'Every group carries the flavour of the admins': leadership on Flickr

Abstract

Although leadership in many types of online community has been recognised as important, relatively little has been written about its nature in informal communities, particularly in the context of web2.0. This study explores the role played by Admins on the photo sharing site Flickr. Semistructured interviews with six Admins investigated roles and motivation in some depth. A content analysis was conducted to explore the character of Admins' activities on discussion boards in four types of group. The interviews revealed the dedication that Admins gave to the role. They saw their activities as one of the main critical success factors for any group. Groups were heavily shaped byAdmins. The content analysis revealed that Admins play a wide range of roles in groups, with markedly varying emphasis between different group types. Keywords: Flickr, web2.0, online community, moderation, leadershipAlthough the complex system of moderation that has evolved on Wikipedia is well known and acknowledged as a critical success factor (e.g. Bruckman & Forte, 2008) discussion of web2.0 often glosses over the extent to which systems based on user created content require active human coordination. Because companies running web2.0 sites do not themselves directly undertake moderaton does not mean that such roles do not continue to be performed, but on a voluntary basis. In fact, some web2.0 sites, like Flickr, may be highly dependent on informal leadership roles undertaken by moderators and other activists. This paper sets out to explore the role of Flickr "Admins" by e-interviews and through content analysis of a sample of Admin activities in different group types.

A Model for Context in the Design of Open Production Communities

“…For example, level of trust determines the expectation for reciprocity, which is positively related to positive attitudes toward contributions [Bock et al 2005]. In line with users' contribution behavior, they may also take organizational roles including leaders or moderators [Holmes and Cox 2011;Zhu et al 2012b]. Furthermore, tenure of users (their stage of lifecycle) may sometimes reflect the course of their active participation and their adapted role in a community (contribution as well as organizational) [Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al 2013;Velasquez et al 2014].…”

Community insights

“…Other work discusses how leaders can promote successful communities, advocating leader activities including: to encourage contributions and discussion [13,15,17,27], contribute and read content [5,13], organize and curate content [1,13,27,36], deal with disruptive behavior [1,5,13,15,17], create a positive environment [1,5,13,15], foster connections [17,35], manage new members [17], advertise externally [5,15], and maintain infrastructure [1,5,15,27,36]. Again, these works don't directly examine leaders' main challenges, motivate designs for leader tools, or observe how leaders use such tools.…”

“…Some activities they perform within communities are to encourage contributions and discussion [13,15,27], contribute and read content [5,13], organize and curate content [1,13,27,36], answer questions [13], moderate [1,5,13,15], create a positive environment [1,5,13,15], advertise the community externally [5,15], and maintain infrastructure [1,5,15,27,36]. Prior work documents effective leader strategies for enacting these activities [15,17,19,28,29,35,39].…”

Flickr’s potential as an academic image resource: An exploratory study

“…However, it tends to be the comments that are attached to photos that are the means of interaction between group members, rather than general group discussions (Cox, Clough and Siersdorfer 2011). Such is the cohesion in many groups that users come to view them as additional online communities (Holmes and Cox 2011). Images posted to groups also receive more exposure (Negoescu and Gatica-Perez 2008) and are therefore more likely to be added to people's favorites and are more likely to receive comments and feedback from other members of the group.…”