Collab-Or-Ate

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.

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.

I’m at HICSS right now and listening to Yannick Assogba present a paper “Mycrocosm: Microblogging” during the Social Spaces mini-track. Below are 2 graphs I made on the mycrocosm site, showing what time I woke up each day of the conference and what I’ve eaten in Hawaii.

Mycrocosm is a mix of many eyes light-weight visualizations and twitter light-weight sharing. It was so easy to make the graph that I’m tempted to start using this for different things. I need to start looking for personal data to collect and share. In some ways, this is similar to Slifeshare, a retired feature in Slife.

When I initially heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded crazy and way too mega-ego and, hello, why would I care that you just got a haircut? Now that I have been using it, oh, every day, for the past 6 months, I guess I have to admit that I find it is kind of useful and appealing. I finally put it together what is so appealing about it. Twitter is a persistent chat room. It is Babble!

Babble is similar to a multi-channel textual chat system except that its conversation persists over sessions, allowing both synchronous and asynchronous talk. Its aim is to support everyday, opportunistic interaction among members of a workgroup. [link]

I never used Babble (it was built in 1997 and used internally at IBM before I joined), but it is one of the projects that inspired my thesis research. Its key concept is social translucence:

Social translucence is the idea that we should make some (but not all) cues about the presence and activity of users of digital systems available to one another. [link]

Twitter fits this criteria and has a lot of the same features as Babble:

• you can communicate either synchronously or asynchronously (txt, mobile, browser, etc… )
• you can see who is present (Twitter’s following and followers pictures)
• you can see who is active (Twitter’s time-sorted list of who said what)
• you can selectively determine who sees your posts (direct messages, @ messages, broadcast)

The main differences between Twitter and Babble are:

• Babble has a graphical visualization showing who is currently engaged in the conversation
• Twitter’s “groups” are not bounded. Even though you and I might be following each other, my group is probably different than your group. It is possible there could be 0% overlap, but we could still communicate.
• The cultural norms of Twitter are pretty distinctive in that people use “tweets” to give casual updates on their latest thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. The updates are not solely focused on workgroup interaction, like Babble was conceptualized to be for. But I see this as Twitter’s unusual strength.

It would be great if Twitter had some social visualization capability. (Maybe it does? Anyone know?) Then it really would be Babble, adapted for the flexible, ad-hoc type of collaboration and communication we do in this post-2000 world.

If you haven’t read them already, I highly recommend these papers on Babble and social translucence:

Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of “Babble”, by Thomas Erickson, David N. Smith, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, John T. Richards, Erin Bradner. In Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI ‘99. ACM Press, 1999.

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg. In Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp 59-83. New York: ACM Press, 2000.

Went to a talk today at MIT by Craig of craigslist. (As a side note, Sergey of Google was sitting a few seats away, but I was a little slow to pick up on this, despite Craig calling on him by name when he asked a question.)

I really enjoyed hearing Craig talk about his original vision for craigslist that continues to drive the site today. Some of his points:

• He recently realized he is a community organizer. In 1994 when he started craigslist it was about connecting people, mostly nerds, together so that they could get what they needed. For a long time he was an engineer. Now his title is customer service rep.
• The experience of exchanging goods is social — people really enjoy doing it. Like flea markets and the Roman Forum, places where people come together to buy and sell are enjoyable places to be.
• Craigslist is fast and simple. He’s not a designer but he knows how to make things fast and simple. He thinks the front page of craigslist is too cluttered today, but it is pretty simple in terms of figuring out what to do.
• He doesn’t care to define “web 2.0″ (yay!!) and says that craigslist is web 0.1. He wasn’t interested in talking about “what’s next” for craigslist (people were asking about video, multimedia, blah, blah), because he is more interested in doing what is best for the community.

He kept returning to the point that the no-ads and no-selling-out isn’t because he is altruistic or charitable, but rather because of his nerd ethos. He believes that everyone in the world just wants to have things simple and easy and wants to be given a break once in a while. His original decision to not have banner ads in the 1990’s was because he thought banner ads were usually lame and distracting. He always goes with his gut instinct on how best to provide a service to his users and does not think of how best to make the most money, because he’s always made plenty of money.

He still uses pine for email. How awesome is that? I miss pine!

Since I’m now a super-fan, I’ll point you towards Craig’s blog, twitter feed, and interview on the Colbert Report.

