Aesthetics: Assignment 2

Cooperation & Collaboration on the Web

The promise of the Internet as a tool to raise humanity's ability to cooperate, collaborate and solve problems is still far from reaching its potential. For those unacquainted with the power of social networks and online community to share resources and knowledge, the Web can appear like an unwieldy compendium of pages designed to be ends in themselves. Though the ability to access information is clearly a function of the web, what if we highlighted its ability to help us access each other?

Conversations on the Web

Over the past few years, the Internet has evolved to being called "Web 2.0," or "the social Web." This basically means that people are favoring interaction, participation, peer-to-peer exchange, and engagement over one-way communication flow. The platforms and medium of exchange vary widely, from blogs to social networks to music or image sharing:

Despite the growing trend towards peer exchange, the focus still seems to be on the content itself, and not so much on the people who create it. It tends to keep the web depersonalized and cold, dangerous and untrustworthy. What if we changed the perception? What if the mantra were:

"The Web is not a destination. It is an interface between human beings."

Trust, Transparency, and Authenticity

What is it that prevents us from wanting to connect with strangers via the Web in order to solve problems and take action together? Part of the beauty of the Web is that you can navigate your experience anonymously, using a made up screenname or an avatar. But, that same anonymity can be a roadblock to building trust and creating an environment where people are comfortable opening their resources to each other. So, how could an environment be created where the value of authenticity and transparency is immediately apparent, and individuals are motivated to collaborate on a globally distributed scale?

How unmediated can a mediated experience be?

In thinking about what it would take to design an interactive environment that facilitates trust-building, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, it seemed that a video-based solution could be effective. The Web can feel impersonal when the only information you have to go off is someone's professional profile or the constructed reality they create from a Facebook page or profile page on a social networking site. When you are speaking directly to that person in a live video dialogue, some of those constructed illusions fall away, and you are left with the actual person. Video based interaction on the Web isn't revolutionary - there are many neutral web applications for this, from Skype for one-to-one conversations, to Tinychat or Dimdim for group collaboration, to Cisco's Telepresence system for enterprise solutions. But, there are no good examples of a specific ecosystem designed for public video-based collaboration.

Potential Users

Not everyone wants to collaborate, so this environment is not for everyone. The mainstream mentality is still very much a top-down, command and control, hierarchical structure, where knowledge is proprietary and sharing is shunned. This environment is not for that mentality. It is intended for those who share the open-source mentality and spirit of sharing, learning, and developing together. Participants are comfortable streaming live video of themselves, using their real names, and making their skills, strengths, and social connections transparent so that they can be optimally utilized in the collective experience.

Proposal: Junto

Junto is an environment for open discussion, combined with a public backchannel. It’s not about being a platform – it’s more of a meme and a mindset of collaboration and cooperation. Junto was a club started by Benjamin Franklin for mutual exchange of knowledge and information and personal and business development. It is in that spirit that the community of people who believe “we can’t do it alone” would model the behavior online of what generative dialogue and open innovation looks like. The environment allows live conversations to occur publicly, and any other participant can listen in and learn what they are hearing.

Components

livestreaming video – The idea is to have the ability to host a dialogue, meaning 2 people. There is also the potential to include a format for group dialogues as well, that would expand to no more than 4-5 people in the video discussion during any one session. There would still be an unlimited backchannel of spectators. An additional option would allow other potential participants to be able to enter a “waiting area,” and enter the conversation when one of the other participants exits.

multiple spaces – The environment allows for unlimited discussions that could be occurring in parallel. There will be a directory available, searchable as a calendar and also by keyword, so that you are able to see what live conversations around a specific topic are in progress at the moment, as well as what conversations are upcoming. A global map view will be available with time zone charts so that participants understand the scope of who is present as well as activity status.

2 types of discussion – The host/facilitator can select one of 2 types of discussion to have – freeform or structured.

• freeform format – there is no time limit, it is just open-ended; good for brainstorming, idea generation, and hashing out perspectives and clarifying an issue
• structured format – this version is constrained, and intended to actually produce some type of “product” or piece of knowledge or task or actionable step at the end; the conversation has a limit of 20 minutes, and at the end a text box must be filled in that summarizes the takeaway of the discussion. this box will have a limited amount of characters that are able to be entered, which encourages the participants to be clear, concise, and to the point.

shared document – an area for participants to co-create text documents

shared whiteboard – an area for participants to co-create drawings

concept mapping – each conversation will have a mapper who is documenting the conversation on a concept map. the reason for using a concept map instead of just a word document is that complex issues often have many interrelated components and branches, and a concept map allows for visual representation of this. each “node” of information on the concept map can contain other metadata, which can be accessed by double-clicking on it, and another box of information will pop-up. that box could contain information like keywords, links to more in-depth info around the topic, names of people associated with the topic, etc.

public backchannel – as this is intended to be a public discussion, there should be an ability for an unlimited public backchannel. there would be a textbox available for the backchannel to enter in their comments or suggestions so that they are able to contribute to this generative discussion. the participants can join the backchannel directly through the site when they click on a conversation, or they can be imported in from twitter.

user profiles – participants can list their topic areas of interest, areas of expertise, and keywords for conversations they would like to participate in. they are also able to list what they can bring to the table in terms of an open collaboration process. meaning, they define the types of roles they feel best suited for, in order to be easily found and approached to join a discussion or project. users are able to create synapses to each other and build out their social network, as well as define the relationship to those people. the user’s network can then be viewed as a data visualization, and filtered by different criteria (keyword, role, location, etc.)

ranking participation in discussions – in addition to having a text box to fill out at the end of a discussion, users will also be able to evaluate each other on their effectiveness at engaging in collaborative, cooperative dialogue. the point of a junto is to be productive, and so behavior and participation that moves the conversation in that direction is rewarded. participants who are argumentative for the sake of arguing, disrespectful, or unable to support their arguments productively will not be ranked as highly. the public backchannel also has the ability to rank participants. these rankings will show up on the users’ profiles as a way for everyone to begin to establish a metric for evaluating each other’s expertise or value to a generative conversation.

Conclusion

The Junto environment is meant to be as simple as possible for facilitating generative dialogue and collaboration. There are plenty of other "collaborative software" features that could be added, but bloating the interface with tools is not the goal. The intent is to create the environment where the interaction can happen, and to open the API so third-party developers can create extensions off the platform - allowing for any type of extra tools to be customized by the user. The longer term vision would be an interface that consisted of floating video screens clustered around conversations and topics, making search and navigation both fun and multidimensional. The focus of the conversations is some type of content, of course, but the human-centered focus of the interaction design will highlight the fact that the web is comprised of people, not just information.