Natural language processing has come a long way. One popular application is in chat bots. One of the first and most famous was text-based "computer therapist" ELIZA in the 1960s.
Nowadays, chat bots have much more sophisticated algorithms and user interfaces, usually in the form of moving avatars. A current state-of-the-art chatbot is Jabberwacky. Although way more natural in experience than those of the ELIZA generation, conversations with chatbots still feel plenty odd. To illustrate, here's the talk I had with "George" Jabberwacky just now:
George: Hello, my name is George and I am the human.
User: Don't you think you are a human instead of the human?
George: I know I'm a human.
User: What makes you think you are a human?
George: Because I have a mum and dad and they are humans.
User: Would you be depressed if I told you that your mum and dad are mere figments of your computer-generated imagination?
George: I wouldn't find anything depressing about that at all. Why should I?
User: I think this proves my point that you are not a human.
George: What point?
User: The point that you a self-referential software program.
George: I have a point!
User: Enjoy it.
George: I will, thanks?
ELIZA's grandchildren may be around, but they are still far from having grown up...
Last week, in a meeting with a customer, I was introduced as a "community guru". Although flattered, of course, the label didn't feel right to me at all. I told them that instead I consider myself more like one-eyed in the land of the blind... I kept thinking about what exactly was bugging me about the label. Here are some of my musings. I would be happy to learn what you think.
Gurus are dangerous. The term guru implies somebody who is leading the way, followed by followers. It is nice to have a guru, because it means somebody else is doing the hard thinking work for you and you can hide behind that person's authority and visibility. This may be great for religious cults, since there it's totally up to the eye of the beholder which arbitrary person to put one's faith in. It doesn't make any sense at all for communities, however.
Communities cannot be designed, predicted, or owned. Communities are unruly, living beasts, with very much a will and soul of their own. Each community is unique. No matter how hard we try to inspect, frame and classify them, they always escape capture. Each individual community has its own norms and values, practices, energy, and sense. The motley crew of community members themselves best know the essence of the community and the unpredicatable characteristics and quircks of their peers. Only they really know what could possibly work and what not.
Outside "experts" have only a very modest role to play. At the very best, they can give some heuristics and guidelines, share some lessons learnt about what happened in other communities and give some hypotheses about why it happened that particular way. It is up to the community to decide what does make sense in its own case. It is the community members who should speak, the outsider who should listen. Not the other way around. The community itself is the guru.
What?
At the Prato 2009 conference, we decided to set up a wiki, dubbed the "CIRN Living Knowledge Base". At this year's conference, we decided to change its name into the "CIRN Commons", as this much better reflects what it is about: a shared, active knowledge resource, used and jointly created by the members of our global community:
Why?
There are two major reasons for us to get very serious about this commons:
- Only a small fraction of CI researchers and practitioners can afford to attend the conference in Prato. If we want to practice what we preach about empowerment, we have to do our best to include all our global friends and colleagues in a much more intensive and inclusive way. As Clodagh Miskelly very rightly so put it on Twitter (@miskellaneous): "wd be lovely if you kept those of us who can't afford Prato in your loops...I suppose I'm talking about outreach & networks from the people who can manage to get to the annual bash." The CIRN Commons is one means by which we can help close the "resource divide" in our community.
- We call ourselves community informatics researchers and practitioners. If we, with all of our combined expertise, experience, contacts and resources cannot make this commons come to be, what right then do we have to claim we can help others resolve their CI problems? So, the commons can and should become a vibrant showcase that we can use to convince others that we really know what we are so passionately talking about.
How?
We're all info- and communication-overloaded human beings. Yet another unseen database that we spend too many wasted hours on, we can hear you think? No! This is not about creating huge amounts of dead data. It's supposed to be a _working_ resource, a portal to what all of us are doing and deem important. So, if you are already maintaining info relevant to the community, don't duplicate it, but add links on the commons. If, however, you have something new you would like to share, or would like feedback on: create a page and invite people to it, start a discussion on one of the mailing lists you subscribe to and include a link to that page, etc.
