Post in Participation Inequality

I agree that participation information is important, Steve. One of our [my?]
goals for GroupServer is to have the best participation statistics of any
message-based system: including keywords, and post statistics.

We have plans for adding more participation information to groups and profiles.
Recently, we added the ability to view the participation statistics in a group
  http://groupserver.org/groups/development/stats.html
but there is still some way to go. In particular, I would dearly love to plot
the number of members in the group over time.

In addition to the simple membership statistics, Dan and I are quite keen to
add “sociograms”, which would visualise who interacts with whom. If someone
asks me about sociograms in a new topic I will explain them more fully, and
tell you how I was inspired by the Wattle Tree visualisation of Trac that Judy
Kay help develop
  http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/research/tr/tr582.pdf

I also agree with your second point, Steve: the user should be able to see what
has happened in the last week, which is possible now. Using email, the messages
that the user has or has not read are marked read. With the Web, topics that
have new posts are marked "unvisited", as are posts that the user has not seen.
Dates are displayed against all topics and posts. Various Web Feed readers also
indicate if a post is read or unread. Is there something else that we do not
do, Steve?

I am against grouping anything by a "week" because it gets into all sorts of
religious and cultural arguments about what a week *is*. Someone else can start
that fight… I could indicate when Kalends, Nones, and Ides occur, but that
would be too obscure for most people ☺ Besides, not all groups would benefit
from the weekly grouping:
   http://groupserver.org/groups/development/messages/topics.html

Addressing your third point, any modification to a post (such as adding tags or
rating) would have to wait until we have a mechanism for tracking all changes
to the posts, and have a mechanism to back out of those changes. This *major*
item of infrastructure has been dubbed the “audit trail” project; some other
items also rely in it being done, such as allowing managers to edit aspects of
a user's profile. (Once again, open an “Audit Trail” topic if you want to know
more ☺)

The technical challenge of rating posts aside, we also have the problem of the
usefulness of such a mechanism. As Richard says, the similar feature in Google
has very little use. From my own experience, if users cannot be bothered using
topics correctly, then I cannot expect them to take time out to add extra
metadata, which is only available in one of or three interfaces! Adding tags to
posts is a different story, as I can see the participation coach (alias forum
manager) using them to highlight important posts, such as those written by a
guest speaker in a public issues forum.

Finally, you are right that there are many unanswered research questions
relation to participation in online groups. I am especially interested in how
invitation-only forums differ from more open groups. However, research is very
expensive, and fraught with difficulties. For example, controlling external
factors (promotion of the forum, external events that may make the forum
popular, the weather, the time of year, the changing membership of the forum…)
make experimentation a nightmare.

I actually have a small research project on this month. I will keep this group
informed with how it goes.