PICNIC 2008 report

Open innovation at PICNIC 2008
Three sunny days in September. Thousands of sunny people, including myself, gather for a three day event at the Westerpark in Amsterdam. PICNIC 2008 has started, with a promising program filled with famous speakers, writers, businessmen and women, leaders, and interesting geeks. People who made it in business, technology, world peace, or online. Great to listen to, and above all, inspirational. A pretty expensive type of inspiration I must say, with people paying over €1200 to get a three day pass.

Fortunately, I was able to attend a special track, called Enquiring Minds, for researchers or people with an special academic interest in a relevant field. Which could be anything, considering the wide range of topics covered by the conference. 25 of us academic researchers, scientists, or all-round investigators gathered that beautiful morning in an old but nicely renovated building on terrain of the (late) Westergasfabriek.

Each participant was asked to explain his/her research to the others in three minutes. Some interesting topics were covered, ranging from the (the future of) arts and media, internet security, gaming and education, social software, co-evolution of knowledge production and ICT, and many more.

I explained the others that my own research aims at trying to describe and model the relationship between contributions (in online networks; i.e. blog posts) and the contributor in terms of trust, quality, and expertise. Have a look at the illustration below. It tries to depict a person who is contributing content in an online network, possibly within an organization. People, both experts and non-experts, may use (read/visit) and evaluate (rate) this content. How do expertise of the users of this content, and the type and intensity of use, can be used to profile both the contributor as well as the contribution? Quite a BIG question, I know, maybe that’s the reason I have not really started it yet (need some focus?!).

Unfortunately, I have not really been at talks of people really focusing on this topic (merely acknowledging the need for research, which is good), but there was a lot of action on social media, and success factors. In my job at a small software company (doing exactly the thing I intend to research), we create social software that empowers the user to contribute, the first and most essential step needed in order to measure the mentioned relationships (between “contribution-use/users-contributor”). It is therefore very important to know what makes software social, why people use it, when a social software project fails. So that’s has been the red line of my conference, and the subject of this short record of the event.

So what makes social software really social, what is successful and what is not?
I read several publications about this subject, and was interested in how these theoretical elaborations correspond with the recommendations, issues, and notes mentioned by some speakers on the conference. Some of these people were researchers, some of them were entrepreneurs who experienced success themselves. They explained trends and explained how the Internet and relating technologies offer great opportunities for more open, transparent, innovative, more efficient, and distributed ways of innovation and collaboration. And how we are moving towards a more people centered online environment, where friends in common, proximity, shared taste and objects matter. In the following sections, I deal with this in putting forward

• criteria that concern the design of the platform or processes that empower people to contribute and make connections, but also to sustain innovation and collaboration; and
• some examples that have been successful and explaining the reasons of their success.

These results are all derived from my experiences at PICNIC, so it will clearly lack in some respects, but I hope it gives a nice overview of the current mindset of online collaboration.

Criteria for designing the software and the processes
Software alone may be engaging and provide with incentives for people to share and connect, but some institutional mechanisms and process rules should be built in as well to sustain and improve collaboration. The last section, with examples, show how different initiatives have adopted these criteria;

• Recognition; people want recognition for their contributions. Recognition from peers is even a more powerful incentive and mechanisms must be built in to ensure this;
• Social object; without a social object that connects the users of the platform, you have a problem. This theme was recurrent and relates to having a shared purpose and focus;
• Processes and tools for contributing; there are numerous tools available that can empower people to connect, contribute, and share. Still, these should be designed and named such that it truly corresponds to the ideas, wishes, and incentives of the users. This means accommodating for different types of contexts and users, and their respective motivation;
• Different task sizes (contribute more or less), like in Open Source communities;
• Modularity of contributions allow you to connect and combine contributions to increase the aggregate value and let people built on top of each other´s contributions;
• Language that corresponds with the social context of the users: It has to be crystal clear what a service offers (like eBay website: Buy|Sell), what you can do on a platform, and what the added value is;
• Involve people differently, and in different stages of the process;
• Create different roles based on previous contributions and feedback by the community.
• Nodal points refer to the methods and intensity of interactions of the service and user: What should trigger interaction or intervention with the user? When should you send an update, and notification, or something else? It is important only to give information the user cares about. Nodal points are the filters that are used to put forward only the relevant stuff for every occasion.
• Policies and structures for making decisions prevent chaos, as can be seen at Wikipedia. This remains an extremely difficult challenge (Wikipedia is an ongoing design effort) for the future of collaboration.

Clearly, the above list is not extensive, but it’s what I picked up by listening to the people on stage. More lessons can be drawn by looking at the various examples.

