Last: etcon: monday
Next: Enabling 'Life Goes Mobile'
February 11, 2004
Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net
(and so, notes begin)
Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net
Marc Smith
Microsoft Research
monthly tree map of Usenet (last 50 months)
Social cyberspace is large and burgeoning environemnt, distinctly biological.
Ideas from sociology - collective acction through computing
What do people really need to interact successfully?
Finding your place in the hierarchy, and communicating that to other people.
social neighbours:
Social - ologist
Social - worker
social - izing
social - disease
social - problems
social - psychologist
social - netowrk
social - software
other names:
community - were they really communities?
group(ware)
networks
worlds
These get us into trouble. Even groups - what is a group? Probably not what we're finding online. (small <10, rather than online >1000)
Robert Axelrod - The Evolution of Cooperation
Elinor Ostrom - Governing the commons
we don't celebrate the commons or collective project any more
a successful culture lets people get things done collectively
Erving Goffman - The presentation of self in everyday life
Edward T Hall - The hiddden dimension
? - Social Network Analysis
Tufte (the church of Tufte - I'm a sinner in that church)
Marc Smith - Communities in Cyberspace
When is a group not a group? - Brian Butler
small population of people who often know who else is in the group
know that they are in the group
online aggregations resemble voluntary associations more than groups (Shriners, PTSA, AxAs)
boundaries are more porous and memberships less demanding
'virtual schelling points' - places where people congregrate, each with different affordances.
If you're 1 in a million, there are 768 of you on the Internet.
Yphrum's Law - systems that shouldn't work, but sometimes do. There are enough of them for some to work.
e.g. ebay, with relatively flimsy reputation system
Ostrom's design principles for groups to organize:
5 is the kicker - a system for monitoring members' behaviour exists; this monitoring is done by community members themselves
the goal: plumbing for collective action
what affordances or furniture do you need?
waste, resource networks.
scaffolding to support collective action
key tasks for participants:
discovery
selection
evaluation
motivation
clean data (e.g. A-Z restaurant names) isn't used, you'll use extra data - how does it look, is it busy, how does it smell etc. etc.
Usenet, is that still around?
2003 - 240 million messages
8.6 million unique authors
151 thousand newsgroups
the message - at the nub of newsgroups, authors and threads
threads do not exist within a newsgroup, they veer off
http://netscan.research.microsoft.com
Rich clients - treemaps, scatterplots, histograms, piano roll, soon thread visualisation
3 million identities , 10 million messages in the microsoft.* public hierarchy
a growing environment
related visualisation work -
shneiderman
doanth
viegas
sack
ducheneaut
venolia
binaries groups do not have regular authors, discussions groups (e.g. fan groups) do
in microsoft.*, chinese hierarchy has appeared and grouwn to be as big as other languages.
(bubble visualisation of a newsgroup)
shows a structure, sohws regulars, people who are going to be there in 4 years
without pictures, you could not seee the difference in how people interact in the groups
what does a person look like in cyberspace?
(histogram of an author's postings)
need to visualise to show things, such as trends in posting, hiatusses, initiator of threads or replier, flamer?
'answer person' - just replies once in each thread - member of tech support newsgroups
25,000 of 3 million in MS hierarchy are like this
Styles of participation are often stable across time.
Implicit vs .explicit
problems with explicit systems - 'are you my friend?'
statements about behavious and relationships
self-report data is bad - people have difficulty telling you what they had for breakfast
Implicit is better - observations about behavious and relationships
Now online is mainly inscription mechanisms, there's a lot more implicit data.
mobile devices as the new mouse
first waves of devices that integrate cameras, processor, network, display
the world is a web page - every object has a digital aura, a story to tell
applications: navigation, annotations ....
these things are getting small (e.g. rfid)
Swiss - spotme.ch
linux handheld for conferences, set what you like, and when like-minded people come together, they both ring
Boston - ntag
the display is for the other person (until you flip it up to read it)
hot stuff, dangerous stuff - 'i thought you said you didn't see david'
barcode route - semacode etc.
machine-readable tags
Aura: weaving threads into things
link online info to physical objects
create an app platform for tag-driven apps
a set of sample apps
social goals
link people through shared objects and places
2% of people will do a lot to help create systems
can get more info from tags, and start searching the net for more info
(e.g. tags in an art gallery)
easy to blog (harder to annotate - but the option is there)
isn't this just cuecat?
what's changed? mobile devices, open backend, public wireless broadband, enormous amounts of existing content to leverage
(most of the supermarkets in redmond have wifi)
use in supermarkets - get Google results from barcodes (e.g. food recalls)
labels are political (nutrition labels, art labels)
all this is stopped with things like Aura
collecting places where standard formatted data could be looked up (UPC numbers, VIM numbers)
Aura going public in a few weeks. (pocket PC w/wifi or phone edition)
easy to build a new resolution service
anyone could become a trsuted authority on a topic
create easily digested summary wisdom
annotation hosting and sharing
business model? sponsored links(?)
great for activism - and great for selling things!
next steps -
web apps to manage collections
address network speed/reliabilty
cameraphone barcode reading (hard) [no it isn't]
integrate photography into annotation tools
integrate more work on sensors and location detection
newsgroup
microsoft.pubblic.research.aura.discussion
try it yourself!
annotate the planet!
Trackbacks
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.anti-mega.com/cgi-bin/mt/addmttb.cgi/107
