POD projects

Due to the fact that I am based in London I was unable to attend the POD project meetings to experience and collaborate as a class using a variety of social networking tools.  Instead (at Ken’s request) I have compiled a list of my experiences and observations with a subset of these tools.

Facebook

Facebook is the ubiquitous social networking tool that has made social networking a reality (addiction?) for some 300 million people.  Despite the fact that I have experience with a number of social networking tools, I can’t help but refer to Facebook when thinking about the topic.  It also seems to be the platform on which I have my most mature online profile – if I was to consolidate my online identity into one place, most of it would be on Facebook with perhaps just a tiny bit needed from LinkedIn to fill out my professional side.  I have even read recently that they are making a movie about the Facebook story starring Justin Timberlake.  I challenge you to find another social networking tool that stars in its own movie.

GMail chat

I am an avid user of the Google suite, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Reader in particular.  Not only to they offer high performance, but their stripped-back usability also appeals to me as an interaction designer (and a Mac user).  GMail chat is no different – it just works, no install required (unless you’re after video).  I actually retired from IM about 3 years ago in an attempt to increase my ‘Flow’ time at work.  I still find myself on GMail chat from time to time however as it seamlessly works in with Gmail and sneaks up on me.

Ning

My experience with Ning has been with the London IA group, and that was fairly limited.  The Blue Pod group decided on Ning as our primary tool for collaboration however and I’ve learned much about it since.  The feeds are an excellent way to stay across the activity of a group where members are all working separately but with coordination.  We also used discussions and blogs to share thoughts and ideas across timezones.  Finally, we made heavy use of the chat facility in the 3 real-time group meetings that we had to complete assignment 2.  I found that Ning’s profiles allowed us to connect as a group and removed the facelessness of communicating electronically.

Skype

I use Skype in 2 capacities.  1 – Professionally as an alternative to paying for phone calls.  2 – Socially as a means to keep in touch with my family in Australia as we now live in London.  Skype has been a revelation for our parents who we actually now ‘see’ more often then when we were living in Australia.  Although the chat and messaging facilities allow a good sense of connection over timezones, the synchronous nature of Skype does make me feel more self-aware and uncomfortable than other less direct tools – I often consciously log out of Skype if I don’t feel like being disturbed or am in the middle of something (like assignments such as this one!).

Tokbox

I hadn’t seen this tool before but it is an excellent example of a both web 2.0 browser-based rich internet application and a tool that consolidates existing online identities.  This fact made the barrier to entry extremely low as not only was minimal information required to get started, but I very quickly had a personalised interface with my own contacts up.  This tool is a real trendsetter and I think that we will see far more of this seamless leveraging of our existing online identities in the near future.

Twitter

I joined twitter in 2007 but had all but forgotten about it before its rise last year.  I use the platform very differently than the Facebook status – instead of social banter it use it almost completely for ‘professional’ purposes as a means by which to tap into what mentors and leaders in my field are saying.  It will be interesting to see what happens when the search engines really start to unlock the vast amount of knowledge being broadcast on Twitter – I wonder if there really is anything of worth in there 🙂

Webex

This is a tool that I use at work.  We do agile development and regularly present to stakeholders and its rare to get them all in the same room at the same time.  We have even had occasions when due to the lack of meeting rooms available, we have done an entire presentation on Webex with voice via a standard phone-conference call even though most people in the meeting were actually all sitting next to each other.  It works well enough and the business people are able to use it – my only gripe is that it can be a little slow if the network connection isn’t good, which has made interacting with a prototype extremely difficult when there is a slight delay on clicks and drags!

Topic 10 – Complexity and social networks

Exercise 10.1: Social networks case study

1. I’m going to assume that if someone has left comments on a blog then they are ‘following’ the author.  Blogger appears to have an explicit ‘follow’ function but I can’t find a parallel on WordPress so for group members not using Blogger I will just define ‘following’ as whether a comment has been left or not.

By this definition, in the blue pod:

Andrew is being followed by James, Sarah and Tyrone.

James is being followed by Sarah, Andrew and Jessica

Sarah is being followed by Petar, Jessica and Andrew

Tyrone is being followed by Sarah and James.

2. I have assigned the participants the following letters:

• A – Andrew
• B – James
• C – Sarah
• D – Tyrone

3. In the following matrix, each row represent a participant and each column a follower:

	A	B	C	D
A	0	1	1	1
B	1	0	1	0
C	1	0	0	0
D	0	1	1	0

The social network diagram is below (created with Balsamiq – another great web 2.0 tool!):

Social network diagram for the blue group

4. The fact that the diagram I was following (from the OLR notes) didn’t seem to articulate an direction of flow made analysing the relationships far more difficult – but here goes:

The http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm reference in the notes talks about the self-organising behaviour of complex systems and how environmental feedback is a key driver to this.  One pattern that I noticed is that it seems rare from someone to be following someone else and not have that replicated.  Blogs – unlike Facebook or LinkedIn – have two strands to relationships, A can follow B and B can follow A.  The interest that one participant shows in another (feedback from the environment) often seems to result in an additional new relationship being formed.  It was interesting to note that “Such responsiveness occurs even when the elements and system are non-organic, unintelligent and unconcious…” – no comment!

Another interesting observation is the loose framework that the subject is run within, yet many of the blogs turn out to be quite similar in length, tone and tool.  This seems to be a by-product of running the subject in such an open forum where everyone’s work is open to the group – a group style emerges.  Pavard (2006) mentions that socio cognitive systems are sometimes emergent and mentions the resulting crowd behaviour.

