2. From the highest perspective, in the grandest terms, our client asked us to design an online workshop for his new course - and new discipline - of global redirective practices. Big Picture http://www.flickr.com/photos/chelmsfordpubliclibrary/2210233729/
3. The workshop to be designed, should be “an electronic facility to be created in order to encourage graduate research students world-wide to tell each other about their projects, exchange information, make their research available to their peers, share problems, issue invitations to comment or collaborate.” - Tony Fry 2008 The Request
4. Our client was proactive and delivered the following request for features: User Profiles Forums Login / Registration Moderator Controls Ability to Scale Chat Technical Features Requested http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakob/83393263/
5. When many viable options are available; how do we decide which option most completely satisfies our particular client, at this particular time, with these particular immediate needs, and this particular vision for the future? The design question
6. There is no dominant online collaborative tool. No iPod No Microsoft Word No Google Search No Facebook Collaborative Tools
7. Highly successful communities exist. Yet technically similar communities fail to gain traction. “ At the time of this conference, the tendency of those involved in building graphical virtual worlds is to create visually compelling worlds that look good, but do a poor job of fostering social interaction. Many of these systems have more in common with lonely museums than with the vibrant communities they set out to create.” (Kollock 1997) Online Communities
8. Peter Kollock et al,1997 “ The key challenges the Internet community will face in the future are not technological, but rather sociological… This is not to diminish the difficulties of creating new technologies, but rather to emphasize that even these tasks will pale besides the problems of facilitating and encouraging successful online interaction and online communities .” Design Principles for Online Communities
9. “ If information about individuals and their behavior is shared among the group, this encourages the development of reputations, which can be a vital source of social information and control (institutional memory).” (Kollock 1997) Design Principles of Cooperation between individuals
10. EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION (Axelrod 1984) 1 ST - Must be the potential that interacting individuals will meet again 2 ND - Individuals must be able to identify each other 3 RD - Have information about how the others have behaved till now Design Principles of Cooperation between individuals
11. GOVERNING THE COMMONS (Ostrom 1990) 1 ST - Group identity is clearly defined 2 ND - Most individuals in community can participate in modifying rules 3 RD - The right of individuals to create new rules is respected 4 TH - The members particpate in moderating group behaviors 5 TH - A graduated system of sanctions are used 6 TH - Focus community on a particular interest group 7 TH - Confront members with a specific crisis to build union Design Principles of Successful Communities
12. (Kelly, Sung & Farnham 2002) “ There are 3 major questions facing designers of on-line communities: how to get users to behave well, how to get users to contribute quality content, and how to get users to return and contribute on an ongoing basis” Encouraging Positive Actions from the Using Audience
13. “ While providing most of the standard services one expects from an on-line community (such as discussion forums, homepage building, chat, user reviews, etc) these [highly successful] sites feature custom tools that have contributed greatly to the success of the sites in a largely un-moderated capacity. These tools include a built-in member status/reputation system, a navigable member contribution history, tracking tools for members usually only available to moderators… and a popularity ranking system for all member-contributed lesson material.” Encouraging Positive and Return Interactions from the Audience
14. USE DATA THAT ENCOURAGES PROPER PROTOCOL “ Community data is used to encourage its users to act in accordance with accepted community norms, to make the community environment self-policing, and to correctly identify continually deviant users.” Member identity : members are asked for real first & last name Identity in Context : the absence of role playing and anonymity within the community is a hugely important factor in creating accountability, real social consciousness, and behavioral norms. User Control of Resources : invested members tend to protect, promote, and update their specific contributed resources in the community, look for feedback, and ensure that the experience for their public audience is a rewarding one Repurposing Data Collection to promote sustainable community
15. “ Community data is fed back into the site for three distinct purposes: to increase social consciousness, to encourage and reward user participation, and to increase the navigability of the site .” (Sung, Kelly, Farnham 2002) Status Metrics
16. WITH STATUS METRICS Members become aware of what counts as positive contribution Low level point-rewards encourage newcomer use and return High level point rewards encourage valuable user added content Influence and prestige accord to most valued members Since sites pays no one, sites take pains to let users know where and how their content is being appreciated Status Metrics – outcomes
17. WITH STATUS METRICS Status metrics emerged as an entry point for new user engagement Proper users add more content because the see how others value viewpoint Users provide answers because it is “their job” not because of personal connection to the inquirers. Metrics allow multiple viewpoints of same types of data, and have thus become major facets of the emergent navigation scheme of users. Status Metrics – outcomes
18. Focus Group discussion on Online Collaborative work spaces 7 Graduate students Experience in online collaboration
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21. Provides a common ground for discussion Contextual relativity – tools by need, finding contextually appropriate solutions. Having a task to perform Easy access Visible presentation of the dialogue Sticky like (having a closure to a discussion, summarizing it and putting in the lifecycle of the discussions.) Online Collaborative work spaces - Likes
37. After collecting what we could find, we matched it up against the pre-determined criteria that we extracted from both the research and the focus group. The current online tool that turned out perfect was – ? Comparing the collected online tools
39. To build collaboration, one must first have community Primary function is an online collaboration tool Must encourage coherent, asynchronous debate Must encourage a ‘sticky’ final result of debate Data collection of use must be reflected back to the audience Collaborative Tool Requirements
40. Concept Discussion Wikis Forums Fikis Google Docs Blogs Social Networks Increasing order of ability to change content on online collaboration tools Legend
43. Fiki facets breakdown FIKI The union of a "forum" and a "wiki", a Fiki is online collaborative tool that encourages the nonlinear flexibility of collective debate and brainstorming while simultaneously tracking, developing, and organizing a temporally 'final' representation of the aggregate debate.
