The conference was the first of its kind and hopefully will stand as the first in a long line to continue investigating how we work together in seemingly intelligent ways. The overview text from the conference website:

Collective intelligence has existed at least as long as humans have, because families, armies, countries, and companies have all – at least sometimes – acted collectively in ways that seem intelligent. But in the last decade or so a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: groups of people and computers, connected by the Internet, collectively doing intelligent things. For example, Google technology harvests knowledge generated by millions of people creating and linking web pages and then uses this knowledge to answer queries in ways that often seem amazingly intelligent. Or in Wikipedia, thousands of people around the world have collectively created a very large and high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control, and almost all as volunteers!

These early examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence are not the end of the story but just the beginning. And in order to understand the possibilities and constraints of these new kinds of intelligence, we need a new interdisciplinary field. Forming such a field is one of the goals of this conference.

We seek papers about behavior that is both collective and intelligent. By collective, we mean groups of individual actors, including, for example, people,
computational agents, and organizations. By intelligent, we mean that the collective behavior of the group exhibits characteristics such as, for example,
perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

human computation
social computing
crowdsourcing
wisdom of crowds (e.g., prediction markets)
group memory and problem-solving
deliberative democracy
animal collective behavior
organizational design
public policy design (e.g., regulatory reform)
ethics of collective intelligence (e.g., “digital sweatshops”)
computational models of group search and optimization
emergence and evolution of intelligence
new technologies for making groups smarter

Invited Speakers

• Lada Adamic (Michigan)
• Yochai Benkler (Harvard)
• Colin Camerer (Caltech)
• Chris Chabris (Union)
• Yiling Chen (Harvard)
• Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo!)
• Iain Couzin (Princeton)
• Deborah Gordon (Stanford)
• Ed Hutchins (UCSD)
• Panos Ipeirotis (NYU)
• Robert Kraut (CMU)
• Karim Lakhani (Harvard)
• Winter Mason (Stevens)
• Rob Miller (MIT)
• Scott Page (Michigan)
• Matthew Salganik (Princeton)
• Ben Shneiderman (Maryland)
• Justin Wolfers (Penn)
• Anita Woolley (CMU)
• Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard)

All the plenaries were excellent and nearly all the accepted paper sessions were strong as well. I began the conference a little in awe of the names walking so near me at a conference with a population of only 203. But the intimacy of such a setting allowed me to have hallway conversations and lunch(es) with some of the researchers I most admire in this interdisciplinary field.

I am tickled that my work will be found in the proceedings alongside such strong, visionary research.

The full proceedings are online at arXiv.org and freely available.

My paper is here: Collective Cognitive Authority: Expertise Location via Social Labeling

And the accompanying poster:

For posterity, I’ve included my tweets from during the conference:

