Beyond end user content to collaborative knowledge mapping

Abstract

Most studies of social tools examine usage of each tool in isolation. Instead, we explore how online communities (a) combine multiple social tools, and (b) use social tools together with external tools. Based on interviews with community leaders and quantitative analysis of 128 online community spaces, we explored the combined use of six social software tools--wikis, blogs, forums, social bookmarks, social file repositories, and task-management tools. We contribute a detailed characterization of how enterprise online communities combine multiple social tools, adding to our understanding of community behaviors: Communities combine social tools to curate and organize complex information spaces. When combined, each tool is used for limited "core" functions; thus 'social' features are not always leveraged for every tool. Leaders and members divide labor by tool boundaries. Our results suggest that an important overlooked aspect of social media concerns how different tools can be effectively combined. While most prior work on communities emphasizes end user content, we identify additional important design activities where community participants curate and organize pre-existing content from multiple tools to serve their community needs.

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