I've finally bitten the bullet and moved over to a wordpress blog. I wanted tags and I got sick of waiting for Blogger to implement that.

Please read here:
http://rahrahfeminista.com/blog/
in the future for posts of a nerdier tenor. I'll probably still cross-post some things to livejournal, but I'm not sure for what.

Ideologies and Community Design

At the Microsoft Social Computing Conference, I listened to Clay Shirky describe the editorial policies of Slashdot. I had long assumed that Slashdot employed explicitly collaborative filtering, using reader ratings and reader visibility preferences to render the comments above the acceptability threshold -- kind of anarcho-libertarian. However, Shirky explained that, in fact, the moderation system described in this CHI paper gives some moderation power to many, but it gives relatively unconstrained moderation power to the paid editorial staff.

Is such unconstrained power explained by a anarcho-libertarian ideology? I believe it is consistent with some strains of anarcho-libertarianism to have limited government for the protection from bodily or property harm. But can offensive or low quality posts be considered such harm? No. Instead, a moderation design decision has been made because of expedience, solving a problem in the way that seems most obvious despite contradiction to an ideology.

My big assumption here is that anarcho-libertarian ideology is dominant in the Slashdot team. I have little evidence for this at the moment, but my assumption is based on books like Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish, documenting the libertarianism so common in Silicon Valley. I would love the opportunity to approach Slashdot as an ethnographer and unpack the ideologies that really influence the design.

I'm fascinated by this question of how ideologies influence design. My fascination was reengaged reading Lofland and Lofland's "Analyzing Social Settings" tonight.

At the broader level are meaning "packages" that are life-encompassing, that lay claim to relevance for virtually any topic that might be discussed. Such packages are often called ideologies, worldviews... (p. 113)

And later:

Because the situations of living are constantly changing, new and often novel meanings are constantly being generated to cope with new contingencies. (p.116)

It's this process of ideology negotiation, or ideology salience, or hypocrisy in the design of techno-social systems that I think is really interesting. What are the kinds of political or belief systems people try to reproduce through their technical systems? And how does it go? People reappropriate technologies all the time.

Projects that would be cool:

• ethnographic account of design processes at two different sites of technological creation, especially when the technology has the property of being distributable at very low cost to many, many people -- bonus points for distributable across cultures.
• investigation of what a moderated community means to its members; how is that moderation interpreted or experienced, if at all consciously?
  

Implications for Design by Paul Dourish (CHI 2006 paper)

Central points:

• The requirements that ethnography provide an "implications for design" creates a relationship in which knowledge is produced for the benefit of the designers and administrators -- those who wish to create some goal state in a system that happens to have people ("users") in it. Instead, Suchman proposes ethnography as providing an account of the partnership in which producers and consumers co-constitute one another, in part through technological artifacts.
  
• A key part of ethnography often lost in the way ethnography gets thrown about as a design methodology is the self-consciousness of the observer as a part of the social relations richly described. The observer is not a positivist instrument for transmitting impressions of the observed. (However, a lot of SCOT could be construed as including this subjectivity in non-human observation instruments' construction as well.)
• Ethnography can have empirical outcomes, which inform others of the simple facts observed, as framed and understood by the observer, but we should not overlook the analytical outcome -- those that, when revealed, call into question or qualify assumptions tacit in the design, the specification, the technologist-consumer relationship...

I read this article because I was writing an email to PD and I wanted to make sure I didn't misuse ethnography and ethnomethodology when I really meant interview. I got more than I bargained for, but that's good.