While off in our ivory tower this week, we missed the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Some interesting stories that came out of it:

• Ross Mayfield says SocialText will be a better sell in this economy than IBM and Microsoft’s solutions because SocialText is cheaper. I don’t know the prices, but this sounds pretty logical.
• Facebook and Twitter don’t plan to become profitable any time soon. I think this is a good sign that the fun isn’t over yet.
• LinkedIn has released some “all work, no play” applications. Will be very interesting to see where this takes LinkedIn.

Last week, Irene Greif (the head of CUE, the group I work in) announced that IBM is opening new Center for Social Software in Cambridge, MA. There is some press about it here and here.

The focus of the center will be on a style of research we are calling “Venture Research.”

Venture Research can be distinguished from other types of technology research by two major features. First, a venture project involves a large-scale deployment of a research project “in the wild,” for example, on the web. Typically the reason for doing a deployment to a large population is to test hypotheses about interactions between thousands of people and to allow for appropriation of the technology for unanticipated purposes.

Second, at a practical level, recruiting thousands of participants for a project means that the venture project’s application must provide a tangible value to its users. As a result, they are typically long-lasting projects and users often expect that the services will be available consistently and indefinitely. This is where the practical funding issues arise. While you can build a Web 2.0 app relatively quickly, maintaining a community of thousands, over extended periods of time takes funding that is separate and on top of base funding that supported the initial research idea’s formulation. In this way, the projects require funding more akin to venture capital — high risk, but high reward.

The reason IBM is interested in doing this style of research is that we see this scale of user interaction more the norm than the exception. As IBM is in the business of building solutions for companies, the new Center’s intention is to lead the field towards understanding how companies will communicate, interact, collaborate, and exchange at these scales of interaction.

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 9th 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

While at CHI last month (our international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI)), I went to two panels (“Celebrating ‘The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction’” and “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful?“) that had really interesting discussions about what defines our research conference (CHI) and our field of study (HCI). I’m still synthesizing my thoughts around these panels and what I’ve been reading since, but based on them, here is how I think about the HCI field today:

1. The HCI field (and the CHI conference) began in the 1980’s with a strong grounding in computer science and cognitive science. Card, Newell, and Moran’s The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction is considered the seminal textbook describing this approach.
2. Computer science and cognitive science guide us towards taking a systematic, scientific approach to building and evaluating software (for e.g. GOMS). This is a solid way to build systems and many of the early successful HCI research projects utilized this approach.
3. As the software and consumer electronics industries exploded over the last two decades, it has become obvious that there is something more going on here driving user adoption, in addition to computer science innovation and cognitive science usability. You could summarize this as “design” or “context” or “the third paradigm.” However you describe it, it has to do with human emotions, social dynamics and desire.
4. As Greenberg pointed out in his paper presentation, evaluating an early prototype in a systematic way, particularly in terms of usability, can kill the innovation process. Early design often gets things wrong, but it is a critical stage in the product innovation cycle and should not be stunted through rigorous evaluation. He claims that inappropriate evaluation is harming the quality of the work presented at CHI — read Greenberg and Buxton’s paper for more details.
5. The CHI community is struggling to find an identity that simultaneously supports a scientific process (so that there is a criteria for judging quality) and product innovation (so that CHI has an influence over the technology world, outside of academics).
6. The paper The Three Paradigms of HCI (Harrison, S. Tatar, D. and Sengers, P.) tries to define exactly what this “third” thing is that is missing from our traditional HCI education, calling it the “phenomenological matrix.” Research practices this third paradigm include are ethnography, action research, practice-based research, and interaction analysis, where the “goal is to grapple with the full complexity around the system.”
7. Because I’ve been working within the space of design, social psychology, and “context” for so long, this approach to building technology seems so logical, yet surprisingly hard to justify to CHI paper reviewers. But on the other hand, my response should not be to reject the CHI’s body of work as misguided or uninformed. I think a rejection of stringent evaluation techniques should not lead to a rejection of the innovations that have been born out of this structure.
8. My conclusion from this is that I should read more, spending time becoming more aware of and inspired by the work done before us. I’m all in favor of coming up with alternative evaluation methods or no evaluation criteria so that we can foster risky, exciting ideas within HCI. But I don’t want to abandon all the early work’s ideas.

