15. Ed Chi, "Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Social Cognition research"

PARC Forum: May 1, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA ,USA

Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Social Cognition research

Ed Chi, PARC Augmented Social Cognition group

We are experiencing the new Social Web, where people share, communicate, commiserate, and conflict with each other. As evidenced by Wikipedia and del.icio.us, Web 2.0 environments are turning people into social information foragers and sharers. Users interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense of topic areas from "Obama vs. Clinton" to "Islam."

PARC's Augmented Social Cognition researchers -- who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, sociology, and other disciplines -- focus on understanding how to "enhance a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason". Through Web 2.0 systems like social tagging, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.

In this Forum, we summarize recent PARC work and early findings on: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and
metadata.


Bio:
Ed H. Chi is a senior research scientist and area manager of PARC's Augmented Social Cognition group. His previous work includes understanding Information Scent (how users navigate and make sense of information environments like the Web), as well as developing information visualizations such as the "Spreadsheet for Visualization" (which allows users to explore data through a spreadsheet metaphor where each cell holds an entire data set with a full-fledged visualization). He has also worked on computational molecular biology, ubiquitous computing systems, and recommendation and personalized search engines. Ed has over 19 patents and has been conducting research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been quoted in the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, Slate, and the Associated Press. Ed completed his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota between 1992 and 1999. In his spare time, he is an avid Taekwondo black belt, photographer, and snowboarder.

14. John Giannandrea, "Freebase: An Open Database of the World's Information"

PARC Forum: April 17, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA

Freebase: An Open Database of the World's Information

John Giannandrea, Metaweb Technologies


Freebase -- an open database of the world's information -- is built by a global community and is free for anyone to query, contribute to, and build applications on. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC, Freebase is curated by a passionate global community of users and contains structured information on millions of topics such as music, food ingredients, rocket engines, stock indices, historical events, and more.

Part of what makes this open database unique is that it spans domains, but requires that a particular topic exist only once in Freebase -- even if it might normally be found in multiple databases. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger would appear in a movie database as an actor, a political database as a governor, and in a bodybuilder database as a Mr. Universe. In Freebase, however, there is only one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger that brings all these facets together. The unified topic is a single reconciled identity, which makes it easier to find and contribute information about the linked world we live in.



John Giannandrea co-founded Metaweb Technologies in July 2005. Previously, he was CTO of TellMe Networks, Inc., where he was responsible for the development and operation of the world's largest VoiceXML network -- which was acquired by Microsoft Corporation in 2007. Prior to TellMe, John was Chief Technologist of Netscape's Web browser group. Throughout his career, he has contributed extensively to industry Internet standards and protocols, including Java, HTTP, SSL, and RDF. John is originally from Scotland and graduated from Strathclyde University.

13. Chris Anderson, "FREE! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"

PARC Forum: March 27, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA

FREE! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine & Author, The Long Tail

The Web has become the land of the free. The idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical -- free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Not only is technology giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, but anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. In this Forum, Anderson will discuss the rise of "freeconomics" and technologies driving the spread of free business models across the economy. Between new ways companies have found to subsidize products and the falling cost of doing business in this digital age, the opportunities to adopt a free business model of some sort have never been greater.



Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, a position he took in 2001. Since then he has led the magazine to six National Magazine Award nominations, winning the prestigious top prize for General Excellence in 2007 and in 2005, a year in which he was also named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age magazine. He is the author of New York Times bestselling book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, which was published in 2006, and runs a blog on the subject at longtail.com. In 2007, the book won a prestigious Loeb Award as the best business book of the year and Anderson was named one of the “Time 100” -- the newsmagazine’s list of the 100 most influential men and women in the world.

Previously, Anderson was at The Economist. He also started The Economist’s Internet coverage in 1994 and directed its initial web strategy. Anderson's media career began at the science journals Nature and Science, where he served in several editorial capacities. Anderson holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from George Washington University and studied Quantum Mechanics and Science Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

12. Lisa Petrides, "Open Education: Stepping into New Collaborative Processes"

PARC Forum: March 20, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA

Open Education: Stepping into New Collaborative Processes

Lisa Petrides, Ph.D., President and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

The open content movement – which involves the aggregation, sharing, and collaborative enrichment of free educational materials over the Internet – is re-energizing teaching and learning efforts and making educational resources more dynamic through a cross-pollination of ideas and expertise. This Forum will discuss open education efforts worldwide, including the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education's (ISKME) online network, OER Commons. OER Commons aggregates open educational resources (OER) within a social networking environment to stimulate engagement of diverse populations in accessing and using these resources. Drawing on insights from ISKME’s OER Commons initiative, as well as its research on online collaborative learning environments, this Forum will discuss: (1) how the open education movement is fundamentally about strengthening scholarship and teaching through collaboration – and developing technologies to make that happen; and (2) how this nascent movement is addressing the technical and cultural challenges that impact its widespread adoption.


Lisa Petrides, Ph.D., is president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), an independent non-profit educational research institute located in Half Moon Bay, California. ISKME’s work includes applied research, innovative projects, and field-building initiatives in the area of knowledge sharing in education. Petrides has led the OER Commons initiative, an open source teaching and learning network, which focuses on supporting teachers and learners to facilitate the creation and adaptation of dynamic and evolving open educational resources (OER). A former professor in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Columbia University, Teachers College, Petrides received her Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, MBA from Sonoma State University.

