Category Archives: Social Software

On the Technology Behind the Wikipedia Sexism Debate on “American Women Novelists”

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The English Wikipedia is currently embroiled in a debate on sexism (local copy), because of classifying female American novelists as “American Women Novelists” while leaving male American novelists in the more general category “American Novelists”, suggesting a subordinate role of female novelists. I find this debate regrettable for the apparent sexism but also interesting for the technology underlying such changes, which I would like to focus on here.

With technology, I mean bureaucratic practices, conceptual modeling of the world and Wikipedia content, and software tools to support changes to those models.

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Announcing OpenSym 2013, the Open Symposium!

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OpenSym is the conference for open collaboration researchers and practitioners, including free/libre/open source software, but also open access, open data, open government, and open innovation. OpenSym 2013 will be held for the first time in 2013, on Aug 5-7, in Hong Kong, China. OpenSym joins hands with WikiSym, an established conference that brings together wiki and Wikipedia researchers and practitioners. WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 will co-locate with Wikimania 2013, the Wikipedia (and related) user conference.

OpenSym is unique in bringing together all strands of “open researchers” and I can’t wait to see how it works out! It is truly an exciting time to experience how researchers and practitioners join hands across disciplines to make the world a better place!

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Why I'm Interested In Computer Games Research

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Just before my inaugural lecture at University of Erlangen, a broad panel of scientists was debating the merits of computer games. Except for a computer games researcher and a games professional, all participants thought that computer games are of no particular interest. When I asked: “But isn’t there anything to learn from computer games?” I got a full rebuke by the M.D. on the panel: “No, there is no recognizable value whatsoever.”

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Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise: An Empirical Analysis

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Abstract: Given the increasing interest in using social software for company-internal communication and collaboration, this paper examines drivers and inhibitors of micro-blogging adoption at the workplace. While nearly one in two companies is currently planning to introduce social software, there is no empirically validated research on employees’ adoption. In this paper, we build on previous focus group results and test our research model in an empirical study using Structural Equation Modeling. Based on our findings, we derive recommendations on how to foster adoption. We suggest that micro-blogging should be presented to employees as an efficient means of communication, personal brand building, and knowledge management. In order to particularly promote content contribution, privacy concerns should be eased by setting clear rules on who has access to postings and for how long they will be archived.

Reference: Valentin Schöndienst, Hanna Krasnova, Oliver Günther, and Dirk Riehle. “Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise: An Empirical Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2011). Page 931-940.

The paper is available in PDF form. You may also like the prior paper “Modeling Micro-Blogging Adoption in the Enterprise” as well as my “patterns of effective tweeting”.

The 2010 AMOS Project (from OSR Group)

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The AMOS Project is the Open Source Research Group’s main class, teaching students agile methods and open source practices. It is also part of my incubator for startups. We just finished the first year. For your convenience, here are links to the most recent and relevant blog posts on the 2010 AMOS Project.

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MediaWiki and Commercial Open Source Innovation

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You may be surprised to hear that the dominant public Internet wiki engine, MediaWiki, only plays a minor role in the enterprise. Within the corporate firewalls, TWiki, Confluence, DokuWiki, TikiWiki, and others are running the show. Why is that? It is certainly not the lack of commercial customer interest in MediaWiki, which everyone already knows as the software running Wikipedia. It is also not an anti-commercial stance by the creators of MediaWiki (and its effective owner, the Wikimedia Foundation).

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Call for Papers: ACM CHIMIT 2010

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The ACM CHIMIT 2010 organizers are soliciting submissions for Papers, Short Papers, Panels, Courses, Posters, and presentations of recently published papers in other venues. Please see the submission page for detailed submission instructions on each kind of contribution. I’m on the program committee.

The Paper & Short Paper Deadline is July 3.

ACM CHIMIT ’10

Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

November 12-13, 2010, San Jose, CA (co-located with USENIX LISA in San Jose)

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WikiSym 2010 Program Announced!

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The WikiSym 2010 program has been announced. Keynotes are by Cliff Lampe and Andrew Lih, and the program is full of research talks, workshops, posters, and demos. And, of course, there is a continuous track of open space available for everyone to discuss their wiki and open collaboration interests and issues. Check it out! And see you at WikiSym 2010, July 7-9, in Gdansk, Poland!

My Open Source Research Agenda (as of 2009)

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As you may seen in an earlier blog post, I’m starting in a new position as a professor of software engineering focussing on open source software at the University of Erlangen. In this post, I’m laying out my abbreviated research agenda as of September 2009.

The overarching goal of my group’s research is to comprehensively define “the next big” software development method. To that end, we will work to unify agile software development methods with open source software development. Agile methods can cope with changing requirements but don’t scale up well. Open source methods can cope with changing requirements and also scale up well. However, open source remains poorly understood as a development method and practices vary significantly from project to project. Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in the enterprise, but it is open source methods that innovate intra- and inter-company collaboration as well as vendor-customer relationships. Given prior significant research on agile methods, the focus of my group’s work will be on understanding open source methods and practices in both an engineering and a business context.

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Pre-test Survey on What Drives Enterprise Micro-blogging Adoption

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My collaborators on the Enterprise Micro-blogging Adoption study at the Humboldt University of Berlin are at it again. In this second step, we are working to refine our understanding of what drives micro-blogging adoption in the enterprise. For this, we are looking for participants in a short pre-test survey. Here the survey summary:

You are using Twitter. We would like you to imagine the use of a Twitter-like system for internal collaboration and communication within your enterprise. We are interested in how, why, or why not you would use such a system on the job. We know that your time is very valuable. However, we hope that you can find 10 minutes to complete our survey. As a thank-you every second participant receives a $5 Amazon.com gift card.

Please help out by taking the survey! You input is much appreciated, and if we get enough contributors, you will certainly read about the results of the survey and the adoption model on this blog.

Here the link to the survey: http://www.unipark.de/uc/microblogging. Thanks so much!