatically creating hundreds of accounts. A CAPTCHA (an acronym of "Completely
Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is an automated test,
such as the challenge to recognize a distorted word presented against a cluttered
background, to differentiate people from computerized agents attempting to exploit
Internet services. These tests are difficult for machines to accomplish but easy for
humans, and therefore many Internet companies, including Yahoo, MSN and eBay use
this mechanism to identify whether an agent applying for an Internet service is a human
or a machine.
In the case of signals, similar principles apply, although one generally assumes that the
candidates for selection have the ability to invest in acquiring visible features that reliably
signal quality. Then organizations and other decision-makers can select among
candidates who have previously invested in resources that they cannot change during the
period of selection. For example, job candidates might invest in completing four years of
college at a good school to show their intelligence and their conscientiousness, even if the
education itself will not provide them skills that help them perform the job. Analogously,
players in the online game World of Warcraft, for example, can invest hours in playing
the game to acquire weapons and the steeds they use for transportation. In turn, guild
masters and others recruiting players for guilds can use candidates’ level, the weapons
they have already acquired, or their steeds to choose among candidates, because the
factors are reliable signals of past performance as well as being tools which the candidate
can use to carry out quests, if they become members.
Design claim: To allow communities to evaluate newcomers, provide diagnostic barriers
to membership
To help select good community members, signaling theory suggests that designers of
online communities create entry barriers, diagnostic tasks that would be easy for
desirable members but difficult for undesirable ones. In many open-source software
(OSS) development projects, for example, potential members must first demonstrate their
competence and commitment to the group by offering bug fixes or small enhancements
before they are given "committer" status, permission to commit (save) their own changes
to the software database (Krogh et al., 2003; Ducheneaut, 2005). In the FreeNet project,
only 8.4% of individuals who participated in the technical discussions were ever given
committer status and considered developers in the project (Krogh et al., 2003). Without
committer status, programmers must pass their modifications to more trusted members of
the group who then vet the software and decide whether to merge it with the existing
code base. Mere talk without code, such as describing one's offline technical
accomplishments, asking for tasks to work on, or proposing modifications did not lead to
committer status; potential members had to pass substantive contribution barriers to
become full members.
Another barrier is the credential check: Sermo.com, a discussion forum for physicians to
discuss medical decisions, asks potential members for their names and the zip code of
their primary practice, which it then cross-checks against a national physician database,
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Newcomers
to ensure that its membership includes only physicians. Craigslist requires posters of
classified ads to enter their email address and then respond to an invitation sent to that
address before their ad goes public. The goal is similar to the goal for CAPTCHAs, to
prevent screen bots and other software agents from gaining membership in the
community. Pornographic websites that ask prospective members to provide a credit card
number or license do so to try to differentiate adults from minors (or give the illusion of
doing so), because adults are more likely to have a credit car or driver's license than
minors. To weed out spectators, established members of one online depression forum
have an unspoken practice of engaging newcomers in discussion about their symptoms
and treatment (Fussell, personal communication). Producing these medical terms is likely
to be easier for people who are clinically depressed than for those who aren't, although
obviously this is not a failsafe system, because anyone could potentially conduct an
online search to discover the names of antidepressants.
On the flip side, the designers of Wikipedia intentionally minimized entry barriers,
allowing anyone to make immediate changes to almost any article, without even
registering, much less demonstrating competence or legitimacy. We speculate that the
reason for the low barriers in Wikipedia is due to the relatively low interdependence
between contributions to a Wikipedia article, reducing the risk that one newcomer's
change will cause system-wide problems. It is also easy to revert to a prior version of an
article using MediaWiki's history mechanism. Compare this to OSS development, with
relatively high interdependence between contributions and a somewhat more difficult
reversion process through typical version control systems. More importantly, there is
simply less interdependence among the elements in a natural language article than in a
software program. Readers can interpret around a misspelling introduced into a
encyclopedia article, while the compiler cannot do this to a misspelled variable name in a
program.
