Jenn Thom

I’ll be presenting a note at CSCW describing how new employees and employees far from headquarters perceive a social networking site as a potential resource for learning about an organization.

While in China, I’ll also be visiting some of my collaborators in the IBM Research lab in Beijing pre-conference. After CSCW, I’ll be conducting interviews during a visit to an IBM site in Shanghai. I’m watching youtube videos to brush up on my rusty Mandarin comprehension skills but probably won’t have a chance to bust out the Cantonese this time around.

Thom-Santelli, J., Millen, D.R., and Gergle, D. Organizational Acculturation and Social Networking. Proc.CSCW2011.

Since my postdoc began last fall, I’ve stepped into the world of intercultural research, particularly as it relates to the adoption and appropriation of social software. Studying culture is full of messiness yet really exciting, and I’m still struggling to figure out how to approach this kind of complexity.

I’ll presenting some of the initial analysis that we’ve conducted of worldwide usage of SocialBlue (formerly known as Beehive) at ICIC. The short story – we noticed some differences in friending behaviors, where users from certain geographies have a larger percentage of unreciprocated connections while other geographies have more insular connections (e.g. accepting more connections within country).

We’ve used the results relating to reciprocity to inform our current analysis/data collection to focus on the practices of global service centers in India and the Philippines. Inspired by the observation of the insular networks, I’m working with an intern extraordinaire who’ll be looking at ways to improve readability in social software for non-native English speakers. Good times!

Thom-Santelli, J., Millen, D. R. and DiMicco, J. (2010). Characterizing Global Participation in an Enterprise SNS. Proc.ICIC2010.

The promise of web 2.0 systems holds that a diverse swarm of users will gather to contribute and collaborate on a social system, whether to create an encyclopedia or rate content. Some of the most valuable contributors to these systems play a role that I characterize as informal experts, in that they may know something about the topic at hand but are not necessarily formally recognized by others for their expertise. At times, however, it’s not immediately evident who these informal experts are, particularly if the system aggregates contributions in such a way that they look equivalent on the surface.

Because of this ambiguous position in the social hierarchy and the aggregation of contributions alongside novice participants, these informal experts may be more likely to be territorial about their contributions, especially if they have committed time and resources in obtaining their expertise. I propose, though, that certain territorial expressions may be good for a social system when managed appropriately and can ultimately benefit an online community.

I’ll be presenting this work at CHI 2010 during the Expertise session on Wednesday, April 14th, 11:00-12:30.

Thom-Santelli, J., Cosley, D., and Gay, G. What Do You Know? Experts, Novices and Territoriality in Online Environments. Proc.CHI2010.

One of the things that I desperately needed/wanted to do after I defended my dissertation was to redesign my website. So, in a fit of procrastination from other more pressing matters (CHI talk, cough, cough), I finally sat down and made it happen, instead of letting it fester on my to-do list.