Technology-Mediated Social Participation: The Next 25 Years of HCI Challenges

Abstract. The dramatic success of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and traditional discussion groups empowers individuals to become active in local and global communities. Some enthusiasts believe that with modest redesign, these technologies can be harnessed to support national priorities such as healthcare/wellness, disaster response, community safety, energy sustainability, etc. However, accomplishing these ambitious goals will require long-term research to develop validated scientific theories and reliable, secure, and scalable technology strategies. The enduring questions of how to motivate participation, increase social trust, and promote collaboration remain grand challenges even as the technology rapidly evolves. This talk invites researchers across multiple disciplines to participate in redefining our discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) along more social lines to answer vital research questions while creating inspirational prototypes, conducting innovative evaluations, and developing robust technologies. By placing greater emphasis on social media, the HCI community could constructively influence these historic changes

A Taxonomic Framework for Social Machines

As the Web has developed into a global social platform there has been increasing interest in a particular class of systems known as 'social machines'. Social machines are typically presented as systems that combine some form of social participation with conventional forms of machine-based 'computation'. Beyond this rather general characterization, however, there is little consensus as to what the term 'social machine' actually means. Furthermore, little has been done to explore the core features of social machines and examine differences between them. This limits our understanding of the kinds of social machines that currently exist, and it also limits our ability to imagine the kinds of social machine that could emerge in the future. In this chapter, we introduce a taxonomy for the description and classification of social machines that could be used to frame future scholarly discourse and identify aspects of the social machine research effort that deserve further consideration. As part of this effort, we propose a definition of social machines that puts them in relation to the broader class of socio-technical systems, while distinguishing them from other kinds of technology-mediated social participation system; for example, human computation systems and collective intelligence systems. The taxonomic framework we present serves to extend our understanding of social machines. It includes a total of 33 dimensions and 106 associated characteristics. Together, these specify the space of all (theoretically possible) social machine types