3. Socialization to groups and organizations
Research on organizational recruitment makes a crisp distinction between recruits, who
are not members of an organization, and employees, who are. In many online
communities the distinction between non-member and member is more blurred. Theories
of socialization to groups (Levine & Moreland, 19xx) and to organizations (Van Maanen,
J., & Schein. 1979) are more likely to take into account the continuous nature of
commitment an individual might have to a group, organization or community or the
degree to which are they peripheral or central to it. For example, Levine and Moreland's
socialization theory (19xx) emphasizes separable phases in their relationship with a group
through which individuals can pass (investigation, socialization, maintenance,
resocialization, and remembrance). These phases are separated by four role transitions
(entry, acceptance, divergence, and exit). In understanding how to bring newcomers on
board, the first two of these phases -- investigation and socialization -- are most
important. In this section we concentrate on the investigatory phase, in which newcomers
and the groups assess each other. If successful, the investigatory phase ends in entry, in
which an outsider becomes a member of the community. In many formal conventional
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Newcomers
groups and organizations, the distinction between outsider and group member is clear,
and is analogous to the recruit/employee distinction in the recruitment literature. Thus, an
applicant can become a member of a fraternity, enlist in the military, be admitted to a
university, or be hired by a company. All of these organizations have formal points at
which the member joined.
However, even in conventional groups and organizations, the distinction is sometimes an
ambiguous one and entry into the group or organization can be a matter of degree, rather
than a discrete event. When groups have little structure and diffuse boundaries (or low
"entitivity" in the jargon of social psychology), whether one is a member is a matter of
degree. Thus, one’s centrality to friendship cliques or even project groups at work can be
a matter of degree (Mortensen & Hinds, 2002). In academia, for example, those who hold
joint appointments and courtesy appointments in an academic department are often seen
as less legitimate members than those whose whole salary is paid by the department in
question and who have voting rights there. The same variability of the degree to which
boundaries are well defined exists in online communities. For example, membership in a
Usenet group may consist simply of reading posts occasionally, membership in a World
of Warcraft guild involves applying to and being accepted by the guild master and
existing guild members, and membership in Wikipedia projects is somewhere in between
[1].
3a. Promote friendly initial interactions
Design claim. To encourage newcomers and potential recruits to join an online
community and return, encourage old-timers to have friendly interactions with the
newcomers
During an investigatory phase, newcomers actively investigate their fit to the group and
the benefits they are likely to receive from participation. This is analogous to the
information gathering that recruits perform, as outlined in the Process Model for
Developing Expectations outlined in Figure 0-1. Investigation is a major reason that
newcomers silently read posts (i.e., “lurk”) before posting (Preece et al., 2004). At the
same time, the group is evaluating whether the newcomer would be a good fit, so the
group needs the newcomer to do more than simply lurk. Both the group and the
individual require information exchange in order to estimate the benefits they will bring
to each other. This investigatory phase is an especially fragile one for newcomers. During
this early period, when they first encounter a group, they have little commitment to it and
often little data to make judgments about whether to invest effort in finding out more or
to explore alternatives. As a result, small amounts of either positive or negative evidence
about how the group behaves and how it treats members may have an especially large
impact on whether they leave for good or return again. Similarly, small amounts of either
positive or negative evidence that the prospective member has desirable attributes will
impact how the group responds.
