The UCSB Social Computing Group held a workshop on Friday May 30th on the present and future of social computing with guests Joan DiMicco (IBM Collaborative User Experience Group), Tad Hirsch (MIT Media Lab), Peter Kollock (Sociology Dept., UCLA), Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia, Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium), and Nancy van House (School of Information, UC Berkeley). The workshop is a small-scale, by-invitation-only event designed to facilitate brainstorming.

Workshop Schedule:

• 8:00—Breakfast


• 8:30 – 9:15—Introductions (led by: Alan Liu)


• 9:30 – 10:45—Conversation Roundtable 1 (co-leads: Joan DiMicco, Alan Liu)


• 11:00 – 12:00—Bluesky Group Presentation & Discussion (co-leads: Pablo Colapinto, Darren Hardy, Rama Hoetzlein)


• 12:00 – 1:00—Lunch


• 1:00 – 2:15—Conversation Roundtable 2 (co-leads: Peter Kollock, Tad
  Hirsch)


• 2:30 – 3:45—Conversation Roundtable 3 (co-leads: Nancy Van House, Larry Sanger)


• 4:00 – 5:00—Critique Session (led by Kevin Almeroth)

For more information, visit the UCSB Social Computing Workshop Wiki.

About the UCSB Social Computing Group:
The UCSB Social Computing Group includes faculty and graduate students from several UCSB centers, programs, and initiatives—including the Center for Information Technology & Society, the Transliteracies Project, the Credibility & Digital Media@UCSB Project, the Bren School, Computer Science, Media Arts & Technology, Education, and Sociology.

Summary:

CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book as part of their ongoing experiments with “networked books”. First instituted in 2006 as part of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1 publication, the software was developed to work with WordPress and intended to reconfigure the nature of blog discussions. CommentPress allows respondents to post comments in the margin of the text, on a paragraph-by-paragraph or “whole page” basis. This breaks down the top-down hieararchy typical of blogs whereby a main post is positioned vertically above any commentary. Instead a reader may view the text and commentary at the same time.

Version 1.0 of CommentPress was released to the general public in July 2007 and the software has been used to generate discussion around Master’s Theses, scholarly articles, and books. (more…)