11. Bernard Kerr and Joshua Schachter, "Making del.cio.us Tastier"

PARC Forum: March 13, 2008, 5:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA

Making del.cio.us Tastier

Bernard Kerr and Joshua Schachter, Yahoo! Inc

Del.icio.us has fundamentally changed the way people bookmark and discover the best things on the web. With its launch in 2003, it unleashed the concepts of social bookmarking and tagging on the web, which have inspired an entire generation of social sites.

Many millions of bookmarks later, del.icio.us is now preparing for the next stage of its journey: a new release that features a fresh design with many new features. This talk will explore the unique design challenges of evolving an iconic design into a much richer experience that attracts new users without alienating the existing ones. We will share many of the lessons learned along the way, and show how these have affected our thinking and the upcoming design.



Bernard Kerr
Design Lead del.icio.us
Yahoo! Inc

Bernard Kerr is the lead designer on del.icio.us. He is in charge of the complete user experience for del.icio.us and the ecosystem of products that surround it.

Prior to working at Yahoo! he was a Strategic Designer at IBM Research's Collaborative User Experience group, where his research focused on designing advanced concept software applications and visualizations for collaboration. His work has been published various places including the Infovis and CHI conferences. Before joining IBM Research Bernard held positions at Interval Research and IDEO.

Bernard graduated from the Royal College of Art’s Computer Related Design program in London (2000). He also holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand (1992).


Joshua Schachter
Founder of del.icio.us; director of engineering, Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc.

Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, put web tagging and social bookmarking front and center at Yahoo! when his company was acquired in December 2005. Joshua is responsible for overseeing the strategic direction and growth of the del.icio.us platform and user community as part of Yahoo!’s ongoing development of social search tools.

Before founding del.icio.us, Inc. in 2005 (it was originally developed as a personal hobby starting in 2003), Joshua spent 10 years in the financial services industry in New York

10. Katie Delahaye Paine, "You can’t divide by zero – measuring the effectiveness of free "

PARC Forum: February 28, 2008, 5:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA

Beyond Web 2.0: You can’t divide by zero – measuring the effectiveness of free

Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO, KDPaine & Partners; Publisher, The Measurement Standard


For the past 20 years, Katie Paine has been analyzing the media landscape and helping her clients figure out whether the money they were spending on marketing and PR was worth it. But now, in the post-Web 2.0 world where so many tools are free (or virtually so), the old ROI no longer works. The new ROI is less about quantity and big numbers than it is about relationships and conversations. This session will discuss how to measure the impact of those “Naked Conversations” on brand, reputation, and relationships.



Katie Delahaye Paine is publisher of the first blog and the first newsletters for marketing and communications professionals dedicated entirely to measurement and accountability. Her book, Measuring Public Relationships: the Data-Driven Communicator’s guide to Measuring Public Relationships was published in December 2007. Prior to launching KDPaine & Partners in 2002, Paine was the founder and president of The Delahaye Group, which she sold to Medialink in 1999.

For the past two decades, Paine has been providing professionals with the tools, data, and information to make better business decisions. Paine and her colleagues have conducted interviews and analyzed countless news articles, blogs, newsgroup postings, and internal communications in the relentless pursuit of quantitative and qualitative measures of her clients' marketing success. Paine has worked with companies such as Raytheon, Allstate, Facebook, and Southwest Airlines. Most recently, she has focused on social media measurement as well as providing cost-effective measurement programs for non-profits, small businesses, and government agencies.

9. Andrew McAfee, "Enterprise 2.0: The State of an Art"

PARC FORUM:
February 21 ∙ 4:00 – 5:00 pm ∙ George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto Research Center

TITLE: "Enterprise 2.0: The State of an Art"

SPEAKER: Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT: Andrew McAfee will discuss Enterprise 2.0 – the use of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches by companies in pursuit of business goals. He will describe the trends that have converged to make Enterprise 2.0 an appealing reality now, illustrating them with examples from both the Internet and Intranets. He will also frame the benefits brought by Enterprise 2.0, and use case studies to show how they address some longstanding challenges within organizations. Finally, he will outline substantial barriers to successful adoption of the new tools and approaches, and discuss appropriate roles for general managers, IT departments, internal champions, and other important constituencies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Andrew McAfee joined the faculty of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School (HBS) in 1998. His research investigates how managers can most effectively select, implement, and use Information Technology (IT) to achieve business goals. He was the recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy Integrated Manufacturing Fellowship for his doctoral research, which focused on the performance impact of enterprise information technologies such as SAP's R/3. His current research falls into two categories: (1) an exploration of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used within the enterprise, and what their impact is likely to be; and (2) a study of IT's impact over time on the structure of U.S. industries and the nature of competition within them.

Awarded a Doctorate in Business Administration at HBS in 1999, McAfee also holds dual M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Management from MIT as a Leaders for Manufacturing fellow, and B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and in Humanities from MIT.

This is the 9th talk in our special forum series on Going Beyond Web 2.0.