5.1/5.2 I don’t believe that I would find the same patterns if I was to perform this analysis on another set of blogs due to the Order/Chaos dynamic of complex systems described by Kirshbaum (2002).   He describes the uncertainty of predictability due to the tiniest changes of environment creating a huge number of possible results.  There is much environmental uncertainty in a university class – particularly one that incorporates distance learning.  Although most students seem to be school teachers from rural areas in Australia, I for example am an interaction designer based in London.  It is impossible to predict what effect that could have on the dynamic of a group.  Kirshbaum uses the ubiquitous illustration for this principle of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another.  In an environment as varied and complex as an online classroom, many of the contextual factors are not even perceivable let alone predictable.

Kirshbaum, D. (2002).  Introduction to Complex Systems. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm.

Pavard, B & Dugdale, J (2006).  An Introduction to Complexity in Social Science.  Retrieved October 26, 2009, from http://www.irit.fr/COSI/training/complexity-tutorial/why-socio-cognitive-systems-are-complex.htm.

Topic 9 – Business, government and research perceptions

Exercise 9.1: Is social networking a business model?

I joined LinkedIn in 2007 but haven’t touched it since. Updating my profile is one of those things that I intend to do one day but never seem to have time to do (as opposed to Facebook where I seem to end up even if I try not to!).

Social networking/media provide new ways for companies to converse with their customers.  Although this may increase visibility, enhance the brand and provide new ways of getting feedback, I wouldn’t consider it a ‘business model’ in its own right.  There may be some exceptions to this for companies who actually make their money directly from social networking/media (such as companies who develop applications for Facebook), but generally I would see social networking/media as enhancing what the businesses are already doing.

Exercise 9.2: Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

1.1. Wiki drafts of papers for discussion would theoretically allow a large group of people to collaborate to produce a paper that would have been done through an alternative process of public consultation which by its nature would involve far fewer people.  I am a skeptical about the use of wiki for government.  Wikipedia works because of the strict academic code in regards to referencing and sourcing information.  In a context where opinion may be entirely subjective, this becomes far more difficult.  Also, a wiki allows the opinions of those on the margins to be erased entirely – this may be appropriate for a public encyclopedia but is completely unacceptable for government purposes.

1.2 Twitter in government is less controversial however.  This has the potential to be of great democratic benefit as it not only provides a mechanism through which information can be ‘broadcast’ to the public but also allows subsequent discussion and comment to be generated that was not previously possible.  Members of government from all levels could tweet relevant information from matters of federal policy (e.g. economic stimulus measures) to the most minute of local issues (fixing a pot hole).  If the appropriate resources were put in place to monitor and report on twitter activity, much could be learned by government about the mood and opinion of citizens.

2. I do see myself as a supporter of government 2.0.  I see the biggest problem with democracy as being ignorance and lack of participation.  I would hope that by providing people with more visibility of the issues and workings of government as well as the opportunity to provide their opinions, they will not only be ‘heard’ but will also have a greater understanding of the issues in the first place (and views that oppose their own).

It was interesting having a look at the Gov 2.0 Task Force site as I had heard about it from friend and fellow interaction designer Ben Crothers (who not only designed much of it but also won the logo competition – see the acknowledgment right below the logo!).  I like the way the task force is engaging industry leaders, it provides weight and legitimacy to the process and helps ensure that what is output is informed and realistic.  I suppose it couldn’t be a ‘Web 2.0’ site without a tag cloud could it?

I didn’t realise that the Gov 2.0 conference was only a week ago.  It looks as though there was a fair amount of interest and coverage (although I’m surprised that only “Hundreds of people from Australia and around the world viewed the conference proceedings online through live streams”).

Assignment 2 – CIO Recommendations

Blue groups created a list of merged recommendations collaboratively in real-time using Google docs and communicating over Ning chat.

The report can be found on the Blue Ning at http://itc501blue.ning.com/profiles/blogs/blue-groups-final-cio.

Topic 8 – Applications, tools and services

Exercise 8.1: The 30 minute walk

As I pass through the front door the fresh autumn air reminds me that winter is fast approaching.  I turn the corner and can see the activity on Brick Lane, running perpendicular.  The contrast between that street and my own only a single block surprises me every time I move between the two.  As I approach Brick Lane I can smell the sweet scent of many curry houses cooking the first orders of the evening and hear the raucous banter of drinkers, walking up the street in cheerful groups.  As I turn the corner I see the street sign in English and Bengali and am reminded of the cultural melting pot that 21st century London is.

There is something comfortable about the narrow cobbled streets and old buildings around the Truman Brewery but I have to stay on my toes as I move in and out of the crowds as cars crawl up the narrow one-way street towards Bethnal Green road at the top of Brick Lane.  The outrageous fashions and hairstyles, quirky coffee shops and vintage clothing stores stand in contrast to the curry houses and woman in hijabs but it makes for a strange balance which grows on you very quickly.

As I exit Brick Lane and head the block back to my street I muse to myself that I will always think back fondly to these times.

I have created a Google map of my stroll at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
113719407279333524030.000475c397861f50ebf86.   Use the streetview feature to take the walk yourself (drag the little man onto the map)!

Exercise 8.2: The avalanche of applications self-interview

1. Have I discovered any new tools that I will use after the course is over?

Although I have found many of the tools interesting, I don’t seem to have the time to stay on top of Facebook and Twitter let alone fly around virtual worlds in Second Life.  I suspect that unless there is some strong underlying personal or professional need that drives my participation I wont persist with anything beyond Facebook and Twitter.

