but already adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft and others.

Why is this relevant to Community Equity ? Well – to calculate the social value of a content object, person, community or tag [...]]]> Activity Streams (http://activitystrea.ms/) is a extension of the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around web. This standard is still in Beta

but already adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft and others.

Why is this relevant to Community Equity ? Well – to calculate the social value of a content object, person, community or tag we need to capture all activities of a person on whatever site the activity happens. Activity Streams seems to be a perfect fit.

The article below explains the concept of the activity streams standard and provides a mapping between the activity streams verbs and the Community Equity activities.

List of Basic Activities (enclosed sections have been co-authored by Josef Holy and Max Wegmüller)

All activities are described with a user, a verb and object.
Applications implementing this standard, needs to map there specific activities to the verbs and objects defined through Activity Streams.

Let’s start with a listing of basic (general) set of activities which users perform on some Content Object (CO), in the context of the Social Web. Content object can be literally anything – document, file, another user, community etc. Simply put – on the Web, content objects correspond to resources and are identified by URLs (persistent identifiers, which can be accessed and their representation retrieved via HTTP).

The following table contains a very basic list of activities, which can occur between basic entities of the Social Web – People, Content and Groups. These entities and their relationships form a mesh, where people, groups and content are interconnected. Cross-application distribution of activities then means notifying of changes done trough this mesh.

Now you can and it is sooo easy !

You just need to download Netbeans version 6.7

Steps:

1. Login / Register on Kenai

2. Request for a membership in the Project Communit Equity by “bookmark” the project.

3. In Netbeans, login to [...]]]> Do you want to load the Community Equity project from Kenai to Netbeans with a few clicks ?

Now you can and it is sooo easy !

You just need to download Netbeans version 6.7

Steps:

1. Login / Register on Kenai

2. Request for a membership in the Project Communit Equity by “bookmark” the project.

3. In Netbeans, login to Kenai (Menu Team > Kenai > Login)

4. Get the Community Equity (Open Source) code from Kenai, use /trunk to get the latest version

5. Open the 6 downloaded projects. After opening, you may be need to correct the JDK plattform version (to 1.6) in all project properties to a version you have available.

6. Build & Run the project ceq

(Thanks to Max Wegmueller for providing the description)

That’s it …

…and btw Kenai und Netbeans support chat rooms as well – join the Community Equity chat room if you have questions or if you want to meet the Community Equity Community members.

Joining a chat room is easy. Download your favorite jabber client (Pidgin, Adium, etc…) and use the following settings:

Protocol: xmpp or jabber

Username: your kenai username

Password: your kenai password

Domain: kenai.com

Chat room name: community-equity

Feature Summary

Installation

This blog post explains the various widgets we have implemented as part of our SunSpace project.

Feedback is highly appreciated !

Personalized Widgets

This are set of widgets which are personalized for a specific user

My Community Equity

Use Case: Show the overall Contribution and Participation Equity across all communities of a user Objective: Motivate [...]]]> How do we visualize Community Equity ?

This blog post explains the various widgets we have implemented as part of our SunSpace project.

Feedback is highly appreciated !

Personalized Widgets

This are set of widgets which are personalized for a specific user

My Community Equity

Use Case: Show the overall Contribution and Participation Equity across all communities of a user
Objective: Motivate a user to improve her/his overall ranking

Remark :

- Data Privacy laws (in our implementation only the user can see this widget)
- Show % of ranking can be misleading when you have only 5-10% of very active users   

(Personal Note)
  I don’t really like this widget. I would like see more and eBay like model with stars,diamond etc..
any feedback and suggestions are highly appreciated
(End Personal Note)

My Contribution Tag Cloud

Use Case: Show all Contribution Tags of a user ordered by Tag Equity (Social value of a tag)
Objective: Show a users expertise based on her/his overall contribution

Remark :
- need a clear tagging policy.
- Skills (tags) should be suggested during content creation
- can be combined with Contribution Listing widget via inter-widget communication

My Contribution Listing

Use Case: Show all Contributions from user ordered by Information Equity (Social value of an information)
Objective:  Show a users contributions with the highest social value

Remark :
- can be combined with Contribution Tag Cloud widget via inter-widget communication

Community Widgets

This are set of widgets which are related to all or to a specific community

Top Communities

Use Case: Show the top xx communities
Objective: Motivate communities to get into the top ranking of all communities

Top Contributors – Top Countries

Use Case: Show the top xx contributors or countries of all or a specific community
Objective: Motivate people to get into the top ranking of a community

Remark :
- if a user is not in the top x ranking but is part of the community her/his ranking is shown at the bottom of the widget

Top Content

Use Case: Show the top xx content of all or a specific community
Objective: Show the most valued content of a community

Remark :
- if a user looking at this widget – own content she/he has authored is shown in bold

We can use the tag cloud or listing widget to show the most valued content of a community

or a specific widget to show the top content. Furthermore there is an activity widget which shows the details per content (URL)

Expert Calculation

Use Case: Show the top xx experts for tag x

Objective: Automatically calculate expertise of users (our countries with expertise) based on the social feedback they receive on their contributions

Remark :

This is probably the coolest expert location model today as it calculates experts based on contributions of a user and the
social feedback of the entire community

What’s next ?

We are tuning the mathematical model and history service to provide time bound Equity.

As example we want to show to most valued person,content or community during a specific time period.

But how do you measure it? In the real live you might have friends which help you in a bad [...]]]> Have you ever thought about how you might gain Social Capital in your live ?
By inviting friends, participating in communities (like a church, a sports club etc.) and other social interactions you create personal Social Capital.

But how do you measure it? In the real live you might have friends which help you in a bad situation or you get invited for a party and so on ….

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a way to measure the Social Capital in an enterprise ?

