Friendsters @ Work (SDForum)

Friendsters @ Work:Displaying Social Media

Streamsin the Workplace

Joe McCarthy

Principal Instigator

Nokia Research Center Palo Alto

(http://www.slideshare.net/gumption)

Outline

• Motivation

• Context: NRCPA, C3

• Content: Context, Content & Community Collage, a proactive display

• Community: Early experiences

• Future [of Friendsters @] Work

The Problem

• Employees feel un[der]appreciated

• #1 reason people leave jobs (US Labor Dept)

• 2/3 of workers receive no recognition (Gallup)

• Active disengagement costs US$300B / year

• Employees feel disconnected

• Lack of community in workplace

• Us vs. them

• Managers have less time,broader responsibilities

• Difficult to manage frequent, sustained “personal touch”

Friendships at Work

30% of employees have a best friend at work (BF@W)

20% of employees dedicate time to building relationships at work

Employees with a BF@W are 50% more satisfied with their company

Employees with a BF@W are 7 times more likely to be engaged in their work

Maintaining Friendships through Social Media

• ambient intimacy • “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity

and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to”

• Leisa Reichert

• http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/

• http://www.slideshare.net/leisa/ambient-intimacy

• continuous partial friendship • David Weinberger

• http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-may04-07.html

Friendships through Social Media @ Work?

@

A Brief History of N[RC[PA]]

• Nokia: est. 1865

• Nokia Research Center: est. 1986

• Nokia Research Center Palo Alto: est. Nov. 2006

Nokia Research Center Palo Alto

• An Experimental Systems Research Center

• Co-creating the future mobile Internet experience

• New lab, new people, new culture … new challenges

• New Nokia

Experimentsall the way down

John Paul ShenResearch Fellow

Head of NRC Palo Alto

Context, Content & Community (C3)

Team Leader : David RaczVision:

A world where everyone connects effortlessly to relevant resources -- the contexts, content and communities that empower us to achieve our dreams.

Mission:Design, develop and deploy systems to connect individuals with relevant resources at times and places that create value for all stakeholders.

Assumptions / Trends • Everything: The volume of digital content is growing

exponentially, and will escalate further as we approach the era of an Internet of Things (physical objects with digital representations accessible via the web).

• Everywhere / anytime: The range of contexts in which content is produced and consumed is rapidly expanding.

• Everyone: The number of connectable people is growing, and the number of potential communities is 2^N.

• Relevancy is key: human attention is finite, thus the ability to extract meaningful signals from the noise will be paramount.

The Context, Content & Community Collage:A proactive display application

Proactive Displays

+

OnlineProfiles

Physical Tokens

+

LargeDisplays

BetterReal-worldInteractions

Bridging the gaps between peopleby bridging the gaps between the online and offline worlds

=

Large computer displays that can sense & respond to the people and activities taking place in their vicinity.

1st Generation Proactive Displays

UniCast, OutCast, GroupCast

UniCast, OutCast & GroupCast: Three Steps Toward Ubiquitous Peripheral DisplaysJoseph F. McCarthy, Tony J. Costa and Edy S. LiongosariInternational Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2001)

Promoting Awareness of Work Activities through Peripheral DisplaysElaine M. Huang, Joe Tullio, Tony J. Costa and Joseph F. McCarthy2002 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI 2002)

2nd Generation Proactive Displays

AutoSpeakerID

Ticket2Talk

Neighborhood Window

Augmenting the Social Space of an Academic ConferenceJoseph F. McCarthy, David W. McDonald, Suzanne Soroczak, David H. Nguyen and Al M. RashidACM 2004 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2004)

http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/prospero/

Next Generation Proactive Displays

• Shortcomings of previous efforts• Special-purpose sensors

(IR badges, RFID tags)

• Special-purpose profiles

• Special-purpose installations

• Goals of future efforts• Multi-purpose sensors

(BT mobiles … NFC)

• Multi-purpose profiles (C3)

• Multi-purpose installations

Next Generation Proactive Displays

• Goal: increase the sense of community in the workplace

• Method: open windows in shared physical spaces into the social media co-workers are creating

• Situated Social Software (SiSoSo)

• Hypotheses

• Adding a physical dimension of audience will promote greater social media usage

• Social media sharing in the workplace will enhance personal relationships

• Enhanced personal relationships will lead to more productive professional relationships

• Challenges

• Privacy / benefit tradeoff (usability vs. security)

• Sustainable engagement (after novelty factor has worn off)

• How to measure the impact? (measuring community, relationships)

How?

• Signup

• Walk around

• Check it out

'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them.

'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives.

'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.