Initial positive interactions work to retain new members. Newcomers to Usenet groups
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Newcomers
are more likely to come back for subsequent visits if others reply to them (Arguello et al.,
2006). Cosley (personal communication) found a similar phenomenon in Wikipedia,
where newcomers who received a welcome on their talk pages were about 50% more
likely to subsequently edit at least one page than people who created an account at about
the same time, but who did not receive a welcoming message. Our analysis of the initial
interactions between newcomers and old-timers in Wikipedia project shows a similar
pattern. New members to a project who receive at least one message from an old-timer
within two weeks after joining subsequently edit more on project pages (and in
Wikipedia in general) and stay active in the project for a longer period. Lampe and
Johnston (2005) found that new Slashdot members whose first comment received a rating
from other members posted a second comment more quickly than new members whose
comments weren't rated. They also found that newcomers who received negative ratings
on their first comments came back even faster; they hypothesized that these newcomers
returned quickly to improve their records, or that they intentionally wrote inflammatory
content which they post more often {?}.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject
How much access should they have to group resources? In this case, resources include
both people--other members' attention and support--and any artifacts the group produces,
such as wikis, collective movie ratings, or software. Should newcomers be isolated to
prevent annoying other members and damaging community artifacts, or should they be
allowed to ask questions, scribble on others' walls, delete code, and join raiding parties
right away? The answer to this question depends on a community’s goals.
To recruit and retain new members, small-group socialization theory and the research on
recruiting reviewed in the previous section suggest that newcomers should interact
directly with experienced members right away. The goal of the first contact should be to
encourage initial positive interactions as the newcomer is exploring the community and
deciding whether to join or not. Rather than isolating newcomers in a mandatory private
sandbox or preventing them from posting messages to a discussion group, they should be
allowed to make themselves known and interact with other community members.
Discussion forums often include a prominent "Introduction" thread, in which newcomers
are encouraged (or required) to post brief biographies. Newcomers to PGHDance.com, a
forum for Pittsburgh swing dancers, go to the "Hi, I'm ..." thread to describe their level of
dance experience, day job, and other cities where they've danced. The forum is a hybrid
community, in which many members socialize in person at local dances, but that
socialization is often hindered by loud music and a norm of not talking while dancing.
Thus, PGHDance allows members to get to know each other off the dance floor, and
provides a more neutral platform where dance skill is less salient. Veteran forum
members greet the newcomers and offer to dance with them at local events. Similarly,
WrongPlanet.net, a community for individuals with autism and other developmental
disabilities hosts a “Getting to know you” section, where newcomers describe their
hobbies and diagnoses. These introduction threads serve two purposes: First, they allow
the newcomers to move beyond the lurking stage and provide enough information to
invite interaction with other members, and second, the threads allow newcomers a safe
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Newcomers
space to practice using the posting tools.
Design claim. To encourage old-timers to have friendly interactions with the newcomers,
assign these responsibilities to particular community members.
One way to accomplish initial positive interaction is to assign welcoming responsibilities
to old-timers. For example, Wikipedia has a “Welcoming Committee,” [1] whose main
activity is to greet new editors, known as red users, because they have not yet made a
personal page for themselves and thus their usernames appear in red. Welcoming
committee members skim Wikipedia's account creation log and lists of contributions by
newcomers, select friendly text from a set of welcoming templates, and post the text to
the user's talk page, creating the page if necessary. Welcoming committee members
encourage anonymous contributors--identified by their IP addresses--to register, post
links to tutorials, and offer to answer questions.
For example, the following is a standard welcoming template in Wikipedia:
"Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope
you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find
helpful:
Introduction
The five pillars of Wikipedia
How to edit a page
Help pages
How to write a great article
Manual of Style
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name
on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your
name and the date.
If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or
place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again,
welcome!"
As the following excerpt from The WELL’s (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) Hosts’
Manual explains, moderators are responsible for welcoming newcomers (Hoag, 1996):
“Learning to welcome, inspire and incorporate new visitors into the
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Newcomers
conversation is perhaps the most important talent a host can acquire. …
There's one thing a host can be fairly sure of, however. Nobody likes to go
into a conference for the first time, post a response, then have it sit there
without ever being acknowledged. … At the very least, as host, you will
want to keep an eye out for postings by folks who have never responded in
your conference before, and acknowledge their participation. Even a simple
‘Hello! Could you tell us more about your experiences with...’ can mean the
difference between someone feeling snubbed, and feeling like a welcomed
participant in the conference.” [2]
Design claim: To promote friendly initial interactions between newcomers and oldtimers, explicitly discourage hostility towards newcomers who make mistakes.
