I created this 10-minute introduction to Virtual Worlds (think Second Life, but also online games like World of Warcraft and social networks with ‘rooms’ like Cyworld) for the panel on “Legal Developments in Virtual Reality” at the American Bar Association’s Second Annual National Institute on CyberLaw. I shared the limelight with gaming lawyer Sean Kane, IBM’s legal strategist for virtual worlds Steve Mortinger, and Mark Rasch, with Andy Grosso moderating.
In my remarks, I advise folks to keep an eye out for these Virtual World trends: open source to create your own worlds, public grids, virtual workspaces, serious gaming, casual gaming, and the return of virtual reality technologies (now that we have more interesting places to visit, maybe it’s time to start digging those gloves and goggles out of the closet).
The legal types seem to be most interested in virtual property rights and regulating money transactions, but we had time to talk about fun stuff like the virtual ’strike’ against IBM in Second Life. A continuing point of controversy: the terms of service for most virtual worlds give users little recourse if a company decides to suspend or delete their account. But what if I built and furnished my whole mansion online?
My new book project has the provisional title The New Web: Knowledge Sharing as a Part of Everyday Life. The book is my attempt to explain what makes Web 2.0 sites successful, but more importantly what will make them significant for our culture and our economy.
My argument is that the best Web 2.0 sites have stumbled upon a set of capabilities that solve a big problem: how to share knowledge. Sharing knowledge is not something that businesses are good at, not something that governments are great at (see CIA), and, sadly, not even something that my beloved universities are great at, even though that’s supposed to be our raison d’être. The best Web 2.0 sites have made knowledge sharing so cheap, easy, and effective that it can be a part of everyday life. As time goes on, we will come to expect free access to the best available knowledge about anything. And that will change things in interesting ways.
My current five page outline (alpha release 1) is available here. As the project firms up over the next few months, I will be blogging various parts of the argument, case studies, and data that might be interesting on their own.
I am happy to take requests from potential collaborators, publishers, and agents. An extended 26-page outline is available on request.
Steve Sawyer and I organizing the second IFIP 9.1 workshop on IT and the Future of Work. With all the research focus on technologies and business models, we believe that significant changes to the nature of work itself might not be getting the attention they deserve. That’s why we’re so excited about this paper line-up for the workshop:
- “The role of professional networking websites in business relationship building” by Lih-Bin Oh (National University of Singapore) and Yao Zhang (Xiamen University)
- “The establishment of pervasive control mechanisms as a consequence of compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act” by Gasparas Jarulaitis (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
- “Is IT employment in the United States really hurt by offshoring and work immigration?” by Sonia Vilvovsky (Bentley College)
- “A longitudinal investigation of practice adaptation in a successful open source development project” by Mary Beth Watson-Manheim (University of Illinois, Chicago), Katherine M. Chuboda (Utah State University), and Sanjeev Jha (University of Illinois, Chicago)
- “The integration of tools and systems in inter-disciplinary work” by Torstein Hjelle (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
- “The three modalities of work and their needs for IT support” by Markku I. Nurminen (University of Turku)
- “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday life and work” by me (USF)
- “Users and information systems: Two empty concepts that mean so much” by Steve Sawyer (Penn State University).
Why not join us in Montréal on Wednesday, December 12th?
What’s really new about the new generation of web sites and services?
Whether we call it Web 2.0, mass collaboration, online community, or social networking, I believe what’s really new is how large-scale knowledge sharing, and the services built on top of this knowledge, are allowing the web to deeply embed itself in normal, everyday life.
Research has shown how the boundaries between online and off, private and public, work and living are all being blurred by mobile phone use (see my review essay in The Information Society, January 2007, for more details). I argue that these boundaries are also blurring on the new web.
“Worklife is being affected by the ‘consumerization’ of IT, and everyday non-working activities are being subjected to analytic scrutiny normally reserved for the working world: detailed peer review, in-depth data collection and analysis, and rapid experimentation.”
The abstract for my presentation on “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday work and life“, to be delivered at the 2007 IFIP 9.1 post-ICIS workshop on Computers and Work is available online. Slides to come.
(Note: I’m sharing this essay for a friend who has no idea what my academic field is, or what we do.)
In business schools, my academic specialization is called
Information Systems.
Information systems people study the design and use of information technology in all kinds of organized human activity: businesses, government, schools, hospitals, even social movements.
Information technology offers us the possibility of changing the world for the better. Humanity now possesses a mind-boggling ability to store information, process it, and send it around the world for almost no cost. And the raw power of information technology is still doubling every couple of years.
