Essay 1

Compare and contrast the works of Jenny Preece and David Winer in 500 words. What has been their contribution to the development of online communities?



Although they travel on separate paths and their communication mediums are different, both Preece and Winer provided the leadership, enthusiasm and vision which helped bring about the explosion in online communities that we see today.

Jenny Preece, Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, carried out extensive research into the cognitive, social, psychological and affective issues that underpin the design of online communities. Her contribution to the development of online communities is wide-ranging and seminal at the research level.

Over the past ten years she has published four books and miriad journal articles, book chapters and conference papers. She led the way for discussion on the social and usability issues involved in online communities with the publication of Online communities: Designing Usability, supporting sociability (2000) in which she states, "Supporting sociability and designing usability lays the firm foundation on which online communties can thrive" (Preece, 2000, p.xvii).

Her next book, Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction (2002, 2007), builds on her earlier work and incorporates practical interaction design and evaluation strategies. Its central theme is that "design and evaluation are interleaving, highly iterative processes, with some roots in theory but which rely strongly on good practice to create usable products" (Preece, Rogers & Sharp, 2002, p.v). The 2007 edition incorporates current and next generation technologies such as Web 2.0, mobiles, and wearables.

Preece’s journal article and conference paper output show a similar evolution from ground-breaking research linking the importance of sociability and usability in the development of effective online communities to practical interaction design. Recent recearch includes investigations into web communities such as YouTube (Rotman, Golbeck & Preece, 2009) and the role of social networks in community emergency response (Jaeger et al., 2007).

Dave Winer has been described as the "father of modern-day content distribution" (Null, 2007). Unlike Preece, who's an academic specialising in her chosen field of knowledge, Winer is a visionary software developer and entrepreneur with cult figure status. He developed 'outlining' software, invented podcasting, was a pioneer blogger and helped create RSS feeds.

Although he doesn't publish along traditional lines, as Preece does, he's a prolific writer and commentator who uses the medium he's most comfortable with - the web. In the past ten years he's used his weblog, Scripting News and before that his email newsletter, DaveNet, to get his messages into the public realm. "I'm a software designer - that's what I do. But as a writer, I want to leave a legacy" (Cone, 2001). The topics he covers are wide-ranging and diverse although brief and succinct as befits a blogger, "I want to write about five or six things in 200 words each. That's what bloggers do" (The Tech Lab: Dave Winer, 2007).

His perspective on a wide range of topics is valued, in particular, by industry insiders (Cone, 2001), while Preece addresses “a wide range of readers with different needs and aspirations” (Preece, Rogers & Sharp, 2002, p.vii), including students, web designers, users and other researchers.

Both Preece and Winer have made significant contributions to the development of online communities. Preece, through rigorous research, has provided both the theoretical underpinnings and practical strategies to help designers and practitioners create effective online communities. Winer supports Preece's work at the technical level. Podcasting adds an additional dimension to online communication while RSS serves to link online community members together by allowing them to easily update and share information - the fundamental purpose of online communities.

References

Cone, E. (2001). Almost famous. Wired, 9.05. Retrieved September, 3, 2009, from

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.05/winer.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

Jaeger, P. T., Shneiderman, B., Fleischmann, K. R., Preece, J., Qu, Y., & Fei Wu, P. (2007). Community response grids: E-government, social networks, and effective emergency management. Telecommunications Policy, 31(10), 592-604.

Null, C. (2007). The 50 most important people on the web. PC World. Retrieved September 2, 2009, from

http://www.pcworld.com/article/129301-9/the_50_most_important_people_on_the_web.html

Preece, J. (2000). Online communities : Designing usability, supporting sociability. New York ; Chichester: John Wiley.

Preece, J., Sharp, H., & Rogers, Y. (2002). Interaction design : Beyond human-computer interaction. New York, NY: J. Wiley & Sons.

Rotman, D., Golbeck, J., & Preece, J. (2009). The community is where the rapport is -- on sense and structure in the youtube community. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies C&T '09, University Park, PA, USA. 41-50.

The tech lab: Dave Winer . (2007). Retrieved September, 3, 2009, from

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6748103.stm