Mathemagenic

My recent silence (and being stuck with the last study for my dissertation as the main reason for it) is a results of an attempt to make my research more transparent and inclusive by doing it “in public”.

My original intentions are outlined in the study description I used to invite bloggers to participate,  Networking practices of KM bloggers:

In general I prefer using real names of the participants and links to their weblogs to give credits similar to how it’s done in the blogging world. [...]

I would like to post summary of the interview on my weblog (after all interviews are done). I will email it to you before posting, so you can correct anything wrong or decide if it should not be published.

There is a chance that I will blog about work-in-progress while analysing the interview data or working on a publication. In this case I will only quote from publicly available sources (e.g. from your weblog or summary of the interview after you give permission to publish it online).

The main motivation behind this approach was to give credits to the participants and create a possibility of a dialogue around their contributions. I also didn’t expect that the things I wanted to ask would be extremely sensitive, so thought that bloggers wouldn’t mind (or even would appreciate) sharing them in public (in fact, a couple of people I interviewed said that I could just post interview summaries without checking with them first). An additional motivation for doing so was “methodological”: adding transparency to the research process as a way to improve the research quality.

Now what’s happened:

I’ve got stuck with writing interview summaries as those had to satisfy both, putting them online and analysing them for my research. For the analysis the ideal way would be to have “extended summaries”, those with as many direct transcripts of actual interviews as possible, however those would be too long and too fragmented to post in public. I could also make shorter summaries to post online, but this would limit what I could use while discussing the results since I promised to “only quote from publicly available sources”.

So I thought of analysing the data, deciding what had to be quoted and revising the summaries accordingly. But then I’ve got stuck with the analysis. For me discussing emergent interpretation with others is the best way to get “unstuck” and for this study doing that in the weblog would be really the best option. However, I couldn’t blog about anything untill posting the interview summaries online. And I couldn’t write those summaries either…

I eventually got “unstuck” with finding a way to discuss the interviews before making public summaries of them. I made anonymous summaries and used them to have a discussion on emergent themes with two colleagues who are far from blogging. With that input I could get a better picture of how to discuss the study results and which parts of the interviews are really important to include. I’m currently making blog-friendly versions of the anonymous summaries, so I can finally email those to the participants to be checked, post them online and get into blogging the results.

In the process I also figured out a few other issues with making the research data publicly available and attributed to the participants: it made more challenging including background data on the participants (e.g. age) or discussing “difficult” issues around their practices. So, my idealistic attempt for an “extreme” transparency didn’t really work - I guess I’ll be more moderate next times :)

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Similar to Stowe Boyd and Jack Vinson I’m not a big fan of wikis: while they are good for collective writing when authorship of specific contributions is not important, there are much more cases where it’s essential to know who makes what changes. Of course, the history of edits is there, but it’s just too unhuman to be used systematically.

However, given that the traces are there getting tools to analyse them is just a matter of time. WikiDashboard (thanks to Jane McConnell) is a good example of what is possible: if you use it to browse Wikipedia, each page is enhanced with a visualisation representing top ten users who edited it.

Motivation: The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

I was curious to see how it works, so I used it to check who edits Knowledge_Management page:

And then click on User:Snowded:

The second screenshot is more interesting: it’s a user page that shows what pages he edits most. As I was suspecting, the user is Dave Snowden and you can see not only which pages he edits, but also that he seems to have given up editing KM page (or that visualisations are not up to date, since this is not the case).

Well, on one hand I’m happy to see tools that add transparency and give credits to individual contributors. On the other hand, I wonder what Dave thinks of it. It’s not only about privacy concerns, but also about the potential of tools like this for messing up contributor motivations and all other consequences of measurement.

The people behind Wikidashboard are interested in the patterns that it might show, also inside companies:

We’re curious of how the Web community will use this tool to surface social dynamics and editing patterns that might otherwise be difficult to find and analyze in Wikipedia. We are also interested in applying this tool to Enterprise Wikis.

I’m interested in those patterns too, but even more in the secondary effects of having tool like that in a corporate settings. I still remember the feedback we’ve got on our innocent prototype that visualised some patterns in a corporate discussion forum. Then I was surprised not that much with the “Big Brother” title for our application, but with a little detail: community members didn’t want to have visible the number of messages they wrote next to their names, the feature that you can see often in public forums. Funny enough, they didn’t mind having a list of messages they wrote displayed next to their names. Numbers are easy to judge and easy to turn into targets, while it’s pretty clear that contribution it not about that.

See also:

• WikiDashboard visualisations explained
• Bookmarklet for WikiDashboard
• WikiDashboard search engine plugin for Firefox/Mozilla Browsers

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16.html#a1965; comments are here.

