Collab-Or-Ate

If you are working in the area of social networking within the workplace or organization, please submit a position paper to our CSCW 2008 workshop on Social Networking in Organizations! We expect it to be a great collection of people interested in this topic. Position papers are due Sept 26th and the workshop is Nov 19th in San Diego, CA. (We are excited to be part of a great line-up of workshops this year.)

Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations

Workshop Website: http://research.ihost.com/cscw08-socialnetworkinginorgs/

Overview:

Social networking websites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, are heavily used by students to maintain friendships and by professionals to maintain contacts with others such as potential customers and recruits. Technologies such as email, IM, and weblogs were initially adopted by students and consumers for personal use and then moved into enterprises, having a significant impact on business environments. Social networking technologies seem to be following suit, perhaps more rapidly, but we are just beginning to explore how these applications are being used inside enterprises and large organizations. To what extent are they used to maintain or establish external ties to family, friends, and professional colleagues? To what extent are they being used to meet internal team or organizational goals? How are organizations responding?

This workshop will assemble 15-20 people with a research or applied industry interest in social networking in organizational or enterprise settings.

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit a 1 to 2 page extended abstract describing their research, experiences, or analyses of social networking software.

Important Dates:

Friday, September 26: position papers due
Friday, October 10: notification of acceptance
Sunday, November 9: workshop in San Diego, CA

Organizers:

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research
Werner Geyer, IBM Research
David Millen, IBM Research
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research

Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg, another member of IBM Research’s Collaborative User Experience group.

The Associated Press wrote an article that talks about our social networking project Beehive: Next generation of business software could get more fun:

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of “things I can’t live without.”

Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

These tidbits, DiMicco believes, help people understand each other better. And the usual communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, phones and even videoconferencing do only so much to fill the gap.

The Associated Press: Next generation of business software could get more fun
USA Today: Virtual apps try to build camaraderie, productivity
CNN: ‘Virtual watercooler’ makes workplace more fun
Washington Post: Next generation of business software could get more fun
Red Orbit: Virtual Communities Boost Employee Productivity

I just got home from a long trip. It included my passport expiring while I flew over the Atlantic, my luggage vanishing into thin air after 10 days of being told it would arrive “tomorrow,” and a severely delayed Italian train causing me to end up spending the night at an airport motel in Frankfurt, Germany. Although I love to travel, this time I have never been so glad to return home!





A few things I learned on this trip to Europe:

1. Not all airport immigration officers or airline check-in agents check the expiration dates on passports. I got through Boston and Frankfurt and to the UK border (at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5) before anyone noticed that my passport expired the day before. (Technically it was valid when I took off on March 30th, and invalid when I landed March 31st.)




2. Apparently the airline that lets on a passenger with an expired passport gets fined £2000 ($US 4000).




3. You aren’t supposed to travel internationally with a passport expiring within 6 months, but trust me: you can definitely fly like this and no one will make any comments about it.




4. You can get an “emergency passport” made within a day at a US Consulate office. Bring your passport application and passport photos that comply with US passport photo requirements (not the requirements of the country you are in) and a credit card. If you are in this situation, hopefully you are in a country where they are polite and the office is open at a time when you are able to get there. (For me, this was getting to Edinburgh on a Thursday between 9 and noon. And they were very polite about it.) An emergency passport is valid for 1 year.




5. When an airline loses your luggage, the rules about reimbursement are very shady and ever changing. The main thing I’ve learned is there is a limit to how much they will reimburse.




6. Apparently the only items in your luggage the airline will reimburse are clothes and toiletries. Not cameras, electronics or perishables. What’s up with that?? My poor Nikon D40 is what I really care about. I also had 8lbs of Bit O’ Honey in the bag, but that’s another story.




7. Primark, in the UK, is my new favorite store — the clothes are trendy and awesomely inexpensive. It is like H&M, but much cheaper! Have to admit though, my new wardrobe is already falling apart, but it looked cool for that 1 week…




8. It is so much easier to travel when you don’t have luggage! And after living this way for almost 3 weeks, I now believe one does not need more than 2 pairs of pants and 2 pairs of shoes, no matter what the purpose of your trip. I’ve heard that before, but now I will live it.




9. Mainland Europe is so over the shoes and liquids thing. When I went through airport security, all I needed to do was take my laptop out of my bag and take off my coat. What a treat!




10. The rumors are true: Italian trains do not run on time. A 2-hour train trip from Venice to Florence took 4.5 hours and at one point the train was actually moving backwards. I learned this is not considered a good excuse for missing your flight, according to your German airline. So I’ve learned that you should not rely on Italian transportation to get you to your airplane on time. Next time, build in at least a day buffer.




