Making Seed accessible to Newcomers

Buzz

Newcomers need a hooking association with something they have seen: e.g. “live wiki”

It will be a good idea for these words to be part of the description of the platform:

Welcome to Ethosfera’s Seed! Our Live Wiki where you can read, comment, link live documents, and collaborate with Ethosfera!

We need a simple way to communicate to Newcomers how to use Ethosfera’s Seed

Why?

Spain is not the biggest market for Notion (notion has a similar structure to peer production communities)

Semrish

Similar Web

BuiltWIth

Caveat for sources: limited information (likely inaccurate because it wants a paid account before displaying more); websites use a proxy variable: track the traffic on Notion, instead of another more precise metric

Obsidian is even more professionalized and interface-heavy, so if Spanish users have limited exposure to Notion, they will likely not have had any to Obsidian

Point: Users might know of such platforms, but they will likely have a hard time getting used to its functions!

Idea: create graphics (better if moving) that tell any user how to use the platform

Preliminary version on Canva:

Engaged Community

Labeling Comments

Deliberative Platform Design: The case study of the online discussions in Decidim Barcelona: studied how designs can nudge better online deliberations

Conversation Threading (commenting on documents and reply to comments)

Comments Labeling

Marking interface so it allows the user to “label” or “flag” their comment - creates more engagement

Potential labels: question, objection (negative comments lead to more deliberation), clarification, source request, supporting evidence, related idea, suggested edit, summary, other (free text)

Opportunities to also reply to other comments on the document

App/Email Notifications

Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer Homepage: talked about activation, retention, and productivity

Developed suggestions for retention: more retention came from meaningful edits/contributions that keep the user engaged → i.e. the more edits we can make them do in 24 h, the greater the likelihood they will return

Concrete suggestions

Feedback loops: app/email notifications → “someone responded to your comment”

Contributor recognition (continued in "Like Systems/Comment "Picks')

Community-specific reason to return: app/email notification that someone posted a document - e.g. "A New Document was Added on Ethosfera"

Email/App notifications can include a suggestion to what enhanced features you get when you become a Seed member: “Did you know you can post your own documents free of charge and collaborate with Ethosfera? Become a Member now and try this feature!”

Hooking Newcomers after the first 24 hours of their first comment is key for their retention. First app/email notification must be well-timed.

Like Systems/Comment “Picks”

Highlighting High-quality Content as a Moderation Strategy: The Role of New York Times Picks in Comment Quality and Engagement found in 2022 that comment “picks” by the moderators under politically charged news publications in NYT, lead to more fruitful deliberations

Rationale: Corporate Wiki Users: Results of a Survey studied that one of the reasons why corporations use “inside” wikis is if they believe it increases their credibility. Thus, if Ethosfera’s Seed maintains a highly professionalized image, with thoughtful contributing comments, our retention rate will be higher. A way to signal what is a “good,” or “thoughtful”, or “professional” contribution could be through picks

Community Guidelines

(similar to those of subreddits)

A set of rules on what the expectations of the community is, central goal + a code of conduct

Point: professional + the space to explain the Chatham House Rules that Ethosfera follows.

Communicating Safety

Currently, to make a Seed account, the only safety feature to ensure ownership of the account is the passkey which requires biometrics

Despite the fact that there is an option to learn more about how “passkey” functions, said information is linked to a lengthy (but informative) page on GitHub

To decrease the likelihood of newcomers being deterred (fearing for how their data is processed), we could add a brief notification when the user is about to create their passkey: “Seed Hypermedia does not store your biometric information.” and add one more sentence that simplifies the process of how Seed uses said data. Suggestions: only your local device stores your data; Seed uses an encrypted version, etc.

The link to GitHub should be kept for access to further and more detailed information, but the summarized/disclaimer version could be added for informing less tech-savvy users

We should discuss the possibility that mentioning of biometrics at all could deter more users than deterring less