GrowingPains

Social capital/ism

Last Thursday, Noreena Hertz gave a talk at the "debate temple" LUX in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is one of the leading intellectual spokespersons of the alternative globalization movement, having gained prominence with her book "The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy" (2001). Thursday was an important moment for the new world order-inclined, as it was the day of the London G20 summit. Some of the rhetoric coming from the world leaders at the close of the summit even resembled demands coming from their fiercest critics. For example, the summit attendants declared an end to the "Washington consensus", meaning that unfettered globalisation and deregulation is now outmoded, and that a more balanced approach to regulating markets is called for rather than letting them run free. Of course, these are only lofty words and their translation into messy real world practice will turn out to be difficult as always. Still, one should not underestimate the import of having the world's most powerful jointly declaring a much needed change of paradigm.

Hertz saw in all this hopeful signs for a changing world order. She was cautiously optimistic that a new, more people-centered and more sustainable era of capitalism is on its way, after the harsh "there is no society" Reagan/Thatcher-inspired ideology of ultra-free markets which has been dominating the globalizing world in the past three decades. She saw five reasons for why things may now really change to a significant extent:

1. People are mad. People are really, really angry with the irresponsible ways of big business, its excessive bonuses, the ease with which it shifts capital and jobs for no other reason than increasing profits (and those bonuses), their failure to really address environmental and social issues at the levels and with the urgency needed (think global warming), and so on.
2. The end of the ultra-free market dogma. The general public no longer believes that the global free market will take care of all of society's ills just by itself  (meaning: by the excessive bonus recipients).  The majority of people are now in favor of curbing the excesses and (re)introducing real, rather than imaginary regulation.
3. Expectations of government are different. No longer the mantra "business is good, government is bad" prevails. Responsible business is a cornerstone of society, however, citizens expect their governments to intervene when corporate abuses occur.
4. Economics as a scientific discipline is bankrupt. Economics when reigned by the grand names like Smith, Keynes, and Schumpeter was a serious scientific discipline, that paid much-needed attention to history and context. In the past 30 years, economics has become dishonest and mainly produced neo-con ideologues, who wielded an excessive, unbalanced influence on societal decision making. However, the intellectual basis for "Gucci capitalism" is gone, economists are no longer calling the shots.
5. A more cooperative ethos is emerging. In the past decades, it was everybody for himself. However, perhaps most important for truly effecting change is that the age of super-individualism seems to be over. An era of communitarianism is dawning in which we are pulling together worldwide.

Hopeful Hertz may be, but not naive. There are many vested, and very powerful interests which will do their best to derail these processes of societal innovation. Also, we don't really know what are the limits of cooperation. There are many, very big issues like migration, climate change, poverty, and international security which will stress the willingness to work together, such as demonstrated by the increased levels of xenophobia displayed everywhere. An increased sense of community is not necessarily good. Our "belonging" is their "being outcasts".  It is clear that no rosy future awaits the world. Much, very hard work is needed, with many conflicts remaing to be resolved.

Communities are crucial to accomplish societal change, provided they are involved wisely. One issue that intrigues me is whether there is a direct link between the more humane, social capitalism that is being called for at the macro-level and the idea of social capital being one of the engines of dynamics in communities at the micro or meso-level. Social capital is a concept under construction, with many definitions. Robert Putnam, one of the leading scholars on social capital, considers it to refer to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1995). This, according to him, and many others is essential component to building and maintaining democracy, only to be strengthened by the many new forms of Internet-based social networking emerging these days (Shih, 2009).  Definitely a field worthy of study for economists looking to find a new focus for their research efforts... 

Postscriptum: The above argument is of course exaggerated in order to make a point. Globalization does have its positive sides, such as increased wealth for many and international collaboration, travel, and exchange of ideas. There are many serious and good-willing economists who have contributed to realizing the benefits of globalization and redressing some of its failures. However, Noreena's overall point is well taken: too many people still believe that if the free market is left to its own devices it will take care of itself. Any shortcomings, if perceived at all, are allegedly either caused by too little, rather than too much market or by not giving it enough time to produce its full, wholesome effects. This, I think, is of a dangerous naivety and lack of concern about those who suffer the full force of the downside of those effects.

