Adaptive Incentive Mechanism for Sustainable Online Community

Over the last three years, we have been incrementally designing incentive mechanisms to encourage user participation in online communities. Our target community was a relatively small-scale, centralized, peer-to-peer community for sharing links to class-related resources. The users were students in undergraduate computer science classes, typically between 30-35 users. We found that most of the users responded to the incentive mechanism as we intended, but some users attempted to game the system. The excessive contributions resulted in “information overload” and user withdrawal. To make the participation level in the community sustainable, we modified the incentive mechanism to discourage excessive contributions and elicit contributions with higher quality. This required adding a separate incentive mechanism to encourage users to rate each others’ contributions and modifying the existing incentive mechanism so that it adapts to the users preferences and to the current needs of the community. The results showed that the timeliness, quality and type of contributions can be effectively influenced by the mechanism. Comtella: an online community for sharing links Comtella is a small-scale peer-to-peer online community, developed at the MADMUC lab at University of Saskatchewan, for sharing links to academic papers and class-related web-resources among students. Several versions of Comtella have been developed and deployed since 2002, one for sharing academic papers among graduate students at the MADMUC lab (approximately 15 users), and another one for sharing links to class topics in a 4 year undergrad class on Ethics and IT. The second version has been applied twice as a class support tool, in the winter of 2004 and 2005 (separate communities, each with 3233 users) and once in a fourth-year class on Multi-agent systems (16 users). Comtella is now being re-designed to serve as a forum for the User Modelling Community (approximately 250 researchers) to share papers, links, teaching materials and news. Another version (called ComWest!) is currently being developed to support school-girls, teachers, parents, undergraduate and graduate students, female faculty and women in industry in sharing advice about careers in science and engineering.