Short paper explaining Community Equity

1. Community Equity Overview
Author: peter.reiser@sun.com
Open Source Site : http://kenai.com/projects/community-equity
(c) 2007-2009 Sun Microsystems Inc.
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2. Table of Contents
What is Community Equity ?............................................................................................................... 2
Community Equity Overview.......................................................................................................... 2
Information Equity (IQ)...................................................................................................................3
Personal Equity (PEQ).....................................................................................................................3
Contribution Equity (CQ)................................................................................................................ 4
Participation Equity (PQ).................................................................................................................4
Tag Equity........................................................................................................................................4
Mathematical model............................................................................................................................. 5
Calculation....................................................................................................................................... 5
Equity Aging.........................................................................................................................................6
Value Administration............................................................................................................................ 6
Supported activities..........................................................................................................................7
Blacklist Management..................................................................................................................... 8
Use Cases.................................................................................................................................... 8
Equity Administration......................................................................................................................9
User Cases...................................................................................................................................9
Equity Visualization............................................................................................................................11
My Community Equity ................................................................................................................. 11
People ranking............................................................................................................................... 11
Country Ranking............................................................................................................................12
Content Ranking............................................................................................................................ 12
Community Ranking......................................................................................................................12
References
1: Sun Microsystems Inc., Community Equity open source site, 2009
2: Reiser, How to build vibrant communities , 2007
3: Reiser , SunSpace blog , 2007
4: Reiser, Diamond, Patent application: Method and System for tracking social capital, 2008
5: Community Equity Open Source team , documentation , 2009
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3. Introduction
If you want to build vibrant communities [1] with active participation and contributions of the
community members you need to address :
• Architecture / Technology – build a scalable and extensible technical architecture to
seamless integrate existing and future services into your social community platform
• Methodology – a methodology on how to build and active manage online communities
• Value System – a value system which evaluates the value of peoples contributions and
participation to help answer the question “What is in it for me?”.
Sun Microsystems has implemented this model as part of their internal social community platform
for the technical field engineering called SunSpace.[2]
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4. What is Community Equity ?
In a nutshell - Community Equity is a social value system[3] for online communities which
evaluates the values of people, content and tags based on the social activities of community
members.
Community Equity Overview
A social activity relates to a person and to an information object.
The Community Equity model assigns a value for each social activity. Furthermore each value has
an aging time associated with it. This means that the value of an activity is reduced based on its
aging over time. The assumption is that more current information has higher value.
In a modern Web 2.0 application a person can assign tags to information. This is meant to provide
keywords about the information so that it can be located more easily via searching or browsing.
Based on these simple associations the Community Equity model calculates the following
indicators:
1. Information Equity (IQ)
2. Personal Equity (PEQ=CQ+PQ)
◦ Contribution Equity (CQ)
◦ Participation Equity (PQ)
3. Tag Equity (TQ)
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5. Information Equity (IQ)
The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically
calculates a numeric value that represents the importance, relevance, and quality of the information.
Information can be a wiki page, blog post, forum entry, or document.
The activities that the IQ captures includes:
* How many times users (repeat) have viewed the information
* How many times this information has been downloaded by users (in the case of an attachment)
* How many times this information was reused by an individual
* User feedback (ratings, comments)
Personal Equity (PEQ)
The purpose of developing a Community Equity (PEQ) value for each individual is to help
recognize their achievements and their participation in the community.
Here is the calculation:
PEQ = CQ + PQ
Contribution Equity (CQ)
The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person.
It is the sum of all Information Equity (IQ) of a person.
Participation Equity (PQ)
The Participation Equity calculates a value for the active participation of a person. It is calculate by
the sum of all participative social acitvites of a person e.g.
• view/download of information
• Ratings provided
• Comments provided
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6. • Tag or Tags provided
• Reuse of content
Tag Equity
Tag Clouds are calculated by frequency of use. This does not necessarily reflect the value of a tag
(or the topic a tag represents). By calculating the Equity of a Tag based on social activities of the
community (add or edit, comment, view, etc.) we can dynamically calculate a Tag equity of all
contributions related to this tag.
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7. Mathematical model
To reduce the calculations we use a linear model.
That allows us to do not track the whole history to calculate Equity values. We can just change 2
linear trend parameters after every action and after aging time period.
Calculation
Single action case:E = k * T + b(1)
k = - P / A (2)
b = - k * ( D + A ) (3)
where:
T - time of the calculation
E - Equity value at time T
k,b - linear trend parametersD - time of the action
P - Points of the Equity just after the action (at moment D)
A - Aging period
Multiple actions case:
Every action is described by its: time, value on that the equity is changed, and validity period, i.e.:
Di, Pi, and Ai, so it corresponds to ki and bi - according to the formula (2) and (3).
