Social Networking

A Tool to Turn Networks into Backers

/ Katja Reuter

Today I learned about KickStarter, a funding platform for inventors and explorers, including artists, filmmakers, and journalist. It reminded me of  the Web site SciFlies where researchers can reach out to the public and promote project ideas to raise funding for testing initial ideas. We recently wrote about it in Integrating “grassroot” funding opportunities with research networking.

The key idea of KickStarter is different, though. It is a tool for mobilizing the existing networks of the project creator pic blog.pptto generate support. Site users can explore projects by various categories, view information about the pledged score, about how much is already funded, and when the ‘pledge drive’ will end.

Project creators keep the full ownership and control. People who pledge receive access to all project updates, which the project creator posts on the project blog. He decides which of the posts are publicly viewable and which exclusive to the backers. In addition, backers can ask the project creator questions via the “Send Message” button on any project page. Funding is all or nothing. Money is collected only if a project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires.

I’m wondering whether such a tool could be helpful to researchers who want to raise small funding. But even more, it intrigues me whether it could help them find collaborators. Finding collaborators can go both ways: it may involve looking for a researcher in a specific discipline, but it could also be part of a ‘project market place’ where researchers post projects for which they need a collaborator.

Tangential Thoughts: A Speed-Networking Model Event for Scientists

/ Katja Reuter

At our retreat in July this year, I listened to conversations about the challenge of bringing researchers with questions to those with new information and techniques. Using technology is one way to help scientists step outside their usual research network and find expertise. But since face to face still matters, some wondered how an event that gives researchers the chance to meet a lot of people within a short time could look like.

The Weill Cornell Medical College Clinical and Translational Science Center has tried something new in the field of “speed-networking”. In a “Translational Research Bazaar” the Center used a “format popularized by speed dating” – so I learned reading an article featured on the Clinical & Translational Science Network. We wrote about this new network site in our post “New Clinical and Translational Science Network”.

And this is how it works: The organizers “reserved a room that could accommodate 100 people. The tables were SpeedNetBell_160[1]set up to minimize noise, maximize easy movement around the tables, and facilitate conversation”. Basic scientists and clinical & translational researchers “sit on opposite sides of a table and chat for 3 minutes until a bell rings, signaling that it’s time to move on and strike up a new conversation. This process continues until everyone in one group has met everyone in the other group”. As a result, “eighty-five percent of the participants said they met at least one potential collaborator”.

Interestingly, even those who were not looking for collaborators could benefit. For example, Even Robert Dottin, director of the Center for Study of Gene Structure and Function at Hunter College, suggested potential collaborators from within his center.

The first Translational Research Bazaar took place in October 2008. Since then the organizers have tracked the number of “new partners” who submitted grant proposals over the course of 2009 through follow-up surveys and phone calls. And what have they learned and will do differently next time?

  • Require that registrants complete an online bio with photo, contact information, their research priorities and needs before the event.
  • Be prepared to be flexible: “More than 80 people signed up” for the event that was free of charge; “one-third of the registrants didn’t show up”. But “many new people appeared on the day of the event to register onsite”.
  • Use a cowbell instead of a microphone to be sure the signal to switch partners will be heard “over the din”.
  • Color-coded ‘dance cards’ are useful which were to match the side of the table people sat on. The cards “listed the names and top research interests of each registrant, with a blank line to scribble a quick note”.
  • Provide bottles of water, as people will spend about 2 hours talking almost nonstop.
  • Keep the speed networking to an hour as people get exhausted
  • The “wine-and-cheese hour that followed turned out to be a critical, because “people had ideas they were anxious to discuss.”
  • Send a follow-up email with a link to the bios registrants completed.

Also interesting:

Science-Based Approach to Online Participation

/ Katja Reuter

Researchers may disagree on the best social media or “crowdsourcing” approach. However, existing online communities that explore new social participation ideas provide a “vast laboratory” for testing theories about technology-mediated social interaction. Wikipedia, Twitter, Patients Like Me, Open Innovation Pavillion, Watch Jefferson County and Innocentive – today a great amount of data is becoming available, as stated in the recent article “Computational Social Science”. Now is the time to use these data and perform experiments at massive scale, wrote a team of researchers led by Ben Shneiderman, professor for computer science at the University of Maryland. They authored a white paper called “National Initiative for Social Participation” which suggests a “scientific foundation for thinking about technology-mediated social interaction”.

A core assumption is that there are “better and worse forms of social participation and social connectedness”. But what makes them better or worse? We have been thinking about this for a while, as we work towards the launch of UCSF’s research networking site mentioned in the recent post OpenSocial & Best Practices for Social Networking Websites.  Ben Shneiderman’s team argues that an organized research program could help to accelerate promising social action networks and answer fundamental questions about functionality, usability and sociability. For example: What motivates participants to come to a site, read, contribute and collaborate? What are best practices for moderation facilities? How do successful online communities handle the start-up paradox, recruit and socialize newcomers, encourage commitment and contribution from members? And how important are cooperation, competition, and trust for an individual’s participation? Not to mention legitimate dangers;  the white paper states to the point: “In the social networking ideal universe, anyone can connect with anyone else. In the ideal secure universe, there is insurance against that.”