References

- N. Hertz (2001). The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, New York.
- R. Putnam (1995). Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy 6(1):65-78.
- C. Shih (2009). Social Capital from Networking Online, in The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. Prentice Hall, New York.

Argumentation support: who cares?

Argumentation support tools aim to create structured maps of arguments that aid sensemaking in a particular problem domain. A wide range of argumentation support tools exists, some of the more well-known ones including CMaps, Compendium, COHERE, and DebateGraph. My own GRASS tool also classifies as being an early experiment in this realm.

Despite their great potential to help structure, visualize, and reason about arguments in all their manifestations (including debates, conceptual models, and knowledge maps) , the actual use of argumentation support tools in practice has turned out to be disappointing.

Three important reasons that the uptake of these tools is so low are:

• argument mapping in terms of defining appropriate concepts and relations is inherently difficult.
• maps quickly become too large for users to literally continue to see the bigger picture.
• the functionalities and interfaces are often way too complex for the average user.

One particular question that keeps popping up when analyzing this problematic is "who cares?" Why would somebody want to go through the considerable, and at least partially unavoidable, effort of creating knowledge maps? Who is going to use them? How are the creation and usage processes of knowledge maps related?

Thus, sensemaking on its own is not enough. It should be actionable sensemaking, sensemaking that suggests (1) relevant stakeholders and (2) appropriate actions required to address the creation and usage issues identified. In other words, key aspects to address are:

• How to put the maps to good use?
• How to model the alliances of stakeholders, organizations, and policy-makers that would have an interest in contributing to/making use of the maps?
• What goal-oriented argumentation needs do these actors have?
• How can we satisfy those needs in such a way that the actor networks of creators and users of the maps become self-sustaining?

An interesting project in which at least some beginnings of answers to these questions may be found, is the ESSENCE project (E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change). ESSENCE goes beyond the focus on the functionalities of individual argument mapping tools. Instead, it aims to learn about why their usage fails in practice and to improve the usability, usefulness, and interoperability of argumentation support tools by comparing their application in a realistic and very important context of use: climate change. Key here, as in satisfying the argumentation requirements of many other wicked problems, is for these tools to support dialogue that builds common ground, resolves conflict, and re-establishes trust.

In the ESSENCE community, there is a strong interest and commitment by the participants to explore the pragmatics of these argumentation tools: what exact role do they play in the purposeful context of their communities of use? This issue, which is also one of the leading questions of the Pragmatic Web community, is still very much unexplored territory and deserves much more attention of the argumentation tool building crowd.

Visualizing workflows and business processes

SIKS is the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems.  As an alumnus, I attended the annual "SIKS Day" in Utrecht on October 2. It's always a nice event to reconnect with my scientific peers and to keep in tune with state of the art research in my domain through the presentations given by SIKS members.

One presentation of particular interest to me was the one given by Wil van der Aalst on "Creating Better Information Systems with Process Mining". Process mining allows one to analyze business processes using event logs. What really struck a chord were Wil's ideas on visualizing workflow processes as a means for better understanding them.  Most workflow modeling notations are abstract, based on standard control flow nodes and edges. In such "sterile" notations, all activities are modeled the same way.

 

However, for human beings to better understand often very complex realistic workflow logs or models and the business processes of which they are a part, additional cues are necessary. Geographical maps are a category of visualizations from which much could be learned about visualizing such processes. Such maps aggregate, leave out irrelevant details, and stress relevant aspects. How such geographical map properties could or should be transferred to the workflow domain is still an open question.

I am really intrigued by this idea, as I see many applications in my own field of communicative workflow modeling, such as studied in the Language/Action Perspective and Pragmatic Web research communities.  Especially in collaborative communities, in which coordinated communication processes are key and ever changing, proper visualizations could be essential in better facilitating their evolution. Such "rich visualizations" should therefore become an essential element of effective methodologies for community communication systems development.  

Moving community informatics research forward

From Oct 27-30, 2008, the 5th Community Informatics & Development Informatics conference was held in Prato, Italy.  As always, the conference was a great meeting of minds of researchers and practitioners from all over the world, and from many different backgrounds, ranging from cultural anthropologists and process facilitators to hardcore computer scientists.

