Roles in Online Collaborative Problem Solving

The growth of online social networking has created new opportunities for collaboration in problem solving. How can we ensure that everyone is able to make use of it? In my work, I will explore the use of user role assignments as a way to encourage participation in online collaborative problem solving and design. I propose a design for such a roles system to be built into CoSolve, an online collaborative environment that uses the idea of state-space search as a model for problem solving.