Basic knowledge of social computing

Fifteen years ago, personal computing devices were very expensive. The idea that children might have their own mobile phones or other personal digital assistants (PDA) with SMS function was considered absurd at that time. But with the passage of time, its cost has dropped to a very low level, so that most people have at least one PDA that supports text, email or instant messaging. These devices, as well as modular content and computing resources, enable us to contact others in the existing global system quickly and conveniently. In addition, the old social structure ("You will communicate in the way we need when we need it") that is common in large enterprises is being rapidly replaced by these simpler connection methods ("I will communicate in the way I need it when I need it"), while in your social structure, the communication method is decided by people themselves, not stipulated for people.

Another key element of social computing is directly taken from the basic premise of Web 2.0: collective wisdom is far better than individual wisdom. For example, consider its homepage to provide corresponding purchase suggestions based on what others in the Amazon community are reading and discussing; These suggestions change in real time according to daily or even hourly buying and viewing trends. The underlying mechanism and principle in this system is the direct embodiment of the social computing concept of Web 2.0 (the information generated by people will be used to improve the working mode of the system).

In this new social structure, people can get relevant hints from contemporaries. They are increasingly unwilling to accept the command of their work units and often raise objections. Power is gradually transferred from the institution to the community in the institution; Creating value in these communities means giving up control to some extent to encourage more people to participate. Many enterprises find that they no longer rely on top-down communication strategies; They have achieved greater success by using the same types of tools used by the target audience at the individual level. By becoming a part of the community, it can aim at enterprises or architects, improve the collective wisdom of the organization by making employees and business partners part of the solution and encouraging them to participate actively, so as to make full use of them.

Social Computing Tools for Architects

Social computing tools range from projects such as blogs and RSS to social networking sites and wikis. If you don't think these tools have had a great impact on the world, please consider the following: According to Forrester Research, from August 2004 to July 2005, many enterprises wanted to ignore their roles, and these blogs created some special communities, which easily influenced the views of customers and employees (about what can and should be done within enterprises).

In the field of Web 2.0, everything is decentralized, distributed and shared. But in the world of architects, the situation is just the opposite. In architectural design, it is very important to maintain a certain degree of control; Without this control, the integrity in the design will soon disappear. But what if you know that people are discussing your design and have made some gradual changes by themselves? What if these changes are reasonable, but you are not involved? You may want to understand this change and apply it to the whole organization. What should you do if you want a grass-roots employee to directly participate in your organization so as to bypass the troublesome management middleman? If you use the right social computing tools, you can do this completely.

The problem facing architects is which social computing tools to use to maintain their personal influence as architects, and how to use these tools in the organization. These two questions can be answered in a similar way. Here are some basic social computing tools and how to use them in an enterprise environment:

Social networking sites. If you need to connect with others in the industry (not necessarily within your company), consider joining a social networking site, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. The advantage of these websites is that you can get important contacts with little or no operation. Create a profile, add some friends, and then you can have a rest and wait for others to contact you. If the person who contacts you is valuable to you, you can take the initiative to contact and establish a relationship. You can start your work, but at this moment, if you find a new source of information or cooperation, it will be worthwhile.

Enterprise blog. These are valuable tools for communication, project status report or * * * sharing project-related information, which helps others to understand the reasons for making changes. For any blog, the key issue is the ability to communicate in real time, but the most important aspect is the function of providing comments: readers can ask questions to bloggers, and the answers provided can be seen by everyone. If you are providing guidance to someone, then blog is also a very suitable tool for peer-to-peer interaction, which is a time-consuming and informal way. By mixing personal and project blogs, information itself can be classified; People can easily subscribe to blogs they care about.

Intranet sites that use RSS feeds. If you or your department has an intranet site, you can use RSS feeds to provide the latest information. Every intranet site should provide an automatic RSS feed; ; Others in the organization can subscribe to it as needed to get hourly or monthly information. The concept of subscription is applicable to the premise that people will get the information they need through self-regulation; Content creators don't need to worry that some suitable people don't get detailed information. This makes enterprise communication at any level very effective: for those who want to get information, they can get it; For those who don't want to get this information, there is no need to disturb them like using email notification.