19 Apr – walking through MIT campus for start of Collective Intelligence 2012 http://www.ci2012.org #ci2012
19 Apr – remarkable collection of interdisciplinary luminaries in this room. pleased to be here #ci2012
19 Apr – i’m a poster. RT @gegenhuber #ci2012: 104 paper submission, 18 for presentation, 16 for poster. Very diverse group.
19 Apr – nice trend so far of showing faces of named collaborators on slides #ci2012
19 Apr – remarkable work being done at http://icouzin.princeton.edu/ #ci2012
19 Apr – Anita Woolley (CMU) looking for ‘c-factor’, traits/markers that indicate who exhibit collective intelligence #ci2012
19 Apr – says Anita Woolley (CMU) “when sensitivity to signaling within the group is higher, CI is higher” (re: women, ants, etc.) #ci2012
19 Apr – listening to @YBenkler – he works on a different level. impressive. #ci2012
19 Apr – says @YBenkler “collaboration among diverse participants will benefit from structure, and could benefit from power” #ci2012
19 Apr – says @YBenkler “but power can undermine intrinsic motivation” #ci2012
19 Apr – Ian Spiro (NYU) et al have built a markerless motion capture tool using mechanical turk http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3596 #ci2012
19 Apr – and the code is open! https://github.com/movementlab http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3596 #ci2012
19 Apr – incredible. realtime crowds @msbernst – can bring in huge group responses in half a second using ‘retainers’ http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27763/ #ci2012
19 Apr – says @ipeirotis “brain functions are biologically expensive (MTurk workers want to use only their motor skills)” #ci2012
19 Apr – says @ipeirotis “confuse bad MTurk workers by punishing with unpredictable ‘errors’ (fake loading messages, 404s, etc.)” #ci2012
19 Apr – Bob Kraut (CMU) http://kraut.hciresearch.org/ discussing self/group motivation dynamics – how to get social identity to align group goals #ci2012
19 Apr – Bob Kraut (CMU) http://kraut.hciresearch.org/ says publicizing important community tasks helps align individual motivation with group goals #ci2012
19 Apr – .@jpom orig Woolley Science article https://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/686.abstract – signaling part of ‘social intelligence’, made connection to ants today #ci2012
19 Apr – speaker @winteram on Group Identity, Culture, and Collective Intelligence and Social Learning #ci2012
19 Apr – speaker @rbmllr (MIT) showing a ‘wickedly hard handwriting example’, using iterative improvement MTurk HIT #ci2012
19 Apr – says Yahoo’s @xeeliz “I’m interested in the collected as well as the collective. Are they the right data?” #ci2012
19 Apr – And I do love hearing @xeeliz speak – smart, funny, relevant, british #ci2012
19 Apr – Ed Hutchins (UCSD) talks about ‘distributed cognition’ – began by studying high-staked small groups (Navy ship navigation) #ci2012
19 Apr – Ed Hutchins (UCSD) says “What will happen when all airlines/pilots carry iPads instead of 30lbs of paper (maps/data)? Don’t know!” #ci2012
19 Apr – .@benbendc asking “who are we?” to the community in the room “what do we want to do?” #ci2012
19 Apr – says @benbendc “We need a Large Social Collider” – demanding our Sputnik moment #ci2012
19 Apr – .@zittrain saying “significance of this room’s expertise” … agreeing with @benbendc “this stuff matters” #ci2012
19 Apr – says @zittrain “we have a new unit/particle – ‘cogs’ in our field. both cognition… and cogs in a machine” #ci2012
19 Apr – says @zittrain “These arm’s length markets… are laundering ethics” #mturk #ci2012
19 Apr – always book @zittrain as a final speaker. anyone having to follow would be depressed. #awesome #ci2012
19 Apr – .@zittrain writing a book this summer named “Cog” – hopes to offer solutions to our new realities of collective intelligence. #ci2012
20 Apr – speaker @ladamic discussing information diffusion in social networks. “How and how much are we influenced by our people?” #ci2012
20 Apr – says @ladamic “preference of viral social objects: true > funny > awesome > cute” #ci2012
20 Apr – says @cfchabris “simple response time for groups is second highest predictor for collective intelligence” #ci2012
20 Apr – says @cfchabris “turn taking in groups correlated with high CI, followed by social ability (Reading the Mind in the Eyes test)” #ci2012
20 Apr – says @cfchabris intelligence may be a property of all “species” of complex information processing systems #mice #monkeys #groups #ci2012
20 Apr – .@klakhani (Harvard Business School and NASA Tournament Lab) covering many examples of innovation contests #ci2012
20 Apr – Scott E. Page (Michigan) layering economic model math on Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds (diversity = inverse covariance) #ci2012
20 Apr – speaker @seydaertekin on predicting wisdom of crowds without ground truth to best use limited budget #crowdsense #ci2012
20 Apr – Yu An Sun (Xerox) speaking on dealing with when the crowd majority voting doesn’t work, other methods, comparisons #ci2012
20 Apr – being controversial, @nikete w/ @mdreid on Crowd & Prejudice, and impossibility of crowd labeling without a gold standard #ci2012
20 Apr – Michael E. Roberts (DePauw) Group Foraging in Dynamic Environments, modeling group/food behavior #ci2012
20 Apr – Pavlin Mavrodiev (ETH Zurich) showing examples/models of non-independent opinions effecting ‘wisdom of crowds’ #ci2012
20 Apr – Ying Zhang (PARC) on thermodynamic principles in social collaborations – Wikipedia as thermodynamic system #ci2012

Thank you to everyone at MIT, CSAIL, the NSF, the Kendall Hotel, and the conference committee for a thought-provoking, inspiring, and tasty week.

Last week, two documents that I’ve been working on for years are now available in book form.

First, my dissertation is now available from ProQuest in a lovely academic hardcover edition. I plan to order one for my shelf. Everyone else, please, just download the PDF (it’s creative commons). ProQuest has enough money already.

