The Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation

PANEL: The Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation

Billions of people contribute knowledge and opinions through wikis, discussion forums, and blog communities, while others build collective intelligence by tagging photos, rating movies, reviewing restaurants, and commenting on political events. These social applications showed huge growth during the past ten years, but still newer innovations may overtake them. All around us, technology-mediated social participation has been harnessed for remarkable social benefits and social change.

But, there are dangers: many projects fail to motivate enough users, and some social media are used effectively by criminals, terrorists, racial hate groups, or oppressive dictators. However, new thrusts in basic research and engineering are likely to move beyond existing socio-technical media to produce new participatory systems. These developments could produce profound transformations in healthcare, community safety, disaster response, life-long learning, business innovation, energy sustainability, environmental protection, and other spheres of important national priorities. Attention to potential dangers, especially concerning security and privacy, will also have to be considered.

This panel, which brings together researchers from industry and academia to discuss the future potential of a new field of technology-mediated social participation, is part of the Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation being hosted at PARC from 10-11 December.

HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE:

• We will be live-streaming this panel here.
• For those watching remotely, use the hashtag #TMSPpanel to follow and join the disucssion in real time!
• We will also be taking questions via Twitter. Please tweet it to @PARCinc where we will be selecting a few to ask our panelists.

Presenter(s)

About the hosts:

• Peter Pirolli (PARC)
• Jenny Preece (U. Maryland)

About the panelists:

• Ben Shneiderman (U. Maryland)
• Amy Bruckman (Georgia Tech)
• Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs)
• Cameron Marlow (Facebook)