Developing and Maintaining a User Community Todd Swarthout Economic Science Laboratory University of Arizona

Microeconomics Digital Library Traditional topical content –Handbook –Glossary Online resources –Essays and websites –Interactive tutorials –Experimental software Infrastructure to facilitate economics experiments –Connection management –Storage of resulting data –Automated agents

History ESL has been developing experimental economics software for over 20 years These tools have been available, but: –Awareness was limited to researchers –Required technical resources to install and run on a laboratory network Loose affiliation with researchers and teachers that use the software

Relationship with Economic Science Association Organization supports the use of experimental methods in Economics Considering different methods of association: –General affiliation –Online journal focused on teaching economics –Using Econport as a repository for the association (Dspace)

Informing People Dissemination at professional meetings (7 this year: USA, Japan, China, Hong Kong) Academic publications Internal workshops for U of A business school Requests to ESL for software resources are now being directed to Econport

Gathering Feedback Student user study – aimed at functionality of experimental infrastructure Early adopters – colleagues that have prior experience with using experiments to teach Instructor User study – learn how teachers use Econport in the classroom

Creating a Community Experience An environment in which users actively engage others: forum software –Teachers create private class discussions –Teachers interact with other teachers –Students discuss topics with each other –We gather feedback to improve the site Site resources can be publicly annotated by users