Even though the departments of Aalto University’s School of Art and Design provide personal lockers to their students, I have long observed that all but one of the visitor coin lockers at the main entrance hall seem to be permanently occupied.

Calling for release of the occupied lockers

Now the facility management has decided to empty these lockers on December 5 and posted an announcement on one of the school’s intranets:

Pääaulan vaatesäilytyksen kaapit on tarkoitettu vain vierailijoiden tavaroita varten. Kaappeja on kuitenkin otettu vakituiseen käyttöön. Kaapit pyydetään tyhjentämään. Vahtimestarit poistavat kaapeissa olevat tavarat 5.12.2011.

But, surprisingly, no note has been attached to the lockers themselves nor has the message been translated into English. Alas, more than one week later, not a single one of the occupied lockers has been released.

Disclaimer: As an alumnus, I do not have access to all intranet channels of Aalto University, therefore cannot evaluate whether messages have been sent to other intranets or by e-mail lists. My intention is not to discuss about or judge on the quality of the school’s internal communications but to present a very obvious manifestation of non-user phenomena in real life.

How non-use phenomena messed up the process

From my point of view, this reveals a whole set of non-use related phenomena that give pointers for improving the design of such communication flows:

• A user assigns more value to a particular intranet portal than it has to those people occupying the lockers; frequent users are tricked into assuming a wider reach of a channel than it really has – an issue discussed under the label “reachability” in my study on non-users of social network services.
• The process applied fails to consider how much and how regularly different groups use this particular intranet (ever since the merger of three universities the number of internal communication channels has increased at a rapid pace and the channel in question here appears to be mainly used by a small sub-group of very engaged staff and students) – the call for release of the lockers has been read 119 times in a school of 2500 staff and students, a reach of under 5%.
• It has not been taken into account that non-users of the intranet portal could still be users of the facilities, i.e. they could be reached using different channels.
• The process of calling people to release their lockers does not include actionable metrics to measure the “conversion rate” of the intranet message (apparently an alarming 0%) and take additional action.

This is a welcome illustration how relevant the conceptual consideration of non-use as a design factor is not only for social network services, but also for service design in a broader sense, both in regard to planning for non-use and to measuring the impact of an action.

Have you made similar non-use-related observations? I would be thrilled to hear about them in the comments below!

It all started when a friend of mine posted an update on Facebook, announcing that she would “take out the trash” from her GMail account in order to save energy:

Just realized that pointless emails stored in my Gmail (and Facebook etc.) account might have a carbon footprint too… Time for a clean up!

The message was linked to an article from the Guardian, quoting some French research on the topic. Indeed, and this doesn’t come as a surprise, using computers consumes energy – using them less uses less energy. This triggers the thought whether using energy for online social networking is ecologically sustainable behaviour? Are we slowly destroying the planet by pressing “Like” buttons on Facebook, one may wonder?

The complexity of calculating energy consumption

But as the discussion on the Guardian’s article – and on a related article on the sustainablity blog Treehugger – shows, this topic is very complex. The energy savings from not sending messages through physical mail, from not driving to the library to look up an article just one Google search away and from not having fax machines print received documents on paper are to be taken into account when estimating the net carbon footprint of an e-mail, a web search – or a Facebook status for that matter.

In a recent NYT article on Google’s first-time ever disclosure of their energy statistics, the company is quoted with the same arguments: Using Google’s services not only consumes but also helps to save energy. And, in their argumentation, the electricity used per user is very small when put in perspective:

Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries. But when it calculates that average energy consumption on the level of a typical user the amount is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours.

Then again, above calculation does not yet include the energy used by the computer, the modem, the ISP’s infrastructure etc. There is no easy way to reliably calculate the amount of energy used for a Google search or a Facebook post.

Why the topic is relevant for designers

In this context, I cannot leave unlinked an inspiring keynote by John Thackara, delievered in August 2011 to the new masters students at the design department of the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki.

In his talk, Thackara highlights that designers are in charge of coming up with solutions that really make a change for the better – of “creating design interventions that have an impact”. Also the energy consumption of computing is mentioned: All systems of modern life depend on large amounts of condensed energy and already today, the internet accounts for 5-10% of energy consumption worldwide.

I’m not qualified nor interested to make up a calculation about the energy impact of online social networking. But I do consider this an interesting topic from a designer’s perspective:

Regardless of the answer to the question whether deleting unnecessary e-mail or refraining from sending a pointless status update on Facebook really has a significant impact or not, this discussion shows that

• there are users who may assess the value of a design based on its ecological impact, and that
• the trade-off between the value of online interactions and their energy consumption might be worth considering, especially at global scale (one user’s deleted e-mails vs. 260 million GMail users).

Apart from my fascination with discovering what motivates people to use technology in ways that no designer had thought about, I totally admire my friend for being the only person I know who would be concerned about her inbox archive’s carbon footprint! And undeniably, even if online actions may not always have a worse footprint than their corresponding offline activity, if using computers uses energy, using them more efficiently uses less energy.

What do you think? Do you feel guilty about the energy used for that totally pointless tweet you sent out last night?

PS: This blog has been hosted at an energy-efficient CO2-neutral data center, powered purely by renewable energy, since 2008!

It is hard to describe the variety of 80 thesis works exhibited in the show, but I am having a hard time imagining anyone to come out from this building without feeling inspired. From environmental art to textile design and from theoretical research to just beautiful pieces of art, there is something in the mix for everybody.

My involvement in MoA 2011 is two-fold: Participating with my own piece of research, “The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design”, I am happy to be embedded in a section of the exhibition that focuses on design research across graphic, strategic and digital design. In addition, many good friends and fellows are showing works that inspire and trigger interesting thoughts on design, art or life in general.

The exhibition has been built around the five themes of “Human”, “User and Design”, “Research”, “Environment” and “Art” (plus, an additional “Extended” category presenting works from the other Aalto schools). For the purpose of this (p)review, I present the seven works in my section of MoA, as they represent very well how works from different departments reveal a relation, once they are put into context.

Disclaimer: YMMV, your milage may vary. Your own experience of the exhibition and the works presented is likely to be different. Ideally, even my own perception will change after meeting more fellow graduates and diving into the books complementing the exhibition posters. After all, there is 80 works to explore – each with its very own message – and they have been compiled in this space to trigger our very personal dialogue with the works and their creators.

Research on graphic design

Eemeli Nieminen presents an insightful study of how non-fiction books convey information. His work “Book As a Means of Coveying Information – Theoretical perspectives on design and graphic rhetoric in non-fiction books” is represented with a very simplistic yellow poster which inevitably will be the first thing catching your eye when entering the big open exhibition space. However, the true depth of his work is only revealed once you pick up the beautifully designed book from the desk, which is a pity it cannot be bought in a print edition – though luckily, Eemeli offers it for download from his portfolio website.

Minsu Kuusisto, whose work “The Green Book of a Graphic Designer” is officially listed in the “Media” theme of MoA, asks how designers can have a positive ecological impact through eco-efficiency, communication and new kind of platforms that challenge consumption. She designed a climate-themed concept and identity – two posters are presented in the exhibition – that eventually led to that “Green Book” handbook.

Investigations on service design

Teija Losoi went into the field to investigate how design could improve the environment of a hospital as experienced by a patient. “The Waiting Room of Life – Improving the Comfort of a Rehabilitation Patient by Means of Physical Environment Planning” is a work that describes how the needs for efficiency, cost-effectiveness and the constraints of technologies used dictate the context, leaving one of the most important stakeholder – the patient – second place. In the design proposal presented, the well-being of the patient receives more attention in the physical environment, which lately has more and more turned into “health factories”.

Marika Tesolin’s thesis “Brand in space” was done for the kiosk chain R-Kioski, an ubiquitous sight in any Finnish city. Searching for ways for R-Kioski to engage with customers and employees in an emotional manner, she researched the current state of customers shopping at the kiosks and created a vision for the brand in the year 2110.

Riikka Hänninen presents a case study done for a grocery chain, where she investigated the involvement of customers in the development of the products and services they purchase. “Customer Involvement in Retail Business” leads to findings that evaluate how customers can be involved in developing a retail business, beyond the plain analysis of the usage data consumers generate when shopping.

Another book I definitely need to set aside some time to read through is “Navigating in the World of Services – What Are Service Systems and How Are They Experienced by the Users?” by Johanna Nieminen. Based on the abstract and the first impressions after skimming through the beautifully designed illustrations, her approach of considering services as ecologies/systems rather than single tools appears to be a great primer for thinking of service design in a new, more interconnected way.

My own work – on users and non-users

Last but not least, I find it exciting to see how my own work fits in here. In “The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design”, I critically investigate how non-users would have to be taken into consideration in the design of social applications and provide a theoretical framework for designers.

As with the other works in our section, the interest that motivated me was to find out how things really are, in my case from a sociological perspective. Then, since we all are professional designers, we processed these insights into creating either a final design or frameworks that can be applied in future design projects. What all works have in common is that nothing is taken for granted – the concept of “services” is taken apart as is the idea of “analysing customer data to develop the offering” or the general understanding of “the user” – and using scientific methods we found new ways to see the world and, eventually, make it an (even) better place.

On February 8, I was invited by the digital agency Valve to speak at the event “600Minutes BtoC Marketing”. It was an interesting exercise to analyse and process the outcome of my research on “The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design” for an audience of marketing executives from some of the biggest companies in the country.

Internet use in everyday life: reach and frequency

To add some hard numbers to my otherwise qualitative discussion, I decided to start off with a visualisation of statistics on the use of the internet and SNSs in Finland by the national statistics office.

First off, I draw an overall picture of how the 86% of the population that are using the internet are distributed over the different age groups. Then, I went on visualising the percentage of each age group that is using a social network site (this includes Facebook, Twitter and others not mentioned in the report). Since data exists on the frequency of their use, this allowed for the creation of an animated series of slides to visualise how the numbers decrease when investigating how big is the share of the population using SNSs on a weekly basis, daily or even multiple times a day (up to almost “real-time”):

Image caption: Internet use in Finland by age group (average percentage in the background)

Image caption: Percentage of population registered with an SNS service.

