1. Scuola di Dottorato in Informatica
Curriculum Process and Interactive System Design
Web Science:
the empirical side of Informatics
Fiorella.deCindio@unimi.it
Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione
Mike: Community Informatics
Fiorella: Community Informatics
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 1
Gary’s question/suggestion for my talk
Digital Media change the world
Digital Media are developed by (or with the support of) computer
professionals
Computer professionals are educated in computer science
departments (as mine), where:
 weak awareness of the impact of ICT over society
 missed opportunities and wasted intelligence
1994:
the Civic Informatics Laboratory the Milan Community Network
the academic side the activist side
theory practice
a fundamental, continuous interplay
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 2

2. Gary’s question/suggestion for my talk
what computer scientists can do
to help the people
we are discussing in other ISDT talks ?
 to develop digital systems
for supporting people needs
→ how to involve these people in the
development of such tools & systems
(participatory design) ?
→ the nature of computer science
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 3
Why new tools ?
There are so many tools around !
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 4

3. Software systems for enabling&supporting…
 civic engagement
 e-participation
 online deliberation
 citizens&community empowerment and reconstruction
 citizens’ consultations
 ………
Social Interactive Systems
or
Digital Habitat
(socio-technical) systems not only (software) tools !
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 5
A frequent mistake
both public institutions and grassroots movements,
when realize the need of setting up
a Social InteractiveSystems:
place side by side a collage of some popular web-based
applications/modules:
 some discussion boards
 a blog area
 polls
 some social network features
conceived and designed for different purposes and for a
different audience
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 6

4. Be careful !
When designing Social Interactive Systems
technology is not the first and main issue, but anyhow relevant:
“Good technology in itself will not a community make,
but bad technology can sure make community life
difficult enough to ruin it.”
Etienne Wenger, N. White, J.D. Smith, K. Rowe, 2005
Technology for communities
http://technologyforcommunities.com/
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 7
A good example: Facebook
US college students → ordinary people
organized through
page(s)
The Viola movement
has difficulties to
survive and evolve:
 a chat does not
support the rise of
a democratic
organization
 the rules are
eso-defined
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 8

5. An example of the features “we” need
effective public dialog has to be:
 rational: I don’t attach you, but I explain why I do not agree
with you, possibly with the support of factual data
(documents, video, photos, ….)
 interactive: when I say something, I take into account what
has already been said
 responsible: people should ‘put their face’, while allowing
different levels of engagement (styles of citizenship)
 fair: according to some rules (a “Galateo”)
The technology should support/embed this as much as possible
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 9
An example of a tool with facilities
for productive public dialogue
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 10

6. How to develop these tools ?
1983 IFIP Conf. on System Design for, with, and by the Users
for: the socio-technical approach: collect users’ needs
with: Participatory Design (PD): involve users
“it is imperative that users be considered as experts”
by: a vision and a research project
Difficulties:
 PD is demanding in terms of resources (time and money)
 even more difficult now:
from custom systems to web applications
 users are often conservative
(Von Hippel identifies “lead users” and “innovation
communities”)
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 11
Several approaches
An incomplete list:
The HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) community
 End-User Development (EUD): users as designers
 system designers as meta-designers (meta-design)
 the SER model
Seeding
Evolutionay Growth
Reseeding
The Software Engineering and programming community
 Manifesto for Agile Software Development
The market need
 “Always in beta” practice
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 12

7. Moving Beyond User Participation to
Achieve Successful IS Design
Erica Wagner & Gabriele Piccoli
CACM, Dec. 2007, vol.50, no.12
 users are busy
→ people is engaged in activities relevant to their life
 sw development projects become salient to users when the
output affect their daily lives and requires them to change
their (work) practice
 what seems crucial is the point in time when users are
involved [...] earlier is not necessarily better
consequence:
 people feel concerned when the system is running in their
real life setting
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 13
the Milan Community network
10 years of people’ use
early idea of a new software
the model (& testing of existing tools)
first implementation ComunaliMilano2006.it
>400 candidates
22 members of the City
a first ‘experiment’ in a real life setting Council
(Milan Municipal elections) >2000 registered citizens
Jan.2007: partecipaMi.it
new implementation >400,000 access/month
e21 project
a second large ‘experiment’ in brescia.progettoe21.it
10 Municipalities in the Lombardy region vigevano.progettoe21.it
……………
openDCN first release
(2008)
tuning & extensions sicurezzastradale.partecipami.it
e-soccer.org
further ‘experiments’ in different settings ………….
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 14

8. Communications of the ACM, July 2008, vol. 51, no. 7
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 15
Web Science
J.Handler, N.Shadbolt, W.Hall, T.Berners-Lee, D.Weitzner
our everyday use of the Web depends on fundamental
developments in Computer Science (CS) that took place
long before the Web was invented
 protocols
 search algorithms (ex. Brin&Page PageRank algorithm)
based on graphs
But CS does not suffices to explain relevant web “phenomena”
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 16

