Collab-Or-Ate

Since I know my blog readers are sophisticated social media users and don’t need advice on this topic, this is only of marginal interest, but I’m quoted in this article on How to Decline Facebook Friends Without Offence.

I’m a co-organizer of this workshop at CSCW ‘10, that will be held February 6th. Consider submitting a paper and join us for the discussion. The position papers are due November 20th.

Collective Intelligence In Organizations: Toward a Research Agenda

Workshop webpage: www.parc.com/ciorg

CSCW workshop descriptions: http://www.cscw2010.org/program/workshops.php

When: 6 February 2010

Where: Savannah, Georgia, USA

Description

A new generation of web tools is penetrating organizations after successful adoption within the consumer domain (e.g., social
networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). These tools and the collaborative processes they
support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI).

This workshop will focus on CI tools for collaboration in work-related settings, especially for task forces now increasingly common
in industry and government. The workshop is aimed at refining the problem, summarizing pioneering work on CI in general (i.e.,
exemplars of practices and tools), and ultimately developing a research agenda that specifically addresses the problem of
supporting CI among knowledge workers in organizations. Participants will present studies of task forces suggesting specific design
requirements, CI tools, and/or new methods for empirical or design research on CI.

Call for Participation

The workshop aims to assemble a diverse set of participants with a research or practitioner interest for CI in organizations. Workshop
participants should submit either a position paper (1500-2000 words) or extended paper (up to 8000 words) reporting more substantial research.

Topics of interest include:

– Empirical studies of work practices in organizations: e.g., case studies of task forces illustrating practices and design requirements
– Designs of new software tools or proof-of-concept prototypes supporting CI in task forces, communities; or in-depth evaluations
of tools already deployed that support CI in organization
– Theoretical contributions on collective intelligence, crowd sourcing, and community-based learning in organizations, which can directly
inform design and research
– Cases of multidisciplinary research showing the interplay between field studies, analysis of requirements, and development of CI tools

Dates

– 20 November 2009 — submissions should be sent as a PDF or Word attachment to ciorg@parc.com [2-3 researchers will review each submission; based on a shared evaluation scheme, the reviewers will assess the significance of the contribution, its relevance to the workshop themes, and its clarity]
– 18 December 2009 – notification of acceptance [accepted paper titles will be posted here and shared through a wiki]
– 6 February 2010 — workshop to take place [participants will be asked to prepare a brief summary and read all accepted position papers prior to the workshop]

Workshop Organizers

Gregorio Convertino, PARC

Antonietta Grasso, Xerox Research Centre Europe

Joan DiMicco, IBM Research

Giorgio De Michelis, University of Milano – Bicocca

Ed H. Chi, PARC

Later this month at Communities & Technologies 2009, findings on Beehive and social capital will be presented. I did this research with Chip Steinfield, Nicole Ellison, and Cliff Lampe, colleagues at Michigan State. Chip, Nicole and Cliff have done tons of research on Facebook, found in their interesting set of papers.

The four pictures shown here are from Beehive and show IBM employees all around the world going bowling. There are so many pictures just like this shared on Beehive, highlighting coworkers informally socializing and having fun together. In terms of social capital, we hypothesized that this type of informal sharing and communicating on Beehive could be associated with closer bonds with coworkers and increased access to distant colleagues.

By adapting the survey instrument Chip, Nicole and Cliff use for measuring Facebook intensity and social capital to the IBM & Beehive context, we found that even with limited use of Beehive, over a relatively short amount of time, there are associations between types of usage and different types of social capital:

• When someone is using Beehive for meeting new contacts, they report a greater interest in making these types of contacts at the company in general.
• When someone is using Beehive for keeping up with known colleagues, both in their workgroup and in their extended network of loose ties, they report having closer ties with their immediate network (bonding social capital), a higher sense of citizenship (willingness to help the greater good of the company), and greater access to both new people and expertise within the company.
• And finally, the more intensely someone uses Beehive (meaning more frequent visits and stronger associations with the community on the site) the higher they report their social capital is, across all measures. They have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise.

The paper is Bowling Online: Social Networking and Social Capital Within the Organization and the official abstract is below:

Social capital facilitates knowledge management in organizations by enabling individuals to locate useful information, draw on resources and make contributions to the community. This paper explores the relationship between social capital and use of an internal social network site in a multinational organization. We hypothesize that SNS use contributes to social capital within the organization by enabling users to form networks of heterogeneous contacts and maintain and deepen existing relationships. Survey findings show that bonding relationships, sense of corporate citizenship, interest in connecting globally, and access to new people and expertise are all associated with greater intensity of SNS use.

The full conference program includes a lot of interesting papers.

I’ve been invited to Enterprise 2.0 to participate on a panel called Lessons Learned From Internal Communities. It will be moderated by Peter Kim and here is the abstract:

Forget the theory. Proof exists that internal communities work. Today’s media continues to hype the rise and fall of public social networks, leaving many managers to question whether community has a business application. However, smart companies have already implemented internally focused collaboration platforms that offer the best of external functionality with the appeal of a network with dedicated business focus.

This session will highlight the lessons learned from three professionals who are responsible for internal community efforts: Joan DiMicco from IBM Research, Jamie Pappas from EMC, and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte.