So, the total Equity value is:
E = k1 * T + b1 + k2* T + b2 + ... kn * T + bn = sum ki * T + sum bi = K * T + B
where:
K = sum ki
B = sum bi
So, K and B really describe all history to the moment, they are valid between the actions and end of
actions validity.
If there is a new action, we calculate corresponded values k new and bnew according (2) and (3) and
change K and B:
Knext = K + knew (4)
Bnext= B + bnew
After validity period we remove the corresponded k old and bold components from K and B:
Knext = K - kold (5)
Bnext = B - bold
So, all calculation is formula (1) - to get the current Equity value, (4) - for corresponded Equities
after the actions, and (5) - when action validity is ended.
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8. Equity Aging
Equity values age over time.
Example Information Aging: A technical white paper about Internet Security from 1999 was really
valuable at that time but might be obsolete today ...
Example Reputation Aging: 15 years ago I was an expert in IBM mainframe integration. I had a
great reputation reputation of fixing any problems related to SNA.
Over the last 15 years I refocused my expertise and skills and my reputation (and skills) about IBM
mainframe integration has gone.
To calculate time-based equity, we assume that any action, such as view, download, rating, and
updates, has a "time-to-live" value . This value goes to zero linearly.
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9. Administration
This section describes the administration functions and tasks for configuring and managing the
Community Equity services.
Value Administration
The Community Equity Value administration allows to configure values and aging time which are
associated with user's social activities related to the Information Equity and Participation Equity
• Information Equity (IQ) = sum(all activities related to an information)
• Contribution Equity (CQ) = sum (all IQ where a user is the author)
• Participation Equity (PQ) = sum(all"consuming" activities related to
an information e.g. view,rate,comment)
• Aging = the time by when the associated value is aging to 0
• Activity = a social activity of a user related to and information
Supported activities
• CREATE: Indicates that an information has been created.
• DELETE: Indicates that an information has been deleted.
• CLONE: Indicates that an information has been cloned.
• RATE xx : Indicates that an information has been rated.
• COMMENT: Indicates that an information has been commented.
• UPDATE_CONTENT: Indicates that the content of an information has been updated.
• UPDATE_META_DATA: Indicates that the meta data of an information has been
updated.
• TAG: Indicates that an information has been tagged.
• VIEW: Indicates that an information has been viewed.
• DOWNLOAD: Indicates that an information has been downloaded.
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10. Blacklist Management
The blacklist administration allows to block equity value assignment for people, groups and
information. An administrator can add/remove person, group or information and apply rules to
block the assignment of own or receiving equity values for activities.
Use Cases
1. add/remove people - block all equity value assignment for a given person
1. block own activities (self generated Equity values)
1. Example: block all activities of a person like create,edit,rate etc.)
2. block receiving activities ( Equity generated by the community related to a users
contribution)
1. Example: block all community activities like view,rate etc. related to
information of a person
2. add/remove group - block all equity value assignment for a given group
1. block group activities (group generated Equity values)
1. Example: block all activities of a members of a group like create,edit,rate
etc.)
2. block receiving activities for information of members of a group ( Equity generated
by the community related to information of a member of a group)
1. Example: block all community activities like view,rate etc. related to
information of members of a group
3. Information Equity - block information equity for a given Information
1. Example: block all activities like create, edit, rate, view etc. for a given
information
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12. Equity Administration
The equity administration function allows to cancel equity values related to an activity
User Cases
The administration interface allows to cancel
1. own activities of a person
2. receiving activities of a person
3. activities related to a information
The activities can be filtered by
1. start and end date and time.
2. own activities of a person
3. receiving activities of a person
4. related to an information
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13. Equity Visualization
The Community Equity software provides a set of widgets to visualize the Community Equity
model.
My Community Equity
This widget shows in real time the Contribution and Participation Equity of a Person.
People ranking
This widget displays the top 10 people. In addition, it shows the ranking of the person either as bold
(Name) or the ranking position if a person is not in the top 10.
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14. Country Ranking
This widget displays the top 10 countries with the highest Community Equity average per person in
a country.
Content Ranking
This widget displays the top ten Content with the highest Informaton Equity . In addition it shows
the ranking of the contribution of a person in bold.
Community Ranking
This widget displays the top ten Communities with the highest Tag Equity of a given co
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