Image caption: Percentage of population using an SNS at least weekly.

Image caption: Percentage of population using an SNS at least daily.

Image caption: Percentage of population using an SNS several times a day.

Already the numbers for the “at least daily” users are surprisingly low beyond the age of 35. And the low share of the population that is using SNSs in real-time (i.e. more than once a day, up to constant connectivity) is a clear indicator that clues such as “people are all the time on Facebook nowadays” are – and based on my ethnographic research, I am not surprised – just a hype.

I then added the values how Finns use e-mail for personal purposes – again, first for “at least weekly” and then “at least once a day”. It appears that e-mail is a lot less dead than often claimed (and below statistics don’t even include the use of e-mail in a professional context). However, among the youth and young adult age groups, the SNSs already reach more people on a daily basis than e-mail – an interesting insight and maybe an indicator that indeed some change is going on.

Image caption: Percentage of population using SNS vs. using e-mail, at least weekly.

Image caption: Percentage of population using SNS vs. using e-mail, at least daily.

The data I referred to is only a very small subset of what the report has to provide. It is definitely a worthwhile read for everybody (speaking Finnish and) working with the internet – in design as well as in business.

Based on my argumentation, I summarised the most important findings from the statistics into a slide with four statements on how SNSs are used in Finland:

Online conversation and patterns of use

Next, I concentrated on the behaviour of those using “social media”, by referring to the “Social Technographics” categorisation by Forrester Research (2007, 2010) which clearly indicates that internet users’ engagement with these services is limited. Forrester’s model groups internet users (the base are all internet users in the US) into creators, conversationalists, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Interesting observations regarding the numbers from 2010 are that:

• only 30% of users participate in the production of “social content”,
• 30% do not consume “social content”, and
• 17% of internet users do not encouter social technologies at all.

I also referred to a study by RJMetrics from 2009, visualising that only about 25% of Twitter users actively post messages to the service (well in line with the findings by Forrester). To illustrate how different people’s use can be from the intended design of an SNS, I told the story of Mikalah, a Facebook user encountered and described by danah boyd, who disables her account every time instead of logging out from the service (to stay in control over her personal content there).

After sharing a few observations from my own ethnographic work, I summarised this second part of the presentation with a takeaway of four statements:

Rethinking “the user”

In the third part of my presentation, I then turned the attention to the non-users. To build a bridge from the earlier exploration on the different ways users engage with SNSs, I quoted Sally Wyatt (“Non-users also matter: The construction of users and non-users of the internet”, 2003):

users are not simply passive recipients of technology; they are active and important actors in shaping and negotiating meanings of technology

To emphasise how internet users are not just passively “consuming”, but how they interpret the offering based on their own understanding, I explained how a “Like us on Facebook to win an iPad” campaign is seen as a way to build an audience by the enterprise, but for the user it might just be a way to enter a prize draw (with no interest to become part of an audience).

Next, I provided some general insights on non-users from my research – “use and non-use as one phenomenon”, the “six categories of non-use” and “non-use as a form of use” (see my research report, pages 39-51 for details) – which led to another summary:

Conclusions

Summing it up, I presented a set of conclusions that emphasise why the insight on users’ as well as non-users’ behaviour is an important consideration not only for designers (to whom my own research is primarily targeted), but for marketers as well:

• Consumers as users are a heterogeneous crowd: there are no “one size fits all” solutions to reach everybody
• There is a need for research and insight beyond the mechanisms of mainstream “social media”
• The utilisation of less obvious “social technology” (apart from SNSs) remains highly valuable, e.g. e-mail
• Own channels stay extremely important

My presentation closed with a summary slide with the three most important takeaways from the research presented:

A big thank you to Valve and Management Events for the invitation, and to the audience for the interest and the conversations afterwards. Please feel free to continue the discussion below – all of this is constant work in progress and I’m curious to hear your opinion!

Bibliography

Greger, S. (2010). The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. Retrieved from http://www.sebastiangreger.net/absentpeer

Tilastokeskus. (2010). Tieto- ja viestintätekniikan käyttö 2010. Retrieved from http://www.tilastokeskus.fi/til/sutivi/2010/sutivi_2010_2010-10-26_fi.pdf

Wyatt, S. (2003). Non-users also matter: The construction of users and non-users of the internet. In N. Oudshoorn & T. Pinch (Eds.), How users matter. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Sebastian Greger

The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design

Citation: Greger, S. (2010). The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design (Master’s thesis). Aalto University, School of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. Retrieved from http://www.sebastiangreger.net/absentpeer/

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This research aims to provide a framework for the consideration of non-users in the context of social interaction design (SxD), in particular for the design of social network sites (SNSs). Below, I introduce the core of the work and provide the answers to seven frequently asked questions. This page is available also in Finnish.

The theory of “The Absent Peer” consists of two core concepts, presenting the network aspect and the sociality aspect how non-use influences SNS concepts. Herein, the focus of the work is on the discovery of the impact of non-use rather than on its reasons.

“The Absent Peer” is the outcome from my thesis research project for the Master of Arts programme in New Media at the School of Art and Design, Aalto University Helsinki. It has been presented on 2010-11-24.

Building on the insights from the study, this report presents the conceptual considerations for the creation of valuable SNS concepts that acknowledge non-use as a permanent and complex phenomenon of social reality. The work is based on the sociological perspective of symbolic interactionism. Social interaction design is presented as a practice within the discipline of interaction design, with its goals defined through a discussion on user value and worth-centred design.

1. What is the contribution of this work?

A lot of the public debate about social media evolves around the emergence of opportunities, new business models and a revolutionary change in communication practice. Nevertheless, there is a problem emerging from the ever-spreading access to online media that is so far only being discussed in the context of the “digital divide”: the bigger the share of people using the internet, the more difficult it becomes to integrate those who are not there. As a designer, the aspect that I see regularly being overlooked is the impact of non-use on the interactions of those who are already users.

The real-life contacts of users that are not or not constantly present online have an impact on the value of online social network applications. This dissertation seeks for an understanding of how non-use affects both the users and the value of service concepts. It is the aim of my work to provide an analytical perspective on the connection between non-users and interaction design for social applications, posing the research question “how can non-use be conceptualised in the context of social interaction design in order to inform the design process for social network sites?”

2. Why do we need to rethink the concept of “non-users”

In most contexts, non-users – individuals not using the internet, social media or particular online services – are considered to be excluded people. The prevailing understanding is that they are people who, for one reason or another, have not yet gained access to the benefits that a technical application has to offer. In the concrete context of this research, I investigate the conceptual impact of non-use on social network sites (the backbone of what is referred to as “social media”).

In both policy making and design, the predominant answer to the phenomenon of non-use has long been to ease the access for those who are not yet users in order to make them users. Based on the assumption that being a user is the desirable state of being, politics support initiatives to guarantee internet access and improve digital literacy. Providers of online services on the other hand invest in finding the most effective mechanisms to make users turn their friends and colleagues into users as well. Neither of these approaches is wrong in itself, but I want to turn the attention to the fact that non-users will always remain a factor in social media despite the best efforts to eliminate them.

3. Who are these non-users and why aren’t they users?

A variety of research has been carried out to conceptualise non-users. Until about 10 years ago, research on non-users mainly investigated the reasons for involuntary exclusion. Only lately the academic discourse has been extended to investigate absence from technology use also from a broader point of view.

For example, a research group around Sally Wyatt presented a model that divides non-users into “have-nots” and “want-nots” and also emphasises that non-use does not only cover people who never gained access to some technology but also those who stopped using it; the behaviour of non-use may be an act of active resistance or passive avoidance. The motives for non-use are manifold and reach from a delayed adoption through a perceived lack of value for the individual to pure disinterest in the services offered, as Christine Satchell and Paul Dourish present in a recent paper.

Also, there is not just users and non-users, but also users who use a service only irregularly or only use parts of it (think of people who use “social media” but not Facebook) as well as those who use it passively or otherwise not as intended by the concepts. Therefore, recent research suggests to consider use and non-use as a continuum of the same phenomenon – non-use should be considered a special case of use.

4. How has this research been done?

Over a time span of two years, I collected data of how the absence of social peers from social network sites impacts the perceived value of these services for their users (participatory observations, unstructured interviews and a review of secondary sources). I set out to discover what impact it makes if the value proposition of a social media site is to facilitate the users’ interaction with their friends, but not all of these friends are there.

This auto-ethnographic research data has been analysed in a Grounded Theory process – a deductive qualitative method aiming at the discovery of theory contained in the data. It has to be stressed that a theory of this kind does not reflect generalisable truth, but aims at providing a model to facilitate an emerging debate. Therefore, the ultimate value of the theory discovered in this work is that of a framework helping to understand the phenomenon under investigation and to inform further development.

5. How does the theory of “The Absent Peer” explain the impact of non-use in social media?

With most social network services being based on a concept of social interaction within the service (like sharing stories or media among users, sending messages to other users etc.), the solution to the “problem” of non-users is often seen in attracting them to become users as well. This however ignores the fact that non-use is not something like an illness to be cured, but a constraint of the reality that social media acts within – and as pointed out above, even users show behaviour of non-use (partial use, temporary use etc.).

The theory that emerged from the research is based on two concepts that can be used to describe the conceptual impact of non-use in social network sites:

• The social network mismatch describes the fact that the network of users in an online service does not represent the real world social environment of its individuals. This means that the online interaction happens within a subgroup of a larger social group, which leads to situations where a tool intended for sociality among its users creates social exclusion between real-life social peers. A good example is the planning of an event on a social network site, where the users have a much stronger influence on the decision making than the non-users who only receive a one-time e-mail notification about the date and time.
• The sociability gap describes how users of a technology develop new forms of being social. Technology mediates interactions in a way that did not exist before, but only those participating will adapt it into their daily lives. Non-users are left out from the information flow or have less means to communicate with their peers, which ultimately also affect the users. An example for this are internet memes, ongoing jokes shared in social media that make an entry also to offline conversations; non-users are excluded from the discussion.

