Social Media and Gaming Mechanics

Great slide below by Amy Jo Kim. It describes the intersection of that which makes gaming addictive and social media. She defines game mechanics as "the systems and features that make games fun, compelling, and addictive." Those are:

1. Collecting - Impressive Collections = Bragging Rights (think 'Connections' on LinkedIn); People want to complete collections (only X more to go...);
   
2. Points - Game points from the system and Social points from other players; Redeemable points drive loyalty; Leaderboards drive player behavior; Levels punctuate the game experience and open features.
   
3. Feedback - Accelerates mastery and makes it fun. Social feedback drives engagement.
   
4. Exchanges - Implicit or Explicit
   
5. Customization - Of characters and interfaces

Gaming is also influencing Social Media with the following trends, according to Kim:

• Accessible
• Recombinant
• Syndicated

Here's the presentation:

Fun in Functional 2009

View more presentations from amyjokim. (tags: social media)

UserVoice: Collaborative User Feedback

If you haven't heard of UserVoice and you develop anything online, you're in for a treat. UserVoice is collaborative product feedback done right. I'm using it at GradShare and can't say enough about how it's helped us engage users and prioritize work. They offer a bunch of service levels but you can get the basic level for free and if you have a logo image handy it takes about five minutes to get a branded instance up and running.

I'm thinking about using it internally to gather and rank feedback on questions I have but their privacy options so far require you to know a priori (pre-send) who you want to contribute (e.g. participant email), which isn't realistic in large organizations.

Boundary Objects

Came across a great concept while reading the article embedded below. The concept is the 'boundary object', which seems to have been around for a while in cognitive science. The basic idea is that in order to move beyond the limits of the individual mind to create successful collaborations, we need to create externalizations of our thinking and work that others can interact with much as we interact with our own thoughts internally. By externalizing our thinking in the form of a boundary object we also gain the potential to get critique and feedback from collaborators with differing skill sets. In other words the externalization acts as a common boundary with which multiple people can interact. The result is a synthesis of new thoughts, insights, and ideas framed around the boundary object.

Interestingly enough, this post is itself a boundary object!

Transcending the Individual Human Mind

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work collaboration

Social technology in large companies boosts productivity

There's not any data cited in the video below to back it up but the take away is that large multinational businesses can benefit from inclusion of software that supports connections between employees. Main themes cited were the importance of transparency, expertise identification, and associated productivity gains. Video is about 2 mins.

Is it worth it to give your personal information to Change.gov?

I just came across the Citizen's Briefing Book on Change.gov and was all ready to participate when it asked me for the following information in order to register:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Zip Code

Their privacy policy says that they track IP addresses and then has the following little ditty:

It is our general policy not to make Personal Information available to anyone other than our employees, staff, and agents.

Doesn't that mean the entire government of the United States? What's a citizen to do if you don't want to have your personal information known but you want your voice heard and your right to participate? Or, more simply put, is it worth it to give your personal information to Change.gov?

I Hope So Too....NYT lets you vote for Hopes but not add your own

The New York Times launched a nice looking system that takes hopes for the new president from 200 people they interviewed and lets you vote for any you agree with. You can see it here. One thing really bothers me about it though and that's that you can't add another 'Hope' beyond those that were identified by the initial 200 people. For the record, I wanted to add "Resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine" but the closest I could find was "World Peace" or perhaps "Global Image"...lame.

It's important for systems like this to embrace the notion that users will not just want to click a button and support what has been. Editorially, it's certainly a lot easier to have a static pool of 'Hopes' but it really limits the benefit of the system in my opinion when you offer a system that makes people want to participate and then takes away or too heavily limits their voice.

All that said, this is a great example of using a collaborative system to aggregate opinions and raise awareness and I applaud the Times for it. Hoping to see more.

Update I: On closer inspection, the Times does allow you to add a new hope using the Comments feature. This isn't being aggregated into the 'Hope Wall' but does have a 'Recommend' feature in the Comments to up vote what you agree with. Definitely better, but not as good as it could have been.

Nature Publishing Group Launches Scitable for Undergraduate Genetics

Nature publishing group has launched Scitable, an online "collaborative learning space" targeted at undergraduate students and teachers interested in genetics. This is the latest in a series of social information tools that Nature has launched. Past offerings include Connotea (collaborative reference management), Nature Networks (science social network), and their Open Text Mining Initative (scholarly content common data exchange standards).

Scitable is extremely feature rich and supports both synchronous (messaging) and asynchronous (questions, discussions) communications. Here are some key elements:

• The core data model seems to have Documents; Topics>Sub-Topics; People; Groups; Discussions; and Questions. They also have something called a 'Learning Path' which I can't really understand. That data model and architecture will enable Scitable to scale to other areas such as Biology. In this first instance Topic=Genetics and SubTopics={Evolutionary Genetics; Gene Expression & Regulation; Chromosomes & Cytogenetics; ...}.
  
• Each SubTopic has an editor. There are 9 Sub-Topics currently. There is some editorial overlap in the Sub-Topics. The Genetics Topic doesn't seem to have an editorial board that I could find.
  
• Over 150 undergraduate level articles explaining key concepts in Genetics. This content has been bundled by Nature (more editorial work there) into packets that professors can add to classroom groups.

What Nature is doing with Scitable is expand the notion of "publishing" to include the creation of environments that support understanding through user content creation. They're also offering core infrastructure to support collaboration amongst the genetics research and teaching community.

Update I: Here's the Press release from Nature Education. Also here's a quote from Nature Education Head Vikram Savkar:

“Research supports the fact that while science students are still using textbooks and library resources for their science classes, they are now depending increasingly on the internet. However, reliability of information is a concern. Our goal is to provide an authoritative and compelling science resource on the internet for students and faculty anywhere in the world.”

Currently Reading: Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

Title: Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

This is an edited collection of works on the progress in cyberinfrastructure and cyberscience to support distributed research across global research networks. Includes background on terminology (e.g. the difference between an extended research group and a collaboratory); results from successes and failures in subject-specific and multidiscipinary collaborations and data sharing projects; interviews with designers and participants; and an ontology of collaboration types that have been tried in the sciences across some 200 projects. I'm only into the first few chapters but is a great read so far. I was particularly struck by a concept put forward by Michael Nentwich that cyberscience is science that takes place in a the medium of information and communication technology as opposed to the traditional physical medium or cognitive medium (thoughtspace).

There's also a local contributor (University of Washington), Dr. Matthew Bietz.