Tonight we started the closed beta of ginkgo, a cool new tool for the management of scientific events that also makes use of AANs.

ginkgo is no classical conference management system. It rather combines conference management functions with those known from social networking sites. The goal of ginkgo is to raise awareness of researchers, make the organization of scientific events easier and more fun. We are currently working hard on getting the last pieces together and providing you with a fresh approach to the management of scientific events pretty soon. In the meantime you might want to join the beta list, follow ginkgo on Twitter or Facebook or follow Julian and me on Twitter for latest updates.

Abstract:

The increasing agility of business requires an accelerated adaptation of organizations to continuously changing conditions. Individual and organizational learning are prominent means to achieve this. Hereby learning is always accompanied by the development of knowledge artifacts. For the entire of learning and artifact development the term knowledge maturing has been introduced recently, which focuses on these three manifestations of knowledge: cognifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts. In this paper we will focus on sociofacts as the subject-bound knowledge manifestation of social actions. Sociofacts are rooted in respective cognifacts play an independent role due to their binding to collective actions and subjects. These are particularly difficult to grasp but play a decisive role for the performance of organizations and the collaboration in there.The presented paper approaches the notion of sociofacts, discusses them on a theoretical level and establishes a first formal notation for sociofacts. We use the case of a merger between two companies to describe the advantages of sociofact analysis for such process. Some sociofact related problems during a merger are described and possible solutions are presented. We identify technical approaches for seizing sociofacts from tool-mediated social interaction and discuss open question for future research.

Reference:
Riss, Uwe, Magenheim, Johannes, Reinhardt, Wolfgang, Nelkner, Tobias, and Hinkelmann, Knut. “Added Value of Sociofact Analysis for Business Agility” AAAI Spring Symposium Series 2011. Available at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS11/paper/view/2444.

Bookmark it on Mendeley

Driven from the fact that many people in my community are collecting data from social media (you remember all of our Twitter analysis and the cool Delicious visualizations, don’t you?) and always struggling with the question: where to get clean data from, the idea of soharc was born.

What you can do in soharc is fairly simple: you create your online profile with the handles you possess and we’ll create a dedicated page for you. You can create “scientific” events or projects and join them, so everybody who’s interested can see what you are doing. In order to support scientific awareness and solve the problem of how to get clean data, we’ll be soon offering a SWRC export of your social media profile and those of an event’s or project’s participants. This will allow the aggregation of social media data for analyses with multiple tools, done by different people and organizations based on a well-defined and user-generated dataset.

Cool, right? Let me know what you think about the social handle archive in the comments. I’d like to thank Peter Kraker and Gonzalo Parra for the chats we had on soharc and their alpha tests of the service.

The provided data will be used for social media analyses around conferences other scientific events or projects. Doing this will not only help us, it will additionally enhance your network opportunities during the conference and give more visibility to your academic work. The provision of such data is voluntary and you can delete your personal information at any time. This information will be publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. If you like to make use of this data yourself, please do not hesitate to contact us.

NB: SWRC export is not yet enabled as we are discussing a new version of the ontology together with researchers from STELLAR and FZI.

With the recent announcement from Twitter to allow arbitrary metadata attached to each tweet (so-called annotations), the Twitter platform is getting even more interesting for tool developers. ReadWriteWeb writes:

With annotations, third-party Twitter developers can add any additional metadata to a Twitter post. [...] And a tweet can have more than one annotation attached to it. This extra data will initially start off small – Twitter developer Marcel Molina said it will “probably” be around 512 bytes. But over time, it will gradually grow larger as Twitter rolls out the feature and scales up in order to support it. The company hopes to have it end up “around 2K,” says Molina. How developers use that extra space is entirely up to them – there can be one giant piece of extra data attached to a tweet or a thousand tiny ones.

In a blog post Raffi Krikorian posted a useful map of the topography of a tweet. The picture could serve as cheat sheet for any developer dealing with Twitter… See also Raffi’s first ideas on what to do with annotations:

map-of-a-tweet

For doing so we will ask attendees of scientific conferences (e.g. EC-TEL 2010 and ED-MEDIA 2010) to submit some of their online handles during the registration process. The organizers of the conferences will then send those online handles to our team so we can feed the AANalyzer application with the data. All data submitted will be exclusively used for the purpose of analyzing the structure and dynamics of a scientific community. Furthermore we will give all conference attendees access to the AANalyzer tool.

For now we are asking conference attendees for the following online handles:

• Twitter account
• Delicious account
• Slideshare account
• LinkedIn account
• Facebook account
• URL of their weblog

We’ll combine this information with data about location and affiliation of the conference attendees.

Furthermore we will try to monitor the TEL community. So if you feel like belonging to that community and are willing to participate in our studies feel free to contact me via the comments or by mail.