Month: March 2009

Presentation at the National Research Council Canada

090321_nrcc3On Monday, I will give another version of the talk “From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work” that I gave at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, this time at the National Research Council Canada Institute for Information Technology in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It’s good to have another opportunity to present  and get quality feedback on these ideas that have been keeping me busy for such a long time.

Abstract

Inspiration is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for collaborative communities to work. Such communities often make use of complex Internet-based tool systems. In these systems, work gets distributed over many tools, often leading to the fragmentation of communicative acts. To address this problem, explicit attention needs to be paid to community activation. We outline a conceptual model of online collaborative communities. We introduce the use of collaboration patterns for defining socio-technical design solutions for activation problems. We illustrate the approach by discussing the results from a digital class experiment. Applications ranging from e-government to scientific collaborations are discussed.

The talk will webcast live: Mon March 23, 10:30 am – noon Atlantic Daylight Time:

https://iitconnect01.iit.nrc.ca/aldodemoor

Distant participants should be able to ask questions via chat.

(The archived version of my talk is available at: https://iitconnect01.iit.nrc.ca/p14825022/)

Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems

Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems

090316_soctech_research_handbook1ISBN: 978-1-60566-264-0; 1,034 pp; March 2009

Published under the imprint Information Science Reference (formerly Idea Group Reference)

http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=33019

Edited by: Brian Whitworth, Massey University, New Zealand and Aldo de Moor, CommunitySense, The Netherlands

DESCRIPTION

The focus of this book is not how to make technology more efficient, nor even how technology harms or helps society, but rather how to successfully combine society and technology into socio-technical performance.

The Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems provides a state-of-the-art summary of knowledge in this evolving, multi-disciplinary field distinctive in its variety of international authors’ perspectives, depth and breadth of scholarship, and combination of practical and theoretical views. This noteworthy Handbook of Research extends a useful collection for anyone interested in modern socio-technincal systems where knowledge of social principles can mean the difference between success and failure.

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“Brian Whitworth and Aldo de Moor have gathered valuable material from an international panel of experts who guide readers through the analysis, design and implementation of socio-technical systems. It will be widely useful in defining issues in engineering, computing, management, organization, government policy, and ethics. The practical guidance and fresh theories can inspire a new generation of designers and researchers to catalyze even more potent forms of human collaboration.”

– Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, USA

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TOPICS COVERED

  • Agent-based collaborative e-learning
  • Anti-social networking
  • Community collective efficacy
  • Community network research and design
  • Cyber security
  • Cybercrime variants
  • Integrated teams in virtual environments
  • Organizational and software structure
  • Participation in online communities
  • Remote participation in research
  • Social derivation of technical systems
  • Social networking systems
  • Social study of computer science
  • Social support for online learning
  • Socio-technical communities
  • Socio-technical design
  • Virtual collaboration and community
  • Workflows in software development

For more information about Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking, you can view the title information sheet at http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/pdf/33019.pdf.
To view the Table of Contents and a complete list of contributors online go to http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=33019&v=tableOfContents
You can also view the first chapter of the publication at http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/excerpts/33019.pdf