Visualization used to improve team coordination

This past Thursday I spent some time at IBM Almaden research center to attend the NPUC conference, which focused on the future of software development. In computing, software development is one of the most energy intensive collaborations, and often requiring significant coordination. There are elements of competition thrown-in for good measure, and of course, everyone is working in the same workspace, which is often coordinated by version control software. Sounds quite like Wikipedia, doesn't it?

One of the interesting talks given at NPUC was Gina Venolia's talk on using visualizations to represent the structure of the code. This representation can be used individually to make sense of the system, as well as being used by a team to explain structure to others. As a map to the system, they help anchor conversations between developers by providing for an intermediate representation of the knowledge structure that they must share for effective coordination.

This is a fascinating area to think about how augmented social cognition ideas could provide for better tools for collaborative software development. For example:

* Each developer could get an color on the map. Overlaps between two developer can then be easily visualized to see areas where they need to coordinate in the past and in the future.

* Building up an understanding from the code of who is working with whom, annotations and comments made by one developer could be send over to another developer's map when code is checked into the system.

* Social analytic can be used to discover where developers are clashing with each other (like how we have discovered conflicts in Wikipedia).

Microsoft Research indeed has been thinking about awareness tools toward this direction. A project named FASTDash works to increase awareness between developers in software teams. Lots of exciting possibilities!

Differences between Social Tagging and Collaborative Tagging

I'm here at the InfoVis conference in Sacramento and a conversation with Marti Hearst over at UCBerkeley just reminded me why I have been bothered by the 'confusion' between the phrases "social tagging" and "collaborative tagging" for quite some time. In fact, Wikipedia has a redirection of "Social Tagging" to "Collaborative Tagging" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_tagging&redirect=no). This, I would argue, is wrong. Why?

'Collaborate', according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is "to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort." The problem is that tagging features in many of the popular Web2.0 tools such as Flickr and YouTube are not really 'collaborative', since users aren't really working together per se. In YouTube, for example, only the uploader of the original video clip can specify and edit the tags for an video. Most of the time, in Flickr, one only tag their own photos. However, Flickr is somewhat more collaborative than YouTube because the default setting for any account is to allow contacts such as friends and families to also tag the photos.

Both of these two systems don't seem that 'collaborative', because, to me, collaboration implies shared artifact, shared workspace, and shared work. On the other hand, 'social' is "living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation". In other words, simply existing and having some relation to others in a community. So for example, I would argue that in YouTube, we have social tagging but not collaborative tagging, because while users tag their uploaded videos in the context of a online social community, and they do not collaborate to converge on a set of tags appropriate for that video.

The use of the term 'collaborative' in past Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) field has especially come to imply
a shared workspace. With shared workspaces, often there are some elements of coordination and conflicts involved as well (and hopefully conflict resolution as well). So in contrast to YouTube, the most 'collaborative' tagging system I know is the category tagging system in Wikipedia. Anyone can edit the category tags for an article. They can remove, add, discuss, and revert the use of any tag. In this case, the category tags are shared artifacts that anyone can edit inside a shared workspace. The work of tagging all 2 Million+ articles in Wikipedia is shared work among the community.

It's perhaps interesting to note that somewhere in between YouTube and Wikipedia tagging is perhaps the bookmarking system del.icio.us. In del.icio.us, there is a shared artifact (the tagged sites or URLs), and there is shared work of tagging all of the websites and pages out there on the Web. However, there is less of a notion of a shared workspace. My tags for an URL could be and probably is different from someone else's tags for the same URL. I also have the capability of searching within just my own del.icio.us space. So from least collaborative to the most collaborative, we have YouTube, then del.icio.us, and then finally the category tagging system in Wikipedia.

A simple way to explain this is that one must be social in order to collaborate, but one need not be collaborative to be social. So in summary, I would argue that social tagging is a superset of collaborative tagging. But a social tagging system may not necessarily be a collaborative tagging system. We should change the definitions in Wikipedia to distinguish between these two types of systems.

On the Road: Web 2.0 in in the Enterprise

While more enterprises contemplate the benefits of Web 2.0 social software (enhanced collaboration, innovation, knowledge sharing), the coordination and interaction costs that occur in social systems are often overlooked. Based on extensive studies of social systems such as del.icio.us and Wikipedia, PARC has identified multiple factors that must be managed to realize the full benefits of these systems within the enterprise.

These and other insights will be presented at the conference KM World & Intranets 2007 (November 6-8 in San Jose), by Ed Chi, PhD (manager of PARC's augmented social cognition research area) and Lawrence Lee, director of business development. If you're attending the conference, please visit PARC booth #313 — or if you're interested in attending, e-mail pr@parc.com for a free expo pass and conference discount code.

Here is the conference website: KM World and Intranet 2007