On one side of the discussion where issues about what is lost if you bring the social software inside of the firewall. Bob Morgan of University of Washington pointed out that you need critical mass for much of the magic of social software to work. You need many people participating with overlapping interests to form virtual communities. You multiple people to tag the same object to build a meaningful folksonomy. Would you reach critical mass if the population was limited to the enterprise or do you need to be sharing in the wide world for the magic to occur?

An example that I used was Chemical Engineering students using social software out in the world might discover other students at another university. The two groups might work together and learn more both about their projects that the world at large. These forces tend say that we should just use the world-at-large suite of tools.

On the other side is the fact that these systems are out of the control of the university but may be considered by some (especially parents of students) to be under the control of the university. I mentioned a case of an instructor who is using a Wiki on their personal web site for instructional purposes. Students need to go to this site. They may need to participate. This leads to institutional business being conducted at a site that is completely out of the control and governance of the institution. It also leads to institutional information – course content and possibly student performance data (e.g. test data, quizzes and homework data) – being de facto outsourced to an untrusted partner. Who knows what the ISP will do with this information?

The hot discussions around MySpace, Facebook et al show the depth of concern about student privacy and safety and the concerns about the belief that these third party sites are somehow blessed by the University.

Adding to the complexity of these issues is the fact that it is so easy to set-up and use a lot of the Web2.0 / Social Software tools that are out there. You can get a blog set up and running in a couple of minutes. My personal blog is run on Dreamhost. They have one click installs for a variety of software. It would be easy for me to set up blogs, wikis, bulletin boards and galleries for a class. It would take about 15 minutes – tops.

Going back to the earlier example of the faculty member and their wiki – they used their personal web site because their institution doesn’t have any support or offerings for doing wikis in house. Any barriers that the institution erects (including charges) will lead to outsourced solutions. In house solutions may not work as well as the wide world solutions but the institution is mandated to protect student privacy and security. The institution is also legally bound to keep records of performance and it has an interest in keeping an archive of instructional materials.

Is there a balance where students participate in the wide world of social software in a safe and educational way?

The links that I used for the demo are below.

This site hit the front page of digg.com (a site that is catching on as a way to stay on top of cool stuff – front page on digg is like front page on Slashdot).

I’ve posted his results below. The first results are the US News College Rankings where available. The second number is his SVM ranking. (this is easier to read on his site http://vcmike.blogspot.com/2006/01/ranking-colleges-using-google-and-oss.html)

Note that U Washington was rated top by his method and Princeton fell from first place. The interesting thing is how much of a role Google, digg, Facebook and other “Web2.0″ software will play in new students decision making about the College that they attend.

Name 	USNews 	 SVM
University of Washington 	57.4 	98.929
Yale University 	98 	98.081
Harvard University 	98 	97.953
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 	93 	92.996
Stanford University 	93 	92.922
National University
92.523
Columbia University 	86 	92.255
Princeton University 	100 	90.609
New York University 	65 	85.271
University of Chicago 	85 	85.052
Indiana University 		83.973
University of Pennsylvania 	93 	83.91
Duke University 	93 	79.487
University of Southern California 	66 	78.645
University of Pittsburgh
78.274
Cornell University 	84 	78.051
University of Florida
77.864
University of Colorado
76.877
The American College
76.597
University of California, Berkeley 	78 	76.192

Hi all,

Sorry for starting a kerfuffle this morning. I think what I was trying to communicate was lost in the numbers.

I agree that his method and numbers are imperfect at best. But, take into account this was his (first) attempt to build a complex suite of searches against Google to “rank” Colleges.

As Kathi Dwelle points out – his search method found only 170 faculty for UW-Madison out of our 2,064. Other places seem to have a better Google presence for their faculty not more faculty. The fact that his number is wrong does mean his ranking is wrong. It also means that Googling trying to learn how many faculty we have returns bad numbers. This is the issue in my humble opinion.

If students start making choices based on Google (and they are making lots of choices based on Google), then we should be sure that Google returns the results that we want for our institution.

As for Facebook, he is not using Facebook in his ranking but I believe that these types of social software will impact the choices that prospective students make. If they find lots of cool people in Facebook that attend UW-Madison, they will want to come here too.

I am certain the he and others will continue to work on this alpha-test idea. There will be a “Click to see the Google Ranked of Colleges” in the near future and it will probably be pretty popular. We should understand the methods that are used AND make sure our information is presented such that we rank well.

Those were my real points – not that U-Wash is a 98.929 and we are 71.137.

