Collab-Or-Ate

I was going to write this great step-by-step guide to getting Windows applications running on a Mac when I discovered those instructions have already been written by Apple: Boot Camp Installation and Setup Guide. I highly recommend reading and following them! (I didn’t and had to start the whole process over twice.)

In the end, here’s what I did:

1. using the Boot Camp Assistant already installed by default on my Mac, created a 10 GB partition on my Mac for Windows.
2. started from within BCA, installed Windows XP on that partition. (This is where the Apple guide comes in very handy.)
3. rebooted a dozen times while Windows did its thing with all the updates and patches and what-not. (All the things you didn’t think you’d ever have to deal with again because you live on a Mac now.)
4. on the PC, installed the PC applications I wanted (SPSS in this case)
5. on the Mac, installed VMWare Fusion so that I can run the PC partition from within the Mac partition. (VMWare Fusion does the same thing as Parallels.) At this point the PC was running within a single window on the Mac.
6. clicked on that amazing “Unity” button within VMWare Fusion, and voila, the PC applications are now running along side my Mac applications.

Mission Accomplished: a PC-licensed copy of SPSS is living along side a Mac-licensed copy of MSOffice (Excel and Word).

Tomorrow, at the ACM Group conference, Rosta Farzan, PhD is going to be presenting a paper on the work we did together last summer.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, B Brownholtz. (2009) “Spreading the Honey: A System for Maintaining an Online Community.” Full Paper, Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference, May 2009.

Last summer, when Beehive had been running for a full year, it had plenty of content — 100,000 pieces of content, in fact. So we realized the problem on the site was not generating new content, but rather finding the existing, interesting content. This problem is usually tackled in a few different ways: by displaying lists of recent content and most-viewed content (which we already did on Beehive) and by asking users to rate or vote on the best content.

We decided to design a custom system that encouraged a larger group of users to participate in the process of rating content than one usually sees in standard rating systems. We did this by picking a rotating board of users that has the power for one week to give “honey” to content they liked. Each board is picked based on their activity on the site and you can’t serve on the board more than once every four weeks.

We feel strongly that having a diverse group of users involved in selecting the best content brings a richness and diversity to the promoted content that reflects more of the IBM community. Because the Beehive community is large (>50,000) and IBM is even larger (>300,000), we didn’t want to have a small, and in some ways elite, group of enthusiastic raters driving up the visibility of a small set of content. Rather, we wanted to have the power to promote content distributed over a larger group, over a longer period of time.

To find out more about the system and, IMHO, impressive results, read the paper! The screenshot to the right is what you see on the home page of Beehive every time you log in and it shows you the content that this week’s “honey bees” picked as the best of the best.