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Had a pleasure to talk with Nancy on her work on technologies for communities. Some things are still hanging out in my head, so I guess I just write them here to move on.

Open issues for research/thinking on communities (communities of practice; KM perspective).

Definitions. Ton cites Marc Smith:

… let’s shelve the word ‘community’ and use and study the term collective action instead. There are over 150 definitions of community by social scientists. If we (the social scientists) are not able to decide what it is, maybe everybody else should not be using the word either…

I agree with both that there are no good definitions and I like ‘collective action’ as a term, but I think it doesn’t work if you want to talk about specifics. It could include anything between a loosely coupled network, a community with shared language and practice or a project group with tight deliverables and deadlines. The boundaries between those are fluid, but they (at least in the extremes) are different in many respects (e.g. relational density, levels of trust, shared understanding, goal-orientedness, etc.)

Bottom-up evolution vs. top-down control in supporting communities. See the discussion at Dave Snowden’s blog.

Personal vs. social in community tools. Most of the community tools are group-focused (although Nancy is right, it’s getting more and more blurred). However, many of us are members of multiple communities and have to deal with different group tool configurations for all of them. Technology-wise I’d love to see more work on something like personal learnining environments (slides with more) for networking and collaboration: a toolset that would allow me to participate in different social spaces without learning yet another interface.

Aggregation of digital traces and social effects of those. Digital traces we leave eventually get aggregated and fed back to the social spaces we participate in or to some members of those (think of a community moderator who has access to stats on your activity in a community). They change knowledge we have about each other and eventually change the dynamics of our relationships and interactions (think of gaming the ratings or effects of metrics to measure community things in a corporate context). This is going to be bigger and scarier (at least for those people like me :), so we need to know more about it.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22.html#a1857; comments are here.

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My weblog is not that personal. Although being personal (confessional?) style-wise, I don’t feel comfortable writing too much about my private life: this is something left to other spaces and other channels (friends-only Flickr photos, secret wedding blog, emails, Skype, f2f…). Still, major changes in my life find some way here, since for me personal and professional are not easily separated.

Some of the personal events are truly life-changing, so it’s hard to stay the same person as you have been before once you go through them and your writing can’t stay the same. Since I started blogging I has been wondering what would happen with my blogging once I get kids – will I turn into a mommy-blogger? will I start another weblog for it? will I keep that part of my life out of the web?

I still don’t know, but I guess I will find out soon. My own shapes are changing, so I guess the shape of this space will change as well. In both cases I know that the change is coming, but I may only guess where it would lead me :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14.html#a1853; comments are here.

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This time I check my referrers at Technorati (via Bloglines subscription) to my familyskyping post it feels creepy.

There is nothing there that is not online, so why feeling creepy?

The details that I usually choose not to make instanly visible are made visible in one post. It also goes across online spaces, linking my story about using Skype in the family to my wedding photos on Flickr.

This is the first time I see the weblog that links to me and it’s scary how someone “I have no idea who he is” went to collect all that details to put them in one place. I would feel totally different if it would be someone I recognise as a regular reader of my weblog.

I wonder how Robert would react to it. Not only I blogged about his communication with my mom, but now the whole story is at some strange website accompanied by our wedding photo.

Of course, things are not that scary. Very fast I figure out that the post was actually syndicated from Skype journal that I know well and that the original was written by Phil Wolff and starts from “A friend of mine, metablogger and social media scholar Lilia Efimova” invisible in the Technorati quote. And I talk to Robert - he doesn’t mind…

I feel much better now - the context Phil provides makes a lot of sense for a reader not reading my weblog, I’m not surprised that he knew all those details and I actually like how he cropped my photo for the post :)

What is still strange is how much my feeling of creepy or not with my personal online dots connected in one place depends on the context: who connects the dots, why and how…

And a side note. Phil says:

Note the Skype infection spreading through the family vector. Not just within her household (Lilia to Robert, I think) but also across households, to her mother. Someday genealogists will be mining Skype social networks to discover family ties.

Phil’s assumption of Robert picking up Skype from me actually made Robert more unhappy than any of the personal things revealed online :) So, I have to say that this is not true (both of us used SKype before getting together) and that in general Robert is pretty much the same early adopter as I am (actually, he has more gadgets than me, I just blog more :), so all ideas of who might be the first in the family are likely to be wrong.

Also - Phil has a really bunch of interesting ideas about framing Skype for the workplace and an on-going quest for Knowledge Management selection criteria for Skype.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/12.html#a1814; comments are here.

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Our IT guys send an email with a gentle reminder that today is a System administrator appreciation day. A quote from the web-site:

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.

Friday, July 28th, 2006, is the 7th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.

