Wondering how to teach students about teamwork? Try "Software for a Cause!"

It all started after a call between IBM Rational Marketing and IBM Researchers Li-Te Cheng and John Patterson of the Center for Social Software. The topic of the call? How to get people to notice and try out IBM® Rational® Jazz®.

What is Rational Jazz? A new software development technology platform co-conceived by Rational and Research. The platform is designed for distributed teams, which is the way most of the world works. The idea behind Jazz is to transform how people work together on a project by integrating and synchronizing the people, processes, and assets associated with that project.

Back to the call...Li-Te and John's call got them thinking about how to engage students using Jazz itself. So afterwards they continued discussing what might encourage people to write code in teams. They believed Jazz might be a great tool to teach Computer Science students the fundamentals of distributed software teamwork.

Getting students from different universities to co-develop something in a class, using Jazz in a distributed manner, would be an ideal setting. They believed they could harness the prevalent open-source hacker ethos and get a group of students to do it for a cause. And, because social software has enabled people to become more active and connected than in the past, it's easier to get involved in social good. Li-Te decided that this type of project was perfect for a summer internship at the Center in Cambridge, MA. The next steps were finding a "cause" to work with, students to work on it, and - most critically - the right summer intern to design the project.

Li-Te convinced colleagues at McGill University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to run their second year computer science courses together. He made arrangements using IBM's Open Collaborative Research Program, which enables IBM Researchers to work together with university faculty on joint projects. His colleagues were enthusiastic, but had two concerns: they did not want to host and manage a Jazz server, and they wanted to work with a Canadian cause.

Rational helped put Li-Te in contact with Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Marist was setting up server hosting of various IBM products for academic users as part of its Enterprise Computing Community initiative. They offered to host a Jazz server, and Software for a Cause became one of their first customers.

IBM Corporate Citizenship helped Li-Te make contact with the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and he approached them about doing the project. This foundation serves a community of about 3000 people who, because of their compromised physical condition, need to avoid face-to-face contact. Tools such as Facebook and Skype have made a huge difference in their lives. The Foundation agreed to work with IBM, as the "customer" for Software for a Cause.

So, with help from various IBM resources, Li-Te had participants and a proposal. Now he needed to find a summer intern to create the tools for the course. He had to get just the right person to design the tools, develop and assist with teaching the course, and work with us as it all unfolded. In our next post on this topic, we'll meet that person. Tristan Ratchford, a graduate student at McGill, is spending his summer designing this project for the Computer Science class he'll be teaching this Fall semester.

Stay tuned.

The People and Impetus behind Many Bills

MAPLight.org is a public watchdog group that uses the data from Congressional voting records on bills, supporting and opposing interests for each bill, and campaign contribution data to revealing connections that could never before be easily seen.

In September 2009, the Visual Communication Lab (the VCL) of the IBM Center for Social Software hosted an event called "the Transparent Text Symposium," spurred by the US government initiative for transparency. MapLight had heard about the symposium and sent the VCL the text of bill HR627, the "Credit CARD Act of 2009." This bill (now Public Law No: 111-24) is an amendment to the Truth in Lending Act, and was created to make sweeping changes in the credit card industry and protect consumers against egregious pricing.

The bill is 33 pages. The content of almost all of it relates to the title of the bill, and what you'd expect. On page 31, however, section 512, titled PROTECTING AMERICANS FROM VIOLENT CRIME, concerns the right to bear firearms in National Parks. Two questions immediately arise: 1. Why would anyone want to allow automatic rifles in National Parks, and 2. What was that doing in a bill about consumer credit card protection? Then the VCL asked themselves a third question: "As a visual communication lab, how could we help people find things like this?"

Lab members Irene Ros and Yannick Assogba decided to take on the challenge to create a tool to help reveal various topics in a bill - not just the bizarre outliers like this one - but all topics. This came to be the germination of a research project - how could a text corpora best be navigated visually? What impact would a visualization have on people's ability to find what they were looking for. And, who would be likely to use this type of tool?

According to Assogba, "We decided to present the bills in a map mode with the text as a zoomable entity. Knowing that these bills are filled with "legalese" our first step was to help people navigate through the data to find the general area they wanted to examine." On April 5, 2010, after many designs, prototypes, and user input, the team launched a public Beta of what is now called Many Bills. Says Ros, "Our hope is that the interface offers users an overview of this complex dataset while still allowing for full access to the original text." Now that the tool has been available for almost three months, they are beginning to understand what things people want to explore and how better to show that. The next big push is to contact Many Bills visitors who have offered to provide feedback and see how they respond to some proposed feature additions and design changes the researchers would like to make.

Have you visited Many Bills? Try browsing. Or, take a look at various versions of HR627 on its journey through Congress. If you have comments, click the Feedback button on the site to give Assogba and Ros your ideas.

Jer Thorp examines how a new era of open data is affecting science, art, and design

On June 21, 2010, the Cambridge lab of the IBM Center for Social Software will kick off a new speaker series open to the public. Our aim with this series is to attract a steady local audience and build a community of interest by hosting speakers who are well-known and respected in their area of social software.

We are very pleased to have Jer Thorp, data artist and educator, as our first speaker. Jer is a former geneticist. He uses that background in his practice to explore "the many-folded boundaries between science and art." His art has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and the CBC. His award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia and all over the web.

Jer is an instructor in Langara College’s Electronic Media Design Program, a frequent guest lecturer at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University, and a sought-after speaker at various venues around the world.

