Brian Whitworth

Email: bwhitworth replacethisby@ acm.org

This site: http://brianwhitworth.com/ is about socio-technical design and social computing

Recent:

1. Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems, 2008 (Eds Brian Whitworth and Aldo de Moor)

2. Research Roadmap Project Developing online interactive support for thesis students and advisors.

Background:

Born in Oldham, England, but grew up in New Zealand. After seven years at university I joined the NZ Army as an Officer, Psychologist and then Computer Analyst. After retiring, I designed/wrote software for my PhD, on how online groups generate agreement. A US. Professor from 1999-2005, I am now working at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand, since with the Internet the "world is flat". I research how human requirements can "drive" computing technology design and evaluation. The vision is that people and computers are more than people or computers.

Experience:

Registered industrial psychologist, cross-trained in modern IS:

Qualifications:

PhD (MSIS); MA (Hons)(Psych); BSc (Maths); BA (Psych); Army Officer Training; Teacher training.

Hobbies:

Everyday motorcycle rider, singing/songwriting, quantum theory dilettante.

Research:

Increasingly, today’s critical IS/IT problems have a human/social component. The Internet is an evolving socio-technical system, where human and social issues are growing in importance, e.g. spam and email overload; spyware and online monitoring; copyright abuse and music copying; distrust of online trade; copyright restrictions and the creative commons; plagiarism and academic cheating; pornography and online sexual predators; viruses, worms and hackers; online fraud and scams; identity theft and phishing, and massive connected databases of private information. There is developing a socio-technical gap, between what people want and what technology does. Solving such problems needs more than technology power. The cumulative effect is to reduce the social capital of the Internet, which in practice means less people choose to use it than otherwise would. The lost performance potential may be enormous. The future may see today's "information super-highway" as an information "Dark Ages", just as we now view the hunter-gatherers of old, or the American Wild West.

The change we call civilization, with its enormous practical benefits, was a social as well as a technical change. Indeed, without a modern society, it is hard to imagine modern technology. Virtual society, as a social system, has social requirements like physical society. Is it time for a more civilized Internet? Many feel so, but the civil methods of physical society, like ethics, laws and sanctions, often seem powerless in cyberspace. In a social-technical system, social processes (like communication) require technical support. Technical systems should support the human/social cooperative principles that give "non-zero-sum" gains, like modern science. For computer programmers, database and system designers to implement technology infrastructures that support such processes, they must be translated into information system terminology. My research on the definition of IS requirements to improve performance in socio-technical systems has four parts:

  1. IS/IT performance and evaluation - understanding IS/IT success and failure. A concept of system performance is critical to defining IS requirements. The Web of System Performance (WOSP) model is a new view on information system performance and data quality. First published in Communications of the AIS (2003), and then in Communications of the ACM 2006. The model also applies to technology evaluation. Each year IT management spends billions of dollars on company critical technology. We hope to develop a method and tool that can help manangement make better application. Experimental validations using both conjoint analysis (AMCIS 2005) and AHP (under journal submission) support this approach. >See (Whitworth et al, 2005) and (Whitworth & Zaic, 2003).
  2. Social requirements for technical systems: Social performance has social requirements, just as data performance has data requirements (like normalization). Social justice systems support legitimate (fair) social requirements, but in online society laws struggle. Unless legitimacy is also supported online by the IT architecture, online social synergy will not happen. Spam illustrates the performance cost of e-mail technology that ignores valid message receiver rights - each day spam wastes over 70% of Internet resources. Legitimacy requirements like privacy and accountability, can be defined in information system terms and taught in system design courses, alongside technical requirements. See (Whitworth & Whitworth, 2004) and (Whitworth & de Moor, 2003).
  3. Psychological processes in interface design. People, like computers, are information processors, but they process information in a way validated by millions of years of evolution. Hence the nature of people should drive the nature of computers, i.e. IS designers should begin with human psychological processes and end with architecture. Multi-media is an example, as computers recognize people have many sense channels. The C3P model suggests people use three sense making processes (factual analysis, personal relations, and group identification) in online sense making. These could for example be used to organize email. Also suggests politeness is common to all cultures, and so computers should support it. See (Whitworth, et al, 2001), (Whitworth, 2005).
  4. Online group processes. Includes group functions, like generating identity, generating agreement, the group decision process (online voting), online leadership, and online democracy and governance. My PhD on how groups generate agreement online used software I wrote. It showed that voting "linkage" (many-to-many communication) was the key to online agreement, not media richness. See  (Whitworth & McQueen, 2003), (Whitworth, et al, 2000), (Whitworth & Felton, 1999).

The common theme is technology support for human processes in social-technical systems. Contrast this with some well publicized alternative scenarios:

Teaching areas:

Full C.V. http://brianwhitworth.com/cv.html