In an online questionnaire study of 120 technology creatives in the Northwest:

“We found that the targeted community of technology creatives is largely comprised of individuals who have careers in technology, but were pursuing creative interests in the domains of visual arts, maker projects, and entrepreneurial projects.  The open-ended responses to the questionnaire provided a rich image of creative technologists who worked in the software industry (software engineers, web designers) but who were actively interested and pursuing projects that incorporate more physical computing: wanting education and access to electronics, metalworking, microcontrollers, prototyping machines, and so forth.  In other words, people who used technology for more ephemeral digital software in their day jobs sought to incorporate technology into more physical projects in their creative pursuits.”

Interest in various opportunities and resources for artists/technologist, on a scale of 1 to 7 where 1 = not at all interested and 7 = extremely interested.

“They were particularly interested in knowledge sharing, networking, and collaborative opportunities, with many expressing an interest in a shared, membership based incubation space for access to other people.  Those who did collaborate indicated their collaboration groups tended to be 3-5 people.  Even those who worked primarily on solitary projects expressed an interest in shared spaces because of exposure to knowledge and conversation around creative projects.  These results are consistent with reports of the creative process described by Gardner in Creating Minds [12], where he illustrates that even solitary writers such as Tolkein were creatively inspired by regular meetings where they describe their works to each other.”

“For this population of technology creatives, lack of time and education were the greatest constraints in their creative pursuits, not finances — which is distinct from other types of artists.  Many reported they already had a space for independent projects, and were particularly interested in collaboration spaces for access to peer education and discussion.”

It will be interesting to see how these technology creatives in San Francisco compare to those in Seattle.  My impression is there is less of a focus on more hands-on technology projects, and more of a focus on digital art.

Unfortunately I got swept up by the recent layoffs at Yahoo.  After several weeks of rumors discussed in various technology blogs (see http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/yahoo-employees/), the layoffs finally happened mid December which took about 5% of the company.  I was sitting on the fourth floor of building A, home of the communities teams (Answers, Groups, Delicious), one of the target areas of the layoffs, watching managers walk through the floor requesting private meetings one by one, followed by a flurry of packing boxes and goodbyes in the two hours we had to leave the premises.  Imagine my feeling as I watched my own manager approach my cubicle.

I have to say, my main feeling at the time (aside from surprise!) was “but i was working on really cool projects and now I don’t get to finish them!”

Now, two weeks later, holidays over, my main feeling is one of…ugh.  I’ve been on the job market before, and I find it has a lot in common with the more unpleasant side of dating.  As a social psychologist & technology researcher I have spent a fair amount of time focusing on match-making online (both professional and personal match-making) so I’m well-versed in the literature on the topic.  Finding a match professionally is a lot like finding a match personally.  You want to find the best match possible, in a reasonable amount of time.  You go on a lot of “dates” where you put your best foot forward, while trying to stay honest, because if you get the job you have to do the job.  You debate how much do I adapt myself to what they want, versus focusing on myself and what I want.  You have trouble perceiving how others perceive you, and when the “date” does not end well you are never told why.  You have to tell yourself, well, it’s nothing personal, it’s just not a good match, while at the same time wishing everyone you “date” really, really wants you.   You find yourself having to remind yourself “I’m really great!” at the same time wondering why organizations don’t immediately fall madly in love you and hire you one the spot.  I have the additional problem of really wanting three jobs in one (more academic industry research, early stage prototyping, and social tech design), when most larger organizations want you to fill just the one job role.

Finally, as far as match-making services go, job boards are really ineffective.  I’m always amazed that the state of the art in professional match-making technologies isn’t, well, better.   I need to spend a *lot* of time researching where I would like to work, and I still have better luck through personal connections than job boards, because personal connections are much more effective at knowing who you are, where people like you go, whether you would be a good fit, and helping you get on the hiring manager’s radar.

Well, back to polishing my resume and my curriculum vitae….

Try it at http://mytwee.com. You’ll need a Twitter account.

Here’s mine:

What is MyTwee?
My Twee is a living, breathing, interactive painting of your Twitterverse.  This project started as a visualization for a Dorkbot art show last year.   It’s since evolved into an online, flash-based interactive art piece with a few gaming mechanics thrown in and a (not so) secret mission to encourage people to be more green!

It’s a Painting of your Twitterverse:
Your “Twee” is generated based on activity in your Twitterverse, including your own messages and the messages of the people you follow.  Grow your Twee by nurturing activity in your Twitterverse.  The more activity, the more leaves, plants, clouds, flowers, fruit and little forest critters you’ll see. Mouse over individual items or click on the “Guide” button to learn what they represent.  Check out what Barack Obama (@barackobama) or Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) look like!

