participation - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

So what exactly is user research like at YouTube? Sometimes it means letting users design their ideal experience. For example, last year we used a method called FIDO (first utilized by Fidelity Investments) where we cut out different elements of various video sites, stuck them on magnets, and had users arrange their ideal organization of the elements (see below for an example). Other times we use a more standard research method called a usability study, which entails seeing whether a user can or can't complete certain standard site tasks in a usability lab.
Sometimes having users come into labs is not enough, though; we want to understand how users use YouTube in their context, in their living room, with their laptop on their lap, sprawled out on the couch. In this case we might have field studies where we interview users in their homes.
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- In addition to such qualitative research, we look closely at the behavior of millions of users through traffic analysis and try to understand what users think of the site by deploying thousands of surveys.
- One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users -- often uploaders.
- The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible

06 Oct 09

The Politics of Participation in Design « Design for Service

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participation design qualitative research

25 Sep 09

Museum 2.0

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web2.0 culture design research technology participation science

the rubric of participatory models introduces a language that can be useful to many kinds of institutions and projects.
In citizen science projects, the public is invited to participate in "real science" by working with scientists on projects that benefit from mass participation around the world. But most citizen science projects are contributory; participants collect data based on specifications determined by scientists, to help answer questions posed by scientists. The scientists control the process, steer the data collection, and analyze the results. Unsurprisingly, studies have shown that these kinds of citizen science projects are enormously successful at engaging the public with science but are not successful at exposing participants to the entire scientific process.
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- in the collaborative model of citizen science, the scientists still determine the research question and the overall data collection and analysis methodology. However, the public is actively involved in multiple steps of the research process, including collecting data, analyzing results, and drawing conclusions.
- In the co-creative model for citizen science, the public comes up with a question or issue and then works with scientists to answer the question and suggest solutions. These projects include equal partnership between scientists and participants in all stages of the scientific process, including developing new research questions and regimens for data collection and analysis. In many cases, these projects are initiated based on some community concern, such as issues around local sources of pollution, invasive species, or unsafe consumer products.
- co-option. In this model, the public uses institutional facilities or resources to develop and manage projects of their own devising.
- When we move to participation with cultural institutions from science research, these four participatory models can no longer be seen as progressive towards a model of "maximal participation." Consider, for example, the difference between a project in which a museum sources exhibit material from visitors (contributory) and one in which the museum works with a small group of outsiders to develop an exhibit (collaborative). If the first project results in an exhibit made entirely of visitors' creations and voices, and the second results in an exhibit that looks more like a "typical" exhibit, which project is more participatory?
- I'm interested in the question of how to understand the diversity of options and determine which models and levels of engagement will be most valuable for different projects, at different institutions, at different times. The PPSR rubric is a great starting point for this conversation.

14 Sep 09

Participatory Design « Design for Service

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services design interesting tools participation research qualitative

Index of /~comp3503/Resources/Transactions of the ACM Special Issue on PD/

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participation design methodology research

21 Jul 09

How might we design a participatory system? » Design Thinking

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design idea participation

The best examples of current participatory systems included a significant amount of “user” participation in the design process itself.
Nobody will participate in a system that does not serve his or her needs, and hence those involved in design, whether inside or outside conventional organizations, must master the skills of human centered design thinking.
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- Participative systems must be as relevant to a market of one as to a market of millions. Digital technology offers the flexibility to operate at very different scales. Any participatory offering must make effective use of the Internet.
- As I discussed earlier in my post, :”Why We Need Economic Dashboards “, we have to design interactions that are profitable for all participants.
- This means we must design in the information feedback loops that make measurement of the various forms of participatory value easy.
- Hence we also need to design processes that allow us to spot new patterns, encourage the evolution of new ideas, and help new ideas scale to the point where they have impact.
- So, we need to start getting comfortable with letting others participate in our innovation activities. Of course this means that many of our accepted notions of IP and trade secrets go out of the window. This is very scary for the lawyers.

