social software

Social software and the spread of tacit knowledge in science

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:40:45 -0700

Description

One of the more interesting discussions at the Perimeter Institute-sponsored conference Science in the 21st Century involved the role that Web 2.0 technologies could play in the dissemination of tacit knowledge in science.

Sociologist of science Harry Collins made the argument that there are three kinds of tacit knowledge that scientists share:

1) "Contingent tacit knowledge" is knowledge we don't talk about. There can be several reasons for this. We may not realize it's important, because it's enshrined in custom or everyday routines, and thus is never absent. We may not share it because we don't know for sure what others know or don't know. It may remain ambiguous because different groups have different meanings for common terms. Contingent tacit knowledge could be formalized and shared, but it's not.
2) "Somatic tacit knowledge" is physical knowledge. Riding a bicycle is the canonical example: describing all the physics of bicycle-riding doesn't make it possible for a novice to stay stable. (Surgery is another great example of a body of practice that has a strong intellectual component, but is also very physical.) You have to learn by doing.
3) "Collective tacit knowledge" is knowledge that you can only get by immersing yourself in a culture or society. As Collins put it, if riding a bicycle is somatic tacit knowledge, knowing how to ride a bicycle in traffic is collective tacit knowledge. The rules for successful riding are different in San Francisco, Copenhagen, and Mumbai: even if you're successful riding in one place, you can fail in the others.

All three of these forms of tacit knowledge, Collins argues, are important for the success of science. This suggests that there are some hard limits to the gains or transformational impacts of formal publishing efforts like arXiv. As Collins put it, "The Internet is really useful because we've already got all the socialization necessary to use it." Circulating papers more efficiently offers advantages to communities that are already connected, but is not going to be sufficient to build science in the developing world, or support the creation of new scientific communities.

What difference could Web 2.0 technologies-- in particular, social software, but also short-form video, web cams, and other relatively light media-- make for the transmission of tacit knowledge? We've tended to think of the Web's impact on science in terms of displacing publishing, or making the sharing of data easier; but social software tends not to be about moving around large bodies of formal knowledge, so much as facilitating the sharing of small amounts of knowledge, at highly specific times, and in particular contexts. In other words, social software edges toward tacit knowledge.

While more conventional kinds of publishing are useful for communicating formal knowledge, published results are the tip of the iceberg; most of science consists of informal and tacit knowledge, and it's that knowledge that defines and binds together communities of practice, specialties, and other functional groups within science. In the long run, then, it may be that social software is as significant as arXiv, or open publishing, or new modes of peer review, precisely because of its disorganized, informal, contextual nature.

Structure, Tools, and Platforms of Science

Source

Social networks constructed by blog and SMS in China

Jess Hemerly — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:06:48 -0800

Description

From the blog post:

Blog was not invented in China, but it has been hugely popular in this country. Nowadays, almost everybody has a blog, presenting whatever he/she feels like to. Its users range from Nintendo DSL gamers to pop stars, and its hosts range from Windows Live Spaces to the Chinese native blog host www.bokee.com. And nonetheless, many of these hosts are reported to have attracted a large number of users.

This popularity can be probably attributed to the common Chinese character of being self-contained. Many Chinese prefer to keep their opinions to themselves rather than speaking out aloud. However, they do have a desire to share their experiences and knowledge, if the communications channel is right. Blogs are clearly one of those. Very often, the Chinese simply exchange their blog addresses, and then, when sitting back at home, they talk to each other over the blog. Blogs have obviously facilitated information flow and the construction of social networks in this country and particularly among the youth.

China: Science & Technology

Source

"Social networks constructed by blog and SMS in China." Xtract blog, November 14, 2007.

Post-semantic web enhances society and the meaning of data

David Gutelius — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 16:57:31 -0800

Description

In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee first described the semantic web in this way: " I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

Since that time, there has been significant progress towards making such an idea reality (note Radar Networks' Twine, or Metaweb's Freebase). It has also become more tightly constrained and defined (e.g. Wikipedia's current definition: "The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.").

Going beyond RDF-related technologies OWL and other ontology frameworks, however, we may be approaching a post-semantic web phase of development of the Internet. It's not that the "semantic web" as Tim B-L dreamed it or Wikipedia defines has really fully appeared. In fact, I have a suspicion that in either case, it may never appear and function the way its proponents envision. For one, there is still deep disagreement over standards - for all its Sematicness, the community can't even agree on the semantics!

By post-semantic web, I do not mean that it has become irrelevant - but it is beginning to show signs of turning out far differently than anyone could have imagined.

We are now seeing advanced machine learning combined with natural language processing, social graph analysis, and data mining techniques that half a decade ago few could have imagined. These technologies are being put to use by incredibly powerful compute resources (particularly those in mesh or p2p networks) to pick up and analyze a tremendous array of "signals". By signals, I mean not just those most in vogue in "web 2.0" like tags or networks of friends, although these are new and valuable sources for machines to learn to serve people more effectively. I also mean "digital gestures" - small signals that convey meaning to others but differently than "natural language" typically conveys; examples might include symbology or avatars. We are becoming more expressive digitally, and we are now just beginning to be able to also harvest these expressions and have machines learn from them in order to adapt to us.