6. What is the different approach you propose for social interaction design?

By reducing non-users to “not-yet-users” and concentrating on providing tools for interactions between those who are users – and in addition trying to turn the non-users into users – we neglect one of the most innate needs of the users: the meaningfulness of the interactions they engage in. There is a need to explore more advanced ways to include non-use as a design factor in the design for social interactions than just send e-mail notifications or invitations to join a service.

Ultimately, the approach I am proposing in this work is a design process for social network applications that is based on the understanding of the worth these services have for their users in their social reality rather than thinking of value only regarding the interaction between their users. As social interaction designers, we have to acknowledge that people are not using social media for the plain purpose of using it, but as a meaningful element of their social toolbox to interact with their real-life peers.

7. What is the practical relevance of this research?

People use social network sites to engage in social activities through conversation about meaningful subjects. Therefore, they have certain expectations regarding the coverage (“How many of my peers are here?”), reachability (“Can I reach the majority of my peers through this?”) and utility (“Does this provide something of value for me?”) of a service – identifying these desired qualities and providing solutions that make a service meaningful despite the phenomenon of absence is a crucial step in order to take social interaction design to the next level.

A holistic approach to the design of social network applications enables the designer to create successful and valuable solutions that have the potential to take a real role in the social reality of their users, beyond the interaction with a limited sub-group of friends. The approach promoted in this work goes beyond thinking of the users and how they can interact with each other, to a broader context where a digital service is embedded in the social reality of both users and non-users.

A chain is as strong as its weakest link – if a social network site (SNS) does not enforce the use of a secure protocol for all its communications, a user’s personal data may leak, regardless whether or not they have protected their own connection. For the social interaction designer, this implicates that it is more than legitimate to put a requirement for enforced HTTPS encryption on any SNS concept document. In big red letters!

Why Firesheep and Wi-Fi are not the issue

The vector of attack Butler’s tool is exploiting is by no means new, but in providing a one-click solution for everybody to use he has launched a welcome discussion on privacy and data security. The pattern of HTTP session hijacking is easy to explain: When using the internet over an unsecured wireless LAN (such as in a cafe or other public space), other computers in the same network can monitor the data each machine transmits.

Even though login data is often sent over an encrypted HTTPS connection and thereby secured, once the user is logged in many sites transfer their data using the unencrypted HTTP protocol. Since the identification of a logged-in user happens through a temporarily stored key (in a cookie file), this key is transmitted with every request the browser sends to the server. By stealing and applying that key, an attacker is able to access a web site using the identity of some other person – which is what Firesheep allows to do easier than ever before.

Nevertheless, the real problem is not that data transmitted over an open WLAN can be sniffed by others (and as he explains, Butler has not discovered this, his Firesheep tool only makes it easier), but that web sites use an insecure protocol like HTTP to transfer personal content which they encourage their users to upload by promising limited audience.

Data in an SNS is never “private”

While the different solutions proposed for self-protection (never use unencrypted WiFi, use VPNs or SSH tunnels, force your browser to connect to certain sites only through HTTPS etc.) indeed may eliminate the risk of having one’s own account hijacked, this is only an apparent solution. The core issue is a major flaw in the technical design of SNSs that encourage their users to share “private” information by offering all kind of privacy settings whilst at the same time leaving a back door wide open.

Tech blogs and boulevard media all over the world are now pushing instructions how to “protect yourself”. Still, only a small share of SNS users is likely to even read these news; an even smaller fraction will understand the measures needed or bother to do anything about it. But – ironically – those who understand and implement the steps to secure their own connections better are those who are most at risk: With the delusive feeling to have protected themselves, they keep posting private data to a network where it can be accessed by all their contacts through, yes, possibly unprotected connections.

Social interaction design thinks for the user’s benefit

This brings up questions related to digital literacy. The majority of “expert users” is likely to be aware that privacy settings in an SNS are nothing to be trusted beyond their role as an obfuscating layer; that any information that may cause whatever kind of (undesired) trouble if leaked should not be posted online. But observing the current patterns of use by the masses, even this is hard to communicate to the majority of users.

As designers, we inevitably have to ask ourselves what is our responsibility for the security of our users – individuals that we cannot assume to have the same digital literacy as ourselves? For sure, launching a successful SNS would be hard when having red “mind your privacy” stickers all over the place, while the competition not warning its users appears to be the safer environment. And that may not be required either: Responsible social interaction design is partially about thinking “on behalf” of our users on all levels – from the concept to its implementation. Maximising the technically possible protection would be an important step.

But giving a user the possibility to limit the visibility of a possibly sensible photograph to half a dozen of close friends and at the same time making it accessible to any random stranger sitting in the same cafe with one of those friends is definitely not the way to go.

The WP Social Reader is the conceptual exploration for a web-based application that allows author and readers to engage in online discussions about specific paragraphs of a text. The idea is to enable comments on a per-paragraph basis, which allows the reader to comment, complement or correct the statements of the author.

While wikis allow for collaborative editing of texts, one of the core features of this concept is to preserve the original text – making static, finalised texts the key use case for the product – and keeping the community interaction in the sidebar.

Another aspect of the concept is the possibility to deep-link into single paragraphs or quote/share them through social media services such as Twitter. Ideally, the comments sidebar should also aggregate public commentary from elsewhere on the web, such as Tweets about a certain part of the text.

The following demo briefly introduces an early prototype of my software solution, a WordPress hack built during the “Open workshop” at TaiK Media Lab (Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland):

Two existing implementations of a comparable concept served as benchmarks for this prototyping exercise, the collaborative annotation system on djangobook.com and another WordPress solution, called digress.it (formerly CommentPress).

The decision to build the Social Reader on top of WordPress has been made as WP offers all the required backend and database functionalities out of the box – allowing to concentrate on the design and development of the user experience. The technical solution is quite simple, using WP’s “blog posts” for the individual paragraphs (i.e. one paragraph equals one “blog post”) and grouping them into documents using “categories” in WP. All of this is currently achieved through a single installable theme, with many options for further development.

The idea for this concept was born during the annual thesis presentation sessions at Media Lab Helsinki (Aalto University, School of Art and Design), where every thesis contains so much work and thoughts that it really is a shame these are wrapped into 100-pagers and never really trigger a wider conversation within (or beyond) the institution. This concept aims at raising the question whether a school specialised in New Media could consider more “interactive” modes of consumption for its academic output.

While some of the presentations were about very detailed aspects of computing algorithms and the perceived majority of research was quantitative computer science, there was lots to take away for the social scientist and designer; not to mention numerous interesting conversations that revealed how even some of the most technical research presented had a strong social or philosophical background.

This report is the attempt to condense three intense days of workshops and presentation sessions. I herein summarize selected sessions and papers I perceived particularly inspiring, from my point of view and highlighting what I considered the most interesting. Naturally, I had pre-selected all sessions based on my fields of interest, so the main topics identified here are subjective and not necessarily in synch with the structure of the conference – the official division of the conference tracks can be reviewed from the program website. Also, a computer scientist would likely address very different content as the conference highlights and I want to explicitly suggest the advanced reader to refer to the original conference proceedings instead.

In retrospective, the themes of the three-day conference in Turin evolved around two major fields of research: (A) the role of folksonomies in the semantic social web for one and (B) the state, use and changing paradigms of hypertext-based information structures for the other. Naturally, these themes partially overlapped. For this report, I split my observations into four sections, grouped according to the core topics I identified:

1. SW² – the social web as a semantic web: searching for the semantic value of social web content, with a special focus on tags/folksonomies,
2. Social hyperlinks and live social semantics: exploring the “social semantics” of users in the social web,
3. Social search: looking for new ways to provide the search user with the right results by utilizing the semantics of both content and social relations, and
4. Users and usage of hypertext: insight into some of the applications of hypertext and related disputes.

As a trivial observation, one of the most obvious differences between Hypertext 2009 and the design conferences I attended within the last year was what one may call the “Mac credibility factor”: While it appears to be part of the unwritten rules of design conferences to carry an Apple computer, an iPhone and at least two more accessories with the distinctive logo, Mac users were a clear minority in Turin. An impressive share of attendants used Linux. Regardless of the operating system (which, as often pointed out, I consider the least important variable regarding productivity and creativity), we all shared the problem of the limited amount of power outlets around Villa Gualino, the otherwise great conference venue high above the river Po. The WLAN however was highly reliable, and so was the capacity of the catering to provide one culinary experience after the other.

1. SW² – the social web as a semantic web

A major topic of Hypertext 2009 was the utilization of implicit information contained in folksonomies/tags. About half of the presentations I attended discussed topics related to tagging in one way or the other. The debate at the conference was around the topics of how folksonomies emerge as well as what is their semantic value and meaning. Presenters discussed how this form of metadata can be analysed and applied for the benefit of semantic information structures (and the benefit of the users, respectively).

1.1 Tagging as a process

One topic was the process of tagging itself. The research presented at Hypertext analysed the process of how users add metadata to web resources and how this process affects the value of that data.

Tagging dynamics

In the opening presentation of the “Web 3.0″ workshop, “An introduction and an Overview: 3 years of tagging”, Vittorio Loreto (ISI, University “Sapienza” of Rome, Italy) outlined some of the underlying basics of tagging. Being the first session of the opening day, the overall message of this presentation was like a basic definition for lots of other topics to come. The use of folksonomies by users was described as “human computing”: the solving of a difficult problem with small cognitive overhead. By this definition, user-driven tagging is a collective activity; an uncoordinated distributed process generating meaning far beyond the process of attaching a keyword to a piece of content.