And second, the iRODS 3.0 microservices book is now available on Amazon. Everything you wanted to know about iRODS.

Neat.

From http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2011/10/19/flexible-futures/:

If you know something that others want to know, they will find you.

In addition to everything else, we are each a unique set of knowledge, experience and capabilities which, in the right situation, proves uniquely valuable. By sharing what we know, we advertise our expertise. It follows us where ever we go. Because this expertise is mostly hidden from view, it is impossible for us to look at one another and see the depth that each of us carries within us.

Every time we share, we reveal the secret expert within ourselves. Because we constantly share ourselves with our friends, family and co-workers, they come to rely on what we know. But what of our colleagues? We work in organizations with little sense of the expertise that surrounds us.

Before hyperconnectivity, it was difficult to share expertise. You could reach a few people – those closest to you – but unless your skills were particularly renowned or valuable, that’s where it stopped. For good or ill, our experience and knowledge now extend far beyond the circle of those familiar to you, throughout the entire organization. Everyone in it can now have some awareness of the talents that pulse through your organizations – with the right tools in place.

And then:

Every employee in an organization has a specific set of talents, but these talents are not evenly distributed. Someone knows more about sales, someone else knows more about marketing, or customer service, or accounting. That’s why people have roles within an organization; they are the standard-bearers for the organization’s expertise.

Yet an employee’s expertise may lie across several domains. Someone in accounting may also provide excellent customer service. Someone in manufacturing might be gifted with sales support. A salesman might be an accomplished manager. People come into your organization with a wide range of skills, and even if they don’t have an opportunity to share them as part of their normal activities, those skills represent resources of immense value.

If only we knew where to find them.

You see, it isn’t always clear who knows what, who’s had experience where, or who’s been through this before. We do not wear our employment histories on our sleeves. Although we may enter an organization with our c.v. in hand, once hired it gets tucked away until we start scouting around for another job. What we know and what we’ve done remains invisible. Our professional lives look a lot like icebergs, with just a paltry bit of our true capabilities exposed to view.

I gotta build this thing and get it out there…
Contextual Authority Tagging

Congratulations. Your submission has cleared all of the necessary checks and will soon be delivered to UMI.

Hooray!

I’ve posted the entire dissertation online, with supporting materials created along the way.

It is published under Creative Commons with a BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Title: Contextual Authority Tagging: Expertise Location via Social Labeling
Author(s): Terrell Russell

Publishing Settings & Copyright
Traditional Publishing
Do not delay release to ProQuest
Allow search engine access.
Do not allow third party sales.
Do not file for copyright – I am requesting that ProQuest/UMI not file for copyright on my behalf.

Degree/Department Information
Year degree awarded: 2011
Degree Awarded: Doctor of Philosophy
Year Manuscript Completed: 2011
Department: Information & Library Science
Advisor/Chair: Deborah Barreau, Gary Marchionini
Committee Members: Barbara M Wildemuth, Sri Kalyanaraman, Phillip J Windley

Subject Categories
Information Science [0723] – primary
Organization Theory [0635]
Social Psychology [0451]

Keywords
cognitive authority
expertise
identity
knowledge management
reputation
tagging

Abstract
This study investigates the possibility of a group of people making explicit their tacit knowledge about one another’s areas of expertise. Through a design consisting of a modified Delphi Study, group members are asked to label both their own and each others’ areas of expertise over the course of five rounds. Statistical analysis and qualitative evaluation of 10 participating organizations suggest they were successful and that, with simple keywords, group members can convey the salient areas of expertise of their colleagues to a degree that is deemed “similar” and of “high quality” by both third parties and those being evaluated. More work needs to be done to make this information directly actionable, but the foundational aspects have been identified.

In a world with a democratization of voices from all around and increasing demands on our time and attention, this study suggests that simple, aggregated third-party expertise evaluations can augment our ongoing struggle for quality information source selection. These evaluations can serve as loose credentials when more expensive or heavyweight reputation cues may not be viable.

Language
en ( English )

Today, Google launched “Me on the Web” as part of their Google Dashboard.

However, your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others.

Today we’ve released a new tool to help make it easier to monitor your identity on the web and to provide easy access to resources describing ways to control what information is on the web. This tool, Me on the Web, appears as a section of the Google Dashboard right beneath the Account details.

found via http://mashable.com/2011/06/16/google-me-on-the-web/

The idea that reputation matters and will become both more important and transparent are coming of age. Very soon, we’ll start needing better tools to vet the opinions that are being tracked and surfaced across the web.

