Your guide to "understanding how groups remember, think, and reason."
The Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Yesterday, NYTimes finally broke the silence on the kidnapping of David S. Rohde by the Taliban. Turns out, Rohde had escaped, and that the news media finally reported the kidnapping since the publicity on the case would no longer be a bargaining chip for his captors. The NYTimes article showed how keeping this news off of Wikipedia was nearly impossible if it weren't for the coordinated effort of several administrators and Jimbo Wales himself.
WikiDashboard visualized this editing pattern directly. In the figure below, I've highlighted the various edit wars between the anonymous editors (97.106.51.95; 97.106.45.230; and 97.106.52.36, which are believed to be the same person) and some of the administrators such as Rjd0060 and MBisanz and the involvement of a robot XLinkBot. You can also see the huge attention on this article in the last week or so in the visualization.
Check out the editing history and the edit war in detail by reading the edit history.
All of this makes for a great way for us to announce that WikiDashboard now works on the live Wikipedia data again; Thanks to the heroic efforts of Bongwon Suh in my group. He figured out how to execute his SQL query in a quick way on the new DB server.
Since May, ASC has had a lot of activities focused on understanding how Google Wave, Twitter, and other new social media is changing the way we consume news and respond to it. I just finished reading some really interesting articles and watching some videos of how people's behaviors seems to be changing.
First, on June 8th, there was a report that described how, because of the great variety of choices now people have in what they read online, readers now tend to choose news that only fit their view. The research, done by researchers at Ohio State, showed how students tend to seek out and spent time reading media articles that focus on points of views that fit their political ideologies. Students spent 36% more time reading articles that agreed with their points of view.
Perhaps this isn't too surprising, but it has a huge implication for the future of political discourse, since a healthy political debate can only happen when an educated populace is willing to spend time to consider both sides of the issue. This is why Wikipedia has a neutral point of view principle for all articles. The above news article further suggests that the students prefer blogs instead of traditional media outlets for their news. This supports the idea that they read blogs that cater to particular points of views. Moreover, 30% of those surveyed believed blogs are actually more accurate. If this is true, one question to consider is whether having a more balkanized news diet might further polarize the public opinion, and further erode healthy dialog that is necessary for the society to function.
On a more positive note, I also watched Clay Shirky's recent talk on how social media is changing political discourse, because it now enable for not just 1-to-1 (point to point, or telephone/telegram-like technology) or 1-to-many (TV, radio, etc). It now also enables many-to-many communication and coordination. He tells stories of how the Chinese citizens used social media to get out the word about the Sichuan earthquake. They told stories of the heartache as well as the discovery of the corruption of the officials who were responsible for the bad construction jobs on school buildings.
Social media does seem to have changed the speed, cost, and the ability of the public to communicate and coordinate with each other. Citizen journalism does seem like it might have the potential to tip the balance of power back to the people.
Ironically, after these two pieces of information, I'm trying to decide whether I want to feel happy or sad about the state of affairs. I need to spend more time thinking about the changes social media is bringing to the world.
I'm in Hong Kong on some personal business and have had some alone time to think about our research direction. One of the things we have been doing lately at PARC is understanding more about the past work on collaboration, and how it might be changed (or not) by Web2.0 design principles. We have been talking to Gary and Judy Olson, who are recognized experts in collaboration systems and models for large science remote laboratories formed by scientists across many institutions. These laboratories (called collaboratories by the Olsons) are a great way to understand what works and what doesn't work in the real world, when CSCW and distant collaboration technologies are put to the test and used in real everyday scientific work. These studies are interesting because they're real 'living laboratories' and scientists engaged in these collaborations because it is necessary to do real work.
Interestingly, one of the best articles that summarizes their work is written by Technology Review (found here). Studying more than 200 collaboratories, the Olsons found that there are a number of pre-requisites for successful collaboration: - Make sure your research community is ready - Tackle big questions - Get each individual participant on board - Gear up for major technical challenges - Put enough resources into project management - Establish a common vocabulary - Patience, visionary planning and stable management.
What's perhaps most interesting about this list is the amount of common sense it contains, and how it would be impossible to escape these pre-requisites even in Web2.0 collaboration systems. I find it interesting intellectual exercise to apply these requirements to successful Web2.0 systems (such as Wikipedia, delicious, and digg) to see if they meet these requirements.
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