bjbjq Rikke: In this interview we re going to meet Tom Erickson. Tom Erickson is an interaction
designer and researcher and he works for IBM and in their social computing group at their
Wesson Lab in New York. Tom has been working for IBM since 97 and before that he spent
9 years at Apple. So he s the ideal person to tell us about social computing. So, Tom,
what kind of projects are you and your colleagues doing at your social computing group at IBM?
Tom: Sure. There are a couple of areas we re working in. One part of my group is working
in what we call The Next Billion Space. IBM is interested in where the next billion users
are going to come from and the obvious answer to that is from the developing world. I don
t really like the term developing world very much but I think at least people understand
that. So part of my group is trying to understand and develop applications that run on low-end
mobile phones that will provide value to people in other parts of the world besides the industrialized
West. So that s one area that we re working in. A second area that primarily my focus
is again an initiative called Smarter Planet where I like to say that we re putting the
word Smarter in front of everything we can think of. So we ve got Smarter Planet and
then within that we ve got what we call Smarter Cities which is what I m working on. I ve
been interested in urban design for actually a couple of decades, so I leapt at the opportunity
to get involved in the urban area. Mostly when IBM talks about making things smarter
what it means is put a lot of sensors out, gather information over networks, run analytics
on the network and figure out how to optimize things or maybe figure out how to create a
dashboard that will give managers a way to understand what s going on and coordinate
things, which seems fine. However, my mission in IBM is to make sure that Smarter is not
just about sensors and digital technology. What I m concerned about is that our notion
Smarter also includes people. I don t want to see IBM end up designing smart boxes for
passive people. Instead people who anyone, but people certainly people who live in cities
have deep knowledge about where they live, where they socialize, the paths they travel
over. They care about those areas because they live there, because their family and
friends are there, they identify with them. All of these things, I think, give people
in cities an enormous about of both knowledge and motivation that they can contribute to
making cities both more efficient, but especially more humane and livable places. So one example
of that is, this is not primarily my project but I ve been working with Lauren Turvene
s group at the University of Minnesota and they have a system called Cyclopath [sp] and
what Cyclopath is it s a system designed for bicyclist and basic issue is, how you help
bicyclist find bicycle-friendly routes around the city, right. If you go to something like
Google maps which actually has introduced a feature recently for bicyclists but back
when you started they had if you go to Google maps and you request a route from point A
to point B, they ll take you along the interstate; no guarantee there would be a good path for
a bicycle. So what Cyclopath is about is, first of all, it s an open source. Secondly,
it s focused on a particular geographic area. The first case was the seven metro county
area of the Twin cities and what it does, it combines data from multiple sources. So
it has terrain data from the US, geological survey, it has a layer of street map data
from the Minnesota Division of Transportation, it has a map of bicycle paths from another
source and it combines them all together okay and it enables you to do riding over that.
Now there is a problem which is [inaudible 05:45] data or from separate sources, they
re not integrated, right. So if you see a bike path crossing a street, you don t know
if there is an intersection of if there is an overpass. So what Cyclopath relies on is
it relies on its users to add data to the map. In fact, the Cyclopath map unlike the
Google map, the Google map is you look at it on the screen and it s pixels. The map
in Cyclopath is objects down to individual blocks. So anyone can go in; it s a wicky
[sp], edit the geometry of the map if they want. You can go in and remove a street or
put in a new street and although that might not seem very useful in fact, if there is
a dirt path that goes from here to there that allows bicyclists to have a short little shortcut,
that gets put into the Cyclopath map and you can do other things. You can tag routes. So
you can say this particular path is unpaved. You can also rate things according to how
easy or how difficult they are to bicycle. Then when it comes time to request a route,
you say, I want a route from this point to that point, and the points are things people
may have entered, so you have your local names. I can request a route from Lucians to the
U, right, which isn t in any map database but people in my area of the city know what
it is. You can say, and I want it to be very bicycle-friendly as oppose to the shortest
possible route and you can say, I want it to have lots of hills and, if possible, dirt
paths, because maybe I m a mountain biker and I want some good exercise or you can say
just the opposite. Try to avoid hills, try to avoid things that are unpaved. Favor bicycle
paths, and it will computer route using the data that everyone has entered. ll just add
that when Cyclopath first came out sorry. When Google first came out with its cycling
route-finding, the Cyclopath, at that time, computed the same route that was better and
the kilometers shorter than Google gave you and I attribute that to other user-entered
information. In fact, we did an interesting experiment. When Cyclopath was first released,
there was no user-edited data and so what we did is we took the routes that were requested
the first two weeks and then nine months later after 400 users had entered thousands of edits,
we recomputed those very same routes that we requested at the beginning and they were
a kilometer shorter on the average. Probably better but we can t measure that, but they
were better. So that s a nice example of creating something for a community of people that the
community has a motivation to contribute to, that provides some real value and a s it is
used, it not only provides value but it becomes something that they identify with. So cyclists
in the Twin Cities are proud of Cyclopath and it s now become, in a small way, right,
a symbol of the vibrancy of the cycling community. So that s one example. Rikke: So talking about
value, why is it valuable for IBM to have people like you and your colleagues working
on social computing? Tom: Well, a couple of things. So within IBM so IBM is a company
of nearly 400,000 people. We have a tremendous amount of expertise inside of IBM and so one
issue is how do you tap that? It s very hard to manage 400,000 people, right, and to know
what knows what and to bring the right people together. So to the extent that IBM can leverage
social computing for itself or for its other customers, IBM has lots o very large customers,
social computing can make a lot of sense working within the enterprise. Let me give one example
A number of years ago we had an experimental in-house system called IBM Community Tool
where people could join a community and a community was a bad name for it; it s really
more like just saying, m interested in Java Programming, or m an IBMer who lives in the
New Your area, or m a fan of collecting glass, it could be anything. What happened is you
would join these communities of channel I think is a more accurate way of putting it
and anyone on a channel could send little message to everybody else. So I d be sitting
here working away at my computer and there would be a ding and the little window would
slide up from the corner and it would have typically a question on it. Basically people
use this for asking questions. So if I m in the Linux community, there might be a bing,
a question would come out and somebody would say, I am trying to install [inaudible 11:32]
on the red hat, Linux 2.3 and I ve getting this error message. Help. If I can help, or
even if I can t help but I m curious about the answer, there is a button I can click
on and it pulls me into a group chat with everyone else who, at the very same moment,
saw the message and responded. So what you would get is, people would send out questions,
often these would be consultant who read the client s site having him some problem and
in a moment they send out a question, they get a group of people from all over the world
sometimes who, not only well first of all, the question might not give enough information.