2. How do I currently use social networking tools?

As an Australian who lives in London I find that I use Facebook to stay up-to-date with my friends at home.  I use Twitter professionally as a way to stay abreast of what people in my field are saying.  Sometimes these are thoughts and musings, often they are links through to interesting blogs and articles.  I am a member of Linked In but other than opening the odd update email that comes through, I don’t actively log in and probably haven’t updated my profile since 2007.

3. How can I apply what I have learned to my professional life?

As an interaction designer I find that having to design for social networking and social media is becoming more and more common as the web shifts to a more web 2.0 model.  I found the content on sociability really interesting as although I am used to designing for usability, person to person interaction has its own dynamics – particularly when creating an environment that encourages users to join and contribute.

Exercise 8.3: Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic web

1. Watched the ‘Get your data out’ video.  I don’t think that song will be going number 1 anytime soon.  For anyone curious about his pronunciation of day-ta – this is the English way of saying the word and I have been mocked many-a-time since moving to London for my Australian pronunciation of dar-ta.

2. I’m not sure that the movement of our data between sites is like a chain letter.  In my observation, people don’t typically pass on information about others on these kinds of sites (except perhaps for the odd twitter comment about someone), its more about themselves.

3. The FOAF project aims to “create a web of machine readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do” (“About FOAF”, n.d.).  This ties in well with the aims of the W3C’s Semantic Web to allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries (W3C, n.d.).  Providing the ‘meaning’ of social information and relationships via a machine readable format opens up all kinds of possibilities for web services that can do much of the work in performing tasks that can only be done manually by us today.  For example I could suggest a night out with my friends which could be negotiated and organised by our agents software that is acting on behalf of us.  Providing that the relevant information was encoded, my agent could decide who I would want to invite, and move the time around based on my availability and the importance of my other appointments based on who was available and how important it was that they came.

Exercise 8.4: Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

a) RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is an XML-based format for publishing web content (Winer, n.d.).  Syndication describes the practice of producing content which is published through multiple outlets (“Syndicate”, n.d.), aggregation is simply the “act of collecting together” (“Aggregation”, n.d.).  In the context of the web, these concepts describe how content is published out using RSS to be viewed in many different contexts, often in readers that create an aggregation of syndicated content from many sources, representing to a user newly-published content that is interesting to them.

These concepts have changed the way that people follow and consume information from the early web which was more aligned with traditional media and publishing channels to a far more dynamic and personalised view, allowing users to negotiate vast amounts of content to find information that is interesting to them.

I use the web-based Google Reader tool which allows me to subscribe to RSS feeds simply by searching for them and clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button shown in the results listing.  I also interact with Podcasts via iTunes, again performing searches and then clicking the relevant ‘Subscribe’ button.

The swarm concept at digg provides a dynamic and real-time view of popular content according to the number of people who are reading (swarming around) it.  The stack is another dynamic view that shows article read counts being incremented as they are being ‘digged’.  I can’t help but think of this as a virtual parallel to people wandering over to a crowd of people to see what the fuss is about which in turn draws more people in to see what the fuss is about!

b) Delicious is a similar concept to Digg in that it acts as a crowd-driven moderator by bubbling popular items up to the surface.  It is less transient in nature however as it also allows users to tag and describe their bookmarks – creating an extremely valuable folksonomy with a rich set of crowd-sourced information from many people.  This has wonderful potential for workgroups as the informal knowledge references that each individual brings to the group can be consolidated in a way that can be leveraged by everyone in the workgroup.  This creates a valuable resource that represents much of the knowledge of the group that is visible and easily accessed by all.  The concept of a tag is fundamental to the creation of a folksonomy and refers a meta-data label that someone gives to something that describes what it is.  In some ways this is not unlike the concept of a markup tags that web publishers will be familiar with as it is essentially meta-data that describes the meaning of something – one however is a pre-defined construct of a markup language and the other is a fluid categorisation concept.

c) GoToWeb20.net provides a similar service to what has been discussed above for Digg and Delicious, its focus is however on Web 2.0 applications rather than ‘content’.  This is quite novel and extremely useful.  I am already a big advocate of light-weight, web-based tools as opposed to bloated ‘Enterprise’ software and given the vast volume of applications and categories that I can see here, I would be surprised if a couldn’t find some kind of application to suit most contexts and needs for a group of people who are working together – whether in the same room or across the world.

d) The Elgg social engine is a web application that runs on an Apache/PHP/MySQL platform and provides the configurable building blocks from which new social networking sites can be created via the administration interface (or application programming interface for the brave!).  This would definitely be a valuable application to have in the workplace.  As it is highly customisable it can be tailored to the specific needs of the organisation and has the potential to be a repository for profile and contact information, blogs, groups and files, activity feeds (these could help managers keep track of what their teams are working on) and social bookmarking to mention a few.

About FOAF. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2009, from http://www.foaf-project.org/about.

Aggregation. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aggregation.

Syndicate. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/syndicate.

W3C. (n.d.). W3C Semantic Web Activity. Retrieved October 20, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

Winer, D. (n.d.). RSS 2.0 specification. Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html.

