My adviser Coye Cheshire, and I have just had a paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. It’s titled The Social Psychological Effects of Feedback on the Production of Internet Information Pools and it’s freely available here.

I’m excited because this is the work that set me down the research path that I’m currently on, and that will lead to my dissertation research (and beyond). It’s based on research I did while I was working on Mycroft, which then became a relatively short-lived startup company called inChorus.

A friend of mine and I have recently started a new website called isgoodfor.us which is based on a simple idea: all the good domains are gone! So we managed to buy up a series of cool top-level domain names and we’re selling subdomains very cheap. You buy, for example, ‘corruption.isbadfor.us’ and forward it wherever you’d like. You have to host your site elsewhere, but it doesn’t matter what the domain is, because you can just give out the isgoodfor.us domain, which we hope is easy to remember, fun, and makes a statement.

So the question is: how does one kickstart the marketing of a thing like this? Where does one start in making a new meme? Of course, a thing will sink or swim on its own merits. It could very well turn out that people don’t like the idea. But how do we get them to hear about it? I’m sure if anyone had really figured this out they’d be a millionaire by now.

One way, of course, is to blog about it. (ahem!) I’m also thinking about posting the link on digg.com, reddit.com, etc. I’m not going to spam my friends. One idea we had was to put a few high profile domains, in this case georgewbush.isgoodfor.us (auction) and georgewbush.isbadfor.us (auction) up for auction on ebay, hoping that some folks will take notice.

Anyway, who knows. This is the great thing about Web 2.0. My friend and I devoted a few hours of work to a silly and fun idea, and now we can largely ’set it and forget it’ and provide a simple service, hopefully to lots of folks. But it was easy, we learned a lot doing it, and if we can make a bit of beer money, then great!

Today and tomorrow are the culmination of a long, busy semester of working on Mycroft. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, and excited that we finally get to show it off. There are two end-of-semester events at the iSchool that you might come to, if you’re so inclined. For a quick overview of what I and my cohorts have been doing, you can come to the Final Project Showcase, from 4-7 tonight, in South Hall Room 110. (Check out all the project descriptions.) For a deeper look, tomorrow morning’s got a series of 30 minute talks about all the projects. Check out the schedule here. We’ll be giving away (some) of the deepest darkest secrets about Mycroft at our talk at 11:30 in Room 202. Hope to see you there!

Ben Hill, my co-conspirator for Mycroft, our distributed collaboration project, appears as one of two guests on this week’s edition of Jon Udell’s weekly podcast over at InfoWorld. The other guest is Nathan McFarland of castingwords.com. CastingWords is a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as the outsource labor provider.

Jon wanted to to talk about the possibilities of ‘harnessing collective intelligence,’ (a la Tim O’Reilly) a phrase I really like. Collective intelligence is really built when people can collaborate and contribute in the course of their daily activities. When you make a dedicated activity out of it, you begin to move towards the individual side of the individual/collective continuum. We built Mycroft with this in mind, and it was the main reason we chose to focus in on tasks that take only a few seconds - tasks you can do without ever leaving whatever page hosts the Mycroft module. I think enabling these casual, fun interactions will be the key to sustaining a high participation rate over time.

Tomorrow I’m off to Vancouver to attend the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). This is a wonderful conference, and I highly recommend it. In the last few years the number of people who are doing work combining anthropology with design and various IT-related fields is growing - and fast. Add to that the fact that the meetings provide a genuinely diverse set of perspectives, and include a group of people that are (in my experience) knowledgeable, humble, friendly, and eager to collaborate. As compared to the AAA meetings, SfAAs tend to be more informal and to have a great deal more discussion and debate. Check out the program if you want to get a sense of it.

This year I’m giving both a talk and a poster. My talk, terribly titled ‘Cultural Assessment of Kiosk Projects,’ is on Wednesday from 3:30-5:20. Hopefully I can learn from some of the insightful comments on giving talks from Steve and Lorenz. It’s on work I’m doing on integrating cultural assessment into the design and evaluation of projects in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) space. This is getting to be a crowded field, and my own contribution is small, but I feel like I’ve got a good handle on the transitions that are happening from the perspective of applied anthropology.

And like many others, I have first hand experience with the fact that development researchers in many fields are starting realize that anthropology and ethnography are important, but they understand it as a set of methods only. While I have no pretensions about ethnography, as opposed to some who argue that ‘real’ ethnography can only be done by anthropologists, I do think many well-meaning researchers and practitioners in other fields actually do us a disservice by trying to use ethnographic-like methods. In trying to advance the case for ethnography to their colleagues, they often have no real ‘ammunition’ except that they know it ought to be done. This, in my opinion, is the same, and just as bad, as technologists who throw gadgets at development problems because they can, hoping that one will solve the problem.