The previous examples from Wikipedia and The Well are prescriptive in a positive way,
assigning some people the responsibilities for welcoming newcomers and giving the
welcomers some tools to make the task easier. Another way to encourage newcomers is
to discourage the hostility that is often the result of the interactions between old-timer
members of a group and newcomers (cf [3]). For example, policies for experienced
users answering questions in the forum for Ubuntu, a graphical user interface for the
Linux operating system, discourage experienced users from being rude to newcomers. “If
the users' question has been covered in one of the community documents, please give
them a description and the links. … If you wish to remind a user to use search tools or
other resources when they have asked a question you feel is basic or common, please be
very polite. Any replies for help that contain language disrespectful towards the user
asking the question, i.e. "STFU" [Shut the fuck up] or "RTFM" [Read the fucking
manual] are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.” Wikipedia's DBTN (Don't Bite the
Newcomer) policy cautions old-timers that “New contributors are prospective 'members'
and are therefore our most valuable resource. We must treat newcomers with kindness
and patience — nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than
hostility or elitism." (emphasis in the original)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee
[2] http://www.well.com/~confteam/hostmanual
[3] http://www.libervis.com/blogs/15/Jastiv/eric_raymond_and_the_rtfm_jerks
3b. Design formal, one-on-one mentorships
Beyond welcoming committees and introduction threads, early interactions between
newcomers and the community should allow the newcomers to learn group etiquette,
norms, and requisite skills, and provide a basis for future commitment. While many
online communities have developed Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) pages, selfguided tutorials, or monthly etiquette emails to provide this information, far fewer have
formal mentoring or person-to-person training procedures. Organization socialization
theory (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979) suggests that an institutional style of socialization
Page 24
Newcomers
Page 25
leads to the most commitment from newcomers. In this style of socialization, newcomers
are exposed to a formal and collective training experience, with a road map providing
clear and explicit information about roles and sequence of responsibility, and a mentor to
provide guidance.
Organizational socialization theory identifies six dimensions that differentiate the
techniques that organizations use to help newcomers get adjusted to the organization and
learn their place in it. Jones (1986) created a self-report scale measuring these tactics,
which has been extensively used in empirical research examining antecedents and
consequences of successful socialization of newcomers in organizations. Table N
provides an overview of the socialization tactics that van Maanen and Schein identified
and samples of the self-report questions used to measure them.
Technique Description
(van Maanen
& Schein)
Sample of measurement items (from
Jones, 1986)
Collective
versus
individual
Newcomers go through a common
set of experiences designed to
produce standardized responses to
situations, versus, each newcomer
receives unique training in isolation
from others.
C13 This organization puts all
newcomers through the same set of
learning experiences.
C14 Most of my training has been
carried out apart from other newcomers.
(R)
Newcomers are segregated from
other organizational members as
they learn their jobs, versus,
newcomers receive on-the-job
training.
FIl I have been through a set of training
experiences which are specifically
designed to give newcomers a thorough
knowledge of job-related skills.
F14 Much of my job knowledge has
been acquired informally on a trial and
error basis. (R)
Formal vs.
informal
Serial versus With serial tactics, newcomers
disjunctive
observe and get training from
experienced role models, who give
newcomers a clear view of the
experiences they will encounter in
the organization, while with
disjunctive tactics newcomers do not
have more senior people to observe.
SD2 I am gaining a clear understanding
of my role in this organization from
observing my senior colleagues.
SD3 I have received little guidance from
experienced organizational members as
to how I should perform my job. (R)
Newcomers
Page 26
Fixed versus With fixed tactics, newcomers are
variable:
given a fixed timetable about how to
progress in the organization, while
with variable tactics, the timing of
role transitions is variable.
FV1 I can predict my future career path
in this organization by observing other
people's experiences.