At the end of the conference, I was asked to give my impression of the direction the overall field is heading in, based on the presentations and discussions conducted. It was very hard for me to summarize the widely varying ideas and projects presented, an overview of which is given here. Instead, my aim was to identify some underlying methodological strands that, when woven together, could help to strengthen the fields of community and development informatics in terms of coherence, generalizability and reusability of research ideas and the practical impact of their implementation.This text builds on that presentation.

Framing community informatics research

Communities and technologies are key to community informatics. These technologies cover a wide range, with sophisticated computer and networking technologies only being one end of the spectrum. Face-to-face and other non-computerized technologies can be just as important, if often not more so.  ICTs should therefore always be read as covering this whole spectrum.

Communities and technologies co-evolve in that technologies both afford and constrain behavior of their communities of use, and, in turn, these communities shape the technologies as they are being applied in practice.

Community informatics research and practice cannot be seen separately. Without practice, no research can be tested and validated. On the other hand, no practical project can be done without an in-depth analysis, i.e. research, of many aspects. The term "community informatics research" should therefore always be read as implying both research and practice.

The difference between community informatics and development informatics in this respect is only one of degree. Whereas development informatics in general could be said to be dealing more with the practicalities of technology implementation and adoption, community informatics seems to focus more on the social interaction aspects of the technologies-in-use. Still, as with any of these complex but related socio-technical fields, it seems not very fruitful to overly demarcate their boundaries.  

Aspects of community informatics

When researching the interplay of communities and their technologies, at least four aspects are particularly of interest:

1. Context/values. Community informatics research, unlike more traditional branches of informatics, is very strong in analyzing the context of use of ICTs, including the stakeholders involved, their interests and goals, and many essential cultural determinants. In particular, much attention is paid to assessing the community values driving the development and uptake of these technologies. Such values include soft but key notions like passions, energy, empowerment, legitimacy, and social inclusion. Information systems developers not taking into account these context factors and values do this at their, and especially their communities of users', peril.
2. Cases. Community informatics research is very much case-driven. This results in rich, "lived" stories about authentic information and communication requirements, rather than the more abstract "user" requirements often elicited in classical IS development projects.
3. Process/methodology. This is both a strength and a weakness of current community informatics research. On the one hand, it has identified a large palette of situated communication, collaboration, development, evaluation and other community processes and methodologies. Furthermore, it generally displays a great sensitivity towards tailoring these processes to the authentic needs of the communities in which they are applied. On the other hand, perhaps because these processes are so often case-based and situated, the lessons learnt are hard to generalize and reuse across cases, making it difficult to go beyond "situated methodologies". This is unfortunate, as many community informatics wheels are continuously being reinvented, and the exchange with related fields, such as mainstream IS development, is minimal.
4. Systems. Another community informatics research strength/weakness. Much traditional ICT R&D focuses on devoping and evaluating individual technologies, such as office applications, e-mail, blogs etc. However, realistic use cases ever more involve "tool systems" of multiple technologies in concert, and in a specific social context of use, such as a particular community. Community informatics research in general is strong in taking such a comprehensive socio-technical systems view. However, as with its processes and methodology, this systems view is often not framed in more general terms, making it hard to disseminate findings more widely. The paradox is that, in contrast with general IS development approaches, community informatics research seems to have much more of a systems way of thinking in practice, while being weaker in the more theoretical, systematic approach to systems analysis, design, implementation and evaluation. Both community informatics and IS research in general should therefore continue to learn more from and influence one another.

