Pivots, Trackers, and Recommenders: Making Online Conversations Simultaneously Serve Multiple Audiences

SESSION OVERVIEW
Like other large online communities, Drupal.org has a diverse users base who have different purposes of participating in the community. This diversity is reflected in online conversations and forums as well — new comers will be more engaged in on-topic conversations to gain knowledge and to get their problems fixed; while old timers might turn to off-topic conversations to make personal connections. Such tension between different audiences might lead to the failure of the community if the administrators do not pay enough attention to it. For example, new comers might get frustrated if there are too many off-topic conversations and insider jokes that makes the community less inviting; on the other hand, old timers will get frustrated too if they are not allowed to make personal connections through online conversations.

Our proposal is to use the combination of “pivots”, “trackers” and “recommenders” to reduce the tensions between multiple audiences in online conversations and thus delivering better user experience. A “recommender” uses algorithms that find relevant items based on the similarity between users/items. A “pivot” is a navigation aid that displays relevant items and messages based on the same topic or authorship. A “tracker” allows users to subscribe to multiple pivots that interest them.

We have implemented the initial version of “pivots” module for Drupal, and we will develop the “tracker” module (different from Drupal tracker.module) very soon. In this session, we will give a more detailed introduction to our proposal, and demonstrate how to configure the modules by examples. We will also figure out the development roadmap to the modules. We hope our proposal can draw attention from the Drupal.org community, and help you build a better Drupal site for your community

This session will be a mixture of lecture and discussion.

TRACK
design and user experience

AGENDA
To be announced.

GOALS

• Help the audience understand the idea of Pivots, Trackers, and Recommenders.
• Help the audience learn how to configure the “pivots” modules, and discuss the development roadmap for the “tracker” and “recommender” module and suggestions for the next version of the “pivots” module.

RESOURCES
Our website: http://pivots.cms.si.umich.edu