Researching Social Computing

Over the past year, folks from CITS, Transliteracies, and other campus research projects have been working toward a proposal to support research and graduate education around social computing. While social computing as a general area could encompass much of what we do with wired and wireless devices, our group has been focused on several related and core issues associated with social computing:

(1) How do people make judgments about the quality and trustworthiness of online information? On the flip side, how might people try to game systems that provide trust-related information, such as recommendation systems, and how can that gaming be responded to and/or accounted for?

(2) How could metadata about socially produced online content be collected and rendered so that people can better understand the socially produced nature and history of specific online content? For instance, what kinds of browser add-ons might be able to render information that could inform trust and credibility judgments about specific online content?

(3) How do people use online tools to work collectively in work groups and changed-oriented groups? Whether in an open source software project, on a political campaign, or in a protest movement, online tools are offering new opportunities for acting together and our group is already researching some of these opportunities.

Last week we held a one day workshop to get feedback on our thoughts and to discuss these issues with other prominent academics and technologists. If you want to get a sense of the meeting, you can visit the Transliteracies wiki on the workshop at http://ucsbsocialcomputing.pbwiki.com/. I’ll be blogging about it more over the coming days and weeks, but thought I would kick things off with this general post first.