Finding answers to these questions would offer the chance to “redesign and repurpose” social media technologies, improving “usability and sociability to better engage people with diverse motivations, experiences, perspectives, skills and knowledge”. Ben Shneiderman’s team envisions using the knowledge to “produce profound transformations in healthcare, community safety, disaster response, life-long learning, business innovation, energy sustainability, environmental protection, and other important national priorities.”

In this spirit, the National Science Foundation announced a $15-million Social-Computational Systems grant program to support research around social networking – a good opportunity to establish a stronger basis for evidence-driven discussions about online participation.

Is Distance Dead?

/ Katja Reuter

Is the Internet changing our world into a “borderless society” or are geographical distances still relevant when it comes to social interactions? Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy at Hebrew University analyzed Facebook users and the location of email messages to find out more. In their article “Distance Is Not Dead: Social Interaction and Geographical Distance in the Internet Era” the researchers raise doubts about the “Global-Village-Theory”. They come to the conclusion that the importance of physical proximity in social interactions is a “stronger force” than ever. It seems people prefer to send messages over shorter distances – they mostly connect online with those they know off-line.

For more details view the original article or the blog post on the subject in Technology Review, which also talks about “why we have gone so wrong in thinking that the world is getting smaller”, the “six-degrees-of-separation experiments originally performed by Stanley Milgram with letters and later by Steve Strogatz and Duncan Watts using e-mail”.

OpenSocial & Best Practices for Social Networking Websites

/ minikahlon / 1 Comment

XINGWhat is the best web design for a social networking platform? We’re certainly thinking about this as we plan on the release of UCSF Profiles, our research (as opposed to ‘social’) networking site.  Smashing Magazine has a useful article that summarizes key principles.  One of these is about standards – they encourage the usage of OpenSocial as a standard in building social networking sites.  And – we’re glad to say, we’re on it.  We’re in the process of extending our research networking product, ‘Profiles’, as an OpenSocial “container”. i.e. retrofitting the software so that it’s possible to use other OpenSocial applications, built, for example, for applications like Linked In, to plug and play with our product.  This will be a primary contribution of UCSF’s in the continued open source development of the Harvard-developed ‘Profiles’.

New Clinical and Translational Science Network

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

In the spirit of people being the prerequisite for success a new Clinical and Translational Science Network (CTSciNet) was recently launched by Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is described as a “career-development Web portal for clinical and translational investigators with an experimental, evolving communications infrastructure”. The portal provides articles and perspectives about training and career-related issues, resources, and partners in clinical and translational science. As it develops, CTSciNet’s online professional network intends to connect clinical and translational science communities worldwide. I like the Forum Primer that provides answers to the Forum’s most frequently asked questions and links back to the original Forum discussions.

Twitter – a powerful platform?

/ Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

The debate on the usefulness of Twitter is ongoing and whether it could serve communication and promotion efforts at big research institutions in one way or another. I am still befuddled what Twitter could offer that email and text messaging are not doing already.

I came across the post “Nine Ways to Use Twitter” by John C. Dvorak who explains why he thinks Twitter is a valuable service. Some of his arguments may be interesting to some of you. Surprisingly, he concludes that there may be nothing to get from Twitter, unless one invents a use, which – I guess – leaves all options open for further discussions.

Some of Dvorak’s use cases:

  • Tweeting about an event: something solitary is turned into an interactive, shared experience.
  • Spread of breaking news updates/announcements/ public address system: “when a major event happens, often a Twitterer will be there tweeting about it on the spot”.
  • Contact multiple people who work within an organization using the mobile service feature to easily broadcast a quick message to all of them.
  • Easy feedback mechanism for writings etc.
  • Asking and answering questions is easier than with e-mail, almost instantaneous
  • Poll people/crowd-sourcing information/audience voting

Research Networking: “Scientists caught up in fictional friend network on Facebook”

/ Katja Reuter

Since research networking resounds throughout the scientific community, the article “Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit” awoke my interest. It talks about a new case of a bogus network on Facebook of  “more than 100 scientists, policy-makers and journalists linked to stem-cell research, whose identities have been purloined.”  Even though the perpetrators and their motives remain unknown, an interesting assumption was made that through a false profile and a network around it a researcher may obtain “sensitive information from a hoodwinked competitor”. I am not sure that I understand completely how that would work in detail, but maybe some of you can offer more explanations. Other than that, the article also helps to understand the reluctance of some scientists concerning research networking.