Now, if only I could publish this dissertation…

From Smoke Signals:

Your social graph is the most important thing you have that can be represented in bits. With it, I can manipulate you. I can change your tastes, your attitudes, even your politics. We now know this is possible – and probably even easy. But to do this, I need your social graph. I need you to surrender it to me before I can use it to fuck you over.

His four design principles to make sure we own the future:

1. Distribute Everything
2. Transport Independence
3. Secure Everything
4. Open Everything

It seems so straightforward.

So why, again, have we capitulated to Facebook?

It represents democracy in action. It represents our continual redefinitions of both truth and relevancy. It represents our ability to deal with authority in the face of a distinct lack of credentialing. It represents our best efforts to make sense of our world and to both collate and distill its essence.

I think it represents the future.

It is a thing of beauty and I’m inspired by it every day.

Happy 10th Birthday, Wikipedia.

And thanks!

Please consider your fellow servermates and avoid the use of weak passwords.

What Not To Do

Strong passwords are great. Cryptographically secure passwords are even cooler and highly encouraged. That said, under no circumstances should anyone be using something like “jason/jason” or “damelon/damelon” as their login/password combination.

Dictionary attacks have been monitored on these servers from the very early days and are considered “constant” today. Expect that if you are using a weak password for your account to be compromised by these attacks. This escalates the possibility that other users will be affected by your oversight. This is a very bad thing.

Choosing Good Passwords

Information about how to choose good passwords can be found in many places. A good summary can be found at the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team’s site here.

Choice Selections

“It has often been said that ‘good fences make good neighbors.’ On a Unix system, many users also say that “I don’t care who reads my files, so I don’t need a good password.’ Regrettably, leaving an account vulnerable to attack is not the same thing as leaving files unprotected. In the latter case, all that is at risk is the data contained in the unprotected files, while in the former, the whole system is at risk.”—Klein, 1991

“I remember seeing a great phrase on the Mexican Hackers Emergency Response Team page, which went something like ‘Passwords are like underwear: don’t share them, hide them under your keyboard, or hang them from your monitor. Above all, change them frequently’”—SecurityFocus

Thanks, Terrell

References

[1] AusCERT. Choosing Good Passwords. (2001) http://www.auscert.org.au/render.html?it=2260

[2] Klein, Daniel V. (1991) Foiling the Cracker; A Survey of, and Improvements to Unix Password Security. Proceedings of the 14th DoE Computer Security Group. May 1991. http://www.klein.com/dvk/publications/

[3] SecurityFocus. (2001) Password Crackers – Ensuring the Security of Your Password. http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1192

[4] Smith, Richard E. (2002) The Strong Password Dilemma. http://www.smat.us/sanity/pwdilemma.html

Kelly and I commissioned 16 whirligigs from Vollis for our wedding in 2008; 15 tabletop whirligigs for our wedding party and immediate family members, and one larger “bike wheel” for ourselves.

You can see our order for the bicycle wheel in small black text on his door in photo 3 of 12 in the accompanying slideshow. It’s way down at the bottom…

And again, before it was covered with two more years of barn activity.

It’s wonderful to see him get this kind of recognition and I hope many others continue to have a chance to enjoy his work.

He has lived to see what he thought of as a hobby for himself and quirky entertainment for the neighbors become part of a seriously regarded corner of the art world, one that generates master’s theses, museum shows and significant money.

His work, which graced a window at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan last Christmas, is on permanent display in Baltimore, Atlanta and Albuquerque.

We love our whirligig.

Abstract:
The unprecedented sharing of private information on the Internet is leading some to herald the demise of privacy. It is far too facile, however, to conclude that because people are sharing private data online, they should expect no privacy. The need for confidential disclosure is no more prevalent than when sensitive information such as dating profiles, candid thoughts and past substance abuse is revealed in online communities. What happens when information leaks outside these communities? Traditional remedies will likely fail to protect people when members of an online community violate the confidentiality of other members. In this article, I contend that the law can ensure confidentiality for members of online communities through promissory estoppel. This is the first article proposing the application of promissory estoppel via a website’s terms of use as a method for protecting disclosure in online communities. Under the third-party beneficiary doctrine or the concept of dual agency, these agreements could create a safe place to disclose information due to mutual availability of promissory estoppel.