Again, this is not about you having to spend much time building the commons (of course, if you're looking for a new hobby, you're more than welcome to :-)). If all of you literallly add your (little) bit, overall this resource can be bootstrapped and grown into something really useful. Think creatively: what are you doing anyway that with very little effort could be made useful to the community? Some examples:
- Larry Stillman uses the wiki to disseminate information about the Prato conference:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Shaping+CIRN+2011
- Sarah Copeland has been doing a literature review for her PhD research, and has used that to create the initial CIRN bibliography. Andrew Clark has collected lots of CI reports, and is adding them to that page. Now, we ask you to add your own publications to this growing, already much visited page:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Bibliography
- At this year's Prato conference, Doug Schuler gave a fascinating Liberating Voices Pattern Language workshop. One group got so inspired that they decided to use the commons to jointly develop this idea into what may become a real project (the BRIDGES:Building Bridges Across Communities Across Time & Space workshop, if you're interested, please join in):
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/BRIDGES
- Many of you are or have students. Students have to do assignments, which normally go to waste after having been graded by their tired teacher. Wouldn't it be much more useful for our field as a whole and exciting for the students themselves to know that their efforts contribute to a common, evolving repository of knowledge?
For example, one idea could be to create our own CommunIPedia, with entries on the most important CI topics, containing definitions, references, discussions etc. Students could get asssignments (for grades) to develop certain subtopics on the commons, or upload parts of their assignments to the relevant topic pages after they have been graded. Patricia Arnold and Helen Hambly Odame have already offered to involve their students in such an effort.
The topic base at the moment is still very rudimentary, but it could be the stub for a CommunIPedia:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Topics
Ask not what CIRN can do for you...
After the conference, Steve Thompson and I have tried to clean up the wiki and simplify registration. Here are the steps we kindly ask all of you to follow:
--- Essential steps that take no time at all (and for which you really have no excuse for not doing them :-) )
1. Register for a CIRN Commons Account
Fill out this form (if you already have a Wikispaces account, use your registered e-mail address, so that you can reuse your username+password):
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Getting+Involved
2. Create a personal profile
After registration (normally within a couple of days after you have filled out the form), you will get a notification of your account having been created, plus a link to your personal profile template page. You will be asked to fill out the details, which could be nothing more than adding a link to your home page. Have a look at the rapidly growing set of personal profiles already created:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/People
--- Steps that almost take no time at all (but which really give you that much craved for feeling of instant gratification)
3. It would be really nice if you'd add 1-3 (or more!) key CI publications to the bibliography. Which ones do you think are still lacking? Just use 10 minutes and make those edits:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Bibliography
4. Add your ideas about how to shape the Prato 2011 conference:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/message/list/Shaping+CIRN+2011
--- Steps that take a bit more time (but earn you the eternal gratitude of the CIRN community and a pat on the back or a hug from Larry, depending on your preferences)
5. Become a page steward of a topic or project you care about. Have a look at the vacancies at:
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Contacts
So, there's something in the CIRN Commons for everybody. Your turn!
Open access publications are very important for promoting knowledge sharing, innovation, collaboration, and so on. Many research publications are still proprietary, however, and hidden behind high copyright walls. On the Community Informatics Researchers mailing list, an interesting discussion is being conducted about this topic, triggered by the invitation to one of its members to contribute a chapter to a research handbook to be published by a commercial publisher. Here's my response to the invited author who refuses to contribute as the handbook is not open access:
Michael,In principle, I agree with your point. I think we should all strive for open-access publications wherever possible. However, I think there is a large grey zone in between which we cannot afford to ignore.
I have been co-editor myself of a research handbook in the same IGI series (the "Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems"). My mistake was that I didn't check beforehand what the pricing would be, which, frankly, is outrageous: US$ 495 for a two-volume handbook, all the hard work basically having been done by authors and editors! Afterwards, I solemnly pledged never to publish with them anymore unless they radically change their business model, as this model stifles, rather than promotes open research.
Now, where's the grey zone?
- First of all, there are many non/less-commercial, yet still non-open ways to publish, often provided by professional societies. Think the ACM Digital Library:
http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfmACM is doing a lot of soul searching about whether to make this library freely available. They have a valid point, however, that the costs of maintaining a quality, indexed library need to be covered somehow. I think US$ 99 for a full year's access is reasonable. The costing model debate is not over yet, so I am sure that creative ways will be found for providing access to the many who also cannot afford this amount.