I’m excited for it because myself, Jamie Pappas from EMC and Patricia Romeo from Deloitte are going to share the stories we’ve heard and seen first hand from our respective internal social networking communities (Beehive, EMC One, and D Street). When the three of us have chatted we’ve discovered that many of the IBM, EMC and Deloitte stories are the same:

• High adoption rates: employees use these sites more than traditional intranet directories and information repositories
• Viral adoption and word of mouth drives adoption, more so than top-down requirements and instructions to join.
• Appropriate behavior: each company has thought through issues of inappropriate content in detail and provides guidelines to the users, but for the most part (we’re talking ~99.9%), employees know what is right and wrong to say on these company-internal tools
• The list of benefits of these tools goes on and on, centered around the theme of people connecting with each other. Some of our top benefits:
  • humanizing the workplace
  • finding informal information
  • expertise location
  • assisting new hires and acquired employees integrate
  • crossing information silos
  • providing a forum for employees to share their opinions with management.

If you’ll be at Enterprise 2.0, please stop by! (The panel is Tuesday, June 23, 1-2pm.)

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.

The WSJ article “Genes and the Friends you Make” reports that genetics play a factor in the structure of your social network, specifically the in-degree, transitivity, and the centrality of your network:

The scientists looked at how many students in the longitudinal study named a given student as a friend, which it termed “in-degree” affinity; how many students a given student named as friends (out-degree affinity); what the odds were of a given student’s friends knowing each other (transitivity); and how central or peripheral to a network a given student might be (centrality).

The researchers found that in-degree, transitivity and centrality are “significantly heritable.” This means that your genetic background may help determine not only how many people count you as a friend, but also how many of your friends are friends among themselves. This sheds light on the kind of social network you inhabit, and whether your presence is central to it, or not.

There are related studies that find that levels of innovation, obesity, smoking and depression can be linked to who you are friends with. If we break apart the causal link between genetics and innovation/obesity/smoking/depression research outcomes, we might find that it isn’t your genes, but rather your genetically pre-determined set of friends that are influencing the course of your life. Better break the genetic determinism by stepping up that Facebook friending!

Glad to hear at least one company that doesn’t make money yet is able to get venture funding! Twitter, which turned down an offer from Facebook, is getting more venture funding, according to this Washington Post article. The article is little more than a rumor, but interesting. Apparently, Twitter has passed Digg in number of weekly visits.

I maintain that because Twitter’s earliest adopters were adults, not teenagers or college kids, it is in a much better position to find a profitable business model compared to other social network services. Not only are Twitter’s core users in the business of web 2.0, they are using Twitter to support their work. It is only a matter of time before Twitter figures out how to make money off of that.

This is not the most interesting blog post, but I need to make public my personal notes on what papers were interesting at HICSS. So here is the list, with my short summaries and links to the papers.

Agents of Diffusion – Insights from a Survey of Facebook Users, Rebecca Ermecke, Philip Mayrhofer, Stefan Wagner

On viral adoption on Facebook

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, Courtenay Honeycutt, Susan C. Herring

How people use the @ reply mechanism in Twitter. Did you know that 30% of messages get replies?

A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community, Eric Gleave, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento, Marc A. Smith

A theoretical paper on determing social roles in an online community. Best paper award for the Track.

Hello Stranger! A Study of Introductory Communication Structure and Social Match Success, Daphne R. Raban, Stephen T. Ricken, Sukeshini A., Grandhi, Nathaniel Laws, and Quentin Jones

Social introductions.

Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Yannick Assogba, Judith Donath

Overview of the mycrocosm service.

Cyber Migration: An Empirical Investigation on Factors that Affect Users’ Switch Intentions in Social Networking Sites, Cheng Zengyan, Yang Yinping, John Lim

What triggers migration between different social network sites?

A Life Cycle Model of Virtual Communities, Elham Mousavidin, Lakshmi Goel

The lifecycle and stages of an online community

Knowledge Workers and the Realm of Social Tagging, Ralph Boeije, Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten, Pieter de Vries, Wim Veen

Social tagging by workers.

Groupware for Design: an Interactive System to Facilitate Creative Processes in Team Design Work, Arjun Venkataswamy, Rajinder Sodhi, Yerkin Abdildin, Brian P. Bailey

How do you design groupware that is specifically supposed to support the creative process of team design work?

Cultural Diversity, Perception of Work Atmosphere, and Task Conflict in Collaboration Technology Supported Global Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment, Souren Paul, Sumati Ray

I already blogged about this one and how it is an interesting finding about conflict and cultural differences in distributed teams.

Blogs Are Echo Chambers: Blogs Are Echo Chambers, Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom and Karrie Karahalios

Are bloggers talking to like-minded bloggers?

Employee Adoption of Corporate Blogs: A Quantitative Analysis, Sunil Wattal, Pradeep Racherla, Munir Mandviwalla

Model of when/why employees start blogging.

Monetizing the Internet: Surely There Must be Something other than Advertising, Eric K. Clemons

Great title and interesting discussion of some other possibilities for making money on the internet, besides through advertising.

To share an example of content on IBM’s Beehive, here is a hive five I made about Hawai’i, while there for HICSS.

5 Things to do on The Big Island of Hawai'i

When you aren’t busy at a conference, there are a few things to keep you entertained in Hawai’i. If you are looking for a tourbook, Hawaii The Big Island Revealed is fantastic!

1	See the active volcano, Kilauea! We went to the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and hiked Kilauea Iki, which was awesome, even in the rain. Then we took a Doors-Off Helicopter tour over the entire area — very cool!!
2	Hike down into Waipi’o Valley for amazing views and a black sand beach.
3	Sea kayaking and snorkeling day trip. We went to Kealakekua Bay and saw dozens and dozens of spinner dolphins while kayaking and then many fish while snorkeling. We rented everything from Kona Boys.
4	Tour a coffee farm and get a free caffeine buzz. We went to this coffee collective and they had a great tour: Greenwell Farms.
5	Sit in a hammock gazing at the ocean. This is the perfect thing to do at the Hilton Waikoloa Village.

hive5 details:

Hive5 shared by Joan DiMicco on January 13, 2009.

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