Hartzog goes on to quote Professor Daniel Solove in a passage on practical implications:

The use of promissory estoppel to protect self-disclosure in online communities is consistent with many legal and public policy considerations besides privacy. Additionally, it could help create a stronger normative culture of confidentiality to protect the well-being of online community denizens. Professor Daniel Solove has asserted that “[p]rivacy, in the form of protection against disclosure, regulates the way people relate to others in society…[I]t promotes one’s ability to engage in social affairs, form friendships and human relationships, communicate with others and associate with groups of people sharing similar value.” … His conclusion underscores the need to create a safe place for disclosure online.

The four part analysis of whether a promissory estoppel should be applied is proposed as:

1) Was there a clear and definite promise?
2) Did the promisor intend to induce reliance on the part of the promisee, and did such reliance occur to the promisee’s detriment?
3) Must the promise be enforced to prevent an injustice?
4) What are the damages?

Hartzog ends his paper:

The proposed theory of recovery advances privacy as control over personal information, one of the foundations of information privacy law. It focuses on reliance instead of a commercial-based bargain theory. It also encourages speech by offering a safe place for sensitive self-disclosure and an easier process by which potential disseminators of information disclosed within a community can determine the appropriate level of discretion to apply to accessed information.

Ideally, if utilized over a significant period of time, the promissory estoppel remedy could create a stronger normative culture of confidentiality through improved channels of internalization of duties of discretion. Additionally, the solution is likely compliant with the First Amendment, as analyzed under the Cohen standard. Finally, although the available damages under promissory estoppel are less than that in tort, the theory could potentially have an effect on other torts, such as the tort for breach of confidentiality.

It is difficult to predict the full impact adoption of the promissory estoppel remedy would have for online communities, but the provision of a safe place for users to disclose personal information online would likely promote both speech and the personal well being of online community denizens.

Please make sure to watch this movie when you get a chance.

It’s opening theatrically in NYC this Friday for the first time. I saw the film at Social Web FooCamp in April, met and spoke with Ondi and Josh, and had some great discussions around identity, performance, and our senses of self and each other.

It was fascinating to be a part of the conversation with the people building out today’s state-of-the-art communication technologies (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) and the ones who have already seen the future. My mind raced for a few days afterwards.

Go see We Live In Public.

Deep Throat
A few years ago now, in 2005, the world finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. He had remained pseudonymous for over 30 years. Mark Felt came forward himself when he allowed the release of his name in a Vanity Fair article by his attorney. The disclosure was on his terms. He decided to end the secrecy before he died.

This is something that I claim would be impossible in today’s interconnected and recorded world. Are there stories today that are being published where the sources are on “deep background” and the public is clamoring to know the source’s identity?

The Fake Steve Jobs
The Fake Steve Jobs had a good thing going with his blog The Diary of Fake Steve. He was continually witty and received rave reviews for his poking fun at the mystery and aura that is Apple and Steve Jobs, proper. Of course, over time, his identity was revealed by the New York Times to be Dan Lyons. And like Felt, there was a book deal shortly thereafter. The ruse lasted 14 months — much longer than expected.

“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long … I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.” — Lyons

He has since taken up the writing as Fake Steve again – and it’s still just as funny – but without the cloud of intrigue as to who would be so bold…

_why the lucky stiff
Yesterday, _why, a fairly well known programmer in the web2.0 space apparently deleted his online presence. This is news, regardless, but what’s more interesting is that “_why” is a pseudonym and so far, we don’t know for whom. He has deleted his accounts, his blogs, his code and for now, the community of programmers and hackers have yet to unearth his identity. The thread at ycombinator seems to be getting close – I suspect it is only a matter of hours before we get some confirmation.

John Resig posted a remarkable eulogy (his word) to _why:

At this moment, _why’s online presence appears to be no more. All of his sites and code are gone. This includes, and is not limited to:

* http://twitter.com/_why
* http://github.com/why
* http://whytheluckystiff.net/
* http://poignantguide.net/
* http://hackety.org/
* http://shoooes.net/
* http://hacketyhack.net/
* http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Two conjectures are common at the moment: His account(s) were hacked and sites taken down or he simply decided to delete his online presence. I personally believe that he did this deliberately and with some amount of forethought.

Still Hidden?
What examples do we have where we still don’t know who is behind a widely-known* piece or body of work? Does it still happen? The timeframe for the ability to remain unknown is correlated with visibility, no doubt.

