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SIMSLink |
Assignment: You’ve seen the pros & cons of social networking services, and read about face-to-face personal and professional networks. Based on the assignments, lectures and your own critiques, design a new service to connect Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) graduates – past, present and future – into a social network – online, offline or both. Provide annotated sketches and about 4 pages that discuss how your design is connected with the literature, lectures class discussions and the lessons you learned from analyzing existing sites. The SIMSLink consists of five core pieces: (1) a personal information tool that allows people to register with the system, view and control their flows of personal information, and fluidly and freely craft personal profiles for others to view; (2) the SIMian network visualization, which allows participants to visually explore their SIMS social network; (3) a tool to view others' profile information; (4) a face-to-face proximity alert system; and (5) a "Who's where?" tool that people can use to share their real-world locations, and view others' locations in the offline world. SIMS students, alumni and faculty are all permitted to use
the system. It is closed to others; our goal in closing it off is to
protect users' personal information by limiting it to this trusted community.
Further Considerations
1. The Personal Information Tool The personal information tool allows SIMS students, faculty and alumni to register and plug in whatever personal profile info they want to share (including photos and links to multimedia). When a user first logs in, a main profile is created for that user by default. It includes the person's first and last name, affiliation (Ph.D. student, Masters student, faculty, etc.) and graduation year, where appropriate -- these bits of information cannot be changed by the user but can be hidden, as we'll discuss below. Each user can create multiple personal profiles
containing different sets of information, or can choose to just
use the single main profile. Users can specify who is authorized
to see the information in each profile: everyone on the system,
just that person's graduating class, or only particular groups or
users specified by the owner. SIMSLink provides full control over and feedback about each user's personal information flows. Users can quickly see and change which groups and people can view the different facets of their self-presentation (i.e., bits of their personal data). For their reference and convenience, users can create as many groups as they like, create custom group names, and add and remove contacts from groups in much the same way that instant messenger users work with "buddy lists." After creating groups, users can open and close portions of their personal information to entire groups at a time. Each user can also agree to make his/her real-world location visible to all (or to some, or to nobody), and each user can choose to "appear" either anonymously, or with his/her identity exposed. In particular, a user can specify that only users who themselves are visible, or fully identified, can see her identity. The user can change these settings whenever she wants, so when she feels like being social and "findable" she might set her settings to "world visible." A user can also set different location information-flow settings for given recipients, based on different times. (For instance, "show my precise location to anyone at SIMS, but only during business hours.") See the "Who's Where" section for more about the location-based portions of the project.
2. The SIMian Network Visualization We see Jeff Heer's Vizster tool as an excellent foundation to use in visualizing the SIMS social and professional network. Using our Vizster-powered SIMS visualization, users can assign colors to the groups that they define using the Personal Information Tool, or to search terms they define using the Profile/Search Tool.
This screenshot, taken shamelessly from Jeff Heer's site, illustrates a typical Vizster network view showing search results and information from a Friendster network. Each person here is represented by a name and a photo (both taken from that person's Friendster profile) and friend relations are shown as lines between the people. In this case, the user is viewing a portion of a social network that's centered on the person "Jeff." Information from Jeff's personal profile appears in the right column. The term searched upon was "simpsons," and the node for each person in the view whose Friendster profile contains that word turns yellow. Users can click on another person in the network view to cause the view to re-center on that person's portion of the network, and to make that person's profile information appear in the right column. In our case, the viewer would see (and be able to search on) only the profile information they've been permitted access to by the person in focus. As a default (i.e., not in the search results view or in any other special views), we might indicate current students' different classes (for instance, Masters graduating class of 2007) with different highlight colors. Alumni and faculty could be designated with colors of their own. Friendster provides just one sort of link (friend) but that's not the way people operate in real life. We'd like to explore visualizing different sorts of links. A link between two nodes (people) might appear thicker or brighter depending on the number of projects that the connected people collaborated on together and the number of businesses that the two worked on together. Users might be able to add new link types as they see fit, and assign colors or patterns to them in their own network views.
3. The Profile Viewer and Search Tool This works similarly to the way search functions in traditional Web-based social networking services work: the user can add or remove constraints that correspond to the predefined fields (city, graduating class, etc.) as well as adding or removing search terms. Search results appear as a list, and from that point the user can switch to a view of the results rendered via the SIMian Network Visualization tool. At any point the user can view a profile from the search results (subject to the privacy rules that person has set on their profile).
SIMS students and alumni can register their wi-fi and bluetooth devices and laptops with the service, so that the service can recognize these machines when they connect to the network. This involves installing client software that communicates with the network, and (in the case of wi-fi and bluetooth devices) reporting to the system each device's unique networking identifier code (MAC address). As a SIMSLink user, if you install the client software it will periodically download from a central server a copy of a table storing all the SIMS device unique identifiers, along with all personal profile information about other SIMS folks that these people allow to see. The client software can notify you whenever you come within range of another SIMS person's device -- or, you can set it to only notify you when certain individuals, or members of specified groups, pass nearby. For each alert you can specify that it should be active anytime and wherever you are, or only at certain times of day, or only in certain places (for instance: "alert me if I run into any SIMS people, but not if I'm in South Hall or in Berkeley Espresso at the time.") (See the next section for a description of how SIMSLink can recognize such locations.) You can also use client software (or the Web site) to "attach"
your own reminder notes to other people (i.e., "I met David and
his wife Charlotte at CHI 2003. David is really sensitive about his
bald spot so don't pat it next time"), so that those notes will
appear when you're close to their associated person. Whenever they appear
you can edit or add to them. These notes are visible only to you, not
to the "target" person or to any other users encountering
the target person. This enhances face-to-face networking, augmenting
it with advantages of computer-mediated social networking. People are
better than computers at emotional subtlety, but computers are better
at remembering details that we tend to forget; this melds the best of
both.
