Collaborative information finding in smaller communities: The case of research talks

Social navigation and social tagging technologies enable user communities to assemble the collective wisdom, and use it to help community members in finding the right information. However, it takes a significantly-sized community to make a social system truly useful. The question addressed in this paper is whether collaborative information finding is feasible in the context of smaller communities. To answer this question, we developed two social systems specifically focused on smaller communities - CoMeT and Conference Navigator II - and explored several techniques to increase the volume of user contributions. This paper reviews the explored techniques and presents empirical evidence that demonstrate their effectiveness.