11. After spending much time in UK, Italian and German airports, I have to say the pastries are better in Germany’s, the coffee is better in Italy’s (duh), and mmmm, well, they are good at losing your bags at Heathrow. Another observation is that it is easier to buy a replacement phone charger in Germany, but it is half the price in the UK. I couldn’t find one in Florence’s airport.
    
    

12. The other rumors are true: the Dollar is doing horribly against the British Pound and the Euro. So if you are in the US, I advise you drop what you are doing right now and go shopping! (Now if only we had Primark…)

After all this negativity, I have to say, the trip wasn’t all bad: the first conference was interesting, the second conference was stimulating and fun to see lots of friends, and traveling afterwards in Italy with Mike was exciting as always. I also had fabulous meals throughout Italy.

And I got a camera phone picture of my new favorite store:

I am about to hit the road to present some research results.

Rosta Farzan, the PhD student intern who worked with our team last summer, has two papers on the incentive mechanism she deployed on Beehive. Rosta implemented a basic point system on the site where users earn points and move up through status levels as they contribute content to our social networking site. The results have been pretty dramatic! First, users added more content. Then users objected to the system. Then users started to game the system. Then users opt-outed of the system. Then users discussed the merits and weaknesses of the system. The list of our lessons learned grows by the week, which has made this research project extremely interesting. I can’t wait for Rosta to return to IBM this summer and implement a new type of incentive system, so we can see what drama unfolds when the rules of the game change.

Rosta (and she’s kindly sharing some of her presentation time with me) will be presenting the initial results of deploying the points system at the annual CHI conference. This year it is in Florence, Italy, yahoo!

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "Results from Deploying a Participation Incentive Mechanism within the Enterprise." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And prior to that, I will be in Aberdeen, Scotland, presenting the follow-up paper describing what happened after the initial experiment. This paper will be published at the Symposium on Persuasive Technology that is being held in conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention on Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users." Symposium on Persuasive Technology, In conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention, Aberdeen, Scotland, April 2008.

And it isn’t all about the point systems, either. I’m going to be participating in a CHI workshop on Sensemaking, to talk about “people sensemaking” with David Millen:

JM DiMicco, DR Millen. (2008) "People Sensemaking with Social Networking Sites." Sensemaking Workshop,Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And Werner Geyer will be presenting another paper on Beehive that discusses everyone’s favorite social content type the “hive five”!

W Geyer, C Dugan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, M Muller. (2008) "Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

I’m back! I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to blog more frequently. It is a great way to reflect on what is going on in the world and I haven’t been taking the time to do that recently. And now that I’m back from a vacation and nearing my one year anniversary of working at IBM, I’m in the mood to make a few adjustments.

Since I hate blog posts that are all about “sorry for not posting!” here is a picture from my recent vacation to Berlin. Berlin is a totally awesome city and I can’t wait to visit again!

I have an article in the latest volume of the HCI Journal, which is a special issue on awareness systems. My article is called “The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face” and my co-authors are Katherine J. Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, and Walter Bender. Of course, I highly recommend reading it!

The issue’s introduction, written by the editors Markopoulos, de Ruyter, and Mackay, has a nice summary of the recent work done on awareness systems, which the individual articles respresent. Of most interest to me is the historical perspective. The editors make the point that:

Current awareness systems have been deeply influenced by the media spaces of the late
1980s, which supported sustained audio/video links among remote co-workers and emphasized
the importance of awareness for maintaining social coherence (see Bly, Harrison, and Irwin,
1993, for an excellent review of this literature). At the time, Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work systems were usually measured in terms of productivity. These benefits of social
awareness proved difficult to quantify (Gross and Stary, 2005). As a result, awareness systems
were sometimes criticized as having marginal benefit (Schmidt, 2002) and were largely ignored
for a decade.

I think the entire field of CSCW suffered a bit from this phenomenon. If the tool didn’t make meetings faster or didn’t demonstrate quantitative gains in decision-making, then the tool was considered useless or even harmful. Now, as social scientists have become more involved in the fields of CSCW and HCI, there is a much more holistic view on the benefits that interaction design and information visualization can bring to our human-human interactions. Additionally, the cost of technology has gone down so much that tools for collaboration and communication can be built for and designed for consumers, rather than just the executives in the boardrooms.

The editors summarize this nicely as:

The research culture has changed as well - valuing systems that move beyond simple
collaboration - making it easier to justify systems in terms of their support for maintaining
informal social relationships, both in the home and in the office. For example, Putman (2000)
defines the creation of social capital as an important feature of social organization and argues that
systems should support social relations, including the norms, networks, and trust that facilitate
cooperation and co-ordination for mutual benefit. We adopt a correspondingly broad
interpretation of awareness and a more inclusive consideration of potential benefits.

