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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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