Ok, so now I've done some reading, and I have dusted some of the luster off the academia-business divide. (It's Friday; I wrote another proposal draft yesterday; I'll be unpredictable today.)
I'm reading Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007" report. I got it from Socialtext, but I'm not sure how. In fact, there were a few PHP errors when I submitted the form to get the document, so my path was broken anyway. So, the ridiculous title aside, I thought maybe this document would be interesting and enlightening. The summary at the beginning is nice - tells me social software is a priority in 2008, explains that the paper is going to talk about social software market players. Fair enough. I'll leave the fuzzy definition of "social software" aside and read on.
The paper tries to describe products available in the market and lists strengths and weaknesses for each. No where in the whole thing does it say where Mr. Nikos Drakos (again, Gartner, with the boys' club) got any of his information or whether he ever spoke to a person who uses any of these products. I'm apparently supposed to assume that Mr. Drakos knows more than I do and that this oracle is authoritative and accurate. Yeah, not so much. If nothing else, I've learned to doubt in my 22 years of schooling. I think I'm fired up because some of the products he mentions such as Twiki are miserable failures for users. Those of us who do user-centered research involving social software found that out by, gasp!, watching users try to use them, analyzing log data about use and content, and trying other products.
I don't know that I meant for this post to become quite so rant-y, but there you have it. I see the difference in rigor that distinguishes academic research from at least some forms of business research. I like rigor. I wish I had more time to develop my own social software based on what academic research has shown (maybe I could even make money), but I have to write that pesky dissertation. I wish I could find more organizations interested in studying the use and effectiveness of the social software tools they employ. I wish we could afford to experiment a bit more with the tools we build and use. That said, Gartner's report is clearly more clearly written and probably more immediately useful than my work, so they get points for that. But Twiki? Seriously? Come on.
How about indigenous content? "Created by the natives for themselves." That's the definition offered on Many to Many by Clay Shirky (who credits his friend Kio Stark) and available on NetLingo. The comments for that blog post offer some other interesting alternatives to "user generated content" such as "lovingly generated content" (instead of amateur, which lots is loving roots in translation).
I've been looking for a way to describe the content users of the SI Wiki contribute, and indigenous might work for now. I like that indigenous content invokes notions of a physical community, and it is, in part, the physical SI community that makes that wiki different. It's not a wiki for the world or for some mass of people who don't know one another; it's a wiki for the people, by the people. Stay tuned for more research on how that wiki works, who uses it, what kinds of information people contribute, and why all that matters. For a summary of the early work, see our GROUP paper.
Here's a summary of the other research I do (or want to do) that's not my dissertation. This was originally a 2-page research statement submitted to some people with money to burn.
Research Summary - Communities and Technologies
At the broadest level, my research is about communities and technology. My research enriches our understanding of the roles social media play in supporting offline communities. My approach differs from much of current social media research, because I focus on teams and organizations in which people know each other and use technologies to support their activities (e.g. Upcoming!, workplace wikis) rather than on online communities of people who do not know one another offline (e.g. SlashDot, Yahoo! Answers) (see Beenen et al., 2004; Lampe & Resnick, 2004; Preece, 2000; and Smith & Kollock, 1999). My work necessarily encompasses studying offline behavior as well online behavior; in order to understand social media use by groups, it helps to understand the nature of a community. My research highlights the situated nature of social media use by offline communities and focuses on how social and technical processes impact community behavior both online and off. A better understanding of behavior in communities using social media enables us to design social media more effectively and to recommend behaviors and tools to make communities more successful.
My most recent work asks, how do faculty and students in a graduate school use a wiki to share information about their community with each other and with the public? What does their use tell us about what it might be important for new community members to learn? How can we use their wiki use behavior to understand how people make decisions about what information to share and what to keep to themselves? Understanding the community provides insights into the way members of those communities interact with one another via social media. My goal is to leverage human and computing resources so that a sociotechnical system can use the skills of humans and benefits of computation to improve collaboration and its supporting technologies. The remainder of this document briefly describes projects in which I have been involved with and ends with an overview of my continuing work.
