Performance and retention

To assess the impact of individual online characteristics on performance and retention, we used xt models in Stata to estimate logistic regressions that model the relationship between the individual online behavior and (1) the probability of receiving online response as a measure of performance, and (2) the probability of posting again within average time, within a quarter, or posting to another E-Democracy forum (i.e., migration) as alternative measures of retention. The dependent variables are binary indicators. The independent variables are the prior level of contribution of the user, whether the user had posted to other forums in the past, the user’s degree centrality and brokering position in the forum’s social network, and the kind of content and length of the post. A control variable that represents the forum’s number of contributors was also included to account for the forum’s collective effect on the individuals’ behavior. These multilevel models considered the posts nested within forums and users. Table45describes the results of these regression analyses.

Unlike what has been observed in related research [4], compared to newcomers, users with more experience as contributors were less likely to receive an online response. However, even though old-timers are less likely to receive a response, they are significantly more likely to post again in the forums. These results have two possible explanations: (1) there are differences in online interactions that take place in systems for urban communities as opposed to systems with global reach; and (2) users with different levels of experience in the local forums tend to use the system in different ways. For example, more experienced users might tend to use the forums as a

tool to propagate information on a periodic basis, rather than to acquire information. On the other hand, newcomers might tend to engage in more back-and-forth conversations in the forum. These results also reveal that power-users are much less likely to migrate to other E-Democracy forums, thus confirming their commitment to the focal forums.

Membership overlap is correlated with lower likelihood to receive a response and more likeli-hood to migrate to another E-Democracy forum. These results can signify that membership overlap is often associated with the need to cross-post information for information dissemination across several geographical areas in the city. Such information dissemination need is often a one-way path in which an online response is not necessarily required.

Aligned with the expectations from prior research on social capital [92], central users are more likely to receive a social capital benefit available through the local information system. Users with higher degree centrality (more prior online interactions with other users in the forums) are more likely to receive a response to their requests. These users are also more likely to continue posting in the same forums in the future, and much less likely to migrate to other forums. This result indicates that stronger connections with other members enable users to benefit more from the forum (by getting responses). Beyond that, stronger connections among users contribute to make the system more viable, as they tend to keep posting in the forum.

While it was expected that brokers in the forums’ social networks were more likely to get benefits [16], we found no support for an effect on the probability of receiving a response. The brokering position is not significantly related to retention either. It is possible that these results are associated with the rather low and homogeneous values of the network constraint measure in our data.

Our analysis of the kinds of content suggests that they matter for performance, but not for retention. Compared to non-mobilizations, posts that are coded as active mobilizations are signifi-cantly less likely to obtain an online response. Compared to non-mobilizations, the probability of receiving a response drops by a factor of 0.529 when the post is coded as an active mobilization.

This means that while the largest share of posts are active mobilizations, these posts lead to little content generation. Thus, they have a negative effect on the performance of the forums. On the other hand, passive mobilizations were not significantly different than non-mobilizations in their impact on performance and retention. Furthermore, post length of the post is also significantly

Table 45: Performance and retention: online response and new post at the individual level

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Response Within avg. Within quarter Migrated

Old-timer 0.802^⇤⇤⇤ 1.463^⇤⇤⇤ 1.443^⇤⇤⇤ 1.306

Power user 0.585^⇤⇤⇤ 1.856^⇤⇤⇤ 2.046^⇤⇤⇤ 0.315^⇤

Membership overlap 0.711^⇤⇤⇤ 1.008 0.906 17.28^⇤⇤⇤

Degree cent. (log) 1.455^⇤⇤⇤ 1.675^⇤⇤⇤ 2.114^⇤⇤⇤ 0.173^⇤⇤⇤

Brokering 1.022 1.112 1.145 0.407^⇤⇤⇤

Passive mob. 1.071 0.998 0.932 1.001

Active mob. 0.529^⇤⇤⇤ 1.079 1.105 1.081

Network size (log) 0.939 0.457^⇤⇤⇤ 0.334^⇤⇤⇤ 8.728^⇤⇤⇤

# words (log) 0.840^⇤⇤⇤

Responded 2.559^⇤⇤⇤ 2.299^⇤⇤⇤ 0.320^⇤⇤⇤

Observations 23006 21605 21605 21605

AIC 28102.4 24160.9 18819.1 6088.4

BIC 28198.9 24256.7 18914.9 6184.2

Exponentiated coefficients

⇤p < 0.05,^⇤⇤p < 0.01,^⇤⇤⇤p < 0.001

related to the chance of obtaining online responses from the neighborhood forums. As suggested by prior work [73], shorter posts are significantly more likely to receive a response.

Our analysis also provides support for a significant relationship between online feedback and user retention in E-Democracy online forums for local communities. Users who received responses to their prior posts are more likely to post again in their local forums than those who did not receive any answer. This result confirms what has been consistently found in different studies of participatory information systems with global reach. Online response is a significant predictor of future participation in public newsgroups [4, 73], Facebook [15], large enterprise social sites [13], and other user-generated content sites [90, 129]. We were not able to find support for this relationship in a preliminary study [97] that explored a smaller dataset of posts from a subset of the same forums. In such analysis, the effect size of the user’s prior level of contribution was much larger than the estimation in the current study, and online response was not a significant factor. To better understand this difference, we conducted further analysis on the data and found that there is a significant interaction between prior level of contribution and online response (p < 0.001). The positive effect of responsiveness is significantly larger for newcomers than other contributors, as illustrated in Figure 10. This offers a feasible explanation for the result discrepancies in the two studies with two different sample sizes.