Collective dynamics of social annotation

Andrea Baldassarri gave a talk on folksonomies as complex web systems titled “Minimal Modelling of Folksonomies”, introducing the University of Rome’s framework for mathematically modelling aspects of social annotation. The paper defines social annotation as a “collaborative exploration of a semantic space, modelled as a graph” that “expose[s] aspects of semantics and of human dynamics”. He employed the “Flickr user model” visualization by Bryce Glass as an example of how complex the ecosystem of a folksonomy can be:

The “tripartite structure of folksonomy” referred to in Baldassarri’s presentation was another essential definition that reoccured throughout the conference. In their paper the authors describe it as “a central collective artefact of the information society” where folksonomy structures consist of three elements: users, metadata/tags and resources.

In the discussion, critique was formulated that tags might well be overestimated: how do we know that they are not just names with no semantic value? This question was part of many of the papers presented, and therefore returned into discussion repeatedly throughout the conference.

Why do users apply tags?

One poster that caught my attention on the first day already and was later rewarded the Student Research Competition award was “The Motivation behind Tagging” (poster in PDF format) by Christian Koerner, who identified two types of tagging behaviour and researches methods to discover the tagging type of a user on a website – ultimately an important asset in creating better engines to exploit folksonomies.

• Categorisers: Using tags to organise their resources for later findability. They use few tags, which are applied repeatedly.
• Describers: Establishing their own vocabulary by describing the content of the resource based on its content, not a limited amount of categories. These users are identified by a rapidly growing vocabulary with a low rate of re-use.

A related topic was covered by the presentation “Individual and social behaviour in tagging systems” (Santos-Neto, Condon, Andrade, Iamnitchi and Ripeanu), stating that tagging motivation is mainly personal information management, not collaboration and that user populations self-organize into clusters of interest. I believe this is a very important consideration, as to me the weakness of many Web 2.0 concepts appears to be the general assumption that users are tagging things for the purpose of collaboration while the real reason might be far less altruistic.

1.2 Extracting meaning from folksonomies

Based on the proposition that folksonomies include semantically valuable meaning – even though they are created by individuals for their own purposes – a lot of presentations discussed approaches and algorithms on the extraction of that data. The research questions mainly evolved around two major challenges; how to process data from the social web to turn it into valuable semantic data and how to connect the otherwise unrelated folksonomies of several web services for semantic exploitation.

Merging the Semantic Web and the Social Web

During the workshop “Merging Semantic Web & Social Web (SW²)”, both chair and audience pointed out that, interestingly, most of the papers discussed the same problem: how to turn folksonomies into ontologies. In the light of the research presented, “Web 3.0″ was eventually defined as:

• collaborative generation, “discovery”, management and population of ontology,
• automatic, user-friendly annotation of text,
• improvement of tagging with semantics, and
• use of tags to improve the intelligent behaviour of systems (recommendation)

Two of the papers in the workshop presented approaches to involving the user in self-organizing their own tags into ontologies. However, it has been discussed whether users are willing to do it, despite of the availability of the required tools? While adding a simple tag is a small investment, incentives have to be provided to do more. The power of the social web lies in leveraging the “wisdom of crowds” (plain text, tagging, folksonomies, collaborative filtering, social search), but its’ problems are that it is noisy, suffers from term ambiguity and lacks structural depth and reasoning capabilities.

In their paper “Working the Crowd: Design Principles and Early Lessons from the Social-Semantic Web”, Niepert, Buckner and Allen stated that the semantic web, based on formal conceptualizations of a domain (ontologies, taxonomies…) and applied successfully for instance in biomedical and business domains (e.g. the gene ontology), provides reasoning and matching capabilities, interoperability and enables semantic search. However, its’ problems are the need for double experts, lack of user participation and that it is too complex. Simply put: the more structured the content is, the lower the willingness to contribute.

Cross-Folksonomy Analysis

Martin Szomszor (University of Southampton, UK) addressed the aspect of user profiles and tagging in his paper “Modelling Users’ Profiles and Interests based on Cross-Folksonomy Analysis” (slides download). Quoting the Ofcom study “Social Networking – A quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use” he presented that UK adults have in average 1.6 profiles, in other words 39% of those having one profile have at least another one. In future, people will maintain an increasing number of online identities.

By tagging, people create an overall “profile of interests”:

• profiles could be exported to other sites to improve recommendation quality;
• profiles allow designing better user experience;
• profiles could be user to support personal searching.

By means of consolidation and integration, users can be provided with a coordinated view of all the tagged data. There are, however, challenges connected to this aspect. Tagging variations are the biggest problem found in investigations (as Szomszor presented in his Hypertext 2008 paper “Correlating User Profiles from Multiple Folksonomies”). Identical tags do not always mean the same, and different tags are used to describe the same concept. Therefore, there is a need to transform raw tags into filtered tags, eliminating spelling variations, typos etc. Disconnected identities are another challenge. The problem is ending up with a lot of isolated profiles.

Making sense of folksonomies is possible by creating a set of tagging semantics, in this approach by integrating contacts and tags. When looking for tag senses the main question is: what are the possible meanings for a tag? The research group at Southampton uses two reference sets: DBPedia for concepts and WordNet for synsets (TAGora Sense Repository TSR).

In the discussion, the question was posed how to mine data to match user profiles to one person. This obviously is a challenge, but can often be done by reverse analysing links from the profiles to other resources. Ultimately, cross-folksonomy allows building better profiles. This requires:

• knowledge on what tags correspond to interests (locations and topics are useful, but other terms are not),
• an approach that eliminates the obvious (it’s not that useful to find out all attendants of Hypertext 2009 are interested in HTML), and
• making use of the category hierarchy (as an example: the interests “facebook”, “flickr” and “lastfm” express the category interest “Online_Social_Networks”).

1.4 Folksonomies and their use

Some folksonomy-related papers were particularly interesting from a practitioner’s point of view, discussing the application of tags and its practical implications.

Tag recommendation

Andreas Hotho (University of Kassel, Germany) gave an introduction to tag recommendation techniques, “Tag Recommendation in Theory and Practice”. As a simple baseline for tag recommendation, he defined the use of an existing tag cloud related to the URL. In their research of collaborative filtering, datasets from delicious.com, last.fm and the social bookmark and publication sharing system bibsonomy.org (run by the University of Kassel) are used to calculate personalized tag recommendations.

In the discussion, a critical question was expressed whether it is even good or desirable to recommend? The commenter stated that users are conformist, therefore tag recommendation would lead to less variety in tagging. Summarizing the presentation and discussion, tag recommendations are an interesting and important topic for social bookmarking systems, though their use has to be carefully considered to avoid negative impact on the quality of the folksonomy.

Tagging in real life

Barteb Ochab (SONY-CSL) presented an approach called “the CSL approach”, applying the insight into online tagging systems to real-world environments. His presentation “Tagging Usages in the Reality” (slides) showed, how tagging principles as used on the web can be applied also to real-world context where they work in a similar way:

He presented Sony’s project “Noise tube” where mobile phones are used as environmental sensors. The idea is to overcome the challenge of collecting data in a real environment, currently relying on rather poor monitoring systems. The idea of the project is to monitor noise levels and tag the sources of exposure, as with current solutions it is difficult to find and separate the sources of noise from recorded sounds; modelled noise maps are limited to the assumed sources of noise. The proposed solution is to tag sources of exposure: this way people are utilized as sensors, adding layers of meaning to a measurement. This is based on the assumption that users are motivated to inform the community about sources of annoying noise.

Another project presented was “Linking Linke”, an interactive installation to explore tagging in the physical world. As a controlled experiment, exhibition visitors are asked to arrange high quality photo prints on a table that are then printed as a book. After picking 8 photos on a topic, the user has to arrange them and give the book a title, therefore “tagging” these images.

2. Social hyperlinks and social semantics

But Hypertext 2009 did cover the topic of semantics not only from a content perspective. Looking at social web services, this kind of applications is basically pure semantics: social semantics. The theme was omnipresent throughout the conference, thanks to a live experiment on tagging its participants. In addition, Lada Adamic’s keynote “The Social Hyperlink” was one of my personal highlights of Hypertext 2009.

2.1 Live social semantics

During registration for the conference in the morning of day one, we did not only receive the obligatory name tag and the usual bag filled with programme, sponsors’ ads and note-taking paper, but also a small RFID chip from sociopatterns.org to be carried in the name tag holder. A set of RFID receivers at the venue (in the conference rooms, the lobby and the cafeteria) could now track the attendees’ movements and face-to-face interactions. These movements were analysed in real time – allowing for interesting conversations when standing in front of the visualisation screens where proximity indicators almost allowed to identify the otherwise unknown strangers standing in the vicinity. The more hidden aspect of the experiment lies in the web profiles each of the users had previously filled into a web form – this is best explained by the following video clip:

In addition to this explanatory video, the research group also wrote a blog post on the experiment. It was interesting to experience live social semantics, and in addition we all contributed valuable data to the ongoing research “on the go”.

2.2 Social hyperlinks

“The Social Hyperlink” was the title of Lada Adamic’s keynote on day 2 (slides), an excursion into different fields of network analysis all based on data on social hyperlinks. She started with some anecdotes about differences in real-life social networking between different US universities, using examples to emphasize the difference between causation (similarities in behaviour based on a social relation) and correlation (similarities that are not related to a relationship).

The introduction led to the first out of three social hyperlinks presented, the “social influence hyperlink”. The talk referred to Second Life, where research on the exchange of virtual objects has revealed that transfers within friend networks are deeper (i.e. objects were handed on more often) but also that early adopters are not really influencers: they often have less contacts and are significantly less active in sharing than influencer type users.

The “knowledge exchange hyperlink”, the second link explored, refers to research carried out on the motivation and characteristics of people sharing knowledge online. The information exchange between individuals serves as the research object here, for example identifying that the number of answers from a particular user generally indicates better expertise, but also that incentives for answering ensures more answers but less attention (due to the fact that incentivised questions are often more difficult). The motivation to engage in online knowledge exchange can be manifold: for example a genuine aim to help, “learning by answering” or trying to promote the user’s business. Also, it has been researched that people appear to have a significant need to complete incomplete information which again leads to the fact that the last answer in a thread is often considered the best.

