Reiser 2.0

Community Equity Specification

Hurray! We finally filed the patent on Community Equity and I can disclose more details....



Overview

The objective  is  to build a dynamic Social Value system by calculating  the Contribution, Participation, Skills, and Reputation equity  a person can gain by actively engaging  in  online communities.

The Equity values are captured through activities that the Community members are participating in, for example:

• Adding or updating contributions (wikis,forums, attachments)

• Rating, commenting

• Tagging

• Downloading and reusing content

• Social connections

• Search queries

Equity  Model



The systems will  calculate the following equity values:

• Information Equity (IQ)


• Personal  Equity (PEQ)

Information Equity (IQ)



The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculates a numeric value that represents the importance, relevance, and quality of the information. Information can be a wiki page, blog post, forum entry, or document.

The activities  that the IQ captures includes:

* How many times users (repeat) have viewed the information

* How many times this information has been downloaded by users (in the case of an attachment)

* How many times this information was reused by an individual

* User feedback (ratings, comments)

How do we know that a document has been reused?

We developed a web service called  "Content extraction and metadata store,"  which writes a tag in an OpenOffice document. This tag describes the source community  of the document  (for example, Project xx). If a user is downloading this document and stores it in another community,  we write a parent tag into the OpenOffice  document, which describes the destination community. By analyzing the tags we know that a document has been reused. In addition, we can build a dynamic cloning reference of related documents.



Personal  Equity  (PEQ)

The purpose of developing a Community Equity (PEQ) value for each individual is to help recognize their achievements and their participation in the community.

Here is the calculation:

PEQ = CQ + PQ + SQ + RQ + OE

Contribution Equity (CQ)

The Contribution Equity measures the contribution of a person related to his or her role or roles in a company.

The CQ tracks the total contribution of wiki entries, blog posts, attachments such as documents, podcasts, videos, software, and how this information is useful to the community (IQ).

Per contribution we calculate an equity value based on downloads, ratings and reuse by the community.

Participation Equity  (PQ)

The Participation Equity calculates a value for  the active participation of a person. We use the  feedback activities a person has provided to other community contributions like

* Ratings provided

* Comments provided

* Tag or Tags provided

* Reuse of content

Skills Equity (SQ)

The Skills Equity shows  the skills of a  person based on his or her contribution

Details will be disclosed later.

Reputation Equity (RQ)

The Reputation  Equity (RQ) is a combination of contribution, participation and role equity.

Details will be disclosed later ...

Personal Sociometry Equity (OE)

Humans suffer from information overload. There's much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend ,on each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how, or know-why information has become most crucial. "Know-who" involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person (Johnson et al., 2000).

In this context, understanding the formation, evolution, and utilization of online social networks becomes important. A social network is "a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange." (Garton, et al., 1997). While the Internet contributes to the information overload, it also provides useful tools to effectively manage one's social networks and through them gain access to the right pieces of information.

(source:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks)

We are looking to add  the following Social Equity indicators:

* Centrality (number of friends) - Freeman 1977: http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/27.pdf

* TBD

Tag Equity

Tag Clouds are calculated by frequency of use. This does not necessarily reflect the value of a tag (or the topic a tag represents). By calculating the Equity of a Tag based on social activities of the community (add or edit, comment, view, etc.) we can dynamically calculate a Tag equity of all contributions related to this tag.

Details will be disclosed later.

Equity Aging

Equity values age over time.

Example Information  Aging: A technical white paper about Internet Security from 1999 was really valuable at that time but might be obsolete today ...

Example Reputation Aging:  15  years ago I was an expert in IBM mainframe integration. I had a great  reputation reputation of fixing any problems related to SNA.

Over the last 15 years I refocused my expertise and skills and my reputation (and skills) about IBM mainframe integration has  gone.

To calculate time-based equity, we assume that any action, such as view, download, rating, and updates,  has a "time-to-live"  value . This value goes to zero linearly.

Mathematical model (credit goes to Dmitry [Dima] Riachtchentsev, our math genius on the team)



Excerpt from Dima's specs:

To reduce the calculations, we use a linear model:

1. Just after the action that affects an Equity, the Equity value is changed to a multiplier value.

2. Then this value goes to zero linearly. It becomes zero after a valid time period.

With such a model, we have a linear trend every time.