22 Jun 09

Mobile phones: Sensors and sensitivity | The Economist

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technology innovation phone health trends participation

The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.
Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats.
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- A good example is InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), a non-profit group based in California, which promotes the use of mobile phones to improve developing countries’ ability to respond to disasters.
- Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number.
  
  The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables “geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data”.
- The aim is to enable a quick response to any outbreak of avian flu, cholera, malaria or dengue fever. InSTEDD is helping aid organisations and government agencies deploy its free tools in other countries, including Bangladesh, Peru and Tanzania.
- Dr Pentland and his colleagues will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population. How public-health officials will use this information has yet to be decided: people who are thought to be infected could be contacted by text message and asked to visit a doctor, for example.
- Path Intelligence, a British firm, is applying a similar approach to answer more commercial questions. Its FootPath system aggregates and analyses signals picked up from mobile phones as people move through a particular area. The results can be used by planners to optimise the flow of pedestrians through railway stations and airports or to guide the layout of shopping centres.
- On a grander scale, InSTEDD’s Dr Rasmussen is trying to stitch together a global network, tentatively dubbed Archangel, to combine all manner of data sources, from satellite imagery and seismic sensors to field-workers texting from refugee camps. A first glimpse of what such a network would look like is pachube.com, an experimental web-service launched in 2007 by Usman Haque, an architect based in London. He aims to patch together sensors and people into a “conversant ecosystem” of devices, buildings and environments.
- An abundance of sensors, they believe, will lead to two things. First, the amount of data will increase, allowing scientists to build more realistic models.
- Second, once people are able to contribute data to research projects from their mobile phones, it could provide an ideal way to broaden public involvement in scientific activities.
- When people can report mundane variables such as the level of traffic noise in their street or the degree of air pollution at the bus stop, he argues, their outlook on science changes. “People develop a relationship with and a sense of ownership over the data,” he says. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Nokia has even designed a prototype handset with environmental sensors (see article).

07 May 09

Beth Simone Noveck for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

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politics wiki opensource governance participation democracy information society essential

Although political legitimacy demands accountability to an
electoral process, those living in a democracy readily submit to what
sociologist Michael Schudson calls the "permanent embarrassment" of
expertise. We believe that administrative governance by a professional
elite is the best way to organize decision-making in the public
interest.
The justification for this professional decision-making,
articulated by theorists ranging from Max Weber to Walter Lippmann, is
that while citizens can express personal opinions based on values, they
are incapable of making fact-based decisions on matters of policy.
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- Only institutionalized and
  governmental professionals possess the expertise, resources,
  discipline, and time to make public-policy decisions.
- And citizen
  participation is hard to organize and administer, and even harder to
  scale. It is one thing for 10 bureaucrats to debate a policy and come
  to an informed consensus; try getting the same result with 10,000
  people–or 10 million.
- Now, however, new technology may be changing the relationship
  between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve
  competence by making good information available for better governance.
- Ordinary people, regardless of
  institutional affiliation or professional status, possess
  information–serious, expert, fact-based, scientific information–to
  enhance decision-making, information not otherwise available to
  isolated bureaucrats.
- Partly as a result of the simple tools now
  available for collaboration and partly as a result of a highly mobile
  labor market of "knowledge workers," people are ready and willing to
  share that information across geographic, disciplinary, and
  institutional boundaries.
- Wikipedia is open enough to allow expertise to emerge,
  but it is also structured enough, with outlines and to-do lists, to set
  the rules for a certain kind of group collaboration–and that
  collaboration is producing high-quality results.
- Or take sites that utilize self-reinforcing "reputation" systems to
  improve quality and reliability.
- Making expertise
  relevant for the complex processes of policy-making also requires
  forming communities that can collaborate, but it goes beyond that. It
  demands "civic networking," tools designed for groups to transform data
  into knowledge useful to decision-makers, as well as the concomitant
  institutional practices designed to make use of that knowledge.
- Political philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau to Rawls have
  suggested that when groups engage in the public exchange of reason,
  they produce better ideas. In practice, however, more talk usually
  slows decision-making and comes with the attendant problem of
  groupthink. Increasingly, however, we are discovering how to use
  computers to enable deliberation without endless talk and without
  having to be in the same room. And those structures–enforced through
  software–are what transform the subjective, free-wheeling, dynamic
  expertise of amateurs into effective communities of experts.
- For example, the Omidyar Network, the philanthropy launched by eBay
  founder Pierre Omidyar, asks the public to participate in awarding its
  grants.
- Or consider New Assignment,
  which was launched to demonstrate that "open collaboration over the
  Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce
  high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under
  scrutiny, and builds trust." The site set forth the social practices to
  elicit collaborative reporting (instead of collaborative
  gossip-mongering), resulting in the publication of seven original
  essays and 80 interviews, as well as a series of stories about
  collaborative journalism for Wired
  magazine.
- Similarly, the Sense.us program at
  the University of California–Berkeley provides public mechanisms to
  allow people across disciplinary boundaries to collaborate in making,
  and thereby making sense of, census data graphs and charts. And the
  United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is taking this idea
  to the next level: connecting experts directly to actual
  decision-making in the "Peer-to-Patent" project.
- This has
  particular application to policymaking: Non-governmental participants
  have something more to offer than voting once a year–namely, good
  information.
- If we can harness the
  enthusiasm and knowledge of "netizens" to the legal and political
  processes generally reserved for citizens, we can produce government
  decision-making that is both more expert and, at the same time, more
  democratic.
- The Problem with Experts
  
