Towards a classification framework for social machines

Abstract

The state of the art in human interaction with computational systems blurs the line between computations performed by machine logic and algorithms, and those that result from input by humans, arising from their own psychological processes and life experience. Current socio-technical systems, known as 'social machines' exploit the large-scale interaction of humans with machines. Interactions that are motivated by numerous goals and purposes including financial gain, charitable aid, and simply for fun. In this paper we explore the landscape of social machines, both past and present, with the aim of defining an initial classificatory framework. Through a number of knowledge elicitation and refinement exercises we have identified the polyarchical relationship between infrastructure, social machines, and large-scale social initiatives. Our initial framework describes classification constructs in the areas of contributions, participants, and motivation. We present an initial characterization of some of the most popular social machines, as demonstration of the use of the identified constructs. We believe that it is important to undertake an analysis of the behaviour and phenomenology of social machines, and of their growth and evolution over time. Our future work will seek to elicit additional opinions, classifications and validation from a wider audience, to produce a comprehensive framework for the description, analysis and comparison of social machines. 1. WHAT ARE SOCIAL MACHINES Once upon a time 'machines' were programmed by programmers and used by users. The success of the Web has changed this relationship: we now see configurations of people interacting with content and with each other, typified by social Web sites. Rather than drawing a line through such Web-based systems to separate the human and digital parts (as computer science has traditionally done), we can now draw a line around them and treat each such compound as a 'social machine'-a machine in which the two aspects are seamlessly interwoven. This was the insight be-Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

Crowdsourcing and the Semantic Web: A Research Manifesto

“…An alternative way to look at this space is by considering the kinds of activities the crowd is expected to perform, which some crowdsourcing sources group into data collection, data analysis, and problem-solving (Shadbolt et al, 2013). The first refers to those situations in which new data, in our case new Semantic Web artifacts such as ontologies, knowledge bases, data sets of some sorts, benchmarks, gold standards and so on are created or enriched through crowd contributions.…”

Digital Taxonomy for Sustainability

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“…There are important features that the framework does not distinguish. First, the role of ICTs in linking large numbers of people to form social machines [13], such as social networks, e-marketplaces, collaborative working, collaborative consumption [14], or crowdfunding. Second, the crucial role of ICTs in shaping and transferring ideas as well as products.…”

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