FV4 I have little idea when to expect a
new job assignment or training exercise
in this organization. (R)
Sequential
versus
random:
With sequential socialization tactics,
newcomers are given a clear
sequence of steps leading to their
ultimate role, while with random
socialization the sequence of stages
isn't known in advance.
SRI There is a clear pattern in the way
one role leads to another or one job
assignment leads to another.
SR4 This organization does not put
newcomers through an identifiable
sequence of learning experiences. (R]
With investiture socialization
tactics, the organization confirms
newcomers' prior identity, while
with divestiture tactics the
organization tries to strip this prior
identity away.
ID1 I have been made to feel that my
skills and abilities are very important in
this organization.
ID3 I have had to change my attitudes
and values to be accepted in this
organization. (R)
Investiture
versus
divestiture:
Table N. Six organizational socialization tactics.
Van Maanen and Schein hypothesized that these tactics would be used in very different
contexts (e.g., that collective socialization would be used in jobs where newcomers
needed to learn technique skills, while individual socialization would be used where
already existing organizational members were being prepared for promotions), and would
have different consequences (e.g., collective socialization would constrain innovation,
while individualistic socialization would allow for role innovation). However, most
subsequent research has not examined these boundary conditions. Instead, it has
developed a simpler picture of the effects of using these socialization tactics. In Bauer et
al.'s meta-analysis of 70 samples of newcomer socialization to organizations, most of the
research examined how the use of these organizational socialization strategies led to
positive organizational outcomes among newcomers from a week or two after they
became organizational members for four months or more. They studied how newcomers
adjusted to the organizations they joined and performed in them.
The literature reviewed by Bauer et al. shows that both active information-seeking by
newcomers and the use of a more institutional style of socialization, involving collective,
formal, serial, fixed, sequential and investiture socialization tactics lead newcomers to
become more committed to the organization, have a greater intention of remaining in the
organization and cause less turnover.
However, socialization processes in most online communities are informal and
Newcomers
individualistic. For example, in Usenet groups, lurking newcomers have no opportunities
for formal mentorship, because their presence is unknown to old-timers. Also consider
Ducheneaut's description of the socialization of newcomers to the Python open-source
software development community (2004). Even in this production-oriented environment,
with defined workflows and sharp distinctions among the social roles participating in the
project, socialization is still informal, based on trial and error. For example, although
there is a progression of participation in this community, with newcomers first
participating in technical discussion and then submitting bug fixes before obtaining
committer status, this progression of roles is not documented. When one new developer
who was slowly making his way toward the core of the community attempted to
introduce a new module to the standard library used in this project, he did not know the
organizational routines he needed to engage in order to make his contribution. A core
member of the community eventually stepped in to offer advice (i.e., provided
mentorship), but mentoring was not a regular socialization tactic in this community.
Design claim: Provide newcomers with formal mentorships by old-timers.
Some
communities have successfully deployed mentorship practices, both formal and
informal. Wikipedia's Adopt-a-User program [1] matches inexperienced editors with
more senior editors, with the aim of reducing vandalism and test edits. More experienced
editors are discouraged from requesting adoption; instead they submit specific work for
editor assistance or review. Newcomers seeking adoption add the {{subst:dated
adoptme}} tag to their userpage, which adds them to a list checked by adopters. New
sellers at eBay benefit from Trading Assistants, experienced and active eBay sellers with
at least 97% positive feedback. Trading Assistants assess whether an item is saleable,
plan starting prices and shipping methods for items, and communicate directly with
bidders. Newcomers benefit from the Trading Assistants' high reputation scores,
proficiency with seller tools, and familiarity with listing policies and best practices.
