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.

Charlene Li writes and talks about the groundswell and the power of social applications

Charlene Li of Forrester recently came to PARC and gave an excellent talk on the transforming power of social applications on businesses.

She defined the "groundswell" as the "social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations". She illustrates this idea with examples. She writes in the MIT Sloan Management Review recently: Brian Finkelstein recently made an YouTube video of a Comcast repairman who was put on hold with a call back to the home office for so long that he fell asleep on Brian's couch. This video was an instant hit with over 1 million viewings and counting.

Take the opposite example that happened with the CBS tv series "Jericho". After CBS canceled the show, fans organized themselves and sent 20 tons of peanuts to the president of CBS entertainment, taking the cue from a character in the show who loved using the phrase "nuts!" CBS listened and engaged with the online fans and asked them to watch the re-launched show to help boost its ratings.

In the talk, she also mentioned examples of companies such as Dell using idea markets to engage customers directly. But of course, there are risks. She mentions the loss of control as the major risk. As an example, when Walmart created a social application on Facebook, it became a magnet for anti-Walmart comments and discussions. For ways to mitigate these risks, you will have to read the MIT Sloan article and watch the video:

Premal Shah's Kiva talk at PARC stresses the importance of Social Transparency

As mentioned previously, Premal Shah of Kiva.org recently spoke at the PARC's special speaker series on "Going Beyond Web2.0". During the talk, Premal gave many great stories of how Kiva got started and the growth of the system. It was a great talk, because it showed that Web2.0 can be used as a way to connect people directly and to help them to get out of poverty. The way Kiva.org does this is through microloans.

The key, according to Premal, is transparency. At the talk, he said, "The reason why people dig Kiva is because of the transparency." This coincides with our "social transparency" principle that went into the design of WikiDashboard---we make the data visible and easier to understand, and you decide on how to use the information. Premal used the same principle here in the design of Kiva. For example, he said that they expose on the website the risk rating of various microloan organizations, and it is up to the users to decide on how much risk they want to take with their loans. The idea here is that a "social investor" in microloans need all of the information and make the decision locally in a distributed way. If enough people votes with their $25 loans, then a higher-risk loan can still get funded. Indeed, "people funded $25 at a time can actually beat Citibank's $100M microfinance total fund."

Incidentally, Katie Payne, who is giving the PARC forum on how to measure social media effects, is just now talking about the importance of "transparency" in building credibility and trust.

In any case, here is the Premal's Kiva talk:

Ross Mayfield's talk at PARC available as video stream

The PARC Forum Speaker Series called 'Going Beyond Web2.0' that ASC organized will continue to release video recordings of the talks at:
http://www.parc.com/events/forum/archive.php.
The first talk by Ross Mayfield was an entertaining talk about how Web2.0 is changing the way people think about enterprise software:
Social Software is made of people, and it is often about how the software needs to get of the way. Ross makes the point that much of Web2.0 is about bottom-up processes, and about the augmentation of the groups rather than automation of workflows. Indeed, he says that the average knowledge worker isn't to spend time to perform workflows, but actually dealing with exceptions in the workflow. More importantly, workers add their value by dealing with these exceptions.

View Ross' talk here.

Ross' talk plucked some patterns out of the current movement in Enterprise2.0 software. He said that one way to look at the current Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 movement is to notice that these systems are all made of people, and it is important for the software to enable users to connect with each other and just get out of the way. The point here is to augment the people, not to automate them.

Indeed, one of the intriguing point he made is that "the average knowledge worker doesn't spend time to perform workflows, but actually to deal with exceptions." Indeed, much of new communication software and infrastructure enable a kind of emerging culture to occur. For example, when email was introduced to enterprises, it enabled a new kind of private small group communication and gradually developed its own culture---the appropriateness of topics and the amount of formality and pitfalls.

Another pattern he noted was that there is "abundant desire to share information", and that "Social goods are created when the means of production and/or distribution is broadly available". Ross mentioned the example of Craig's List, which was a community that was build bottom-up that eventually became a disruptive force in classified ad market. What's interesting about Craig's List is that it did this by sharing the control of what to publish with the end-user.