The linear trend enables us to not track the whole history to calculate equity values. We can just change two linear trend parameters after every action and after the aging time period.

Equity Visualization

We developed a set of widgets to visualize the Community Equity model.



My Community Equity

This widget shows in real time the Contribution and Participation Equity of a Person.

People Ranking

This widget displays the top 10 people. In addition, it shows the ranking of the person either as bold (Name) or the ranking position if a person is not in the top 10.

Country Ranking

This widget displays the top 10 countries with the highest Community Equity average per person in  a country.

Switzerland is leading.... I like it!

Content Ranking

This widget displays the top ten Content with the highest Informaton Equity . In addition it shows the ranking of the contribution of a person in bold.

*What's Next?*

Stay tuned for  some future blog posts  on our pilot experience and results....

Technorati Tags: CE 2.0, Social Capital, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Posted at 11:58AM Feb 29, 2008 by Peter Reiser in Community Equity  |  Comments[12]

Community Equity in Action

This week we hold the Sun Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas with over 4'000 participants and over 200 break-out sessions

At the conference we launched our first Community Equity Pilot based on CE2.0 - our Enterprise Social Network Community Framework for Customer Engineering .

Community Equity in action !

In a previous blog post called Community Equity - a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise I explained the theory...
Now lets see how we implementing Community Equity in practice.
The CEC 2007 conference with over 4'000 participant and over 200 break-out session was the perfect pilot case.
We implemented the Conference as a social networking experience and asked the conference attendees to actively participate.

What we asked the conference attendees

1. visit the communities pages of the session they have attended

• rate and comment the session
• participate in the session forums

2. adding content to their myshare
3. check out the myProfile pages of the other attendees

• review their content
• rate and comment
• and last but not least adding friends to their friends list

How a user can check her/his Community Equity
While attendees actively participated in the CEC 2007 community, they could see how their Personal Equity evolves by just checking the My Community Equity widget
on their My Profile Page

The widget dynamically shows the current Contribution - and Participation Equity related to the average of the community and the current rank in the Community.
And yes this widget is only visible to the user - (Hey - we respect Data Privacy laws :- ) )

How to drive participation ?
For the conference we announced a contest for the most active participant.
After day one - the participation was pretty low. We somehow expected this and thought about an additional incentive..
So we asked Dan Berg (VP GSE EMEA, CTO Services), the host of the CEC conference to announce the name of the last day winner at the General Session in the morning ...
and show the name on the big screens to the 4'000 attendees ...
Well - it worked very well - the next day the participation more then doubled ...

and even better some people got so excited about it that they tried to hack our rating service !.
Wow - have you ever seen a hack on a website site which does not provide any value ????

What's next !

The conference is over and people are flying back..
To keep the good participation trend up we decided to extend the participation contest until end of October.
That means attendees can go back to the CEClive site check out the content, provide feedback, add related content etc.
Lets see who will win the contest .... I will announce the winner on this blog

How did we implement it ?

Social Network and Community Service
First we developed & deployed the community and social network service as part of our CE 2.0 architecture.
This enabled us to pilot community  building and social relationships funcitionality on top of an enterprise wiki.

Community Equity Web Service
We implemented Community Equity as  a web service as part of our CE 2.0 architecture 

Dynamic Community generation
AT CEC we had over 200 breakout sessions. We developed an XML based data feed between the external conference registration application and our CE2.0 framework and dynamically created over 200 communities around the breakout sessions.

A session community page consists of set of widgets
Speaker widget - list the speakers of a session
Session Description - a short description about the breakout session
Attendees - a list of all people attending a given session
Session content - a dynamic aggregation of session content based on session tags
Related content - shows related content for the session based on related session tags
Forum - a Forum were attendees can discuss the session

Dynamic My Profile creation
Then we dynamically generated around 4'000 user profiles of the conference attendees by implementing a mashup between the registration data from the conference
and our internal LDAP name service.
These My Profile pages are our initial implementation of our "Facebook for the Enterprise" service and are not specific to the conference. Only the MyCEC session is a specific widget for CEC.