Newcomers search a directory for assistants who are geographically close and have
expertise in particular areas, such as estate liquidation or motor vehicles. Trading
Assistants themselves have training tutorials, guides to best practices and promotion, and
a discussion board. Help from Trading Assistants is not limited to newcomers; any busy
seller can outsource items to others in this way. However, unlike voluntary mentorship in
other communities, eBay's Trading Assistants negotiate fees with new sellers for their
services [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ADOPT
[2] http://pages.ebay.com/tahub/index.html
[check open-source communities to see if there's some semi-formal mentoring of new
developers going on; the more formal the better; John]
[how guilds help people get higher levels; emphasize teaching/mentorship; John]
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Newcomers
3c. Protect the community’s resources while newcomers are
socialized
Design claim: To encourage newcomer socialization through exploration while
preventing harm to the group’s resources, provide mechanisms that protect resources
without hindering newcomers.
So far, we have suggested that newcomers be socialized through friendly initial
interactions with old-timers, that they be allowed to contribute immediately, and that oldtimers mentor the newcomers directly. Yet this is not to say that newcomers should
receive carte blanche access to a group and its resources. Many communities include
protection mechanisms to prevent potential damage or annoyance by newbies. Major
blog platforms, including Blogger and WordPress, while allowing newcomers to post
comments (subject to the blog owner's preferences), automatically include the
"rel=nofollow" attribute in links embedded in comments. This mechanism directs search
engines not to trust these links, preventing spam links from receiving PageRank, and thus
discouraging spammers from disguising links to their products within blog comments.
Slashdot also uses the nofollow attribute in some potentially misbehaving users'
comments, using heuristics based on the age of the user's account and the user's karma.
[4] These invisible mechanisms do not prevent newcomers from participating; they
simply limit the amount of damage a potentially malicious newcomer could do.
Another mechanism for allowing newcomers to experiment and develop skills is to
provide a safe, isolated area for exploration. Newcomers need not be required to
participate only in the safe area, but it does offer a measure of protection for both parties.
One common approach in wikis is the sandbox: a page allowing editors to experiment
with wiki syntax without having consequences on the rest of the site. All Wikipedia
editors have a personal sandbox by default, as well as access to communal sandboxes
[5]. Typical policies, such as formatting guidelines or notifying other users before
making large changes, do not apply to the sandbox, although civility and copyright
policies still apply. Sandbox content is automatically cleaned every 12 hours, although
other users tend to overwrite content much faster. Multiplayer online games frequently
contain "newbie gardens," safe spaces where new players practice skills, thwarting
players who intentionally harass or kill unskilled avatars. Newcomers are not required to
participate in these venues, and thus still have opportunities to demonstrate their desirable
attributes to the wider community, but sandboxes and newbie gardens allow additional
practice space.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox
CONCLUSION
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Newcomers
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Newcomers
Page 34
Additional Fodder:
Theories
Design goals
S: Selection C: Commitment B: Behavior
1. Signaling
Theory
Contact
Barriers
2. Dissonance
Theory
(Theory
doesn't
address)
Barriers
(Theory doesn't
(Theory doesn't
address)
address)
Contact
Barriers
Contact
Welcoming
FAQs
(Theory doesn't
address, but
might be side
effects.)
3. Group
socialization
Theory (M&L)
Protection
(Theory doesn't (Theory doesn't Use signals to
address)
address)
show who to
trust
4. Organizational
socialization
Tactics Theory
(van Maanen &
Schein)
NA: Theory
assume
members
already
selected
Contact
Welcoming
FAQs
(Explicit
training, FAQs
& mentorship
increase
likelihood of
newcomer
learning how to
behave
appropriately )
5. Rewards &
deterrence
?
?
(Theory should
Impose
address this)
penalties
6. Theories of trust
Provide training
to show
newcomers how
to behave
Keep out those
you don't trust
Key: Pink=Moira, Blue=John, Yellow=Bob
(Remove this key and colors before sharing with C-Lab)
CHESS cancer group, moderator welcomes newbies. Acts more like a mentor
Barriers: [do MMOs make you do stupid things before you're accepted; find guilds that
haze?]
Newcomers
[hurdles in open source; perhaps groups are not relying on consistency theory]
. [Discuss the mediating processes -- good person/organization fit, in which
newcomer knows what to do, feels confident in being able to do the work,
and feeling accepted by the organization] .
