Designing for improved social responsibility, user participation and content in on-line communities

Web sites face difficult challenges in supporting successful communities. In this paper we discuss 2 operating web sites, identically designed but with different and distinct audiences. These sites collect user data from site activity and feed it back to the user community in novel ways. The sites are highly active and growing, and have fostered socially conscious, easily navigable and comprehensible on-line communities with little cost and maintenance. The practice of user data collection and re-purposing we describe works particularly well in highly contextual or information /resource-driven communities. These sites also integrate custom content authoring tools and track their use. The authoring tools were designed to quickly grow a specialized "knowledge base" of content created by users and published to a larger audience. A status system encourages the participation of users to contribute to this knowledge base, while increasing social awareness and responsibility in areas of high user interaction. All user activity, communications, and feedback are tracked. Then data is compiled and re-incorporated into scalable solutions for better navigability, content filtering, and presentation of contents to a larger audience. This practice creates a uniquely high quality of interaction within web communities