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I was trolling through some project folders today and found a couple of papers that were never published. I am sure any research scientist would understand the grief of coming across an old paper representing months or years of work that somehow never made it past the review process into a respectable journal or conference. It’s a grief that, well, i don’t think bloggers would identify with at all. Why wait six months to get your words into a conference, or a year to get a paper into a journal, constrained by the biases of the review process, when you could just get your message out online Today?

In any event, I thought I would put a couple of my favorite unpublished papers online. They’re a little old now, in blogger time, but still full of meaningful lessons…. Here are titles and abstracts, with links to full papers:

Research in Social Computing (written Feb of 2005, an overview of the topic of social computing) Abstract: People have begun to accept technology as a matter of course in the day-to-day areas of their lives. As a result, the development and proliferation of social software has enjoyed exponential growth in the past several years. In this paper we argue that as researchers and practitioners who create social technologies, we must take a “social engineering” approach, actively designing social applications to help users achieve their social goals. We then review current trends in innovation in social technologies, and discuss some of the hard problems that need to be addressed by the field in the next several years. We expect that as social technologies continue to innovate in areas such as social networks, social navigation, lightweight authoring, and mobile and ubiquitous computing, we must increasingly envision an integrated social computing experience: that is, a social computing platform.

Approximating Social Networks from Public Mailing Lists (originally written in 2003, describing a particular research project) ABSTRACT: Online social networking tools may facilitate knowledge exchange by allowing users to share information and develop relationships with others near them in their social network. However maintaining complete, u p -to-date social network information is challenging, requiring users to provide continuous, explicit access to their personal relationship data. We explore the viability of using public mailing lists in a corporate environment to automatically approximate social relationships. We found that co-memberships in mailing lists provided a reasonably accurate indication of who works with whom. We then explored whether people would find such social networking information valuable in seeking out or providing information to others. We found that organizational distance, social status, and informal social connections had a meaningful impact on whom users would chose to meet for sharing knowledge.

Over the past several years I have become increasingly involved with the Seattle chapter of a group called Dorkbot. (There are over 30 chapters world wide.) It’s a monthly meeting of artists/geeks/scientists who use technology in their art (or…art in their technology). It’s extremely “geeky”, for the most part a crowd of established professionals in the tech industry interested in the creative uses of everything from RFID tags to microcontrollers. There’s also a yearly exhibit of art called “People Doing Strange Things with Electricity”. You can get a good sense of the kind of work presented at these meetings by reviewing bios of past speakers: http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotsea/archive.shtml.

Recently the founder of the Seattle contingent, Kate Seeking, decided to head off to art school so she recruited a few of us to take over running the meetings. We have an organizing committee, for which I have volunteered to be the Dork Overlord for the next several months. (Hee. I volunteered primarily for the privilege of the title, believe me.) I became involved with dorkbot because I have often observed at conferences, with friends, and with colleagues that some of the most innovative new technologies come from people using it for art.

swilson/book/infoartsbook.html”>Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology”, from the abstract: “Who said that scientific research and technological innovations belong to the technicians? Research has become a white hot center of cultural foment. It is affecting everything from the gizmos of everyday life to basic philosophical notions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human. Wilson explores the idea that the arts can assume their historical role at the edge of culture by becoming the independent zone of research, undertaking investigations ignored or discredited by commercial interests and academic science.” Yeah, what he said.

It’s rarely the case that people have the right combination of artistic vision and technological talent to implement their visions, so not only does dorkbot attract a rare breed of individual, it enables people with distinct skill sets to develop an awareness of each other and collaborate. Visual artist, meet microcontroller geek!

Dorkbot has been getting a lot of attention from the media lately. Here’s a video blog from on10 with Laura Joy about last months meeting, in which I make a brief appearance: http://on10.net/TheShow/2203/. The month before, a guy got an RFID chip embedded in his hand live which attracted a bit of press from the Seattle Times. Here’s some AP coverage of the original New York dorkbot: http://www.yahoo.com/s/292019

I was recently talking to folks at the UW digital media grad school about doing a ten week class on social technologies this summer. I put together a syllabus and came up with the following reading list. Some of the reading came from my own experience/exposure with the literature and some from reviewing other similar courses offered by Liz Lawley, Clay Shirky, & Jenny Preece.

