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[Ayatana] The DARPA baloon challenge and design of social networks
Recently DARPA created a contest to measure social networking skills:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10406752-76.html?tag=mncol;txt
The idea was for contestants to identify the latitudes and longitudes of
10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the US sky.
The only way anyone could find the 10 balloons was by relying on social
networks. DARPA wanted to understand how people use social networking
to solve problems. For those who wonder: MIT won the contest.
I was just reading _The DARPA Balloon Challenge and the Design of
Social Participation Systems, _by Ed H. Chi, about the initiative and
what was learned. Here's a quote:
"The primary issue relating to the design of social participation
systems is understanding the relationship between usability,
sociability, social capital, collective intelligence, and how to elicit
effective action through design.
* **Usability** concerns the ability for all users to contribute,
regardless of their accessibility requirements and computing experience,
and how to lower the interaction costs of working with social systems.
* *Sociability* refers to the the skill or tendency of being sociable
and of interacting well with others. There is a huge role in how the
designer can facilitate and lubricate social interactions amongst users
of a system.
* *Social Capital* refers positions that people occupy in social
networks, and their ability to utilize those positions for some goal.
Designers need to enable people to sort themselves into comfortable
positions in the social network, including leadership and follower
positions.
* C*ollective Intelligence or Social Intelligence* refers to the
emergence of intelligent behavior amongst groups of people. Designers
can create mechanisms such as voting systems, folksonomies, and other
opinion aggregators to ensure the emergence of social intelligence over
time. [Note that the definition for "Social Intelligence" here differs
from traditional use of the phrase in social psychology.]"
These findings could lead to interesting innovations in design as well
as in research both when thinking about the social networking features
for users but also in creating a "designed environment" in which the
opensource community can work even more effectively. Definitely a
challenge to create a design that realizes all these aspects of social
networking !
C.
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