Figure N. Antecedents and outcomes of newcomer adjustment during organizational
socialization. From Bauer et al (2007).
Cognitive dissonance
Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance holds that if people have two ideas that are
psychologically inconsistent, they experience the negative drive state of cognitive
dissonance and try to find a way to reconcile the ideas, generally by changing one or both
to make them consonant (Festinger, 1957). This theory explains why we tend to change
our attitudes to be consistent with our behavior (e.g., Festinger & Carlsmith,1959) or why
we like people to view us as we see ourselves (e.g., Swann & Read, 1981). The theory
has also been used to explain people's initial feelings of connection to the groups they
join. In particular, experimental research by Aronson and Mills (1959) demonstrated that
people like groups more if they have to endure a severe initiation process to join them
than if they undergo a milder initiation (see also Gerard & Mathewson, 1966; Schopler &
Bateson, 1962). According to Aronson, people come to like things for which they
suffered, because this is the only way they can reconcile their views of themselves as
intelligent people with the actions they have performed (Aronson, 1996). Although social
psychologists have used this phenomenon to explain the effects of hazing in the military
and in fraternities, there is controversy about the strength of these results (see Lodewijkx
& Syroit, 1997 & 2001 for correlational studies that have failed to replicate the severity
of initiation and liking link).
Theories of rewards and deterrence
(Pointer to norms chapter)
Page 35
Newcomers
Design options
Barriers to entry
According to cognitive dissonance theory, difficult barriers have the added effect of
increasing commitment among members who have completed them: causing newcomers
to suffer a little before joining a group should increase their eventual commitment.
However, given the ease with which people can leave an online community (as opposed
to a military academy), severe initiations may drive away potentially valuable
contributors. Therefore online community designers should not instigate these types of
initiations unless there is a surplus of prospective members. However, the newcomers
who survive the initiation should have stronger loyalties than those who are invited in
without initiation. First, as selection theory predicts, the severe initiation acts as a filter,
preventing new recruits without the appropriate desire from joining. Second, as
dissonance theory predicts, these initiations should increase the commitment of those
subjected to them.
Initiation rituals imposed by online communication can range from non-existent to quite
severe. At one extreme, Usenet discussion groups impose no initiation at all. Newcomers
can read and post without any formal barrier. Wikipedia explicitly encourages gentle
treatment of new editors, with its "Don't bite the newcomer" policy [1]. At the other
extreme are game-playing groups like World of Warcraft and OSS projects that require
newcomers to go through a long period of initiation before they can become members.
Some guilds, for example, require the newcomer to play with the group for a month or
longer before the newcomer is allowed to become a regular member. In open-source
software projects, it is common practice for newcomers to offer "gifts" of code before
they are granted membership (von Krogh et al., 2003). While both of these activities
provide data by which existing group members can evaluate the newcomers and may
weed out the least motivated, the activities are also effortful actions that probably
increase the newcomers' loyalty to the group.
Small-group socialization theory suggests that these barriers be low, so that the exchange
of information that allows the group and newcomers to evaluate each other can begin
early. Thus, barriers that prevent prospective members from investigating the group
reduce the likelihood that they will ever attempt to join. For example, in the online
cancer support group ACOR.org, readers cannot search or browse archived messages
without a subscription. Though subscribing is free, prospective subscribers are vetted by
the list owners, which delays the newcomer's opportunity to evaluate the group and his or
her expected fit. Furthermore, the archives are hidden from search engines. Though this
protects the privacy of existing members, it also reduces the likelihood that desirable
members will find the group.
While signaling theory and dissonance theory are unidirectional, with signaling theory
emphasizing the information that a test provides to the group about prospective members
and dissonance theory emphasizing changes in motivations of prospective members
toward the group, small-group socialization theory is bi-directional, simultaneously
Page 36
Newcomers
considering the effects of barriers on choices that both the group and the individual make.