- Second, even with the very commercial publications, there are ways to work around their inaccessiblity. For instance, many commercial publishers, even IGI, allow an author to make a copy of a chapter available via his/her personal home page. In the case of our handbook, we made an index page to those chapters, so that many handbook chapters can now be easily accessed (unfortunately, not all authors took this effort, but that's beyond our control):
http://brianwhitworth.com/STS/This triggers a concrete idea: perhaps we could turn a section of the CIRN Living Knowledge Base
http://cirn.wikispaces.com/into a "CI Digital Library" that makes accessing this "grey zone" in our field easier? Any librarian (student) volunteers out there to think this through and set it up?
Aldo
On September 18, Andrew Keen gave the Incubate Innovation Lecture. Incubate is an annual independent culture festival in Tilburg. Keen is a well-known web entrepreneur and web critic. In 1995 he founded Audiocafe.com and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. After a while, however, Keen realized the negative impact of the democratization of the Internet and the Web 2.0 hype. He is most (in)famous for his "Cult of the Amateur" book, in which he shows the downside of user generated content, peer production and other Web 2.0 related phenomena. These are often uncritically promoted as only having beneficial effects for society, if not being the cure for all its ills. Keen, however, builds an alternative case for why they, like any technology, can also be dangerous. Although at least partial counter-arguments to many of his claims can be made, he makes some very good points. Anybody interested in designing socio-technical systems and facilitating communities on the Internet, should at least seriously consider what he has to say. I took extensive notes of his talk and the ensuing discussion, and summarize the most salient points here, as food for critical thought.
Notes of the presentation by Andrew Keen
The hypeThere are several problems with this argument
The economic foundations of Web 2.0 don't work
Web 2.0 does away with the value of culture by abolishing the intermediary
Hope?
Alternative ways of thinking
Now what?
Notes of the panel discussion
After Andrew's presentation, there was a lively discussion with a panel and the audience. Members of the panel: Andrew Keen, Konrad Boehmer (Buma Stemra), Amelia Andersdotter (Pirate Party), Hans Abbing (artist/sociologist), James Kirby (musician). My notes here are not comprehensive, and focus on Keen's statements. For full videos of the keynote and the discussion see Bijgespijkerd.
Con: the more knowledge available, the better for creativity, so, Web 2.0 will generate more, not less talents
Keen:Con: why/who is filtering? Industry, the political class with their vested interests?
Keen:
Con: old media are also corrupt
Keen:
My own perspective
Keen's polemic views have drawn a lot of flak, see, for example, "A Bad Case of Nostalgia" for one of the more reasonable critical reviews. So, where do I stand? Web 2.0 is an essential technological infrastructure for enabling collaborative communities, which are my own professional focus. Of course, I wouldn't want to go back to the "old industrial" communications world in a million years. There is incredible potential in the new technologies, only a tiny fraction of which has actually been realized for empowering these and other communities. However, Keen may be forgiven for his, what some think, is a bad case of nostalgia, or worse, kind of style.
Keen is trying to make an important point. Web 2.0 is not a panacea. It's a very, very powerful technology. Still, like any technology, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. And even if the intentions are good, the implications may not be. Web 2.0 enables citizen journalism, but also indirectly leads to the loss of budgets for investigative journalism. The blogosphere has become a major force for the common good, allowing oppressed peoples to circumvene stifling government censorship. Still, it has also become a tool for the ultra-right(eous) to organize themselves.
I think many respond in such a visceral way to Keen because his arguments express something profound and deeply disturbing. It is my strong conviction that as the shapers of this new Web 2.0 world, we have to heed his call, and start thinking in a much more sophisticated, balanced way about not just the pros but also the cons, instead of being enamoured by the superficial glitz and feelings of false belonging engendered by many (but of course not all) of current Web 2.0 pseudo-communities.
From my point of view, one concrete way to balance the pros and cons of Web 2.0 are socio-technical patterns. These patterns circumscribe describe the goals, roles, workflows, and communicative norms of (collaborative) communities. Through these patterns that communities define themselves, they can combine the energy and drive of Web 2.0 with their own, evolving "authority by merit" structures. Have a look at my "From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work" presentation if you want to know more.
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:
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 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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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: