Research Notes

Traditional workplaces spend a fair amount of effort mentoring and training their workforce as a way to increase the quality of their work and their job satisfaction. Does mentoring crowd workers also increase the quality of their work? How can one mentor the crowd workforce? These were the questions we tried to tackle this weekend at the Crowd Camp Workshop at CHI.

First we approached these questions by setting up a task that we thought people could improve through mentoring: slide design. We asked Mechnical Turkers to help us improve the design of a set of three slides (which we purposely created to look really ugly). We provided Turkers with a set of guidelines for well-designed slides that included tips on color, graphics, text, etc. We then gave each Turker a slide to improve.

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I have been reading a lot of Tweets in Spanish lately. One thing that I find particularly interesting is how a lot of people use a different retweeting syntax is. For example, a lot of retweets look like this:

"@JohnSmith: original message" // commentary

I wonder if this is linked to the type of client early adopters used. I also see this among Mexican celebrities, so maybe this is something that they started and it spread from there. I wonder how many different ways of using Twitter or other social technologies there are that we are not even aware of.

I’ve been to a couple of conferences and presentations lately so I wanted to write a trip report, but then I thought it would be more useful to summarize it in terms of the most popular topics I noticed.

1. Big data. People are trying to figure out how to make sense of so much information and, more importantly, what to do with it. So far most of the work has focused on trying to understand costumers for marketing purposes, which I find pretty uninspiring. However, as part of this theme, I’ve seen a number of sub-themes that are more interesting. Here is one: The “quantified self” movement. As exemplified by Steve Wolfram’s analysis, he did of his own personal big data , the movement is getting more attention.

In general, it seems like Big Data is need for some innovative tools that can help lay people understand it and manipulate it for practical purposes.

2. Techno Politics. From SOPA, to the Arab Spring, to Wikileaks. An interesting question people are asking is on what should be the role technology tech companies. Some companies are gaining cultural capital by demonstrating how their services are being used for noble causes (like Twitter) while others are using their visibility to push publicly for their agenda (like Google supporting SOPA). Regardless, it seems like having a voice in this space will be even more important for tech services to demonstrate relevance.

3. Online learning. Seems like everyone is doing online learning these days, from the Khan Academy, to Udacity, to MITX, and others. It’s becoming a very rich space that is getting a lot of attention, but most efforts are focused on information delivery, which is only a small part of learning. Ironically the social aspects of learning, which some would argue are the most important, are being ignored.

4. Open vs Fauxpen. Now that “open” has become some sort of a brand, people are starting to realize that there’s a lot of fake openness. It seems like we are going to start seeing a bigger push for truly open systems (i.e. Creative Commons licenses, data portability, etc). Like “organic” food, I suspect web services are going to have to show how open they are. For example, Google’s data portability efforts and YouTube’s ability to upload content under Creative Commons licenses are these type of signals of openness. The reality is that many consumers didn’t used to care about this, but an increasing number do, especially those that are loud and influential.

5. Crowdsourcing. I saw three interesting platforms that go beyond Amazon MTurk. Crowdflower which is more reliable than MTurk, captures its audience from people playing social games (e.g. Farmville), and has a very high female base. Kaggle, which attracts top talent to compete in data analysis contests. Taskrabbit, which allows you to crowdsource things in the physical world (e.g. hire people to run errands). In general, it seems like crowdsourcing has shiften from buzzword to an actual usable tool for doing all sorts of things. I think there are opportunities to either leverage some of these platforms or build new ones that tap into a wider range of people.

I would  like to argue that drama, used responsibly, can be a positive factor for building online communities.

In this paper boyd and colleagues describe it as the “skirmishes and their digital traces” that teens have online  While typically undesirable, I would argue that a little bit of drama goes a long way and it’s even necessary for building community.

