Redesigning question & answer sites to promote culturally diverse adoption: what are participants’ needs to exchange in stack exchange?

Abstract

Question and Answer (Q&A) sites have the goal of solving participant’s problems by provid- ing tools for them to collaboratively create answers to posed questions and build a repository of searchable knowledge. More than a repository for information though, these environments are communities of people that interact around the created knowledge. However, because collaborators are spread around the world they tend not to share the same socioeconomic context nor the cultural background. Such differences can either create barriers or opportunities for collaboration, and a lack of observation of these differences might result in less diverse and productive communities. This research is grounded in the perspective that openly-available online environments can be designed to equally support the engagement of culturally diverse communities, and aims to improve the knowledge on how to do so in the case of Q&A sites. While the success of online Question & Answer environments relies on user participation, previous work has shown that the number of contributions varies between countries and that they are also associated with regional cultural values. We follow this lead to examine: (1) If such differences hold for two not previously explored popular Q&A sites; (2) Whether differences in national groups participation also happen because certain countries have a higher percentage of users who are willing to contribute; and (3) What local cultural values and perspectives on collaboration can guide the design of more inclusive Q&A sites and other knowledge-based intercultural peer-production activities. To answer our research questions we use a mixed-methods approach, starting by developing a quantitative exploration of national groups’ participation and the significant explanations for its differences. We then show how these differences can be further understood through a qualitative study, a human values based comparison of the site designers’ perspectives and the participants’ preferences from three national groups. Our quantitative analysis confirm previous results regarding the relation between national culture – more specifically the “Individualism versus Collectivism” construct – and differences in online participation. For instance, we find that the countries with a smaller percentage of participants who engage in answering or commenting to posts are more likely to be from countries that have been shown to be more collectivists (mostly the ones outside North America and Western Europe) or have lower English proficiency indexes. We complement this result with an analysis of interviews with Question & Answer site users from three countries: China, India and United States. Our results show that Indian and Chinese participants seem to search for more social interactions than Americans – an affordance that is in general not supported by the studied sites. This research surfaces the human values inherent to online Question & Answer communities and the existent tensions between different stakeholders collaborating to create high quality knowledge artifacts. Based on that we discuss how specific design decisions on these sites, such as the competitive reward mechanism used to encourage contributions could be changed to encourage currently passive people to contribute. By clarifying the nuanced information underlying the relation between cultural theories and online engagement we hope to contribute to the design of more culturally-aware online environments.