This is the fifth blog in the miniseries on the Health Factors of CHI. Other blogs already in this miniseries are:

1. Traffic
2. Content
3. Members
4. Liveliness

Last time we talked about the most troublesome predictive health factor: Liveliness. This time we will discuss Interaction.

The Interaction Health Factor

When you are able to create a lively community, the hard work is half done because by definition a lively community has solved a difficult conundrum of participatory media: How do you get people to participate? However, in a healthy community, it is not enough just to participate. There must be interaction with other users. Otherwise, where is the social of social media?

There are two important dimensions to interaction:

1. The amount of conversation you have with a particular user.
2. The number of different users you've communicated with.

Clearly, the more you talk to a user, the more interaction you have with that user, but talking to different users also increases the level of interactions within your community. In fact, the latter has a greater effect on the overall health of the community. The interaction health factor measures the average number of unique participants per topic weighted by the amount of conversation between them. Thus, this health factor provides an estimate of the average number of members a potential user is likely to interact with and the estimated amount of messages that will be exchanged between them. Accordingly, this health factor may be interpreted as the expected scope of the engagement for potential visitors.

Different Modes of Interactions on the Lithium Platform

Because different communities have vastly different kinds of interactions, the interaction health factors also vary greatly across communities. For example, the dominant mode of interaction of a support community consists of a troubled user asking a question and a knowledgeable user answering the question. This kind of interaction usually involves few users with relatively short diagnostic dialogs before arriving at the solution, so support communities tend to have a steady and modest value for the interaction health factor. In contrast, the dominant mode of interaction for an enthusiast community often involves extended discussions among many users. Also, because the topic and amount of discussion is usually event-driven, enthusiast communities tend to have a higher, but more volatile value for their interaction health factor. B2B and internal communities also tend to have lower level of interactions than that of enthusiast communities.

The Current and Future of Interaction

Besides the difference in community purpose, the different web applications, such as forums, blogs, ideas, and tribal knowledge base (TKB), also have drastically different modalities of interaction. However, the current health factors and CHI were developed based on analyses of primarily forum interactions. Blogs, Ideas, and TKB are relatively new products in our platform that do not have 10 years of historical data. Consequently, the expected level of healthy interaction in the current algorithm may be too stringent for these new interaction modalities. As a result, the interaction health factor for communities that use these new applications may appear slightly lower than expected. We have made note of this issue and we will address it in the next revision of our formulae.

I hope this blog gave you a better understanding of interaction and addressed the concerns you may have concerning this health factor. Next time, we will move on to the last health factor, responsiveness. Watch for updates at mich8elwu.

After a month of digression, let's come back to the topic of health factors. Previously, we have covered the three diagnostic health factors:

1. Traffic
2. Content
3. Members

In the next three post, we will explore the predictive health factors. Base on all of your valuable feedbacks, I got the impression that Liveliness is the factor that has raised the most questions. So I will begin with this health factor.

The Liveliness Health Factor

A number of people have asked:  what is liveliness? The liveliness health factor is a perception of the amount of activity within a given space, so it is a measure for the concentration of activities. This health factor is extremely important, because it strongly influences a user's propensity to participate. In fact, liveliness gives an estimate of the likelihood of active participation for community users. The more lively the community appears to be, the more likely an individual is to participate. It's logical to think that a lively community is more likely to respond to the user's question or comment.

Concentration of Activity = Perception of Liveliness

Although modern communities furnish users with many activities, posting messages is still the most visible action that is going to influence a user's perception of the community's liveliness. Since other activities (such as rating contents, tagging messages, chatting with other members, etc.) are less noticeable, they have much less effect on the perceived liveliness of the community.

Look at the above picture and ask yourself: what make it lively? This picture looks lively to a spectator because the children are concentrated, and there are a lot of visible actions. This playground would be much less lively if the same group of children were dispersed throughout the park.

Since liveliness is a concentration measure, the absolute amount of post is not very important. For example, if your community has 200 posts per week and there are 4 boards, then each board gets 50 posts per week on average. That is more than 7 posts a day! Users would perceive this as a pretty lively community. In contrary, if there are 50 boards (same 200 posts per week), then each board will only get 4 posts per week. That is less than 1 post a day! Even though the absolute amount of posting activity is the same (200 per week), the former example has a much higher concentration of post, and therefore gives the perception of greater liveliness than the latter example.

The Current and Future of Liveliness

The question that is often raised is "Do you excluded private boards, archived boards, read-only boards, etc, when computing the liveliness health factor?" In the current version of CHI, the liveliness calculation only excludes boards that are hidden or under a hidden category. These hidden boards may contain some private or archived boards, but they probably do not encompass all of them, and it certainly does not include read-only boards or announcements boards. Consequently, communities with many of these "non-public" boards may appear to have a lower liveliness, because our current calculation may not excluded all boards that are not intended for public participation.

Like the content health factor, liveliness is currently computed at the community level, which prohibits drilling down to identify of categories or boards that are not lively. These two items are already on our roadmaps of to-do items. If you can think of others, please let me know. Also, if there are any questions about liveliness that I did not cover, please bring it up . Let's try to make this a lively discussion.