SCD 2013 - 2013 International Workshop on Social Computing as a Disciplinev (SCD-2013)

It has been over five years since the first workshops on social
computing (e.g., Forrester’s Social Computing Workshop, Microsoft’s
Group 2007 Workshop: Research Directions for Social Computing, SBP 2008,
etc.) began to coalesce a community that investigates
technology-mediated human social behavior. Today we observe the
formation of distinct branches of inquiry in social computing pertaining
to analytics, participation, engineering, HCI, infrastructure, and
others. Each of these new directions has benefitted from the influence
of related disciplines, such as network science, social informatics,
cybernetics, economics, and psychology. Meanwhile, private industry
continues to innovate in this space, generating applications that give
rise to new case studies and data sets, all of which feed back into the
fundamental research.
Despite the tremendous activity and rapid growth of this burgeoning
field, social computing nonetheless lacks the requisite characteristics
of an established discipline (though it may find itself on the precipice
thereof). What, then, stands between social computing as a loosely bound
interdisciplinary community with a common world view and social
computing as a formal discipline in its own right? The following
questions expound on this:
* What are the essential elements of social computing that differentiate
it from other fields of study?
* What are the sub-disciplines of social computing and how does social
computing fit into the broader taxonomy of both established disciplines
and related fields that are evolving in parallel?
* What research threads in social computing exist today and how do they
interrelate?
* What are the research goals of social computing and what do we expect
the state of the art to be in five, ten, and twenty years?
* What are the professional goals of the social computing community and
how do we expect those goals to manifest over the next five years?
This half-day workshop seeks to answer these question, and in that
course to develop an agenda that will advance social computing as a
discipline. Thus, topical areas of interest include (but are not limited
to):
- research agenda
- principles and practices
- taxonomy and relationship to other disciplines
- repeatable methods
- theoretical frameworks
- infrastructure considerations
- professional promotion and communication
- societal impact