44. NONLINEAR FLEXIBILITY Design is not always logical. A collaborative tool that encourages nonlinear flexibility is one that accepts, tracks, tags, and coherently stores the wandering, chaotic thoughts that enable the discovery of new insight and creation of new artifacts. Fiki facets breakdown
45. TEMPORAL FINAL There is no final 'answer' to any Fiki debates. However, there is at all times ("temporally") a coherent representation of the aggregated, valuated pieces-of-debate that can be presented as a linear fashion to the participating audience. Fiki facets breakdown
46. Fiki facets breakdown VALUATED In the Fiki, "valuated" refers to the ability of the community to choose for itself that which is expressed in the final temporal representation of any debate. The community ranks highly those pieces-of-debate which it believes most fully accords with its own values and beliefs. Individuals, too; receive rankings from their peers, their activities, and their contributions to the community
47. Fiki facets breakdown PIECES-OF-DEBATE Any text added to the community through debate may be parsed into smaller pieces by any other users. Paragraphs may be parsed into sentences. Sentences may be parsed into phrases. Phrases may be parsed into words. Similarly, smaller pieces-of-debate may be refashioned into larger semantic structure. Both the micro and macro pieces may have their own individual identity and valuation, as well as the complex identity and valuation born of their union.
56. Set up a mock Ning group ourselves Redefined the interface to make it a forum focused community Redefined the interface according to usability Still allow flexibility of the client Still allow flexibility of individual users. Deliverable
66. What do We Deliver? A list of the available technologies A list of the modern literature A strategic design vision for the future experience A working prototype for the client A working, functional prototype that is the best deliverable for this particular client, with these particular needs, at this particular time, and with this particular vision for the future
Read from the card 2) “Now, from this perspective it sounds easy. It sounds easy because the word “workshop” remains largely undefined. It is not until we begin to deconstruct what this workshop is - in both technical and social terms - that the request has an degree of difficulty. Since we only have 20 minutes, let’s jump right in.”
When we asked our client to further define what he meant by “workshop” he e-mailed a rich and detailed response to us. Read card. Now, as designers of a digital environment, what is the problem hidden within this request? Right. Of the five specific requests made explicitly in this request, precisely none of them are technical in nature. We make no fun in pointing this out about our client. Indeed, it reinforces our belief that the audience cares only about the experience of interactions with an artifact, design, or device. While our client will in fact deliver a specific list of technological requests, it is important to notice and reinforce that every way our client talks about this workshop is in plain social terms of the existing world outside of cyberspace.
This is the list of requirements that our client felt would create a workshop that would deliver on all five of the experiential criteria defined in his request for a workshop. We knew that we had one of three options, we could custom build the site from the bottom up, we could appropriate similar functionality from existing online tools, or, we could grab a fully developed online tool that closely approximated this functionality. Given the technical skill of our team, all three options were open to us. The question was: how to make an educated decision?
So, deciding “what” to do was not really the critical issue in this project. Answering “why” we would make the decisions we would make became the critical issues of this project and is what took us on our journey into the literature, the technology, and the future direction of collaboration in online environments. (START GOING FASTER THROUGH THIS NEXT PART - BE LESS DRAMATIC AND HIT THE FOLLOWING POINTS QUICK)
Read card. There are many online collaborative tools, but since no one collaborative tool dominates we know that not just any tool will automiatically satisfy our client’s needs. If there were, it would be widely known and widely in use. Since no brand name dominates this market, it will require research to understand what exactly builds a collaborative community - both in real space and cyberspace - and - we understood that if we were able to design a concept that filled this hole in collaborative space it would provide a large niche market opportunity for ourselves as designers.
