Social translucence

Social translucence is a term that was proposed by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg to refer to "design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another".

Social translucence represents a tool for transparency, which function is to

• stimulate online participation
• facilitate collaboration (via collaborative filtering but also by helping the construction of trust)
• facilitate navigation (social navigation)

Social transluscence is in particular a core element in Online social networking such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in which they intervene in the possibility for people to expose their online identity, but also in the creation of awareness of other people activities, that are for instance present in the activity feeds that these systems make available.

Social translucence mechanisms have been made available in many web 2.0 systems such as:

• Online communities
• Online social networking
• Wikis (McDonald et al. Zachry) (Chi, Suh & Kittur 2008)

See also

• Collaborative filtering
• Digital traces
• Online communities
• Online identity
• Online participation
• Reputation system

References

• Chi, E. H.; Suh, B.; Kittur, A. (2008), "Providing social transparency through visualizations in Wikipedia", Social Data Analysis Workshop at CHI 2008; 2008 April 6; Florence, Italy 
• Erickson, Thomas; Kellogg, Wendy A. (2000), "Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes", ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7 (1): 59–83, doi:10.1145/344949.345004 
• McDonald, D. W.; Beschastnikh, I.; Kriplean, T.; Borning, A.; Zachry, M. (2009), "System Design for Social Translucence in Socially Mediating Technologies", Socially Mediating Technologies Workshop at the ACM 2009 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'09) 

• Thomas Erickson, Christine Halverson, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, and Tracee Wolf. 2002. Social translucence: designing social infrastructures that make collective activity visible. Commun. ACM 45, 4 (April 2002), 40-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/505248.505270

• McDonald, D. W., S. Gokhman and M. Zachry (2012) Building for Social Translucence: A Domain Analysis and Prototype System. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’12).