I’d love to keep a list somewhere…

We’ve seen CNN get slammed (via the #CNNFail hashtag on Twitter) for not doing a timely job of covering the nascent election results and ensuing reaction on the ground.

We’ve seen CNN ironically run a pre-scheduled show (Reliable Sources) on the very topic of Twitter and other social media and their questionable relevance in a world of network news and (known) talking heads.

But we’ve also seen the realization that with many conversations and an exploding number of sources from which to choose from, we begin drowning in the overhead of deciding what to follow and where to focus our attention. In a rapid news cycle with new sources and new faces, we don’t know what’s good. We don’t know who is reliable. We don’t know where the trusted voices are.

3. Buyer Beware

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so). -source

And this is because we have very little in place that can provide us with credentials for these new voices. They’re all equal and they’re all anonymous, until we work through the quality of their content on our own (which is very time-consuming and expensive from the perspective of the news-hungry individual).

5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge

For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques. Of course, Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting. In that way, Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presumably has some supporters somewhere in Iran, is losing in a North Korean-style landslide on Twitter. -source

We need a system in place whereby the community itself (read here: The Internet) can continuously and collectively vet these voices and provide a contextual backdrop on what a particular actor knows about. We need the ability to see and hear the collective’s live opinion on the sources themselves – as well as a continued eye on the content they’re producing.

Now that everyone really can have a global, instant, “retweetable” voice – we need to know who’s doing the tweeting if we want to believe the content before digging through our own vetting process. We grant authority to The New York Times and The Washington Post – largely without questioning their sourcing. If they say something, we run with it. We should get to the point when we can do the same with individuals we don’t personally have a relationship with (mediated or otherwise).

This need is being demonstrated with ad-hoc tools like twitspam.com and posts like this one specifically about the Iran Election and trusted sources.

Perhaps this is another case of the academic seeing everything from the perspective of his own problem/solution, but I sincerely feel a huge opportunity for whomever can get a robust expertise market online and available for exactly these kinds of moments. Contextual Authority Tagging…

Eugene Eric Kim has written a wonderful post on the Blue Oxen Associates blog about his use of my ideas around Contextual Authority Tagging in his work with organizations regarding reproductive health.

Terrell’s premise is that reputation in context can be extremely valuable, often more valuable than what you say about yourself. For example, suppose you asked me for three words to describe myself. In a work context, I might say, “collaboration, transformation, do-gooder.” That is how I perceive myself, or at least how I want others to perceive me. Those three words have gone through a personal filter, which may be filtering useful information. Maybe I’m too modest to say certain words. Maybe I’m deluded. Or maybe I simply don’t know what others value most about me.

There are three interesting pieces of information here:

* What do others say about you?
* What’s the difference between what others say about you and what you say about yourself?
* If you and everyone else get to see what is said about you, how will what is said evolve over time?

I’m anxious to see what Terrell discovers about these and other questions. If his premise is correct, then there are all sorts of interesting applications of this. For example, many knowledge management tools include some sort of expert finder, which is generally reliant on what people say about themselves in their personal profiles. It may be more valuable to have an expert finder that’s oriented around what others say about you.

He’s included some Wordles of the types of information and interactions that come from having people share stories and talk about one another.

Earlier this year, I facilitated a strategic workshop for Civil Liberties & Public Policy (CLPP), another reproductive health advocacy and leadership organization, and I kicked things off with this exercise. The visualizations from that exercise are particularly instructive. Here is a visualization of all the words that the participants used to describe each other:

This is most rewarding to me – and I look forward to working with Eugene in the next few months on some collaborations. I think we have a lot to offer each other in the ways we see these tools.

Social Web FooCamp

In only a couple weeks (gah, how’d that happen…) I’ll head back to the Social Web FooCamp. This is a great honor to be invited back and I hope to continue providing insight and ideas on the tangle/noisiness/mess of our social Internet.

IIW8

I’ll be at IIW8 again in May. This is a fantastic event and one I hated missing last Fall. I really look forward to seeing everyone in the Identity community again. So much has changed in only a few years – and Doc Searls, Kaliya and Phil Windley always put on a great un-conference.

Progress

And then, back to the library. Also, found two guys in Brazil who simulated my (not finished yet) dissertation. I guess that means I’m officially in a race now. Excellent.