Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2012) | February 2012

The relationships and work that facilitate content creation in large online contributor system are not always visible. Social translucence is a stance toward the design of systems that allows users to better understand collaborative system participation through awareness of contributions and interactions. Like many socio-technical constructs, social translucence is not something that can be simply added after a system is built; it should be at the core of system design. In this paper, we conduct a domain analysis to understand the space of architectural support required to facilitate social translucence in systems. We describe an instantiation of those requirements as a system architecture that relies on data from Wikipedia and illustrate how translucence can be propagated to some basic visualizations which we have created for Wikipedia users. We close with some reflections on the state of social translucence research and some openings for this important design perspective.the community and the health of the community at large.