Brian Whitworth

Email: bwhitworth replacethisby@ acm.org

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

Recent:

1. An Introduction to Socio-technical System Design, Part I: The Evolution of Computing,.Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

2 . The Research Roadmap Online interactive support for thesis students and advisors.

Background:

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

Experience:

A 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 emerging socio-technical system where human and social issues are growing in importance, e.g. spam and information 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 data. The socio-technical gap, between what people want and what technology does, is increasing. These problems need more than technology power. The evolution of human civilization has always involved both social andtechnical progress. Indeed, it is hard to imagine modern technology without modern society. Yet only recently have we realized that just as a physical system like a bridge has physical requirements, so a social system has social requirements. In the socio-technical view it is time to "civilize" a technologized Internet, to apply social ethics, laws and structures to cyberspace. This means applying concepts like freedom, democracy, legitimacy, transparency and justice. Successful social-technical systems, like Wikipedia and eBay, are those that get the social processes right. The change is from zero-sum gains based on competition to the "non-zero-sum" gains of community cooperation, where people produce more working together. Open research sharing illustrates the power of social synergy. My socio-technical research has four parts:
  1. The social requirements of technical systems: See The Social Requirements of Technical Systems, Chapter 1 in our 2009 Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. Aldo de Moor and I began with a 2003 Legitimate by Design paper, updated in 2006 byTowards a Theory of Online Social Rights. My work on Polite Computing illustrates a social requirement that will soon dominate the software industry. Spam occurs when technology ignores social needs. Already 90% of emails on the Internet are spam (mostly caught by filters), and cell-phones, texting, chat etc now also have spam forms. A 2009 Channel Email paper suggests how socio-technical design can stop spam. Recent work develops A Social Environment Model of Socio-technical Performance.

  2. Socio-technical system performance evaluation: This began with a 2003 Web of System Performance (WOSP) paper, a follow up 2006 CACM paper and a 2008 evaluation experiment that compared the usefulness/usability factors of the TAM model that has dominated IS/IT thinking for two decades with the WOSP model's eight factors of: reliability, security, flexiblity, connectivity, privacy, functionality, usability and extendibility. My PhD student Karen Patten and I analyzed flexibility into anticipation, agility and adaptation, see How CIOS Use Flexibility to Manage Uncertainty in Dynamic Business Environments, best practitioner paper AMCIS 2009. Other work on Measuring Disagreement gives a measure for group diversity.

  3. Online group processes. My first work on how groups interact online had to use software I wrote, as it was before email, the Internet or Windows became popular. It used the Cognitive Three-Process (C3P) model, where as well being concerned about factual task analysis and personal relations, people also try to maintain group identity. Contrary to the media-richness view of the time, Generating agreement in computer-mediated groups showed that "social" group interaction could be supported online by many-to-many linkage. That there were group processes Beyond Rational Decision Making suggested new online forms of group interaction like Voting before discussing. People dont work like computers, as A Comparison of Human and Computer Information Processing shows.

  4. Socio-technical knowledge exchange. The group-to-group communication idea put forward in 2001 anticipated today's community tag clouds, reputation measures and recommender systems - all of which are "lean". Yet it was incredibly hard to publish.The then convention was that "social" must be "media rich", which Google's simple white screen now shows is wrong. The WOSP model was equally hard to publish - even an evaluation was editorially rejected by JAIS in 2005 because "papers critical of TAM never pass review." It was like a feudal system whose barons use "the religion of rigor" to defend the intellectual castles that give them power, rank and grant money, even if it throttles democratic creativity. A Research Publishing Checklist For New Authors argues that research should be creative as well as rigorous - see also the research roadmap. The paper outlining these problems was of course impossible to journal publish (rejected by CAIS 2006, EJIS 2007 and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 2008). Finally Rob Friedman and I published it in the online journal First Monday as Reinventing Academic Publishing Online Part I: Rigor, Relevance and Practice and Part II: A Socio-technical Vision. Will the prediction that democratic cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange will out-perform elite specialist knowledge silos be ignored? If so, academia may go the way of past aristocracies.

Contrast technology support for human processes with some well publicized movie alternative scenarios:

Indeed the "connected" people you see plugged into their cell-phones are really "the disconnected" - from the world. When drivers on cell-phones crash and die, we see which connection has priority. Yet when we have both, we can connect the entire world, which is a wonderful thing.