NotifIMe & Email Curation

Over the past few weeks in class we've been working on developing a bot from initial conception to design and visual prototyping (disclaimer: this is not an actual bot!). For this project I worked with John from Program of Action: Write Words. Check out his blog for the companion post!

Although e-mail is undoubtedly a useful tool for collaboration and communication in work environments, it can also, paradoxically, be an enormous drain on productivity. We constantly have the threat of missing an important email hanging over our heads. Some of us check our email compulsively to make sure we don't miss anything important, which interrupts our focus and makes it hard to get work done. Nobody likes doing it; if we could automate the process of looking for important emails, we certainly would. 

But why can't we? Considering we have a 'bots on Wikipedia that automatically delete vandalism, 'bots that take data and write presentable news articles, the idea that we could delegate the task of scanning our inbox for important emails doesn't seem too unreasonable. We had the idea for a “curation bot” which we named NotifIMe for its IM/text notification functionality.

The idea is pretty simple; the bot would have some default settings, and you could further modify them by both adding tags and feeding in emails to help “give it a better idea” of what constitutes an “important email” (one that warrants opening your inbox immediately and reading it) to you.

There were a few problems with implementation to consider. The bot would need some sort of access to the user’s email account, and some users would feel a little sketched by the idea of handing all their email passwords to a ‘bot. Another problem was making the interface work as well as possible with a range of email providers. We considered making it a Google Labs thing, but doing so would limit it to Gmail users. In the end we decided to keep the bot open an utilize an POP/IMAP functionality for email retrieval that users would simply have to set-up when creating their account.

If well implemented, our ‘bot would save its users a great deal of time and focus. From the LA Times article we linked earlier:

“On average, people with email switched windows about 37 times per hour. Without email, that was cut in half to 18 times per hour.

With email, they spent an average of 394 seconds on any particular window. That went up to 568 seconds without email. This may not seem a lot, but in the world of multitasking it's a huge difference."

Going without email improves focus and productivity, but for some of us, email is a vital form of communication. It’s not the reading of our emails that lowers our productivity; it’s the constant checking. With this ‘bot, we could have the best of both worlds.

Wikispaces Project Reflection

The following is a reflection regarding our class collaborative assignment to create a wiki for Citizen Designer. The wiki can be found here.

I understand it is rather cliche to state that I learned a lot from the class project and I'm better because of it, but cliches are cliche for a reason. I learned a lot, but not regarding the sort of thing I think others might have drawn from this project. Power struggles (or the collective ambivalence and/or confusion that leads to a lack of power structures altogether) are nothing new for a social scientist like myself - tracing authority within an organization or group becomes something of a hobby a few semesters in. What I found to be most valuable about this project is how the singular act of sitting down at a computer and going online is not singular at all, and that even when content creation is driven by individuals, content itself, at least in a project like this, must be driven by the group.

That said, in reflection on our project, I see areas in which more defined leadership and organization might have been beneficial. Overall, I think our wiki is quite okay. I'd venture so far as to say the content is rather good. Unfortunately as a class we never seemed to figure out what to do with the Introduction nor the Last Word and I feel that was one area in which greater defined leadership might have been beneficial. I really think one of the reasons that the wiki is presented in a somewhat cohesive manner is because our wiki moderators made the decision to publish an article template and provide tutorials on how to achieve their standard. While not all pages followed that standard, the generally adherence to the template makes the wiki more user friendly. If perhaps the content creators had decided to address the issues of empty pages more directly in and out of class discussions we wouldn't be left with incomplete pages. That said, overall I'm fairly happy with our team effort. I think we were on the right sort of track to figuring everything out, we just didn't do fast enough to fully develop by the deadline.

Second level editing of the articles was both good and bad, to the extent that some articles were not redressed adequately the second time around. By and large, the second level edits brought a lot more to the table regarding format and content. The original posts that I contributed did not receive a great deal of content editing, but formatting and some amount of reorganization is evident. The posts that I revised varied on how much content editing I did; those with significant content edits were done primarily to remove bias and make the concepts a bit easier to understand. I also did a lot of formatting edits to bring the articles to standard with the template released by the wiki moderators and located graphics that pertained to the topic discussed.

Overall, good writing in a wiki is a balance between brevity and a comprehensive discussion, all wrapped up in an easily accessible format. Should we write differently for something that is going to be revised and reused? I think so, yes. If we know what the end goal should be like, then we should write for that end goal from the start. Revisions and such would be an easier process of refinement instead of more involving rewrites. This project, along with our in-class tasks, have changed how I look at Wikipedia. It's not an academic paper, but it holds a lot of data and is the collective effort of a lot of people, many of whom edit content simply to make it easier for the rest of us. It is crowd-sourced curation, and it is dang useful.

What would have made our project better? Bottom line - better communication among all agents. A lot of my complaints could have been largely addressed with better communication, though I am assuming here that such would lead to a leveling of effort across the board and I'm not quite sure it would have worked out like that. Regardless, in retrospect there should have been more discussions about content moderation and we fell short in that respect.

WebMD and Crowdsourcing

This article was written in collaboration with Anna from The Path to Digital Digital Discovery during class on 2 November 2012.


