Four hundred techies are gathered in a pleasant exposed-brick building in Copenhagen. And although the group is as geeky as it gets, the topics so far are wider ranging than at a tyupical US tech conference. Here’s what the conference’s site says Reboot is about:

reboot is a community event focused on digital change and culture

Reboot is the European meetup for the practical visionaries who are building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for creation and organization ó in a world where the only entry barrier is passion. Reboot is two days in June filled with inspiration, perspective, good conversations and interesting people.

I missed Doc’s talk on re-framing the Net. I heard Scoble’s rap on why blogging is here to stay. Jimbo Wales talked about Wikipedia. These three are stars of the tech conference circuit. But I also participated in a session led by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff that used improv techniques to lead a discussion about open source marketing. When the discussion turned to llimitations on openness, someone asked: “Does anyone know of a company who is too open?” Good question. (Johnnie and James’ del.icio.us tags are here.) I also heard an imaginative talk by Thomas Harttung on “gap dynamics” and farming — he runs his farm not via Darwinian competition but by increasing collaborative complexity.

The gap conversations have been just wonderful. And, by the way, although there are few women speakers, there are lots of women attendees, and their presence is definitely felt.

Also by the way: So far, conversation seems to be the meme du jour. It keeps showing up in sessions as the corrective to the existing model. [Technorati tag: reboot]

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There’s an IRC channel for Reboot: irc.freenode.net #reboot7.

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Amy Bruckman at George Institute of Tech says that researchers knock the use of the word “community.” We ought to use a prototype model for defining communities, using Eleanor Rosch’s idea of prototypes, she says. [Go Rosch!]. Our prototypes for communities vary by “genre,” e.g., Flickr is one type of community and so is the WELL; we understand them in relation to different prototypes. The work she proposes going forward would try to discern the relevant differences among the prototypes.

Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon’s CommunityLab Project begins by upbraiding the conference for using a panel of kids to discover what kids think instead of using the serious research that’s been done on the topic. He suggests using group theory to design online groups. For example, in many online communities, a small percentage of people (80:20, roughly) contribute. The “collective effort model” explans under contribution and the conditions that mitigate it. It says that “effort = outcome probability x outcome value.” It predicts you can increase contribution by make salient the uniqueness of contributions, increasing how much people like the group by making it more homogeneous, and make the benefits of contributing more salient. (This is based on well-established research, he says.)

He describes two experiments.

First: To get more people to contribute movie ratings, the system reminded posters of their uniqueness (identify a movie the person has rated but no one else has) and made the group more attractive by putting together people with similar tastes. Results: Uniqueness increased the number of discussion posts and movie ratings, but similarity in tastes depressed the posts. (The first finding supports the hypothesis, the second disconfirms it.)

Second: They sent email inviting people to contribute ratings. Some were told thjey’ve been invited because they have unusual tastes, others because they have typical tastes. Some were told that the more ratings they contribute, the better the system works for you, or for other people. Again, emphasizing uniqueness helped, but being told the number of benefits they would get depressed the results.

He concludes by looking at how useful it is to approach the design of online communities by starting with theory. He found that it inspired design features not often used and allows for reuse of principles.

Randy Farmer, now at Yahoo! but an early pioneer in Net communities, says that at last we’re ready to scale. But, he points out, there are problems with scaling communities, including spam, fraud and “intellectual property” issues.

Massively Multiplayer games have blazed one trail, Randy says, raising hard questions of virtual economies and property law: Are virtual goods property? He says Sony is enabling an actual cash market for Everquest.

Social networking has blazed another path. Because too much info was published with too little to do with it, selective disclosure is arising.

Challenges: Boundaries of identity and disclosure. How do we scale trust? Answer: “Hand the trust question over to the users.” He says Yahoo’s “This is spam” is an example of handing trust to users. And how will public-scale tagging avoid tagspam. How do we do “pagerank” for tags?

1. Tag rating: Positive reputation: “537 people tag this as penguin” Negative: People respond to a tag saying “This is not a penguin.”

