SOCIAM all-hands, September, University of Oxford

1. SOCIAM Book: The Theory and
Practice of Social Machines
Kieron O’Hara
presented at SOCIAM all-hands, Oxford, 20 September 2017

2. Book Blurb
• Social machines are a type of network of
people connected by interactive digital devices
made possible by the ubiquitous adoption of
technologies such as the Internet, the
smartphone, social media and the read/write
World Wide Web, connecting participants at
scale to document situations, cooperate on
tasks, exchange information, or even simply to
play. Existing social processes may be scaled
up, and new social processes enabled, to
solve problems, augment reality, create new
sources of value, and disrupt existing practice.

3. Book Blurb
• This book considers what talents one would need to
understand or build a social machine, describes the
state of the art, and speculates on the future, from the
perspective of the EPSRC project SOCIAM – The
Theory and Practice of Social Machines. The aim is to
develop a set of tools and techniques for investigating,
constructing and facilitating social machines, to enable
us to narrow down pragmatically what is becoming a
wide space, by asking ‘when will it be valuable to use
these methods on a sociotechnical system?’ The
systems for which the use of these methods adds value
are social machines in which there is rich person-to-
person communication, and where a large proportion of
the machine’s behaviour is constituted by human
interaction.

4. Chapter Breakdown
• 1. Characterising and classifying social
machines
• Intro/examples
• Building blocks/concept
• Classification stuff
• Dark social machines
• Ecosystems of SMs
• SMs and human-to-human communication
• Philosophical stuff

5. Chapter Breakdown
• 2. Analysis: understanding social machines
• Incentives in crowdsourcing
• Social machines/platforms
• Experience with Zooniverse
• Properties of SMs
• Sociograms/sociagrams
• Narratives/wayfaring
• Participants and their data (e.g. quantified self
data in medical context)

6. Chapter Breakdown
• 3. Synthesis: implementing social machines
• Design decisions: experience from Zooniverse
• LSC
• Formality? Sociograms
• Incentive engineering/payments/gamification
• Managing data – annotation, data citation,
scholarly social machines
• Web observatory
• Scale, federation, coordination (cf. data safe
havens)

7. Chapter Breakdown
• 4. Trust: ethics, accountability, provenance and
privacy
• Provenance
• Transparency/X-ray
• Provenance models from process models
• Data stewardship
• Data terms of use
• PDSs
• Bias in algorithms
• Practical steps: ML
• Data safe havens
• Ethical theories
• Mandevillian intelligence (?)

8. Chapter Breakdown
• 5. The future of social machines
• IoT
• Redecentralisation
• Social knowledge machines?
• ?

9. Venue
• Favourite is Springer
• E.g. Lecture Notes in Social Networks?
• comprises volumes covering the theory,
foundations and applications of the new
emerging multidisciplinary field of social
networks analysis and mining. LNSN
publishes peer- reviewed works (including
monographs, edited works) in the analytical,
technical as well as the organizational side
of social computing, social networks,
network sciences, graph theory, sociology,
Semantics Web, Web applications and
analytics, information networks, theoretical
physics, modeling, security, crisis and risk
management, and other related disciplines.
The volumes are guest-edited by experts in
a specific domain. This series is indexed by
DBLP.
• Or other suggestions?