So they say, Well, what install package did you use? or What s the number on the obscure
error message you re getting? So they d find out more about it and then they could very
often solve the problem right then and there, tapping, in some sense, IBM s worldwide expertise.
Whenever a consultant did that, nobody again ever asked, Why did you hire IBM? because
it was such a striking demonstration of the power of being able to tap a large community
of expertise. Rikke: But I guess, doesn t it also interrupt a lot of people to say,
Help Tom: Yes. So that s one thing. We did a study of this system; this is not our group
designs but it s one we studied because I initially heard of it and I thought, what
a stupid idea. This is going to drive people nuts. It did drive some people buts and so
they left the system or never joined it. But a bunch of people, for whatever reason, it
didn t drive them nuts. Actually, when we did the study, a lot of people who were using
it, although there was a lot of traffic over the system, there were 900 public communities
and those people were only members of the few. So the average person would maybe get
three, four, five, six little dings a day, at least the people who stay don trying to
right it. Right. People would say, Oh I see a question there. I don t know how to answer
it; I ll pop in and learn the answer or I ll pop in to see who knows the answer. Right.
Often knowing who knows if the answer is more valuable than the answer itself. So that s
the kind of thing that happened and yes, it was annoying for some people and so they didn
t use it but enough found it bearable or that it was fine. Rikke: So what first got you
into social computing? Tom: Well it was a gradual process I think, but I think, for
me, one of the starting points was when I first came to IBM. On the second day they
ask me to makeup something that I might like to work on. There was no guarantee I could
work on it but that s what they told me. I had just had an experience I found kind of
interesting which a few months, actually a few weeks ago, before that I ve been a in
a kite workshop and at the end of the workshop we all said, well this is really interesting,
we should keep talking. Let s get a mailing list going. So we discussed that and we realize,
oh, there s actually an old mailing list that s dead now that we could just sort of re-inhabit.
So we agreed that we do that. This is a workshop on patterns and so I was suppose to send out
the first message. So I went home and then I thought, well, when exactly should I send
out the message because people need to subscribe to this but mostly people weren t saying anything.
They d subscribe but they and the system wouldn t tell me who was there. So I thought to myself,
Wouldn t it be nice if somehow as people signed onto the mailing list, I could get some kind
of cues as to how many people were there and I kind of thought to myself, d just like to
see something very minimal, like little dots showing up, and so, when you get a big enough
crowd, then you get started. So that was the very maybe not the very beginning of the thinking
but that was a very formative event because I started talking about that to the folks
I was working with at IBM and somebody else in our group, a software hacker, a small talk
guy, went home and over the weekend built a little system. It wasn t quite what I envisioned;
it wasn t a mailing list. It was more of a online chat system but eventually that evolved
into a system that we came to call Babble which had, in addition to being an ordinary
multiroom chat system, it showed when people logged on by putting little dots inside a
circle. Not only could you see how many people were logged on, but whatever people were active
on Babble, which means they type a bit or they move the mouse, there dot would move
into the center of the circle. So if you have a bunch of people who are actively typing,
which you do when you talk, or if they were just mousing and scrolling which you do when
you re reading messages, you end up with this tight little cluster of dots in the center
of the circle which gets you a feel of you walk along the street and you see a crowd
of people all gathered together and you re curious and you want to know, What s going
on over there? That s how Babble worked. You could actually close down all of Babble except
for this tiny little visualization that we call the cookie and be doing your work and
you glance up, maybe finish an email or something, you glance up and you see there is a cluster
of dots and it is, Oh, my friends are there. They re talking about something. Rikke: I
want to listen or I want to participate. Tom: Yeah, yeah. So it pulled you right in. So,
for me, that was one of the big ah-has social computing journey that these social effects
you d have in the real world; seeing a crowd being curious, wanting to join because you
re curious, could be used to design online systems too. Rikke: Thank you so much, Tom,
for sharing some of your knowledge and perspectives on social computing. If you want to know more
about social computing, you should read the chapter Tom has written at interactiondesign.org.
Thank you so much for watching. Social Computing The Reason http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAhceha8EAY
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