Moving community informatics research forward

Community informatics is a "meta-field", building bridges between existing social and technical paradigms (in both theory and practice). This makes it so hard to frame what is the "right" way to move its research forward, as some of us are leaning more towards the social, others towards the informatics side. Still, how then to  address at least some of the process/methodological/systems weaknesses? Some practical steps forward could be:

1. Definitions, definitions, more definitions. Some of us seem to be afraid of giving definitions, as they would not capture every possible meaning and would overly constrain discourse. True, definitions, almost by definition, constrain. However, they also afford. They point out new directions and open up unexpected viewpoints. Furthermore, one should be clear about the exact role definitions should play. They are only hypotheses, forcing authors and readers alike to focus, explain, and align their ideas, not to force one particular point of view to be the one and only truth. Providing clear definitions is all the more essential when one reaches beyond the confines of one's own paradigm. Definitions should always be tentative, and multiple definitions should be allowed or even welcomed, as long as they help us become more explicit about stating and comparing our assumptions.
2. Identify lessons learnt/best practices. Another step to take would be to more systematically identify and compare lessons learnt and perhaps even come up with some best practices or at least criteria for assessing them. Granted, best practices are in the eye of the beholder and given the situatedness of much community informatics work may be hard to define. Still, as with the definitions, the contexts in which they are to apply should be described as carefully as possible, and their validity in any particular case always critically questioned. In that way, lessons learnt and best practices can help crystallize and convey the added value of our research to ourselves and the outside world. 
3. Testbeds/collaboratories. In IS research in particular and science in general, much work is currently being conducted on the development of testbed and collaboratory methodologies for large scale, realistic development of technologies in complex, evolving contexts of use. Case in point is the adoption of the Living Labs methodology, already used in some development informatics projects in South Africa, as presented at the conference. More strongly connecting community informatics research to these systematic approaches to socio-technical systems development and adoption could be very beneficial to both fields. Along the same lines, simulation approaches such as system dynamics, could be used to more efficiently come up with realistic testing scenarios in a CI context.  

Birth of a portal

On September 30, the Tilburg University student portal was launched. The portal seems to have been enthusiastically received by both the students (the end users) and the information suppliers (such as faculties, service departments, and student associations) who own the portlets that make up the portal. To get an idea of what it is, look here for a brief overview.

Developing the portal has been a very complex project, with respect to both the technology (trying to develop secure and scalable portlets and integrating the portal with a live digital learning environment in Blackboard) and the organizational back-end of requirements analysis, definition of procedures, and communication. Nevertheless, the many people and organizational units involved together have been able to produce something the university can be proud of. The project will continue until the end of December, to finetune the embedding of the portal in the university organization, but my role as project leader has now officially finished.

Some key development goals of the portal were that it had to be Single Sign On (one login for most applications), comprehensible (in terms of having a clear overview of underlying information resources) and userfriendly and customisable. One of the most important features of the portal to me is, however, that it is owned by the community and will be further developed in a continuous process. It is a good sign that during the demos of the portal just before the launch, many ideas have already come up for new portlets, which will be worked out in future rounds of portal development.

The portal is of, for, and by the students. It should be their view on the complex and fragmented information system reality of the university. As end users they have been closely consulted in the development of the current version. Furthermore, the students also play an active role as information supplier, for example through the news and activity agenda "community portlets" owned by the student associations.

To ensure ownership by the students, interactive, two-way communication with the students has been a priority in the project. Some communication channels were:

• Consultation with formal student representatives, such as with the Library and IT Services Student Advisory Board, as well as informal talks with individual students.
• A suggestion form which allows students to provide ideas for improvements and new features. An overview of these suggestions is publicly accessible.
• An extensive student survey resulted in over 900 completely filled out surveys. These results were the basis of many design decisions for the final version of the portal.
• A weblog was set up to inform the students and other stakeholders about developments and considerations during the development process.

The portal should have great value for the organization. Students have more efficient and customised access to that information that is most relevant to them. Still, the portal is much more than that. Creating a useful "cockpit for student applications", requires an extensive consultation and alignment between needs and interests of students, information suppliers and technology providers. In this process, bridges are being built between people and organizational units and much synergy and energy can be released in the university organization. As such, the portal acts as a "university wide web" in which users and suppliers of information and ICT meet each other in a continuous process of idea generation and collaboration, resulting in the development and integration of essential work support systems and processes.

I am moving on now with CommunitySense, but am very happy that I have been able to put some community theory into good practice...

Facebook redesign: whatever happened to the user?