Examples of social software
We have many examples of services where there is a very specific and clear social object that connects the users, including the relevant tools (and right language used) to incentivize contributions, sharing, and creation of more value. Dopplr (frequent travelers), Nikeplus (running), and MiMoA (modern architecture and traveling) are just a few of them.

Furthermore, there are numerous projects that not so much focus on a shared social object or purpose, but offer the tools for collaboration and intend to crowdsource their communities.

• Mechanical Turk is a service offered by Amazon to distribute tasks among a huge online community. The most important characteristic of the success of this service is the granularity of tasks, and the ability to combine tasks to make the whole larger than the sum of all parts.
• Nederland P is a Dutch initiative for user-generated videos, an advanced YouTube, that offers a distribution channel and support for people who contribute high-quality content. Additionally, they have different roles that are based on reputation, number of subscribers, etc.
• Aswarmofangels.com intends to create a movie for one million English pounds (1.8 million US dollars) by sourcing contributions (financial and in terms of decision-making) of a thousands of people worldwide. In this project, the focus is not on getting as many participants as possible, but slowing the participation down by focusing more on quality.
• Openad.net is a successful crowdsourcing advertisement project that allows anyone to really make money out of open and closed assignments. An interesting aspect is that it does not intend to replace the existing marketing industry, but it rather partners with it, changing the organizational structures and vision.
• Similarly, Sellaband.com is a successful startup in the music business that sources the musical creativity of anyone with a computer. Anyone can invest (community funding) in an artist or group in order to make this group successful and share in the revenues.
• Blurb.com is just a nice tool to create online books and portfolios, but it also keeps the creations for sale in their online shop, with all revenues going to the creators.
• Finally, Blender.org concerns a true open source project creating open source animation, and also advancing the open source tools and software to be able to create the animation. This reinforces each other, and the availability of support and tools contribute to the success of the initiative.

Like most of the mentioned initiatives, you can see a shared self-interest of the users, which is important to consider. This can be money (Mechanical Turk, OpenAd), but also something very different like seeing nice new architecture when you visit a city in Europe (MiMoA). This concludes the overview of ideas and lessons learned at PICNIC ‘08 about succesful social applications for online collaboration, innovation, and other activities. As said, literature will offer more perspectives, but it’s interesting to see which things are brought forward by speakers on a innovative conference as PICNIC.

Changing education

Besides finalizing my thesis on the future of Delft Open Courseware (expect the final report medio-April), I am throwing out some bait to catch a PhD fish somewhere. I rewrote my earlier concept (which I posted on the LabSpace forum) into a 4 page draft proposal for the research I would love to conduct.



I came across some interesting posts about the structural change that happens in education, or whatever, society. And these posts have much in common with the thing I want to research, which is the reason I post it here.

First of all, Stephen Downes speaks about “Open Source Assessment“…

What we can expect in an open system of assessment is that achievement will be in some way ‘recognized’ by a community. This removes assessment from the hands of ‘experts’ who continue to ‘measure’ achievement. And it places assessment into the hands of the wider community. Individuals will be accorded credentials as they are recognized, by the community, to deserve them.

How does this happen? It beaks down into two parts:
- first, a mechanism whereby a person’s accomplishments may be displayed and observed.
- second, a mechanism which constitutes the actual recognition of those accomplishments.

Furthermore;

Eventually, over time, a person will accumulate a ‘profile’ (much as described in ‘Resource Profiles’). We can see this already in systems like Yahoo Games, where an individual’s profile lists the games they play and the tournaments they’ve won.

In other cases, the evaluation of achievement will resemble more a reputation system. Through some combination of inputs, from a more or less define community, a person may achieve a composite score called a ‘reputation’.

In still other cases, organizations - such as universities, professional associations, governments and companies - may grant specific credentials. In such cases, the person may put forward their portfolios and profiles for consideration for the credential.

The piece on “Resource Profiles” is recommended for people interested in the subject.

Then we have a discussion by Jeff Cobb about an online spoken presentation by George Siemens about a World without Courses (if you’re in a hurry, start at slide 21). This interesting post deals with the difficulties of assessing value in the world informal learning that has proliferated on the Web. Siemens suggests two possibilities: reputation points and referral systems.

The first involves individuals gaining reputation points over time based upon their participation in learning conversations and activities. The process, as I understand it, would be similar to how sellers on eBay or reviewers on Amazon build reputation, though Siemens points out that we would need to know the identity and credentials of the person assigning reputation points in order for the value of points to be fully assessed. Reputation, in other words, should not be arbitrary.

The second has more to do with drawing connections between learning content and activities using a process similar to the recommendation system at Amazon, i.e., “The person who bought ‘x’ also bought ‘y.’” In the world of learning, this process might translate to “The person who read this, also read this” or “The person who studied this thinker also studied this thinker.” I’m not entirely certain I follow Siemens line of thinking here, but I believe the point is to ensure a certain quality, consistency, and intensity of learning in a particular subject area over time.