User locations can often be determined, especially within South Hall, thanks to:
Of course, access to someone's location data can be restricted
by that user in many ways, as described in the Personal
Information Tool section.
Assume you're a SIMSLink user, and you've accessed the screen above. Each circle represents a person. When a person appears who has agreed to let you see his/her identity, that person's initials appear below the associated circle. Mousing-over a circle with initials causes part of the person's profile to appear in a callout window. (In the screen shot above, you are mousing over Debbie Harry's circle.) The user can change the default color assignments. For instance they can set specific colors to represent members of a group, or to illustrate people who match a certain set of search terms. Users can add new places by simply clicking "add another place," giving the place a name, and registering with it a static IP address, a wi-fi MAC address, or a set of multiple IP and/or MAC addresses. Above, the user has added two new places.
Further Considerations Our data model is a simple faceted knowledge base, stored on a centralized server and browsable from mobile devices. Each user has a set of annotations, which have several forms. Some are automatically defined and authoritatively true, such as name, affiliation, project team membership, and location; the rest are user assertions. We debated how much to categorize entries. One proposal was to qualify each annotation with a type (new ones easily added), which would aid searching; The other was to leave most information to an unclassified free text space, allowing users maximum freedom to define their own self presentations. Rather than settle on one model, we decided to present both as possibilities, specialized for different usage models. (Ideally we would engage in extensive field research and user testing to determine the best approach.) Some annotation values are persistent; localization measures, of course, are updated constantly by automatic contact with portable devices. All annotations have a permission setting, describing who can see them (names would almost always be public, but MAC addresses would generally be private information). Multimedia URLs are valid annotations, so we can publish any kind of content on the network. "Contributory" annotations, or testimonials, can be placed on other users' records; but the recipient gets to set their permissions. One important utility in the metadata scheme is data mappings from other human-networking systems. All such importation is done only at the user's request. (See "profile import" and "profile export" explanations in the Personal Information Tool section.) This scheme is tailored to serve the social,
professional, and privacy needs of SIMS students. By comparison,
Tribe.Net's data model focuses on self-expression and attracts a
lot of unusual characters; LinkedIn's is about business
experience and is correspondingly used mostly for professional
purposes. Our system facilitates both social and professional
networking, and it's designed to encourage more free-form user
customization than the others. The school constitutes a concentration of similar people in one place, constantly dispersing into niches across the Bay Area. Our network spans the market of relevant work. According to Granovetter (Getting a Job, 31), socially-connected graduates of a prestigious university have especially good connections for job acquisition. Each alumnus sent to a different, but similar company is a liaison between SIMS and that organization. This matters because these connection points expose much more network; with N such liaisons, network scope increases at N^2. We believe that SIMS's own network presents the best opportunities for its students to find work. These interconnection nodes are like the matchmakers described in detail by Ahuvia and Adelman (Formal Intermediaries in the Marriage Market). Financial compensation for advice is possible, but more often these ties are presented by way of social capital in exchange for exposure to a new subnetwork. Various kinds of valuable matches can be made this way: professional, academic, romantic, etc. Some information publication is nonelective, but the rest is subject to the same motivations Nardi (”I'm Blogging This”, 5) gave for weblogging, as well as the important weblogging motivations that she overlooked (such as business and branding motivations). This medium has a small, homogenous audience, documents life, provides commentary and artistic expression. This kind of information exchange promotes the formation of communities as people know each other better and collaborate more closely. A set of explicitly "true" information means less room for creative self-expression, so we would not see as much deception as did, for example, Nakamura (Race In/For Cyberspace) or Donath (Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community). Two properties of the SIMSLink might result in less deception than one might see in most online social networking services: (1) the degree to which members of the community already know one another via face-to-face contact, and (2) the one-to-one correlation between registered users and students, which dissuades "fakesters" because in order to create a completely fake account you must replace your "real" account. But we hope that the much wider degree of freedom we allow in profile presentation will reduce the desire for fakester creation. And within these constraints, the space of elective self-description would support just as wide an array of profiles as Bolig, Stein, and McKenry found (The Self-Advertisement Approach to Dating). Please note that this essay presents a very preliminary set of ideas and not an actual design. Properly designing such a system would involve a substantial amount of fieldwork and user testing. These ideas might provide a starting point, but if such a system is to be successful it will be redefined by the people who use it. Users change social networking systems into something substantially different from what the inventors originally imagined, and the best we can hope to do is to observe this phenomenon and design for flexibility and change, to support this evolution. Just three of the many key questions we might start with include:
The design of the South Hall basement effectively accomplishes two objectives:
Objective 2 might induce a positive side effect: it might encourage SIMS people to meet and collaborate with people from outside SIMS, thereby extending and strengthening the SIMS social network. But that's outweighed by the negatives. Ideally we might consult with architects or environmental and civic planners to learn the best ways to improve this situation; but certainly removing the basement walls and rethinking the current make-believe kitchen will improve things. Streamlining the physical structure of South Hall's rooms 2, 5, and 10 would increase the comfort of, and thus potential for, enhanced social contact. |
4.
The Proximity Alert System