9. two examples
If we study the Web as a graph, or as a set of protocols:
 we cannot explain the success of Wikipedia, developed with
MediaWiki, vs the failure of several sites/iniziatiaves based on
the same tool
 “the protocols used by social networking sites like MySpace
and Facebook have much in common, but the success or
failure of the sites hunges on the rules, policies, and user
communities they support.”
“Understanding the web requires more than ….” Computer
Science
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 17
Web as Social Machine
Today’s interactive [web] applications are very early social
machines. [...]
An important aspect of research exploring the influence of the
Web on society involves online societies using Web infrastructure
to support dynamic human interaction. This work — seen in
trout.cpsr.org [*] and other such efforts — explores how the Web
can encourage more human engagement in the political sphere.
Combining it with the emerging study of the Web and the
coevolution of technology and social needs is an important focus
of designing the future Web.
[now hosted at www.publicsphereproject.org] a project led by Doug
Schuler
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 18

10. Web Science
Physical Science: an analytic discipline to find laws that explain
observed phenomena
Computer Science is predominantly synthetic: formalism and
algorithms are created to support desired behaviours
Web Science deliberately seeks to merge these two paradigms.
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 19
Sept. 1986:
IPIF 10th IFIP World Computer Congress
Kristen Nygaard
the inventor, with O.-J. Dahl of Simula 67,
the first object-oriented programming language
Opening lecture:
Program Development as a Social activity
“The term computer science should be replaced by informatics “
→
→
“a formal discipline “an [empirical] science”
akin to which studies
mathematics” “selected aspects of specified
classes of phenomena”
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 20

11. Aspects of Sciences
1. Phenomenology: the empirical study of phenomena
(any fact, circumstance, or experience that is apparent to the
sense): their identification, observed behaviours, and
properties
ex.: Tycho Brahe in astronomy, Linneo in botany
2. Analysis: comprehension and explanation of phenomena
in terms of an underlying theory
properties, concepts, relations,..... anticipation of behaviour
ex.: Newton in astronomy, Darwin in botany
3. Synthesis, construction, technology: knowledge organized for
the purpose of interferring with, constructing and generating
phenomena
ex.: the experiments at CERN (Genève) in physics
4. Multiperspective reflection: the examination of concepts and
phenomena from the perspective of more than one science
(or more than one perspective within the same science)
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 21
Natural Sciences vs Informatics
1. Phenomenology: the empirical study of phenomena
(any fact, circumstance, or experience that is apparent to the
sense): their identification, observed behaviours, and
properties
ex.: Tycho Brahe in astronomy, Linneo in botany
2. Analysis: comprehension and explanation of phenomena
in terms of an underlying theory
properties, concepts, relations,..... anticipation of behaviour
ex.: Newton in astronomy, Darwin in botany
3. Synthesis, construction, technology: knowledge organized for
the purpose of interferring with, constructing and generating
phenomena
ex.: the experiments at CERN (Ginevra) in physics
4. Multiperspective reflection: the examination of concepts and
phenomena from the perspective of more than one science
(or more than one perspective within the same science)
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 22

12. Informatics
 Develops from the invention of a technology:
the programmable computer (3)
 The analytic roots of the discipline (computer science) based
in the second half of the ‘50 and established in the ‘60 (2)
 First efforts for a multidisciplinary perspective in the ‘70 (4)
 Nygaard and the Scandinavian Trade Unions projects
 Xerox PARC: the Dynabook project (anthropologists,
ethnographers, cognitive psychologists,...) leads to GUI
(Graphical User Interfaces) and Smalltalk
Which is the phenomenology (1)?
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 23
The phenomenology
The anomalous path (3 → 2 → 4 → 1) led to a wrong
identification of the class of phenomena:
not the computer in itself, but the impact of computer on society
are integral part of the discipline
Nygaard: “ informatics needs in a number of areas a proper and
wider empirical platform (1) “
Now: the Web is the empirical platform
→ Web Science
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 24

13. Real-life social interactive systems as
“experiments”
e-participation/ theoretical
online deliberation framework
theory (the model)
Design of a specific specific system
e-participation system requirements
“traditional” PD (experiment design)
Development of a specific specific system
e-participation system development
agile programming (experiment preparation)
experiment data
gathering
specific system running specific system
in a real life setting release and use
(running experiment)
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 25
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 26

14. Research challenges
for designing the future Web
“technology [is] needed to allow user communities to construct,
share, and adapt social machines so successful models evolve
through trial, use, and refinement”
Scientific trials based on a theory, to validate it
not practical attempts
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 27
Conclusion (back to the initial question)
what computer scientists can do to help the people
we are discussing in other ISDT talks ?
 to develop software tools for supporting people needs
Requires to
→ recognize the empirical nature of “their” science
→ recognize the impact of computers on society as an integral
part of the discipline
→ develop theories to support the develpoments
A revolution !
necessary for Liberating intelligences
Fiorella De Cindio, ISDT 2010 28