Open content communities such as wikis derive their value from the work done by users. However, a key challenge is to elicit work that is sufficient and focused where needed. We address this challenge in a geographic open content community, the Cyclopath bicycle route finding system. We devised two techniques to elicit and focus user work, one using familiarity to direct work opportunities and another visually highlighting them. We conducted a field experiment, finding that (a) the techniques succeeded in eliciting user work, (b) the distribution of work across users was highly unequal, and (c) user work benefitted the community (reducing the length of the average computed route by 1 kilometer).

We present the system design and rational for a novel social microcalendar called Timely. Our system has been inspired by previous research on calendaring and popular social network applications, in particular microblogging. Timely provides an open, social space for enterprise users to share their events, socialize, and discover what else is going on in their network and beyond. A detailed analysis of the events shared by users during the site's first 47 days reveals that users willingly share their time commitments despite an existing culture of restricted calendars.

Behavioral statescan be transferred to others, leading people to behave in ways similar to those around them. Can this phenomenon of behavioral contagion be seen in the workplace? Using employees' organizational social media data and their workplace hierarchical network structure, we studied contagion across a large multinational corporation, focusing on an important workplace behavior - employee engagement. We measured employees' engagement based on their word choice in organizational social media, and we applied a longitudinal statistical technique which controls for homophily, employees' traits and prior expressions of engagement. We found that engagement and disengagement spread from one employee to another with direct peers exerting the strongest influence. While engagement-spread was more powerful laterally among people at the same organizational level, disengagement-spread followed the vertical managerial chain. Further, we found that disengaged co-workers exerted a stronger influence on employee's future engagement compared to the engaged co-workers. Our results suggest the need for organizations to sense and address workplace disengagement promptly. Moreover, our findings offer opportunities for using workplace interventions to promote engagement and mitigate disengagement.

Existing enterprise calendaring systems have suffered from problems like rigidity, lack of transparency, and poor integration with social networks. We present the system design and rationale for a novel social coordination mechanism, called "Suggestions," that addresses these issues. Our system integrates ideas drawn from designs of lightweight polling systems and one's social network into an open calendar tool, providing a space for users to coordinate, socialize around, or negotiate the "what" and the "when" of their events. Suggestions was released inside a large enterprise setting, where initial interviews revealed users' thoughts on transparent scheduling, reaching wider audiences and task appropriateness, and suggested ways to improve our design.

Social psychology offers several theories of potential use for designing techniques to increase user contributions to online communities. Some of these techniques follow the "compliance without pressure" approach, where users are led to comply with a request without being subjected to any obvious external pressure. We evaluated two such techniquesfoot-in-the-door and low-ball -in the context of Cyclopath, a geographic wiki. We found that while both techniques succeeded, low-ball elicited more work than foot-in-the-door. We discuss design and research implications of applying these (and other such techniques) in online communities.