Facebook is completely revamping its layout and functionality in, what some say, is much needed to remain a viable social networking platform, while many others are disappointed or at best consider it a mixed blessing. Whatever the reason, fact is that there is a huge opposition against this move. For instance, just now the group "Petitition Against the New Facebook" had 342,839 members, and counting...

Of course, the redesign does result in some real improvements as well. However, what really seems to irk users most is the unilateral decision to totally remove the old profile as an option.

Here's my statement in the Petition Group:

I am the project leader of the implementation of a university student portal. Portals are very hard to develop, as there are many conflicting requirements and interests to satisfy. However, we are doing our very best to consult students: we use focus groups; a suggestion form, with automatic public display of all suggestions collected; have done an extensive user survey among students; regularly report feedback results, our design choices and motivations to a public blog etc.

Frankly, I am outraged by the insensitivity displayed by Facebook management. They are in their position of power solely because of their users. Their users have often spent much time and energy building their profiles, which are their unique "social windows" to their friends distributed all over the world. Given the amount of resistance, just "undoing" these profiles is incomprehensible.

Don't just join this group, sign the petition to protest this 1950s management attitude in a 21st century digital world!

I find it hard to understand how Facebook is totally ignoring the often very legitimate concerns so many of its users have with the - forced - changes. This lack of legitimacy goes against the grain of community-driven development, which is a necessary condition for social networking sites to grow and prosper. It will be interesting to see how this develops, whether the power ultimately is really with management or the community.

Vulnerable societies and communities?

Last Wednesday morning, a water main broke down, leaving the whole of Tilburg without water for a couple of hours.  In a country like the Netherlands, it's an unusual experience not to be able to flush the toilet, have a shower, brush your teeth, make tea, clean, and have access to so many other necessities  you are usually at most only semi-conscious of. Of course, in theory we all already know how dependent modern mass society is on, normally invisible, infrastructure like roads, utilities, and the Internet. Still, it's good to be reminded the hard way once in a while how little it takes for all of these unrecognized marvels to break down, big time.

It made me think: what are the "water mains" of communities? What are the weak spots that, once broken, bring a whole community to its knees? Are communities more resilient to such breakdowns than mass society, because they are usually smaller, more tightly knit, and have that sense of community to sustain it through rough times? Or are they perhaps even more vulnerable, as there is usually less formal capacity and assigned responsibility to resolve crises? What is the role of communities in resolving societal (infrastructure) crises? Vice versa, how, if at all, can societal governance capacity be put to good use to repair communities in trouble?

My music communities

Among my research interests are tool systems. I want to know how (communities of) users combine different tools to support complex workflows, often leading to usage patterns very different from those originally intended by the tool designers. Earlier, I gave an example of how we used a combination of tools to help us in the difficult collaborative process of writing a call for papers.

A very different example is how I am using three different tools to build a collection of my favourite songs on the Web. Already for quite a while I have been a subscriber to Last.Fm, the “social music revolution” site. This site allows you to enter an artist, tag or username. A music stream is then dynamically generated, often starting with a song from, for example, the artist you entered, to be followed by many other songs from related artists.

Last.Fm is a great way to learn about new music, so it builds my list of interesting artists. It does not help you to retrieve that one song you are craving to hear right at this moment, however. Other tools are better suited for this, one of them being Songza. This tool allows you, Google style, to just enter a string and then gives you all the versions of songs of which the artist name or song title match the string (It is also great for parties: last Saturday, I had some friends over to play a board game. We had my mini laptop next to us on the table, and in between making moves on the board, we took turns selecting our favourite songs, together acting as a kind of “distributed DJ”)!

One nice feature of Songza is that you can save a playlist (it would be much better to be able to save multiple playlists, but as the tool is still being developed, this may soon be realized). Unfortunately, I am one of those sorry souls who have a notoriously bad memory for song titles, so how am I to fill that playlist with the songs that have touched my heart?

Here, another tool has come to the rescue. Actually, it is a regular website, but I informally define any piece of functionality that serves an individual or community purpose as a tool (see also the article I wrote with Mark Aakhus: Argumentation Support - From Technologies to Tools). The website is the Dutch National Top 2000 site. It contains the top 2000 songs as voted by listeners from all over the country, and is broadcast at the end of every year. My recipe was to browse the songs, select the ones that triggered a remnant of a musical memory, then looked up the title on Songza, and added it to my playlist there.  The result, an (emerging) playlist of my golden oldie favourites.

