Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers
Communications of the ACM
Perceived critical mass effect on groupware acceptance
European Journal of Information Systems
Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities
CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia
GROUP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Leadership in online creative collaboration
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia
Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
"Voluntweeters": self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Supporting reflective public thought with considerit
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Coordination and beyond: social functions of groups in open content production
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Searching for the goldilocks zone: trade-offs in managing online volunteer groups
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Redistributing leadership in online creative collaboration
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Understanding crowdfunding work: implications for support tools
CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Does slacktivism hurt activism?: the effects of moral balancing and consistency in online activism
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The web is a catalyst for drawing people together around shared goals, but many groups never reach critical mass. It can thus be risky to commit time or effort to a goal: participants show up only to discover that nobody else did, and organizers devote significant effort to causes that never get off the ground. Crowdfunding has lessened some of this risk by only calling in donations when an effort reaches a collective monetary goal. However, it leaves unsolved the harder problem of mobilizing effort, time and participation. We generalize the concept into activation thresholds, commitments that are conditioned on others' participation. With activation thresholds, supporters only need to show up for an event if enough other people commit as well. Catalyst is a platform that introduces activation thresholds for on-demand events. For more complex coordination needs, Catalyst also provides thresholds based on time or role (e.g., a bake sale requiring commitments for bakers, decorators, and sellers). In a multi-month field deployment, Catalyst helped users organize events including food bank volunteering, on-demand study groups, and mass participation events like a human chess game. Our results suggest that activation thresholds can indeed catalyze a large class of new collective efforts.