Enterprise wiki. Wiki focuses on collaboration and is very suitable for the following tasks: for example, you can collect business and technical requirements in a place where everyone can easily access and edit them; Or release version notes, error reports or problem tracking information. Wiki can replace intranet sites in many ways. Undoubtedly, it is easier to update. The main reason is that wiki is very simple to use. This makes it available to almost everyone in the organization because it doesn't require any special skills or knowledge. After creating several wikis, you can also create your own enterprise "Wikipedia", which is an information source in use and accessible to everyone. (In addition, if necessary, you can make the wiki private with your password and ID. )

Now that you know how to make full use of social computing tools, let's introduce a brand-new concept that is very popular in the field of enterprise 2.0.

Social subjects are fully considered in the system design.

As we all know, human beings are social animals. Since ancient times, when Neanderthals lived in groups and moved tens or hundreds of miles to join social groups, human beings began a long journey, even sacrificing their own safety to keep in touch with others. This is no different today. We may fly thousands of miles away, or drive hundreds of miles back to our hometown, or stay with friends for a few days. When we get together, we can get nonverbal cues by observing other people: Did anyone doze off during my speech? This means it's time to make a concluding speech. Did she laugh when I told a joke? This means that she must like what I said. We are very concerned about other people's opinions and reactions (the social behavior that each of us shows).

When dealing with others, being sensitive to social behaviors and hints is very important for the success of social computing. However, IBM Research began to study social computing from 1998, and found that because we are almost blind in the digital world, communication in this field may be very clumsy and require great efforts. When you use digital systems, it is very important to provide social background for people's activities. We should use the concept of social subject instead of imitating the real world (for example, by using video).

Social agents can visually show who is participating in online conversations and what they are doing. They provide an online environment for the social behaviors we show. For example, one of the goals of IBM Research's first social computing system was to support communication between workgroups. It is called Babble, and it is a persistent, chat-like environment that allows people to see who is online in a virtual room. Therefore, people can infer who is participating in the virtual session. Loops is a follow-up project of Babble. This is a network-based system with * * * enjoyment tags and bulletin boards, which runs on IBM's infrastructure. The research team is expanding the cycle in IBM for those who are allowed to use the system for team learning and those who are more likely to benefit from its use.

Social agency has the nature of * * *, which makes it very valuable to the group; The whole group can observe the activities of social subjects, so it can cultivate a sense of responsibility, pressure from peers and imitation ability. Figure 1 is the "babble" timeline provided by Thomas Erickson and Mark R. Laff of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center: the design of social agents for visual groups. Activity Over Time (see resources), you can see the representation of social agents in Babble system. The big circle indicates the room that contains the conversation, while the small circle indicates the people who participate in the conversation. As some people become active and make "speeches" (types), their points will move to the center; When their activities stop, their points will gradually move to the edge. Points outside the circle indicate people who have left the conversation. In this legend, * * * five people are very active in the conversation, two people seem to be just listening, basically doing nothing, and one person quits the conversation.

If you consider the concept of social subject in your design work, you will design a visual system for people, and they will become a part of it, not just use it. Social agents can be used in various ways, but it is important to remember that they encourage people to participate because they can observe the social clues displayed by others.

Improve your influence

At this point, I assume that your organization is ready to use social computing. But you may find that most people in your organization have never heard of social software or don't know how to use it in a business environment. In this case, you need to complete the corresponding work, including training your management team on related concepts to help them understand how to use social software to benefit the organization. You can add some small elements to the design: you can work in corporate blogs and intranet RSS feeds because they encourage people to participate and only need to do a little work on the client side. If your organization needs time to adapt, please don't add advanced features.

