Sizzling 2012

Happy 2012, friends of Sizzle!

Kassi is on its way to world fame as a fresh new start up, with interesting collaborations amongst others in the world design capital (aka Helsinki) and in Chile. You can learn more and follow the on-goings in the Avoin yritys blog (in Finnish).

On the research side of things, we are attending the CSCW 2012 Workshop on Reconciling Privacy with Social Media in mid-February. This workshop will bring together many of the core people from the interactional privacy field. It is, thus, the perfect venue to present the initial pilot survey results as well as the future plans outlined in our position paper Privacy Management Strategies and Online Photo Sharing: A Pilot Survey.

For those who wonder what’s going on in California: The work with Oakland Single Parents’ Network continues. We have been making modifications to their version of Kassi to make it match the needs of the community better. Based on interviews conducted with members of OSPN, we are also about to launch something completely new as a co-creation of OSPN and Kassi.

Stay tuned!

Sizzle International Workshop

Returning from the US, I encountered Helsinki the way I like it: beautiful in the late summer sunshine, sizzling with colleagues from four continents.

Helsinki viewed from Tervasaari, our meeting location (picture credit: kesakko on flickr)

For the first time, the global Sizzle crew gathered together to one location. The round of introductions in the first morning was a revealing moment for many of us: So many people working on Sizzle!

And it’s not only that we are many but that we form such a diverse team: not only are there people from Kenya, China, California & Finland. Another way to look at it is to recognize our wealth of academic backgrounds: some more focused on technology and software development, others on user research and design.

Over the two-day workshop, we shared news and experiences from what has been done in different locations and discussed our plans going forward. All of this is valuable in keeping everyone updated and opening eyes for potential collaborations. Furthermore, now that we have learned to know one another better and names match with faces, it will be immensely easier to bridge the distances and work over them.

A round of applause goes to Olli Pitkänen who shouldered most of the planning and organizing of the workshop.

CalSizzle – Summer Update

A quick update for the Californian end of Sizzle:

We have just concluded the data collection for our survey on social media usage. Let’s see what the data will tell us – interesting analyses ahead!

The work on OSPN Kassi is ongoing, too, although right now things will slow down a little as the CalSizzle team will be traveling a lot in the upcoming weeks. I’m about to shift the base camp back to Finland but the collaboration with both OSPN and the ISchoolers will stay as close as ever.

We will be back in day-to-day business in mid-August. That’s when it’s time to join in on the Sizzle workshop in Helsinki – the first event to bring together researchers from all of the four Sizzle continents.

Create 4 Millions Competition

Yesterday I learned news of an exciting new development here at University of Nairobi: a group of students from the 2010 NairobiSizzle team have decided to revamp the services developed here last year and enter them into Nokia’s Create 4 Millions competition that looks for new applications that could help delivering internet services to the next billion people still without. Basically that sounds like a) mobile internet, b) internet on lower end phones, c) low bandwidth applications.

http://ideasproject.com/nokia/create4millions

http://www.ideasproject.com/community/challenges/create4millions

Sounds pretty perfect for NairobiSizzle and I wish the team best of luck. Application submission deadline is 20th of September 2011, watch this space!

NairobiSizzle 2011

So here we go again: NairobiSizzle 2011. Not quite a re run from last year, but almost. This year we’re down to 6 students hoping that a smaller team will be agile and effective. Three new students and three students from last year, so a mixture of experience and fresh blood.

The agenda this summer will be around Kassi. We’re going to be creating a local installation of Kassi for the University of Nairobi students, but also we’re going to be looking at adding some new features to it. Mobile web UI and SMS payment functionalities have been shortlisted, but lets see what happens. SMS payment would fit the Kenyan scene very well due to the popularity of mobile payments, such as M-Pesa here, so that’s the option that I’m hoping will be picked and implemented.

Also this summer the students will be looking at applications developed last year with a view to adding a PC user interface to it. Feedback from users has indicated that a PC UI would be nice to have as many students at the university have access to internet on a PC also, not just on their mobiles.

Last but not least we’ll be migrating the existing Sizzle services onto Amazon Web Services and merging the ASI databases together with the ASI currently used in Finland.

