Which brings me to another HICSS-42 paper. This one reports the development and use of a social networking system for IBM employees called Beehive. Beehive was designed to facilitate "people sensemaking" within the company. It has only a small subset of users so far, but it seems to have enabled connections between employees who would not have otherwise connected. I like some of the features of the system such as "top 5" lists and free-form profiles.  

Boyd, Danah; "Autistic Social Software", The Best Software Writing I, Apress (2005) pp. 35-45.

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.  Her argument should be familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, detailing why current design methodology does not work.  Seems like an indictment of positivist design of social software.

The author claims that the way that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is designed to be used models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not fit anyone's actual needs, and in fact people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.

• Ripping apart my lit review "E-mail as shared context in virtual organizations," re-reading my sources (making sure that I paraphrased and quoted correctly, and seeing if I need to go back to earlier sources), and looking for newer work.  I'm looking for some theoretical foundations, and I'm looking to strengthen the flow.
• Simultaneously, I'm looking to cut the length of the review in half so that I can use it (or parts of it) as the first part of the work product for IS360.  It's 20 pages now, and I need it to be 7-9.
• Thinking about how I can do a first study/experiment based on what I'm learning.  I'm interested in seeing how visualizations of knowledge extracted from e-mail archives does or does not make members of a virtual team more effective communicators or collaborators.  I've been thinking about using the mailing list archives of open source projects as a test case: generate some static (at first) visualizations from those archives, recruit some people to act in the role of potential new members of the project, and hand them some specific tasks to perform.  Give some people the visualizations + mailing list archives, and make others use the raw mailing list archives, and see what the difference in task performance between the two populations is.
• Learning who the big people (the "100 important people in the field") in e-mail, collaboration via e-mail, and e-mail visualization and analysis are.  Thus far: Fernanda Viegas, Marc Smith, Martin Wattenberg, Nicolas Duchenaut.
  

CommentPress is a WordPress theme that allows readers to add comments to each paragraph of a document.  Comments made on a paragraph appear in a column to the right of the body of the text, aligned with the paragraph, so that the reader can read the document and see the comments relatively in situ. The makers of CommentPress intend authors to post long works (articles or books) in sections to a CommentPress site, and then to invite people to comment much as an editor would, paragraph by paragraph in the context of the text.  Alternatively, the author can invite comenters to give very targeted comments, and then readers to read the text less like the post and response of blogging and somewhat more like a conversation, or a text with related and well-situated sidebars.

As a collaborative editing paradigm, I think it would be interesting to compare how effective this is compared with the Wikipedia :Talk pages (see also [1]), with which comments are closely associated with the text being written, but are not visible  while one is reading the text.

[1] Viegas, FB; Wattenberg, M; Kriss, J; van Ham, F; "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, (2007) pp. 78-78.