URLs of wisdom – W.T.Facebook edition – April 2018

This is a special instalment of the URLs of wisdom in which I round up some new and some not-so-new links about privacy, fake news and the business of community as relates to Facebook. If you have additional reading material on these topics to recommend, please add it as a comment.

 

When you add a feature that is really a bug…
Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/2825261107/

URLs of wisdom – silencing, story and speaking up edition – March 2018

Having diverse voices able to safely express their input and for it be received respectfully is vital to the functioning of teams, groups and communities – including those online and in science. This is a special instalment of the URLs of wisdom in which I round up some new and some not-so-new links that explore silencing, story and speaking up. If you have additional reading material on these topics to recommend, please add it as a comment.

“I’m a unique bird and I will not be deterred from making my song heard.”
Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnfish/3932308358/

URLs of wisdom – resilience and self-care edition – August 2017

URLs of wisdom is a round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. This week is a special instalment of the URLS of wisdom in which I round up some links that explore self-care and the challenges of maintaining resilience in our online interactions.

From social in silico 

It’s been a few weeks since the last URLs of wisdom. Here’s what’s new on the blog since then.

• Introducing a new series of Monday morning pithy prompts – “Reading for Leading”
• Reading for Leading #1 – Illuminate the Marginalia
• Social intelligence and what’s missing in online interactions on social media
• Reading for Leading #2 – Going long
• Reading for Leading #3 – If you feel helpless, help someone
• Reading for Leading #4 – Check in with your calendar
• 5 books that have influenced how I think about leadership and team culture
• Considering Community: What’s a social-impact network?
• Reading for Leading #5 – 5 questions for your team
• 5 books that have influenced how I think about online interactions
• Considering Community: The connect-align-produce model for social-impact networks

 

URLs of wisdom – 16th July 2017

URLs of wisdom is a round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. 

From social in silico 

Recently I’ve shared the following new posts:

• Collaborative technologies – facilitating how we do work together in 5 ways
• Reflecting on my experiment to read 52 books in a year – now that I’ve reached halfway
• What does community mean when we focus on personal identity online? 
• What is “emergence” in a community? I consider the similarities between quorum sensing in bacteria and how human cohorts form.

URLs of wisdom – June 30th 2017

URLs of wisdom is a round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. There’s been a big gap since the last one, but the URLs are back!

From social in silico 

This week I’ve shared the following new posts:

• Thoughts about the change agent traits of community managers.
• A new skills model which helps to accommodate people in roles of social leadership who don’t have binary skills but rather hold both forms of a skill in tension in a skills web.
• Part one of a series  considering the types of communities we find within science – first up, professional associations and “infrastructure” organisations.
• 10 questions to ask before starting a collaborative project.

URLs of wisdom (30th May 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. There’s been a bit of gap since the last post due to lots of work travel but things should pick up again from here 🙂

Social network analysis

• Assembling science networks online – Liz Neeley shares her thoughts on a recent study showing how social networks often mature in two distinct stages (and another write-up here).

Behaviour

• Online discussion forums good for well-being – “Often we browse forums just hoping to find answers to our questions. In fact, as well as finding answers, our study showed users often discover that forums are a source of great support, especially those seeking information about more stigmatising conditions. Moreover, we found that users of both forum types who engaged more with other forum users showed a greater willingness to get involved in offline activities related to the forum, such as volunteering, donating or campaigning.”

• Trust erodes over time in the online world – A look at the Couchsurfing website: “The findings revealed, the researchers wrote, an interesting mechanism at the root of interpersonal trust: “The accumulation of ratings about users (whether guests or hosts) had a double-edged effect on trust and relationships: it made relationships easier to establish initially but it also weakened them after a certain threshold.”

• What we talk about when we talk about the raised hands emoji – What do emojis actually mean? A recent study looks at how we use them.

• How to go faster – what’s really holding you up?

Academia online 

Social media/networks/data sharing

• A Facebook for science? Brett Buttliere describes how it might look: “I believe science would benefit from having one online platform for people to do basically all aspects of science in, including review. Such a system would probably involve: a user friendly profile, a feed of (science) stories based upon previous viewing behavior, the ability for users to like, comment, and interact with content (e.g., papers, datasets, materials) within the system, and some sort of impact metrics that quantify the individual’s contribution into the system; basically, something like a Facebook or Twitter for science.”

