Supporting social innovation through visualisations of community interactions

Online communities that form through the introduction of sociotechnical platforms require significant effort to cultivate and sustain. Providing open, transparent information on community behaviour can motivate participation from community members themselves, while also providing platform administrators with detailed interaction dynamics. However, challenges arise in both understanding what information is conducive to engagement and sustainability, and then how best to represent this information to platform stakeholders. Towards a better understanding of these challenges, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of simple visualisations integrated into a Collective Awareness Platform for Social Innovation platform titled commonfare.net. We discuss the promise and challenge of bringing social innovation into the digital age, in terms of supporting sustained platform use and collective action, and how the introduction of community visualisations has been directed towards achieving this goal

A Geographic 3D Visualization and Browser of the World Wide Web

Internet är ett stort globalt nätverk som fortsätter växa i komplexitet med nya tekniker och protokoll som utvidgar dess användbarhet och sättet vi sprider information. Trender, nyheter, videor och annan information sprider sig snabbt över världen vilket gör Internet till ett fantastiskt redskap för de användare som prenumererar på rätt informationsströmmar eller nyheter. Webläsare är en nödvändighet för att struktuera den information vi hittat och för att surfning av webben ska bli bekväm. De områden som en traditionell webläsare saknar är främst en vägledning in i den digitala världen för en icke-erfaren användare. Det är svårt att få en uppfattning av Internets storlek, djup och var man är respektive alla andra användare. Internet har en stor kultur som kan anses transparent i första ögonblicket då man öppnar en webläsare för första gången. Traditionella webläsare saknar en vägvisande introduktion till Internets kultur och dess populära hemsidor. Om man visualiserar alla Internet's publika hemsidor i en 3-dimensionell värld så ger det möjlighet till att se dess storlek och utforska det på ett alternativt sätt. Vilket därmed också simplifierar dess komplexitet. Användaren kan då få en överblick av webben där dess aktivitet och kultur kan visas i formen av en mer spelliknande miljö. Denna avhandling handlar om att visualisera en delmängd av Internet's publika hemsidor som byggnadsobjekt i en värld där användaren interaktivt kan besöka varje hemsida i världen, där höjden av varje byggnadsobjekt återspeglar hemsidans popularitet. Ett bot-program med flera trådar har används för att lagra relationerna mellan hemsidorna vi hittat för att senare använda denna data i en så kallad force-directed algorithm. Denna algoritm kommer skapa attraktions och repulsions krafter mellan noder som representerar hemsidorna, där nodernas position ändras iterativt av dessa krafter i mån om att få dem geografiskt placerade. Krafterna mellan noderna bestäms av hur mycket PageRank en sida har gett en annan. Världen kommer renderas i WebGL med hjälp av en 3D JavaScript motor som heter Three.js. En användare kommer kunna nå den visualiserade världen via sin webläsare som ansluter till min hemsida där de laddar ner alla nödvändiga resurser t.ex. texturer, objekt och skript. Jag använder mig av olika tekniker bl.a. en variant av Level of Detail för att kunna rendera en så stor mängd av hemsidor som möjligt i världen.Internet is a vast digital network. Evergrowing in its complexity with frequent newly developed protocols extending the technology and changing the way we communicate and share information over the world. Trends, news, videos and other information spread quickly over the world, making web browsers an incredible tool for users who listen to the right feeds or news networks. Web browsers are a necessity for structuring our obtained information and are needed for convenient surfing of the web. But for the non-experienced user it may not be completely self-explanatory what the Internet is, where to go or how far its borders stretches, the depth isn't shown and have to be individually explored mainly through the use of search engines. The culture of Internet can seem transparent the first time you open the traditional web browser. Traditional web browsers lack an introductional guidance into the culture and to the popular sites. By visualizing public websites of the Internet as objects in a 3-dimensional world, the user will be able to see the boundaries of the web and explore it in a new fashion where the complexity of its structure is greatly reduced. The user will get an overview of the web in which activity and the culture can be shown in a game-alike environment. This thesis will be about visualizing a crawled subset of websites as a city of buildings, where each building represents a website that the user can visit inside the world, the building's height reflecting its website's popularity. A multi-threaded crawler is used to find and store the relations between the set of websites, namely how many outgoing and which outgoing links each site has. This data in turn will be used by a force-directed algorithm that will position these buildings relatively geographical by attaching imaginary strings between them that either repulse or attract websites with high respective low relational attraction. The attractional forces being defined by the calculated PageRank that are passed between the sites. The world will be rendered in WebGL and use the JavaScript library Three.js, and will thus be accessed through a web browser that connects to a web server and download all the necessary resources, e.g. textures, objects and JavaScript functions. Trying to render a subset of Internet's websites as objects obviously puts a lot of stress on standard web browsers. Graphical features and tricks such as Level of Detail have been necessary to implement in order to make it appear a larger part is visualized than what actually is

Trust and Reputation for Successful Software Self-Organisation

Abstract An increasing number of dynamic software evolution approaches is com- monly based on integrating or utilising new pieces of software. This requires reso- lution of issues such as ensuring awareness of newly available software pieces and selection of most appropriate software pieces to use. Other chapters in this book dis- cuss dynamic software evolution focusing primarily on awareness, integration and utilisation of new software pieces, paying less attention on how selection among different software pieces is made. The selection issue is quite important since in the increasingly dynamic software world quite a few new software pieces occur over time, some of which being of lower utility, lower quality or even potentially harmful and malicious (for example, a new piece of software may contain hidden spyware or it may be a virus). In this chapter, we describe how computational trust and reputation can be used to avoid choosing new pieces of software that may be malicious or of lower quality. We start by describing computational models of trust and reputation and subsequently we apply them in two application domains. Firstly, in quality assessment of open source software, discussing the case where different trustors have different understandings of trust and trust estimation methods. Sec- ondly, in protection of open collaborative software, such as Wikipedia

A study of early indication citation metrics

Research outputs are growing in number and frequency, assisted by a greater number of publication mediums and platforms via which material can be disseminated. At the same time, the requirement to find acceptable, timely, objective measurements of research "quality" has become more important. Historically, citations have been used as an independent indication of the significance of scholarly material. However, citations are very slow to accrue since they can only be made by subsequently published material. This enforces a delay of a number of years before the citation impact of a publication can be accurately judged. By contrast, each new citation establishes a large number of co-citation relationships between that publication and older material whose citation impact is already well established. By taking advantage of this co-citation property, this thesis investigates the possibility of developing a metric that can provide an earlier indicator of a publication's citation impact. This thesis proposes a new family of cocitation based impact measures, describes a system to evaluate their effectiveness against a large citation database, and justifies the results of this evaluation against an analysis of a diverse range of research metric