There are three sections:

* Tagging and Multiple Tag browsing
* Folksonomy and Social Discovery
* Cool Apps, REST and RSS

Part 1 – Tagging and Multiple Tags

* http://del.icio.us/
* http://del.icio.us/jimphelps
* http://del.icio.us/jimphelps/folksonomy
* http://del.icio.us/jimphelps/folksonomy%2BConnotea
* http://www.technorati.com/
* http://www.technorati.com/tag/itarchitecture
* http://www.technorati.com/watchlist/add/
* http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/seattle/
* http://www.youtube.com/

Part 2 – Folksonomy and Social Discovery

* http://del.icio.us/url/fd3ba631e0adbe85e25f3cd519882341
* http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/06/23.html
* http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2005/05/28/tagclouds-and-cultural-changes/
* http://cloudalicio.us/tagcloud.php?button=Graph+Tag+Cloud=http://del.icio.us/url/19456e761687204e2bc7857cbc52fe4b

Part 3 – Cool Apps, REST and RSS

* http://www.connotea.org/
* http://www.citeulike.org/
* http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/31/74927_HNredhatcommits_1.html
* http://del.icio.us/infoworld
* http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/iwx/explorer.html#top
* http://www.technorati.com/tag/wag_edu
* http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/
* http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/index.php/tagcloud/
* http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/index.php/category/socialsoftware/

* The Web 2.0 movement is about empowering people to publish their own content quickly and easily with a minimum of knowledge. Flickr, Youtube, del.icio.us, Blogger et al allow people to publish content with little knowledge of apache servers, domain name registrations and the rest of the system admin knowledge usually needed to run a web site.

* Social software (which Clay Shirky put as, “the stuff that gets spammed”) allows people share their content with others, to learn who is interested in their content and to learn who has interesting content. It is the “who” part that is of interest. Social software enables the discovery of people of interest similar to how Google enables the discovery of content of interest.

* Folksonomies enable the loose classification of content. This classification is done by people and is not a rigid hierarchical taxonomy but a loose metadata based classification scheme. This classification scheme is great for informal content such as blog entries or URLs and content that may be interpreted differently by different social groups.

Knitting these three things together, we get a system which enables the easy publishing of content, discovery of the people behind the content and of others interested in similar content and a simple way to classify information content. Employing these systems inside of an enterprise should allow for much better communication and collaboration with the added benefit of social discovery. Jon Udell uses scripts to analyze del.icio.us data to discover people with similar interests and content that they are reading that he has missed (Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us).

In the early days of System Operations and enterprise computing, we were working on Data Management. The big question was, “how do we store all of this data and then recall it when we need it?” Huge tape libraries with colored number codes were built and technicians fetched and threaded tapes. We then advanced to Information Management where the issue changed from data management, which is raw and uninterpreted, into, “How do we find the actual information inside all of the this data?” It was no longer good enough to find the file by file name, we wanted to find the file that had the information we needed. This was followed by the Knowledge Management movement. The enterprise wanted to find the patterns that were present in the information to glean a higher level understanding of the enterprise.

Enterprises that take advantage of the Web 2.0 / Social Software / Folksonomy movement will move on to next level: Social Mining. This will enable users to mine the informal content within the enterprise and find others with similar interests and the content that those others find interesting. As one person I work with put it, “it is virtual mentoring”.

Thoughts?

- JJP

My opening comments are included in my PDF.

George Brett’s opening comments:

1. The recent Wizards Meeting used wiki’s for real-time posting of notes and documents. This was a shift from the usual – mailing list and weekly phone call.
1. Ineternet2 has many communities of interest. Those communities can aggregate to form larger communities. You can imagine a vin diagram of nested and overlapping circles that represents these groups.
1. He will be listening to see what these people think about these topics and to look for direction for Internet2′s collaboration and communication.

JPR’s Demo of MyVOCS.

Discussion Portion of the Meeting

Internet2 currently has about 15,000 Sympa email users. Internet2′s 15,000 email addresses may not represent 15,000 users. It represents 15K identities. Shibboleth could push us all to one identity but not necessarily so. You could have one identity for each IdP that you belong to.

Balance the political need to control and organize information vs. personal desire and choices for how to handle information. Pushing information out for the use of the masses vs. controlling information because of privacy fears.

What is the learning curve for new users using these tools? For the Folksonomy stuff it is pretty low and simple. For MyVOCS, people get hung up on the shibboleth portion.

Jill – hoping to learn what other open source collaboration tools people are interested in using. John-Paul – this is much like our desktop analogy. You find new tools you like. By having this common identity management framework, you can easily add new tools.

What about delegated administration? The goal is push the administration out. The MyVOCS space is pretty wide open. Anyone can create a new VO and become the new administrator for that VO. They have all of the capabilities as an administrator.

Can the average user do that or do the tools need to be simplified? Depends on what tools they have used before. Jump in and start using these tools.

Internet2 is a big user of Sympa. If we wanted to delegate this out to chair of a working group. Can these chairs handle the delegation of rights (read/write by group, readable by everyone, etc)? What you need to know is how to handle administration of Sympa. All of the rights flow from Sympa out to the other tools.

