Brains working towards machine consciousness

This is an edited extract from a forthcoming book chapter about the use of Folksonomological Reification to examine and bridge the onto-folksonomical divide. That all makes more sense in the context of the full chapter, though, and I won't go into it further here. The chapter is co-authored with Shirley Williams, Karsten Lundqvist and Edwin Porter-Daniels.

"Social Software"

The term "social software" can be used to cover a wide range of software tools which enable interaction between people (Boyd 2003). These can support community in terms of providing a common point of focus, such as with the folksonomy based tools like del.icio.us, or by specifically providing tools to support social behaviour, such as with Facebook.

Social bookmarking sites provide tools for users to keep track of sites they have visited (e.g. Clipmarks and del.icio.us), use 'tags' to act as aid memoires when accessing them again, and in many cases add comments to them. The primary purpose is to ease the individual user's browsing, but because the bookmarks can be made public, there is an additional pay-off. Users can browse through other members' public bookmarks and tags, and thus make discoveries that would have taken them longer otherwise. Additionally, they can get an idea of whether a resource will be useful (or interesting) to them by reading any associated comments, or by recognising a pattern of common interests between their respective bookmarking habits. These sites also typically allow for 'connections' to be made between individuals using the service (e.g. 'followers', 'friends', 'fans').

Social networking sites are web-based tools facilitating social interaction. The facilities they provide vary, but typically involve a profile page, and various means of keeping in touch with other people using the site. They are, in effect, an extension of the older forum sites, with more of a focus on person-centred, rather than subject centred, communication.

In both cases, people adopt roles within the social context of the community using the site. Each user can take on multiple roles, and because the sites are not hierarchically designed, they are generally free to change roles, or position themselves (Davies 1990). It is useful to create a taxonomy to help with describing these roles, as described below.

Before describing the naming convention being proposed, a method of analysis for the relationships between community, technology (tools) and users is considered. Activity Theory, as expanded by Engeström, describes systems as comprising 6 parts, often represented by the 'activity triangle':

This fits the domain of social software, where the different components all have effects on each other. The folksonomy created by users contributions to del.icio.us, for instance actually forms a tool itself, which is then used by other members of the user-base to determine what meaning people give to resources within their own contexts, and by extension, the meaning of a resource to the community as a whole.

A modified form of the Activity Theory relationships brings out the key relationships in the interactions in this type of system (figure to follow later)

In terms of the communities which form around social networks and social utilities, there would be no community without the tools, which is why there is no link in the model directly joining the individual Subjects with the Community.

It is hoped that the framework may be useful in other scenarios, such as to help a Technology Steward, as described by Wenger et al, analyse a potential technology for use by a community of practice.

Individuals and Communities

Investigating the nature of the wisdom of the crowd in loosely connected communities

We define Folksonomology as the study of the formation of rules by the 'wisdom of the crowd' (Surowiecki 2004).  This enables insight into the meaning the folk (individuals acting separately) attach to resources, and also, through analysis of the dynamic behaviours involved, allows for a view to be gained of the way they reach consensus, as well as the roles they play within the group.  With the read-write web, users tend to become more of a 'prosumer', producing and consuming (web) content.  Users of social bookmarking, mashup and social network sites fall into this category, creating content for their own purposes which can then be consumed, re-purposed and re-published by others (assuming sufficient rights are permitted in the licensing of the original content).

Supporting the analysis with a taxonomy

Users who bookmark content for their own purposes use tags which mean something to themselves (Bookmarker).  Users sometimes tag in order to heighten awareness (Explorer) of content for other people.  This can be to raise the profile of the material they have posted, or to bring the attention of a group to something which they think might be of interest.  In these cases, the tagger can make use of tags which are pre-agreed with their community (a tagging-handbook is a way of maintaining a list of such tags), or which may be found easily by others.  This tends to generate either very specific tags (typically neologisms, and potentially containing numeric characters), combinations of tags, or very generic ones.  A third role the posting individual may take is that of an Editor – someone who adds tags to content which are missing from the existing corpus.  Fourthly a Translator may add tags in languages other than the original.

The ability to see the existing set of tags for an item may tend to make many users select from existing tags.  Whilst this may contribute to a more coherent body of tag-content pairings it decreases the individuality of the tags and moves away from the concept of a folksonomy. The individual may accept a tag suggestion despite it not being the word they might have used if left to their own devices. The resulting tag cloud has a narrower focus, which may not express the richness of the content in the same way it would if they were not prompted in a particular direction when choosing the tags.  The strongest 'defence' against the suggested tag is to foster the Editor role in users - people who will examine the existing tag set and expand it to include less obvious, but still relevant, tags.

These roles are not yet well defined, and the reader may well be able to identify many others or hold the nomenclature in dispute.  The names, and indeed descriptions, are there to stimulate discussion - the 'final definitions' will come about as a folksonomy of sorts.

The individual as part of the community

Any community has norms (including hierarchical rules of behaviour and cultural prejudices, amongst many others), a lingo, ideals and shared experience (Maanen et al 1979) and the social network, and social networking communities (Shirky 2008) are not significantly different (Benkler 2006).