Designers of online communities, especially those focused on young people, tend to avoid drama like the plague. For example, Club Penguin has an option called “Ultimate Safe Chat” where users are not allowed to freely type their messages to other users (which is the whole point of the site). Instead users are allowed to communicate only from “a set menu of greetings, questions and statements.”

While the fear of drama is probably rooted in the fear of bullying, I don’t think we see this aversion to drama only in online communities for kids. We also see it in social technologies “for business,” which often strive to keep things as “clean” and “professional” as possible.

The cost of these anti-drama efforts, I think, is that they reduce the conversations to emotionless and sterile interactions. Any successful and worthwhile social system with more than one person, at some point will experience conflict, tension, and yes, drama. Removing it completely, however, can reduce the motivation for participation (people often go back to follow up on the heated discussion they had) and, given the right moderation strategies, a community can come out stronger and more united after a drama episode.

Of course, without the appropriate moderation, drama can take over the discussions and create a hostile environment that can also kill a community, but like, everything, drama with moderation can be used for good.

In a recent trip to New York I saw a huge QR code on the side of a building. The QR code was a pointer to an ad for apartments. I wondered how often people take out their phones and use those QR codes. I doubt it it is common but it would be great to do an experiment. The idea would be to create an appealing ad with a QR code and place it around places where there are a lot of people with smartphones, then record the number of hits that QR code received. For now, I think most QR codes are merely a status signal that do not serve a very functional purpose. But as they become more prevalent, I wonder if they will turn into a functional technology.

I recently read chapter five of Castell’s Communication Power. Here is an overly simplified, half-joking summary of it in the form of a half-joking Linux HOWTO.

HOWTO create a successful social movement in the network age:

1. Emotions. Appeal to strong emotions such as anger and fear. “Fear and other strong emotions motivate people to search for information but also determine news choices.”
2.  Science. Get science behind. Using the global warming example, Castells argues that after a “shift from lack of evidence to a certain level of scientific consensus, the media covered the report, and public alarm began to mount.”
3. Celebrities. Get celebrities in your cause. “While celebrities have historically supported political and ethical campaigns, today’s celebrity activists have more incentive to adopt global causes and are more likely to be successful in pushing the agenda (Drezner, 2007). This has less to do with the celebrities’ fame and more to do with how people consume information.”
4. Mobile. Make the message short and spreadable over SMS and other short, person to person communication forms. This is something that Castells took from the Spaniard movement after the Madrid bombings.  ”[T]he network of diffusion was increasing at an exponential rate but without losing the proximity of the source.”
5. Remixable. Create generative messages and let go. In the case of the Obama campaing, supporters were empowered (or at least not discouraged) to run with Obama’s content, even to the point of making some of the strategists a bit nervous. “Obama was able to unite counter-cultural trends at the source of creativity in the entertainment industry.”

Back in July, I learned about IDN homograph attacks. I decided to check if two of the most visited websites in the world, Google and Facebook, were available in slightly different spellings (góogle.com and fácebook.com). To my surprise, both domains were available. So I purchased them, and set them to redirect to my Google+ and Facebook profile.

Almost six months later, I got an email from the Google Trademark Team asking to transfer góogle.com to Google (they also offered to   refund the cost of the domain up to $100, which seemed totally reasonable). I told them I was happy to give it back to them, but I also explained that the goal of the website was educational. I even changed the redirect I had to a page stating the goal more explicitly along with the Wikipedia definition for homograph attack.

Their response was surprisingly nice. They let me keep the domain as long as I continue to use it for educational purposes. So kudos to the Google Trademark Team!

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Recently, the influential, yet obscure, bodybuilding.com‘s forums were a bit on the spotlight after some of its members discovered a security hole in Facebook.

Influence through Obscurity.