Assignment 2 – CIO notes for merging and editing

A. What are the issues involved with using social networks for professional development in the workplace?

Social networks are sets of people who are connected by social relationships such as friendship, co-working or information exchange (as cited in Singh, 2007).  Using social networks for professional development has the potential of delivering higher quality, lower cost professional development to companies.  There are however many different social networking systems and technologies available and many ways of utilising them.  Options range from setting up a Facebook group in a couple of clicks to installing a wiki to the creation of extensive 3D environments.  According to the National Professional Development Center on Inclusion (2008), professional development “encompasses all types of facilitated learning opportunities”.  In order to implement a professional development programme that leverages social networking, the following issues will need to be considered:

• Which existing social networks will be used: This will depend on a number of factors such as cost, time to setup, existing employee familiarity and security of company intellectual property.  Second Life has specific products for this and has even recently launched a microsite dedicated to it.
• Goals: While it is easy (and common!) for CIOs and IT managers to jump aboard the bandwagon of the latest buzz technologies, social networking and online communities come in so many different forms that a clear idea of the goals and objectives of the project are essential from the outset.  Is it primarily the distribution of individual learning materials that is required with some discussion to enable questions to be answered?  Should the project facilitate real-time, synchronous discussions or generate output such as a wiki that can be used as a resource by others in the future?  Is participation to be done at the employee’s own pace over a long period of time or are sessions moderated and facilitated by managers or trainers?  The answers to these questions will provide the parameters for this project and the issues listed below will allow the company to then move forward and select candidate systems and propose how they will be used.
• Cost: Blogging and wiki software is freely available, but total cost of ownership must be taken into account when measuring these things as they will need to be configured and maintained.  Hardware may need to be purchased and training can be expensive.  Existing advertising-based platforms such as Facebook can be free to set up and almost free to maintain (depending on the amount of ongoing administration required for the community).  More sophisticated solutions such as 3D worlds can start to become very expensive, but must be measured against the cost of the alternative.  SecondLife’s IBM case study (Linden Lab, 2009) reports that over 200 IBM employees attended their conference on virtual worlds in October 2008 at a cost of $80,000 USD.  This doesn’t seem so bad when you consider that the same event would have cost $250,000 USD to hold in the physical world.
• Time to setup: Setting up blogs on existing platforms such as wordpress and blogger is almost instantaneous (“a minute” according to the blogger homepage) and has indeed been used as the solution for this very subject.  Having large amounts of employee data in the pubic domain is unlikely to be acceptable to a multinational corporation however and their own copy of the platform would need to be installed and configured.  In addition to the time required to setup the base platform itself, consider effort required to populate it with content, add structure such as categories, create user accounts and permissions and develop community guidelines and focus (“How to start a wiki”, n.d.).  Developing an in-house product may also be an option depending on the goals of the community and resources available to do the work.
• Knowledge management goals: Blogs and wikis can facilitate learning and adaptation within an organisation to enormous advantage (Andrus, 2005).  If research and discussion are being generated as the result of online community activity, plans on how this could be captured and used in the future should be put in place.
• Existing employee familiarity: Some platforms and paradigms are more familiar to employees than others.  Although there are few people who haven’t used Wikipedia, how many would be savvy enough to actually contribute to it.  Statistics from founder Jimmy Wales show that over 70% of Wikipedia’s the edits are made by just 2% of its users (Swartz, 2006).  Platforms such as Facebook with an active membership of 300 million users require far less training than more complex paradigms.  SecondLife’s IBM case study (Linden Lab, 2009) describes how employees were provided training before their virtual world conference.
• Security and privacy: Any proposed solution will need to be ratified against the organisation’s security and privacy policies.  Using the infrastructure of a 3rd party requires a high degree of trust and possibly appropriate legal documents in place.  IBM’s SecondLife virtual worlds conference required several months of work with Linden Lab to create the environment which sat behind IBM’s corporate firewall (Linden Lab, 2009).
• Culture:  The degree of control and structure that the network takes on will depend on the culture of the organisation and probably be an extension of the way that professional development is currently done.  Employees who are used to micromanagement and strong direction may not perform well if given a blank wiki.  Senior executives of a top-flight legal firm may not be accepting of flying around in meetings within virtual worlds.

B. How do Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, podcasts and video lectures) complement such social networks.

Social networking has risen in as part of what is known as Web 2.0.  Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase in 2004 and describes it as “using the internet as the platform… using that platform to build applications that harness networks effects to get better the more people use them” (O’Reilly, 2006).  Web 2.0 tools are built to facilitate the communication and collaboration of groups of people and usually provide the ability for participants to define their online identities within the group.

Singh (2007) points out that one of the uses of our social networks is to acquire knowledge and that while the internet contributes to information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage one’s social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.  As well as providing the platform for delivering professional development content, Web 2.0 tools also provide access to social media to help us to judge whether it is what we are looking for, discuss it and in the case of the wiki, change it.  This provides the opportunity for those participating to reinforced what has been learned and apply it to specific work situations as a group.

Of the Web 2.0 tools available, this question explicitly mentions blogs, wikis, podcasts and video lectures – each of which is discussed below:

