Increasing Cultural Accessibility in a Global Organization

Large global corporations have deployed social software to encourage information sharing and informal communication between geographically distributed employees. Recent research has observed geographically local differences in participation rates and perceived benefits of these systems. We suggest that increasing participation in organizational social software so that it is representative of the demographics of an enterprise is a valuable goal and propose a framework to encourage intercultural collaboration and communication. Finally, we describe the design of Clearly, a prototype system that improves readability of social software content for nonnative English speakers so that multi-lingual employees can consume more of the available content in the system. Author