During the past 2 weeks at PARC, I wrote and piloted an interview on information sharing practices in the workplace. From it, I created a survey that I posted on Mechanical Turk, where I’ve received 10 responses from unnamed entities each of whom I paid $0.25 for their response. I’m currently evaluating the quality of the responses and deciding if we should tweak the survey further before opening it up to hundreds of people.

I’ve also got the subjects for my second year project lined up. There are 4. I am still waiting to receive consent forms from two of them. One has already begun recording files for me. The rest will begin sometime next week.

This is a short update this time. But better short than nothing!

The second year project class mostly questioned the value of this data to researchers and designers. I said that my goal was to explore new and interesting combinations of social web technologies and usagepatterns (implicit information sharing, interactions with others, etc.), rather than evaluating how the general population uses these tools today. Consequently, I will collect data from early adopters, or “lead–users”—individuals who have worked out methods and stable patterns of using such systems beneficially in their daily lives.Early adopters are the first users of new Web tools. As such, they can provide a critical perspective on the technology state space. Lead–users may also be the developers of new technology; understanding their usage and behaviors patterns may inform us of the evolution of technology. In fact, by studying their activities, our research may additionally influence technology development. Finally, as Web technologies and access to the Internet become more pervasive, the tools and behaviors observed in early adopters today may eventually become widespread in the general population. (Does that address the question? Perhaps somewhat..and perhaps it still needs tobe developed more thoroughly?)

I have also begun coordinating my research “team” (including 4 undergraduate assistants). Their first task involves performing a pilot test of my data collection procedures. I gave them directions for capturing some of their online activity along with a few “deadlines.” The biggest problem I see for data collection at the moment involves uploading large data files to a shared server for the research team to access. I’ve looked into several online services that allow data storage and sharing: civil netizen seems the most promising at this point, although Jim may set up an FTP server for me. The undergraduates and I are planning to test the recording software and upload procedures this coming week. Subsequently, we will review the (pilot) data together and discuss technical and/or research issuesthat may have arisen. From this, I hope some of the undergrads will begin brainstorming interview questions, while others may begin reviewing the relevant literature.

I am back at PARC for the next two weeks, where I will focus my time on the enterprise tagging research project. However, in this time, I also plan to contact (and attempt to recruit) several participants for the UCSD study.

However, I have also been busy applying for funding and fellowships. I submitted an application for travel funds from the ACM group on Women in Computing and from the UCSD Social Science Dean’s fund. I also applied for a 3-year fellowship from AT&T Labs, and submitted an application for a summer internship at PARC (again). Hope all this work will pay off somehow!

Per Leif’s advice, I’m going to keep these updates shorter. Although today I decided to attach the abstract for my second year project. Any comments/suggestions/advice is greatly appreciated! (Or you can stop reading now.)

I have begun to explore the behaviors, goals, and motivations of early adopters, or power users, as they engage with Web services and public communities online. A majority of Web systems used by these early adopters provide light-weight mechanisms for creating and saving new Web content, essentially providing an implicit means of sharing. In fact, several users reported that they intended to share information with small groups of known friends and even with unknown extended communities, even though sharing occurred as a side–effect of their primary actions. Furthermore, some informants indicated that their continued involvement served as a means of “self–endorsement,” to maintain relationships and accrue social capital. Regardless of the actual user motivations, these online behaviors have the potential of creating repositories of knowledge that would benefit information discovery and learning by others. However, this preliminary work has only considered the perspective of the individual who is sharing information. Therefore, I would like to extend data collection to look at the behaviors and interactions among a small group of online friends (4–5 individuals), to observe the cycle of information as it is shared and received by different members of the group. I will ask the entire group to video record their online activities for the same 2–week period, and I will subsequently interview participants about their behavior and the behaviors and perceived influence of others in the group. While my main purpose is to document the diffuse, yet hopefully overlapping, activities of a group of individuals as they engage with new Web systems and with each other, I also hope to explore the social and cognitive motivations for their actions and sharing behaviors.     

These last two weeks, I have been working at PARC with the intention of getting a new project started (with Ed Chi in the Augmented Social Cognition group). Generally speaking, the project will look at tagging in the enterprise. More specifically, we are interested in the information search, retrieval, and sharing practices among individuals in a workgroup with the hope of designing social tagging systems that help enterprise users with their information and sharing needs. This past week, I met with folks from a few small companies (dotherightthing, Bolt|Peters, and Get Satisfaction) and got mixed reviews on their potential to provide us with the kind of information we’re looking for. They are open to helping with our research, but the companies are relatively small (less than 10 people) and they mostly don’t use social tagging systems as part of their routine. After these meetings, we decided to pursue two different approaches for this project.

1) Distribute a critical-incident style survey, asking targeted questions about search, retrieval, and sharing behavior of individuals within workgroups. We think this could provide interesting data about current behaviors and specifically about behaviors that we are interested in. It will be challenging to compose appropriate questionnaires, but I can work on this in the coming weeks and will test it out on some pilot users to make sure the questions are specific enough. Obviously, knowing the person’s role in the company and the nature of the company will be interesting/important here so we might be able to create profiles of different styles of behavior. I will look into Survey Monkey and Mechanical Turk (and others–suggestions?) for distributing surveys and paying subjects. I will also consider recruiting participants by using the Ethnio system that Bolt|Peters has developed.

2) However, we still think that studying workgroup behaviors directly could help inform the design of a tagging system. In fact, looking at work practices of individuals as they share information across (more remote) work groups could be particularly informative. Perhaps we could observe (and/or interview) folks at Xerox, PARC, or even the Xerox group in NY. Since we don’t have contacts or a strategy for this lined up quite yet, we thought that we could initially pursue the survey and try to supplement it with data like this in the coming weeks.

Additionally, I worked with Stu Card to revise our CHI’08 paper, “Augmented Information Assimilation: Social and Algorithmic Web Aids for the Information Long Tail.” We presented the paper at the ISL Dialog; I imagine the talk will closely resemble the talk we give at CHI in April. Hopefully this will have been good, advanced preparation for that.

I have also been brainstorming my second year project and writing the final proposal. I hope to finish the proposal THIS WEEK. I’ll be discussing my project and plans in the HCI-DCOG Lab meeting on Wednesday and possibly revise my final draft after hearing other folks’ opinions/suggestions. More on this next week. I will be in San Diego through February 1 and plan to spend this time really focusing on the second year project.

Questions, comments, concerns? Let me know