Lots of work, but all pretty exciting I’d say.

We’re In It Together: Interpersonal Management of Disclosure in Social Network Services

Yesterday was the last day of CHI 2011 and, also, the day we were scheduled to give the talk on our paper We’re in it together: interpersonal management of disclosure in social network services. And so I did, with my co-author Vilma Lehtinen also in the room to take questions and meet colleagues. Taken that we were slotted to the last paper session of the last day of the conference, we were delighted by the sizable crowd that came to our talk.

We’re in it together summarizes a year of research we conducted in 2009-2011 on how students who use social network services view issues of control over disclosure and on the ways in which they deal with related challenges. Users of SNSs often make efforts to balance with both privacy and publicness: what to share, with whom, and with what consequences. We were especially interested in understanding how people perceive the fact that while they do have some liberty to build up their profile and presence as they wish, others can also post content that is either directly about them or that in some other way affects them and their network. In considering our results, it is important to bear in mind that we talked with 27 university students – so while their experiences are important and the concepts we present apply more widely, we do not make quantitative claims of what the millions of SNS users around the globe do or don’t.

In (very) brief, we found that shared rules of disclosure are rarely discussed although there is a strong reliance on mutual consideration. Looking into the ways in which users of SNS manage disclosure, we found that individual, preventive strategies were most varied. A number of corrective strategies -both individual and collaborative- were found, too, but they had many faults: they were seen as ineffective, sometimes counterproductive as they could easily backfire, and, when it comes to collaborative corrective strategies, awkward to use, as these questioned the trust on which interaction relied. Finally, there were few preventive collaborative strategies in place and, what is more, these were mostly not supported by technology. This is where we see a design space opening – one in which we hope to see activity in years to come.

For more details on the study, you can read the paper, look at the slides below (although without the talk that goes with them, they tell only part of the story), or read this news piece from ScienceDaily.

Back from the biggest conference of the spring and the semester now behind us, we are looking forward to gathering new data as well as sitting down to think about next publications – and those, at least to me, are some of the most exciting moments in research.

Contracts and Workshops

Last week, we at the Californian end of Sizzle were treated with both a heat wave and a HIIT wave, as the arrival of summer temperatures coincided with a number of our colleagues visiting Berkeley – many of them on their way to the CHI conference.

The days were packed with meetings and workshops around Berkeley. We met up with our colleagues at Berkeley Institute of Design as well as with many ISchoolers. CalSizzle workshop brought to the same room many of the key players working on bringing Kassi to Oakland Single Parents’ Network. We shared news, discussed the challenges that lie ahead, and made a number of introductions.

Next to hearing of Sizzle from different perspectives, OSPN’s Kadie Kelly shared her views about the network and its collaboration with Sizzle. Furthermore, Jen King presented recent work (in review) on third-party application privacy, and Heather Ford talked about the Masks final project, focusing on privacy in the realm of online education.

Making things concrete, the contract for OSPN’s and HIIT’s collaboration was signed. Finding ourselves ready to do so is delightful, as over the past months, a lot of work has gone into solving the legal and technical issues of setting up Kassi in California. Now that these challenges are behind us, we are preparing to launch Kassi for the members of Oakland Single Parents’ Network. The plan is to have this happen in a few weeks, in the early summer.

CalSizzle workshop at UC Berkeley's ISchool

Right now, however, we are out of California, at the CHI 2011 conference. This weekend, I was running the Workshop on Networked Privacy together with Fred Stutzman. The main conference started yesterday, with more than 2000 attendees. More on our experiences and presentations at CHI later. For now, you can keep up with news from CHI via social media, for instance through this Event Burn feed.

Breaking the Ice in Nairobi

Standing in front of twenty lively students from the Institute of Anthropology, Gender and African Studies at the University of Nairobi.  I’m bit embarrassed showing up in what I thought would be a suitable dress in a safari country…but which turned out, not too surprisingly, to look quite touristic in front of the well-dressed students. Despite this cultural shock, we had three days of intensive and, for me at least, eyes-opening workshopping around user research methods. Because of the participants being experienced in anthropology, we focused on the role of ethnographic methods in the design of online social network services.