• Blogs: “Blog” is an abbreviation of “weblog”, a site that maintains an ongoing chronicle of information (WordPress, n.d.).  Blogs promote structured discussion with a persistent output that is accessible not only to a marker, but the entire group.  Educational institutions such as Charles Sturt University have used blogs successfully to provide students with an environment in which to work collaboratively through a structured curriculum.  The asynchronous nature of the blog also facilitates collaboration between people from around the world who may be in different timezones – an great advantage to a multinational company who’s smartest people may not get to rub shoulders in their day-to-day working lives.
• Wikis: Wikis are shared spaces that anyone contribute to.  C2 is the original wiki site and defines a wiki as “a composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration. Really, we don’t know quite what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating asynchronously across the network.” (”Front Page”, n.d.).  Wikipedia is the most popular example of the wiki concept today and illustrates how such a system can allow a group of people to create a shared repository of information over an extended period of time.  This is an excellent example of the web 2.0 quality of getting better as more people use it.  Whilst it is also true of blogs to an extent, a wiki would provide both a means of participation in professional development tasks as well as the creation of a valuable resource that can be leveraged by other participants in the future and even the business in its daily activities.
• Podcasts: A podcast is a series of digital media files that are episodic, downloadable and program-driven (“Podcast,” n.d.).  Podcasting can be used to deliver content to professional development participants as well as provide a means through which to elicit feedback and discussion from them.  iTunes U is an excellent example of how podcasting can be used for educational purposes and actually has content that may be able to be utilised by a corporate professional development programme.
• Video lectures: Video lectures allow content to be produced once and then used by many people over an extended period of time.  Free video lectures can be sourced from many places on the web and could complement any materials that the company is planning to produce themselves.  Training and development staff could then spend their time reviewing and sourcing content instead of producing it.  MIT’s OpenCourseWare site is an example of this and provides free content for a broad range of subjects (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm).  The videos are even streamed through YouTube which means that employees don’t even need to download them to watch them.  Video lectures could be used in isolation or as part of a broader podcast (see above).  As with podcasts, video lectures are a means of delivering content which would then need to be rated, discussed and worked through using the other social networking tools mentioned earlier such as blogs and wikis.

C. How is a work-related social network developed and sustained?

To create a social network that is able to initially develop and then sustain itself over time, a number of aspects of sociability need to be incorporated into the professional development programme.  The following recommendations are drawn from the research of Granovetter (as cited in Singh, 2007) and Preece (as cited in Eustace 2009):

• Clearly state the purpose of the community: This needs to be in line with the company’s brand and policies, particularly for output such as blogs or wikis that may be used as a resource in the future.

• Assign special roles: Preece points out that an awareness and use of special roles can help newcomers and keep experienced members.  Moderators and mediators can further help community governance by ensuring that policies are adhered to.

• Encourage stars and allow sub-networks to drive growth: This is closely related to the previous point.  Kumar, Novak and Tomkins (as cited in Singh, 2007) showed in their study of Flickr and Yahoo that the development of social networks follow a pattern.  When the it initially emerges, over half of a network is represented by the “middle region” (isolated sub-networks that only interact with each other and are often centred around a ‘dynamic’ participant’) and “singletons” (individuals who have no connections and are least central).  The rest of the network is made up of of the “giant component” (the largest central group, tightly connected to the central nodes and to each other).  Most growth happens in the middle region where the star members encourage others to join the network.  Singh refers to these sub-networks as “virtual ghettos”.  Eventually these sub-networks may join the giant component, at which time the dynamic member’s influence diminishes.  Therefore to drive growth, the network must encourage growth amongst smaller groups and empower and incentivise the dynamic participants within those groups.

• Joining and leaving policy: This will be be important for security as credentials may need to be tied back to participant’s employee privileges and permissions to determine who can access what.

• Allow for lurkers: In a work-related social network, lurkers should not necessarily be seen in a negative light as their access to the activity and output of the community can still have a positive impact on their professional development.  They can however be a hindrance in situations where a critical mass in community size needs to be achieved.

• Encourage the formation of weak ties: As a multinational company, participants have much to gain by connecting to others who they may not work with every day or know very well.  These connections are known as “weak ties” and are more useful than strong ones as the lack of shared history provides more diversity of information.  Facilitating the formation and utilisation of these weak ties by encouraging participants to go beyond their local cliques could add much value to the community.

References

Andrus, C. (2005, September).  The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Studies in Intelligence, Vol 49, No 3. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=755904.

Eustace, K. (2009).  Topic 6 – Designing for usability, sociability and sustainability. Retrieved October 12, 2009, from http://ispg.csu.edu.au/subjects/cscw/schedule/topics/topic6.

Front Page. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.

How to start a wiki. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2009, from http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Wiki.

Linden Lab.  (2009).  How meeting in Second Life transformed IBM’s technology elite into virtual world believers. San Francisco: Author.

National Professional Development Center on Inclusion. (2008). What do we mean by professional development in the early childhood field? Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, FPG Child Development Institute, Author.

O’Reilly, T. (2006). Web 2.0 compact definition: trying again. Retrieved October 7, 2009, from http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/web-20-compact.html.

Podcast. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast.

Singh, S. (2007, September). Social Networks and Group Formation. Boxes and Arrows.  Retreived October 7, 2009, from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks.

Swartz, A.  (2006).  Who writes Wikipedia?.  Retrieved October 4, 2009, from http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia.

WordPress. (n.d.). Introduction to blogging. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Bloggin.

Topic 7 – Devices for display and interaction

Exercise 7.1: Smart screen interface study

Dan Saffer provides an introduction to the mechanics of touchscreen devices in his text Designing gestural interfaces (2009, pp. 12-16).  He starts with a general architecture for gestural systems according to systems theory of sensor, comparator and an actuator.  The sensor is the part mentioned in the HowStuffWorks article given in the OLR question, which for the iPod touch is a capacitive sensor panel.  When the user touches the screen, a portion of the charge stored in the coating material is transferred to the user, decreasing the panel’s capacitive layer and triggering a touch event (Saffer, p. 15).  Saffer also mentions other methods for implementing touchscreen sensors such as resistives with two layers pushed together and surface wave using the interruption of ultrasonic waves.

The activity detected by the sensor is then passed on to the comparator, which in the iPod touch is the gesture software mentioned in the HowStuffWorks article.  The comparator compares the current state of the system to the previous state and makes a decision as to what needs to be done as the result of the input.