Having read a lot on invisible work and coming from working environments where lots of things I had to do myself I’m starting to realised how much “overhead” or “infrastructure” work can be easily taken for granted. Secretaries, sysadmins, information specialists and many others internally called “support stuff” keep me working on what I do best, providing a space where I’m not bothered with many “non-core” small things. I go to them only if things break or I need an extra something. If things work their efforts is so invisible, that they can easily become non-existent.

Just an example: talking to a colleagues running our information center I realised how much work she has to do “behind the scenes” to make sure that I can access all those papers from online databases. I find something, click and access the source not knowing that that the only reason I can do it is that my IP address sits in some contract that gives us access to some database. I don’t have to bother about contracts and databases, budget and legal negotiations, technical details - I can just get the paper and continue to work on my own stuff.

So, once in a while it could make sense to think about your “invisible colleagues” and do something to let them know that their work is important for you - appreciate your sysadmins, worship a librarian or give flowers to a secretary.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/28.html#a1809; comments are here.

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Was searching for something else, but found this - del.icio.us tagrolls. So, an overview of my bookmarks

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/28.html#a1789; comments are here.

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Jill, in between the lines:

I love reading between the lines of blogs - though sometimes I’m completely wrong about things! So it was fun to see an interpreted and confirmed version of what went on behind the scenes of Jason Kottke’s and Meg Hourihan’s blogs in the last few years:

[...]

Me, I’ve gone a bit quieter with my own between the lines. Realising that a lot of students and colleagues and bosses and journalists sometimes read my blog has got me drawing sharper lines between public and private. I’ll let you know when I get married, though :)

This echoes my own struggles. When preparing for our wedding I was drawn between desire to share and need for privacy.

From one side, I’ve learned so much about bringing different cultures together in a wedding while reading stories of Wendy and Joey getting married - I’m grateful they blogged so much of it. I felt like doing something similar for unknown readers (anyone needs help regarding paperwork to marry a foreigner in Moscow?). And I also wanted to share the fun with those friends who do not come for dinner often enough to hear the stories.

From another side, I wouldn’t be myself doing something like that - I close the curtains so strangers on the street can’t peek into our living room (and if you walk in a residential neighbourhood in the Netherlands you know how uncommon it is). In same way - I’m not comfortable making things too explicit in my blog.

We tried to figure out something in between for our wedding - figuring workarounds, mix of technologies and practices to share and to keep it private at the same time (I was close to reposting here “wedding blogging policy” from our private blog, but then did a check and figured out that having a quote here makes it too easy to find ;).

I just hope that one day I will need less workarounds for selective sharing - deciding for a piece of information how far it should do - to the whole world, to friends, to family or to my personal online space, visible only to me. It works now in many bigger group spaces (e.g. Flickr and LJ), but I want it to work in my own space and I don’t want to depend on the registering all my friends in yet another online something.

Fingers crossed. We’ve got so many buddy lists around that they should turn into something really useful.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/16.html#a1780; comments are here.

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It’s so funny that I couldn’t avoid blogging about it - Ton tells me on Skype that he saw in his referrer logs someone searching for “lilia efimova” boyfriend. I checked mine and it’s there as well…

I guess none of the pages in this search actually answers the questions that the person who searched for it could have :)

Which brings me to the interesting bunch of questions about privacy and choices people make around it.

As for me - I’m not comfortable making things too explicit in my blog. Explicit link gives things away without any work - just one look and you know my bio and demographics and how I look and what is my phone number. Somehow I’m not comfortable with having all that information instantly visible.

However all of it is online in public. It takes slow uncovering, time and effort, but you can find all that… I’m not hiding it, but somehow I feel much easier if it’s not on the surface.

It’s like any relation - the more time you spend together, the more you know about each other. The closer you are, the more you know…

Some of my blogging friends met my boyfriend, some know all kinds of details about him and where to find him online, some could connect the hints and links from different online spaces, over time, and get the whole picture… I’m fine and happy with that, but I’m still not comfortable advertising it (as well as all other personal things) on my homepage - somehow the time needed to find things out gives me a sense of privacy…

And, of course, I know that the tools to connect the dots instantly will be here sooner or later. And I’m thinking of what happens then and how this could be useful for knowledge sharing (see posts on transparency and knowledge mapping)… I guess those tools will redefine our thinking of what privacy is and our practices around it.

But so far - my own definition of privacy:

a lot of my life is online, but you’ll have to read the whole story to discover

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/14.html#a1667; comments are here.

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And while I was searching for the right link for “It’s just a matter of common sense”: Ethnography as invisible work by Diana Forsythe to add to my story I came across A web on the wind: The structure of invisible work by Bonnie Nardi and Yrjö Engeström, which is an editorial for the “invisible work” issue of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Wonder how I could miss it - with all my interests in invisible work?

More to read :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/17.html#a1525; comments are here.

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