This post was inspired by something that has been bothering me about the exodus from Twitter: the moral pressure to leave that is being exerted on those who – for now – out of necessity still remain there.
While, of course, I see the danger of autocratic plutocrats controlling our global communication infrastructure, and yes, we should move toward publicly owned social media platforms, we face a practical dilemma. Ideally, we’d instantly switch to a smooth, decentralized, user-friendly Fediverse-like infrastructure that prevents dictatorial control while maintaining effective global reach for mass emancipatory movements. Sadly, we don’t live in that ideal world. In reality, Twitter (which I refuse to call X, as Twitter is the community, while X is the hijacked technical platform) remains a powerful global network for climate action, Gaza advocacy, COVID research, and many other similar, often fragile social movements.… Read more...
social media
Collaboration Patterns for Social Innovation: The Dutch – US Connection?
As part of my visit to the University of Alabama in Huntsville I gave a presentation “Creativity Meets Rationale – Collaboration Patterns for Social Innovation” at the College of Business Administration. It was based on the book chapter with the same title that was published earlier this year in the book “Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience by Design”. The slides can be downloaded here.
From the discussion, it seemed that Europe is ahead in implementing scaled applications of social innovation, although the US is catching up and making it a national priority as well, as indicated by the White House having created an Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. See also the Economist article Let’s Hear Those Ideas.… Read more...
Expanding the Academic Research Community: Building Bridges into Society with the Internet
Below the slides of the honors lecture I just gave at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The slides can be downloaded here.
The talk is based on a book chapter with the same title that will be published by Monash University Publishing in the fall. A preprint of this chapter can be downloaded here. Thanks to the students for all your great questions. If there’s any more, feel free to post them here as comments.
New publication: “It’s the Conversation, Stupid!” – Social Media Systems Design for Open Innovation Communities
My joint book chapter with Mark Aakhus, “It’s the Conversation, Stupid!” Social Media Systems Design for Open Innovation Communities was just published in J.E. Lundström et al. (eds.), Managing Open Innovation Technologies, Springer, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-642-31649-4.
Abstract
Open innovation is about crossing boundaries to create networked synergies in/across collaborative communities. Conversations are the lifeblood of communities, building the common ground of shared meanings, beliefs, interests, norms, goals, trust and social capital. A fundamental challenge for open innovation lies in the successful crafting of the social media systems supporting the community conversations. Innovation communities (which are not limited to business interests but also include public and civic organizations and communities) therefore need to continuously make sense of the conversation context of the tools they use.… Read more...
“It’s the Conversation, Stupid!” – Social media systems design for open innovation communities
On November 5, the Swedish Open Innovation Forum organized a “Managing Open Innovation Technologies” workshop at Uppsala University, to present and discuss state-of-the-art research insights into open innovation & social media and for authors working on an anthology on this topic to get feedback on their draft chapters. It was a very lively meeting, generating lots of ideas for new research. Concluding, it was clear there’s still a very long way to go for social media to realize their full potential in this domain.
At the workshop, I gave a keynote on social media systems design for open innovation communities:
After that, my good friend and co-author Mark Aakhus (Rutgers University, USA), reflected upon what I said. Mark wasn’t physically present, but participated from his study at his home in New Jersey, 6000 km away.… Read more...
Conversations in Context: A Twitter Case for Social Media Systems Design
On September 1, I gave the invited talk for the 5th AIS SIGPrag International Pragmatic Web Conference Track of the I-SEMANTICS 2010 conference in Graz, Austria. Here are the abstract of and link to the paper, as well as the presentation.
Abstract
Conversations are the lifeblood of collaborative communities. Social media like microblogging tool Twitter have great potential for supporting these conversations. However, just studying the role of these media from a tool perspective is not sufficient. To fully unlock their power, they need to examined from a sociotechnical perspective. We introduce a socio-technical context framework which can be used to analyze the role of systems of tools supporting goal-oriented conversations. Central to this framework is the communicative workflow loop, which is grounded in the Language/Action Perspective.… Read more...