Shared experience is of particular interest here - in common with real-world social networks and communities people move from one online community to another.  When they join a community, they do not share the same set of experience of that community (or, indeed, anything else) as the long standing members. Forums used to recommend 'lurking' to get a feel for the community, but the social networking sites are more about self-expression, so users get involved earlier in their membership.  This provides a socio-technical system which is closer to the folksonomic view, because individuals are not expected to conform so completely with the norms of the group.

Personally tagged content can be formatted in the form of a discussion thread. Google mail allows the user to do just this, and to view the content filtered by the tags they have chosen to apply to the contents of their mailbox. As tagging becomes more widespread in systems with a social aspect, it is possible to use the tags to follow a topic, just as one would have done on the forums, but from a widely distributed set of sources - and this facilitates each user in becoming more of a prosumer.  If a user's contribution gets discovered by others, it can be bookmarked and re-tagged with the terms that the explorers who found it think represent it best - and then reviewers can use it as the basis for their own précis, which in turn can be discovered by others.  The individual is now able to follow their line of thought and allow the vox populi to determine the merit of their contribution.

People adopt different roles or positions (Davies 1990), with attendant behaviours, to suit the context of the environment they are in (figure 8).  In terms of a social network site, for example, several roles can be identified.  There are Explorers, who find content which is outside the local network, and post links to it, for their community to see.  Then there are Writers who author their own content, a subset of whom are Diarists (or Bloggers).  Bridging the gap between the Explorers and Writers are the Reviewers, who take existing content, analyse it, and contribute their own views. 

Any role can be in a specific domain, such as an Academic Explorer, who explores issues relating to their field of academic study, or a News Explorer who explores the recent news articles, providing an index for their community. Splitting the names this way allows for easier recognition of patterns between communities which operate in different domains. If two communities share the same roles, but with different domains attached to them, and yet one community operates without, say, any Diarists, this can provide insights into whether the Diarist is an essential role, or whether there is a domain specific need for diarists in one domain but not the other. The intent is to make the analysis of ad hoc communities easier.

There are also Socialites, who add content in the context of conversations with other members of the community, and Readers who don't add content, but consume it.  With systems which allow for tagging, there is also a Classifier role, of people who dedicate time to producing meaningful and consistent tags for content.  The Ambassador makes connections between multiple services, posting content from one to communities which might find it interesting. There are also the Troll, and the Flamer, (both names inherited from usenet communities), and many other roles, and any individual may take on any of these roles at any time within any community.

Roles within a community can be composites of several basic role types.  Important to online communities in particular, the Technology Steward role (Wenger, White, Smith 2007 and Wenger 1998) is to select and configure technology, and provide support for it, within a community, for the benefit of the community, not just because the technology 'is neat'.  This role comprises multiple separate strands, such as the Explorer (in finding new technologies which may support the community), the Reviewer (in analysing the suitability of the technology for the way the group works), a Leader (in driving adoption of technologies which will provide benefit, and gaining consensus to avoid technologies which will not) and Mentor (providing support for the group members as they get to grips with the technology in the context of the group).

In communities of practice, the role of Ethnographer, suggested by Smith (private correspondence, Smith 2007), takes on the task of examining how the technology is used within the context of the group.  This role is effectively a Reviewer, but instead of observing the content produced by the community, they observe the practices and tools and review them.  The Ethnographer is in a good position to observe the way the tools change through use.  In terms of communities supported by folksonomical tools, these changes can happen in two ways.  Modifications can be made to the design of the actual tool (software) which supports the folksonomies which allow the community to express their implicit ontologies.  But, more importantly, the folksonomies are tools which the community use, and these are highly dynamic in nature.  A folksonomy is not being used as a tool unless it is changing.  This motivates an analysis of socio-technical communities and tools using the modified Activity Theory framework, and a discussion of trust networks within communities.

Glossary

Flamer – someone who engages in trading excessive retaliatory insults.

Folksonomical – of, or relating to, one or more folksonomies.

Folksonomology – the study of folksonomies.

Folksonomological – of, or relating to, the study of folksonomies.

Folksonomy - representations of domains gathered though processes performed by many people, such as tagging content.

Lingo - the language and speech, especially the jargon, slang, or argot, of a particular field, group, or individual.

Ontology - a formal specification of a domain, defining and specifying the different classes of individuals that form the domain, the actual individuals and the properties (relationships) of the individuals.

Ontology-Folksonomy Divide – the division between ontologies and folksonomies.

Prosumer – someone who both consumes and produces a commodity, such as web content, as used by Tapscott in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Penguin, 2006

Social Network – specifically here, online sites fostering social interactivity.

Tag – a word or composite word, possibly with characters other than letters, that an individual chooses to use in relation to material for the purposes of helping them find it again, or in helping others to find it.
Tag cloud – a graphical representation of the use of tags in a particular domain, generally using the font size of a tag to represent its frequency of use.

Troll – usenet term for someone who deliberately provokes argument, and historically not always considered to be a bad role.

References

The full list of references from the chapter has been included; not all are used within this post.

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