CS376 Seminal Ideas

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Social Computing
Jeffrey Heer 16 April 2009
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Administrivia

• Research project abstract drafts, due this
  Friday, April 17 _at_ 7am
• Content
• Research Question (in one sentence!)
• Hypothesis
• Methodology
• Study Recruitment Plan
• 1-2 paragraphs (be concise, but concrete)

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google earth
flickr
post-it notes
time
snail-mail
usenet
graffiti
asynchronous co-located
asynchronous remote
tagging
blogs
web
email
whiteboards
youtube
ambient displays
IM
table-top interaction
projectors
telephone
teleconference
synchronous co-located
synchronous remote
distributed visualization
virtual workspaces
space
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Social Computing via Wikipedia

• The intersection of social behavior and
  computational systems.
• (a) Supporting social behavior through
  computational systems
• Blogs, e-mail, IM, social networks, wikis
• Is this different from CSCW?

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Social Computing via Wikipedia

• The intersection of social behavior and
  computational systems.
• (a) Supporting social behavior through
  computational systems
• (b) Supporting information production and
  computation by groups of people
• Collaborative filtering, prediction markets,
  tagging, games with a purpose
• The Wisdom of Crowds

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USENET Smith, Fiore
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World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft Yee, Ducheneaut et al
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History Flow
Wikipedia History Flow Viégas et al
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Group Lens
GroupLens / MovieLens Univ. Minnesota
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GWAP
Games with a Purpose von Ahn et al
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Kohavi A/B
A
B
A/B Testing Kohavi et al
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Many-Eyes / sense.us
Many Eyes IBM
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Mankoff Green FB
StepGreen Mankoff et al
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research
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Research Approaches

• Studying characteristics of online communities
• Collect usage data Observe, interview users
• Intervene in existing systems
• e.g., Facebook apps
• Controlled experimentation
• Introduce study new systems
• Requires massive investment (?)
• Mining social media
• Recommendation and matching algorithms,

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Research Questions

• How and why do people join communities?
• How is collective action organized?
• Why do people contribute?
• Issues of quality control, privacy, trust,
• What are the interactions between social
  structure and system design?
• How do these findings generalize and inform the
  design of new socio-technical systems?

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friendster
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Profiles, Fakesters, Fraudsters
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vizster
InfoVis 05
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World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft Yee, Ducheneaut et al
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(No Transcript)
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(No Transcript)
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History Flow
Wikipedia History Flow Viégas et al
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Talk Pages on Wikipedia
Viégas et al. 2007
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Coordination on Wikipedia

• we note that administrative and coordinating
  elements seem to be growing at a faster pace than
  the bulk of articles in the encyclopedia
  Wikipedia
• Viégas et al. 2007

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Emergent Order and Coordination
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Wiki Dashboard
Wiki Dashboard Suh et al
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Collaborative Tagging Rating
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Chi Mytkowicz
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Budiu, Pirolli, Hong
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Public Goods

• Non-Excludability
• No one can be stopped from using the good
• Non-Rival Goods (Jointness of Supply)
• Consumption does not reduce availability
• Commons-based peer-production
• (Tech-mediated) social production of goods
• Free-rider problem
• Consumption disproportionate to production
• Gnutella 10 users ? 87 of music Adar 00

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Integrating Contributions

• Reduce the cost of synthesizing contributions

Wikipedia Shared Revisions
NASA ClickWorkers Statistics
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Incentives for Contribution Benkler

• Monetary (you get reward, )
• e.g. Mechanical Turk
• Hedonic (you enjoy it)
• e.g. Games with a Purpose
• Social-Psychological (you get social capital)
• e.g. Discussion forums, Open-source software

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Manipulating Incentives

• How to design systems to foster contribution?
• Ling et al 05 movie recommendations
• Highlight unique contributions, issue challenges
• Cheshire 07 simulated music sharing
• Positive feedback from peers sustained contrib.
• Visible group activity short-lived boost

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Social Psychological Incentives
Cheshire
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Awareness and Task Allocation

• An understanding of the activities of others,
  which provides a context for your own activity.
  Dourish Belotti 92
• Ensure work is relevant to the groups activity
• View the activities of others (e.g., live or via
  history)
• Coordination via shared artifacts
• Info explicitly generated or passively collected?

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Scented Widgets Willet et al, InfoVis 07

• Visual navigation cues embedded in interface
  widgets

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Next Time Research

• The Science of Design, in The Sciences of the
  Artificial, pp. 128-159.
• Herbert A. Simon
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Ch. 1-4,
  9, Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, pp. 1-42, 92-110.
• Thomas S. Kuhn