So I highly recommend checking out the articles in the Special Issue! Here’s a rundown of the articles in the issue:

• Incorporating Human and Machine Interpretation of Unavailability and Rhythm Awareness into the Design of Collaborative Applications
  James “Bo” Begole and John C. Tang
• The Impact of Increased Awareness While Face-to-Face
  Joan Morris DiMicco, Katherine J. Hollenbach, Anna Pandolfo, and Walter Bender
• Interpreting and Acting Upon Mobile Awareness Cues
  Antti Oulasvirta, Renaud Petit, Mika Raento, and Sauli Tiitta
• Announcing Activity: Design and Evaluation of an Intentionally-Enriched Awareness Service
  Markus Rittenbruch, Stephen Viller, and Tim Mansfield
• Exploring Awareness-Related Messaging Through Two Situated Display-Based Systems
  Keith Cheverst, Alan Dix, Daniel Fitton, Mark Rouncefield, and Connor Graham
• Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Peripheral Displays: An Analysis Using Activity Theory
  Tara Matthews, Tye Rattenbury, and Scott Carter

The cool thing about tracking your own website’s hits is that you can tell what people were looking for when they came to your site. But sometimes you are in the situation where you know the answer to their question, but the answer is not on your website. So I’m going to give a little bit more to the blogosphere tonight and answer some of the questions that random internet readers had, but couldn’t answer by reading my blog:

“mac does not detect blackberry”

In my experience, my Mac did not detect my blackberry until I had the proper version of Pocketmac (the one for the 8100) installed on the machine. And then I had to use the USB cable, not Bluetooth.

“blackberry pearl copy addresses from sim”

*UPDATE* You can copy your phone numbers from your SIM by going through the Blackberry set-up wizard. It will prompt you to copy your phone number over. That’s the only way I know of to do it.

When my phone was broken, the T-mobile customer support person explained to me is that the SIM card doesn’t support the Blackberry format for address book entries (because the SIM card only stores name and number), so there isn’t too much point to copying things back and forth. It is much better to use your computer’s address book as your backup. So hopefully you have a copy on a computer you can sync with.

“blackberry 8100 html tables”

In case my post wasn’t clear about this: don’t check the browser option to load HTML tables. It will make page loading much slower.

“recalibrating ipod nike”

To recalibrate the nike+ipod widget you just have to follow the menu options for recalibrating and run a set distance on a measured track (found at most high schools and universities). You can recalibrate for running or walking. I just did it for running and it vastly improved the accuracy. I think if I had also done it for walking, it would further improve accuracy.

A couple of people have asked me why I retired my blog Sunfleet and moved my blog to www.joandimicco.com. Well, it is because I have switched companies. I now work at IBM Research in the Collaborative User Experience group located in Cambridge, MA. I’m working with David Millen on social software.

So this blog will continue to contain my thoughts on collaboration and social software along with details of my current projects. So stay tuned! I hope to be a more frequent contributor to the blogosphere.

Hello, Blogosphere! I am blogging here now, in a new, permanent location.

Last week, Sun Labs held its annual Research Open House. It was a two-day event in Menlo Park: the first day was for Sun employees and the second day was for press & analysts.

This was Sunfleet’s debut onto the Open House scene and we had a great time, giving a group talk entitled “Design and Engineering: An Emerging Culture of Collaboration” and presenting demos of the Media Affinity Browser and our Hole in Space and Constellation projects

One of the tangible outcomes was some positive press on our projects! Very exciting, given our size and short history at Sun. And, as reflected in the headlines, Sun needs some positive energy out there in the media world.

Here are the highlights:

RED HERRING: Sun’s Idea Factory soldiers on:

Sun also is developing media interfaces that go beyond “list-based” menus. The Media Affinity Browser uses bubble charts and boxes to find movies or programs, while Search Inside The Music uses sound analysis—such as the timbre of instruments—to help an aficionado find new artists. Both could one day be licensed to software makers or content providers.

CNET: Sun Labs pushes forward despite l*yoffs:

Researchers showed off a concept for a media browser, a search application that would let home users find movie titles, for example, based on factors that they control. “We want to avoid list-based interfaces. Lists do not scale,” said Scott Nazarian, a company researcher. The basic idea is to let couch potatoes surf across a grid of movies sorted by genre and labeled with visual cues, and then let people select a particular movie based on how it matches up with preset criteria.

The company is also working on a combination social-networking/video-conferencing application that would let colleagues interact over high-resolution video screens like they were meeting in the hallway, said Joan DiMicco, a Sun researcher. The project is still being fleshed out, but two people on opposite ends of a video-conferencing application could access a social-networking map that plays “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with fellow employees. For example, the application showed how Sun researchers were connected to each other by where they sit, what projects they’ve worked on, or patents they have filed.