An elementary social information foraging model

User interfaces and information systems have become increasing social in recent years, aimed at supporting the decentralized, cooperative production and use of content. A theory that predicts the impact of interface and interaction designs on such factors as participation rates and knowledge discovery is likely to be useful. This paper reviews a variety of observed phenomena in social information foraging and sketches a framework extending Information Foraging Theory for making predictions about the effects of diversity, interference, and cost-of-effort on performance time, participation rates, and utility of discoveries

Citation

Pirolli, P. L. An elementary social information foraging model. 27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009); 2009 April 4-9; Boston, MA.