Abstract:
Community members would benefit by finding others who can answer questions or provide assistance. We want to find new ways to help find people who have expertise by creating metrics that can easily estimate expertise. In this presentation, we explore discount expertise metrics that are easy to obtain and use. We present one such discount expertise metric that uses people’s browsing history to estimate technical expertise. In a study of 26 users, we show that this metric can distinguish experts and novices from others. We also validate this measure by comparing it to the ground truth about our users. We also discuss the possibilities in using measures like this, based on digital traces, to augment interaction within online communities, for example, gauging newcomers in a community of practice or evaluating people in a learning community.