Suggestions for additions? It’s an interesting excercise cobbling together a reading list on social technologies, and recognizing some of the most up to date/relevant work is online, in the context of blogs, outside the more traditional peer review process—which suggests to me we need a form of online blog peer review: a measure of quality not just determined by the quantity of eyes attending to a blog, but rather by assessment of experts.

Course description:

Online digital media is increasingly authored and shared in the context of social technologies such as email, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites. Not only do social technologies enable people to find, share and collaborate with others, socially enhanced information systems enable people to filter for the most relevant, quality digital content. This course provides students with an opportunity to learn the theory and practice underlying the design and use of social technologies for content creation, sharing, collaboration, and knowledge management. We will examine current trends in social technologies ranging from massive online communities to personal profiles, and discuss implications for the assessment and management of social technology systems.

Week 1: Introduction to Social Technologies http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/07/22/discussing_social_media.php

Farnham, S., MacLauren, M., Counts, S. Research in Social Computing: Approaches and New Directions.

Erickson, T., and Kellogg, W. A. (2000). Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7, 1, 59-83.

Davies, W. You Don’t Know Me, but…Social Capitol and Social Software. ISociety (2003).

Madden, M. America’s Online Pursuits: The Changing Picture of Who’s Online and What They Do. Pew Internet & American Life Project (2003).

Mayfield, Ross. Discussing Social Media.

Blogs: http://many.corante.com/ http://www.smartmobs.com/

Week 2: Communication Technologies

Technologies to review: Email, Netscan, IM, SMS, Mailing List

Walther, J. B. Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23 (1996), 3-43.

Ducheneuaut, N and Bellotti V. Email as Habitat.

Smith, M. and Fiore, A. (2001) Visualization Components for Persistent Conversations. In Proceedings of CHI 2001, Seattle.

Cummings, J.N., Kraut, R., and Kiesler, S. Do we visit, call, or email? Media matter in close relationships. In Proc. CHI 2001, ACM Press (2001), 161-162.

Preece, J. Online Communities. Chapter: Research Speaks to Practice: Interpersonal Communication.

Week 3: Identity and Online Matchmaking

Technologies to review: Match.com, MySpace.com, eHarmony.com, Xbox Live

Donath, J. Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. In Smith, M. & Kollock, P. Communities in Cyberspace.

Wallace, P. Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge University Press. (1999). Chapter 2: Your Online Persona.

AT Fiore, JS Donath. Online Personals: An Overview.

Week 4: Social Networks

Technologies to review: MySpace.com Friendster, Tribe, Netflix, LinkedIn, Biznik

Boyd, D. Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking. In Ext. Abstracts CHI 2004, ACM Press (2004).

Jensen, C., Davis, J. P., & Farnham, S. D., Finding Others Online: Reputation Systems for Social Online Spaces, CHI 2002, ACM Press (2002), 447-454.

Terveen, L. G. and D. W. McDonald (2005) Social Matching: A Framework and Research Agenda. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI). 12 (3), pp. 401-434.

Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., & Schwarz, H. (2002). It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know: Work in the Information Age. First Monday, 5, 5.

Coakes, E. Knowledge Management: A Sociotechnical Perspective. In Coakes, El, Willis D., and Clarke, S. (Eds) Knowledge Management in the SocioTechnical World:CSCW. Springer 2002.

Judith Meskell: Home of the Social Networking Services Meta List. http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/02/14/home-of-the-social-networking-services-meta-list/

Week 5: Online Communities I

Technologies to review: Mailing lists for community groups, Yahoo community groups, VJ Central, Wholenote.com

Kollock, P. The Economics of Online Cooperation: Gift Exchange and Public Goods in Cyberspace. In Smith, M. & Kollock, P. Communities in Cyberspace.

Preece, J. (2000) Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chapters: Introduction to Online Communities, and Research Speaks to Practice: Groups.

