fiorella de cindio isdt2010

1Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010

Web Science:the empirical side of Informatics

[email protected] di Informatica e Comunicazione

Mike: Community InformaticsFiorella: Community Informatics

Scuola di Dottorato in InformaticaCurriculum Process and Interactive System Design


Gary’s question/suggestion for my talk

Digital Media change the world

Digital Media are developed by (or with the support of) computerprofessionals

Computer professionals are educated in computer sciencedepartments (as mine), where:

weak awareness of the impact of ICT over society missed opportunities and wasted intelligence

1994: the Civic Informatics Laboratory the Milan Community Networkthe academic side the activist sidetheory practice

a fundamental, continuous interplay


Gary’s question/suggestion for my talk

what computer scientists can doto help the peoplewe are discussing in other ISDT talks ?

to develop digital systemsfor supporting people needs

→ how to involve these people in thedevelopment of such tools & systems(participatory design) ?

→ the nature of computer science


Why new tools ?There are so many tools around !


Software systems for enabling&supporting…

civic engagement e-participation online deliberation citizens&community empowerment and reconstruction citizens’ consultations ………

(socio-technical) systems not only (software) tools !

Social Interactive Systemsor

Digital Habitat


A frequent mistake

both public institutions and grassroots movements,when realize the need of setting upa Social InteractiveSystems:

place side by side a collage of some popular web-basedapplications/modules:

some discussion boards a blog area polls some social network features

conceived and designed for different purposes and for adifferent audience


Be careful !

When designing Social Interactive Systemstechnology is not the first and main issue, but anyhow relevant:

“Good technology in itself will not a community make,but bad technology can sure make community lifedifficult enough to ruin it.”

Etienne Wenger, N. White, J.D. Smith, K. Rowe, 2005Technology for communitieshttp://technologyforcommunities.com/


A good example: FacebookUS college students → ordinary people

organized throughpage(s)

The Viola movementhas difficulties tosurvive and evolve:

a chat does notsupport the rise ofa democraticorganization

the rules are eso-defined


An example of the features “we” need

effective public dialog has to be:

rational: I don’t attach you, but I explain why I do not agreewith you, possibly with the support of factual data(documents, video, photos, ….)

interactive: when I say something, I take into account whathas already been said

responsible: people should ‘put their face’, while allowingdifferent levels of engagement (styles of citizenship)

fair: according to some rules (a “Galateo”)

The technology should support/embed this as much as possible


An example of a tool with facilitiesfor productive public dialogue


How to develop these tools ?

1983 IFIP Conf. on System Design for, with, and by the Usersfor: the socio-technical approach: collect users’ needswith: Participatory Design (PD): involve users

“it is imperative that users be considered as experts”by: a vision and a research project

Difficulties: PD is demanding in terms of resources (time and money) even more difficult now:

from custom systems to web applications users are often conservative

(Von Hippel identifies “lead users” and “innovationcommunities”)


Several approaches

An incomplete list:

The HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) community End-User Development (EUD): users as designers system designers as meta-designers (meta-design) the SER model

SeedingEvolutionay Growth

Reseeding

The Software Engineering and programming community Manifesto for Agile Software Development

The market need “Always in beta” practice


Moving Beyond User Participation toAchieve Successful IS Design

Erica Wagner & Gabriele PiccoliCACM, Dec. 2007, vol.50, no.12

users are busy→ people is engaged in activities relevant to their life

sw development projects become salient to users when theoutput affect their daily lives and requires them to changetheir (work) practice

what seems crucial is the point in time when users areinvolved [...] earlier is not necessarily better

consequence: people feel concerned when the system is running in their

real life setting


the model (& testing of existing tools)

a first ‘experiment’ in a real life setting(Milan Municipal elections)

openDCN first release(2008)

a second large ‘experiment’ in10 Municipalities in the Lombardy region

further ‘experiments’ in different settings

new implementation

tuning & extensions

the Milan Community network

10 years of people’ use

first implementation

early idea of a new software

ComunaliMilano2006.it>400 candidates22 members of the City

Council>2000 registered citizens

Jan.2007: partecipaMi.it >400,000 access/month

e21 projectbrescia.progettoe21.itvigevano.progettoe21.it……………

sicurezzastradale.partecipami.it e-soccer.org ………….


Communications of the ACM, July 2008, vol. 51, no. 7


Web ScienceJ.Handler, N.Shadbolt, W.Hall, T.Berners-Lee, D.Weitzner

our everyday use of the Web depends on fundamentaldevelopments in Computer Science (CS) that took placelong before the Web was invented

protocols search algorithms (ex. Brin&Page PageRank algorithm)

based on graphs

But CS does not suffices to explain relevant web “phenomena”


two examples

If we study the Web as a graph, or as a set of protocols:

we cannot explain the success of Wikipedia, developed withMediaWiki, vs the failure of several sites/iniziatiaves based onthe same tool

“the protocols used by social networking sites like MySpaceand Facebook have much in common, but the success orfailure of the sites hunges on the rules, policies, and usercommunities they support.”

