Users in Volatile Communities: Studying Active Participation and Community Evolution
User Modeling 2007, (2007)Abstract
Active participation of a person in a community is a powerful indicator of the person’s interests, preferences, beliefs and
(often) social and demographic context. Community membership is part of a user’s model and can contribute to tasks like personalizedservices, assistance and recommendations. However, a community member can be active or inactive. To what extend is a communitystill representative of the interests of an inactive participant? To gain insights to this question, we observe a communityas an evolving social structure and study the effects of member fluctuation. We define a community as a high-level temporalstructure composed of “community instances” that are defined conventionally through observable active participation and arecaptured at distinct timepoints. Thus, we capture community volatility, as evolution and discontinuation. This delivers usclues about the role of the community for its members, both for active and inactive ones. We have applied our model on a communityexhibiting large fluctuation of members and acquired insights on the community-member interplay.
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