Wellman, B., Haase, A.Q., Witte, J., and Hampton, K. Does the Internet Increase, Decrease, or Supplement Social Capital?: Social Networks, Participation, and Community Commitment. American Behavioral Scientist 45, 3 (2001), 436-455.

Haythornthwaite, C. and Wellman, B. The Internet and Every Day Life: An Introduction, in Wellman, B., and Haythornthwaite C. The Internet and Everyday Life.

Week 6: Online Communities II

Preece, J. (2000) Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chapter: Community-Centered Development.

Resnick, P, Kuwabara, K., Zeckhauser, R., Friedman, E.. (2000). Reputation Systems. In Communications of the ACM. Vol. 43, 12, pp. 45-48. ACM Press.

Constant, D., Sproull, L., and Kiesler, S., (1996), The kindness of strangers: The usefulness of electronic weak ties for technical advice. Organization Science, 7, pp. 119-135.

Week 7: Lightweight Authoring in Social Context: from Blogs to Wikis

Technologies to review: LiveJournal, Blogger, Wikipedia, YouTube, Creative Commons http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html, and http://shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html, and http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html

Herring, S., Scheidt, L., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proc. HICSS-37 (2004).

Nardi, B., Schiano, D., Gumbrecht, M., and Swartz, L. Why we Blog. Communications of the ACM, December 2004, Vol 47, 12, (2004).

Clay Shirky, in Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html

Lenhart, A., Horrigon, J., & Fallows, D. Content Crea-tion Online. Pew Internet & American Life Project (2004).

Cedergren Magnus. Open Content and Value Creation. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_8/cedergren/index.html

Viegas, F., Wattenberg, M., Dave, K. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In Proceedings CHI 2004.

Commentary on www.shirky.com: The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality

Week 8: Social Metadata: from Rater Systems to Folksonomies

Technologies to review: Ebay, Flickr, Slashdot, Delicious, YouTube

Hook, K., Benyon, D., and Munro, A. (Eds) Designing Information Spaces: The Social Navigation Appoach. Springer (2004).

Kelly, S., Sung, C., & Farnham S. (2002). Designing for Improved Social Responsibility and Content in On-Line Communities. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, Minneapolis , April 2002.

Weinberber, D. Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves. http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/misc/taxonomies_and_tags.html

Resnick, P., Zeckhauser, R., Swanson, J., Lockwood, K. (2003) The Value of Reputation on Ebay: A Controlled Experiment.

Mark Frauenfelder: “Revenge of the Know-It-Alls: Inside the Web’s free-advice revolution” (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/egoboo_pr.html)

Lueg, Christopher. Exploring Interaction and Participation to Support Information Seeking in a Social Information Space. In Lueg, C., and Fisher, D (Eds) From Usenet to CoWebs. Springer (2003).

Week 9: Mobile Technologies and Social Coordination

Technologies to review: SMS, UPOC, Dodgeball, Mobog, Upcoming, Meetup, Evite, Couchsurfing

Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Revolution. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2002.

Ito, M. Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Re-Placement of Social Contact, In Mobile Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere, Rich Ling and Pedersen, Eds.

Ling, R., & Yttri, B. (2002). Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring: Micro and hyper-coordination through the use of the mobile telephone. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.), Perpetual contact (pp. 139-69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Recently Danah Boyd presented results of an ethnographic study of MySpace, where she focuses primarily on its use for identity construction in youth culture. A good overview if you’re not familiar with it. I’ve been playing around with MySpace myself recently, and find myself much more interested in one of its more notable features: how they handle groups. Unlike Friendster or Tribe they encourage groups to host their own blogs as if they were individuals in a network of friends, enabling bands, DJs. etc who wish to promote their events to do so through the network links. For example, check out Suntzu Sound a local DJ group here in Seattle. Look at the comments and how friends of Suntzu Sound can interact with the group, really fostering that sense of community in their fan base. In promotional emails etc. I increasingly see DJs/musicians refer to their MySpace site. It really works, mixing individuals and groups as equivalent in a network. In various projects we did at Microsoft in the Social Computing Group we really struggled with how to visualize groups in the context of a network of individuals: if you are trying to best represent real world social dynamics neither the group model, nor the network of individuals model adequately captures how individuals socialize/organize as collectives. Depending on your entry point into a network - through an individual you know or through a group you know - each provide a lot of contextual information for the other that aids in groking a particular crowd. In MySpace you see both at the same time, and easily hop from group view to individual view. This is very humorous: I was searching for a favorite video recently (greg the bunny) and found this Greg the Bunny in MySpace. I love it, though I wonder how this trend towards commercialism of the site will impact its sociability.

