Assignment  #1  –  HCI  course  at  Coursera  April,  2013    Luiz  Manghi  –  http://bit.ly/luizmanghi    The assignment #1 consisted of choosing an activity and observe people doing some tasks related to it. I observed a political Facebook group called Direitos Urbanos (Urban Rights) that is very active online and offline here in my city (Recife, Brazil). My main goal was to try to answer the question: "What's the most effective way to join people together to help a cause?". Facebook has been used a lot for the purpose of discussing various subjects, and my intention was to check how the available tools fulfill this need, if it does.  I took for observation two persons with a different level of engagement with the group and besides that I observed the group itself, searching for some gaps in the communication process, looking for some insights and watching their behavior as people and group.

Engaged I interviewed and observed Nadja. A 47 years old woman, who is very active in the group. She not only consume the content posted in the group, but also publicate fresh content. She often comment in the posts, share on her timeline, and so on. Nadja participates in other groups too and these groups also use Facebook as a tool for communication and decision-making about online and offline actions. Before the internet, she had already participated in political groups. She mentioned she feels lack of participation in real life actions by the people today.

While she's using the Facebook to read important content from these groups, she constantly turns off the chat, to concentrate better. We did shared-screen observation through Skype and when she logged in the chat was inactive, so I ask her why.

Nadja with the chat in offline mode.

To Nadja, the role of the Facebook in the organization of groups is to facilitate communication and be a source of content that she wouldn't find easily in the media. The amount of content is mentioned by Nadja as a good and bad thing at the same time. It's good to have a lot of content disposable to many people in an easily way, but it's too much content that starts to not allow a focus on something.

First thing Nadja did when he enter the group everyday is to look for subjects that are affecting the city right now.

In one of the publications that she read during the observation she mentioned that that discussion was a waste of time for some reasons and she wouldn't comment because she believe not worth discussing it. Imagine if Nadja could start a votation to decline that discussion.

That discussion is a waste of time for Nadja. Nadja is worried about the 'off topic' thing in the group. She believes that this kind of content takes out the focus of the contents that really matters. It seems contraditory, but Nadja says that this kind of content is important too, somehow. She already posted an 'off topic' content in the group. So this contradition shows that it's an important content for Nadja, it just don't fit well in the Facebook way of organizing conversations.

Another interesting point said by Nadja is the academicism of some texts posted in the group. The language used sometimes is too colloquial that she needs a dictionary to understand some terms. So, if Nadja do that, she can record a synonymous or something explaining a part of the text, so the next person that would read the article, will not need to look outside anymore, in case of missunderstanding.

Nadja seems worried about strange eyes in the group, people from government and media that are interested in the people who is more engaged in the discussions, for the good and for the bad. She mentioned that she receives a job offer because of the

content she posted in the group and on the other hand she told that some journalists express to her the fear of participate in the group because of the fear of being fired or alerted in their jobs. So secure is an important thing to Nadja.

During my entire conversation with Nadja, she often purpose resolutions for some problems. Ideas and projects constantly comes out of her mind.

Sympathizer

Felipe is a 23 years old guy who are in the Facebook group, but he doens't participate much. Because of this lack of use, I did just an interview with him, not an observation.

For his lack of participation, Felipe mentions the fact that he doesn't feel prepared to colaborate in the discussion. It's too academic sometimes and people who are discussing seems to know a lot about the topics. But he makes a point of he doesn't want the content to be less depth, it's him who needs more involvement in the subject to understand. And he mentioned the big amount of content as a bad thing, because he can't read all that. That inhibits a more present participation of Felipe in the group.

As Nadja, Felipe also mentioned as good the fact that he wouldn't find easily in the media the kind of content that is on the Facebook group. So, it seems like this contradition between importance of varied content and the overshare of this same content bothers the users. It shows a breakdown in the manner that content is showed and managed in Facebook groups.

Observation of the group

An interesting thing occurred during my observation period. An 'off topic' gets a too hot discussion because the group noticed that a girl was trying to generate polemic in the group and the group itself starts a conversation about what they have to do with this girl, either she should be banned from the group or not. So, in an ideal space this people should be allowed to vote about things like ban people from the group, continue or decline a discussion, etc.

Insights collected during the observation period

1. The posts should be taggered by subjects and Nadja should be able to set a personalized dashboard to show her preferred subjects at a glance.

2. She should be able to easily configurate this dashboard.

3. Since people use Facebook groups also as a decision-making space, they should be able to instantly set a private group chat, with video allowed, to make short meetings. Something like the Google Hangout with the choose to broadcast or not.

4. It would be useful if the platform was gameficated, seeking to stimulate real life participation of people with scores, badges, and so on. Outside actions should reward people. Perhaps making jokes like 'couch activist', revolution frontman, and this kind of labels based on profile scores and real life participation.

5. Make available an 'concentrate mode' in the application, to people who choose to focus 100% on the group at a given time or period.

6. The big amount of content bothers people if it's not organized well. We should divide the content display in different areas like latest posts, most active, user's preferred subjects, events, etc.

7. People should be able to initiate a votation for decline a post or to ban somebody for bad behavior, for example.

8. An organized 'off topic' space is necessary. People find important to share other things that they believe or see as inspirable, but this content should be outside the main space for discussions.

9. People should be able to, while reading an article, link a word to a synonymous or explain a part of the text. This will be important to avoid doubts and missunderstandings for the other persons who will be reading the article after.

10. We should improve the security of our platform. People should feel the will to post, comment and so on. They should never be afraid of being part of the group and participating on it. This could be done by invite-only network. This configuration of the group should be user's choice.

11. We should organize the content in a way that it never seems overwhelmed. People should not receive a notification about all the things posted in the group, they can set up a daily, weekly or month resume of the content posted in the group.

12. As real life actions are a very important thing to these kind of groups, we should make available an event creator with tools for discussing the event itself and organizing the preparation of all related to the event.

13. People should be able to follow a subject. They could make a list of tags that they are interested in and every post that is marked with this tag should be rapidly delivered to them. In general, this should be a subject oriented platform.

14. We should have a solution purposition's form and subject oriented rooms in some contexts of the platform. Like when people are discussing a urban mobility project, for an example. They should be able to purpose their own solution, be it a drawing, text explanation, etc. People should share and discuss their own ideas.

15. Like happened back in the IRC days of internet, these groups should have an operator (admin) and his helpers to maintain the group. We should offer a bunch of admin tools for this people to organize the group their manner.

16. The platform should offer a wide variety of tools and when an user is creating a new group, he choose what he wants to put in the group. This could be changed easily after the creation of the group.

17. People with more technical knowledge should be able to create articles explaining te bigger picture of some subject and put that in an appropriate place to the other people that needs and are interested in this kind of content can read.