Sympa developers are active in the MList project. The MList follows this meeting. We can take is GUI and functional issues back to the developers if we need to.

Part of this is a training issue also. These chairs need to understand the space and the best use of these tools.

There is an issue of how to mailing list attributes (members can post but everyone can read archives) translate to other tools (what happens in the wiki)? That is where the tool provider/configurer must make intelligent decision. They chose Drupal because it understands assertions but the wiki doesn’t.

Issue of email address as an identifier. In MyVOCS it is NetID@IdentityProvider. Sympa is moving towards netid@idp also.

My voice messages get routed to my email automatically as MP3 attachments. I have my cell phone with most of time and I have coverage almost everywhere. I have wireless internet access in almost all of my meetings both on campus and off. I am present on chat whenever I am on wireless. I have RSS feeds in my browser (Safari) that update every few minutes that tell me when things have changed on shared blogs or wikis. I post all most all of my documents and references (URLs mostly) on web accessible stores. I am as functionally present at home in my home office or in a conference in Denver as I am in my work office except that I cannot physically walk to an office or into a meeting.

I have my iSight and iChat. If someone is going to the meeting and they iChat and an iSight, I can attend via video and/or audio conference. If they don’t have an iSight and iChat, we can use Skype and I can attend by voice. Once, my boss Keith Hazelton, was in Japan when we needed him here in Madison, Wisconsin at a meeting. I took my laptop, iSight, a set of external speakers, and a projector to the meeting. Keith was in his hotel room with his iSight. He was virtually present for the 1/2 day session.

As I was thinking about this, I ran across Wade Roush’s [_Social Machines_](http://www.continuousblog.net/2005/07/social_machines.html) article. This is the cover article for the August 2005 MIT Technology Review. Wade Roush argues that we are now in an era of pervasive computing. We are connected via cell phone and wireless networking in most places. We are always on and always pushing content out to the web, to our social groups, to our friends and families and to the world at large. It is a great article.

To me, the interesting and important change that has occurred recently is the easy ability for novice users to push information out to the world. In 1994, you had to know how to write HTML and you had to find a web server or set up an FTP site. Now, you can go to Blogger and create a free account and start typing. You can send photos straight from your cell phone to Textamerica or Flickr. You can video chat or do VoIP without any knowledge of how to get a dedicated ISDN line or how to set up a protocol gateway.

Take the easy push mechanism and add the social software of Technorati, del.icio.us and Flickr and you get a new and interesting social information fabric. To borrow a quote of a quote from Roush’s article: Jyri Engeström states, “…social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” We have now made it very easy to push the objects to the web and to share them with our social groups. We now have interesting applications which build the social fabric around those objects. These two advances have moved computing off of the desktop and into the lifestyle at large.

The two advances of easy push technology and social software have made the statement “away from my desk” almost meaningless unless you want to drop by and see me. If you do, chat me first and I’ll tell you where I’m at.

- JJP

Favorite quote:

>”Whenever there is a really major disaster but no immediate news, the people on cable are often vamping because they have to keep repeating the basic story on the chance that someone has just tuned in even in the absence of any new information. Wikipedia solves that problem while, at the same time, having a symbiotic relationship with those news outlets because it points people to the written form of stories”

To me, this has the same implications for enterprise communication and collaboration (and virtual organization comm and coll). Instead of repeating the same information in meetings, a wiki can gather the decisions, details, facts and pointers about a topic easily.

You can download the show as an MP3 or subscribe to the podcast which is my favorite method of getting these sound files. Clay’s segment starts at about the 13:50 mark.

>TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify…

I keep running into the term “Automated Folksonomy tool”. To me, this is like “Fresh Frozen” or “Hand Made by a Robot”. The point of a “Folksonomy” is that there are people – real live human flesh and blood – adding terms which provide social value and content evaluation. Folksonomies aren’t about extracting metadata. Folksonomies are about people, who have similar social knowledge, judging content and adding metadata based on their personal assessment. The term “cool” or “gnarly” or “awesome hack” have social value that is not extractable by a bot crawling RSS feeds. If my friends in my social circle tag something as “cool” or “awesome” then I will want to look at that object. It is their judgement that I value and the tag is a way for them to share their judgement with others.

TagCloud may be “cool” or an “awesome hack” but please spare me on the automated folksonomy stuff. Automated Folksonomy is a pile of Fresh Frozen Hand Made by a Robot stuff.

> This weekend Technorati tracked its 10 Millionth Blog. It is a chinese blog, on mblogger.cn, and it appears to be a blog talking about glassblowing, with some really cool pictures. Unfortunately I don’t read Chinese so I can’t tell…

Just in case you thought blogging was going away soon, Technorati is now tracking 10 Millionth blog. Social Software is off and running folks.

{JJP}