In an earlier post I discussed some of the striking similarities between ephemeral work groups such as I found in New Orleans following Katrina, and the ad hoc teams of independent professionals found here in Seattle here. Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was discussing converting his business web site entirely to open sourced technologies. Why, I asked? He said “to make it easier to collaborate with others”. Once again, I found myself much struck by the transformation we have seen over the past several years, where innovations in web technologies were driven through small groups building on each others’ work in nimble response to new technologies as they emerge. Many examples of this on John Musser’s site: http://www.programmableweb.com/ In sharp contrast, I visited a colleague at Microsoft and noted once again the almost myopic nature of such a large organization’s approach: how does it use current Microsoft technology, how will it integrate with new Microsoft technologies, and how can we develop these new web-as-platform infrastructures on the large scale? (In psychobabble we call that assimilating vs. accommodating.) They will always be catching up to the fast and nimble response of small groups of people that do not need to be deploying technologies in the context of all the bureaucratic, political, and legal limitations of an extremely large organization. Another Microsoft friend of mine told me “I get a lot of kudos from what I learn from actually using a lot of the new web technology out there.”

After SearchChamps I went over to Chris Pirillo’s house where he did an informal interview with me for the Chris Pirillo show, live broadcast & podcasting. Mix of casual chatter and conversation about social technologies. I talk a bit about the Social Computing Symposium, an event at MSR I organized the past couple of years but Liz Lawley will be organizing this year, and a few research studies and projects I worked on over the past few years (Wallop, Swarm, Slam). Always strange to hear your own voice….

Went to Search Champs v4 last week, Flickr pictures and list of attendees on Emily Chang’s blog. I participated in the community track, basically we were providing feedback to search team on social filtering/community tools they are integrating into search. The overall feedback to the team seemed to be “solid work” but they could be taking greater risks in their prototyping. On the whole people seemed to find the experience rewarding, appreciating the opportunity to a) provide MSN with feedback that would impact the quality of their products and b) schmooze with each other. The three most interesting people I met were mary hodder, who told me a bit about her new project Dabble, John Musser, who has implemented programmableweb , a very cool site providing a repository of “mashup” web applications, and chris pirillo of lockergnome who’s organizing gnomedex here in Seattle with his fiance Ponsi. Brady Forrest organized the event and I thought he did a great job, it’s definitely improved over the years. At one point late in the evening I looked around me and realized I was sitting with Brady, Rael Dornfest and Chris…all who organize these events and were the last ones up chatting. Coincidence, to find yourself at a table full of connectors?

I have been obsessing on mailing lists lately. I know it’s not very fashionable, relative to blogs and social networking applications, but I honestly believe people spend more time interacting with groups of people through mailing lists than blogs or social networking applications. In fact, I did a study on this very topic a couple of years ago and when I presented the results showing that people still spend more time on mailing lists than IM or blogs, I basically received the feedback I must be studying the wrong population: “don’t you know email and mailing lists are going out, MySpace is in?” Admittedly, my sample was drawn from urban Seattleites. But, are urban Seattlites really that different from the average teenagers and/or bloggers?

