jaresty's tumblog

Ohloh and Ontology Social Networking

I love this concept.  Ohloh is a social networking site that is focused on the users and developers of open source software.  It is a great way to raise awareness about the various open source software packages that are out there, and put users in touch with others who have been there - used or developed the software to meet their own needs.

The other day, I was thinking about a problem that I’ve got with ontologies on the semantic web today.  Please please correct me if I’m going about this the wrong way, but it always seems that I have to look hard to find the ontologies that I want to use for a given project. 

One good thing about the semantic web community is that they try to preserve URIs forever.  There is a downside to that practice - it results in a cornucopia of dead information.  I have a very hard time, when I see an ontology for the first time, knowing whether it’s still in use.   

Enter Ontology Social Networking: modeled after Ohloh, ontology developers and users can stand up and share both what ontologies they have used, and how they have used them.  This will help to connect fragmented and confused users, and to encourage people to learn from existing solutions.  It will encourage people to collaborate on developing new ontologies and to reuse existing ones where appropriate.  With sufficient data, recommender systems could begin to directly connect users with useful and relevant ontologies much more efficiently than can be done currently through search, pick, and choose.

Who wants to get started building something like this?   

User Research Social Networking Service

Imagine a site where companies could identify products they are bringing to market, and potential users would voluntarily, directly guide their product development.

 Too often, user-centered design is still an afterthought in product design.  It’s costly to do correctly, and the benefits (although very obvious after the fact) are hard to identify, quantify, and communicate.  It’s practically impossible to do as a one-man programming team, and it’s still not easy when you’ve got just a few team members.  Enter UR SNS - the user-research focused social networking service.

Companies will post products that they are developing, along with some pre-defined customer markets that they believe to exist.  They will post a series of qualitative questions about the niche they are trying to fill.

Users sign up, and pick a product they are interested in using.  They self-identify from the list of customer roles that the company predefined, and then proceed to answer the qualitative research questions that the company put together.  They can either do a voice recording (which will be transcribed automatically), or type up their notes. At the end of the day, users who fill out these surveys can earn software discounts and reputation points which they can use to boost their profile’s visibility on the site.

The software may help the company to conduct qualitative analysis by allowing the company to later hilight quotes and identify key user mental models and behaviors.

This site, while promoting open collaboration and a fun atmosphere, will help to bring down the cost of conducting good user-research. It will encourage users to take an active role in developing their software.  It might even be viable for open source projects to use this model to conduct user research - imagine what could happen then?

Distributed Social Networking - Update

Global Warming, and Standards Organizations

Up until recently, in my mind, I had a picture of how International Goverments would work toward international standards to reduce global warming. Today, it occurred to me that there may be a problem with that approach. There are two fundamental issues at stake here:

1. What targets, goals, etc. are necessary to prevent global warming (and various other environmental concerns).
2. What compromises are governments willing to make to achieve those goals.

I’m under the impression that most of the information regarding the targets/goals/etc is currently coming from individual actors or small groups of people. The conventions that have been held are trying to resolve both of those issues simultaneously, which is incredibly difficult - it results in a sort of tragedy of the commons, where it is in each government’s best interest to minimize the sanctions, but in everyone’s interest to maximize them. However, there is still disagreement about what outcomes are necessary to prevent these issues.

It seems to me, therefore, that we could benefit greatly (as a world) by founding open, international, environmental standards organizations - whose purpose is not to create laws or sanctions that *must* be followed by governments. Rather, their purpose would be to identify the necessary outcomes, and come to an internationally recognized agreement on just what it will take to achieve those outcomes. I hope to get some feedback on this post - please submit your thoughts.

 p.s. check out Leonardo Academy. 

Nonpartisan Social Network - Continued (Idea)

To avoid appearing too complicated, you would want to market each plugin separately.  That is to say, don’t say “An RDF-triple store” that allows FOAF and other plugins.  Instead, say a FOAF server, and then, a SIOC server (etc).  The reality is that each would be a prepackaged RDF server with a plugin, and on the developer site you could find out more about that (and build a custom multi-plugin server).

The reason  for this is - there are far too many solutions that claim to be silver bullets and end up confusing and complicating things.  For that reason, users (and developers) may steer clear of things claiming to do too much.  I do believe that there is something to be gained through abstraction here, but don’t want to scare people away.  For that reason, marketing this as separate servers may work very well.