Why? Because we could give the individual and answer to the most important question

” What is in it for me “

As part of our Customer Engineering CE2.0 project we are developing a measurable Community Equity System

The idea is pretty simple – lets measure the contribution, participation, skills and role equity of a person.

Then we combine the Community equity values with the aggregated profile information of a person

…. and then we can build user specific and dynamic mashup services based on the users need…

Use Case:

1. A user specifies that she/he needs help to develop a certain skills or expertise ( lets say AJAX programming) and create a Skills tags with a personal rating 1 (= need help).
2. The system dynamically generates a list of internal & external trainings, books, experts based on their Community equity value…
3. The user takes an online training on Ajax programming and passes the final training test
4. The training application updates the Skills equity of the person by updating the training equity
5. The overall Skills equity of the person increases …

Pretty cool stuff I guess …. and YES we are looking in all the data privacy issues.

We are very interested in existing or evolving standards for rating, voting, commenting services etc.
specially in the Semantic Web space… Just leave a comment with a pointer … Thanks!

Technorati Tags: web2.0 web_n+1 web3.0 CE2.0
Technorati Tags:microformat semantic web

The objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating [...]]]> Hurray! We finally filed the patent on Community Equity and I can disclose more details….

Overview

The objective is to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity a person can gain by actively engaging in online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating in, for example:

• Adding or updating contributions (wikis,forums, attachments)
• Rating, commenting
• Tagging
• Downloading and reusing content
• Social connections
• Search queries

Equity Model

The systems will calculate the following equity values:

• Information Equity (IQ)
• Personal Equity (PEQ)

Information Equity (IQ)

The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculates a numeric value that represents the importance, relevance, and quality of the information. Information can be a wiki page, blog post, forum entry, or document.

The activities that the IQ captures includes:

* How many times users (repeat) have viewed the information
* How many times this information has been downloaded by users (in the case of an attachment)
* How many times this information was reused by an individual
* User feedback (ratings, comments)

How do we know that a document has been reused?
We developed a web service called “Content extraction and metadata store,” which writes a tag in an OpenOffice document. This tag describes the source community of the document (for example, Project xx). If a user is downloading this document and stores it in another community, we write a parent tag into the OpenOffice document, which describes the destination community. By analyzing the tags we know that a document has been reused. In addition, we can build a dynamic cloning reference of related documents.

Personal Equity (PEQ)
The purpose of developing a Community Equity (PEQ) value for each individual is to help recognize their achievements and their participation in the community.

Here is the calculation:

PEQ = CQ + PQ + SQ + RQ + OE

Contribution Equity (CQ)
The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person related to his or her role or roles in a company.
The CQ tracks the total contribution of wiki entries, blog posts, attachments such as documents, podcasts, videos, software, and how this information is useful to the community (IQ).
Per contribution we calculate an equity value based on downloads, ratings and reuse by the community.

Participation Equity (PQ)
The Participation Equity calculates a value for the active participation of a person. We use the feedback activities a person has provided to other community contributions like

* Ratings provided
* Comments provided
* Tag or Tags provided
* Reuse of content

Skills Equity (SQ)
The Skills Equity shows the skills of a person based on his or her contribution
Details will be disclosed later.

Reputation Equity (RQ)
The Reputation Equity (RQ) is a combination of contribution, participation and role equity.
Details will be disclosed later …

Personal Sociometry Equity (OE)
Humans suffer from information overload. There’s much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend ,on each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how, or know-why information has become most crucial. “Know-who” involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person (Johnson et al., 2000).
In this context, understanding the formation, evolution, and utilization of online social networks becomes important. A social network is “a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.” (Garton, et al., 1997). While the Internet contributes to the information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage one’s social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.
(source:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks)

We are looking to add the following Social Equity indicators:

* Centrality (number of friends) – Freeman 1977: http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/27.pdf
* TBD

Tag Equity
Tag Clouds are calculated by frequency of use. This does not necessarily reflect the value of a tag (or the topic a tag represents). By calculating the Equity of a Tag based on social activities of the community (add or edit, comment, view, etc.) we can dynamically calculate a Tag equity of all contributions related to this tag.
Details will be disclosed later.

Equity Aging
Equity values age over time.

Example Information Aging: A technical white paper about Internet Security from 1999 was really valuable at that time but might be obsolete today …

Example Reputation Aging: 15 years ago I was an expert in IBM mainframe integration. I had a great reputation reputation of fixing any problems related to SNA.
Over the last 15 years I refocused my expertise and skills and my reputation (and skills) about IBM mainframe integration has gone.

To calculate time-based equity, we assume that any action, such as view, download, rating, and updates, has a “time-to-live” value . This value goes to zero linearly.

Mathematical model (credit goes to Dmitry [Dima] Riachtchentsev, our math genius on the team)

Excerpt from Dima’s specs:
To reduce the calculations, we use a linear model:
1. Just after the action that affects an Equity, the Equity value is changed to a multiplier value.
2. Then this value goes to zero linearly. It becomes zero after a valid time period.
With such a model, we have a linear trend every time.
The linear trend enables us to not track the whole history to calculate equity values. We can just change two linear trend parameters after every action and after the aging time period.

Equity Visualization
We developed a set of widgets to visualize the Community Equity model.

My Community Equity
This widget shows in real time the Contribution and Participation Equity of a Person.

People Ranking
This widget displays the top 10 people. In addition, it shows the ranking of the person either as bold (Name) or the ranking position if a person is not in the top 10.

Country Ranking
This widget displays the top 10 countries with the highest Community Equity average per person in a country.

Switzerland is leading…. I like it!

Content Ranking
This widget displays the top ten Content with the highest Informaton Equity . In addition it shows the ranking of the contribution of a person in bold.

*What’s Next?*
Stay tuned for some future blog posts on our pilot experience and results….