Sharing and Storing Community Knowledge
In an era when more than half of all doctoral students leave before finishing their degrees and students must compete for increasingly scarce human and financial resources, it's no surprise that students welcome help completing their degree requirements. What is surprising in this instance is that students are not just the primary consumers of the information but are also the primary producers. They share human subjects review applications, books that help them write dissertation proposals, interview protocols, even advice about how to set up an experiment using existing technical resources. We might expect students competing for the same pool of resources to hoard, but in this instance, students are much more collaborative than competitive. Their behavior on the wiki demonstrates this difference, but only by studying the offline community can we really understand why. In this case, it's likely that the collaborative ethic of the school itself permeates the doctoral students. Faculty and students at the school, regardless of whether they use the wiki, recognize and enjoy the collegial atmosphere of the school. Students are well-funded by research and teaching positions and are encouraged by their faculty's examples and instructions to work together to do better research. The wiki is not the reason students share, but it is the social media tool they use to do so.
Another aspect of the wiki example that I find interesting is the near-mashup nature of content created and the potential such behavior indicates. On the wiki, users include data available elsewhere but combine that data in community-specific ways. For instance, one wiki page serves as a marketplace for used textbooks required by courses within the school. That page includes data from the course syllabi, email lists, booksellers, and individual users. Such pages indicate community information needs - in this case, students need to sell their extra books to a small potential market while students in that buying market seek good deals on books and some advance warning of what textbooks they'll need. Such pages also indicate what potentially useful mashups might appear were users able to construct them. New social media that offer and use open APIs such as Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and Upcoming! make asking such questions - what data sources might users combine for their communities if they could do it themselves? - possible.
Facilitating Ad Hoc Ridesharing
I was part of the original RideNow team at the University of Michigan. Our goal was to facilitate ad hoc ridesharing in Ann Arbor and to develop technologies that could be used to do the same in other communities. Cars in the U.S. can comfortably seat four or five people but rarely carry more than one (Transportation Statistics, 2004). Filling some of those seats would create tremendous benefits for both individuals and society as a whole. Riders and drivers would have convenient travel and the possibility of pleasant conversation. Society would benefit from reduced emissions and road congestion. However, barriers to ridesharing include 1) coordination problems, 2) risks of riding with strangers, and 3) mismatch in cost and benefit for riders and drivers.
We designed a service, called RideNow, that approached the problem of ridesharing by capitalizing on the benefits of incremental and localized design. Our system avoids the costs of overengineering by allowing incremental changes to occur. For example, the first instance of the system was rather bare bones - it offered free text fields that allowed users to decide how to specify ride information. Later versions of the system offered structured fields based on the behavior users exhibited in the first system. For example, the second generation of RideNow can parse dates such as "next Friday" rather than requiring a user to enter a specific date. The system also capitalizes on the benefits of nuance and ambiguity afforded by localized design. For example, RideNow's data fields allow users to enter information such as "after the faculty meeting." Our goal with RideNow was to design a system that allowed a well-established community to use personalized, situated software (Shirky, 2004) and that remained flexible enough to be adopted by other communities.
Continuing Research
My future work will extend my interest in studying communities and designing/building software to facilitate their collaborative activities. It is important to me to have a close connection between field research and system design. As social computing tools become more prevalent and the distance between developer and user diminishes, opportunities to improve both development and use abound. I look forward to asking question such as, how can we make powerful mashup tools such as Yahoo! Pipes usable by non-developers? What would users do with such technologies if they could use them? How would users tailor the content of their mashups and contributions to specific community audiences? I have seen users embrace flexible, situated technologies such as ridesharing systems and wikis, and I believe there is great promise for end-user development of social computing technologies. Issues such as community building and information sharing generalize regardless of the community being studied, and I look forward to the opportunity to study social computing and larger, distributed offline communities such as political movements and distributed work teams.