It’s a Lightweight Game:
Based on green things you say and do using Twitter, you can earn “Green Scout Badges”.   All you have to do is talk about it through your tweets. This way, not only do you earn your badges, all your friends get to hear about the cool green things you are doing.

Print, Post, or Share!
Help us spread the Twee forest around the world! You can download a picture of your Twee, embed a live Flash animation in your blog, or print a poster.

Got ideas for badges, or other ways to improve the experience? Email us at mytwee@wagglelabs.com.  You can also go to our MyTwee Facebook page to add comments or upload a picture of your Twee for others to see.

I attended Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this past week.  Brady Forrest (co-chair) invited us to have our H.E.Ai.D. installation (large scale, collaborative play space with lasers, generative sound, and a tinge of augmented reality) in the Expo.  Aside from the joy of watching Tim O’Reilly dance  in our installation, it was great to get up to date on all things Web 2.0.  Here’s my report:

Tim O’Reilly framed the event very well during his keynote speech, essentially giving a report card on the state of Web 2.0 – arguing that the web as application platform should be conceptualized as an information operating system rather than platform of devices or technologies.  See his recent article on O’Reilly Radar to learn more.  The main concern he raised was the ongoing tension between large companies’ desires to dominate the web as an information platform (one ring to rule them all…) versus a more utopian, Internet-style, democratized version where services from multiple providers are “horizontally integrated via open standards”.  Applying this thinking to the social space, he argues that the real power is in developing applications and APIs that allow third-party developers to leverage the social data that companies have produced through years of supporting communication and networking technologies.

Aside:  This kind of thinking is one of the reasons I love the O’Reilly crew and their events.  Because they don’t create their own technologies, but are rather a publishing company specializing in books and events for technology innovators, they are in a unique position to serve as trusted, impartial advocates for a future that best serves the needs and interests of individual users.  I only wish they could run events without any sponsorship at all….I’m sure it introduces some bias.

I was happy to see a lot of the event focusing on the social space – themes included:

• Helping user focus on content they care about.  Users are overwhelmed with a fire hose of information on the Web, so a few talks/technologies focused on how we can help users focus their attention on content they care about.    
  • Social aggregation. that is integrating content from multiple social streams such as Facebook and Twitter is one such method.  Both Spindex.me from Microsoft’s Fuselabs and Strings (presented in the LaunchPad session) had social aggregation tools, allowing users to incorporate their various social streams into one location.  I’m often dubious of social aggregation tools, because I’m not convinced the average user really wants all their content mixed in one place — plus it’s been tried (e.g., FriendFeed, Strands).  However, I thought Spindex.me had a compelling use case: layering smart search over the socially aggregated content to help users find content their friends care about, and focus on emerging trends in their social sphere.  T
  • Social curation.  There were also a couple of social curation projects: that is, allowing users to select the best online content, either your own content (again, Strings), or content around a search theme (Montage from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs) and then share with friends.  Pearltrees.com had personal content management social curation with a network based visualization.   pearltrees.com. 
• Managing user generated content.  User generated content allows technology companies to leverage large amounts of information.  But with the advantages are many pitfalls, because when everyone has a voice, and everyone can share, sometimes they say mean and inappropriate things.  A few talks provided basic “how-to” information, including Randy Farmer’s discussion of reputation mechanisms.  He said sometimes the best reputation mechanisms are not shared:  don’t share negative evaluations publicly, because some people will use them to gang up on others, but rather use them on a hidden level to prioritize content.  At the Web 2.0 Expo/Bay Area Ignite a few talks discussed not abusing social media and user generated content.  Listening to these talks you got a sense of a UGC backlash:  you shouldn’t force people to over share (Avoidr and The Forgiveness Engine by Jesper Andersen) and you shouldn’t waste people’s time with contests (Jen Bekman).
• Building on a culture of social participation and sharing.  A couple of talks explored issues around building large scale pro-social participation and sharing.  See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21842, nothing too surprising here, but if you’re new to using social media a good overview.  Perhaps the hardest lesson for big companies is giving up control and being accessible to community, practicing what you preach with openness/sharing.  A similar theme emerged in a discussion of open leadership by Charlene Li.  (This talk seemed to be more about open, social media marketing than leadership – in the modern web 2.0 world…marketers should engage with consumers.) 
• Designing for rich interaction applications.  A few talks addressed the fact that there are increasingly rich internet applications online, and the existing tools and methods for designing web applications need to be updated to address new online interaction models.  E.g., Chris Griffith argued that you need to actually prototype your more complex interaction sequences as a part of the design process before handing it off to developers — or, he warned, they end up designing for you.

