I (also a metafilter member) have been researching how to manage and moderate online communities this week. Lots of interesting stuff to read but not much scientific research, I'm afraid.
Matt, Metafilter's founder, gave a talk on community moderation at this year's SXSWi http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/ . To sum it up: good moderation = moderators and powerful troubleshooting/profiling/stats tools.
Unfortunately I haven't found much about community growth and innovation, but I've just started my research. I've been thinking about setting up a blog/wiki on this topic. Anyone interested in this?
This topic comes up often enough that I imagine a blog or wiki would get some interest.
As for scientific research: That's really quite hard to do when dealing with people stuff. (I participated in some psych/social research that was laughably badly flawed.) I did some verification of my own ideas for my own edification while very ill, largely housebound and online a great deal. I would basically predict (to myself only) what was going to happen and then watch and see if that actually happened, then intercede at some point and see what happened. My predictions were accurate enough that I concluded I wasn't imagining things and my judgement was fairly good. But there is no documentation of any of that. <shrug>
In that interview he specifically states that he tried lots of different approaches for commenting / regulation / non regulation etc.
EDIT:
The most community involvement I get is when i give something away. The The regulars and base community utilize the forums and self moderate, though i need to regularly post content for them to discuss.
And very true that there isn't much research here. The bibliography I did for CFP2008 has links to a couple of great research papers by Susan Herring from about 10 years ago but there's not a lot since then -- http://cfp.wikia.com/wiki/Dealing_with_hate_speech%2C_flamin...
Yes, I'm interested. This article was relevant to some community building efforts I'm involved with, and I'd love to read more veteran insights on the subject.
Matt, Metafilter's founder, gave a talk on community moderation at this year's SXSWi http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/ . To sum it up: good moderation = moderators and powerful troubleshooting/profiling/stats tools.
Unfortunately I haven't found much about community growth and innovation, but I've just started my research. I've been thinking about setting up a blog/wiki on this topic. Anyone interested in this?