An interesting pattern here is that "to get the benefits of sharing control and being open, you have to move towards transparency". This obviously connects with our research on WikiDashboard, which enables a kind of social transparency in Wikis.

If you want to watch Ross' talk, I recently also uploaded Ross' talk to Google video:

Guy Kawasaki speaks about the ease in experimenting with new social websites

One of the amazing thing about the new web platform that is being formed by the Web2.0 and open-source movement is the ease in which someone in a garage (in his spare time) could build and maintain a website. Del.icio.us founder, Joshua Schachter, started the project on his spare time, and eventually sold it to Yahoo! The (in)famous website, amihotornot.com, started by James Hong, was also started on a whim, and grew to 40K visitors in its first weekend. These stories and other interest facts about starting a Web2.0 website was recently discussed here in a talk in the special speaker series of the PARC Forum.

Guy Kawasaki (of Garage Venture and Truemors) recently came to PARC (where we gave him a tour of PARC) and gave a talk entitled "How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09". Well, let's just say he packed the auditorium of nearly 350 people with laughter and inspiration.

Indeed, there are so much amazing software out there now, that someone with the right idea, at the right place, and knows how to market it to the right people, can get started with amazing little amount of resources. The democratization of software isn't in just making it free, but also is in having the right conditions so that Average Joe can reach hundreds and thousands of users easily.

Check out the video of this great talk.

Lada Adamic visits PARC and the ASC Project

Today, Lada Adamic came to PARC and give a talk on the identification of expertise networks in discussion forums. Her talk provoked a lot of discussion and thoughts about future research in this area.

Her abstract and title information are below:

Expertise Networks in Online Communities: Structure and Algorithms

Abstract:
Web-based communities have become an important place for people to seek and share expertise. We find that networks in these communities typically differ in their topology from other online networks such as the World Wide Web. Systems targeted to augment web-based communities by automatically identifying users with expertise, for example, need to adapt to the underlying interaction dynamics. In this study, we analyze the Java Forum, a large online help-seeking community, using social network analysis methods. We test a set of network-based ranking algorithms, including PageRank and HITS, on this large size social network in order to identify users with high expertise. We then use simulations to identify a small number of simple rules governing the question-answer dynamic in the network. These simple rules not only replicate the structural characteristics and algorithm performance on the empirically observed Java Forum, but also allow us to evaluate how other algorithms may perform in communities with different characteristics. We believe this approach will be fruitful for practical algorithm design and implementation for online expertise-sharing communities.

This is joint work with Jun Zhang and Mark Ackerman at the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

In her talk, I found a quote that's worth keeping around. Referring to Yahoo! Answers, Eckart Walther said:
[it is] the next generation of search ... [it] is a kind of collective brain -- a searchable database of everything everyone knows. It's a culture of genrosity. The fundamental belief is that everyone knows something.
- Eckart Walther (Yahoo research)

Of course, this has great connection with Wikipedia and the answers it provides too, so these kinds of ideas are at the center of several research projects here at PARC, including our characterization studies of Wikipedia (see previous blog entries).

Lada's work here, in a nutshell, is using some simple methods to identify the expertise level of users in a discussion forums, by looking at the social network formed by the answer/question pairs. It turns out that simple algorithms that rely on simple measures of # of answers provided works nearly as well as sophisticated algorithms such as PageRank or HITS algorithm. She and her co-workers measured this by looking at the data in the Java Forum.

Some of the most interesting discussion revolved around the understanding of micro-economics of behavior. If it is known to users in the community that # of answers or replies will get them a high rank, they might game the system by replying with minimal irrelevant content. We have seen this kind of behavior in Wikipedia as well. If we were to align the incentives in one way, users are likely to game the system along those incentives. How do we design social systems, then, knowing the user behaviors that might follow certain micro-economic predictions?

On a side note, she recently won the vote on Wired.com for being a sexy geek!

Ed Chi talking about Augmented Social Cognition at Google

Recently, I gave a talk over at Google about the efforts we're starting here at PARC on Augmented Social Cognition (ASC). The Google video archive of the talk can be found here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3491597281548199656





Interesting enough, it was already blogged by someone at AOL Search here.