Interesting from a community perspective is that, even though my playlist is about as personal as it gets (I don’t blame you if you never want to talk to me anymore having seen some of my favourites :-)), it could only have been generated by the efforts and intersection of three huge online music communities. They not only supply the content (Last.Fm and Songza), but also the relevance measures for that content through community members discussing and voting for their favourites.

It is fascinating to ponder how all these different individual and community levels paradoxically mix and mingle to provide me with my ultimate personal listening experience. If this isn't a telling example of how every person is shaped by his community (or rather, communities)...

Simple is beautiful

Since yesterday, I am the happy owner of an Asus Eee laptop. No, it's not yet another machine with more cycles, megabytes, and features. Rather, the philosophy is "less is more". My version is the 4G-SURF: it has only a 7" display, 512 Mb RAM, and 4 Gb (solid state) harddisk. However, the beauty is exactly in these limitations. It's ultra-portable because of its low weight and comes pre-installed with Linux and a whole range of open source Internet and office applications, including OpenOffice. Look here for some useful links. 

EEE stands for “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”. Interestingly, Asus seems to have learnt a lesson or two from the "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)" project. The basic idea of that project is that as many children as possible in developing countries should get a cheap laptop, as this would be a crucial catalyst for improving their education and work prospects. There has been a lot of criticism of this project, see for example the recent discussion on the Community Informatics researchers mailing list. One main critique is that spending money on relatively still expensive equipment and the required supporting technical infrastructure would not necessarily be the best investment to help local communities bootstrap themselves.

The jury still being out on the value of OLPC, it is fascinating to see, however, the second-order effects  on major for-profit companies. These are starting to realize that real user needs are not necessarily satisfied by the usual "more complex software-requires more complex hardware-enables more complex software" cycle that has been promoted so heavily and for such a long time by the "Microsoft/Intel-ial complex". The feasibility of this philosophy has been proven by the fact that Asus has totally underestimated  the demand for its EEE subnotebooks.  Other vendors are now also starting to jump onto the bandwagon. Although they seem to be pushing Asus to go (somewhat) more complex again, overall, there is a pressure for vendors to take a "simple is beautiful" strategy much more seriously. As I already wrote years ago, we need less tools, more process, and this -healthy- back to the basics-development seems to fit right in.

Portals as Community Hubs

The main project I have been working on since last September is as the leader of the implementation of the student web portal of Tilburg University. It is interesting to be back here, this time in a very different role. Whereas as a student and scientist I was always thinking analytically about information systems development, I am now in the trenches trying to make these systems actually work, a very different ball game!

The original project assignment was quite a different one from the current mission. The initial idea was to build and deliver a portal consisting of a number of predefined portlets (channels to applications). These included portlets like My Week Schedule, My Exam Schedule, University News, Webmail, and so on. Through the portal, these applications are to be accessed from a single location, with a single sign on. The list was compiled by a committee in a preceding project, based on student surveys and a thorough analysis of goals and available resources.

Although such a well thought-through list is a prerequisite for a successful portal, it is not a sufficient condition. Rather than being a frozen technical system, a portal is a living socio-technical system.  It is a catalyst for the building of relations between people, applications, and business processes. Much more than a static, hierarchical model, a lateral, evolutionary model should guide the development of a portal. A portal is never finished, but needs to continuously grow in requirements and functionalities, driven by the real needs of the end users, in this case, students, while being constrained by technical and organizational realities.

Having been fully immersed in this process for half a year now, and still to go on for half a year more, it is surprising how much time and effort is needed not only in building technology, but in identifying stakeholders and aligning their needs, preferences, and interests. Not only students, but also the technologists and the owners of the applications and information resources to which the portal links need to have their say. Legitimacy is therefore all-important, as every decision can affect the ways of working of so many in the organization. In fact, the portal project is all about building for a community with a community. More about how we approach this from a community perspective in a later post.