My poster, during a session on Friday from 1:30-4, is based on work I did with Ben Gross regarding how people manage multiple email addresses, messaging accounts, and the like in the course of everyday life. We wonder: what are the factors that influence habits, perceptions, and decisions around complex, multi-faceted lives online? This is my first poster at the SfAA, and I’m kind of psyched for it. Poster sessions seem much more engaging than paper sessions, where the audience is always at a distance.

I hope to be online and blog some of the sessions as we go along. If you’re also attending the SfAAs, drop me a line.

The Mycroft Project (which I blogged about previously) has finally reached rollout stage. We’ve been working feverishly to get this prototype up and running, though like anything alpha, we’re expecting some glitches. This week we’re rolling out our website and a prototype of the banner that we hope will someday be on thousands of websites as a replacement for web ads. Check it out at the top of this page.

Go ahead, play around with it. Feel free to sign up. Right now we’re in the process of looking for volunteer sites to host the banner. It’s really simple: you just go to our website, sign up, and drop the auto-generated code-snippet into your website, just like you would do with Google’s AdSense. In return we’ll advertise that you are in the Mycroft Network, you’ll be first in line when we start paying webhosts per-click, and you’ll get the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping to put an end to the irritation web ads that we all know and love. So if you’ve got a blog or a website that gets any traffic at all, we’d really appreciate your help.

This is the ‘proof-of-concept’ phase where we are trying to generate traffic in order to test the system, and develop our algorithms for data quality and incentives. So please use the banner, try to break it, sign up, and come back often. For more information about all of this, please visit mycroftnetwork.com.

I’ve blogged in the past about the Mycroft Project that I have been working on for several months now. Unfortunately, our website is down right now so the link won’t do you any good, but still, mycroftnetwork.com.

Anyway, we are trying to learn a few things about how people contribute on the web and how they feel about advertising, so we’ve put together a short web survey. If you can spare about 10 minute, we’d really appreciate it if you’d take the survey, which is completely anonymous and confidential.

Thanks so much!

I want to insert a plug for an exciting project I’m working on called Mycroft. It’s still in the very early stages, but we’ve got an extremely alpha prototype up, and some web content (quickly evolving). Check us out at mycroftnetwork.com. Very soon you’ll also see the prototype appearing on these blog pages as well.

I’ll be posting more about this project (probably a lot more) in the coming weeks and months. What I love about it is that it’s a wonderful synthesis of the technical and the sociocultural. It’s a research platform and a practical tool, and I get to do design and coding as well as anthropological fieldwork. You’ll get the gist from the site, but I’ll be interested in starting some discussion about the specific sociocultural issues later on. In the meantime feel free to post comments here, or email the team at mycroftnetwork@gmail.com.

My paper has been accepted to the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Washington, DC. It has been a challenge for me to learn to bridge the gap between technology and anthropology in other forums, so it’s good to know that the AAA pays a bit of attention.

I did this work in the spring in conjunction with a wonderful course I took with AnnaLee Saxenian and Joyojeet Pal called ‘ICT for Development: Context, Strategies, and Impact.’ What I really liked about the course is that it was a fantastic synthesis of many disciplines - economics, sociology, anthropology, computer science and engineering. We had participants from all these fields, and together I think we were able to expose the problems with much of the ICT-based development work that’s going on today. I blogged recently about an abstract I wrote for EPIC (rejected) about how companies that explore markets in the developing world (the mythical ‘other’ 3 billion) are essentially doing development work without realizing it. This paper is a first step in trying to make that process more acceptable.

A Case for Culturally Appropriate Kiosks

Judd D. Antin
School of Information Management and Systems
University of California Berkeley

Though many anthropologists have long recognized the need to tailor interventions to specific cultural contexts, that revelation has come more recently to technologists and information scientists in other fields. Ethnography has been recognized by some in the information technology fields for its ability to inform the design of sustainable new programs and assess and modify existing ones, but for others it is still seen as unsuitable or impractical. Few attempts have been made to use ethnographic methods to create culturally appropriate information and communication technologies (ICTs) and programs based upon them. Kiosk programs, which provide public access to computers and computer-related services for a variety of purposes including education, communication, and access to government services, have become one of the primary means for bringing the power of modern technology to underserved populations in the developing world. However, though many kiosk programs have been implemented, few have become sustainable or widely used. Beginning with the premise that successful and sustainable programs are those that adapt themselves to local cultures, this paper will explore the application of ethnographic methods to the assessment and design of culturally appropriate kiosk programs. Using several case studies, this paper will describe the unique challenges of designing culturally appropriate and sustainable kiosk programs, and illustrate how cultural factors can contribute to the success or failure of a kiosk project.