Some Recommended Readings:


The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, Allen Newell

Twenty-five years ago, Card, Moran and Newell’s book, “The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction”, named our field and launched us into a new world of user-centered design and development. These pioneers believed that “a scientific psychology should help us in arranging [the human-computer] interface so it is easy, efficient, error-free – even enjoyable.”

Saul Greenberg & Bill Buxton’s paper “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time).“

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today’s reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow’s eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology – if any – must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

The Three Paradigms of HCI, S Harrison, D Tatar, P Sengers

Informal histories of HCI commonly document two major intellectual waves that have formed the field: the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind. In this paper, we document underlying forces that constitute a third wave in HCI and suggest systemic consequences for the CHI community. We provisionally name this the ‘phenomenological matrix’. In the course of creating technologies such as ubiquitous computing, visualization, affective and educational technology, a variety of approaches are addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues. We demonstrate the underlying unity of these approaches, and document how they suggest the centrality of currently marginal criteria for design, evaluation, appreciation, and developmental methodology in CHI work.

Thomas Erickson, David W. McDonald’s new book, HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community

From Tom Erickson’s web page:

The goal of the HCI Remixed project is to produce a collection of essays in which researchers and practitioners reflect on a paper or other piece of work by someone else, that is at least 10 years old, and that has had a personal impact on their view of or approach to HCI.

I am listening to Eric Baumer present this paper at CHI 2008. It seems fitting to blog while listening….

Baumer, E., M. Sueyoshi, B. Tomlinson. 2008. “Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging.” In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008). Florence, Italy.

I think the paper will be available on Bill Tomlinson’s web page.

One of the interesting things Eric mentioned is that readers are much more forgiving of a blog of their friend than a blog of a stranger. They tolerate lame posts and poor visual design of friends, but not of strangers. (hmm, I hope I pass this stranger-test, but perhaps not always!) They also forgive erratic posting. I’m trying to fix that by posting this!

Both types of readers enjoy the random personal tidbits added to the otherwise professional blog, because it humanizes the blogger and makes the reader feel a personal connection to the blogger.

I recommend the paper based on his talk, and I definitely plan to read it.

Here’s my personal tidbit to keep you coming back for more… British Airways lost my luggage 9 days ago when I arrived in Scotland. I am now in Italy and have had to buy a new wardrobe, which is both excellent and kind of a pain. It has been quite an adventure and BA has been everything but helpful.

I’ve been working for a year now on Beehive, with Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, and Casey Dugan. We can finally (officially) talk about it outside IBM, starting with Lotusphere, and there has been some buzz generated by that, in the press and the blogosphere:

In the press:
• eWeek: IBM`s Social Beehive and Discovery Search
• Business Week: Managing the Global Workforce (This is a more general article about IBM and mentions Beehive at the end as an example of how IBM is dealing with a globally distributed workforce.)
• CIO: IBM Shows Off Social Software for Business

And on the blogs:

• Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog: Is there a Link Between Social Computing and Business Networks?
• Collaborative Thinking: Lotusphere 2008: IBM Research – Glimpsing The Future
• Lotusphere 2008 – Day 2

This is a response to Chris Poile’s comment where he points to an interesting article by Cory Doctorow on Facebook friending….

What do you think the world (AKA the social networking website world) would be like if you didn’t need to confirm your friends on Facebook (LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, etc…) ? In that universe, it could be argued that friends lists would be meaningless. But as Chris, Cory, and many others point out, you often feel obligated to friend-back people you don’t particularly feel friendly with in our current universe, so how meaningful are friends lists now? You can draw a firm line and say you will only friend people you have met face-to-face, but that subset of “friends” still includes a lot of “non-friends” like the bully from high school.

If friends are unconfirmed, you would be freed to build your list anyway you like. You could actually create an accurate list of who you think are your close friends and colleagues. Or you could leave it empty. Or you could fill it with millions.

You could decide on a whim to add or remove people without offending anyone. Or would you still offend people? Is there so much pressure to reciprocate the friending (this pressure created by these websites, not by anything in our “real” lives) that we would carry that over to a universe with no required confirmation?

Real friendships are often not perfectly balanced. I consider my sister to be one of my best friends (yes!), but as we jokingly discuss, she might not even consider me a friend at all, but rather just a sister. I recently tried and failed to convince her to join Facebook so I can friend her. So where does that leave me? My Facebook friends list is totally wrong! I wish I could add her without requiring her to confirm or even join the site.