Highly successful communities exist in the online arena. eBay. Facebook. Worlds of Warcraft. YouTube. Yet technically similar communities fail at a much faster rate than successes. SOMETHING. Friendster. Bebo. GAME LOSS. MSN Video. It was immediately apparent to us, that while while the audience at large only ever hears about of the “web2.0 big hits” -- and the features that attend these successes -- graphics, video, community, collaboration -- we knew that there were many more failures that were precisely technically similar -- and that for some reason, these communities failed. That is what we wished to avoid. We knew that our client hoped to develop a community that would grow, and scale, and encourage collaboration and we had to find the research that supported the social side of community development. This was confirmed in our research [HIT ANINMATION TO REVEAL QUOTE]
Kollack’s insight into interactions between individuals led us to a classic text in the study of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is the “Evolution of Cooperation” by Axelrod.
Kollack’s insight into interactions between individuals led us to a classic text in the study of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is the “Evolution of Cooperation” by Axelrod. These are the pattern of characteristics that had marked influence on beahviors exhibited in the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem.
Going further into research in the social sciences of community building led us to another important text, Ostrom’s research into “Governing the Commons.” In Governing the Commons Ostrom isolates several factors that create unity and community between geographically co-located communities. The idea here is to appropriate some of these criteria with the aim of fostering community in an online environment.
Now that’s some of the core research of social sciences that is being appropriated into use in the building of virtual worlds. Here’s where we get really specific about online communities. In this CHI paper by Kelly, Sung, and Farnham, they highlight the major question facing designers of online communities. How do you get users to behave well. How to contribute quality content How to get them to return and contribute on an ongoing basis. It’s this number three that really concerns us. Part of our client’s specific request is that this is a place that needs to grow. It needs to adapt. This site needs to become whatever it has to become to support the designers of this discipline as it emerges from and idea into a powerful force in the sustainable design community. It needed to “scale” it needed to “grow” it needed to be “organic.” There were no technical solutions to “grow.” We can technically accomplish the ability to scale, but to grow? What is the research that motivates use?
In the research, Kelly, Sung, and Farnham highlight to particular sites with custom built tools that not only collect data on basic user interactions, but, they repurpose the collected data and present it to the audience in terms of popularity points. It is important to note that this study in 2002 precedes the advent of YouTube, which used user rankings and taggings to help navigate video content that otherwise had no semantic information (which is how search is based). They simply collected what the audience was doing -- which user-added content was being reviewed the most, enjoyed the most, and e-mailed or shared the most, and reflected that information that was being collected anyway back to the audience members. What was the effect?
Based on internal data collection (ratings, bookmarks, etc.) a point total is developed that is shown to the audience whenever a member contributes content to the community knowledge base.
Based on internal data collection (ratings, bookmarks, etc.) a point total is developed that is shown to the audience whenever a member contributes content to the community knowledge base.
Based on internal data collection (ratings, bookmarks, etc.) a point total is developed that is shown to the audience whenever a member contributes content to the community knowledge base.
We recruited a specific group of graduate designers and we offered them a bunch of pizza to sit with us for an hour. Of the seven participants, only two had ever considered themselves long lasting participating members of an active online community. Only one was a current participating member of an active online community. However, all had at one time or another been members of online communities, and each was asked to articulate which facets of the communities they had found useful, and, which facets of the communities they eitehr did not like, or, found to be barriers to entry.
When communties failed to attract return use, this is what was cited as negatives.
This is the functionality -- some of which is technical -- some of which is communtiy based, that we found our focus group figured would be important in developing a high caliber online collaborative tool.
After our research into the literature and after focus group with appropriate high-level students in the niche field of question, we now felt we were finally able to look into the available tools and begin to assess what might fit our client’s needs. So we went out into the field and we found Everything.
Media Wiki is Wikipedia’s free wiki download
Remember Informatics Moment?
Internet Relayed Chats
It may seems as we go into some of these that we are reaching a bit too far out into potential technologies to understand what might work best for our client. However, we felt it was best to cast a wide net, gather all the available opportunities, and than rate them against a predetermined standardized metric. Using this metric, we could then make a sound judgement against the wide net of technologies found.
There were also others, but many of them - like say Dolphin which is PHP-based or say MSN Instant Messenger which shares many similarities to AIM -- as well as the many other tightly controlled social networks like Orkut, MySpace, Friendster, etc -- but including everything in the tally was a little messy. So these are the best of the best of the different types of technologies, but, to make comparison as concrete as possible we chose specific manifestations of a technology -- like Google Groups over Yahoo Groups -- to make a detailed and coherent comparison.