On the other hand, if your organization is eager to use social computing, you can try to get the most functions according to the specific budget and start the implementation tool quickly. Understanding usage: Do people use related tools in the expected way? Do people often use these tools? If not, then why not? No matter what tools you use, you should cooperate with the enterprise communication team. They know the communication trends in business best and will be your biggest supporters, because social computing tools are very suitable communication methods at any level.

If you are not familiar with designing with social software, you can consider using a product, namely IBM&; Reg Lotus & ampreg. This is the first time that IBM has provided social software outside the company. It includes five basic services (profile, community, blog, Dogear and activities) to help your organization get up and running quickly. If necessary, you can even get a demonstration of the product; See Resources for more details.

After choosing a specific direction, you can enhance your influence in using social computing in the enterprise by widely using social computing tools. If you are creating an enterprise blog, you can create your own blog and write something about this project. For example, if you are testing simple RSS feeds on the intranet, create your own social computing project site and link to other sites, so that people can get RSS feeds from your site and understand why they should be implemented. Let everyone know why to choose a specific tool and how it can bring benefits to employees.

abstract

Using Web 2.0, the social software of large enterprises has influenced architects, making it more difficult for them to manage through formal power, because the power of institutions has migrated to the community in many ways. Correctly facing this trend can improve the consistency and cooperation ability of the whole development community, expand and strengthen the social community of the organization, and at the same time keep its own views influential and acceptable. Now that you know what social computing is, you can make full use of it in your next design.

2008-09-05: Today, SharePoint experts from Microsoft came to the graphic mining class of our department to introduce and publicize Microsoft products and the "social computing" platform.

To be honest, in recent years, various novel concepts have emerged in the IT field, from Web 2.0, social networks to enterprise 2.0, cloud computing to this kind of social computing, which is dazzling. Of course, some of them are commercial propaganda, and some of them are slightly fanatical daydreams, especially cloud computing. A famous domestic science and technology blog said that everything in the future can be solved on the "cloud".

While we were still thinking in the "cloud", Microsoft showed us their actions. The SharePoint implementation within Microsoft not only completes all the functions of Facebook and LinkedIn, but also further integrates multimedia, instant messaging, document management and teamwork. It doesn't sound strange, but the point is that these integrations are not concepts, but actual products.

What is the practical significance of such a product? Of course there is. Three experts who come to promote SharePoint have never met before coming to school. They naturally organized themselves through the company's internal website, looking for interests and skills, and came to our school for publicity. One of them is a salesman, one is a trainer and the other is a developer. The traditional hierarchical management structure has disappeared, or "invisible". This self-organized, naturally formed small team is undoubtedly cost-saving and more efficient for a large company with tens of thousands of people.

I have expressed, and many people have expressed, that websites like Facebook have failed to grasp the essential motivation of social networks. What is the essential motivation? The motivation is not to "net" everyone together, nor to send pictures or chat. Therefore, no matter how popular Facebook is, it is similar products of Microsoft's SharePoint platform that really promote social computing. You know, a product of SharePoint has brought hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to Microsoft, which is enough to show how much the customer company needs this platform capability.

However, social computing has not reached the height we imagined. We blog, wiki and rss, and then what? Everything is 2.0. Problem solved? Don't!

Think about it, can you search for people by "skills" on Facebook? Can you enter a query like "computer doctoral student with compilation skills and published research papers" in LinkedIn? If a person's file does not clearly indicate that he has such skills, does it mean that this person does not exist?

On Wikipedia, can you easily say "which physicist was most influenced by Newton"? Can you know which content is more credible than others?

We have a lot of information, but we still lack the ability to process and analyze it. This is the core motivation of social computing.

In fact, practical application is difficult. For example, when you subscribe to more than 100 RSS feeds, but you don't want to read them all, is there an algorithm that can provide a reading list that best suits your reading habits? You don't know which ones in your RSS are authoritative and which ones are not worth watching. Does the computer know?

Nothing is actually 2.0. This is why the mainstream academic circles have not accepted the term Web 2.0 at all, and this term does not describe the height we should actually reach. Simple tool updates can't bring revolutionary changes. Although this change is what we need.