References
(2004). Omnibus survey household survey results. U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Beenen, G., Ling, K., Wang, X., Chang, K., Frankowski, D., Resnick, P. & Kraut, R. (2004). Using social
psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. In Proceedings of the Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004.
Lampe, C. & Resnick, P. (2004). Slash(dot) and burn: Distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004 (pp. 542–550). Vienna, Austria: ACM Press.
Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbility. New York: Wiley.
Shirky, C. (2004). Situated software.
Smith, M. & Kollock, P. (Eds.). (1999). Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge.
If you were to crawl the whole web to get an index of the content there, where would you start? Well, Wikia members are answering that very question on the Wikia Search Whitelist. This list is supposed to be a list of the good starting points for crawling the web. From the Whitelist itself: "They should be the kind of thing people will want to find in a good quality search result." It seems there's an opportunity here for people who know a little something about searching and information needs (ahem, librarians, ahem) to jump in and make a difference. Maybe I'm dreaming. In my dreams, librarians would be there to help me on the web; Wikia search could be a place to make a little bit of that happen. Like the Internet Public Library only with different priorities and audiences. I'm not sure. Either way, this Whitelist and Wikia Search in general seem like big opportunities for information professionals.
Yes, I am available for hire. I've received some email inquiries about whether I'm available for contract work. I am indeed. If you're looking for help
- Setting up a wiki, blog, or intranet,
- Analyzing wiki or blog traffic and use,
- Writing surveys and interview protocols, or
- Analyzing survey and interview data,
send me email. My recent work focuses on improving collaborations and facilitating organizational knowledge sharing. I also have 8 years of web development experience (ASP, SQL Server, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript) and 5 years of research experience (interviews, surveys, statistical analysis). I have installed blogs and wikis in a variety of organizations and environments and have run workshops for individuals interested in setting up their own. I can give workshops to large and small groups about what new media technologies are, how they can be used, and what pitfalls they present.
Thank you for your interest!
Sean Munson and I will be hosting a roundtable discussion at the iConference at UCLA in February. The preconference wiki is up and ready for your contributions. Here's the description of the roundtable:
---------------------
Professional students, whether undergraduates or masters’ students, represent a significant portion of the iSchool community. How do iSchools effectively educate those students while continuing to develop successful research programs? This roundtable discussion will focus on how iSchools educate their professional students and engage them in the research aspect of their programs. Innovative approaches to training and integration will be the central theme of this discussion. In an iSchool – where students training for professions including librarianship, information policy, human-centered computing, preservation and researchers exploring such topics as incentive-centered design, forensic informatics, computational linguistics, and digital libraries have both competing and complimentary goals – the potentials for collaboration, innovation, misunderstanding, and disharmony are all high.
The annual iConference provides a unique opportunity for us, as a community, to discuss the roles our professional students have in shaping our identity and our practices. The proposed roundtable will invite participants to discuss questions such as:
* What should the role of research in training information professionals be?
* How can we best engage professional students in our research?
* How do iSchools address the unique curricular challenges we face in preparing students for a very wide variety of careers?
* What do we want an Information degree to signal in the marketplace?
* What are some successes in which research and professional training have benefited one another?
Participants will share innovative approaches to professional education, best practices in engaging professional students in research programs, and remaining challenges. We intend roundtable participation to represent the diversity of iSchools’ current programs. Confirmed participants include:
* Dr. Eileen G. Abels, Master's Program Director, Associate Professor, College of Information Science & Technology, Drexel University
* Dr. Judith S. Olson, Richard W. Pew Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Information, University of Michigan
Each speaker will present introductory remarks highlighting some of the achievements and challenges they face in their home programs, after which discussion will include questions and input from the attendees. This will be an interactive forum proposing ideas for new approaches to education and integration of professional students. We encourage participants to discuss ideas that work (and those that don’t!) in their schools. We will create and publicize a wiki space for pre- and post-conference participation as well.
