LogiLogi: The Quest for Critical Mass

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LogiLogi: The Quest for
Critical Mass
Wiersma, Wybo
mail@wybowiersma.net
King's College London
In this abstract, and more so in the poster-
presentation, we will report on the process
of, and the problems involved in, gaining a
critical mass of users for an interactive hypertext
application for the Digital Humanities. The aim
of any DH application ultimately is to be used,
but for collaborative ones, the contributions and
interactions of existing users are often what
make it worthwhile for new visitors. Gaining an
initial critical mass of users for such applications
is notoriously hard, but especially important if
they are ever to be used at all.
First we briefly introduce LogiLogi, the system
on which we are going to try to get a community
started. Next our strategy for gaining users,
some possible improvements, and attempts so
far, are explained. Here we will also discuss the
kinds of users we target, and the possible size of
the application's critical mass. We finish with an
overview of the usage-data that our poster will
report on.
1. System
LogiLogi is a Web 2.0 application that tries
to find an informal middle-road between good
conversations and journal-papers by providing
a form of quick, informal publication, peer-
review, and annotation of short philosophical
texts. It is intended for all those ideas that one
cannot turn into a full-sized paper, but that one
deems too interesting to leave to the winds.
It does not make use of forum-threads (avoiding
their many problems), but of tags and links that
can also be attached to phrases by people other
than the text's original author. It also features
a rating-system modelled after journal-based
review. Well-rated texts earn authors more
voting-power, and thus a measure of standing,
within their peer group (of which there are
multiple).
LogiLogi is Free Software, and has been under
development for 3 years, during which about
30 volunteers have done 8 man-years of work
(worth $500.000). A public beta is already
online and fully functional at
www.LogiLogi.org.
2. Strategy
Things that have been done so far to gain
users are, first of all, making sure that LogiLogi
works properly. LogiLogi has been extensively
tested and improved at the LIRMM lab of the
University of Montpellier this September. And
it was used there by about 30 active users for
internal discussions until the end of October.
Secondly, some seed-content has been added
(about 100 philosophical texts, some of which
are part of larger essays). And finally, since
October, it has been made easy for users to track
new replies, annotations, and votes for their
documents, both through a personalized RSS
feed, and e-mail alerts. These things have made
LogiLogi practically usable for the first time.
2.1. Target Audience
LogiLogi has not yet been advertised widely,
and changing this is one of the first things we
will do next. LogiLogi aims for a wide audience
of scholars, students, and people interested
in philosophy, but to set the right tone, we
first aim for people with academic credentials
(students and scholars). Among them, most
success is expected with students, both because
of their limited access to other publishing
channels, and their greater average computer-
literacy. Possible places to reach them are
forums, newsgroups, and (limited) advertising
via Google Adwords.
2.2. Process
Then, as part of user-driven, agile development,
feedback will be collected from users on
possible improvements: both ongoing, from
users on the web, and from a small group
of philosophers/students in a usability test.
Some of these improvements will then be
implemented, after which we plan to repeat the
process, with another round of usability testing
and improvements.

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2.3. Improvements
A possible improvement so far identified is
simplifying the application, for example by
(temporarily) limiting the number of voting-
communities (peergroups) to one. This would
have the additional advantage of reducing the
number of users that are needed to reach critical
mass, because votes are no longer limited to,
and divided between groups. While it is hard
to determine what the critical mass of LogiLogi
would be, from what we saw in the LIRMM
case, it most likely lies between 30 to 60 active
users per peergroup (or for the whole site, if
there is only one peergroup). To examine this
further, a small literature study of the notion of
critical mass, and of the factors influencing its
size (especially for hypertext based applications,
close to the humanities) will also be undertaken.
Another place for improvement is the editing
and annotation process: its responsiveness,
especially, could be improved. LogiLogi
currently requires people to open a new page
when they want to insert annotations or links,
while it would be a lot easier if this could be
done while reading the text, at least for simple
annotations. And finally, a demo-video will be
created, which quickly explains what LogiLogi
is, and how it can be used.
2.4. Report
In our poster we will present LogiLogi, explain
the notion of critical mass, and report on
developments in the number of users. In
addition, the strategies and improvements
we applied, and their practical, and causal
relationships will be explained, where possible.
Also, we will not just be reporting the number of
registered users, or unique visitors, but also on
the number of documents, annotations, replies,
and votes given over the time-period from
December 2009 until June 2010. Thus a detailed
view will be given of the process of gaining
critical mass.
3. Conclusion
Whether we succeed or not in gaining a
critical mass for LogiLogi, there will be
meaningful results from this experiment, as
it not only involves presenting, or further
improving an already quite usable interactive
Digital Humanities application, but foremostly
trying to give it a critical mass of users, and
exploring this process, producing insights and
a valuable case-study (of success or failure)
for future Digital Humanities projects to learn
from: projects which will, most likely, be more
interactive than their predecessors, and thus
will sooner or later face the same challenge of
gaining a critical mass of users.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Lars Buitinck, Maarten
Geraedts, Allan van Hulst, Auke Klazema,
Bart Leusink, Miguel Lezama, Charl Linssen,
Jan Mikac, Steffen Michels, Roel 3 van
Rijswijk, Bruno Sarlo, Thierry Stamper, Artyom
Syazantsev, Rens van Summeren, Pieter van
der Vlis, Jordy Voesten, Ilona Wilmont, Andrew
Wolters and Feng Zhu for their contributions
to the development of LogiLogi over the years.
Among them we want to especially thank Bruno,
Charl, Miguel, and Steffen, without whom
LogiLogi would not have been what it is today.
We would also like to thank the Philosophy
Department of the University of Groningen for
the initial small grant that got LogiLogi started,
and the University of Nijmegen which twice
provided a group of Computer and Information
Science students to work on LogiLogi for credits
as part of their GIPHouse program. In addition
we are grateful to the OFSET (Organization
for Free Software in Education and Teaching)
foundation for supporting us with a small grant.
We would also like to thank the audiences of
our presentations at the FOSDEM (Free and
Open source Software Developers' European
Meeting) of 2007 and 2009 in Brussels, the
TDOSE (Technical Dutch Open Source Event)
of 2007 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the
ECAP (European conference on Computing
and Philosophy) conferences of 2008 and
2009 in Montpellier and Barcelona, the Digital
Humanities 2008 conference in Oulu, Finland,
the RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel
Libre) of 2008 in Mont-de-Marssan, France,
the FKFT (Free Knowledge, Free Technology
Conference) of 2008 in Barcelona, and the
Philosophers Rally of 2009 in Enschede, the
Netherlands, for their questions and insightful
comments.

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