• What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like? Bjoern Brembs describes his vision for the future: “As an author, I want my data to be taken care of by my institution: I want to install their client to make sure every piece of data I put on my ‘data’ drive will automatically be placed in a data repository with unique identifiers. The default setting for my repository may be open and a CC0 license, or set manually to any level of secrecy I’m allowed to or intend. The same ought to be a matter of course for the software we write. In today’s day and age, institutions should provide an infrastructure that makes version-controlled software development and publishing seamless and effortless.”

• Citation boost or bad data? A closer look at a recent claim by Academia.edu that using the site causes a major boost in citations of papers uploaded there. – “Compared to a control group of papers, selected at random from the same journals and same years as the Academia.edu group, their analysis finds a positive association between free access and article citations that grows over time. This association should not be surprising, given a decade and a half of similarly reported results. What IS surprising about their findings was that having one’s paper freely available from other freely accessible locations only boosted a paper’s citations by just 3%.”

• Which online tools do you use? A new survey to look at scientific workflows.

• Maintaining relationships with readers as they cross affiliations – “Researchers’ multiple and changing institutional affiliations create tangible challenges, both for the researchers themselves and for scholarly publishers as well. While an ideal solution may not be possible, it is worth contemplating a vision that would address these challenges.”

• How long does a scientific paper need to be? – Publishing online removes the space constraints imposed by traditional print publishing – what does this mean for how we should be presenting papers?

Outreach/public engagement

• 6 practical guidelines for public engagement – including remembering that it’s a long game!

 Communities 

• Does your online community feel like Twitter pre-2009? It should.  – “Six years ago, Twitter was a much more intimate place. In explaining it to people, I often used the “dinner party” analogy – “It’s like a dinner party – you go in and you may only know one person, but you talk to them and meet their friends, and your network begins to grow.”

Social media developments

• Medium is not a publishing tool – Medium introduced shared highlights on posts. Interesting to see annotation as a kind of “social layer” on top of content (framed in this post as features that “create network value”).

Just for fun

Ask the emojis…

URLs of wisdom (31st March)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Social network analysis

• Adapting old structures to new challenges – Does adding more nodes to a network make for more effective “networking”?
• Identifying emergent communities in complex networks – visual explanations of why it’s often hard to predict communities within larger networks

Behaviour

• Is email one of the last private spaces online? “This realm of asynchronous communication is akin to our living rooms. They’re private spaces that others are invited into. You select who enters your inbox, whether that’s by opting-in for a newsletter or sharing your email address with a friend or colleague.”
• The psychology of mass government surveillance – “Just how accepting are people of surveillance in the first place? In short, not very. Across all 13 countries, there was no majority support for surveillance – only 26% of people, overall, agreed that the government should monitor the communications and Internet activity of its own citizens, while a similar number (29%) felt their government should monitor overseas citizens.”

Academia online 

• What do members want from scholarly societies? A preliminary look at a recent survey of 14, 000 people evenly spread across 3 age ranges. “The top reason for renewing [society membership] (41%) is feeling connected to the community” but there’s more that can be done in terms of marketing: “15% of non-member respondents said they haven’t joined a society because they haven’t been invited! A further 12% (each) responded that “it never occurred to me to join one” or “I don’t know what’s available in my field””

• Online tools for comparing scientific journals

Social media/networks/data sharing

• Paige Brown defends her PhD thesis on the science blogging ecosystem this week – and has shared slides summarising her dissertation.

• The importance of informed consent in social media research – “Contextual integrity refers to a theory of privacy in which the protection of personal information is linked to the norms of information flow in a specific context. Thus, contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms in a specific context. In essence, it demands that information collection and its dissemination should be appropriate to the context.”
• How articles get noticed and advance the scientific conversation
  

  “If the end game is impact, the way there is engagement” Figure from PLOS ONE studied cited http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2015/03/get-paper-noticed-join-current-scientific-conversation/

 Communities 

• A look at the hook model for engagement.

Working with technology

• Personalizing discovery without sacrificing serendipity – “One approach would be to apply usage data as a mechanism to gauge the importance or notoriety of an individual item, allowing for materials to be discovered from further afield only insofar as they were relatively important….This type of approach underscores the importance of controlling, or at least having access to, data not only about researchers’ interests and practices, but also about research materials and how they are used.”

Social media developments

• Twitter unveils Periscope – a new video live-streaming app (see also “Meerkat is dying and it’s taking US tech journalism with it” and why live video is hard to do -“We humans are not good at being spontaneously amazing. While there are times when unedited video is important – in the face of disaster or when trying to show the ugly or truly beautiful – mankind does not need to be video-streamed.”