Over the past few decades, we information systems people have found that converting better information technology into better human activity is hard work. The difficulties can come from a hundred different places–technological complexity, organizational confusion, human frailty–but all stem from a common source: the absolutely central role that information plays in organized human activity. When you try to change the guts of anything, it can get messy. Read the rest of this entry »
Working Group 9.1 is the division within IFIP (the International Federation for Information Processing) responsible for research on computers and work.
After a few years of inactivity, a team of new officers is working to ‘relaunch’ IFIP WG 9.1. As the newly elected Secretary of the group, I will be the true power behind the throne, with the new Chair (Steve Sawyer, Penn State) and Vice Chair (Rudi Schmiede, Technische Universität Darmstadt) filling out the rest of the management team.
One of our first tasks is to create a new mission statement for the group. The current draft is:
The mission of IFIP Working Group 9.1 (Computers and Work) is to promote, facilitate and disseminate research on ICTs and work, in order to promote quality of life, technology that meets human needs, and social accountability. IFIP WG 9.1 strives to identify important new perspectives on the future of ICTs and new ways of working, and to communicate the social and organizational consequences of ICTs and work.
If you have comments or suggestions, we would love to hear them, either here on the blog, or at the new official IFIP WG 9.1 website.
Our next official workshop and meeting will be immediately after the ICIS 2007 conference in Montréal. Please join us!
I’m pleased to present the paper lineup for the Social Theory in Information systems Research (STIR) track at the AMCIS (AMericas Conference on Information Systems) 2007 conference. For the past five years, my fellow track chairs and I have tried to bring together an international mix of research that shows how social theory, and social research methods, are useful for answering questions about the future of information technology.
This will be my final year as part of the STIR management team. If you are interested in becoming a track co-chair, please contact me or my colleagues Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf at Indiana University.
The 2007 STIR papers:
- “Examining Alignment of Frames Using Actor-Network Constructs: The Implementation of an IT Project”, by Bijan Azad (American University of Beirut) and Samer Faraj (University of Maryland).
- “A Realist Social Theory of Information Systems”, by Michael Cuellar (Georgia State University).
- “Mediated Interaction: Social Informatics in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing”, by Hamid Ekbia (Indiana University).
- “Understanding Online Community Effectiveness: The Efficacy of Integrating Group Development and Social Capital Theories”, by Roderick Lee (Penn State University).
- “Internet Use from the Perspective of the Theory of Planned Behaviour”, by Johann Kerschbaum (University of Vienna), Elisabeth Donat (Donau-Universität Krems), and Roman Brandtweiner (Donau-Universität Krems).
- “Web 2.0: A Social Informatics Perspective”, by me (USF), Howard Rosenbaum (Indiana University) and Pnina Shachaf (Indiana University).
During FastTrack advising last week, some of the new students asked “can you recommend particular teachers?” Not knowing the different first-year writing, math, and econ profs, I told them to check out RateMyProfessors.com — the market-leading faculty evaluation site, now owned by the noted research firm MTV/Viacom. Many professors are not big fans of the site, but that’s the back-alley where our undergraduates go for information because they have no good alternatives.
A recent study (somewhat surprisingly) showed that the online ratings on RateMyProfessors.com correlate very highly with the “official” teaching evaluations, at least in one state university system.
This result has been interpreted in at least two different ways:
- RateMyProfessors.com is more accurate than we think
- most “official” evaluations are less accurate than we think, being no better than the methodological disaster zone known as RateMyProfessors.com
Taking a break from my extensive summer duties, I downloaded the summary scores (’quality’ and ‘ease’) for the 38 faculty categorized as Business or Business Administration at USF. Our average ‘quality’ score is 3.6 out of 5, with the average ‘ease’ score at 3.2 (5 easiest, 1 hardest). For our ‘chili pepper’ faculty, rated as ‘hot’ by the students, the ‘quality’ average jumps to 4.52! Cool! (Maybe our students can’t tell the difference between physical beauty and pedagogical effectiveness? Or are the beautiful just better than the rest of us?).
And to add to the eternal debate about whether faculty who are ‘easy’ get higher evaluations, the answer from RateMyProfessors.com is…seems like it. ‘Quality’ and ‘ease’ scores are correlated at 0.52 (p<0.001). When you remove faculty that have fewer than 5 evaluations, that correlation increases to 0.60 (p<0.005).
A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.
While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.
When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.
The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.
It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 