I have three active projects going right now. Each project, though, often has multiple studies and papers. All three projects concern questions about how the technological design of social computing / social media systems influences the user behavior on those systems. In short, I am trying to understand incentive mechanisms in social computing: causal relationships between technology designs and user behavior that can be re-used across many different types of social media systems.
My main project, Practical Incentives for Contribution, looks at how we can design features in social media systems that encourage users to contribute information to these systems. Since social media systems by definition depend on user-contributed content, this is one of the most fundamental design challenges that a social media system must overcome. Right now I am studying three different incentive mechanisms: setting a minimum threshold, taking advantage of side effects, and the power of simply asking for contributions.
Another project I am working on, the Life-cycles in Social Media project, is joint work with my Cliff Lampe and Nicole Ellison. I am working with these two professors at MSU to try to understand the different ways that people use social media (such as Facebook and Everything2), what value they get out of using social media, and why they might stop. We divide the different types of use into categories using a life-cycle model (lurking, contributing, collaborating, governance, and exiting), and study the use in each category to develop a bigger picture of how these new systems are being used.
Finally, I have a longer-term interest in finding ways to help non-experts improve their Home Computer Security. One of the really valuable features of understanding incentive mechanisms is that they allow you to design both the social behavior and the technical features in socio-technical systems, leading to new types of social computing systems. I believe that there is promise in applying these tools to design a novel social computing system to improve the decision making among home computer users. However, there is much research that is needed before such a system can be designed, built and deployed in a usable manner. My dissertation takes a few first steps in this direction, and I intend to continue down this path in the future.