• Whats App usage now surpasses text messaging 

• Flipboard launches private magazines for groups –“With the update, Flipboard is taking its own stab at participating in the trend toward more private sharing that’s occurring across a number of social media sites today.”

Just for fun

A taxonomy of Twitter users

The followback Twitter user – image by Matthew Partridge of ErrantScience.com

URLs of wisdom (22nd March)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology.

Social network analysis

• The online world replicates traditional offline structures and networks of social capital – “Our research shows a new picture, perhaps more balanced, of the role of new technologies in social life. We do not believe that social media is damaging social capital, but we argue that, at least from an structural point of view, behaviour transcends the distinction between online and offline platforms.”

Behaviour

• Let’s really be friends – a defence of online intimacy
• Trollbusters – strategies to preserve constructive online discourse
• Americans’ privacy strategies post-Snowden – “Those who are more likely to have changed at least one of their behaviors include the people who have heard a lot about government surveillance (38% say they have changed a great deal/somewhat in at least one of these activities), those who are at least somewhat concerned about the programs (41% have changed at least one activity), and those who are concerned about government monitoring of their use of social media, search engines, cell phones, apps, and email.”
• The ethics of algorithms – Beatrice Martini rounds up some notes and resources from a recent discussion hosted by the Center for Internet and Human Rights.
• The search engine should not be the arbiter of truth
• Where do millennials get their news? “Simply put, social media is no longer simply social,” the report says. “It long ago stopped being just a way to stay in touch with friends. It has become a way of being connected to the world generally — to send messages, follow channels of interest, get news, share news, talk about it, be entertained, stay in touch, and to check in and see what’s new in the world.”
• How many TV sets do you have? And does it matter?

Academia online 

• End of feed – Cameron Neylon on the closure of Friendfeed: “relying on the largesse of third parties is not a reliable foundation to build on. If we want to take care of our assets as a community, we need to take responsibility for them as well.”
• Paper Now – Create, edit and display an academic paper entirely in GitHub

Social media/networks/data sharing

• 4 questions researchers need to ask before using the web to share their research –“what goes on the web, stays on the web and that what you think is a private comment is easily sharable by your contacts”
• Search is so 2014 – with nods to new tools such as Sparrho and Kudos.
• Changes at WIRED – more changes to the science blogosphere

Outreach

• Social media and science – the problems and the challenges – “many anti-scientific or pseudoscientific ideas a promoted by social media. What’s more, these new social media are very effective at promoting messages, especially in areas of social health, so we ignore the media at our peril. Social media are a fact of modern life and if we can’t beat them, perhaps we should use them ourselves. These are the messages I got from a recent study of the way public health misinformation is promoted via social media.”

• Selfish reasons for researchers to publicize their study findings “Researchers already have a lot of responsibilities: grant-writing, lab work, writing papers, preparing presentations, working with grad students and post-docs, being grad students or post-docs, having a life outside of work, etc. So – why add publicizing research findings to that “to-do” list? There are a lot of reasons.”

Communities 

• The business model of engagement –“Typically, organizations work to recognize as much value as possible, as soon as possible; when is the last time you heard a sales executive say ‘We don’t get paid until our customers feel like they have won’? This mentality leaves stakeholders feeling combative, not collaborative – whether they are customers or employees – and that does not lead to organic and frequent engagement because those stakeholders don’t see the organization’s success and their success as the same thing.”
• 5 reasons you need to execute an offline community strategy
• Q&A with Instagram’s Editorial Director

Working with technology

• A great overview of product management by Ian Mulvany, Head of Technology at eLife. “The story that gets built up internally about a product can often be very different from the story that the end user has created about that product. Reconciling these world views is only ever a good thing.”
• Found from Ian’s piece above – Improving bug triage by scoring user pain -“At with many agile techniques, User Pain isn’t all the complicated.
  1. Rank each bug on several criteria
  2. Combine those criteria into a single score called User Pain
  3. Sort all bugs by User Pain into a public list
  4. Start fixing the most painful bugs at the top of the list.

  There is a distinct philosophy at work here. First, empower bug submitters to easily create well formed, well classified bugs. Next, give the team the tools and information necessary to make smart decisions about what to work on first. Finally, encourage practices that make it easy to put quality first. Instead of relying on expert managers, you rely on a well informed, empowered team.”

