CSCW 2008 Workshop (W12): Tinkering, Tailoring, & Mashing: The Social and Collaborative Practices of the Read-Write Web

November 9, 2008 - San Diego, California, USA

Workshop Website: http://mashworks.net/

Overview:
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in CSCW interested in discussing the human-centered, collaborative and creative aspects of web 2.0 and the current internet-based experience of creative social coding - mashups, the programmable web, remix culture, game modding, copy-paste, and social programming. We invite researchers to ask: how are people sharing programming, tailoring, and modding knowledge on the internet and what are useful models of collaborative and social creativity?

Some relevant topics and themes include:

• sharing, reusing, remixing, and recycling of electronic materials;
• web mashups, mashup creation, and mashup use;
• end-user customization and tailoring;
• collaborative debugging and problem-solving;
• loose collaboration;
• hackers, hacking culture, and the bazaar;
• notions of sharability and learnability;

Additionally, we also wish to revisit many theories and theoretical constructs which have long served CSCW, and evaluate them in light of contemporary and emerging practices on the web, including: “community” as both an interpretive lens and a unit of analysis; distributed cognition; activity theory; and social network analysis. How these theories relate to the daily practices of creative life online is not clear, especially what they may (or may not) tell us about issues of personal and group expression, passion, motivation, intention, and deep engagement.

Important dates:
Friday, September 19, 2008 Workshop submissions due
Friday, September 26, 2008 Notification to authors
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Early registration deadline
Friday, October 3, 2008 Conference rate hotel reservation
Sunday, November 9, 2008 Workshop

Organizers:
M. Cameron Jones, Yahoo! Research

Elizabeth F. Churchill, Yahoo! Research

Michael B. Twidale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submission Details:
Participants should submit research reports or researcher position statements, up to four pages in length, by email to mcjones@yahoo-inc.com no later than, September 19, 2008. Submissions should be formatted in standard ACM SIG-CHI long paper format and submitted in either Adobe PDF (.pdf) or Microsoft Word document format (.doc, or .docx).

Here is the abstract for the paper:

Design is a central activity in HCI, but a design-centered approach to HCI has only recently gained traction in human-centered computing education. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of persona-based design methods in HCI and human-centered computing education. We describe the experiences of our students in learning, practicing, and using personas in a number of design contexts. From these experiences, we identify common patterns of use and misuse and characterize challenges in incorporating and using personas in the classroom. We conclude with advice on how to effectively teach design using personas.

Anyway, I decided to fill out the phorm — with fake data of course — just to see what the scam looked like. As I was doing this, I realized that there are loads of scripts and applications which already do this: ruin my efforts at free, open, public wikis, and force me to disable comments on my blog — SPAM BOTS!! What would happen if we took the tools developed by these con artists and spammers, and used them against themselves? What if we pointed spam bots at these phishing sites? Could we choke them out of existence? Or, would they just start implementing CAPTCHAs — possibly making them appear more legitimate?

I wonder why ICANN isn’t doing something about policing the registration of “Phishing domains” (i.e., domains which are deceptively similar to legitimate ones and serve to con people). I know that this is a delicate and difficult problem, but I believe that some solution exists out there.

Another thought that had occurred to me was along the lines of digitally signing HTML, to prevent people from copying the HTML of legitimate sites, thus making it more difficult to reproduce the look-and-feel — but this goes against my love of copy-paste as a primary method of technology production.

The 28th Annual Symposium of the Special Interest Group on Cameron Jones (SIG-CAM) will take place this Friday, October 26, 2007 at the Grotto (aka. Mert Bay’s apartment) located at 212 W. Healey, Apt. 303. Champaign, IL. SIG-CAM is the premier annual symposium devoted to research and scholarship related to Cameron Jones. The symposium will focus on current trends and challenges in beverage markup, digital drunkenness, drink recommender systems, and the impact of new media on society.

We invite interested parties and experts from academia, industry, and government to attend SIG-CAM 2007. The opening Plenary will start at 7:00 PM at the Grotto, with a reception will follow the plenary at the Blind Pig bar in downtown Champaign sometime later Friday evening. If you can’t make the plenary, try to meet up with us later at the reception!

You can find a map of locations for SIG-CAM 2007 on Google Maps by searching “SIG-CAM” on maps.google.com.

i.e., Cameron’s Birthday Party this Friday, October 26, 2007 @ 7:00 PM

Anyway, this one goes out to all those people I’ve neglected to call recently — especially you Kal!

PS - no birthday party this year, just drinks next Friday somewhere in Champaign if you’re around.

–update!–
It looks like Kal has left the Gift Shop to stagnate for about a year — almost to the day. Which had me confused, because I thought that posting was from today (no year in the date). So, maybe this will motivate Kal to start posting again (again).

4S 2007 - Montreal, QC, Canada
I was on a great panel organized by Tolu Odumosu from RPI on Technological Appropriation. Other panelists included: Tolu Odumosu, Ron Eglash, Min Suh Son, Shib Shankar Dasgupta, and Tarleton Gillespie was our Discussant. Here are the slides from my talk:
Web Mashups: Technological Appropriation in Web 2.0 [ PPTX | PPT ]

ISMIR 2007 - Vienna, Austria
I presented 2 posters and 1 paper at this year’s ISMIR. We had the MIREX DIY Service Poster, Jin Ha Lee’s dissertation research poster, and my paper on Human Judgments of Music Similarity from MIREX 2006. Here are the slides for that presentation:
Human Similarity Judgments: Implications for the Design of Formal Evaluations [ PPTX | PPT ]

In this talk I cover some recent research I’ve been doing on the role of copying in the production of web mashups. I talk about the Yahoo! Pipes system and it’s “cloning” function. I also present some preliminary findings from a clone analysis of Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps web mashups source code. Some of this research is part of my dissertation work, where I’ll be studying cloning in open-source.

I also presented some of these findings (the Google Maps parts) in my CSNA poster from earlier this month.

It was totally random luck (or maybe fate) that we got the Wii. By a random set of circumstances, I ended up spending an extra day at my parents’ house this weekend. My brother and his two kids were visiting too. My parents went to Toys R Us this morning to get training wheels for my nephew’s bike and while they were there, saw they had Wii’s in stock. They picked one up for me, and boy am I glad I stayed the extra day! YAH! WII!!!! Now, I just have to get my characters back up to Pro level on all sports

I don’t think there is much explanation needed… it is an awesome robotic, self cleaning toilet found in the Europaischerhoff in Munich, Germany.