The confusion of crowds: non-dyadic help interactions

ABSTRACT

Help-giving interactions in open source technical support often involve more people than the conventional help-giver help-seeker pair. Contributions include lightweight but useful me-too contributions from fellow help-seekers. Problems with the reuse of help documentation may be resolved by contextualized discussions, and those discussions themselves are found to be substantially reused.

REFERENCES

• 1: Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, 2006
• 2: Constant, D., Sproull, L., Keisler, S. (1996). The Kindness of Strangers: The Usefulness of Electronic Weak Ties for Technical Advice. Organization Science, 7(2) 119--135.
• 3: Davenport, T. H. and Klahr, P. (1998). Managing customer support knowledge. California Management Review 40(3) 195--208.
• 4: Christine A. Halverson , Thomas Erickson , Mark S. Ackerman, Behind the help desk: evolution of a knowledge management system in a large organization, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 06-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA [doi>10.1145/1031607.1031657]
• 5: Lakhani, K. R., and von Hippel, E. (2003). How Open Source Software Works: Free User to User Assistance. Research Policy 32(6) 923--943.
• 6: Vandana Singh , Michael B. Twidale , Dinesh Rathi, Open Source Technical Support: A Look at Peer Help-Giving, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p.118.3, January 04-07, 2006 [doi>10.1109/HICSS.2006.370]
• 7: Michael B. Twidale , David M. Nichols, Exploring Usability Discussions in Open Source Development, Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 7, p.198.3, January 03-06, 2005 [doi>10.1109/HICSS.2005.266]
• 8: Michael Twidale , Karen Ruhleder, Where am I and who am I?: issues in collaborative technical help, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 06-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA [doi>10.1145/1031607.1031671]
• 9: Michael B. Twidale, Over the Shoulder Learning: Supporting Brief Informal Learning, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.14 n.6, p.505-547, December 2005 [doi>10.1007/s10606-005-9007-7]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Training, help, and documentation

General Terms:
Documentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
help-giving, open source software