Social media developments

•  Twitter puts trillions of tweets up for sale to data miners
• Twitter turns 9

Digital marketing

• 12 classic content marketing problems and how to avoid them
• Two things you need to sync content calendars across teams

Resources

• Useful slides on Defining Community Management roles – slide 5 especially gives a (dense) overview of the different tasks carried out by community management professionals.

Just for fun

9 modern curses – by Gemma Correll http://gemmacorrell.tumblr.com/post/113726287113/modern-curses-pre-order-my-book-of-comics-the

URLs of wisdom (mid February – early March 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. This instalment covers mid-February to early March as I’ve been busy with work-related travel.

Social network analysis

• Love across the Twittersphere

Behaviour

• Is there joy in missing out? – “We’ve focused mainly on how seeing the accomplishments of others can make us feel—the pressure to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, the sense that everyone is hitting the typically accepted life milestones—but we aren’t really talking about how other’s downfalls may make us feel.”

• Why I’m saying goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft – “Our economic system is adapting to community-based solutions, slowly but surely. But let’s face it: we collectively seem to prefer convenience to control, at least for the moment.”

Academia online 

Social media/networks/data sharing

• Principles for open scholarly infrastructures – “What should a shared infrastructure look like? Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance), funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership of it (insurance). In this spirit, we have drafted a set of design principles we think could support the creation of successful shared infrastructures.”

• Why is open data a public good? – “a public good is something that you can’t stop anyone using, and that doesn’t get used up. The examples of public goods that people tend to use are “clean air”, “lighthouses” or “public parks”. Open data also fits this economic definition.”

• Many different flows of data – Great interview with Geraint Lewis, the NHS’s Chief Data Officer, by Matt Shipman.

• Article sharing on scholarly collaboration networks – draft STM guidelines and a consultation “…there’s no doubt that SCNs are here to stay; so, in hopes of finding a collaborative solution to the challenges and opportunities they present, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) has recently issued a set of voluntary principles that aim to facilitate article sharing on SCNs.”

• Ars Technica now links directly to the NPG papers it covers (via ReadCube) – and their readers start dissecting the system in the comments.

Outreach

• The Communicating Science seminars from the AAAS annual meeting were live-streamed and video archives are available online.

• Storifys from the Investing in Science Communication funding conversations at the AAAS meeting – part 1 and part 2.

• What do we know about our investment in science communication? – asks Brooke Smith in reflection on the panel she co-organised at the AAAS meeting. “Last year, the United States invested $465 billion (from public and private sources) in scientific research.  Our panelists explored what percentage of this amount we invest in scientists communicating and engaging. But the truth is, no one knows. Turns out it’s a very hard thing to measure. Communications and engagement is not a line item in budgets that we can pull out and add up.”

• Effective communication, better science

Communities 

• Seth Godin’s daily thoughts on his blog are one of my favourite reads. This on the difference between connecting to and connecting particularly nails the difference between treating users as customers or a community.(This is also good on ways not to make customers feel stupid).

• Jono Bacon on building engagement within an organisation –“So, if you want to have a culture of engagement, take the time to actually follow up and make sure people can actually do something. Accepting great ideas, agreeing to them, and not following up will merely spark frustration for those who take the initiative to think holistically about the organization.”

• 7 questions to ask before attempting to launch another online community – “It’s not a case of build it and they will come. It’s build the community, cultivate a ton of relationships and promote it heavily, then they might come. This takes a lot of hard work and time to get the community up and running. That’s in the early community days. If your community takes off, you then need to consider scaling and moderation concerns.”

Social media developments

• Introducing Tweetdeck teams – for sharing access to Twitter accounts

• Twitter updates user safety features and explains why it faves Net Neutrality “Openness promotes free and fair competition and fosters ongoing investment and innovation. We need clear, enforceable, legally sustainable rules to ensure that the Internet remains open and continues to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers. This is the heart of Twitter.”

• Google to split up Google+?

• What blogging has become – reflections on changes to Medium “But you can only flirt with being a platform for so long before you just become one. The description of Medium that’s most stuck with me is from Josh Benton again, this time on Twitter: Medium is now “YouTube for prose,” he said. In other words, it’s a platform. And I think with these product changes, it’s embracing that. It feels like a social network now.

  The YouTube model is revealing, too, because it sets up two kinds of Medium readers. Some people go to YouTube to watch a one-off viral video. (Read: an especially popular essay.) But many of them go to watch their favorite YouTube stars, video bloggers with whom they’ve developed long, intimate relationships over time. To run a YouTube, you need well-recognized authors, working over time, with audiences all their own. You need bloggers.”