WebMD provides a free resource for people looking for medical insight in regard to a wide variety of issues including pregnancy, chronic illnesses, nutrition, and pain management. The WebMD community includes a forum for expert insights where members can post problems and receive answers from medical experts only. There’s also a community discussion forum open to all members of the WebMD website where people can discuss similar problems and find advice from those who’ve had personal experience with those medical issues.
The objective is to provide a free resource for those looking for support and advice in regard to medical problems and prevention. For example, on the Alzheimer’s community there are numerous posts from people just looking for a friend who can relate to the problems they are facing.

This objective was and will probably continue to be accomplished. The forums are highly supported by notable medical communities and establishments. The website has built up a reputation of expertise and reliability that maintains a steady influx of members and postings. The community is empathetic and supportive, and fosters open discussion of difficult issues.

The outcome could go one of two ways: largely the community is beneficial on the social support scale. As far as diagnosis the outcome is unreliable – experts can’t run tests or meet the patients seeking advice face to face so they are essentially making guesses about diagnoses and solutions. Overall, however, WebMD is a beneficial community that utilizes collective intelligence and crowdsourcing to build a community around medical support and advice.

Terranova argued that people are essentially “NetSlaves,” and produce free labor and content in the “digital economy.” WebMD doesn’t really fit that model because the focus isn’t on the labor, it’s on the knowledge and expertise that people contribute to the community. It goes back to the articles and discussions about peer production: if you have a vested interest in the topic, then you’ll be willing to do the work and contribute to the community without compensation. This relates to ideas discussed by Yochai Benkler and Daniel Kreiss, Megan Finn, and Fred Turner. The people posting on WebMD have had experience with medical problems like cancer, psychological disorders, and sexual conditions and voluntarily offer up their personal expertise to help others going through similar issues.

Philippines, what are you doing?

Remember SOPA? PIPA?

Remember how the internet largely shut itself down in protest of this legislation?

Unfortunately, it seems that the Filipino government doesn't. Just this week they passed a new Cybercrime Prevention Act that some have said "makes SOPA look reasonable." While there are legitimate claims made within the legislation, this act falls prey to the same primary criticism as SOPA and PIPA - the phrasing is not specific enough to prevent widespread abuse that would result in the suppression of free speech.

As Paul Tassi says,

"Who exactly is libel for the libel? Is it the person who made the statements? Anyone who reblogged or retweeted them? The website on which the comments were made? Anyone who commented in assent or even clicked ‘like’? The way the law is worded, the Filipino police could actually charge you with simply criticizing them or the government in a way they deem “malicious,” a word very much open to interpretation."

You can get 12 years in prison for a Facebook like. That's pretty ridiculous.

It should be no surprise that the Cybercrime Prevention Act has been met with quite a bit of protest. The BBC, News.com.au and (my personal favorite for the large cache of info-graphics) GlobalVoicesOnline all speak about the opposition that this legislation is facing, but the courts have pushed off a petition ruling until sometime next week.

We were able to stop this in the US (for now) - can it be stopped on the other side of the world?

You can head over here and sign the change.org petition.

Website up and running!

Or, well, a sort of prototype one where I can mess around and perhaps actually learn what I'm doing.
... Maybe.

Go Explore the Digital Grid 2.0!

Stick around for new content this upcoming week!

Networks and Nodes - Investigating Personal Network Connections

Personal Network Visualization

For class we were asked to record information on the different people that we spoke to only one day last week and create a visualization based off of this information (I used NodeXL for this). My chart analyzing this information can be seen above. The node shapes were chosen to group individuals by both geographical proximity and social ties - circles are family members that live in the same house as I do; diamonds are family members that live >100 miles away; the square is a friend who lives locally; solid triangle is a friend located >500 miles away; and the open triangle (which is unfortunately covered in the graph by the label) is a professor who lives locally. Node size is representative of how often or how long I spent communicating with that individual on the sample day.

With 5 of the 8 connections I made that day being members of my family, it's not surprising that the majority of my daily personal connections know each other. That said, we often still utilize each other to pass on information to the others because it's easier than texting or calling everyone we want to keep in the loop. The other individuals that I spoke to do not know each other and while information might flow from them to other members of my network, there is no way for them to convey that information without going through me.

tl;dr : Even with the widespread use of advanced technology it all still boils down to interpersonal connections and relationships.

Time for a Technology Detox?

Are we spending too much time with technology?

Apparently yes. Websites ranging from Net Addiction Recovery to Forbes to Laywerist.com all suggest we go on a technology detox or diet - heck, there's even a 4-Step self help book out there to help us break our technology addictions.

TG Daily (who, for the record, also recommend a tech diet) cites research conducted by scientists UCSF claiming that the multitasking current technology enables is not only killing our attention span but also hindering "long-term memory and mental performance."

However, whether we choose to engage in a tech diet or not might not be our decision to make if state governments have any say in the matter - most states have some sort of law against texting and driving and TGDaily (in the above article) suggests that some are attempting to take that legislation even further. You can check out what legislation your state has put forth over at handsfreeinfo.com.

Capitalist undertones aside, what are the benefits of constant technology use?
... Bueller?