The DARPA baloon challenge and design of social networks

Recently DARPA created a contest to measure social networking skills:  
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10406752-76.html?tag=mncol;txt

The idea was for contestants to identify the latitudes and longitudes of 
10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the US sky.  
The only way anyone could find the 10 balloons was by relying on social 
networks.  DARPA wanted to understand how people use social networking 
to solve problems.  For those who wonder:  MIT won the contest.

I was just reading  _The DARPA Balloon Challenge and the Design of 
Social Participation Systems, _by Ed H. Chi, about the initiative and 
what was learned.  Here's a quote:



"The primary issue relating to the design of social participation 
systems is understanding the relationship between usability, 
sociability, social capital, collective intelligence, and how to elicit 
effective action through design.  

* **Usability** concerns the ability for all users to contribute, 
regardless of their accessibility requirements and computing experience, 
and how to lower the interaction costs of working with social systems.
* *Sociability* refers to the the skill or tendency of being sociable 
and of interacting well with others. There is a huge role in how the 
designer can facilitate and lubricate social interactions amongst users 
of a system.
* *Social Capital* refers positions that people occupy in social 
networks, and their ability to utilize those positions for some goal. 
 Designers need to enable people to sort themselves into comfortable 
positions in the social network, including leadership and follower 
positions.
* C*ollective Intelligence or Social Intelligence* refers to the 
emergence of intelligent behavior amongst groups of people.  Designers 
can create mechanisms such as voting systems, folksonomies, and other 
opinion aggregators to ensure the emergence of social intelligence over 
time. [Note that the definition for "Social Intelligence" here differs 
from traditional use of the phrase in social psychology.]"



 These findings could lead to interesting innovations in design as well 
as in research both when thinking about the social networking features 
for users but also in creating a "designed environment" in which the 
opensource community can work even more effectively.  Definitely a 
challenge to create a design that realizes all these aspects of social 
networking !

C.
-- 

*CHARLINE POIRIER*
*User Research Programme Lead*
*Canonical*
*27th floor, 21-24 Millbank Tower*
*London SW1P 4QP UK *

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