Jeff Cobb adds to this the possibility of old-fashioned assessment, certification, and testifying. He also mentions

An association with a strong enough brand within its particular niche may possess sufficient authority to play a valuable validation role on its own.

And that is what I think too. In a way, people are brands, and if someone’s reputation (=brand) is high, his or her word is believed… He or she can then perform duties as assessment, and certification.

The main difficulty, according to Siemens and Cobbs, is how to put all the pieces together in a cohesive way.

We see some similarities in the described issues. This makes my proposal relevant, especially considering the question on how to create and assess a Virtual ID, something the above authors ask as well. Any suggestions, or rather, any good research question is much welcome.

OpenLearn 2007 - Learning the open source way (day 1)

Ellen Sjoer and I went to the OpenLearn conference last week in Milton Keynes, England. The conference about open content in education had four main themes;

• Research agenda
• Models of informal learning in the world of open education.
• Cross-cultural issues of open education.
• Research methods for online research of informal learning.

• Sustainability
• Sustainability models for open educational resources.
• Production approaches and costs for open educational resources.
• Methods for embedding open content in education.

• User experience
• User experience with open content.
• Case studies illustrating user models.
• Accessibility of open education.

• Software and tools
• Tools and software supporting open education.
• Social software for open education.
• Mobile technologies in open education.

This post will treat the experiences of the first day: a FLOSScom meeting about the principles of open source, and how these can be applied in a formal educational context.

With some delay Ellen and I arrived at the session that concerned the question whether open source (OS) principles can be applied in educational settings, specifically for the creation of open content. An interesting topic introduced by researcher Andreas Meiszner of FLOSSCom. FLOSS means Free-Libre Open Source Software. His research focuses on

1. Identification of factors that contribute to successful knowledge construction in informal learning communities, such as the FLOSS communities.
   
2. Analysis of the effectiveness of FLOSS-like learning communities in a formal educational setting.
   
3. Provision of case studies, scenarios and guidelines for teachers and decision-makers on how to successfully embed such learning communities within formal educational environments to enhance student progression, retention and achievement.
   
4. Evaluation of the project and dissemination of the results of the project to the wider community.
   

Andreas prepared two presentations to support this workshop. The first one is a basic overview on learning related aspects within open source software communities and the second one tries to model FLOSS-like learning scenarios for educational settings. In explaining the characteristics of learning in OS communities and formal education, he mentions the following;

Andreas made a very interesting overview of applying FLOSS principles in a formal educational environment and explains how such an environment will overcome some of the mentioned problems:

The discussion touched upon different relevant issues:

• Quality assurance and evaluation
  (for both content and learner). Some emphasized the high importance of experts, and doubted that an anarchistic OS environment for learning would enhance learning and learning resources. Others explained that
  
• a faster feedback loop on resources and questions/problems improves quality;
• quality depends on the context of learning, hence cannot be determined for others;
  
• advanced rating and tagging mechanisms can be implemented to overcome some of these perceived issues;
  
• there is a social element of learning embedded in OS communities;
• experts (old foxes) and leaders play an important role in OS communities as well, next to roles and task assignment. (Connexions research).
  
• The need to meet a given curriculum, setting ground rules
• Making a metalayer or learning contexts on how to make resources and combine them, focusing less on content.
• Cultural resistance to change, and community development aspects
• Culture of learning versus accreditation. Next generation university: exam-only + external bodies for learning?
• Interface management is crucial in creating learning objects in an open source way :: “Modularity reduces the costs of coordination, but is only possible when the interfaces between the modules are clearly defined.” (Understanding Open Source Communities, van Wendel de Joode 2005, p.85)
• Difference between open source and (formal) education
  
• Richard Heller said that there is a foundational difference between OS and OER.
  Within OS is the software the end, but for education the learning process is considered more important. OER cannot be considered the end, rather the education process that surrounds it. I am not sure whether I agree with it, and not because I think that learning objects or resources are more important than the process. Rather, I think that software creation in OS communities is not an end either. People and machines in this respect can be treated in the same way: software feeds the machine to work better, educational resources feed the human machine to function better in society.
• Getting passionate users in an OER community, like within OS communities
  
• Andreas explained the so-called “Onion Model”, with 2% of the community core programmers making more than half of the code (OER: educators), and the rest of the code (45%) being made by passionate users. A third group is formed by the passive users. Andreas argues that within OER initiatives we miss this group of passionate users. We have 2% educators responsible for the content, but no tools, manuals, incentives for the users of the content to become active and passionate
  contributors as well.