2. Tagger reputation: As people are known for putting better tags on things, their tags count for more.

David MacDonald at U of Washington looks at “visual blogging communities” — sites with photos and a little text. (Example 1 2 3) His project has been archiving 9-25 sites of the 53+ he knows about. They picked 19 sites with at least 3 months of data. You can do content analysis (what’s in the picture?), ethnographic analysis (what is this picture about?), and interaction analysis (what’s the relation among a set of pictures).

He talks about preliminary results from the interaction analysis. He suggests some categories: Positional polay (glance, point), inmage stealing (re-use), theme (impromptu or planned group action), text in picture as a title (which forms the majority of the interaction). Then he gives great examples of how people engage in various forms of “conversation” in these photo sites via their images. (Molly Wright Steenson in the backchannel points to the Internet employee of the month page at Flickr.)

Fernanda B. Viegas at MIT Media Lab talks about a project visualizing the evolution of wiki pages. She’s been visualizing archives: email, usenet, chat. She shows work, with Martin Wattenberg, in visualizing wikis as a way of understanding the dynamics of the community that builds them. You can play with it yourself: HistoryFlow. She points to the abortion page, showing how quickly it gets restored. And she points to the chocolate page where a zigzag pattern indicates an editing war, in this case over whether there is such a thing as a “chocolate collage.” The patterns also show that the text of the people who start a page tends to be long-lived.

She says IBM is releasing the software and will likely also release the Wikipedia plugin.

[Excellent morning.]

[Technorati tags: scs2005 community]

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Wendy Kellogg from IBM Research says that IBM replaced its solid doors with ones with windows so you could see if someone is on the other side before you slam the door into her. They call this “social translucence.” Not only can you see the person, but the other person knows that you know, which creates accountability. Social translucence is common in the real world but rare in computing systems, she says. She talks about how this got idea got implemented in the Babble and Loops projects that provide a minimalistic graphical “proxy” that provides some of the metadata that occurs naturally in face-to-face meetings. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware ibm]

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Molly Wright Steenson talks about some interesting student experiments. In one, students put up official-looking “Silence please!” signs in a car of an Italian commuter train, resulting in that car being the loudest in the train. Another was a favor bank. Another, Mass Distraction, studies the social interactions around being interrupted by cellphones: In one example, you have to close your hood around your entire head in order to take a call. In another, if you get a call, you have to give your friend a video game to play and your call lasts only as long as she keeps on playing. At FashionVictims you can see clothing that bleeds when it comes in contact with cellphone radiation. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware mollySteenson]

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Anne Kirah is Senior Design Anthropologist for Microsoft. She lives in Paris. She points to some of the oddities (from a US pov) of how cyworld.com (Korea) and Almererulez (Netherlands) are used. She gives lots of great examples of how cultural norms affect the take-up of tech, especially IM, text messaging, and the like.

Genevieve Bell from Intel Research points out that technology is not just going to be in our hands as we commute, it’s going to be in rural villages, powered by truck batteries, etc. We’ll see work-arounds to unexpected problems, she says, such as cellphone charging stations. She says the most popular phone service in China is a novella being sent out to cellphones via subscription, in part because cellphones can display 120 words, not just 120 characters. She says 30% of Koreans with Internet connections at home nevertheless use cyber-cafes because of the social millieu and because there is fragmentation across devices. She talks about the Indonesian e-mosque project, providing access through mosques because they are close to ubiquitous; Indonesia built access into the existing infastructure.

In most of Africa, she says, “flashing and peeping” predominate: You signal that you’ve arrived somewhere by calling home and hanging up. Families have developed remarkably sophisticated codes: Call once means “Where are you going?” Call twice means “I’ve arrived,” etc. She says that 95% of calls are incomplete. And flashing and peeping are being adopted by the African community in Europe.

Her conclusions: We should think more broadly about what computers can or should do, and we should be prepared to critically interrogate taken-for-granted terms and ideas. We could even look outside of the US for new technology cutures and design inspirations. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

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Six teenagers from a local sci/tech high school give presentations on how they’re using their computers socially in the course of a day. Random tidbits (kidbits?):

One got a gift certificate for iTunes, but otherwise she uses Limewire (a gnutella shell).

