About Moa (모아)

Who can use Moa?
How does Moa work? (Moa tutorial)
Who has access to my data?
Is Moa affiliated with the University of Michigan?
Is this study approved by the IRB?
How is Moa moderated?
What does Moa mean?
Related publications

Who can use Moa?

Moa is developed to support and empower PhD students who are experiencing any challenges—neglect, mistreatment, exploitation, or abuse—in their PhD advising relationships. This includes PhD students who are not so sure what exactly is going on, but nevertheless want to get advice for more clarity. It is also for PhD students who have a genuine interest in helping other PhD students, regardless of whether they have experienced challenges themselves. At this stage, Moa is only available to University of Michigan PhD students.

How does Moa work? (Moa Tutorial)

For the full tutorial, please visit here. Or, if you prefer to schedule a 10-15 minute Zoom session with Jane to learn about Moa, please reach out to her at imjane@umich.edu.

Our research found that PhD students would only feel comfortable using Moa if they had granular control over who can see their posts and responses—what we call "consent boundaries." A consent boundary indicates the set of people whom a person feels comfortable interacting with about a particular topic, and is closely related to one's identities and past experiences.



Moa lets users set a specific consent boundary per post—based on one's identities and experiences—in an unburdensome way. For example, a post about improving communication with one's advisor could be set to only be visible to PhD students who have experienced communication issues with their PhD advisors. Or, a user can set a certain post to be visible only to international PhD students.



Who has access to my data?

Only the lead PhD student of the project, Jane Im, and an UM ITS team member have complete access to the database. Jane technically has access to all of the information you submitted, including your email address. But, this is only to verify PhD students signup and prevent abuse of the system. Other than 1) checking signups and 2) handling cases of someone alerting Jane about problematic user behavior (e.g., harassment, uncivil comments), Jane will NOT use the database to connect posts with actual users. Especially as someone who went through multiple advisor changes, she is very aware of the sensitive nature of these discussions. Jane’s faculty advisor (Kentaro Toyama) is the only research collaborator on the project, and he will NOT have any access to the system.

Is Moa affiliated with the University of Michigan?

No, Moa is not affiliated with the University of Michigan or any other institution. It is, however, developed by researchers at the University of Michigan. Moa is an academic research project and not a commercial product.

Is this study approved by the IRB?

Yes, this study has been exempt-approved by the University of Michigan IRB (HUM00258907).

How is Moa moderated?

Currently, Moa is moderated by Jane Im. Jane manually reviews all sign-up requests, as well as the posts and comments. Moa follows ACM CSCW's code of conduct. Please read the code of conduct here. If the moderator (Jane) finds that a post or comment violates the code of conduct, she will remove it and suspend the account. Please keep in mind that Moa is a space for helping each other as fellow PhD students—we hope to ensure the atmosphere is supportive and respectful. For the long run, we hope to recruit moderators from diverse backgrounds, so that moderation decisions are not made by only one person. (Jane actually hoped to recruit some moderators before for this study as well, but we ended up deciding against it for various reasons, including ones related to privacy.)

What does Moa mean?

Moa is how you pronounce "모아"—which roughly means "gather" in Korean. The PhD student who built Moa, Jane Im (임제인), was born and grew up mainly in South Korea.

Related publications

A CHI Late Breaking Work provides a glimpse of some of Moa’s design decisions.
Jane Im, Kentaro Toyama. Understanding How to Design a Social Computing System That Helps PhD Students Collectively Navigate Mistreatment or Abuse in Advising Relationships. In Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2024). Honolulu, HI. May 2024.

A panel at CHI 2024 on improving PhD advising relationships.
Jane Im, Himanshu Zade, Steve Oney, Pamela Wisniewski, Kentaro Toyama. Improving Advising Relationships Between PhD Students and Faculty in Human-Computer Interaction. In Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA 2024). Honolulu, HI. May 2024.