Finally, this decision is fed through to the actuator which performs the appropriate action.

One of the things that struck me most about the iPhone the first time I used it was the smoothness of the interaction when browsing websites.  I worked with iPaq PDAs in 2002/2003 and although these represented the state-of-the-art in mobile browsing at the time, it was still an excruciating experience.  The multi-touch ‘pinch to shrink’ and ‘stretch to zoom’ gestures allow the user to get their bearings on a page and then easily zoom in deeper to relevant content without becoming disoriented.  This is a simple but powerful use of natural gestures which made the iPod touch/iPhone so superiour to the competition of the time.

Exercise 7.2: New devices, aged care and people with disabilities

This question is very topical for me at the moment.  I am currently redesigning Barclays online banking system and we will be spending an entire sprint (4 week chunk of effort in the Scrum methodology) updating and testing the system for accessibility.  This includes designing for and running testing sessions with users who have visual impairments, motor impairments and cognitive difficulties (such as severe dyslexia).  The participants we will be testing with use a range of assistive technologies including:

• Screen readers
• Text-to-speech systems
• Keyboard-only navigation
• Voice-recognition software

I’ve had some experience with most of these technologies, but voice-recognition is not something I’ve explicitly designed for before.  WebAIM is a source that I often refer to for accessibility resources and their Motor Disabilities: Assistive technologies article (n.d.) has an excellent introduction to these devices.  It defines voice recognition software as “software that allows a person to control the computer by speaking”.  The article also makes the point that although the disabilities and assistive technologies used to support those disabilities are extremely varied (in their thousands), almost all assistive technologies for motor disabilities work through or emulate the keyboard.  This means that by designing interactions that support keyboard accessibility, you are creating a system that will be accessible to users with motor disabilities.  It finishes with a mention that navigation in as many key strokes as possible is an important part of this.  The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines define what is considered keyboard accessible (“W3C”, 2008).

Saffer, D.  (2009).  Designing gestural interfaces. Sebastopol: O’Reilly.

Motor Disabilities: Assistive technologies.  (n.d.).  Retrieved October 1, 2009, from http://www.webaim.org/articles/motor/assistive.php.

W3C. (2008). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Retrieved October 1, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/.

Topic 6 – Designing for usability, sociability and sustainability

Exercise 6.1: Design rules and your CSU forum experience

My first subject at CSU was ‘INF440 Introduction to Information Architecture’.  As someone who was in the middle of a career change to a specialisation that was new and uncommon, the forum for this subject invoked a sense of belonging, worth and satisfaction as well as a sense of loss when it closed.

• Purpose: As the introductory subject for a new masters course, it was unique for the participants as almost everyone was starting a Masters of Information Architecture.  This was in contrast to the other more general subjects that would make up the course over the next 3 years as they contained students from varying courses and degree types.  Because of the unique purpose of this subject, everyone’s introduction was interesting.  Each unique background and reason for taking the course fed into the group’s understanding of what Information Architecture was and what could be done with it.
• People: The course was primarily made up of students with some type of background in the library/information sciences.  As someone from an ITC background who had only ever worked with Information Architects in a web development environment, this was actually surprising to me.  In hindsight however, perhaps the fact that it was offered by the school of Information Studies should have given that away.
• Community size: With around 20 participants (not including any lurkers that may have been lurking!), the size was small enough that you could remember previous contributions and construct a mental image of most of the participants.  It was also large enough to ensure that a steady stream of conversation was maintained.

Exercise 6.2: Wiki and Moodle design

Visually, the interface had a very ‘old-school’ appearance and it took me a few minutes to work out how the site hung together.  From an interaction design perspective I don’t think that the interface did enough to surface recent activity – instead this lay buried under various categories – which would have provided more dynamism to the interface and in turn encouraged more participation.   On reflection however, the concept of housing a number of powerful paradigms for social interaction together in one interface (wiki, blog, forum, calendar) has a great deal of potential.    I had a poke around the forums, which were a little dusty with the last activity being from 2007!  I then added a blog entry and tagged it with the existing tag of ‘OLR exercises’.

Although a Moodle shares the common attribute with a wiki of being able to anonymously edit content, a Moodle also brings a sense of the individual that a wiki does not.  A Moodle seems to be a meta-tool which incorporates a number of paradigms for social interaction, including those of the wiki, whereas the wiki focuses only on the creation of content without a sense of contributor.  If I could sum it up succinctly – a wiki is about content, a Moodle is about people, content and conversations.

I think that the presence of “likeable” features is a combination of good usability, sociability and sustainability as advocated by Preece and Kim.  Ultimately, what is likeable is that which is useful to someone in achieving their goals, which are of course closely related to the broader goals of the community.  This was illustrated in the reading material for topic 6 by the robustness principle of ‘Task conformance’ which is the measure to which the system’s features completely and adequately support the user’s tasks.  If the features of a system are closely aligned to this goal-directed behaviour then those features will be deemed “likeable” by its users.

Exercise 6.3: Trust and reputation, how is it achieved?

I will consider this question in regard to Google and YouTube.  Don Norman addresses trust in his landmark book Emotional Design (2004, pp. 141-143).  He lists reliance, confidence and integrity as the qualities of trust.  Both Google and YouTube are platforms that service a massive amount of requests, so reliance and confidence are established over many successful interactions over an extended period of time.  For Google, trust is built each time someone types in a query and finds what they were looking for in the first few results.  This trust is what they then so cleverly use to sell pay-per-click traffic to advertisers.  YouTube similarly build trust through the qualities of reliance and confidence by firstly having relevant content for most searches and then allowing users to find that content.  Norman’s final quality of integrity is satisfied differently by these two platforms.  Google clearly demarcates their paid traffic with its ‘Sponsored Links’ label, this provides transparency to users which prevents trust from being eroded by the presence of these paid links.  YouTube resists the temptation to promote their ‘Featured Videos’ first on the homepage and instead gives the slot to ‘Videos being watched now’.  They also keep paid-for content clearly separate further down in the site.

