Social transparency in networked information exchange

An emerging Internet trend is greater social transparency, such as the use of real names in social networking sites, feeds of friends' activities, traces of others' re-use of content, and visualizations of team interactions. Researchers lack a systematic way to conceptualize and evaluate social transparency. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for thinking about social transparency. This framework builds upon multiple streams of research, including prior work in CSCW on social translucence, awareness, and visual analytics, to describe three dimensions of online behavior that can be made transparent. Based on the framework, we consider the social inferences transparency supports and introduce a set of research questions about social transparency's implications for computer-supported collaborative work and information exchange.