January 4-7, 2012 - Maui

Papers due June 15, 2011

Additional information about the minitrack and papers presented in previous years may be found at the website of the  social networking and communities minitrack. General information about the conference may be found at the HICSS primary website.

Mini-Track Chairs:
Karine Nahon, University of Washington, karineb@uw.edu [Primary Contact]
Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia

Following the success of this minitrack from the past nine HICSS conferences, we invite submissions to the 2012 mini-track on social networking and communities.

This minitrack focuses on social networks and their interrelations with communities in the context work, learning, social and/or personal life. At present, there is tremendous research interest in these topics, driven by the fact that these sociological phenomena are changing the way people work, play and socialize, and how they spend their time and money. Accordingly, billions of dollars are being spent by businesses and consumers on these technologies, and the rate of adoption has been phenomenal, while empirical and theoretical work on social and technical design, and economic and social outcomes lag behind.

We would like to attract papers that address issues of online communities of practice, inquiry and interest created in the interest of political, educational, business, social and/or gaming pursuits, and with attention to how online community building and management contribute to success in the digital economy and society. While the focus is primarily online communities, papers are also welcomed that address the interplay between online and offline means of interaction.

We call for empirical and theoretical papers that add to our understanding of the social, political, and economic landscape of communities and social networks at work, school, home, and play. Examples of the possible interdisciplinary topics of interest in these contexts include, but are not limited to the following:

• Social, political and/or economic impact of social media
• Communities as sociological phenomenon in the digital economy
• Community development and community informatics
• Design, development, and user studies of social media
• Online communities of practice, inquiry or interest
• Business models of Second Life
• E-learning: structures, implementations, and practices
• Serious leisure communities online
• Organizational behavior of communities
• Social network studies and analyses of online communities
• Mobile applications, services and use for and by online communities
• Case studies and topologies of online communities
• Case studies and analyses of the rise and fall of social network sites and online communities
• Theoretical models of virtual worlds
• Advertising in online communities and social networks
• Models for managing behavior in online communities
• Behavior in online gaming communities
• Models and cases of synergies and/or conflicts between real and virtual worlds
• Diffusion and adoption of social networking applications and practices
• Development of social networking applications and practices
• Critical perspectives on social media and local and/or virtual community
• Disruptive strategies of virtual worlds

Important Deadlines

Abstracts: Authors may contact Minitrack Chairs for guidance and indication of appropriate content at anytime.

June 15, 2011: Authors submit Full Papers to the Peer Review System, following the Author Instructions found on the HICSS web site. All papers will be submitted in double column publication format and limited to 10 pages including diagrams and references that conform to HICSS standards. Papers undergo a double-blind review.

August 15, 2011: Acceptance/Rejection notices are sent to Authors via the Peer Review System.

September 15, 2011: Authors submit the Final Version of papers following submission instructions on the Peer Review System website

Virality of Networks

One of the hottest topics currently under investigation is in the area of virality and campaigns, or the role of the Internet in political campaigns. Here are several articles from a conference titled "You Tube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" -

Bob Boynton Going Viral

Kevin Wallsten "'Yes We Can': How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon

LaChrystal Ricke A New Opportunity for Democratic Engagement: The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates

Hillary Savoie YouTube, Community, and Me: The New Media Balance Between Self and Community

You can find the full list of articles and posters here: http://youtubeandthe2008election.jitp2.net/frontpage

Having Blaise Cronin, Dean of the School for Library and Information Science at Indiana University give a talk, was as usual an inspiring and intellectual experience.

Did you ever wonder how the industry (in many cases but not always, a non-profit industry) of citations work? Who becomes a co-author on a masterpiece and who doesn't? What can we learn from the acknowledgments about the politics of creating a masterpiece? Who are those inventors and who are the informal collaborators that usually are not mentioned formally and vanish as time passes? These and some more related topics were discussed in his talk (His powerpoint can be download here). I will try to bring some of them with my comments.

Michelangelo -Capella Sistina

Just to give small examples - Michelangelo's genesis on the ceiling of the Capella Sistina, was the work of many apprentices and students under the mentoring of Michelangelo. Today, 500 years later, can we name even one of them? why no credit was given to them, although they took part in creating this masterpiece? Who was Robert Boyle's mysterious partner, that we know was the technician of most of his inventions? why he was never credited? Who should be credited for the invention of cloning Dolly? The technicians that worked on Dolly complained that their contribution is ignored.

Here are some statistics before analysis and speculations:

According to ISI data, published papers which involve multiple authors, specifically 50, 100 and 200 authors have increased tremendously from1981. I would have a wild guess, that if you check social science vs. exact science, you would find that these numbers applies mainly to exact science.

Can anyone imagine Foucault's book "The Archeology of Knowledge" written by 50 different people simultaneously? And indeed most of the examples Blaise gave were from the exact and life sciences.

Is there a connection between the number of authors and the number of acknowledgments? Take a look at the two tables for example taken from JACS (Journal of the American Chemical Society).

Two parallel trends -  the number of multi-author papers has increased and so the number of acknowledgments. Looking only at this table, one cannot conclude whether the increase in acknowledgments is bigger than the increase in the number of authors.

BTW, while most of the acknowledgments deal with thanks to financial supporters, and help in tools and technology in JACS, this changes when moving to other disciplines.

So the next figure below shows that the number of acknowledgments did increase more than the average number of authors.

So does it mean that people became more polite now and they mention anyone who saw even one word of their manuscript? or does it mean that the increase in the number of authors during the years should have been higher and maybe some of these acknowledgments should have been co-authors? so not politeness, but political consideration of reducing potential conflicts with co-workers?

But there are few problems with acknowledgments. Nobody remembers them, they are not recorded anywhere in a systematic way, and in the academia there is no system of incentives that will acknowledge the acknowledgments. So it is more profitable and worthwhile for a colleague to be cited than be mentioned in the acknowledgment. With citations researchers are being more evaluated. More citations more status. Blaise gave a wonderful example that when we use someones' publications to develop an idea or to describe the literature we cite them, and therefore they are being rewarded. But if we ask a colleague to help us with a statistical analysis, and this colleague might even spend hours and hours the maximum we would do in the profession is to acknowledge them, not even one citation as a cure.

So if the world is going toward interdisciplinarity - maybe it is time to create also a system that will acknowledge the acknowledgments and by this reduce the politics behind them?

Blaise gave the example of Rob Kling. If you look at the following figure you will see that Rob Kling collaborated mostly with people who were in his environment (UCI), not necessarily people he preferred to work with. When he moved in 1996 to Indiana he stopped working with most of his UCI colleagues.