EDITOR Jonathan Lazar [e-mail]

from across the street and across the planet. The connections and discussions that result will lead to profound transformations in health care, community safety, disaster response, lifelong learning, business innovation, energy sustainability, environmental protection, and other spheres of important national and international priorities.

Recognizing Dangers, Building Trust

Of course, any sufficiently potent technology, such as social media, is also useful to criminals, terrorists, hate groups, and oppressive regimes intent on quelling dissent. Social-media designers, advocates, and theorists will have to deal with the ethical issues, much as the nuclear scientists of the 1940s and 1950s had to wrestle with the dangers of their science and technology successes.

If responsible designers and researchers for this
new generation of social-participation tools can pro-
vide compelling interfaces while weighing the dan-
gers, they will encourage large numbers of users to
participate. Frequently updated content presented
attractively, tutorials and FAQs, clear navigation
paths, online help, and well-designed features for
reading, searching, browsing, and sharing will help
engage people. Once users have had the chance to
explore a new group and become comfortable with
the content and direction, lightweight participation
tools can encourage the transition to more active
roles. Support for exploring discussions, comments,
and ratings; easily contributing or commenting and
making direct contact with other participants; and
responding to malicious or destructive content will
help users make the potentially scary leap from
lurking to posting. Tools for finding relevant indi-
viduals, forming groups, collaborating, and resolv-
ing differences will help participants gradually
transition to greater levels of engagement starting
with occasional passive participation, moving on to
occasional contribution and engaged collaboration,
and, finally, engaged and committed participation—
completing the evolution from “reader” to “leader”
[ 2]. (See Figure 1.)

[ 2] Preece, J. and Shneiderman, B. “The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-mediated Social Participation,” AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction 1, 1 (2009): 13-32; http://aisel.ais- net.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/

All
Users
Reader
Contributor
Collaborator
Leader

March + April 2010

• Figure 1: The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation. As users become aware of social media, they become readers. Some will become contributors, then collaborators, and possibly leaders [ 2].