In this paper we investigate the role of champions in processes of mass collaboration in software product development. The case is Get Satisfaction, a company and social media platform for engaging end users and customers in product development activities. We employ a mixed methods approach, combining social network analysis (SNA) and interaction analysis (IA). We found that when scaling up, a new hybrid user group, champions, emerged. Champion is a role given end-users who make large contributions in the community. When this happens the end-user is appointed by Get Satisfaction and gains privileges.
We present a case study of mass collaboration
The major objective of cultures of participation
content creators
An ordinary end user (a customer) of a software product is normally not interested
(nor have the time) to think about the design and modification of it, and users would
under most conditions prefer to be consumers. In a culture of participation, the
stereotypical user-developer dichotomy has been challenged, and intermediate roles have
been proposed and studied. Arguable the first among them is prosumer (Toffler, 1980
(a portmanteau of the two words producer and consumer). Related terms are lead
users
Get Satisfaction as a company was established in 2007 and has more than 63.000 online communities using their tools, and boasting 9.600,000 visitors a month. It resembles a social media technology by engaging a broad range of end users and lowering the threshold to making contributions with easy to- use tools. The support community at Get Satisfaction is organized around question/answer (discussion) forum, where anyone who is registered can start a new discussion thread or topic and tag it with one of the system’s four different categories: 1) ask a question, 2) share an idea, 3) report a problem and 4) give praise. Table 1 gives an overview of the statistics of the participation in GS, illustrating that there is a mass of participants contributing with postings of the four categories in the online community.
March 2013 19,747 269,280 47 50 269,183
Get Satisfaction is one example of a culture where most users participate because they choose to because they can contribute with improved solutions and find answers to problems occurring locally with the GS software. Champions are one of three user categories and they emerge out of customers, and are appointed as such by GS emProc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016 Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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ployees, after having demonstrated extraordinary skills with the GS software. In the next section methods used for analyzing these masses of data is explained.
We employed a mixed methods approach for data collection and analysis (combining social network analysis and interaction analysis). This allowed us to analyze the empirical data on two different levels; a) macro level (SNA) giving us an overview of all the empirical data and b) the micro level (interaction analysis) providing detailed explanations of selected parts of the empirical data. By using a mixed methods approach and combining SNA and IA we get a fuller understanding of the phenomena being studied than either method by itself could deliver.
As a quantitative approach for studying large online communities, social network
analysis (SNA) provides a set of methods for analyzing the relational aspects of social
structures
By using SNA for analyzing the empirical data we obtain a macro overview, or the “climate”, of the empirical data we collected in GS (Table 1). This can help to answer questions such as who are the most active participants in a large community, who communicate with whom, what subgroups exists and how are they connected, who are the powerful actors, and in what sense are they powerful, and so on. After having used SNA to compute the social structures we can in the next round zoom-in on the details, according to more specific aims (e.g. how is social structure influencing action; what are talked about in conversations, etc.). Doing this interaction analysis is needed.
Interaction analysis (IA) is an interdisciplinary method for the empirical investigation
of interaction of human beings with each other and with objects in their environments
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We can for space reasons only show an example, related to the emergent role of champion and how they are characterized as such. First, the network data providing an overview and then the interaction data will be presented to go into more detail.
In Figure 1 the boxes represent all of the different discussion threads in the online community and the nodes represent the champions. The size of the boxes and nodes reflects the degree centrality. Degree centrality is an SNA measure for calculating the most active discussion threads and the bigger node or box the more active participant or activity in the discussion thread.
What we can interpret from Figure 1 is that champions participate in the most active and largest discussion threads, where there are most activity going on, but why this is the case we need interaction data to tell us more about.
Context: The participants’ discussion centers on various aspects of improvement to the products, the GS tools in our case. We focus on end user (customer) participation and development and the role of champions as mediators between users and developers. As shown below. Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016 Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
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Data extract 1: The extract is from “Share an idea” thread called “sticky or featured topics,” which in its full length contains 57 postings by 44 participants. The extract shows the beginning of the thread. “Sticky” is a term assigned threads judged important, appearing before the others in Internet forums.
Post 1 2 3 4 5
Summary of findings: Champions take on the role of mediating between end-users (customers) and the company’s professional developers. According to Get Satisfaction, “champion” is a role given end-users who make large contributions in the community, such as responding to questions and filling an informal leadership role (getsatisfaction.com). When this happens, the end-user gets a badge around his/her name, implying that this person has managed to become a champion. A champion needs to speak two “languages,” the language of end-users (domain-specific, customer-oriented) and the language of professional developers (technical, softwareoriented). The dynamics of transitioning from end-user to champion may also go the other way. A champion may decide to end the relationship with Get Satisfaction and thereby return to being a regular end-user.
The mediation activity of champions according to our data is that they are
characterized by being anchored twice: a) Champions are partly paid by the company (GS),
which implies a commitment to this company (e.g. brand advocates), which may
cause some of their contributions to be biased, and b) champions started out as
ordinary end users, representing a customer organization like a lead user
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The space provided prevents us from giving more than one empirical extract from our
case study of mass collaboration (involving a crowd of participant) in software
development from the perspective of mutual development (involving different types of
actors with type of power relations. The main finding form this case study is four
identifying patterns in this community of customer-initiated software product
development
Champions emerged in previous work as mediators and translators (Mackay, 1990;
Volkoff et al. 2002; Åsand & Mørch, 2006). We also found that champions were
crucial for mutual development. Mutual development means there are two centers of
development: locally at the customer site and globally in the software house
We believe Get Satisfaction is an example of a “want to participate” culture. The
“want to” participate phenomena is characterized by users participating by their own
free choice and own initiative, rather than being forced or demanded to participate.
Get Satisfaction resembles a culture of participation in lines with Fischer’s notion
“fostering a culture where people have the opportunity to actively participate and be
content creators”
“Twenty years from now we will look back at this period of the early twenty first century as a critical
turning point in economical and social history. We will understand that we entered a new age, one based
on new principles, worldviews and business models where the nature of the game was changed”
Mass collaboration in mutual product development and the emerging role of champions are examples of such a new model of mass collaboration involving different stakeholders in an intricate and productive way. However, researching on mass collaboration entails masses of data –and appropriate methods to analyze this are needed. In further work it would be interesting to continue to use a mixed methods approach combining SNA and IA, and advancing it. Direction for further research is also to ask what motivates the different participants to contribute and spending much of their time to improve products belonging to a company that may profit from it. Why do these users want to put in free time, most of which are unpaid and may gain more benefits to the GS company? Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016 Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2016 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.