What do you think a no-confirm-required friending model would look like in practice?

There’s a new concept device out called the “Moody Sensiblog,” which the creaters at Yanko Design describe as a “biological twitter.” Much like twitter, it broadcasts what you are doing to your friends, but instead of sending text messages, this device automatically broadcasts your motion (from an accelerometer), sounds (from a microphone), and your galvanic skin response (your palm sweat detected from electrodes). Would you consider wearing this? Yea, me neither!

But it it similar to a project I worked on with Andrew Fiore and Vidya Lakshmipathy in 2002. Conductive Chat was an instant messaging interface that automatically changed the size and color of your typed text to reflect your level of excitement, becoming bigger as your galvanic skin response increased and turning red when you were at elevated levels.

I found out about this via Mobile Messaging 2.0.

Have you ever worked in an open office setting without any cubical walls? The closest I came was in 1997 at a 15 person company where the cubes were organized into groups of four. In that setting, when anyone entered our area, all four of us would look up.

Jeremy Birnholtz presented a very interesting paper at Group that discussed a study where he, Carl Gutwin and Kirstie Hawkey examined several 100% open office workspaces and the verbal and non-verbal negotiation people go through before initiating conversation. He talked about two concepts: “attentional legitimacy” (what are you legitimately allowed to look at within your co-workers workspace?) and “public displays of attention” (the acts you go through so that others know you are trying to get their attention). He talked about a 3-4 foot bubble that people hover within around your desk while they assess how available you are, before they approach you.

What I like most about his talk was how he highlighted that tools that have been built for managing awareness between remote colleagues have not taken into account that there is often a subtle, non-verbal, two-way negotiation going on between people to assess the availability of someone. If you are wearing headphones you are not available. But if you see your boss walk by slowly, looking over, you may take off those headphones and make yourself available. Both parties adjust their behavior to fit the environment and to signal to each other. How could you do that over an electronic mode of communication such as instant messenger?

Here is the paper:

Jeremy Birnholtz, Carl Gutwin, Kirstie Hawkey. (2007) “Privacy in the Open: How Attention Mediates Awareness and Privacy in Open-Plan Offices.” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP 2007), Nov 2007.

* Image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Company Headquarters building, Racine, WI

Yesterday, Warren Sack visited IBM to talk about his latest research thoughts about how to evaluate software, in particular the aesthetics of information visualization. Here is an excerpt from his talk’s abstract:

This presentation is a part of a larger project to articulate critical criteria for
evaluating information and communication technologies (ICTs): criteria of democracy and the public good. It is hoped that these evaluative criteria offer alternatives to the way hardware and software developments are usually evaluated by computer scientists and
information architects.

My interpretation of what he said, and a point I heartily agree with, is that we embed our values into the technology we design. A nice example he gave is of object-oriented programming paralleling the structure of modern top-down, distributed corporations. We believe that is how efficient programs and companies should be run. In some situations, the applied value structure is not the best design and it can be hard to break away from certain structures because our value systems are so ingrained into our models for thinking about systems. In particular, he is focusing on issues of democracy and deliberation (see his project Agnostics for some of this).

You know how once something is pointed out to you, you see it everywhere? Well, you have to read Walt Mossberg’s column yesterday, entitled “Free My Phone.” Mossberg is voicing a frustration that many cell phone users have over the limitations of the technology. He describes the problem as a conflict in values. There are two value systems at play: that of the cell phone service providers and that of the creators of the Internet. He claims the cell phone service providers are applying a “Soviet Ministry Model” (obviously that means it is evil) and the Internet was build upon the values of a free market and of free-flowing information (capitalism and free speech, can’t get less evil than that).

Here Mossberg outlines his values:

I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.
…
But, in my view, they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what phones run on their networks, and what software and services run on those phones. We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers’ purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network.

You will probably agree with him because you wish your phone were cooler and you were able to customize its applications. But do you agree with his value statement that the phone industry should reflect the Internet’s “ecosystem” that was largely invented by libertarian academics? If you are reading my blog, you probably do. But you should be aware that one value system that works for one technology may not be the best model to apply to the next. Our libertarian politics might be great for most things, but are these always the right values for all circumstances?

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