This report collects best practices for how to design social features for intranets, including:

The report also covers:

Feature Summary

Installation

Date: 12. February 2009 Time: 9am – 10am Pacific Time Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/904570408  

Then check this out:

http://kapustar.punkt.at/labs/knowledgelounge.org/?q=Semantic%20Web

This is an experimental mashup service from the Semantic Web Company (Credit goes to Rene Kapusta)

What does it do ?

This prototype shows how to use semantic based term extraction and the Amazon API to search for relevant books for a [...]]]> Do you want to see the power of Semantic Web mashup services ?

Then check this out:

http://kapustar.punkt.at/labs/knowledgelounge.org/?q=Semantic%20Web

This is an experimental mashup service from the Semantic Web Company (Credit goes to Rene Kapusta)

What does it do ?

This prototype shows how to use semantic based term extraction and the Amazon API to search for relevant books for a specific topic.

How it works

1. The search input is send to wikipedia.org
2. The respective wikipedia page is sent to the Open Calais service to extract the terms
3. The extracted terms are sent to google, and get enriched by related terms using the google labs service “google suggest“.
4. and last but not least the terms are sent to the Amazon API and the relevant books from Amazon are displayed

Pretty cool !

[Shel Israel, editor of Global Neighbourhoods. Photo from his blog.]

Excerpt summary:

When I first saw CE 2.0, I was pretty certain that the work of this 25-year veteran of IT would closely resemble a Rube Goldberg drawing, filled with complexity [...]]]> Shel Israel did a follow up interview on our former CE 2.0 project .. now called SunSpace

[Shel Israel, editor of Global Neighbourhoods. Photo from his blog.]

Excerpt summary:

When I first saw CE 2.0, I was pretty certain that the work of this 25-year veteran of IT would closely resemble a Rube Goldberg drawing, filled with complexity and confusing we of a nontechnical ilk.

I was wrong. More than anything, it looked like Facebook. It looked like it would be fun to play with. It had all sorts of “consumery” features. For example, you got ranked for your contribution and the ranking was public.

Read the full interview here

Thanks Shel !

Thanks guys

Shel Israel’s summary: “As the chief architect of Sun’s Community Equity 2.0 (CE2.0) project, Peter Reiser is considering the place of the individual in a social network from the perspective of a computer scientist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a carnival ringleader. An attempt to mesh Web 2.0 technologies with corporate communities, [...]]]> link to the video

Shel Israel’s summary:
“As the chief architect of Sun’s Community Equity 2.0 (CE2.0) project, Peter Reiser is considering the place of the individual in a social network from the perspective of a computer scientist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a carnival ringleader. An attempt to mesh Web 2.0 technologies with corporate communities, he hopes to inject fun and serendipity into information exchange.
In one of the more exciting technologies I’ve seen, CE2.0 is equal parts Facebook, corporate intranet, and community forum. The ability to aggregate and display community participation, and to profile the individual on a community equity model is incredibly innovative”

Many thanks to Shel Israel (interviewer) and Robert Scoble (camera man)
It was a lot of fun

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….