Week Two

Hello,
During the lecture this week we were split into groups to discuss our area of interest, I was split into the social networking group. The session started off slowly with only on or two people making suggestions however it slowly grew into more of a discussion. One particular issue that I raised was that of second lives online and just how much people lie about themselves, this was spurred on in part by the channel 4 documentry I watched the evening before in which an 18 year old man was using a chat room to talk to an 18 year old girl. As time went on they traded pictures etc but another man was introduced who worked with the first man, eventually the first man began to think that the second one was also in a relationship with the girl. As the two worked together he became increasingly jealous and eventually shot him in the car park however in the end it turned out that the girl had never met the second man, the first man was in his mid 40's and the girl turned out to be a mother who had stolen their own child's identity! Whilst this is obviously an extreme case it highlights a few issues with the internet and how it allows people to masquerade under any guise they want and do things that they wouldn't normally do. This also raises the issue with regards to how much liability lies with the software developer who's product helped to facilitate the deception. In terms of empirical software engineering it would be interesting to see what factors affect truthful responses and information on a web project, and how these factors could be harnessed to elicit the most truthful response.

My own area of interest at the moment is actually how the internet can be used to facilitate co-operation and stimulate research. This area will be particularly useful to my project as I am developing a piece of software that will enable lecturers to share information and collaborate online. The starting point for my research was the website wikipedia itself who claim that; “Wikipedia contains more than 20 million volunteer-authored articles in over 282 languages, and is visited by more than 477 million people every month, making it one of the most popular sites in the world. “ However academics still do not allow students to reference it due to the nature of the creation process. So it is with this in mind that my next stage of research will be to discover just how effective the peer review process is and that will be my target for the coming week. I have had personal experience with Wikipedia pages before and they generally get reviewed very quickly and the other authors are hard to please, I also have experience on the Xbox Live Indie marketplace where the peer review is the same. So does peer review make for quality information/products?

How much does authorship matter? On Wikipedia it seems that you cannot see who has authored each part of an article, this leads to the question in the previous sentence. It would seem that on WikiGenes[1] that the emphasis is heavily placed on authorship so a user can rate other authors and all of the content on the page shows you who authored it which helps to verify the accuracy of the information.

What I want to leave the post with this week is the example of Goldcorp of Toronto who were struggling to find gold on their land and financially, they took the decision to create a competition with a $575,000 prize and published all of the information that they had on their site. The competition was web-based and allowed thousands of people from a huge variety of fields to apply their thoughts and ideas, the result was the finding of well over $3 billion of gold. [2] It is interesting to see how open collaboration can yield substantial results and in the context of empirical software engineering it would allow experimentation into what online tools facilitate the most profitable collaboration



[1]http://www.wikigenes.org/
[2]http://www.clickadvisor.com/downloads/Tapscott_Innovation_and_Mass_Collaboration.pdf