Sustainable WNC

Researchers Call for National Strategy to Adapt Social Networks to Public Good

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
College Park, Md.

Facebook and Wikipedia are just the beginning. The real power of social networks will be showcased by projects that unite far-flung participants to help track disease outbreaks, revolutionize neighborhood-watch programs, encourage energy conservation, and serve other civic and community goals, according to a group of researchers calling for greater government and university investment in social networking.
More than a dozen researchers met at the University of Maryland here last week to draft a white paper calling for the creation of “a National Initiative for Social Participation.” They argue that computer-science programs at universities and federal agencies need to move faster to support research into social-networking technology, which they see as the next frontier of innovation.

The gathering was led by Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at the university, who first publicly proposed the idea in a letter published in Science magazine in March. He also plans to make his case during conference sessions at three academic meetings this summer. And, naturally, he is using social media to organize—he started a Facebook group called “iParticipate” for those who want to help.

Mr. Shneiderman is thinking big. “I see this as an agency like NASA is for space, or like the NIH is for health,” he said. When pressed, he admitted that part of the goal is to spur his colleagues in computer science, who are often slow to adapt their curricula to emerging technologies, to pay more attention to the possibilities of social networking. “I want a computer-science chair to say, ‘This is pretty interesting, we ought to have a course on this,’” he said.

Not everyone in higher education sees Wikipedia as a model of quality, of course. Many professors have criticized the online encyclopedia, which anyone can change and add to, as being too prone to errors and vandalism. The idea of using a “crowdsourcing” approach to share health information or crime reports is likely to run into plenty of controversy.

‘Legitimate Dangers’

Mr. Shneiderman argues that the challenges of creating useful social networks is precisely why more research should be done. “Coping with legitimate dangers such as privacy violations, misguided rumors, malicious vandalism, and infrastructure destruction or overload all demand careful planning and testing of potential solutions,” he wrote in his letter to Science.

At the meeting here, the researchers struggled to find the appropriate metaphor for what they hope to create. A “Manhattan Project of social networking” was ruled out as bringing too much baggage—the professors didn’t want to be associated with nuclear weapons—but also as too centralized. “This time the right way is not to bring a bunch of scientists to a secret place in the desert, but to get thousands of people across the Web to work together,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The National Science Foundation sent two officials to participate in the discussion (though not to sign on to the resulting white paper). The day after the meeting, the foundation unveiled a $15-million grant program called Social-Computational Systems, which will support research into some of the issues.

Haym Hirsh, director of the foundation’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, said agency officials started the program because they believed that more research needed to be done around social networking. He pointed out that Facebook and Twitter, the latest crazes in social media, were both invented in the United States, and that it is important to “maintain U.S. leadership in this area.”

Mr. Shneiderman called the new program “a very good start,” though he called the amount of financing “modest by NSF standards.” Now, he said, college researchers will have to submit so many good proposals that the agency will want to expand it—or support creating that new agency for social-network strategy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 7:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.