Other highlights:  Location location location was everywhere.   So to was Twitter as a central part of the web 2.0 information operating system, e.g. see bing twitter www.bing.com\twitter.    For a fun example of the power of large scale access to user generated content, see the One Million Giraffes project, where Olla Helland trying to win a bet collecting a million giraffes drawn by 2011 using social media.   Social, casual games and game mechanics were appearing in everything social.    Generally seening people getting increasingly excited about augmented reality, esp. in mobile,  e.g., Microsoft Tag tech embedded in the event:  http://emergingexperiences.com/2010/05/rockstar-on-tour-web-20-expo-san-francisco/

Other cool technologies worth checking out:

Rhomobile – won the launchpad award, converts apps to work on multiple platforms

Ocarina – iPad application  where you could play music, but also see other people playing and *play with them* around the world

HTML5 – everyone was abuzz about HTML5, Alexa Andrzejewski gave an entire talk comparing it to Flash.  I didn’t go to this talk but my developer buddies were all abuzz about it, saying HTML5 web sockets will make the real time web happen by enabling push data that currently web sites inefficiently pull for.  They expect it will replace Flash – companies using Flash are moving to html5.  

Stupeflix – dynamically generated video, they demo’d its use for advertising, showing how you can create a sort of photostory for entire catalogs of ads with updated prices.

What seemed notably absent relative to last years’ web 2.0 events?  Facebook applications.

I’ve been doing very related research recently so I have been thinking quite a bit about the topic, one thought being I don’t really like the word “privacy” and I’ll explain why.

First, some background.  This problem has grown due to several recent trends in social media. Social networking systems tend to provide tools for only a unified identity, reflecting the assumption that one identity fits all situations.  In reality, people live very faceted lives, and a deeper understanding of how people manage identity across areas of their lives would greatly benefit the design of social media.

Second, within new forms of social media, sharing is often defined using a network-based model, where sharing is managed by a social connection, where two people explicitly articulate that they know each other and have access to each others’ content.  These network-based sharing models present new challenges to the average user as she struggles to retain boundaries between areas of her life.  Although Facebook is primarily a context for personal sharing, because of its increasing penetration, and the difficulty denying friend requests from people they know, many individuals find they have “friends” from multiple social contexts, including friends, family, and co-workers.

Finally, social media systems are increasingly pushing and pulling user generated content and activity streams outside the context in which they were originally shared.  Explicit posts and implicit activity updates are scurrying about madly across Facebook, Twitter, social aggregators like Gist, and so forth.  This final issue is at the heart of danah’s talk, where she describes it as a privacy fail on both Facebook and Google’s part.

I certainly agree privacy is an important topic of great concern. I just read a great academic article [1] that indicates that about 36% of people (admittedly, a biased sample of college students) have some aspect of their identity they make some effort to conceal.  Similarly in my own research, I am finding about half of our users indicate they have “faceted identity” — where they have different sides of their identity that are expressed differently depending on the situation – and a third are saying their facets tend to be incompatible.

That said, I also have some reservations about concluding that users don’t realize how much their privacy is being threatened, and that’s why they continue to share content that inappropriately crosses life boundaries online (e.g. pictures of excessive partying with friends leaping inadvertedly across the stage, so to speak, from personal life to work). What I am also finding in my research, is that even though  folks are worried about sharing in social networks, they still do it.  Many people will continue to choose sharing.

The real problem for social technology designers, I believe, is NOT so much how to improve privacy controls or educate users in how to use them.  Users for the most part already have privacy controls, and even when they are aware of these controls will chose to overshare anyways.  Here’s an example from my own life.  A friend from college posted somewhat embarrassing old pictures of me in Facebook and tagged me as in them.   I left the tag up even though some co-workers can see the pictures.  Why?  Because I want some of my other old college buddies to find me.   It reminds me of grocery store discount cards: i’ll gladly trade my privacy for five cents off my milk.

The point is, users really want to share, and many will choose messy, socially awkward sharing over not sharing at all.

The real problem is that users are forced to choose between two suboptimal alternatives: excessive privacy and inappropriate sharing.  What users really want, and we should be focusing on in this age of excessive web 2.0 dissemination of social media across applications, is helping users focus their sharing to the right people, at the right time, in the right area of their life.

For social media designers, this is a very important distinction (even though you might argue it’s purely semantic).  There’s just a lot more to be excited about when it comes to helping users optimize appropriate, targeted sharing, vs optimizing privacy.  “Privacy”  is a much dryer, yet fearful word.   Who wants to say “I’m working on privacy” vs. “I’m working on optimizing sharing”?