A MyProfile page has following widgets:

Who am I - Picture of a person, name, phone number, office location link to the corporate calendar etc.
My Friends - a list of friends
Common Friends - a list of common friends when someone else looks at the Profile
Where am I - a Widget to show the current location of a person using the http://plazes.com service
My Community Equity - shows the current Personal Community Equity
My CEC Sessions: show all sessions a person has registered during the conference
MyShare - a summary of all Community contributions (attachments, links) of the person

Conference Content aggregation
Then we built a content aggregation page based on internal sessions- and external related content (blogs, video, photos) of the Conference - and voila
- we had a Social Network enabled conference pilot -

The CEClive entry page has following aggregation widgets

• Sessions - Just starting, just running sessions, all sessions etc.
. CEC2007 News - A shared wiki page to publish news
• Top of CEC - Top contributors and participants of the conference based on Community Equity calculations
• Blog aggregation - aggregation of all related blogs of the conference using the suncec2007 tag for technorati
• Photo aggregation - aggregation of all related photos of the conference using the suncec2007 tag for flickr
• Video aggregation - aggregation of all related video of the conference using the suncec2007 tag for youtube

Technorati Tags: ce2.0, Community_Equity, social_networking, suncec2007, web2.0

Posted at 05:51AM Oct 13, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Community Equity  |  Comments[0]

Reiser 2.0

Just want to let you know that I changed my blog title to Reiser 2.0 ...

As more and more people calling me by this name ... I could't resist any longer  .....

Posted at 05:47AM Oct 13, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Community Equity  |  Comments[0]

Branchenkonferenz Behoerden Wien

Heute hatte ich die Ehre an der Branchenkonferenz in Wien eine Praesentation ueber

"The path to WebNExt"  zu geben. Es war ein sehr interessanter Anlass (siehe Programm)

und hier ist die  Praesentation.

web2.0 web_n+1 web3.0

suncec2007

Posted at 06:22PM Sep 19, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Community Equity  |  Comments[0]

The path to WebNext

Last week I had the pleasure to provide a keynote on "The path to WebNext" at the Triple-I conference in Graz,Austria.

I was asked by several attendees to share the presentation and here it is

It was a great conference and I met a lot of interesting people.

web2.0 web_n+1 web3.0 CE2.0

Posted at 09:55AM Sep 10, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Community Equity  |  Comments[0]

Community Equity - a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise

Have you ever thought about how you might gain Social Capital in your  live ?
By inviting friends, participating in communities (like a church, a sports club etc.) and other social interactions you create personal Social Capital.

But how do you measure it? In the real live you  might have friends which help you in a bad situation or you get invited for a party and so on ....

Wouldn't it be interesting to have a way to measure the Social Capital in an enterprise ?

Why?  Because we could give the individual  and answer to the most important question

" What is in it for me "
 

As part of our Customer Engineering CE2.0 project we are developing a measurable Community Equity System 

The idea is pretty simple - lets measure the contribution, participation, skills and role equity of a person.

Then we combine the Community equity values with the aggregated profile information of  a person

.... and then we can build user specific and dynamic mashup services  based on the users need...

Use Case:

1. A user specifies that she/he needs help to develop a certain skills or expertise ( lets say AJAX programming) and create a Skills tags with a personal rating 1 (= need help).
2. The system  dynamically generates a list of internal & external trainings, books, experts  based on their Community equity  value...
3. The user takes an online training on Ajax programming and passes the final training test
4. The training application updates the Skills equity of the person by updating the training equity
5. The overall Skills equity of the person increases ...

Pretty cool stuff I guess .... and YES we are looking in all the data privacy issues.

We are very interested  in  existing or evolving standards for rating, voting, commenting  services etc.
specially in the Semantic Web space... Just leave a comment with a pointer ... Thanks!

Technorati Tags: web2.0 web_n+1 web3.0 CE2.0
Technorati Tags:microformat semantic web

Posted at 01:12AM Jun 24, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Community Equity  |  Comments[2]