Beyond Bowling Together

SocioTechnical Capital

Paul Resnick

MOCHI Presentation

7/12/00

www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/stk/ to download a copy of the paper

Activities and Effects

Activity

Immediate Outcome

Preconditions

Activity

Immediate Outcome

Capital

Side Effects

Activity

Capital

Immediate Outcome

Activity

Capital

Forms of Capital

• Physical

• Human

• Information and Communications Technology

• Social

Macro Impacts of Social Capital

• Health

• Economics

• Crime

• Politics

SocioTechnical Capital

• Productive combinations of social relations and information and communication technology

• A special case of social capital

• Interaction effect– social relations and technology that may not be

productive on their own

Implications of STK Lens for HCI Design and Deployment

• Success factors

• Definition of success

Activity

Capital

Immediate Outcome

Activity

Capital

Declining Participation

• Attending Club Meetings

• Family Dinners

• Having Friends Over

The Civic Challenge

• Improve traditional groups– Scheduling– Publicity– Less administration, more fun (or work)

• Explore new forms of togetherness– Dormant but activatable groups– Just-in-time introductions– Lurking and catching up– Massively distributed work

Outline

• Anatomy of Social Capital

• Technology Affordances– interactions– residuals

• Some Promising SocioTechnical Relations

• A Research Agenda

Micro Impacts of Social Capital

• Information routing

• Resource exchange

• Emotional support

• Public goods production (mobilization)

Anatomy of Social Capital

• Communication paths

• Common knowledge

• Networks

• Identities

• Expectations– Shadow(s) of the future– Multi-valent relations

Summary

Social Capital•Communication paths•Common knowledge•Shared values•Collective identity•Obligations•Roles and norms•Trust

Activities•Info routing•Resource exchange•Emotional support•Collective action

SocioTechnical Capital Opportunities

• New Interaction Types

• New Residuals

New Interaction Affordances

• Distant• Asynchronous• Monitoring• Notification• Peripheral

presentation

• Restricted modality• Large fan-in • Large fan-out• Anonymity• Access controls• Concurrency controls

New Residuals

• Document versioning

• Interaction traces

• Explicit feedback

• Network maps

• Local names with late binding

Promising SocioTechnical Relations

• Group self-awareness

Promising SocioTechnical Relations

• Group self-awareness

• Brief, intermittent interactions

Promising SocioTechnical Relations

• Group self-awareness

• Brief, intermittent interactions

• Time conservers

Time Conservers

• FAQs and catching up

• Peripheral participation

• Dormant groups

• Multi-tasking

Promising SocioTechnical Relations

• Group self-awareness

• Brief, intermittent interactions

• Time conservers

• Support for large groups

Support for large groups

• Recommender systems

• Reputation systems

• Mass-authoring

• Mass-conversation

Promising SocioTechnical Relations

• Group self-awareness

• Brief, intermittent interactions

• Conserving time

• Support for large groups

• Just-in-time introductions

Just-in-time introductions

• Exploiting network maps

• Documents as introducers

Research Agenda

• Case Studies

• Measurement

• Grand Theory

Research Agenda: Case Studies

• Creating tools and seeding practices

• Field trials– what happens to SC when new information

system introduced?

• Example: Who’s That? (www.whothat.org)

Research Agenda: Measurement• Need sensitive instruments • Questionnaire items

– Attitudes• Contextualized

– Activities• Which activities?

– Networks• Potential as well as actual

• Behavioral measures– On-line tasks or games?

Research Agenda: Grand Theory

• Which features of SocioTechnical relations are productive?

• Define the space of features

• Determine which features (or combinations) are productive

Take Home Messages

• Pay attention to residual capacities

• Lots of opportunities to explore

• Society needs us to succeed

• Please comment on the paper (by August 6)– www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/stk/

URLs to load up

• Evite

• Three Rivers Free-Net

• Webgrrls

• PHP Manual