Monday and Tuesday this week, Microsoft Research hosted a Social Computing Symposium of about 70 people. We videorecorded all of the sessions, and we are working through the paperwork to get it all posted on the Web. The last status report I saw said that we would get it posted next week. Yeah, I'm impatient too. I keep reminding myself that there are good people working hard to get this done, and no one is trying to slow it down. :-)
It was a great conference, and met my hopes that we could have a quieter conversation that would bring some different people together and drive some good thinking on where the research agenda should be for the domain of social computing.
There were many good parts, but my favorite was a breakout group on the second afternoon specifically focused on discussing priorities for the research agenda. The top six areas we came up with:
1. The social effects of "continuous connection" to other people over a long period of time.
2. Defining explicit metrics for measuring social connections vs. using implicit ones.
3. Continuous partial attention -- measuring whether people can actually split their attention effectively and measuring the effects on social environments.
4. Permanent discourse and permanent identity: what happens when the Internet becomes a searchable archive for everything a person has ever said and done?
5. Creating a better taxonomy of how different cultures around the world are driving different technology adoption vectors.
6. Game theory applied to social computing, particularly the prisoner's dilemma and the logic of collective action.
11:50:37 PM  ; ;
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