After collecting what we could find, we matched it up against the predeteermined criteria that we extraced from both the research and the focus group. The current online tool that turned out perfect was -
None. Not a one. Not tool currently available as a collaborative tool on the web satisfied all the wishes and requirements of our focus group and research. We do take inspiration from this and understand that there is a market opportunity for a concept that does accomplish this object. However, a concept will not suffice in this project. An additional constraint for our team is that our particular client at this particular time needs a working prototype to move forward with his endeavor. We have to make a choice to satisfy his short term needs, but, to fully satisfy his desires, it is also incumbent upon us to provide our client with a vision for the long term, so that he can make his own decisions over time as the technology tends to improve and achieve the full collaborative functionality he desires for his students, his discipline, and his class. Because we realize that the future direction of our client’s vision will also impact what is the proper technology and support he needs now, it was important for us to manifest that future vision - that potential future artifact that can unify all the requirements of a rich collaborative artifact - and utilize that as an additional constraint to the more precisely define what is the proper technology to deliver to our cliet in the now. These were our insights into defining that future object.
The research shows that even real world collaboration is first built on trust and that trust is the result of knowing about your potential collaborators 2) The first requirement is that the tools primary function is that it is a tool for online collaboration. Of all the tools studied, none seem to be primarily built just for fostering a collaborative environment. Even the best tools are really project management tools, focused on delivery and timetables versus pure collaboration, or, they are social networks with forum pages, or, content management systems appropriated into a method of collecting content. The artifact itself can be PART of these larger systems, and, that is likely. But to encourage collaboration, the core of the artifact itself must be to encourage collaboration. Nothing else. If you notice, points 1, 3, and, 4 are reminiscent of a 1) a social network, 2) a forum, and 3) a wiki. And because some of the social networking communities out there are already so strong, we can focus on unifying these last two --
The forum, and the wiki. The Fiki.
Break down all facets of fiki
Because we have developed this non-linear asynchronous fiki that unites the discussion-centric nature of the forum with the final product nature of the wiki in a completely navigable fashion (that rewards top user for participation) we must now retroactively integrate our client’s immediate needs with the potential of the chosen technology to achieve fiki like qualities in the future.
Two additional constraints that should be mentioned at this time. 1) Our client has a budgetary restriction and so we are not looking to buy any technology, or, choose any freely available technology that requires additional purchases to attain the facilities we require. 2) If the tool is to scale for our client long after we leave this project, than we shall have to select a tool that has an active community of developers constantly upgrading the current systems and developing new rich internet applications to keep the client technologically current. 3) Our client does not have an expertise in technical online web development and it would not be a good deliverable product if it requires any knowledge of scripting to moderate and/or update. AND SO, WE TOOK ALL OUR REQUIREMENTS FROM THE RESEARCH BOTH PRIMARY AND SECONDARY, AND TAKING ALL OUR REQUIREMENTS - BOTH IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT FROM OUR CLIENT, AND TAKING TOO THESE LAST THREE ADDITIONAL DESIGN CONSTRAINTS, AS WELL AS ALL CONSTRAINTS INSPIRED BY THE STRATEGIC DESIGN DIRECTION INSPIRED BY OUR FUTURE CONCEPT, WE TABULATED THE RESULTS THUSLY.
Adam does his magic here.
Adam does his magic here.
Now since we did valuate our range of technologies against a range of options at a very small and micro-detailed level, we also wanted to take a step back and take a big picture view, and really look at these things from the macro priorities we had in mind for our client.
To look at it another way, what is easy to use for the moderator, easy to user for the users, encourages collaboration but still gives personal space anchors, and, in a way that gives a recorded history of the group interaction?
Ning has the most functionality we would like to accomplish.
Brief overview and rundown of features. Ning brings us LOGIN, PROFILES, FORUMS, CHATS, MODERATOR TOOLS, and AN ABILITY TO SCALE - all critical feature facets of the clients technological communications. In addition, it provided RSS, threaded forums, Photos, Videos, File uploads, Link attachments, it’s free, it’s easy to use, it’s easy to moderate, it has a community of active developers -- because of that -- it scales and appropriates new technologies easliy, it has searchable content, and taggable content, and they are currently developing a wiki based content management system that will allow it to be ‘sticky’ the one critcal facet it lacks (but again the forums and blogs are taggable and searchable -- just not rankable and stickable). Furthermore, this weekend, the Ning group receivevd 70 mllion more dollars in capital ensuring that, at least for the next five years, this group will have an active and sustainable community of developers keeping its technology current.
Read Card Let’s go through the examples.
Recall again the features that make the ning group an exahustively and robustly researched and designed decision.
Recall again the features that make the ning group an exahustively and robustly researched and designed decision.
Recall again the features that make the ning group an exahustively and robustly researched and designed decision.