• The unbearable lightness of tweeting – “Every good media organization knows that the road to traffic leads through Facebook rather than Twitter. Even so, I thought the sharing economy of the Internet shared a bit more than this.”

Resources

• New ebook from the Community Roundtable – Defining Community Management roles.

Just for fun

So what colour was that dress?

And what about the Amazon reviews of it…?

URLs of wisdom (February 14th 2015)

URLs of wisdom is a weekly round-up of interesting links about topics at the intersection of people, science and technology. This instalment covers a fortnight as I’ve been busy with work-related travel.

Social network analysis

• Ten assumptions about social networks that matter 
• Mapping a social network – Paige Brown gives an intro to using Gephi and NodeXL to map Twitter networks

Behaviour

• How news outlets help to spread or debunk false stories online –“outlets will start a chain of linking to and citing others who have already reported the rumor. “The story’s point of origin, once traced back through the chain of links, is often something posted on social media or a thinly sourced claim from a person or entity.”

• No, research does not say that iPads and smartphones may damage toddlers’ brains Pete Etchells looks at the evidence – and the scare-mongering.

• Clicks, likes and comments – a hacker looks at Facebook’s newsfeed –“getting users to click on links is much more important than getting users to like or comment when it comes to getting a post promoted.”

• A time for fewer, better friends – One study shows that as people reach their 30s they prune their social group: “Time is the key. When it is perceived as limited—either because of pressing family and work demands or because the future literally shrinks as people age—people spend it with those dearest. “We may have fewer friends, but are closer to them”

• The changing definition of friendship –“while Facebook probably slows a relationship’s “rate of decay” when you no longer meet in person, …social media won’t stop a more intimate friend (say, in the 15 or 50 category) from moving into a further-out ring if there’s no longer any face-to-face contact.”

Academia online 

• Interesting read on the digital humanities and what it means to use digital tools for research – “some people feel excluded from the Digital Humanities as a discipline, but also sometimes feel excluded from their stated disciplines because of their digital work. These feelings were echoed by a number of participants, not just postgraduates but also early career and established researchers.”

• The hidden curriculum in graduate education – Liz Neeley asks “Where are our everyday practices contradicting our best intentions? How often is what we are doing undermining what we are saying?”

Social media/networks

• In STEM courses, a gender gap in online class discussions – “The study tracked 420,389 undergraduates and graduate students enrolled in STEM classes in the United States and Canada during four nonconsecutive semesters from the spring of 2012 to the fall of 2014. The study found that, on average, women in computer-science classes asked 2.20 questions and men asked 1.75. In contrast, women answered 0.70 questions and men answered 1.20 questions.”

• New Ciencia Yale initiative -“The Yale Ciencia Initiative will establish programs based at Yale to enhance the scientific training and professional development of students across the nation and to develop culturally responsive strategies for the engagement of diverse audiences with science,” said Giovanna Guerrero-Medina, executive director of Ciencia Puerto Rico and associate research scientist in the Center for Teaching and Learning. “Research and scholarship about how these types of science networks can be applied for these purposes will also be a big part of the initiative.”

Outreach

• No silver bullets – SciComm insights from NAS workshop – Brooke Smith gives a great outline of why “The science of science communication does not, and will never, give us a silver bullet or a clear road map for how to navigate engaging with society.”

• How science communication can fuel modern sexism – and the role for new media – “the analysis also illustrated the importance of new media in diversifying public discussion of science. Blogs and comments allow people to articulate their more personalised, spontaneous responses to scientific messages. This can mean, as in the case of the readers’ comments discussed above, the circulation of pejorative or reactionary statements that would not satisfy the editorial restrictions of more formal media outlets. However, in our study blogs and comments also offered a platform for objecting to the socially conservative interpretations of the research that dominated the traditional press. These online spaces were critical in facilitating more nuanced debate about the social implications of the research, and its potential to perpetuate gender stereotypes and inequalities. The new media bring a vastly increased variety of voices to science communication, which can open up more inclusive and dynamic debates about what emerging scientific findings mean for the local realities of individuals and communities.”

Communities 

• 7 qualities of Community Manager superheroes – What makes a good Community Manager? According to this list, a mixture of passion and humility, plus a few other key ingredients…

Social media developments

• Google to index tweets – an overview of which tweets will be favoured.
• Timeline is providing historical context to the news – but is there a business model behind it?

Resources

• The Community Manager Handbook, put together by the Community Roundtable, is now available for free download.

Just for fun

The creepiest things you can do on Facebook…