Thirdly, the talk referred to the global hospitality network Couchsurfing, talking about the “trust hyperlink”. Research shows that Couchsurfing is not based on direct reciprocity (hosting the same people who have hosted you before) but on “generalised reciprocity”, with people increasingly vouching for people they only know through Couchsurfing. While in the beginning, there is an almost 50/50 divide between people who join Couchsurfing to host and those who go “surfing”, over time both user groups tend to engage in both activities.

3. Social search

In the first two chapters of this report, I first summarized the discussion around general aspects of folksonomies and then referred to a keynote and an experiment around social semantics. These topics can be merged into the third “theme” I identified at Hypertext 2009: social search. The combination of semantic content and the semantic representation of social relationships allows for a broad variety of applications for search, discovery and analysis.

3.1 “Social” adds value to search

The paper “Social Search and Discovery using a Unified Approach” (by Einat Amitay, David Carmel, Nadav Har’El, Aya Soffer, Nadav Golbandi, Shila Ofek-Koifman and Sivan Yogev) presented an approach to social search as applied on the IBM intranet, to support employees in their daily work.

Among other services, the IBM intranet features these services:

• “Blue pages” people index: 475k profiles
• “Community map”: 28k communities
• “Blog central” internal weblog service: 40k weblogs by 70k people
• “Dogear”: Bookmarking system with 330k tagged links
• IBM’s internal social networks (“Fringe”, “Beehive”, “Sonar”) used by 100k employees

Unified search is conceptually based on a triangle of documents, people and metadata. The search space is extended to represent many information objects that may be related to each other. Some people like to find documents, others prefer finding people or a hierarchy of labels; still, most people are between extremes and search some kind of combination of those. The related work presented included some papers on penalizing for too frequent objects (in the IBM context for example the useless tag “ibm”) and the normalization of “serial sharers”.

The problem with the unified approach is that computation is expensive and not scalable; besides, the rate of creation and update is expected to be very high. The solution presented was “faceted search”, a commonly used technique for adding navigation to a search engine’s results. Hereby, any searchable entity is represented as a pseudo document with direct relations between entities and indirect relations computed during the request on the fly.

In the discussion, the question was raised how to handle the fact that some people only do real-world communication. We already have data on virtual relationships that can be weighted, but getting these non-virtual contacts would be important to get. Also, it was brought up that the complexity of social search is due to the fact that it is not a simple triangle, but several interconnected triangles of groups, persons, documents and tags. It has to be taken into account what entities this particular person has and how these entities relate to each other and other people.

3.2 Web usage as metadata for search

Ricardo Baeza-Yates’ from Yahoo gave an interesting keynote on “Relating content by web usage”. In his talk, the vice president of Yahoo! research explained how search is no longer about a user wanting to retrieve a document, but about task fulfilment. The challenge for delivering optimal search results (and search experience) is in identifying the user’s task and providing the means the user needs to complete it.

Besides explicit metadata that is assigned to content, a lot of implicit such as clickthrough patterns etc. can be gathered to gather a better picture on the nature of content. Even though this kind of user-generated metadata contains a lot of noise, it is a valuable source of data in its entirety. The presentation contained two example projects from Yahoo! that make use of metadata for search, TagExplorer and Correlator.

“When users use the web, they think” – data generated through web use (such as logs and UGC) is therefore a highly valuable source of information on content that should be used for achieving best search results. The same applies to social networks, not only those where users explicitly create links between each other, but also implicit social networks that can be discovered by analysing web use.

3.3 User content is not user interest

Sergej Sizov and Stefan Siersdorfer’s paper “Social recommender systems” presented methods for systems that make recommendations to users based on their social graph. The motivation for the research was that “web 2.0″ services have a huge amount of relatively sparse data that is often noisy, even spammy, and there are no natural mechanisms for reliability or trust. Thanks to the large pool of users there is however a huge amount of data that can be used for recommendation: favourites, groups, contact list and comments. The important learning is that the content of a user does not always correlate to her interests. In order to properly serve the interests of a user, the understanding should be based not on her own shared content but on her social environment and expressions of interest (see above, considering web usage data as metadata for search).

4. Users and usage of hypertext

The fourth topic of my report from Hypertext 2009 differs from the previous three chapters, that were all around the themes of folksonomies and semantics. This final section combines a series of papers whose focus was more on hypertext and its use as such. In other words, these presentations were not about tags and implicit metadata but about HTML (and its alternatives) and how they are used.

4.1 Hypertext as a tool for storytelling

Mark Bernstein presented a session on hypertext as a mean for narrative expression, titled “On Hypertext Narrative”. Narrative has three layers: story, plot and presentation. The story tells “what happened”, the plot describes the sequence in which we explain what happened and the presentation is what we see on the page on the screen.

For narrative in hypertext, the motivation is that “we want to do things we couldn’t do in print”. Bernstein presented two propositions related to this.

Hypertextuality is perceived through re-reading and reflection

From the three layers described above, plot, not story, is where we find meaning. The tone, the pacing, the point of view are what makes meaning. For instance, when thinking about the landing of the allied forces in the Normandy: numerous books have been written telling the story, but the plot is what makes them differ. However, plot is not a surface detail; it makes a major difference when do we tell the reader that the wolf has run ahead and eaten grandma?

• Telling it early: tragedy
• Telling it while in the wood: horror movie, melodrama
• Telling it at the last moment: comedy, romance
• Telling it afterwards: …

Bernstein referred to the paper “Nonce upon some times” by Michael Joyce where a narrative is told of a man and woman who fall in love. He is rich, she cheats him for his money and disappears. Some day, they meet again. Here we’d have four possibilities to continue the plot: recursion, time shift, renewal or annotation. The main message is: we want to vary plot.

Stretchtext to the rescue

The cure that Bernstein proposes for navigation is stretchtext. Ted Nelson has seen stretchtext as a (or “the”) natural form of hypertext from the beginning. The concept presented was called “generalized stretchtext”, applied in the software Tinderbox.

According to Bernstein, our “business” is varying plot, not story:

• text stays itself, electronic text replaces itself;
• stretchtext as traditionally applied keeps us from varying plot;
• general stretchtext lets us vary plot without arrivals and departures.

In the discussion, a comment was made that text changed dynamically at the end of a page (i.e. clicking a link on a page that affects a piece of text at a different position of the page) is confusing. Also, it was brought up that navigational hypertext is hard to read, to which Bernstein answered that this is mainly because it is work of the 80s and 90s – which is generally hard to read.

4.2 The personal territories of web users

The presentation “The Dynamics of Personal Territories on the Web” by Thomas Beauvisage (Orange Labs, SENSE lab), later awarded the Ted Nelson newcomer award of the conference, was about getting to know how people use the web. The research was based on a long-time data set about the web use behaviour of users and allowed some interesting insights to the evolution of browsing since 2001: the amount of time spent browsing has increased significantly, and a concentration and stabilisation of practices can be observed (routine and seasonal sites up, transient sites and ephemeral sites down).

The research divided browsing sessions into five groups of “session profiles” and showed how the last years have seen an increasingly clear divide between simple “routine” sessions (often very linear and with only very few sites) and long and complex sessions. For longer sessions, the complexity of the navigation around certain hub sites has increased.

Regarding personal territories, the web as it is used by a particular user, it can be observed how the majority of time is spent on a small amount of regularly visited pages whereas the majority of sites visited are one-time visits and usually for a very short time. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of routinely used pages had more than doubled and they took an even bigger share of the total web use time. However, also the number of “ephemeral sites” (aforementioned one-time visits) was quite stable, which shows that exploration is still an important part of user behaviour – regardless of the strong position of routine sites.

4.3 Weblogs

One session during the conference was about the topic of weblogs. An archive-based research investigated the emergence of the weblog as a writing space and two papers investigated use-related topics.

Blogs – where it all started

Rudolf Ammann reconstructed the emergence of the weblog community in his paper with the title “Jorn Barger, the Newspage Network and the Emergence of the Weblog Community” (weblog entry). It was in January 1997 that the company UserLand released what can be considered the first weblog software: “NewsPage”, a feature in a publishing platform that allowed publishing a news stream. Dave Winer, the owner of UserLand, updated the website scripting.com to run NewsPage and the first weblog was born. Other early adopters of NewsPage started to refer to Winer’s page and he linked back to them – and it was not long until Chris Gulker set up a “NewsPage network” (today we would call it a “blogroll”) to cross-refer to ever more NewsPage sites.

A little later, Jorn Barger joined the NewsPage Network and attempted to define the concept of the weblog as a space where content is vacuumed from the web and promoted in a clearly defined format, without extensive commentary. In Barger’s vision, weblogs were an access structure. The initially small “weblog community” eventually grew bigger, and at some point the concept emerged further into the writing space we know today – which led to Barger’s withdrawal.

The presenter discussed Barger’s role in the community and underlined the importance of the “weblog community” for the history of network theory on the web. The question what led to the transformation of the weblog into a writing space remains unanswered and, according to the author, should be investigated as well.

Blogging cultures

Thomas Mandl’s presentation “Comparing Chinese and German Blogs” opened with the question “Do you do research on blogs, social networks and social media or is your research on the fraction of English blogs?”. Despite its title, this presentation was more about culture than about weblogs, however the latter being the object of the research. Mandl took the audience through a set of theories on culture.

In result, Mandl concluded that Asian blogs are more versatile in graphic design, making use of many more design elements; this is supported by the blog platforms offering more layout options. In another finding, Germans assign more tags to a blog. Regarding the dimension of high vs. low context (as in the dimensions by Hall), German culture is more a culture of high context: Chinese blog texts tend to be shorter and Germans use more external links. In terms of reactions, blog posts are significantly more often reacted on after more than one week from the authoring date, and the culture of “keeping face” leads to less negative reactions in the Chinese set.

