Future Workspaces » social network

Borrelpraat

tombroens — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:52:04 +0000

During the Future Workspaces project day we also introduced a social networking concept called ‘Borrelpraat’. Borrelpraat is a prototype of a social networking tool that can be used at networking events. Participants have a tag on their badge with which they can indicate their position (using RFID technology). Furthermore, they indicated their interests at registration. On a swipe of their badge their location and interests are visualized on a big screen. These interests are matched with other participants at that location to stimulate conversations. Due to the use of standard Web 2.0 and RFID technology, Borrelpraat is easy to extend. Below is a short movie (in dutch) that shows the working of this prototype

We tested this prototype at the future workspaces project day. The participants of this day reacted enthusiastically, which resulted in approximately 100 swipes of badges within the hour. We are going to explore this way of social interaction more and extend this concept. If you are interested please feel free to contact us.

Decision Making in Virtual Worlds: An Experiment

Bart Van den Hooff — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:08:02 +0000

Last year, an experiment was conducted at the VU University to determine what the role of virtual worlds could be in geographically distributed decision making processes. Virtual worlds have been receiving a lot of media attention over the past year, and people in organizations increasingly have experience in various virtual environments. Still, we are in the dark about the potential value of these environments for organizations. Combined with the fact that people in organizations increasingly work geographically dispersed, and independent of time and location, this triggered us to consider the possibilities of virtual worlds as group decision support systems.Our aim was to study the contribution of virtual worlds to geographically dispersed team decision making in terms of both facilitating (and improving) the interaction between participants, and improving the quality of the decision being reached. Not that important now, but I think we could better frame this in terms of communication/interaction and information gathering/processing. Improving the decision being reached is an outcome, while facilitating interaction concerns the process (see presentation) In order to be able to do this, we compared decision making in virtual worlds (we used Second Life for our experiment) to decision making that was supported by a purely text-based chat functionality. This would enable us to determine the added value of the visualization that virtual worlds offer in terms of both interaction and decision making.

The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.

Group Decision Making in Second Life

Participants in the experiment were 240 students of Business Administration, randomly assigned to teams of 3 persons. Participants were unaware of who their team mates were as they were placed in different rooms.

Based on information they were given beforehand, teams were asked to decide what to do with the vacant piece of land. After reaching their decision, they were asked to fill out a survey in which a number of relevant variables concerning their interaction and decision making were measured. The results provide a number of interesting insights into the added value of virtual worlds for distributed group decision making, in terms of both interaction and decision quality. As the experiment will be continued in 2009 with people working in organizations, we cannot provide any more information on the results here – unfortunately…

Conducting this experiment has been a very valuable experience, providing interesting conclusions as to how people may collaborate through virtual environments. It has also provided us with interesting insights in terms of how to conduct such an experiment – insights which will be incorporated into the follow-up experiment to be conducted in 2009!

The researchers: Frans Feldberg, Alexander Schouten & Bart van den Hooff,
VU University Amsterdam,
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration,
Section Knowledge, Information & Networks

The Business Impact of Social Computing 2008 (Gartner report)

infocentre — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:50:26 +0000

The business impact of social computing is being felt across all geographic regions and in all vertical sectors. This Special Report provides a broad overview of the present and future impact through a detailed look at more than 20 specific areas. (Source: Gartner, September 18, 2008)

Challenges for the nomadic worker: Part 2: In Touch

Robert Slagter — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:49:53 +0000

In the series of posts on the main challenges for the nomadic worker, this part focusses on the challenge to stay in touch with the people that are important to you in your personal and professional network.

What is being “In Touch”?
Being in touch is the affective version of being in sync. It is the sense of “being connected” both with people you know well (your strong relational ties) as well as with people you are acquinted with (your weak ties). Important aspects are reassurance of the well-being of significant others, and the ability to let someone else know you are thinking of him or her.

Why is being “In Touch” important?
Being in touch is relational “glue”; it helps to:

Build and maintain a social network.
To maintain social cohesion in a team.
To have peripheral (not goal oriented) awareness of what others are doing.
To build up trust in social relationships.

Our research hypotheses about “In Touch”

Face-to-face contact and mediated contact fulfill complementary roles for being in touch.
Being in touch prevents “professional loneliness” (sensory isolation due to the impersonal nature of much information technology).

Our research questions about “In Touch”

What are the roles of face-to-face and mediated contact in developing a sense of being in touch?
How can social media help people to get in touch and to stay in touch?
In what ways can “impersonal” IT be improved or enhanced to prevent professional loneliness?

FWS Workshop on Enterprise Social Software- 17 sept 2008

Marcel Bijlsma — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:40:40 +0000

September 17, 2008

Future Workspaces organizes, together with IBM, a workshop on Enterprise Social Software. The workshop will be held on Wednesday September 17, from 9:30 to 12:30 hours at IBM The Netherlands, Amsterdam. The workshop is not an introduction into blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and social networking: instead it is aimed at sharing knowledge and experiences with the introduction and usage of such social tools within enterprises. A large part of the workshop will be devoted to sharing experiences and learning from each other. We hope you can join and share your insights and experiences.

Please visit the workshop wiki at http://workspace.telin.nl for the full programme, the list of participants and a list of topics the participants would like to discuss.

Wetenschappers: maak sociale netwerksites kleiner

Marcel Bijlsma — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:19:48 +0000

Nieuwe sociale netwerksites moeten mensen meer de mogelijkheid geven om kleinere online gemeenschappen te vormen, net als in de echte wereld. ‘Duizenden vrienden zijn geen vrienden.’ (source: webwereld 30-07-08)

McKinsey: gemengde gevoelens over Web 2.0-tools

Marcel Bijlsma — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:23:58 +0000

Bedrijven maken steeds meer gebruik van ‘Web 2.0′-tools als wiki’s, blogs, social networks en mashups, Maar het gebruik leidt tot gemengde gevoelens.
Veel bedrijven zijn ontevreden over het resultaat, concludeert McKinsey uit een onderzoek (source Automatiseringsgids 31-07-08)

Google Social

Ruud Janssen — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:31:11 +0000

Google directly for an expert! Enter a topic and Google Social will return relevant pages and relevant people, that is, the persons who created these pages or who are mentioned on them. Click on a person to discover the expert network. The network is based on the same Pagerank mechanism that is used to sort webpages that fit your query.