“Understanding the web requires more than ….” ComputerScience


Today’s interactive [web] applications are very early socialmachines. [...]

An important aspect of research exploring the influence of theWeb on society involves online societies using Web infrastructureto support dynamic human interaction. This work — seen introut.cpsr.org [*] and other such efforts — explores how the Webcan encourage more human engagement in the political sphere.Combining it with the emerging study of the Web and thecoevolution of technology and social needs is an important focusof designing the future Web.

[now hosted at www.publicsphereproject.org] a project led by DougSchuler

Web as Social Machine


Physical Science: an analytic discipline to find laws that explainobserved phenomena

Computer Science is predominantly synthetic: formalism andalgorithms are created to support desired behaviours

Web Science deliberately seeks to merge these two paradigms.

Web Science


Sept. 1986:IPIF 10th IFIP World Computer Congress

Kristen Nygaardthe inventor, with O.-J. Dahl of Simula 67,the first object-oriented programming language

Opening lecture:Program Development as a Social activity

“The term computer science should be replaced by informatics “

→

“a formal disciplineakin tomathematics”

→

“an [empirical] science”which studies

“selected aspects of specified classes of phenomena”


Aspects of Sciences

1. Phenomenology: the empirical study of phenomena(any fact, circumstance, or experience that is apparent to thesense): their identification, observed behaviours, andpropertiesex.: Tycho Brahe in astronomy, Linneo in botany

2. Analysis: comprehension and explanation of phenomenain terms of an underlying theoryproperties, concepts, relations,..... anticipation of behaviourex.: Newton in astronomy, Darwin in botany

3. Synthesis, construction, technology: knowledge organized forthe purpose of interferring with, constructing and generatingphenomenaex.: the experiments at CERN (Genève) in physics

4. Multiperspective reflection: the examination of concepts andphenomena from the perspective of more than one science(or more than one perspective within the same science)


Natural Sciences vs Informatics

1. Phenomenology: the empirical study of phenomena(any fact, circumstance, or experience that is apparent to thesense): their identification, observed behaviours, andpropertiesex.: Tycho Brahe in astronomy, Linneo in botany

2. Analysis: comprehension and explanation of phenomenain terms of an underlying theoryproperties, concepts, relations,..... anticipation of behaviourex.: Newton in astronomy, Darwin in botany

3. Synthesis, construction, technology: knowledge organized forthe purpose of interferring with, constructing and generatingphenomenaex.: the experiments at CERN (Ginevra) in physics

4. Multiperspective reflection: the examination of concepts andphenomena from the perspective of more than one science(or more than one perspective within the same science)


Informatics

Develops from the invention of a technology:the programmable computer (3)

The analytic roots of the discipline (computer science) basedin the second half of the ‘50 and established in the ‘60 (2)

First efforts for a multidisciplinary perspective in the ‘70 (4) Nygaard and the Scandinavian Trade Unions projects Xerox PARC: the Dynabook project (anthropologists,

ethnographers, cognitive psychologists,...) leads to GUI(Graphical User Interfaces) and Smalltalk

Which is the phenomenology (1)?


The phenomenology

The anomalous path (3 → 2 → 4 → 1) led to a wrongidentification of the class of phenomena:

not the computer in itself, but the impact of computer on societyare integral part of the discipline

Nygaard: “ informatics needs in a number of areas a proper andwider empirical platform (1) “

Now: the Web is the empirical platform → Web Science


Real-life social interactive systems as“experiments”

experiment datagathering

theoreticalframework(the model)

e-participation/online deliberationtheory

specific systemrequirements

(experiment design)

Design of a specific e-participation system“traditional” PD

specific systemdevelopment

(experiment preparation)

Development of a specific e-participation systemagile programming

specific systemrelease and use

(running experiment)

specific system runningin a real life setting



“technology [is] needed to allow user communities to construct,share, and adapt social machines so successful models evolvethrough trial, use, and refinement”

Scientific trials based on a theory, to validate itnot practical attempts

Research challengesfor designing the future Web


Conclusion (back to the initial question)

what computer scientists can do to help the peoplewe are discussing in other ISDT talks ?

to develop software tools for supporting people needs

Requires to→ recognize the empirical nature of “their” science→ recognize the impact of computers on society as an integral

part of the discipline→ develop theories to support the develpoments

A revolution !necessary for Liberating intelligences

fiorella de cindio isdt2010

Documents

community informatics

isdt talks

lead users

software tools

different audience fiorella

beta practice fiorella

software systems

esodefined fiorella