In November I copied all of my personal email messages from gmail into excel and did some manipulations on the topic headers to code them by mailing list and whether I knew the person who started each threaded conversation. I imported the file into SPSS and found a few interesting bits of information:

a) I received 4107 messages, in 1806 topic threads in the month of November. That’s about 60 topic threads a day on average, with each thread 2.3 messages long (thanks to gmail, you can scan each thread all at once). b) 1771 (94%!!!) of those threads were started in the context of 16 mailing lists. I know I am on more mailing lists that weren’t active that month. c) In that month, about 318 unique people started a thread. d) I knew face-to-face, in person, by name, living here in Seattle, 76% of all people who started a thread in a mailing list (relative to 92% non-mailing list). e) a very casual perusal of topic indicates about half of these threads are random chit-chat, and the other half relate to coordinating projects or social events.

In sum, I receive many messages through mailing lists from people I know and I can tell you subjectively both my ability to coordinate projects and my social life would be over if I didn’t subscribe to these mailing lists. I know that I am an extremely social person who actively uses mailing lists to help maintain her social life….but am I really that deviant? Surely I’m not the only one who uses mailing lists so heavily? I know I have said this before, but I would really, really like to see some gmail data across users with different demographic backgrounds. (Dear GMail: please send me a very large data file.)

If I were gmail, or yahoo, or msn, I’d be very heavily investing in making the consumption of mailing lists the best experience possible…particularly acknowledging their role in social coordination.

A few years ago Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, challenged the HCI community at a CHI keynote address to design technologies to help regenerate the community centers and community groups that modern american society had lost since the ‘50s. I felt at the time, listening to him talk, that he didn’t actually believe the solution to the modern culture of social isolation was through social technologies, though he urged us to give it a try. Despite my own proclivity for social technologies I have to say I agreed. Encouraging people to sit in front of their desktop computers hardly seemed like a good alternative to old fashioned face to face interaction (though…better than TV, but what isn’t?). The virtual “Third Place” that provides people with opportunities to build and interact with their communities is still, well, virtual.

I find though that my understanding of how we can enhance community through technology has evolved quite bit through recent studies/projects with mobile technologies: not because they help you find a third place, but because they enable you to take your third place with you wherever you are. Through your cell phone and your laptop, you have access to any one in your community irrespective of colocation in time or place. You can serendipitously meet someone at any time. Through Slam, and Dodgeball, I have continuous, moment to moment awareness of social activity around town. It makes everyone seem very close, and finding someone to play with is as easy as falling off a log.

I saw this and almost wanted to spit teeth with excitement: http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/12/22/kiddie_smart_mo.html. Kiddie Smart Mobs, kindergartener’s having access to their social network through mobile technology. I’ve only had a cell phone for about six years, but when I lost my phone recently, and all my cell phone numbers (over 300!), I felt completely isolated and alone. When I am stuck in a room for 24 hours without internet access, I feel claustrophobic. Can you imagine what it’ll be like for these kids, growing up with continuous access to their network of people from such a young age? Wherever they are, they are a node in their mobile network, providing their own continuous third place…

I had an experience recently that really highlights the relationship between email and social identities. I met a guy at a business networking function (seattlemind.com), and we had an interesting conversation about the increasing use of semantic maps on the web. We exchanged business cards, and he sent me a link to an article related to our conversation via email, I sent him a related link, after which our conversation was over. It turns out, however, that we have some mutual friends here in Seattle. The next couple of times I meet him are through social events. I decide to invite him to party I am having, and without really thinking about it rather than just addressing an invitation to his work email I deliberately filtered through all of my personal emails assuming I would find his personal email on a cc list of one of our mutual friends: which I did. I dashed off an invitation to his personal email with my personal email.

When I realized what I had just done, I started thinking about what social faux pas I was unconsciously avoiding by going out of my way to find his personal email address. More importantly, what implicit social information was I communicating by emailing him from a personal email address rather than my work email address? Clearly, I considered us to have migrated from a working relationship/context to a friendship relationship/context, and felt the need to communicate to him through the appropriate channel. If I invited him to an event through our work emails, I felt he might draw the wrong conclusions about the nature of the event itself and whom was likely to be attending.

Does everyone retain such a strong distinction in their email identities between work and personal life? I then remembered a comment from my former manager Lili when I first handed out my new “work” email after leaving Microsoft. I created the new email account because I felt I needed to have a work email once I left Microsoft to help maintain my professional relationships. Lili said to me “but shelly, I want to be getting messages from your personal email account”. In other words, now that I had left Microsoft, she wanted to communicate as friends, not as former colleagues.