Signup / Login

Select / Configure Module

Select Bluetooth Device(s)

Walking around, checking it (them) out

Location, Location, Location QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Locations (early mockup)

Hardware & Software

Details

• Location / proximity detection• Bluetooth sampling (MAC addresses, BT names)

• Location server (separate component)

• Priority queue management• New / old, near / far, 70/30

• Display management• Firefox + Javascript

• Flickr module• Ruby API

• Remote administration• Process, power

• Modular, flexible framework

• Front-end (time / space sharing)

• Back-end

Flickr API

Interaction

The Highest Rated Content (5 up votes)

Edge detection

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/robbery/kidney.asp

Everything in moderation

Moderation: NSFW

Moderation: SFW

Action Type Times Done Times/DayImage Clicked 11727 902.1Image Moved 7210 554.6Image Closed 611 47.0Filter Button Clicked 189 47.3Filter Confirmation 27 6.8Rate Up Clicked 574 191.3Rate Down Clicked 269 89.7

Number of Actions by Day of Week

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2000

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5000

6000

7000

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thurs Fri Sat

Number of Actions by Hour of Day

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Evaluation

• Context

• 8 displays, deployed July 19

• 75 full-time / part-time residents

• 44 proactive display accounts (34 non-empty)

• Perpetual alpha (location sensing, new modules, new features)

• Hypotheses

• Adding a physical dimension of audience will promote greater social media usage

• Social media sharing in the workplace will enhance personal relationships

• Enhanced personal relationships will lead to more productive professional relationships

• Web-based Survey

• Mix of multiple choice and open text questions

• 32 responses

Positive / Negative Impact (Personal / Professional)

0

2

4

6

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16

No impact StrongNegativeImpact

ModerateNegativeImpact

SlightNegativeImpact

MixedImpact

SlightPositiveImpact

ModeratePositiveImpact

StrongPositiveImpact

Personal

Professional

A few choice comments

• I was surprised by some of the photos taken by [a colleague]. I had no idea of his very diversified and, in some cases, adventurous interests, and his photos showed me a side of him I would have never realized. The photos also give you an appreciation of other people's interests and unique travels. I find the photos absolutely fascinating and a very strong method of bringing all of us closer.

• I[t] was nice to see people putting up "themes". One person had a Star Wars theme, actually happening just by tags, but appeared to me as if a themed series of photos.

• Somewhat negative: I was surprised to see a photo of my family (my husband and my two kids) with another female friend. They were all sprawled on the grass. It reminded me of a picnic we all had together. But it also made me self-conscious: what would other people think of seeing this scene. Who is the "mystery lady"? Positive: walking into the kitchen and spotting my daughter's happy face on the screen. It was a nice greeting! Positive: I am delighted to see other peoples pics of exotic places they visited. Negative: seeing a picture of a guy in his underwear. The face was not in the pics so I couldn't tell who it is. Somebody esle in the room "killed" the photo. Positive: seeing people cluster around displays. I like that!

Impact of Displays on Social Media

Flickr Usage by Different User Groups

0.00

1.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

veteran users recent users new users

User Group

Average Uploads Per Day

Before May 1May 1 - July 19After July 19

Influence of Rank & Role

Members # Participants % ParticipantsMgmt 6 1 0.17Lead 6 2 0.33Principal 11 2 0.18Member 18 7 0.39Admin 9 3 0.33

Intern 22 12 0.55

Total 72 27 0.38

Influence of Team Membership

Members # Participants % ParticipantsVCUI 17 9 0.53C3 14 9 0.64WGCS 9 3 0.33IR 5 0 0.00MoBS 5 1 0.20MISS 5 1 0.20NRCPA 9 2 0.22NRC 4 1 0.25SRC 4 1 0.25

Total 72 27 0.38

New Module: PHD Comics

PHD Comics module source code (20 lines)

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rss/2.0'

require 'open-uri'

require 'rubygems'

require 'json'

feed_url = "http://www.phdcomics.com/gradfeed_justcomics.php"

print "Content-type:text/html\n\n"

response = nil

open(feed_url) do |http|

response = http.read

end

result = RSS::Parser.parse(response, false)

item = result.items[rand() * result.items.size]

print {

"width" => "600",

"height" => 150,

"caption" => item.title + " - [A custom module by Ben]",

"image" => item.description.match(/http:\/\/www.phdcomics.com\/comics\/archive[^\"]+/)[0] ,

"contentid" => item.link

}.to_json

Future Work: C4 / C3 integration

FeedMine

EveryBit

Future Work: Algorithms

• Location / Proximity detection

• Near / far

• Proxemics, biosemiotics

• Priority queue management

• People, streams

• Recommender Systems

• Module management

• Space, time, displays

Future Work: Modules

• Other sources of content

• Other interaction modalities

• Other dimensions of experience

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Future Work: Interfaces & Interactivity

• Interfaces

• Signup page

• Display interface

• Administrator interface

• Interactivity

• Authentication

• Phones

• Touchscreens

• Other?

Ongoing Challenges: The Competition

Potential Impacts

• Bridging gaps in the workplaceby briding gaps between online and offline

• Knowledge management via serendipity• Nameless faces / faceless names

• Acquaintanceships relationships

• New channel for employee recognition

• Increase familiarity with Social Media

• Awareness

• Use

• Co-create / mashup

Thanks!

• For more information:

• [email protected]

• http://research.nokia.com/people/joe_mccarthy

• http://gumption.typepad.com

• http://www.slideshare.net/gumption

• Made possible by

• Interns• Max Harper (U. Minnesota)

• Ben Congleton (U. Michigan)

• Jiang Bian (Georgia Tech)

• Context, Content & Community (C3) team• http://research.nokia.com/people/contextcontentcommunity

• All our colleagues at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto• http://research.nokia.com/locations/palo-alto