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Digital collectives are computer-mediated places where a large number of people come together to interact. Back in the 80s and early 90s, users mainly inhabited these online environments to talk with each other—e.g. discussion lists, Usenet newsgroups, etc. Now, however, some digital collectives focus on the creation of artifacts, the collection and distribution of goods, and the accretion of public knowledge. This minitrack focuses on understanding the production and consumption of information in these spaces.

Why and how do people contribute to digital collectives? How are blogs and wikis changing the way people use and create information? Will millions of people adding tags to online content affect use patterns? Now that online communities are producing goods, what do we know about the economy of online cooperation? How are users finding, using, and interacting with these collective repositories of information? How are these technologies changing the ways that people work and play?

Digital collectives are also starting to permeate the physical world. Media spaces such as teleconferencing rooms allow groups of collocated and remote people to stay in touch. Table displays and architecture arrangements that respond to activity bridge the gap between the digital and the physical in exciting ways.

This minitrack at HICSS will focus on how people produce and consume goods in these new social spaces—both online and off. In particular, we are interested in work addressing the design, creation and use of information in many settings, particularly in ways that are newly emerging and especially innovative. We seek high quality papers across a broad spectrum of topics in this area.


Specific topics include but are not restricted to:

• How does collective annotation change the ways information is found, shared, and used? Will socially annotated content pave the way to shared taxonomies?
   
• How do social hierarchies and formal processes develop in originally unstructured online spaces such as wikis?
   
• The design and uses of social visualizations in digital collectives; that is, visualizations of social data for social purposes
   
• How can collections of text, audio, or video be annotated and summarized?
   
• Multimedia document browsing, reading, interacting
   
• Digital collectives that allow users to engage in social analysis of data and sensemaking
   
• Mixes, mashups and re-edits of material are fascinating. How and why are people creating these new forms of content?
   
• Social ethnographies of collective spaces
   
• How do digital collectives in the workplace differ from their public counterparts?
   
• What are the privacy and accountability implications in these new social spaces?
   
• The evolution of memes: how do memes move within a social space or spread from one venue to another? How is this evolution different from what used to happen before the Internet? For instance, the Numa Numa dance video created by a teenager in his room went from a Web portal in 2004 to Disney’s Chicken Little animation movie in 2005.
   
• What new types of interaction are enabled by digitally augmenting physical space?