The diary of a researcher

The talk “Weblog as a personal thinking space” by Lilia Efimova was an autoethnographical study in which the researcher analysed her own blog. It was based on her observations while working on her Ph.D. thesis “Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers”. She described the weblog as a knowledge space, like the papers on a person’s desk; the different functions of the weblog as a personal space are creating, organising, maintaining and retrieving knowledge. Her weblog was to her like a trusted environment to park random thoughts, drafts and notes.

4.4 Bringing dead links back to life

The research of Atsuyuki Morishima, Akiyoshi Nakamizo, Toshinari Iida, Shigeo Sugimoto and Hiroyuki Kitagawa (titled “Bringing Your Dead Links Back to Life: A Comprehensive Approach and Lessons Learned”) is motivated by the fact that meeting broken links is a disappointing experience. The presenter quoted GVU’s 10th WWW user survey from 1998, when lack of speed, broken links and slow ads were the three major issues for web users. While the speed issue has been solved today by broadband access and AdBlock and other solutions have been invented for the ad slowness issue, no toll has been invented to solve the problem of broken links.

Their research is an experimental study of the automatic correction of broken web links. It is focusing, in particular, on links broken by the relocation of web pages . For the solution, location factors play an important role, so it is possible to find new locations without an exhaustive search of the entire web. In the experiment, the researchers achieved a detection rate of more than 70%, much better than those of Google and other index servers.

4.5 HTML vs. Xanadu

The keynote by Ted Nelson was the opening to an entire afternoon dedicated to xanalogical data structures. As myself, quite a few people attended only the keynote and then moved to the other track’s session – most likely due to the fact that the topic of this track was otherwise very specific. But it was impressive to see that there is quite a community around Xanadu, and listening to IT pioneer Nelson’s speech was definitely another highlight of the conference for me.

According to Nelson, “the history of technology is a misunderstanding of human thought and life “, considering technology as a force to be obeyed:

1. Ted’s fight with technology began at age 9: in the 1940s his parents owned a pressure cooker that was designed to require releasing the steam before opening it. His father got seriously hurt because he forgot to open the valve. This is a misunderstanding of human thought: the design was based on the assumption that everybody always remembers to release the steam.
2. The hierarchical organization of information is an example for the misunderstanding of human life. Ted: “I am spending hours on the WWW every day and I hate it very much”. He considers social web sites “cattle pens driving animals down the shoot to slaughter”, for example the “perfectly ridiculous activity” in Facebook that one has to repeatedly answer the question “are you my friend or not?”.

The underlying misconception regarding today’s WWW – which Nelson compares to “paper under glass” – is that electronic documents represent paper documents and that all you can show is what can be shown on a paper. But the WWW is even less than paper as with real paper you can write on it or put sticky notes on it.

“Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; once you have hierarchies and lump files, everything can be a file”, says Nelson and points out that the design of interactive software is not computer science, but movie making – a branch of presentational art. The computer, correspondingly, is to be considered a movie machine and a philosophy machine (defining philosophy as “designing an idea “).

Stating that “the web browser was explicitly designed to prevent everything i want to do”, Nelson presents the initial idea of xanalogical hypertext. The Xanagram shows a document as transclusions and links. Calling his concept “oceanic hypertext”, Nelson’s vision is a system that enables sharing from all over, with the right for re-use. The right to quote anything is a win-win environment for micro-sale. It also is not oppressive, but the way out to honestly participate rather than having little chunks, pointing in one direction .

What I took home from Hypertext 2009

When I signed up for Hypertext 2009, I knew this would be a very scientific conference in a field that is not my own. Still, I was attracted by the idea to go listen to what computer science is currently working on in the field of “the web”, and this ACM SigWeb conference has been a very positive experience. While the level and aim of some of the papers were slightly beyond my understanding and interest, the conference provided a lot of inspirational thoughts, insight into very specific fields of research and I had very good conversations with the other attendees.

While a global army of designers repeatedly praises tags and semantics as a power tool for many purposes, it was very eye-opening to dive into the full complexity of the topic of folksonomies and discover problems and opportunities that had never crossed my mind before. As a sociologist, I was particularly fascinated by the research related to network theory and network analysis – as well as the projects merging the social web with the semantic web. A series of sessions related to the application and use of hypertext and semantics was probably among the most fruitful ones for my work as a designer.

To sum it up: the biggest benefit of this conference for a social interaction designer was the possibility to inhale a lot of fact-based knowledge on hyperlinked information and communication structures, combined with a lot of historical background (Xanadu, blog networks etc.) and critical thoughts whether everything “semantic” and “social” is really such an easy and simple tool to make people (users?) happy. I will not be able to attend Hypertext 2010 in Toronto, but I for sure will closely follow the coverage on that conference.

Reports by other participants:

• Hypertext 2009: hypertext in the wild! by Markus Strohmaier

When ISDT09 ended with a farewell dinner at a Porto wine cave on Friday, July 24, everybody I talked to had similar feelings – the school had been a highly inspiring event, connecting many people from all over the world and raising questions that for sure have been further discussed and advanced between the participants since then. In other words, both organizers and participants agreed the summer school was a big success.

This was the first event of its kind – envisioned by Gary Chapman, based on the model of the annual “International School on Disarmament and Resolution of Conflicts” (ISODARCO) in Italy. Regarding the core inspiration from ISODARCO, the idea to create a global network of friends and colleagues from all over the world around the topic of digital transformation, I believe this well-organised event has fully achieved its main goal. From day one, everybody’s mindset was to enjoy and utilise the offered variety of people, topics and networks to the highest degree – dialog, inspiration and sharing ideas were in advance set as the desired spirit for the school – and an apparently well-selected crowd of people did exactly that. Naturally, not every goal can always be met on the first run; in particular, there had been some critical voices about a lack of interaction between faculty and students outside the sessions.

With the design of the event deliberately open to a certain extent, a lot of things were “crowdsourced” during the week, for example a set of very productive Barcamp sessions (spontaneous meet-ups to discuss a certain topic in an informal setting) during the lunch breaks. Only the digital backchannels would have profited from a little more top-down management – with a forum, a blog, a wiki, Twitter, Zotero, Facebook and many other channels being added throughout the week, it was at times almost impossible to follow where to find the most relevant information. Also the archiving of the presentation files and presentation notes has been patchy, which means that quite some interesting material is no longer accessible.

The networking among the participants has continued to be very active ever since we left Porto; collaborative papers have been written, fruitful discussions have been continued and reports about “reunions” between participants are a regular sight in the Facebook feeds for many of us. 2010 will see a new edition of the ISDT, for sure with the learnings of 2009 applied and aiming at creating an evenly valuable event for its participants. And apart from that, there is no doubt new reunions, collaborations and projects are going to take place that can somehow be traced back to those hot July days of Porto 2009.

Digital transformation – a call to action for civic engagement

The program at the Reitoria, the main building of the University of Porto, started with the core topic of the school: “digital transformation”. The term already provides a lot of room for interpretation, but I believe there was a certain smallest common denominator in the participants’ understanding of what it means: the application of digital technology has become a – if not the – major variable in present society, policy and culture. This transformation into a “digital society” brings along considerable changes both in the realities we are facing and as a new set of tools waiting to be utilised.

Doug Schuler’s talk on “Reinventing Social Thought and Action with Civic Intelligence” framed the opening session as a discussion on the role of social innovation driven by activists in reaction to social needs. Doug’s presentation on how “problems are growing a lot faster than solutions” was spiced with examples of civic intelligence and the statement that we may be doomed without taking an activist approach to research, since elites can’t or won’t solve the problems we are facing. His call for civic activism and policies based on civic intelligence to make use of the creative potential and dedication of the masses for agency was a good start for ISDT09, which focused a lot on grassroots movements and civic activism.

Some of the points brought up in the following discussion were how the history of media is all about hackers packaging up and consolidating their inventions and that the use of commercial services for civic intelligence may mean loosing the chance to do something revolutionary. Open is winning closed, many of those speaking up agreed, and it was also stressed out that technology is no holy grail and the “web 2.0″ will not naturally lead to a democratic society.

Day 1 continued around the topic of activism and social change, with Nicholas Reville talking about “Social Change Infrastructure, Building Value into the Way our World Works”. Nicholas discussed how to achieve change by building a society of participation and engagement, providing two strategic approaches: by defining the debate (i.e. engaging in critical public discourse) or by building social infrastructure (Wikipedia and Mozilla, for example).

Nicholas illustrated the restricting factor of using already existing tools, as they are limiting the emergence of new modes of interaction and presented the two most famous examples for how closed many of today’s mainstream products are: Apple’s iStore, where the computer manufacturer regulates what software the users of their products are allowed to run, and the recent Amazon Kindle case where (ironically) Orwell’s book “1984″ was remotely deleted from the devices of users who had legally purchased it since Amazon was unsure whether they had the right to distribute it.

To overcome the naturally proprietary and narrow interest of corporations, Nicholas called for activism by different social groups to shape the world ourselves: he sees academics as the “climate scientists” (working on the meta-level of the development), suggests students to be activists and organisations to align their technology with their values. Last but not least, he emphasised the huge social return on investment for foundations like Mozilla and Wikipedia, calling for an emphasis on a venture approach to social infrastructure.

Micah L. Sifry rounded up the day with a critical presentation about “The Useful Myth of the Obama Campaign”, where he declared the “web 2.0 meets politics” interpretation of Barack Obama’s election campaign to be a myth while in reality it was just very professional 21st century marketing. His presentation aimed at showing how the campaign indeed had elements of “voter-generated activism”, but in the end the design of the campaign was not about sharing power (in the sense of real political participation through user-generated content) but about distributing the tasks of the election campaign (e.g. reaching more small donors, compared to the other candidates).

