Community equity

Community Equity is the technical implementation of a Social_capital model for Online Communities. It has been developed by Sun_microsystems and will be open sourced soon.

Overview

The objective of the Community Equity model is to build a dynamic Value_system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating in, for example:

• Adding or updating contributions (wikis,forums, attachments)

• Rating, commenting

• Tagging

• Downloading and reusing content

• Social connections

• Search queries

Equity Model

The systems will calculate the following equity values:

* Information Equity (IQ)

* Personal Equity (PEQ)

Information Equity (IQ)

The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculates a numeric value that represents the importance, relevance, and quality of the information. Information can be a wiki page, blog post, forum entry, or document.

The activities that the IQ captures includes:

* How many times users (repeat) have viewed the information

* How many times this information has been downloaded by users (in the case of an attachment)

* How many times this information was reused by an individual

* User feedback (ratings, comments)

How do we know that a document has been reused?

We developed a web service called "Content extraction and metadata store," which writes a tag in an OpenOffice document. This tag describes the source community of the document (for example, Project xx). If a user is downloading this document and stores it in another community, we write a parent tag into the OpenOffice document, which describes the destination community. By analyzing the tags we know that a document has been reused. In addition, we can build a dynamic cloning reference of related documents.

Personal Equity (PEQ)

The purpose of developing a Community Equity (PEQ) value for each individual is to help recognize their achievements and their participation in the community.

Here is the calculation:

PEQ = CQ + PQ + SQ + RQ + OE

Contribution Equity (CQ)

The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person related to his or her role or roles in a company.

The CQ tracks the total contribution of wiki entries, blog posts, attachments such as documents, podcasts, videos, software, and how this information is useful to the community (IQ).

Per contribution we calculate an equity value based on downloads, ratings and reuse by the community.

Participation Equity (PQ)

The Participation Equity calculates a value for the active participation of a person. We use the feedback activities a person has provided to other community contributions like

* Ratings provided

* Comments provided

* Tag or Tags provided

* Reuse of content

Skills Equity (SQ)

The Skills Equity shows the skills of a person based on his or her contribution

Details will be disclosed later.

Reputation Equity (RQ)

The Reputation Equity (RQ) is a combination of contribution, participation and role equity.

Details will be disclosed later ...

Personal Sociometry Equity (OE)

Humans suffer from information overload. There's much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend ,on each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how, or know-why information has become most crucial. "Know-who" involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person (Johnson et al., 2000).

In this context, understanding the formation, evolution, and utilization of online Social_network becomes important. A social network is "a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange." (Garton, et al., 1997). While the Internet contributes to the information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage one's social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.

(source:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks)

We are looking to add the following Social Equity indicators:

* Centrality (number of friends) - Freeman 1977: http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/27.pdf

Tag Equity

Tag Clouds are calculated by frequency of use. This does not necessarily reflect the value of a tag (or the topic a tag represents). By calculating the Equity of a Tag based on social activities of the community (add or edit, comment, view, etc.) we can dynamically calculate a Tag equity of all contributions related to this tag.

Details will be disclosed later.

Equity Aging

Equity values age over time.

Example Information Aging: A technical white paper about Internet Security from 1999 was really valuable at that time but might be obsolete today ...

Example Reputation Aging: 15 years ago I was an expert in IBM mainframe integration. I had a great reputation reputation of fixing any problems related to SNA.

Over the last 15 years I re-focused my expertise and skills and my reputation (and skills) about IBM mainframe integration has gone.

To calculate time-based equity, we assume that any action, such as view, download, rating, and updates, has a "time-to-live" value . This value goes to zero linearly.

Mathematical model (credit goes to Dmitry Riachtchentsev, our math genius on the team)

Excerpt from Dima's specs:

To reduce the calculations, we use a linear model:

1. Just after the action that affects an Equity, the Equity value is changed to a multiplier value.

2. Then this value goes to zero linearly. It becomes zero after a valid time period.

With such a model, we have a linear trend every time.

The linear trend enables us to not track the whole history to calculate equity values. We can just change two linear trend parameters after every action and after the aging time period.

Equity Visualization

We developed a set of widgets to visualize the Community Equity model.

My Community Equity

This widget shows in real time the Contribution and Participation Equity of a Person.

People Ranking

This widget displays the top 10 people. In addition, it shows the ranking of the person either as bold (Name) or the ranking position if a person is not in the top 10.

Country Ranking

This widget displays the top 10 countries with the highest Community Equity average per person in a country.

Content Ranking

This widget displays the top ten Content with the highest Information Equity . In addition it shows the ranking of the contribution of a person in bold.

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See Also

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