The artificial intelligence field has for many years been fascinated with the idea of autonomous agents - semi-stupid digital servants that can act on our behalf under certain circumstances. The recent push into probabilistic reasoning and advances in a particular subfield of AI called machine learning (a characteristically poor name for a field of inquiry, but oh well) has begun to produce something better than semi-stupid in terms of serving us users.

The promise of a post-semantic web goes beyond just a language and representation framework (the techno-wonk vision of the semantic web) or a series of agents that do things for people. It's really a combination of 1) the power of distributed computing, 2) the growing expressivity of digital life and the signals such a life leaves behind, and 3) a way for software to learn and adapt itself to serve users and the human communities that they belong to, better. The implications for such powerful applications are not that they necessarily do things for us (although that would be a useful side effect), but rather give us new cognitive, and perhaps social, capabilities that let us do what we humans already do - just more and better.

AAAI Symposium on Social Information Processing - http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss08symposia.php#ss06

iLink KDD - http://www.ai.sri.com/pub_list/1523

Radar Networks' Twine: http://www.radarnetworks.com/

Metaweb - http://www.metaweb.com/

Signals

Radar Networks: Twine

Machine-to-Machine Intelligence (m2mi) Corporation

Social Information Processing

Web companies race to social and open information streams

Mike Love — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:05:30 -0700

Description

Many large web companies are racing towards a similar goal: owning people's online attention streams by providing the most benefit to those that use their services. For an example of this direction of new products, a San Francisco company, Radar Networks, recently unveiled a new service at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twine, which will assimilate and make sense of the information in users' lives if they feed it with bookmarks and the content of emails.

At the same time, we can see a push towards letting users choose if they want to open their digital identity and network. A new initiative from Google will add a social component to more of their services. Similar to Facebook, it looks like Google will open up a new set of APIs to let developers access the services.

Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create “activity streams” for other applications akin to Facebook’s news and mini feeds.

Google is planning to “out open” Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to build apps for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well.

A New York Times article describes Google, Myspace, LinkedIn and some of the most popular social networking sites convening on a commons standard for social network developers, OpenSocial:

MySpace and Bebo, two of the world’s largest social networking sites, on Thursday joined a Google-led alliance that is promoting a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks....

The open standards could create a boom of innovation around social networks as applications reach more users than ever and encourage developers to create more Internet tools.

Data mining on a large scale has been common practice for companies and the government for years now, but these new ambitious data aggregation and data mining projects will potentially open their results to the public. At the least, each individual user will be benefitted with better recommendations by the addition of data by others.

Radar Networks: Twine http://www.twine.com/
Google's Response to Facebook http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/29/googles-response-to-facebook-maka-maka/
MySpace Joins Google Alliance
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/technology/02google.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Plaxo: More on social network portability http://blog.plaxo.com/archives/2007/08/more_on_social.html
Twine, Freebase and Powerset http://mikelove.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/twine-freebase-and-powerset/

Signals

New Technologies for Cooperation

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:10:30 -0700

Description

New technologies for cooperation and a better understanding of cooperative strategies may create a new capacity for rapid, ad hoc, and distributed decision making.

Within 10 years, a range of nascent technologies and practices may come together in a way that enhances our ability to cooperate in both established and ad hoc groups. Examples of these tools for collective action include:

Self-organization mesh networks, which support new ways of creating and managing stocks and flows of information
Community computing grids, which model efficient use of resources and solve complex problems
Peer production networks, which provide a framework for rapid problem solving
Social mobile computing, which builds contextual understanding of problems and dilemmas and fosters trust and group identity in ad hoc situations
Social software, which builds trusted networks and networked knowledge bases to enhance sense making, trust, and emergent leadership
Social accounting methods, which take advantage of rating, ranking, and referral mechanisms to build trust and provide important management and control levers for leaders
Knowledge collectives, which demonstrate structures, rules and practices for managing knowledge as a collectively created common-pool resource

These new technological tools could support the emergence of new markets and spaces for creation of economic value by helping to overcome classic social and psychological obstacles to cooperative action. This could potentially lead to the emergence of new capitalist structures, akin to the development of limited-liability corporations during the early days of capitalism. By eliminating middlemen, and placing creative power in hands of consumers, these tools could facilitate new kinds of trade and commerce."

This will be enabled by:

Increasing broadband penetration
Development of advanced mobile devices and wireless data networks
Continuing development of software agents

Early indicators include:

The advent and rapid spread of wikis and blogs
Appropriation of art and media through mash-ups and remixing
Formation of clans in massively multiplayer online games

What to watch:

The first Nobel prize in economics is awarded for the study of cooperation in the (online) economy.
Fraud levels approach zero in trust-based online trading spaces.
New intellectual property regimes based on distributed co-creation gain traction.