Web of Science: The Empirical Side of Informatics

Discussion led by Fiorella De Cindio, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics and Communication at the University of Milano in Italy.

Slides from the presentation are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/dmcolab/fiorella-de-cindio-isdt2010

Digital media is changing the world. Digital media is developed by or with the support of the computer professional. However, while the computer professional is educated in computer science, they are weak in the impact of ICTs over society, resulting in missed opportunities and wasted intelligence. Community informatics is attempting to resolve this.
Since 1994, Fiorella has been working at resolving this, as an academic, in Civic Informatics, and as an activist in the Milan Community Network. Throughout her work in both areas, there has been a fundamental, continuous interplay between the two areas. Her research focuses on the design and implementation of social interactive computer systems as well as their deployment in real life settings. Within this framework, she dedicated special attention to promoting civic participation and deliberation at the urban level, and to the development of software tools for supporting them.

What computer scientists are doing to help the people we are discussing in other ISDT talks? 
Computer scientists are designing socio-technical systems for supporting peoples’ needs. These include: social interactive systems and software that enhances civic engagement, e-participation, on-line deliberation, citizen and community empowerment and reconstruction, and citizen consultations.  They have found the best results are achieved in setting up a social interactive system when both public institutions and grassroots movements work together. Some of the most popular web-based applications are modules, discussion boards, blog areas and polls.

Words of Caution: Good technology in itself will not make a community but bad technology can make sure community life will be bad.

The Viola Movement, an example from Firoella’s her own community.
Facebook, although considered individualistic, has worked where political parties failed, in organizing a million protesters. Facebook is an example of a tool being designed for one use, US college students, and being appropriated for another, use by ordinary people. The Viola Movement is experiencing difficulties in surviving because of the limitations of design of Facebook as the chat function does not support the rise of democratic organization. The Viola Movement, as a “we” movement, needs effective public dialogue that is rational, interactive, responsible and fair and the technology should have these characteristics embedded into it.
The ideal platform for productive public dialogue has: i) faces of participants rather than symbols, ii) maps to show location of participants, iii) a safe environment where documents can be stored.
How do you develop these tools? In 1983 participatory design (PD) began and socio tech approach was used which entailed collecting user needs. With PD it is imperative that users be considered as experts. However, this approach is demanding in terms of resources (time and money). It is even more difficult now because of transition from customer systems to web applications and users are often conservative.
There are several approaches to PD (Human Computer Interaction; software engineering and programming communities; market need) and these approaches are moving beyond user participation.
Fiorella’s Project:    Milano Community Network
↓ 10 years of use
The model for new software
                              ↓
1st experimentation (2006), technically a prototype,
however still in use by 1000s of citizens
Web Science
Key Paper: Web Science, An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web.
Our use of the Web is dependent on fundamental developments in computer science long before the Web was developed.
If one only studies the Web, it cannot explain the success of Wikipedia versus the failure of other sites similar platforms.
The idea of the Web as a social machine is appropriate if one considers interactive Web applications as very early social machines (trout.cpsr.org). Exploring the Web can encourage more citizen participation in the public sphere.
Web Science is the merging of the two paradigms of physical science and computers.
Informatics, New Term for Computer Science
The term computer science should be replaced by the term informatics. Computer science is a formal discipline, whereas, informatics in an empirical science which studies selected aspects of specified classes of phenomena.
There are four aspects of natural science: i) phenomenology, ii) analysis –via underlying theory, iii) need for experimentation-synthesis, construction, technology, iv) multi-perspective reflection.
Informatics takes into account technology, theory and development. The anomalous path led to the wrong identification of the class of phenomenon (computer science). It is not the computer itself that should be used for identification but the impact of the computer on society which is an integral part of the discipline.
Informatics has needs in a number of areas, a proper and wider empirical platforms.
Real life social interactive systems provide opportunities for experimentation:
E-participation, on-line deliberation, theory
(this represents the theoretical framework mode)
+ Design of specific e-participation systems
(this requires experimental designs)
+ Development of specific e-participation systems
= Specific systems running in a real life system
CONCLUSION: Technology is needed to allow user communities to construct, share and adapt social machines so successful models evolve through trial use and refinement.