---------------------
We're hoping that Beth Mynatt from Georgia Tech will also join us and talk a bit about their successes. We'd love to have anyone interested in professional students and information research to join our discussion both online and in Los Angeles. The preliminary schedule of the conference indicates that our roundtable will take place sometime on Friday, February 29.
Wikia Search (alpha) is here! Wikia's working on an open-source search engine. Search and search results have such power to drive internet traffic that I can get behind Wikia's statement: "I believe that search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and that it can and should therefore be done in an open, objective, accountable way." (from the About Us page) It'll take a while for the user-contributed parts of the database to get built up, but I've already started doing my part. I wrote a mini article about ICLS 2008 because that was the first thing for which I searched. I know what ICLS is but didn't have it bookmarked, so it seemed like a logical thing for which I could write a mini article. I'll be interested to see what happens with Wikia search, and I'm glad there's now an open alternative.
Ever find yourself needing to embed a Google Calendar in a MediaWiki page? Well, now you can.
Usage
<googlecalendar>umhappyhours@gmail.com</googlecalendar>
Code
<?php
# Google Calendar Extension
#
# Purpose:
# Embed a Google Calendar in a MediaWiki page
# Tag/Wikitext :
# <googlecalendar>docid</googlecalendar>
# Example :
# from <iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=umhappyhours%40gmail.com"
# style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
# Instructions :
# set $input to the Google Account that owns the calendar you want to embed
# set $width & $height to the proportions appropriate for your wiki page
#
# Credits
# This code is adapted from Kasper Souren's original extension, sometimes available at
# http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/wiki/index.php?title=Google_Calendar_MediaWiki_plugin
# License
# GNU Public
$wgExtensionFunctions[] = 'wfGoogleCalendar';
$wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array(
'name' => 'Google Calendar',
'description' => 'Display Google Calendar',
'author' => 'Libby Hemphill',
'url' => ''
);
function wfGoogleCalendar() {
global $wgParser;
$wgParser->setHook('googlecalendar', 'renderGoogleCalendar');
}
# The callback function for converting the input text to HTML output
function renderGoogleCalendar($input) {
$input = htmlspecialchars($input);
//$input = "umhappyhours@gmail.com"
$width = 425;
$height = 350;
$output = '<iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=' . $input;
$output .= '" style="border: 0" width="' . $width;
$output .= '" height="' . $height . '" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>';
return $output;
}
?>
This page made possible by the Code Markup Wordpress plugin. Thank you!
During the CDI Workshop at Rennselaer in September, one of the computer scientists complained that when he collaborates with social scientists, he feels like they view him as a service provider rather than a collaborator. It sounded like he had some experience with a social scientist who's approach was to say, "Go build this thing so I can deploy it and study the deployment." In my short talk, I mentioned that social scientists in interdisciplinary collaborations are not service providers either. I've worked with computer scientists before who approach our work with the attitude that I will "fix the social stuff", whatever that means. So it seems that we have a problem. Computer scientists and social scientists recognize that if we worked together, we might find answers to interesting problems. Here I'm thinking about expertise finding, knowledge sharing, and distributed collaboration as problems that might benefit from such a collaboration. How can we work together without having either side feel like the other side is using them for a service rather than as a colleague?
Man, I wish I had an answer. Why is this bothering me today? Well, I'm trying to set up CoSign so that the new version of the KNOW SI wiki will allow UM users to login using their existing UM login credentials. This means I need to dig into the innards of the Apache server we're running. That sounds almost CS-y to me. Probably not to a CS person though. Anyway, CoSign and the resulting permissions options represent one of the socio-technical problems that I think could benefit from both computer science and social science. What's the best way to set up permissions on our school wiki? What technical infrastructure (e.g. .htaccess, CoSign, MediaWiki extensions) is necessary to supporting the kind of social behavior (e.g. TBD, which makes the technical questions that much harder) in which people want to engage on this wiki? Those are the questions I'll be wrestling with this weekend and probably for a while.