[1] Quinn, D, Chaudoir, S.  (2009).  Living with a concealable stigmatized identity:  The impact of anticipated stigma, centrality, salience, and cultural stigma on psychological distress and health. In Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2009, 97, 4, 634-641.

]]> http://wagglelabs.com/2010/03/better-privacy-or-better-sharing/feed/ 0 http://wagglelabs.com/2010/03/yahoo-powerpoints-and-presentations-on-slideshare/ http://wagglelabs.com/2010/03/yahoo-powerpoints-and-presentations-on-slideshare/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:02:10 +0000 shelly http://wagglelabs.com/?p=400 I’ve been finding Yahoo is a very ppt deck centric company.  People will say “send me the report” and what they really mean is “send me the slide deck”, because, well, that is the report.  I have mixed feelings about the impact the paperless office is having on how we share information.  It is certainly the case it’s a lot easier to page through a lot of powerpoint presentation pages than pdfs of written papers on the desktop screen…  The problem is that how you optimize for an actual presentation, where you are in the room talking about the slides, and how you optimize for a powerpoint “report”, are very different!  As a person who shares knowledge, I’d really rather either be in the room with you, or have you read the paper.

In any event, I’ve been getting some requests for copies of presentations, so as long as I was mucking around in all my directories looking at old powerpoints I threw a few up on slideshare, from talks I’ve given externally.

Psychology of Social Media:  Implications for Design

An overview of a social psychological approach to the design of social technologies, with design principles and a brief review of how I applied these principles to several R&D projects in the past few years.  This presentation was given to the Seattle chapter of IxDA and at Frog Design in October/November 2009.

Online Community Matters

Ten minute presentation discussing to role of community attachment in building loyalty to “host” of online communities.  Presented at the International Association of Business Communicaters, 2009.

Social Networking and Partnering for Startups

So you are new to the startup world, well here are some tips for networking with the startup community.  This presentation was given at Seattle 2.0′s StartupDay, 2009.

Designing for (Local) Community

A review of literature and technology to provide guidelines for designing online communities with an emphasis on local communities and neighborhoods.

Observation of Katrina/Rita Groove Deployment:  Addressing Social and Communication Challenges of Ephemeral Groups

In disaster environments, relief workers have a have strong need for ad ho communication and coordination, but are in an extremely challenged communication environment.  This presentation summarizes findings of a study of a peer-to-peer communication technology (Groove) used by relief workers following Katrina, and based on results makes design recommendations.  Presented at ISCRAM 06.  A few years old now, but this project had a big impact on my thinking about community tools.

My new buddies are all the Yahoo communities/social applications –  Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo, Email, Flickr, Delicious, Profiles, Y!OS etc.  There’s a lot that’s social that’s happening here, so I’m pretty excited to sink my teeth in.  I’ve spent the past few weeks really “studying” Yahoo, meeting people from various groups to help shape my research agenda.

What does this mean for Waggle Labs?  Well, with Peter still working full time with Pathable, and me now at Yahoo, we are no longer engaged in social media R&D consulting.  However, the site will live on as the home of our personal projects and blog.  We still have plenty to discuss, regarding social media, community, and technological art.  We’re still working on MyTwee, a twitter visualization/game that promotes green behavior, in our “spare” time, and of course we have our art/geek projects including Steve the Robot Head to talk about.  See http://heaid.com to learn more about that. 

We’re spending most of our time down in the bay area now, so if you are in the area, look us up!

I posted some frayed wire pictures on flickr here.

Introductory slides for Frayed Wire are here, provides some background on who was there and our goals:

We had a *great* set of speakers and workshops, and people had a lot of fun making stuff out of the items from Junque Exchange in the open lab, and there was a very well attended discussion of how to incubate art/technology in the Pacific Northwest.  There were a lot of volunteers to whom I am very, very grateful!  Thanks Dorkbot crew, 911 Media Arts center, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and Ignition NW!

Here’s the abstract of the paper described in the talk:

Professional networking is a primary goal of people attending conferences and events. Over the past year we developed a social networking and community tool for events, Pathable, to help attendees meet the right people. Pathable provides an online directory of profiles, communication tools, and a recommendation system optimized to help people meet based on commonalities. We performed a deployment study and found that quality of conversations and sense of community were strong predictors of who said they would return. The more people used Pathable to meet others at the event, the greater their event attachment and sense of community.

It was a great event.  Very academic, small number of attendees, but all first tier researchers in the field.  Had a lot of great conversations.  Using community tech for social participation, civic intelligence, and social advocacy were the hot topics.