Google has done such a good job in the quality of its search results and usability of its results pages that people actually talk about “Googling” something.  Once something gets enough momentum it almost becomes accepted wisdom.  YouTube is a more socially-based platform which relies on content submitted by members so is heavily dependent on the early adopters and technology enthusiasts to ensure that a base of content is gathered that can then appeal to the pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics.  This makes sociability an important attribute and as well as the usual social features of comments and user-generated content, features such as ‘Videos being watched now’ add a dynamic community element.

Usability, sociability and sustainability draw mainstream users by creating accessible and dynamic systems with low barriers to entry that clearly satisfy the goals and concerns that these mainstream users have.

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design. New York: Basic Books.

Assignment 1 Essay

1. Major published works and conference activity over the last 10 years

Ward Cunningham has been involved in a number of major innovations over the past 15 years including Extreme Programming and design patterns.  His major contribution to the development of online communities however has been the conception of the concept of a wiki (“Ward Cunningham”, n.d.).  His initial “published work” was the publishing of the WikiWikiWeb to his consultancy’s website in 1995 but he followed this up with the publication of the book The Wiki Way in 2001.  In addition to his published work he has also been a keynote speaker at the WikiSym conference in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Jenny Preece’s current research is concerned with the design and management of online communities, particularly in terms of their the sociability and usability (“Jenny Preece”, n.d.).  Her major published work is ‘Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction’, published in 2002 (which being an interaction designer I happen to own).  In 2000 she also published Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability.  There is sketchy information about a book titled ‘User interfaces in the Real World’ that was published in 2007 and now appears to be out of print.  In 2005 she was Education Co-chair for the CHI conference (Computer-Human Interaction) (“Human computer interaction: Beyond human-computer interaction” 2007).  I also found a reference on Amazon to her contributing to the ‘Communities and Technologies 2005: Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005’.

2. Evolution of ideas

The evolution of the wiki can be clearly seen by looking at Cunningham’s original wiki project (which is still live at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki nearly 15 years later) and then contrasting this to Wikipedia, currently the most famous example of a wiki.  The original vision can be found within the first few lines of the landing page and reveals the beginnings of the wiki concept, “Wiki is a composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration. Really, we don’t know quite what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating asynchronously across the network.” (“Front Page”, n.d.).  Fifteen years on, Wikipedia represents a body of knowledge generated by millions of people.  Alexa shows that yesterday (28th August 2009), 10% of all global internet users visited the site (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t).

*** Update ***

The man himself has offered some addition insight into inspiration below in the comments.

The development of Preece’s work is decidedly more subtle given the fact that she is an academic addressing a broad topic rather than someone responsible for a specific technology.  There are definite hints in the titles of her publications to a journey from more ‘traditional’ human-computer interaction to the broader and more holistic fields of interaction design and user experience and sociology.  This can be seen from ‘A guide to usability: Human Factors in Computing’ (1993) to ‘Human-Computer Interaction: Concepts and Design’ (1994) and then ‘Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000)’ and finally ‘Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction’ (2002).

3. Light-bulb ideas

Cunningham started the project as an Apple Hypercard stack with information about certain keywords.  If there was no information for a particular keyword, Hypercard would create a new card for it.  Although this is a very simple concept, this is the essence of the wiki and the fundamental idea that he fleshed out when creating WikiWikiWeb.

In ‘Online Communities’ (2000) Preece brought together the usability focus of human-computer interaction field and the broader human focus of sociability.  This is articulated in the introduction to the book “… enable you to understand the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability.  People’s interactions create online communities, and developers can influence their success by how they design policies and software” (Preece, 2000).  This marriage of usability and sociability was a powerful and novel approach which Preece is still pursuing today.

4. Change managers for other workgroups.

Preece and Cunningham’s have had two very different careers.  While Preece is a researcher and academic, Cunningham has had a varied career in industry and held various senior posts related to a range of specialisations.  Based on this it would appear that Cunningham is an excellent change manager and has successfully implemented change at the highest level in some of the largest corporations in the world.  It is difficult to comment on Preece as a change manager however due to the academic nature of her work.

5. Shared experiences, synergy and context.

As an interaction designer with a background in programming I can relate well on many points to both Cunningham and Preece.  As mentioned above, I actually own a copy of Preece’s ‘Interaction Design’ text.  I work for a company who practices large-scale agile development (http://www.conchango.com/ and http://blogs.conchango.com/tags/Agile/default.aspx) so I deeply appreciate Cunningham’s contribution to Extreme Programming.  I also have an abiding interest in design patterns (particularly their use in interaction design).  Although my affinity with Preece is based on my interaction design interests rather than anything to do with online communities, I am increasingly becoming interested in the contextual and social aspects of design so can appreciate her work in this area.

Preece, J.  (2000).  Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

Ward Cunningham. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham.

Jenny Preece. (n.d.). Retrieved September 6, 2009, from http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presenters/Jenny_Preece.

Meet the authors. In Interaction Design: Beyond Human-computer interaction. (2007).  Retrieved September 6, 2009, from http://www.id-book.com/

Front Page. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.