Jer's Talk: Hacking the Newsroom

In February of last year, the New York Times announced that it was giving away the keys to 28 years of data - news stories, movie reviews, obituaries, and political statistics - all for free. Whether the dying gasp of an legendary institution, or the beginnings of an extraordinary rebirth, the release of this vast and historically significant information has been a boon to data visualizers, entrepreneurs, social scientists and artists around the world.

In this session, Jer will show a variety of work that he has produced using data from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other traditional and non-traditional media sources. He'll show how to access this information easily, and will share code samples to get you started in explorations of your own. Along the way, he'll attempt to examine how a new era of open data is affecting science, art, and design.

This event will take place Monday, June 21st 2010. 3:30pm-5:00pm at 1 Rogers St, Cambridge MA. Admission is FREE.

More info and registration at Eventbrite

Late-breaking Summer Internship Openings @ IBM Center for Social Software, Cambridge, MA

"Smarter Social Cities" Summer Internship Openings

This summer project will be a team effort in the area of "Smarter Social Cities" research. The proposed project will explore the role of social collaboration in supporting the discovery of the cities people inhabit or visit. The team will design and develop mobile and web tools to support co-discovery and include mechanisms to map attractions to personal interests. The goal of the project will be to implement a basic working prototype of a novel idea, which the interns will play a significant role in shaping.

We are looking for the intern candidates with skills in one or more of the following areas:

• Experience with design, prototyping, and web development tools and technologies. A plus: experience with Apple interface builder and HAML.
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails, Apache, and Linux
• Understanding of database setup in Rails. Understanding of web services and remote DB access
• Experience with mobile development. A plus: experience developing iPod apps with networking component

To be eligible, students must be enrolled in a full-time academic program. Advanced undergraduates or Masters students preferred.

If interested, please send a note and your resume/CV to shupfer@us.ibm.com.

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"Mass Participation Social Software" Summer Internship Opening

We are looking for a graduate (or advanced undergraduate) intern with UI and web development skills to develop an innovative prototype as part of a larger project aimed at supporting participation in large scale events. The project can include novel ways of visualizing and interacting with back-channels, such as those that result from posts on Twitter around an event, as well as inventing new mechanisms for brainstorming, polling, breakout discussions, and decisions through web and mobile interfaces. The goal of the intern project will be to implement a basic working prototype of a novel idea, an idea which the intern will play a significant role in shaping.

To be eligible, students must be enrolled in a full-time academic program. If interested, please send a note and your resume/CV to daniel_gruen@us.ibm.com.

Launching Many Bills: A Visual Bill Explorer

Government transparency is an important issue to many in today's political environment. The recent controversy in the US over health care reform is just one example of how hard it can be to see the realities behind the rhetoric. As researchers, we believe we can help by giving people the right tools to understand, explore, and communicate about government data.

Inspired by the fantastic people we met and conversations we had at the Center's Transparent Text conference last year, we decided to act. Today, the Visual Communication Lab at the Center launches IBM Many Bills: A Visual Bill Explorer. Many Bills is a web-based visualization that enables members of the public to see the high-level topic structure of US Congressional Bills, then drill down and read the actual content. The dataset currently includes all bills considered by both houses in 2009, plus some select content from 2010, courtesy of GovTrack.

You can find more news and updates on the Many Bills blog or follow the project on Twitter.

Social Software from Haifa Research Lab Shines at Lotusphere

Social analytics software from IBM's Haifa Research Lab (HRL) was front and center at the opening session of Lotusphere this year. A demo of the next version of Lotus Connections showed off recommender widgets from HRL. Even more ambitious recommender systems and social analytics based on work from Haifa were envisioned for Vulcan -- the bleuprint for the future of collaboration that Lotus unveiled later in the session.

What people saw was based on SaND, a platform developed by HRL for mining and aggregating social data across multiple data sources in an enterprise. The result is a rich model of relationships among people, content and tags, which search engines, recommender systems, expertise locators, social network analysis systems and visualizations can tap into. For example, the content recommender widget in Lb Connections Next suggests items such as wikis, blog entries, bookmarks, and communities based on the relationships it detects. Detailed explanations for each recommendation explains why it is being suggested. SaND is already used by many IBM projects world-wide.

In the Innovation Lab attendees also got a peek at DUNE (Desktop Unified with Enterprise). DUNE — a first step towards aggregation across the entire Lotus Portfolio — collects social data across Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime in addition to Connections. SaND also has the capability to extend beyond IBM to external products.

Research Talk at Lotusphere Focuses on Enterprise Health and Many Bills

In their Research talk at Lotusphere, IBM Center for Social Software Director Irene Greif and Researcher David Millen highlighted new work from the Center. In the area of enterprise social software, they reported on the latest adoption and assessment studies, including new dashboards for community health, Vivacity and BlogMuse (both seen in the Innovation Lab).

Vivacity shows a variety of ways people are contributing in Connections, and highlights the concept of "Return on Content" as a way to measure impact and understand the relative value of different kinds of contributions, such as status updates, profile changes, blog or wiki entries. BlogMuse encourages people to contribute in meaningful ways to enterprise blogs.

Federal legislation is a hot topic these days, and the Center's latest work on visualization, dubbed Many Bills, tackles the challenges of government transparency and citizen participation by helping people navigate and understand large, complex documents, then communicate with others about them. While Many Bills focuses on government, the work has strong implications for business communities, as well.

Many Bills, tackling the challenges of government transparency and citizen participation.