I find it interesting that, despite their influential role, a number of online communities, such as 4chan and the bodybuilding forums, remain somewhat obscure. I believe 4chan did not gain a lot of mainstream media attention until the whole Anonymous-Wikileaks scandal, and even then, the number of even tech-savvy people who confuse 4chan with FORTRAN is not negligible. Perhaps, as someone during ROFLCON mentioned, these communities are insular and newbie-adverse on purpose as  a way to maintain their underground status.  They rely heavily on in-jokes and secret handshakes that take a lot of lurking to decode.

All  Forums Tend to Miscellaneous 

The bodybuilding forums, like 4chan and others, grew a large and active sub-community out of their “Miscellaneous” section. Even on the Scratch Online Community, a wholesome website primarily for kids to share their own video games and animations, the  ”Miscellaneous” discussion’s forum has been the most active and rowdy social space of the website. But has also served as some sort  of public square for the community that I think is something that most online communities need to maintain authenticity at the expense of rowdiness.

Internet’s Testosterone

Some people have noted the similarities between 4chan and the bodybuilding forums. In particular, between /b/ and the bodybuilding’s Misc forum. The platforms are significantly different, bodybuilding.com uses pseudonyms and has archives while 4chan  is completely anonymous and ephemeral. Despite those differences, different events have shed light at the possibility that both communities have a  decent amount of overlap.

I think part of it is the population they attract. The population of a website focused on bodybuilding is somewhat easy to stereotype: young males with a lot of testosterone. /b/ is a bit harder, but based on the content, it seems like testosterone is a common denominator as well. It is interesting, and perhaps obvious, that when you bring a bunch of young males together, similar kind of content tends to emerge.

Despite the wide adoption of  the Internet by a large percentage population, it seems like gender-based clustering continues to exist. I wonder then, what would be the opposite of 4chan and the bodybuilding forums? Is Internet culture disproportionately influenced by male-centric online spaces?  What female online spaces have the most influence? Is the Internet always going to be about Justin Bieber vs “bros“?

We often assume that information technology is beneficial to society, however, this is rarely backed by empirical evidence. Last week in our cooperation reading group, we discussed a fascinating paper by Jeremiah Dittmar that examines the link between information technology and economic growth. Despite the title, the paper is not about the Internet or even computers, it is about the printing press. The author used data from the fourteenth and  fifteenth centuries to show how that the printing press indeed had a positive effect on economic growth.

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I typically avoid terminology discussions because they tend to lead nowhere, however, sometimes they are a useful way of knowing how different disciplines approach similar phenomena. We had two separate discussions about terminology at the fellows hour. One of them was about the distinction between cooperation and collaboration. The second was about data, information and knowledge.

Cooperation vs Collaboration

Seems like the positions were that despite being used interchangeably in everyday discussions, in most social sciences the understanding is that cooperation refers to the underlying basic human behavior consisting of doing things for others. In computer science terms, I guess this would be a the “low-level” behavior that is closer to hardware (or wetware in the case of humans). Collaboration on the other hand is a more explicit and intentional form of cooperation that requires coordination, communication. So in a way, collaboration and coordination are instances of collaboration.Probably cooperation is of interest to people studying basic human behavior such as cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, development psychologists, biologists, etc. Collaboration might be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and computer scientists working on social software.

Information vs Knowledge

Parallel to the previous discussion, some people brought up the distinction between information and knowledge. Someone wondered if information was the same as data, in the sense that data is “neutral” and yet to be interpreted. Someone else argued that data itself is not neutral as it was the result of a data collection process designed to collect some variables and not others. Finally, Vivek Kundra mentioned a funny thing that happened when he became the CIO of the United States Government. He said that several people thought he was going to be in charge of the relationship between the White House and the press, which was not the case.

Suitcase Words

Marvin Minsky often talked  about “suitcase-words”. He wrote that “consciousness” is a suitcase words because it “does not refer to any single idea or thing, but that we use it as a suitcase-word for a great many different activities”. Minsky’s approach was to unpack these word in at least three different things. I am sure there must be a lot of more formal discussions unpacking the terms above, it would be good to compare those discussions within and across different fields.