The current state of digital transformation

On the second day, the topics evolved around access and participation in the current online world, kicking off with Siva Vaidhyanathan and his lecture on “The Googlization of Everything”. Starting from his concerns about Google as a 7-year-old corporation having enough money to attempt scanning entire libraries, while public libraries don’t, the presentation lead to the main pillars of Google’s business: letting users express themselves through their behaviour and monetizing their passions by offering a “free” service (free in terms of marginal costs, but not total costs – in the end the user becomes a product herself).

Posing the provocative question whether we are so desperate that we are willing to let a corporation take on this utterly important task of making the web’s content accessible, Siva encouraged to consider the cultural, social and political consequences of “Googlization”. He presented the “dream of universal access to knowledge” as a dream of many a thousand years, and showed examples how far Google’s search results are from universality and neutrality. While Siva presented his vision of a public approach to building a global library, the following discussion also brought up the media literacy point of view: what Google is doing is not wrong as such, but there would be a need to make people more aware that Google’s results are a filtered view on reality.

Next up were Martha Fuentes-Batista and Alison Powell, both with presentations around the topic of infrastructure: what it is, what it is needed for and how it can be built.

Martha’s talk titled “Access Cultures and the Construction of Networked Citizenship in the American Technopolis” was about growing citizens’ communicative competence as a precondition for its use. Based on research carried out in Austin, Texas, she showed how the reduced funding for public internet access infrastructure led to the fact that people in poorer areas face more effort/costs to achieve goals through internet tools than citizens with an internet PC at home. The often-praised “open WiFi access” projects also do not neccessarily improve the situation, as the precondition of access to a portable computer is again subject to underlying social inequalities. Yet, networked citizenship demands the building of skills and knowledge capacities at a local level, with the ultimate goal being to ensure equal access for all levels of society.

The topic of Alison’s presentation was “The Future of the Internet from the Bottom Up”: autonomous internet infrastructure projects. A variety of projects from mash networks to open WiFi initiatives served as examples how citizen-built networks have played an important role in transforming the infrastructure of the internet (e.g. the Berlin Freifunk mash network project that enabled internet access in East Berlin after the German reunification and through their activism eventually influenced the telecom monopolist to reduce their prices). She asked to consider whether there is a bottom to the cloud and minded the audience to remember that organisations always lose some of their autonomy once they successfully grow to a size that requires management.

In the evening session, Jorge Martins Rosa talked about “Flow – Understanding the Latest Trend of Social Networking”, where he used a quote from Tim Berners-Lee, how the “web 2.0″ paradigm underlying current social networking is just a more immediate form of the original web (1.0). He described the fractions of blog mentions over time as a “heartbeat” and made analogies between the historical Netscape Navigator “What’s new” buttons and the rivers of news in Google reader, Twitter and other media.

After the first day with topics mainly around the potential of civic activism on the one side and the problem of corporate/centralised development on the other side, this second day discussed the role of access and participation from an overall perspective. We talked a lot about digital literacy, social inequalities and participation as preconditions if we want to interpret “digital transformation” as a phenomenon that really changes society.

Digital transformation and its manifestations

The third day of ISDT09 was taking the debate to a very concrete level. This day was all about presentations of cases, and the related learnings for an analysis of digital transformation. The morning sessions first featured two presenters talking about citizen participation in e-administration and e-democracy, then two presenters sharing regional insight into two less developed regions of the world. The afternoon line-up promised two very concrete talks about possibilities for social and economic development by the means of ICT.

First up, Rui Barros (“Technology Issues and Small Municipalities”) and Fiorella de Cindio (“Facilitating Participation and Deliberation at the Urban Level”) gave two case-centered presentations about the difficulty of facilitating citizen participation online in a top-down manner.

In his example of e-ASLA, an e-administration pilot project, Rui emphasised how the design of such services has to be anchored in the people’s knowledge of existing processes, not in pushing people to a different reality. Somebody said in the discussion that ideally, a public e-service would be discovered by the citizens in just the same way as people “found” MySpace and other fun-related web services.

Fiorella used the analogy of democracy as a three-legged stool – government, economy and civil society – to point out that e-participation requires a space where people feel acquainted to participate and that these are usually on grassroots level rather than in governmental services. She presented the design process of a community network with its underlying features such as authentication, registration and how to ensure fairness. In the following discussion, it was pointed out that deliberative democracy is not representative democracy, with passive participation having to be considered as a design factor. Also, the role of anonymity (still today one of the core features for many communities online) as a protection to participate was brought up.

After the lunch break, Scott S. Robinson and Warigia Bowman took us “into the field”, showing their cases from Latin America and Africa.

Scott’s talk “Slouching toward digital apartheid in Latin America” addressed the inequality of online access (and literacy) in Mexcio due to the shift in public internet access policy from state-funded telecenters to privately owned cybercafes. He described how cybercafes gives only access to computers – to those who can afford – , but not the learning environment of telecenters. The core problem here, as was elaborated in the discussion, is that the elites who are the policy makers do not care about the digitally excluded and therefore no innovation in this field is to be expected from them.

Warigia started her part on “Challenges and opportunities for information technology policy in East Africa” with an outline of “Africa”. By no means is there only one Africa, but we are talking about circa 45 countries. Still, many of these areas share the lowest penetration rates of digital technology in the world and “information technology” mainly refers to paper and pen, radio and simple mobile phone devices (whose penetration is a lot higher than many Westerners may think). Apart from all the engineering problems (no undersea cable, with all of East Africa running the Internet on satellite, low bandwidth, simple devices etc.), the major challenges are how to develop literacy – possibly by combining digital literacy and literacy – and how to find socially and culturally appropriate solutions based on participatory design processes that consider Africans as agents not passive recipients of technology.

In the afternoon session, Katrin Verclas talked about “Mobile Phones and Social Development”. The talk started with an inspiring reconsideration of the term “online”, with Katrin proposing to use “connected” instead, as “online” puts emphasise only on the internet part of digital communication. A lot of research is still needed to gain proper insight into how mobile phones can really improve people’s lives – apart from all kind of hype about their impact on social development. Emphasizing the ubiquity of mobile phones, Katrin showed a variety of projects that successfully used mobiles for social change and advocacy. However, she added very critical notes that “we are not there yet”: from her point of view, the mobile phone is the next big thing after the traditional computer, but there is again a big risk of a (mobile) digital divide. For example it is very questionable whether cheap phones are really the right solution for poor people – what they would really need are sophisticated devices.

Katrin’s presentation was a call for action for researchers to put more emphasis on the use context of mobile phones (needs and patterns of use, capabilities) as well as on software, policies, operators, carriers etc. (topics like open source, bottom-up innovation and “mobile phone eco-systems”). The prevalence of the mobile phone is impressive, she concluded, but there is a huge unused potential for the open and universal use of the technology.

The following video clip was produced for Nokia during the summer school, featuring TEDx fellow Katrin’s non-profit and the event’s inspiring environment as well as some of the people of ISDT09:

Tapan Parikh‘s talk “Sustainable Economic Development and Information Systems” continued around the topic of mobile phones, with the presenter using examples of failed interaction design projects for rural communities in developing countries to illustrate how for example the support for voice makes phones such excellent devices. Couldn’t the concept of the internet be developed to support oral communication? Tapan had a variety of examples to show how the established “design thinking” of the developed world fails miserably in the context of infrastructural issues (power, connectivity), rural community users (culture, education, literacy) and human capital (designers, developers).

The success cases he presented made creative use of voice mailboxes for an agricultural knowledge exchange or enabled true two-way communication between fair trade farmers and their consumers – both based on participatory design with deep insight into the needs of the respective communities. He concluded with three “lessons learned” for success: 1) tools provided should help people help themselves, 2) existing institutions should be empowered instead of creating new institutions and 3) the systems should provide advanced feedback mechanisms in order to improve them.

Katrin’s and Tapan’s talks were followed by a lively debate, in which both had the chance to answer some critical questions posed. It was interesting to see how the development of design, technology and policy are going hand in hand regarding the challenges (use of appropriate and affordable tools) and the approaches needed (focus on the real needs of the user, development of existing structures).

I see day 3 mainly as a continuation of day 2, taking the topics of access, literacy and development to the next level. Also, this Wednesday quite naturally added the topic of design to the curriculum. After considering the circumstances of the digital transformation, it is a viable extension of the debate to also talk about its tools and how they are built.

After the lectures, the summer school went on an excursion: First for a guided tour to the Casa de Música, the impressive concert hall built for Porto’s year as European Culture Capital (though it was finished only years later, in 2005). There, we also got a short first-hand summary from a simultaneous summer school, the “2009 Summer School in Sound and Music Computing”. Then, we enjoyed a dinner party on board one of the river cruise ships on the Douro river (and eventually ended up in some bar downtown).

Digitally transformed means of activism

Thursday continued around the topics of tools and their design, again – as on the previous day – with many of the presentations based on real world benchmarks and their analysis.

Environmental movements and their websites are at the core of Laura Stein’s research, which she presented in her talk “Social Movement Communication”. Based on examples and strategies for web use by some environmental organisations, Laura showed some of the opportunities and challenges of the web for these groups.

The second speaker of the morning session was Tiago Peixoto, who presented his research on “Participatory Budgeting”, the process of citizen participation in public budgeting and the monitoring of public budgets. The increasing number of participatory budgeting projects worldwide are a good example for e-democracy as a process of participating citizens in decision making. One of the visualisations used by the lecturer showed an inverted pyramid, representing how the least popular schemes for participatory budgeting voting takes up the most screen space.

Some of the speakers, as Tiago in the previous talks, had already been utilizing powerful visualisations to support their message. Next, Tanya Notley from the Tactical Technology Collective gave a great presentation “Visualizing Data for Social Change” on the use of visualisation methods for advocacy – information activism, as they call it. Including the case studies of the Ushahidi and Frontline SMS project, Tanya’s lecture was an inspiring session on how to effectively use the power of digital media by making complex data easier to digest.