After my introductory talk we had an ethnography exercise, in which the students went out to observe and interview their fellow students, about specific questions concerning their use of social network services. Based on the findings from this exercise, we built up a co-design game. Through the game characters and events we created, the players of the game can step in to the shoes of the people studied. The aim of the game is to support empathy and collaboration among different stakeholders, for example in a software development project. In addition, we scrutinized the first versions of a survey on social network service use and privacy attitudes. The students gave me pointers to local online social network services, two of the popular ones are chat services to be used with cell phones: Mxit and 2go.

In addition to this valuable knowledge about the current trends in online social networking, I learned a lot from the awesome discussions we had about the role of anthropologists in technology design. These were triggered by the insightful questions from the students, such as the effects of different technical premises for user studies in different contexts, and the role of anthropology and design in post-colonial countries.

Unfortunately the students of computing science and informatics couldn’t attend the workshops. Luckily, they arranged a chance for me to have a morning session with them. Again, the questions the students posed created good discussions, for example about the proper stages of conducting user research in a software development project.

One of the purposes of my visit was to warm up the sizzling between anthropologists and computer scientists. The synergies of this collaboration is to be used to develop the NairobiSizzle services further this year – anthropologies and computer scientists having the tools to gain insights for development, with the prospective users of the NairobiSizzle services. The collaboration between us, the anthropologists and computer scientists will continue now with the survey we’re conducting together. The purpose is to compare online social network service use and privacy attitudes on at least two continents, as well as to dig deeper in to the trends of mobile computing in Nairobi.

Kassi in Oakland

Sizzle is going through exciting times in California as we are about to get Kassi off the ground over here, too. What makes it all especially interesting is the community with which we are collaborating: Oakland Single Parents’ Network (you can find OSPN on Facebook).

The collaboration is delightful for a number of things: First, it is great to be setting up a research collaboration with a community that has been actively looking for a service like the one that we are about to offer for them to use. It feels like we are answering to a real need, and that, of course, is a great place to be. Second, the entire process of setting up an online exchange service in California is a huge learning experience, ranging from figuring out user contracts to taking initial steps in learning to know a new community and their everyday realities. Third, bringing it all back to user research, while a lot can be learned from studying the use of Kassi in student communities, it will be intriguing to see how the service works in a community that is different and more diverse in many ways.

As many good things in life, Sizzle’s partnership with OSPN started somewhat randomly, through a coincidence: The network was looking for an online exchange/barter service that could serve its members, we had Kassi available, and, luckily, there were people to bridge the two parties. Here we are, a couple of months later, close to a point where we’ll be ready to launch the service for single parents in Oakland, a neighboring town of Berkeley.

Today, we visited an event in Oakland to present the collaboration to a nice little crowd. The feedback was encouraging and we are looking forward to launching the service in a couple of months!

Sizzle at CHI 2011

Happy, sizzling new year!

While the blog has been silent, a lot has been going on on the various fronts of Sizzle – and there are exciting plans for the coming year. We here at the Californian end of it all are getting ready to conduct a bunch of interesting new research.

Before sharing more of those plans, I wanted to briefly bring to your attention, that the program of the CHI 2011 conference is up. If you don’t work in human-computer interaction, you’re maybe not familiar with CHI. In short, CHI is the annual, huge, great conference on human factors in computing systems. If you study the program carefully, you’ll notice that there’s a Sizzle paper in there! We are happy to have the honor to present our paper We’re in It Together: Interpersonal Management of Disclosure in Social Network Services in the Privacy session on Thursday, May 12. Welcome to here what it all is about, CHI attendants! (Others, we’ll get back to this here in the blog, too.)

Furthermore, Sizzle themes are taken further in the upcoming workshop ”Privacy for a Networked World”: Bridging Theory and Design that we’re organizing as a part of CHI, in collaboration with Fred Stutzman and Markus Bylund. The Call for Participation is open until Jan 26, so take a look if this fits your interests. Also, we greatly appreciate it if you spread the word to those whose cup of tea this workshop could be. Thanks!