BotViz: Data Visualizations for Collaborations With Bots and Volunteers

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’16 Companion, February 27 March 02, 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA ACM 978-1-4503-3950-6/16/02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2869132 Abstract Online bots are quickly becoming important collaborators with humans in tackling issues in healthcare, politics, and even activism. Recently, non-profits have used many bots in place of their human members to scaffold collaborations with citizens. However, this shift invites new challenges: it is difficult for outsiders to understand the joint effort that bots have now initiated with humans, limiting the goals reached collectively. To help non-profits coordinate the volunteers recruited by online bots, we propose BotViz. BotViz is a new online platform that via data visualizations provides outsiders a clear understanding of the interactions of bots with volunteers. Our data visualization presents two benefits related to traditional interfaces: 1) Diversity, wherein people can understand the diversity of the volunteers, especially their unique strengths; 2) Stalling, wherein people who may be delaying the collective effort triggered by bots can be easily identified by volunteers. Together, our data visualizations point to a future where humans and online bots can better collaborate in order to have large scale impact.