I love that in the name of keeping up on the latest in social technologies I get to play with it all: everything from signing up for a plethora of social networking tools (I’m on friendster, tribe, linked in, ryze, konnect, Wallop to name a few and I am thinking I need to join myspace); writing blogs (I’ve tried live journal, blogger, typepad, wordpress) playing with photo sites (I’ve tried at least two dozen), trying out social tagging sites (flickr, delicious, yahoo); organizing through social coordination and calendaring sites (meetup, upcoming, UPOC, dodgeball, a few others); IMing with all the various IM tools (IM, Yahoo, AOL), emails (I have MSN, yahoo, gmail accounts), immersing myself in various online communities, trying out online dating (I think one long afternoon mired in a usability study I tried out at least six). Add to that all the online gaming sites I’ve had to play around with, the more CSCW collaboration tools, and knowledge management systems…not to mention my home pages as they have evolved over time.

It’s, well, a little frightening to think of all the residual bits of Shelly that are out there. If some mastermind could integrate them all into one giant pool of Shelly I’d probably be very embarrassed at all the inconsistencies in my various online identities. Even so, the fact that I can spread myself across so many online social technologies indicates that its not that difficult to find different online venues to express distinct aspects of one’s life.

danah asks why bi-directional networks? http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/11/29/attention_netwo.html

My comment:

Depends on the goals of the system. I don’t think having online social networks that accurately represent “real” social networks is the higher order goal of most systems, though they would be valuable from a research perspective. If you are trying to find a date through a friend, or a job recommendation, etc., that people actually reciprocate a friendship or work together is very meaningful. In Wallop we thought about having unidirectional networks but from a statistical perspective, when examining interaction behavior, it makes sense to represent relationships as bidirectional because you want to normalize the strength of each relationship by each person’s other relationships. That is, a friendship is more meaningful if both parties interact with each other more than with other people. Otherwise the most active person (sometimes known as a spammer) comes up as everyone’s best friend.

In late September I went to New Orleans for ten days following the Katrina Hurricane to observe the deployment of Groove, a peer to peer technology recently acquired by Microsoft that enables ad hoc, cross organization collaboration. A distaster zone is an extremely technically and socially challenged environment, making collaboration across groups very difficult at a time when failure to cooperate can be measured in human lives. (Send me an email if you want to see the paper we wrote about the experience.) One of the main lessons I learned during those ten days was that in such a pressured environment, where the usual channels for acquiring resources or information no longer worked, people often pursue less traditional channels; that is, through their trusted social relationships. In other words, they were tapping into their social capitol. As a consequence many informal, ephemeral ‘workgroups’ addressing specific problems would emerge across organizations through these social relationships.

Having observed this effect in such an extreme environment, I have since spent a fair amount of time considering the kinds of technological solutions that could aid the development of these ad hoc groups under time-pressured situations where interpersonal trust matters. Now, back here in Seattle, I find myself again observing over and over how often the most effective interdisciplinary collaborations develop through these trusted social relationships. Recently at Microsoft, for example, one of my more fun and interesting projects -SLAM- arose out of a collaboration between me and two friends, who wanted to work together, had common interests, and trusted each other. Lately I have been particularly interested in the technical arts community, where some of the most innovative work involves diverse people working together: electrical engineers and sculptors, architects and social scientists, developers and painters.

Increasingly communication technologies have opened up avenues for sharing information and developing relationships around common interests irrespective of organization, social hierarchy, or geographical location. These social relationships then evolve into nimble, ephemeral, project based collaborations that often arise directly in response to environmental pressures (such as hurricanes, political movements, fluctuations in the economy, etc), mediated by technology through mailing lists, social networking appliciations, cell phones, wikis, blogs… It’s a new form of workgroup, enabled by communication technologies, that I believe is transforming our notions of how to effectively ‘get things done’.