Collwer, J. (2005, August 9). Kim Bruning discusses Wikimania. Wikinews. Retrieved from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview:_Wikinewsie_Kim_Bruning_discusses_Wikimania.

Topic 5 – Online community building and social architects

Exercise 5.1: The many faces of you

My online identities:

• Google profile
• Facebook
• Designthinkage.com blog
• ITC510 blog
• Skype
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Couchsurfing.com
• Google groups (seems to be quite seperate from the standard Google profile information)

Whether I show a “persistent” or “multiple” identities is a difficult question to answer when phrased that way.  I consider myself as showing multiple facets of a persistent identity – which contains qualities of both persistence and multiplicity.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier OLR questions, my Facebook identity is more focused on fun whereas designthinkage.com (my professional blog) obviously needs to have a slightly more serious tone to it.  These are both genuine attributes of a single persistent identity but are moderated to match the context.  This is consistent with how I would behave in the ‘real’ world.

What your online identity communicates is based on the context of the community.  If in a social network where questions are being answered, things such as how long you have been a member and how many questions you have answered help other members to judge the quality of your responses.  ‘Softer’ things such as the name and photo you choose for yourself also communicates how approachable your are and how serious you take yourself.  Ethically, someone’s identity online should not be a function of their race, gender or other attribute unless relevant to the community in which they are engaging.  This is one of the great things about the anonymity of the web.

Even an attribute such as a picture of yourself can vary wildly between communities.  Take for example a photo that you might have for yourself on Facebook compared to the image that you wish to project to a network of your professional peers.  The photo of you wearing a Mankini and holding a beer might be good for a laugh among friends but might be a career-limiting move if used as part of your professional identity!

Exercise 5.2: Social architects and online games

1. Being a bit of a buzzword, “Social architecture” can be a little hard to define.   Most references to it seems to popup sometime in 2007 (around the time social networking starting to hot up) and be in close proximity to words such as information architecture, user experience, social media, sociology and even “ideation”.  I would define social architecture as “the design of virtual systems that facilitate and encourage specific social interactions”.

2. As I feel like I have already joined almost every social network available at some point over the last 5 topics I’ve decided to just go with the suggested communities for something new.  Whyville does a great job at initially engaging you.  You create a little avatar and before you know it you’re halfway through the registration process!  ShuffleBrain was interesting as it leverages your existing Facebook profile – which relates to the discussion earlier in this topic around the reuse of a persistent identity.  I tried a pattern matching game and found it really engaging.  It even used my Facebook photo to show me where I scored on the scale.

The key difference that I see between these two communities is that Whyville is a self-contained environment with a community of members that has been built up from scratch.  ShuffleBrain on the other hand utilises the existing facebook community to provide an instant access to participants by leveraging the identity that they have already spent much time creating.  This model of building identities and then sharing their information with applications on request has been wildly successful for Facebook and not only allows ‘sub-communities’ to spring up quickly but also increases the appeal and interest of Facebook in general.

3.

Community	Objectives	Rules of engagement	Unique features
Whyville	To provide children an environment where they can interact with other children and play games. There is an educational focus to the site and their is a focus on learning and safety.	Being a community specifically for children, these are more explicit than typical rules of engagement and focused on specifics rather than the general spirit of the community. Examples of this are the requirement that children under 13 years of age obtain consent from a parent before engaging in the community. In addition to this, the chat policy discourages the usual suspects of profanity, racism, bigotry etc as well as forbidden the disclosure by anyone of information that could identify a user.	The longevity of the community is one of the unique features of Whyville. In addition to this is the fact that this community exists for specific age groups – meaning that the population of the community would have turned over several times since its inception in 1999. The visual nature of the interaction is also quite unique. Although this has since been by done others such as Second Life, it must have been one of the first and most successful to adopt this mode of interaction.
Shuffle Brain	Shuffle Brain is community built around the playing of ‘brain games’. Although the game play itself is a solo activity, community is fostered through the element of competition and comments around specific games.  As the Shuffle Brain website puts it “…creating games that keep you sharp and socially connected”.	Doesn’t seem to have an explicit set of rules of engagement. Sitting within Facebook however I suppose that it must comply with their broader guidelines which is titled the ‘Statement of rights and responsibilities and can be found at http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=design#/terms.php?ref=pf. This covers spam, viruses and malicious code, bullying, content with nudity or of a hateful nature and interestingly a clause specifically regarding the marketing of alcohol-rated content.	Shuffle Brain is unique in that it is made up of two groups – game creators and game players. The emphasis on the game creator’s both encourages an additional sense of connection as well as giving more credence to the use of the games as serious tools for brain development.

4. Founding out about who is behind Whyville was actually rather difficult.  The about us section of the website didn’t shed much light so I took a cue from the small print at the bottom right and Googled “Numedeon”.  Their website is a bizarre virtual reception room which as an information architect made me cringe and remember the mid 90’s when metaphors stretched to their limits in an attempt to use them for navigation.  Although I can find precious little about who is behind Whyville, according to my definition of a social architect above, the Whyville creators can certainly be considered social architects.

Shuffle Brain was founded by Amy Jo and Scott Kim (I assume they are married) and seems to have investment from some major venture capitalists.  Given that she is listed as being an “expert in online social architecture” and he is a puzzle designer, it appears that they manage the site on an ongoing basis.  In addition to Amy Jo’s impressive list of clientele and her bio actually explicitly mentioning the words “social architecture’, the site has been designed with a definite social agenda in mind, so I would say that they are indeed social architects.