  In his award-winning book On Political Judgment, social
  psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed the predictions of those
  professionals who advise government about political and economic
  trends. Pitting these professional pundits against minimalist
  performance benchmarks, he found "few signs that expertise translates
  into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or
  ‘discriminating’ forecasts." It turns out that professional status has
  much less bearing on the quality of information than we might assume,
  and that professionals–whether in politics or other domains–are
  notoriously unsuccessful at making informed predictions.
- And more
  participation does not mean better participation. How should
  administrators deal with individuals who carp but offer little useful
  information to improve decision-making? Or interest groups that
  electronically submit tens of thousands of identical "postcard
  comments"?
- Scientific peer review provides an alternative mechanism for
  oversight and quality control.

29 Apr 09

IDeA: Practical ways to engage with your community

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qualitative democracy participation methodology

14 Apr 09

Wired.com Readers Pick Personal Petition Site as Best Gov Sunshine App | Epicenter from Wired.com

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participation democracy web2.0

The Petition Archives won the Epicenter Reader's Choice award. The site lets citizens create personal petitions targeted at their representative, using Sunlight Foundation's API to automatically fill in legislators' information.
Second place goes to TweetCongress, which strives to open up communication between lawmakers and citizens using the net's hottest new communication tool, Twitter.

Or as its creator, the web app development house Squeejee,
puts it, "We the Tweeple of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect government, establish communication, and promote transparency
do hereby Tweet the Congress of the United States of America."

10 Apr 09

Global Voices Online » India: The Advent of Citizen-Driven Election Monitoring

interesting piece on ushaidi and how the ushaidi model is being developed in a different context - India - by Vote Report India...

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participation politics twitter activism democracy

That is where Ushahidi makes a difference. Ushahidi ('witness' in Swahili) is an tool that was used to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It provided a mechanism for the local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet. The information was filtered by local activist volunteers and an archive of the events were kept in an website using geographical mashup which is accessible to readers. Its success led to its replication as a tool for crisis reporting in some other places of the world.
The good news is that the Ushahidi model has been introduced in India too. Vote Report India, a collaborative citizen-powered election monitoring platform based on the Ushahidi engine, will monitor the parliamentary elections in India, which is starting in a few weeks from now.
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- Gaurav Mishra of Vote Report India, also a Global Voices author, writes in his own blog:
  
  Basically, users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.
  
  We are hoping that Vote Report India will not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work - The McKinsey Quarterly - Six ways Web 2.0 work - Business Technology - Application Management

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web2.0 socialmedia business trends media research collaboration strategy participation marketing

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