Call for Papers
(with apologies for cross-posting)
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Reinventing trust, collaboration and compliance in social systems
A workshop for novel insights and solutions for social systems design
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Hosted at CHI 2006
April 22-27 2006
Montreal, Canada
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/reinvent06
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Aim of the Workshop
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Designing social systems that support trust, collaboration, and compliance
has
emerged as a core concern in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI)
and
computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research to date has focused on
policing
mechanisms, stable identities, reputation systems, and rich media channels,
among
other approaches. However, these approaches are often costly, negate the
benefits
of anonymity, or rely on the truthfulness of participants.
This workshop aims to provide a forum for novel alternative approaches that
have,
in our view, been overlooked or under-utilized to date. Further, we want to
address
how the analysis of existing social systems and user-centered design methods
can help
in the design of social systems that support trust and collaboration.
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Examples of Novel Approaches
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We have grouped currently emerging research and design approaches to trust
and
cooperation into three guiding approaches. Workshop participants are
encouraged to
take these brief discussions as departure points for the novel themes they
wish to address.
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1 - Self-awareness Mechanisms
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It is well established that the sense of self-awareness online can be
increased with
the use of stable identities and visual identification in rich media.
However, anonymity
(e.g. resulting from a lack of visual identification) contributes to freedom
of
expression and an increased sense of privacy. Consequently, we believe that
there is
a need to find ways of eliciting self-awareness that goes beyond visual
identification
without compromising the benefits of anonymity.
Potential themes are:
- Novel awareness-eliciting methods that do not rely on the use of stable
identities or
visual identification. Those can include avatars, social proxies or other
visualizations
(e.g. IBM's Babble).
- Public and private aspects of self-awareness.
- Tools for measuring self-awareness (e.g. questionnaires, physiological
measures,
linguistic analyses).
- Approaches for examining the impact of self-awareness on behavior (e.g.
cooperation, politeness).
- Concepts, evaluations, and case studies of systems that have unique
approaches to building self-awareness (e.g. bio-feedback, emotive instant
messaging).
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2 - Reparative Mechanisms
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There are strong incentives for considering forgiveness as a possible
reparative mechanism
in online environments. For example, the act of issuing forgiveness alone is
known to
stimulate the offender into voluntary actions of repair. Moreover, punishing
the offender
for a low intent action (e.g. bad ratings for accidentally delivering the
wrong product)
will often result in anger and future low-compliancy behaviors.
Potential themes are:
- Findings from psychological, sociological, and ethnographic studies on
human reparative
actions that can form the basis of novel trust-building mechanisms.
- Concepts of reparative facilitation methods and tools inspired by social
psychology
(e.g. forgiveness, apologies, action reversal).
- Concepts and examples for the integration of reparative tools with
existing trust and
reputation mechanisms.
- Evaluative studies on the benefits of repair mechanisms.
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3 - Social Recommender Mechanisms
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This approach holds that, rather than enforcing set norms within a community
(e.g. through policing or reputation systems), designers of social systems
can increase
levels of perceived trustworthiness by ensuring that individuals with
similar norms and
values are matched. As an example, an online gaming platform may not
necessarily facilitate
optimal gaming experiences by enforcing one code of conduct, but by matching
players
with similar playing styles.
Potential themes are:
- Examples (e.g. experiments, case studies) of improved matchmaking and
social
recommendations that have increased the number of fruitful encounters within
a group.
- Descriptions of domains and scenarios in which such an approach can be
effectively used.
- Empirical findings that can inform the design of matchmaking and social
recommender algorithms.
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4 - User-Centred Design Methods
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In addition to the above we want to emphasize the need to learn from
carefully observing
existing social systems and development processes. Controlled experiments,
ethnographic
research, and interviews - amongst others - are important methods in the
tool-box of
user-centered design that should also drive new developments in social
systems design.
Potential themes are:
- User studies (e.g. experiments, interviews, ethno-methodology, focus
groups,
observational studies, log data, conversational analysis, grounded theory,
contextual
inquiry, interpretive inquiry) that reveal the limitations of current social
systems.
- Interpretive methods for transforming qualitative and quantitative results
into
requirements for new applications.
- Case studies reporting on the design process by which user research
findings were
fed into the development of novel prototypes that support cooperation and
trust.
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Submissions
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Participants are requested to set their proposals into the context of
current research
and design towards demonstrating the novelty of their work.
We welcome position papers, initial reports on experiments and field
studies, or
design case studies in the CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts format
(http://www.chi2006.org/ceaf.php).
Submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee.
Submissions should be emailed by 16. January 2006 to: A.Adams@cs.ucl.ac.uk
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Important Dates
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16. Jan 06: Paper Submission Deadline
20. Feb 06: Author Notification
20. Mar 06: Camera Ready Copies due
23. Apr 06: Workshop at CHI
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Intended Audience
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We specifically anticipate three groups of participants to benefit from this
workshop:
- Researchers who work in established tracks of trust research
(e.g. reputation systems, social computing).
- Researchers who have an interest in the topic, but who feel that their
approaches
or methods have not been adequately represented in the debate to date.
- Industry experts, interaction and system designers, and user researchers
who are
working in industry.
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Program committee members
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- Dr Nathan Bos, University of Michigan, US
- Prof Pamela Briggs, University of Northumbria, UK
- Dr Scott Counts, Social Computing Group, Microsoft Research, US
- Prof William Dutton, Director Oxford Internet Institute, UK
- Dr Florian N. Egger, Telono, Geneva, Switzerland
- Dr Annika Hinze,Waikato University, NZ
- Dr Matt Jones, Swansea University UK
- Cliff Lampe, University of Michigan, US
- Dr Steve Marsh, National Research Council of Canada
- Dr Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College London, UK
- Prof Jenny Preece, University of Maryland Baltimore County, US
- Prof Angela Sasse, University College London, UK
- Dr Abigail Sellen, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
- Prof Susan Wiedenbeck, Drexel University, US
- Lorenzo Wood, Director of strategic services, Framfab Ltd., UK
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Organisers
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- Dr. Anne Adams, University College London Interaction Centre, UK
- Asimina Vasalou, Imperial College London, UK
- Philip Bonhard, University College London, UK
- Dr. Jens Riegelsberger, Framfab UK
For more information, visit http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/reinvent06