We continued in several breakout groups, each with its own topic. I attended the debate on “digital literacy”, where we discussed the problem that not only visualizing information is important, but also educating its consumers to frame it correctly. Afterwards, Tanya distributed some of Tactical Tech’s excellent guide books, which are a highly recommended read and available online.

Christian Sandvig shared valuable thinking about content distribution and its manifestations in the internet of today, in a talk titled “Networked Television Beyond Television Networks: The Policy Problems of Internet Video Distribution”. His argumentation contains the thought of two internets: the internet serving content people want to see – content that can easily be stored with a regular internet provider (think of blogs, “homepages”, documents) – and the internet serving content that is popular and therefore requires content distribution networks (CDNs) to serve it to the masses, such as videos etc. This division, and the enormous economical but also political power these CDNs (Youtube, AOL etc.) are aggregating, can be considered a major threat to the freedom of the internet and the independence of digital media.

Control and public policy

Friday’s topics were aspects of control and policy around the process of digital transformation, with three presentations. It is probably a good sign when a conference provides so much food for thought that a certain saturation point is reached already before it has ended. I perceived this last day of ISDT09 as challenging in that so many impressions had already to be digested from the days before. Reviewing my lecture notes and reflecting on the final sessions, I have to admit that my memories of the day are only fragmented and I focused on subtracting the core message from the presentations with an apparent lack of attention to detail.

Patricia Aufderheide’s lecture on “Copyright and Creativity: Correcting the Imbalance” took off with a brief overview on the history of copyright. Initially introduced to promote the creation of culture by rewarding creators with a limited monopoly and to encourage the creators of new content to build upon existing culture, the intent of copyright was to serve the interest of the public. Lately, however, copyright has been turned into the base of mass media’s business, where a strict enforcement of content rights is intended to protect the income of those companies.

Patricia presented the four core problems of copyright imbalance, as she titled the emphasis on business rather than the promotion of culture: 1) The licensing of content is a very complicated process, with a global media being subject to many regional laws. 2) Abandoned property – “orphan works” – cannot be used even somebody might have use for it. 3) Technical protection of content to enforce copyright hinders its fair use as well, since breaking the protection even for a legal purpose is a crime. 4) There is no international regulation on “fair use” or other balanced use of copyrighted material. In the end, we discussed some of the example solutions how to expand the rights of use for copyrighted material both on governmental and civic level, such as Creative Commons and others.

Next up was “Legal and Technical Control and Resistance on the Internet”, presented by Sunil Abraham. His talk was structured into three threads: legal, alternative and illegal – elaborating on how IPR have turned the internet into a sphere where civil rights and accountability have eroded, how open standards and open source attempt to undermine the rules of this internet lock-down and how piracy is effectively circumventing it. Maybe the most striking example from the presentation was the story of Indian medical students who cannot afford the expensive books required for their studies and therefore are photocopying them – eventually those societies owning the copyright (the West in particular) are indirectly profiting from this act of piracy by recruiting highly qualified personnel from India.

Last but not least, Leslie Regan Shade gave a talk about “Public Interest Activism in Canadian ICT Policy: Blowin’ in the Policy Winds”. She presented three milestones in Canadian ICT policy and the involvement of academics and citizen activists in their creation. Showing how “the public” is participating in policy making regarding information technology, Leslie pointed out how important it is that academics in the field consider grassroots movements as an important player in the policy making process.

Leslie’s presentation, which she ended with a brief summary of ISDT09 from her point of view, smoothly concluded the program of the summer school, taking us back to where we started from – the role of activism in the process of digital transformation.

A visit to a Porto wine cellar with a delicious dinner accompanied by some sweet Port wine and traditional Fado music closed the first International School on Digital Transformation and the next morning mostly everybody went their way.

How I was digitally transformed by ISDT09

All this – and my report above is for sure only a very compressed, subjective and selective summary – was accompanied by tens of hours of face-to-face discussions (and some simultaneous live chatter on Twitter) that complemented and continued the topics from the sessions – apart from getting to know the beauty of Porto and the great variety of food and pastry in the nearby restaurants and cafes. Portugal and our Portuguese fellows have been great hosts, that is for sure the least disputable statement regarding the event.

To put it short: ISDT09 was a blast. My expectations were high but unspecific, and in retrospective this summer school turned out to be pretty close to what I had been hoping for. I enjoyed the unique combination of enthusiasm and criticism, the discourse between academia and practitioners and – while at some point there was some criticism the event would be a little bit too US-centric – I had a great time spending so much time surrounded by Americans. For us Europeans, collaboration with people from Northern, Southern, Western and Eastern Europe has become almost a matter of course (and by emphasizing the presence of Americans I by no means intend to say I didn’t enjoy everybody else’s company just as much), that I personally perceived it as an enriching factor to have so much time to engage in cross-Atlantic discussions and exchange of opinions.

On the downside, I have a feeling that a lot of people did not have the chance to express most of their opinions and comments during the sessions, due to the very lecture-based format of the school and the big amount of participants – even though every session included a Q&A debate. Personally, I recall the most interactive sessions to have been classes where the speakers involved the audience as part of the presentation (for example in Katrin’s session), changed the seating order from a classroom set-up to a big circle (two/three sessions, if I remember correct) or split the audience into breakout sessions (as Tanya did). As far as I have understood, this issue has been addressed by reducing the number of participants in 2010, hopefully also by considering alternative formats for the sessions.

Many of the presentations were highly critical of the current state of the digitally transformed society, of the role of corporations and established mass media and plenty of the talks were connected with a very clear call for civic action. I share quite a few of the concerns brought up, and trust in many of the presented approaches towards advancing the digital transformation of the world from a grassroots level. Anyhow, this does not mean that all of us need to become full-time digital activists. I understand this insight as a call to reflect what everyone involved with digital media can do in their field – be it as part of a big corporation, a volunteer in some development project or those active in policy-making. I take the learnings from this week as a motivation to reflect even more carefully about how to put my effort into turning the digital transformation into something positive for society and communities and I am grateful for the faculty and the fellow students who shared their insight and learnings for all of us to advance.

I want to express my sincere thanks to Sarah and Susannah who took the time to review a draft of this report and provided valuable comments! I’d be more than happy to read more feedback in the comments below.

The way WHO is using online content is very traditional. Also, the use of mashups and other “web 2.0″ concepts is strictly limited by WHO’s status as an international governmental organization, with an extremely strict policy on data publishing. The main findings of our initial research were that

• the web is one out of many vehicles for WHO’s message, with decisionmakers as their main target group
• the website reflects the way content is produced, not how it is consumed
• the potential of multimedia content has well been recognized by WHO, but it is “hidden” in a separate section

During a visit to the WHO headquarters in Geneva we validated our ideas and adapted the three main conceptual ideas – visualization, streaming and embedding – to the realities of the environment we are working in. We learned about WHO’s role of assessing, visualizing and disseminating information, made ourselves familiar with the organizational and technical backgrounds and reframed our initial ideas in the light of the notion of “advocacy”.

The idea: “Giving away” data to boost advocacy

WHO has a mandate to bring about change around the world, by proposing conventions, agreements and regulations, by assisting in developing an informed public opinion, by promoting international standards etc. WHO uses the internet chiefly as a tool for their institutional role in advocacy.

To support their goal of advocay better, we proposed to

• present content as a constant stream of data
• allow the embedding of WHO data elsewhere to multiply the targeted audience
• enable easy creation/addition of information in various formats and by different sources

A prototype for illustration

Our tool prototype is a small Flash application that individuals, organizations and governments can embed to their site. The tool can show either a selected piece of WHO information (the most typical pieces are graphs and maps) or it can update automatically to show the latest information from a selected WHO source, for example latest news from a certain health crisis.

Our concept requires that the decisions about publishing are not made for reports, but for smaller pieces that reports are made from: graphs, images, maps and tables and that they are reviewed and published as soon as these individual pieces are ready. This would provide the stream the tool would latch onto.

When the tool is set up onto WHO’s crisis page, it would be a visually attractive way to explore the latest news about the crisis. If the reader, “data consumer” is from media, or an interested blogger, he may decide to want to use the visualization he found on his article about the issue. The easiest way to add the visualization to the article would be to embed the tool into it. The tool provides a short embed code that the reader uses on his page, thus becoming “data republisher”.

When other “data consumers” find the embedded visualization on blogger’s or journalist’s article, they may try clicking around it and find other visualizations or want to find more information about some of them. The tool links back to the crisis site where it initially came from, thus makes it known to the readers.

Using the power of free data in a restricted environment

Our proposal is based on a strong belief in the changed realities of today’s internet. The web of today does not work in a top-down matter and content consumption habits are more than ever based on multipliers serving their “followers” (as they are called in Twitter, for example) with recommended readings.

While the early internet had simply been an additional distribution channel for publications, the so called “Web 2.0″ (turning the internet ultimately into a participatory medium) brought along the major change that the spread of a message can no longer be ensured by simply publishing it, but the publisher has to ensure that it is discovered and shared by their target group.

Another major change to be acknowledged in the internet age is that giving away information is a good thing. There has been a change in paradigm; where in earlier times power was about having (and holding back) information, “power 2.0″ – the power in the world of today – is all about giving information.

As a UN agency, all information published under the WHO brand has to be verified and approved. This limits the use of participatory strategies many current web concepts are based upon. While utilizing user generated content is not possible, the social web can still be utilized for distribution.

Two major principles of publishing data on WHO sites are that data has to be correct and accessible. We see that WHO communications can maintain trust and transparency in modern media environment by breaking up reports and communication products into smaller particles and publishing them as quickly as possible in public streams of data. When these pieces are accepted for publication, they can be streamed, trusting that the other existing information will provide the necessary context.

Download our concept poster as PDF (1 page, A1 format, 2.6 MB)

Download the entire PDF project report (21 pages, 5.5 MB)