Technology Mediated Social Participation Workshop at PARC next week

Earlier this year PARC and Univ. of Maryland approached NSF with the idea of funding two workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. NSF eagerly provided funding and simultaneously started a new program on Social-Computational Systems (SoCS).

Technology Mediated Social Participation
WEST COAST WORKSHOP & PANEL - Dec 10-11 @ PARC
With the goal of drawing up a strong scientific research agenda and educational recommendations necessary for a new era of social participation technologies, PARC is hosting the first of two workshops designed to bring together a diverse set of researchers from a variety of disciplines.

The West Coast Workshop will focus on three major themes:

• Integration of theory: from individual behavior to collective action
  
• Social intelligence and capital: understanding connections
  
• Research challenges: shareable infrastructure, ethics, and protection
  

In addition, Peter Pirolli and Jenny Preece will be hosting a special PARC Forum on Technology Mediated Social Participation on Thursday December 10, featuring panelists Ben Shneiderman, Amy Bruckman, Bernardo Huberman, and Cameron Marlow. The Forum will be streamed and recorded as well. We'll be live-testing/ soft launching the PARC Forum livestream at: http://www.justin.tv/parcinc

Check out extensive blog post by Peter here.

Twitter hashtag is #TMSP.

Workshop event page: Event - Technology Mediated Social Participation Workshop - PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)

Talk video: Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Social Cognition research

PARC Forum: May 1, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA ,USA

Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Social Cognition research

Ed Chi, PARC Augmented Social Cognition group

We are experiencing the new Social Web, where people share, communicate, commiserate, and conflict with each other. As evidenced by Wikipedia and del.icio.us, Web 2.0 environments are turning people into social information foragers and sharers. Users interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense of topic areas from "Obama vs. Clinton" to "Islam."

PARC's Augmented Social Cognition researchers -- who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, sociology, and other disciplines -- focus on understanding how to "enhance a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason". Through Web 2.0 systems like social tagging, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.

In this Forum, we summarize recent PARC work and early findings on: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and
metadata.


Bio:
Ed H. Chi is a senior research scientist and area manager of PARC's Augmented Social Cognition group. His previous work includes understanding Information Scent (how users navigate and make sense of information environments like the Web), as well as developing information visualizations such as the "Spreadsheet for Visualization" (which allows users to explore data through a spreadsheet metaphor where each cell holds an entire data set with a full-fledged visualization). He has also worked on computational molecular biology, ubiquitous computing systems, and recommendation and personalized search engines. Ed has over 19 patents and has been conducting research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been quoted in the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, Slate, and the Associated Press. Ed completed his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota between 1992 and 1999. In his spare time, he is an avid Taekwondo black belt, photographer, and snowboarder.

PARC and ASC to host a special Web2.0 speaker series

Starting next week on Nov 15th, PARC and ASC is hosting a special Web2.0 speaker series as part of our normal PARC Forum talks. We have a very exciting and evolving list of speakers. This series will run for several months throughout the winter season, right here at PARC.

The first week we will have Ross Mayfield from SocialText speaking to us about Wikis in the Enterprise. Following that, we have speakers from various places ranging from startups, industrial research labs, and academia. Topics will range from social practices of online communities, startup excitements, mashup techniques, and academic studies. The talks will be recorded and published on the web. Here is the preliminary announcement:

PARC Forum -- special speaker series on going beyond web 2.0
Thursdays at 4 pm, Palo Alto, CA

more info at www.parc.com/forum

Upcoming confirmed speakers:

*November 15 -- Ross Mayfield, SocialText
*November 29 -- Garrett Camp, Stumble Upon
*December 6 -- Charlene Li, Forrester Research
*December 13 -- Guy Kawasaki, Truemors, Garage Ventures
*January 10 -- Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs
*January 17 -- Chris Anderson, Long Tail
*February 7 -- Premal Shah, Kiva.org
*February 21 -- Andrew Mc Afee, Harvard Business School
*March 20 -- Lisa Petrides, Amee Evans; OER Commons
*March 27 -- Ed Chi, PARC Augmented Social Cognition

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please visit: www.parc.com/subscriptions.

New Project forming at PARC

Augmented Social Cognition is a new project that just formed at the Palo Alto Research Center. Its mission is to understand and develop engineering models for systems that enhance a group's ability to remember, think, and reason.

Our intention is to conduct research in two main different ways:
First, we are characterizing the various social web spaces, such as Wikipedia, del.icio.us, etc.
Second, we are building new social web applications based on the concepts of balancing interaction costs and participation levels. We are planning on extending information foraging theory to understand some of these economic models of behavior.