For example friends of mine - Dan and Lara - recently started an alternative business networking group called biznik. I met with them recently to talk about how they might best integrate some of the newer, emerging social technologies into biznik (blogs, reputation systems etc.) to facilitate achieving their group’s goals. I was extremely excited when Dan read to me the description of a biznik he had posted to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biznik, in which it is noted that “Bizniks view themselves as belonging to an urban tribe for business, a supportive network that encourages creativity, radical thinking, and community”. Here you have a group of independent professionals, using a web site and regular face-to-face meetings to develop an affinity network of trusted social and business relationships. If you needed a nimble team of individuals with a diverse skill-set to solve a time-pressured problem - a loose collection of individuals who already trusted each other and had both the communication infrastructure and decision-making agility in place to respond immediately to new situations - you might go to a biznik group.

I went to Seattle Mindcamp a little over a week ago, and it’s interesting to note which conversations have really stuck with me. The first was the one on encouraging women in technology. There’s always a nature vs. nuture tension in those conversations, whether the gender differences in career pursuits of technology have to do with socialization, cultural forces, and/or inherent differences in intelligence and sociability etc. An examination of the distribution of gender differences in intellegence- suggests men score higher than women because there are more of them at the extreme end of the distribution: if you cut off the extreme outliers, the differences go away. That, combined with my own experience working with developers at Microsoft, and the fact that the incidence of aspergers amongst kids born in Redmond and the Bay area is so high, certainly suggests there’s a genetic component to a person’s ability to sit isolated in front of a computer for hours and days at a time….

Even so, whatever the cause of these differences, there’s no doubt that the computer industry suffers from the disproportionately male presence, particularly in the growing area of social computing which should be largely influenced by those with expertise in the social sciences and design. I think it’s extremely important to separate out conversations about the causes of gender differences and the solutions towards minimizing those differences. The variability within gender is so much greater than the variability across gender. If our culture actively supported and lauded women for entering the computing technology fields, there are enough women out there inclined in that direction.

The other conversation that I have found myself mulling over is the use of social technologies for supporting collaboration and community in the Burning Man groups here in Seattle. Mailing lists in particular largely dominate as the tool for social coordination and social awareness amongst these groups (which are comprised of sociable individuals who collaborate around large scale art, often year round). It was noted in the conversation that as much as these mailing groups have an impact on coordination for collaborations, they have an impact on community and identity development. Seattle is a very technically connected city, with many individuals conversing and tracking the activities of their groups over the course of the day. People often report feeling “left out” if they aren’t online at least once a day. A friend who recently moved to Seattle told me that he found that people are online and using mailing lists much more in Seatle than in Chicago. “It really makes it much easier to get things done” he said.

Gmail has proven to be a valuable tool for the mailing list junkies because of its search and filtering capabilities, but there are many features that would increase it’s effectiveness: their emphasis on search and filtering over folders makes it difficult to simply sort conversations from mailing lists. I would actually like to sort out mailing list messages out of my inbox into certain folders. Also, I would like Gmail to automatically tag my mailing list messages with the names of the mailing lists. I would also like to be able to sort my contacts by mailing list. I would also like to save or tag certain messages as event messages specific to a certain date, since so many of my mailing list messages are around events. I could go on and on, really. I highly recommend that Gmail and Yahoo (and MSN, for that matter) think about examining mailing lists in particular, with a mind toward understanding their prevalence and impact on people’s lives and how mailing list systems could be improved with mailing list overload in mind.

If I could get my hands on all that mailing list data, I’d have a field day. I’ve seriously thought about just exporting my own data and examining it but I do recognize I am at the extreme end of the sociability scale…

This is my first week as an independent agent since my departure from Microsoft Research. I had a number of people ask me if I would going to keep a blog on farnhamresearch.com, so I decided I might as well! It is going to be quite a transition for me, I think. When blogging in the past, I always knew at least implicitly that I was representing the mother ship, so to speak, which had a somewhat inhibiting effect on what I had to say. I am very excited to be a free agent, at least for a little while. I imagine working for a corporation is much like being in a relationship: sometimes you do not realize how much it has affected your thinking until you’ve left it for a while.