Socializing Scholarly data- reputation management and other issues for affectual design

Our project, Design and Art of Australia Online blogs.unsw.edu.au/daao/ is opening up contributions to the database to larger project community. Among other things we will developing communities around different spheres of scholarly research through social media style tools, conventions and practices. We will also be using some classic crowdsourcing techniques for datawashing and sub-editorial style projects. In other words, we will traversing a whole range of different cohorts with different needs and expectations of the site.

If we want lots of people to input quality data, we’ve been working hard on thinking about how to make the experience of using our site ‘rewarding’ ( as well as pleasurable). We’ve done a lot of work on user experience of data entry logical and pleasurable, but now we are turning our heads to the issues of community moderation system in a mixed cohort setting (has to generate value to academic, glam and ‘amateur’ research communities) and have been thinking about how to manage social reputation and activity systems ( ie badges etc).

We’ve been doing quite a bit work researching existing scholarly crowdsourcing projects, like the Zooniverse Science Projects www.zooniverse.org/home and of course the NLA’s newspaper projects etc. We’ve also been looking at badging reward systems like Foursquare etc. to see what productive ( if any) analogies could be made that produce any type of value for contributors.

Anyone interested in having a session on how you manage the affectual and reputational side of data? How to link permissions to reputations? How to give value to immaterial labour of online scholarly practices? Bluntly put, how to design ‘win- win’ into the front end of content hungry database? Practical focus: specifically looking at badging and reputation and permission systems.

Really happy to share or negotiate session with anyone who has similar problems to solve.