2004-02-11

Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4797
(Marc Smith)


"sociology is a treasure trove of concepts to lead us through this space."
[bingo]

loads of stuff that contribute to this question:
"what do people need to interact successfully?"

being social is about finding your place in the network and hierarchy and
communicating that to other people. [bingo again! and this is especially
important in your community and your primary network.]

old names for social software:
- community
- group(ware)
- networks
- worlds

key texts for sociology: [yay!]

- the evolution of cooperation (robert axelrod)
- governing the commons (elinor ostrom): collective actions in commons is one of
the things humans do very well.
- the presentation of self in everyday life (erving goffman): how do you walk
past someone in the hallway? how do you do being attentive?
- the hidden dimension (edward t hall)
- social network analysis
- visual explanations (edward tufte)
- the visual display of quantitative information (tufte)
- communities in cyberspace (marc smith)

we're going through an inscription revolution because so much of our
communication is mediated by inscription. we leave a trace.

but are we really dealing with groups?
- when is a group not a group? (brian butler)
- the groups online are large. they're more like voluntary associations
- online groups are like this organisations in that most of the people in them
don't do anything. there's a minimal contributing set, a very small number of
people, who get most of the work done.

Virtual Schelling Points:
- social software gives us addresses
- sites of coordinated action
- affordances for association
- places on a landscape that are the ones to go for certain times of
interactions. Grand Central Station is a schelling point to meet someone.

Yphrum's Law:
- murphy backways.
- systems that shouldn't work sometimes do, or at least work fairly well.
- in large numbers, enough of those systems work that we get things that work
reasonably well.

Ostrom's design principles for groups to organize and govern themselves:
- [this is a great list of things groups need for collective action.] groups
need rules, they need respect by external authority, they need inside and
outside. a system for monitoring members' behavior. visibility of other people's
behavior.

[so he's just like said my entire talk in 5 minutes]

what plumbing do you need for collective action?
- architecture and furniture for association
- waste and resource networks
- scaffolding or trellis to support collective action

* On Usenet:

http://netscan.research.microsoft.com

loads of datamining tools looking at usenet.

[stats being shown about Usenet.]

"three million people, or at least three million identities, did" [go to the
microsoft public newsgroups. i like using "identity" instead of "person"]

a reputation system is something you might figure out from the metrics they're
making here.

people's style of participation (flamewarrior, answerperson) is pretty stable
over time. [the graph of it looks like a fingerprint.]

[nice word he keeps using, 'delaminate': 'To split into thin layers.' ...in
terms of unpacking complex diagrams.]

[it's worth seeing his presentation on these proto-senses he's making.]

* Mobile Devices As the New Mouse

(phone plus cam plus processor plus internet connection)

social implications?

laminated reality

thw world is a web page, everything is worth clicking on.

if everything has a machine readable tag, why not read it?

cool device:
spotme.ch

[so this plus ghost phones. both endpoints of the connections
deterritorialising. what does that do to the shape of cyberspace wrt the shape
of the real (social) world.]

ntag has a tag with a display for other people. it's for brokering
conversations.

semacode, 2d barcode.

* Aura

on nutrition labels:
"the fog of consumption. it's impossible to figure out what's infront of you."
[i was looking at tic tacs like this. they manipulate the text in order to print
that a tic tac has exactly *no content whatsoever*.]

[i also like this guy says 'cyberspace' rather than internet. it's coming back.]

resolutions services: a list of places you go to look up a barcode. for an isbn
is looked up at certain places, but UPCs are looked up somewhere else. on cars
it's a VIN and you look it up at Carfacts.

Auro Blog: when you scan items they appear on the weblog! that's going public in
a couple of weeks, and it's work with a pocket PC and a barcode reader.

See
http://aura.research.microsoft.com/aura/AuraPortal/

"clink and pour interfaces" -- bump your laptops into one another to file 
transfer.