Social Transparency and Latent Group Discovery

In March 2008, I participated in the AAAI Spring Symposium on Social Information Processing organized by Kristina Lerman (USC Information Sciences Institute), David Gutelius (Social Kinetics), Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs) and Srujana Merugu (Yahoo). The event brought together a very interesting mix of researchers investigating social media and the dynamic, emergent communities that are enabled by these technologies. Among the host of intriguing presentations, one in particular that caught my attention was given by Ed Chi from PARC.

Ed leads the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group which is focused on systems that “enhance the ability of a group to remember, think and reason; the system-supported construction of knowledge structures by a group.” Ed’s talk focused on insights derived from their investigation of the Wikipedia community and on a specific software component they’ve developed called WikiDashboard to enhance social transparency with the community.

The notion of increasing social transparency in the Wikipedia community amounts to providing greater visibility of community member actions in creating and editing the collective knowledge store. By allowing anyone to easily view the actions taken by others in the community, the assertion is that this will result in an increase in credibility and trust in both the content and among the members of the community.

While listening to Ed’s talk, I thought about the broader implications of social transparency and how social media technologies provide opportunities that lead to significant outcomes. More and more we are witnessing examples of collective action in the real world that emerge from movements that develop initially online. Take as a notable example the recent worldwide protests against the FARC in Columbia. It all started from a small group of young people expressing their outrage on Facebook over using kidnapping as a weapon. Little did they know their message would lead to a movement culminating in synchronized protests in 185 cities worldwide.

By increasing social transparency, we aid the process of latent group discovery, the discovery of hidden groups that share one or more attributes in common. Facebook groups provide one mechanism for latent group discovery. They allow individuals to form a group construct on Facebook and easily broadcast that construct to their social networks. Whether or not it is successful in exposing a larger latent group is dependent mainly on how the group idea resonates and therefore propagates. Many questions linger here about how various types of social media support latent group discovery which we will examine in the future.

What appeals to me about the pursuit of social transparency is its potential role in combating extremist ideologies and enhancing freedom. Without a doubt, social media is being used already along these lines. The Iranian blogosphere, for example, is providing a significant outlet for political expression and organization that is otherwise infeasible. Yet I believe we have only seen the beginning.

Latent group discovery is far from systematic in my opinion. Technologies will emerge that aid latent group discovery and coordination in more dynamic settings such as disaster relief. Such technologies will also enable greater political freedom I believe by allowing groups of individuals to quickly discover their shared outlooks and channel their collective energies toward positive change. Consider the potential for such technologies in the Middle East. Imagine the impact of an emergent group expressing their outrage swiftly online against extremist media messages from groups such as Al Qaeda. Empowerment begins with group awareness. And awareness can quickly lead to action.