WhitePaper

Key theory foundations and concepts for the National Initiative for Social Participation.

This should contribute to our 1-2 page white paper, which I think needs to identify three things:

1) compelling national priorities like healthcare, community safety, open government, energy sustainability, or environmental protection. This seems clear to me, but it has to be written in a compelling way. We have to make clear that we can improve usability and sociability to motivate people to shift from sympathetic awareness to constructive action.

2) the deep science questions tied to the theory foundations and concepts. I hope you might specify how collective intelligence, collection action, social dilemmas, social roles (answer person, discussion person, reply magnet, etc.), and basic ideas such as privacy, freedom, identity influence design decisions and social participation. A second part of this is to identify key metrics such as community efficacy, conversion rates from readers to contributors, intensity of engagement, degree of reciprocity, network density, small-world-ness, local/global connectedness, etc. A key notion is to expand on motivation for different participations and show how managers can influence outcomes with usability and sociability interventions.

3) the computer science challenges: I'd like to expand on the basic issues of scalable reliable delivery of community support, scalable network analysis algorithms, effective visualizations that guide design decisions for moderators and community leaders, universal usability to support diverse users and platforms, tracking evolving networks, rapidly rankings millions of networks by feature metrics (diameter, density, etc.), searching for distinctive or common features in large networks, etc.

Then the White Paper needs to lay out the initial steps for the next year for government agencies, corporations, and universities. Then it should describe how growth happens over a 5 year period. How will we know if we are successful?