comment on “How to use social media for science — 3 views” (Tips from science and journalism pros at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting). by Alison Bert, Elsevier Connect, 25 February 2014). 

Great panel and excellent writeup. I followed parts of #AAASmtg via Twitter remotely, but wish I’d been there in person.

The panel seems to have focused on ways & reasons scientists might post on social media, which perhaps was implied by the panel title “Engaging with Social Media.” However, I’d like to pose the question, is it possible that the most important potential use of social media, at least for most scientists is not for posting, but for reading, discovery, and more indirect use?

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James Watts’ “centrifugal governor” 1788

Below are the tweets from an exchange on Twitter with Tim O’Reilly about “algorithmic regulation.” The term was apparently coined by O’Reilly in a Google+ post 19 Sept 2011:

18 months after President Obama authorized a program providing $7.6 billion to states to help homeowners escape foreclosure, fund have been awarded to only about 7500 homeowners. In the same time period, banks have foreclosed on 1.5 million homes.

Stories like this one fuel disgust with government. What they really highlight is that we’re trying to manage 21st century problems with 19th century methods.

Rather than building a government bureaucracy to award funds, the program should have set goals for number of homeowners whose mortgages would be relieved (or even better, the conditions that would justify loan modification) and left it to the banks to meet those expectations.

The regulatory overhead should have been in testing outcomes, not managing process.

Let me be clear by analogy. Imagine that Google’s search quality team wrote a set of rules for sites to be approved for inclusion in Google, and had a bureaucracy to allow sites into search results. Instead, Google tests the quality of search results, and uses algorithmic regulation to remove results that are deemed bogus.

The analogy in this case isn’t exact, but the idea of algorithmic regulation is central to all internet platforms, and provides a fruitful area for investigation in the design of 21st century government.

 

Subsequently O’Reilly wrote book chapter, “Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation” in the 2013 compilation volume Beyond Transparency from Code for America (free to download). I recently came across and read this chapter, and my comment on it led to this exchange:

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(video clip: 50 seconds).

A classic line from This is Spin̈al Tap, the 1984 rockumentary / mockumentary about the world’s loudest band, British heavy metal group Spin̈al Tap.

This Is Spinal Tap was directed by Rob Reiner and largely improvised by the main players Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, (as documentary director Marty Di Bergi, and band members Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls).

Transcript:

David St. Hubbins: It’s such a fine line between stupid and..
Nigel Tufnel: clever. It’s just that little turn-about..
Derek Smalls (?): a reversal of roles.

And here I’ve made it into a handy poster image, using a shot of the famous amplifer from This Is Spinal Tap which is louder than others, Nigel explains, because it can be turned up all the way to 11.

More quotes: Wikiquotes: “This is Spinal Tap.”

Derek Smalls:

We’re very lucky in the band in that we have two visionaries, David and Nigel, they’re like poets, like Shelley and Byron. They’re two distinct types of visionaries, it’s like fire and ice, basically. I feel my role in the band is to be somewhere in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

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Comment below, or by Twitter .
#stupidclever
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comment on “Why Twitter needs a design reset” by Frédéric Filloux in Monday Note.

excellent article. I’ve been a heavy user of Twitter and intrigued by its value and potential, but likewise dismayed by the company’s blundering on user-experience issues.

So I’ve developed several proposals and projects in response to the problem:

1) “open innovation” model:
a public product-development and feature-suggestion forum and product accelerator, allowing user submission and voting on ideas. Top ideas/features might get a trial, funding or equity from Twitter.

This proposal responds in particular to the situation of Twitter’s product-dev division, whose head Michael Sippey recently left without a replacement named, and which appears to be in some disarray. (see “Can Twitter Fix Its Product Problem?” by Mike Isaac in AllThingsD, 8 November). I would guess that there is significant anxiety inside Twitter management right now about the product division and issues such as a) rate of account abandonment; b) continuing difficulty in conveying value proposition and service features to new users; c) not achieving near the user base or daily usage minutes of Facebook or newer entrants such as Snapchat or Whatsapp.

Since Twitter’s internal product-dev seems adrift, I think a really interesting and bold way to kickstart new directions would be to engage the user/developer community openly with a forum/accelerator such as described.

2) Prototyping of new interfaces:
you make some great suggestions above, and I discuss related ideas in a recent post “Another Twitter is Possible.” As noted there, many lead users have been talking for some time about Twitter’s lack of good means to filter and configure user experience. I see interesting opportunities to prototype quite new approaches, even bearing in mind the many 3rd-party clients already built, and the unfortunate history of Twitter choking off this client development by restricting API use.

In my project area FlowSort, I’m prototyping an open system to allow plugin/tradeable sorting, filtering, and display features. The idea is to support, at least at a low volume, low-barrier-to-entry and rapid exploration of new user-experience approaches, perhaps as proofs of concept to influence Twitter or (see below) other interest-graph platforms.

3) Explore new, open replacement platforms for Twitter.
For a while I’ve followed various alternate systems such as Status.net and App.net which have had either different architectures or different business/user models, and so far have had little success. Recently, though, I came across some intriguing work by Zhiwu Xie of Virginia Tech, et al, demonstrating the surprising feasibility of building a low-cost platform, functionally similar to Twitter, by relaxing some requirement on up-to-the-second realtime freshness. (See Xie et al [2012] “Poor Man’s Social Network” #webapp12).

In conversation with Xie and others, I am exploring the idea of building a demonstration/prototype platform oriented to scientific and scholarly communication, “SocialScholar.” See @SocSchol. Here the motivations include building a platform more suited to this sector’s needs, such as archiving, open API, filterability, and variety of use modes other than realtime / time-windowed interaction.

So I fully agree, Twitter needs a design reset. Also, perhaps we can be a part of that resetting! Another Twitter is possible..

Tim McCormick, Palo Alto
@tmccormick tjm.org
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What do you think? Comments are welcome below, or by Twitter or email: tmccormick at gmail.com.
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