SOCM 2014 - 2nd International Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines

The 2nd International Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines
A workshop at WWW2014
Seoul, Korea - 7 April 2014
Continuing from last year's Theory and Practice of Social Machines workshop at WWW2013, the second edition of the SOCM workshop will look deeply at social machines that have, or may yet soon have, a profound impact on the lives of individuals, businesses, governments, and the society as a whole in significant ways. Our goal is to study both extant and yet unrealized social machines, to identify factors that govern the growth or impede these systems to develop, and to identify unmet potential needs (both human and technical) for the kinds of loosely-coordinated distributed social systems the Web enables. The workshop will discuss methods to analyze and explore social machines, as essential mechanisms for deriving the guidelines and best practices that will inform the design the next generation of these systems.
Objectives
The objective of the workshop is to bring together experts of various kinds of social machines, including crowd-powered systems, social networks, and online communities, to discuss the scope of this new scientific and engineering apparatus and to present specific tools that they have designed and applied to analyze social machines and their impact.
The goal is to discuss the latest theoretical frameworks and empirical insights around Social Machines, an emerging interdisciplinary field of research investigating Web-enabled systems governed by combinations of computational and social processes. As introduced in last year's workshop, we use the term "Social Machines" to refer to socio-technical systems which leverage the Web as a medium for communication, socialization, decentralized coordination, and peer production. This theme derives from concepts introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in his influential Weaving the Web book, in which he describes the Web as an engine to "create abstract social machines - new forms of social processes that would be given to the world at large".
Unlike conventional Turing machines, their social counterparts are comprised of loose collectives of people connected by computational communication substrates at their core. By being accessible to any individual with a Web browser, such social machines have demonstrated the ability to allow groups of individuals to accomplish major goals using methods of distributed coordination and crowdsourcing at unprecedented scales. However, studying and designing such systems also requires a new and fundamentally different set of instruments, which, though inspired by the mind set of Computer Science and Engineering, naturally embraces theories, findings, and scientific methodology from a variety of other disciplines in order to understand how human and machine intelligence could be best brought together to help individuals, businesses, governments and the society as a whole in significant ways. This includes languages and models to describe their function and operation; methods that can be applied to study and predict their behavior; as well as qualitative and quantitative studies of the ways in which these systems have evolved and grown to support community appropriation and the development of the social practice.
Topics
The workshop proposes a multidisciplinary discussion focused on the following three themes:
Studies: analytical and empirical studies of social machines that have changed the world, including:
Quantitative and qualitative aspects of online peer production and information exchange systems (multimedia sharing sites, auction sites, discussion forums, crowdsourced science, gamified customer relationship management, Wikipedia etc)
Incentives and motivation, and discussions of their broad implications.
Design: papers describing insights on the design of effective (extant and future) social machines, including:
Human-computer interfaces
Architectures and design patterns
Socio-cognitive computational primitives
Computational and social infrastructure
Methodology: papers describing approaches and methods studying social machines, including:
Languages and models
Taxonomies that define the constructs (dimensions/characteristics) that describe and differentiate current social machines when viewed as a collective
Web observatory installations
Complex ecosystems of systems and platforms bringing together social and algorithmic components
Evaluation and quality assessment techniques.
Although we do not wish to restrict discussion to these particular topics, we hope that these can serve as a basis that can be extended with additional topics of interest as assessed by submissions received.
Workshop format
The workshop will span a full day, commencing with a keynote introduction and closing with focused discussion session. During the workshop, we will have brief presentation of short papers submitted to the workshop, and an invited panel comprising speakers who selected by conference organizers who have done relevant studies and work on social machines.
Paper presentations will be given a 15-minute slot of which no more than, 10 minutes will be used for presentation; the rest of the time will be available for questions and discussion. Papers will be up to 5 pages long in ACM format. We are expecting to accept up to 12 papers.