Barriers should be valuable only to the extent that they provide the group information
with which to realistically assess prospective members (akin to signaling theory) and for
prospective members to realistically assess benefits they might receive from the group if
they were to become members. Thus, while signaling theory would recommend that
groups impose tests on prospective members that only desirable members can easily pass,
socialization theory would recommend that these tests be conducted in the context of
realistic job previews, so potential members could select to join only communities where
they perceived a good fit with their interests, values and skills. [Add example from Bo's
research about matches between guilds and individuals on social/task-focus]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee
[2] http://www.well.com/~confteam/hostmanual
[3] http://www.libervis.com/blogs/15/Jastiv/eric_raymond_and_the_rtfm_jerks
Punishment:
While Wikipedia's "Don't bite the newcomer" policy poses a forgiving stance toward
newcomers' foibles, other communities show less leniency, warning or punishing
newcomers early to prevent future misbehavior. At JoBlo's Movie Emporium (check
this) newcomers who post links to other communities in their first posts are treated with a
barrage of angry messages to their personal email accounts. Vandals in Wikipedia are
treated to a series of increasingly assertive warnings, ranging from a polite notice:
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to make constructive
contributions to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one
you made to Article, did not appear to be constructive and has been reverted
or removed. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make,
and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this
encyclopedia. Thank you.
to a threat of blocking:
This is the only warning you will receive for your disruptive edits.
If you vandalize Wikipedia again, as you did to Article, you will be blocked
from editing.
[need more examples of punishment directed at newcomers and what theory says about
this, or else refer readers to another chapter]
Page 37
Newcomers
Page 38
Candidate’s initial impression
of community & role
Organization’s information
provision
 Channel
 Amount
 Accuracy
Candidate’s information
gathering
Accuracy and completeness of
expectations about community &
candidate’s role in it
Candidate’s characteristics
compared to what
community wants/needs
Candidate’s needs/wants
compared to what
community offers
Candidate’s &
community’s selection
decisions
Fit between
community’s
wants/needs and
candidate’s attributes
Fit between
candidate’s
needs/wants what
community offers
Newcomer’s
satisfactory
performance in
community
Newcomer’s value
attainment
Mutual satisfaction
Retention
Figure 0-1: A Process Model of Formation of Job Expectations and Their Influence on
Recruiting Outcomes (adapted from Breaugh & Starke, 2000).
Newcomers
From Norms chapter:
There are two main ways to induce people to feel they are members of the same group
and to care about it. One approach is to recruit a homogeneous set of people who fit the
intended community profile. We discuss recruiting community members in the chapter on
newcomers, but raise it again here because recruiting is relevant to the promotion of
group identity as a means of regulating behavior. For instance, alt.hackers requires
members to perform a skilled task for entry into the group. This recruiting strategy
separates the “ingroup” from the “outgroup” and increases group identity (even though,
otherwise, this community is not very sociable).
Other communities, such as those for medical doctors, require members to prove they are
doctors. Many exclusive BitTorrent tracker sites (groups that provide private BitTorrent
seeds) require existing members to vouch for new members. Bad behavior on the part of
a new member (such as downloading much more than they upload) can result in sanctions
both to the new member and to the sponsor.
Still other communities filter new members by requiring them to be invited by existing
members, and limiting the invitations each existing member gets. Invitations to Google’s
exclusive Gmail Beta were so highly coveted that some users put them up for bid on
eBay (http://www.news.com/2100-1023_3-5203162.html). A number of Flickr photo
groups have requirements that users’ photos have awards or have been marked as
favorites by some number of other users. (Offline companies have started to use this
technique to recruit new employees as well; for example, Google has posted recruitment
billboards whose web address is hidden in the solution to a complex mathematical
question.
Include Drenner, S., Sen, S., & Terveen, L. (2008). Crafting the initial user experience to
achieve community goals Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on
Recommender systems (pp. 187-194): ACM New York, NY, USA.
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