Text messaging costs too much to use.

One wishes there were upgrades for cellphones since hers can’t receive photos from others.

It’s rude to call up a friend just to ask about a homework question. So she uses IM.

One does a lot of Photoshopping and enjoys Audacity for remixing.

One doesn’t do much with IM but spends a lot of time on online forums about games.

One has a gmail address, a school address, and a “hotmail address for my junk mail.”

Q: Do you listen to podcasts? A: To what???

A few have blogs. One uses deadjournal instead of livejournal because it’s simpler and easier to figure out.

Q: Do you use Typepad? A: Never heard of it.

Blogging was big last year, but now it’s not. People got tired of commenting on their lives and sharing their lives.

One keeps a secret blog to put the feelings she doesn’t want to share.

One has blacked out all the names of her friends and all of their content in the screen captures she shows us in order to protect their privacy.

Some of the banner ads are fun to play especially since the popup blockers block the popups that result from, say, swatting the fly.

One’s phone broke, and even though she only talks on it maybe once a day, she “freaked out,” feeling completely disconnected.

“My attention span is just too short for email. I need a rapid response.”

They tend to use a handful of away messages. They do not use different screennames for different groups of friends.

They think the remixing they’re doing is within the law because they’re not redistributing the results. They think people will always invent new ways to get around any legal limitations on filesharing. They have no idea that “trusted computing” is going to lock down content.

They only buy music when it’s so new that they can’t find it on filesharing.

[Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

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I’m at the second Microsoft Social Computing Symposium in Redmond, a group of about 100 academics and normals. Last year, the conference was useful mainly outside of the presentations (and I say this as one of the presenters) because we didn’t quite figure out how to talk with one another in a public forum. This year, it’s more discussion-oriented. They even switched from last year’s One Big Room format to a hotel with some nooks and crannies.

The main room is a typical set up: long tables with chairs, all facing forward. (I’m sitting next to Liz!). But Shelly Farnham has us do an unusual opening exercise: A person stands up, says a few sentences about herself, and throws a ball of string at someone she knows, creating a physical knot of people.

The IRC is at irc.freenode.net #scs. Come join us. [Technorati tags: scs SocialSoftware]

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Paul Marino has been doing machinima for six years. Machinima are animated films created using the tools video game companies make available to build levels to add on to their games. It started with Quake in 1996. He shows some terrific samples

He says his group is working with game developers to allow for derivative works and to explore various licensing models, ultimately making machinima commercially viable. He says that machinima’s future is the democratization of animated storytelling.

[I have to leave the conference now. Damn.] [Technorati tags: s2n machinima]

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David Dixon tells how in 2001 he publicized an MP3 that performed a Beatles track in the style of Metallica. He did it without permission of the band that did it. Sony sent him a cease and desist letter. Lars of Metallica is actually on the right side in ths case, trying to get Sony to drop its stupid, bullying lawsuit. Sony is not pursuing the suit, although they also haven’t dropped it.

Wendy Seltzer of the EFF says that this is a good example of chillling effects. The new means of distribution bring small-town bands under the gaze of big corporate property holders.

Naomi Novik is a fanfiction writer. She says she hasn’t received any cease and desist orders. She talks about “fan vids”: Clips from favorite shown over music tracks. “We’re flying under the radar,” she says. “The better the work is, the more likely it is to be hidden and hard to found” because “the people who write the better things are more aware” of the risks. The better writers, she says, post a few things publicly to draw people in, but keep the best hidden. She’s trying to create a modified Creative Commons license that let people read a work and use it in fan fiction, while protecting the author from later getting sued by a fan who claims the author stole the idea from her.

Wendy: “I’m really distrubed to hear that we have fewer rights when we’re dealing with richer media than when dealing with text.”

Should the owner be allowed to control who gets to use or remix? Naomi says if you let someone, you have to let anyone. Walter McDonough of the Future of Music says that if an objectionable group were to do that to music made by one of his clients, he’d go ballistic.

[They’ve delayed lunch by an hour, to 2 o’clock, and I’m losing focus. Sorry.] [Technorati tag: s2n]

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