Todd Davies

Todd Davies, Mike D. Mintz

We characterize the "social Web" and argue for several features that are desirable for users of socially oriented web applications. We describe the architecture of Deme, a web content management system (WCMS) and extensible framework, and show how it implements these desired features. We then compare Deme on our desiderata with other web technologies: traditional HTML, previous open source WCMSs (illustrated by Drupal), commercial Web 2.0 applications, and open-source, object-oriented web application frameworks. The analysis suggests that a WCMS can be well suited to building social websites if it makes more of the features of object-oriented programming, such as polymorphism, and class inheritance, available to non-programmers in an accessible vocabulary.

Stanley J. Rosenschein, Todd Davies

Coordination is a key problem for addressing goal-action gaps in many human endeavors. We define interpersonal coordination as a type of communicative action characterized by low interpersonal belief and goal conflict. Such situations are particularly well described as having collectively "intelligent", "common good" solutions, viz., ones that almost everyone would agree constitute social improvements. Coordination is useful across the spectrum of interpersonal communication -- from isolated individuals to organizational teams. Much attention has been paid to coordination in teams and organizations. In this paper we focus on the looser interpersonal structures we call active support networks (ASNs), and on technology that meets their needs. We describe two needfinding investigations focused on social support, which examined (a) four application areas for improving coordination in ASNs: (i) academic coaching, (ii) vocational training, (iii) early learning intervention, and (iv) volunteer coordination; and (b) existing technology relevant to ASNs. We find a thus-far unmet need for personal task management software that allows smooth integration with an individual's active support network. Based on identified needs, we then describe an open architecture for coordination that has been developed into working software. The design includes a set of capabilities we call "social prompting," as well as templates for accomplishing multi-task goals, and an engine that controls coordination in the network. The resulting tool is currently available and in continuing development. We explain its use in ASNs with an example. Follow-up studies are underway in which the technology is being applied in existing support networks.

Eric Showers, Nathan Tindall, Todd Davies

Online deliberation may provide a more cost-effective and/or less inhibiting environment for public participation than face to face (F2F). But do online methods bias participation toward certain individuals or groups? We compare F2F versus online participation in an experiment affording within-participants and cross-modal comparisons. For English speakers required to have Internet access as a condition of participation, we find no negative effects of online modes on equality of participation (EoP) related to gender, age, or educational level. Asynchronous online discussion appears to improve EoP for gender relative to F2F. Data suggest a dampening effect of online environments on black participants, as well as amplification for whites. Synchronous online voice communication EoP is on par with F2F across individuals. But individual-level EoP is much lower in the online forum, and greater online forum participation predicts greater F2F participation for individuals. Measured rates of participation are compared to self-reported experiences, and other findings are discussed.

Lu Xiao, Weiyu Zhang, Anna Przybylska et al.

There has been rapidly growing interest in studying and designing online deliberative processes and technologies. This SIG aims at providing a venue for continuous and constructive dialogue between social, political and cognitive sciences as well as computer science, HCI, and CSCW. Through an online community and a modified version of world cafe discussions, we contribute to the definition of the theoretical building blocks, the identification of a research agenda for the CHI community, and the network of individuals from academia, industry, and the public sector who share interests in different aspects of online deliberation.

Todd Davies, Reid Chandler

This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the spatiotemporal distance separating participants, the communication medium, and the deliberative process to be followed. After a brief overview of criteria for evaluating different design options, empirical findings are organized around design choices. Research has evolved away from treating technology for online deliberation dichotomously (either present or not) toward nuanced findings that differentiate between technological features, ways of using them, and cultural settings. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on how well the communicative environment is matched to the deliberative task. Tradeoffs, e.g. between rich and lean media and between anonymous and identifiable participation, suggest different designs depending on the purpose and participants. Findings are limited by existing technologies, and may change as technologies and users co-evolve.

Todd Davies, Brendan O'Connor, Alex Cochran et al.

We have created a platform for online deliberation called Deme (which rhymes with 'team'). Deme is designed to allow groups of people to engage in collaborative drafting, focused discussion, and decision making using the Internet. The Deme project has evolved greatly from its beginning in 2003. This chapter outlines the thinking behind Deme's initial design: our motivations for creating it, the principles that guided its construction, and its most important design features. The version of Deme described here was written in PHP and was deployed in 2004 and used by several groups (including organizers of the 2005 Online Deliberation Conference). Other papers describe later developments in the Deme project (see Davies et al. 2005, 2008; Davies and Mintz 2009).

Todd Davies, Benjamin Newman, Brendan O'Connor et al.

We describe and motivate three goals for the screen display of asynchronous text deliberation pertaining to a document: (1) visibility of relationships between comments and the text they reference, between different comments, and between group members and the document and discussion, and (2) distinguishability of boundaries between contextually related and unrelated text and comments and between individual authors of documents and comments. Interfaces for document-centered discussion generally fail to fulfill one or both of these goals as well as they could. We describe the design of the new version of Deme, a Web-based platform for online deliberation, and argue that it achieves the two goals better than other recent designs.

Todd Davies, Brendan O'Connor, Alex Cochran et al.

Design choices can be clarified when group interaction software is directed at solving the interaction needs of particular groups that pre-date the groupware. We describe an example: the Deme platform for online deliberation. Traditional threaded conversation systems are insufficient for solving the problem at which Deme is aimed, namely, that the democratic process in grassroots community groups is undermined both by the limited availability of group members for face-to-face meetings and by constraints on the use of information in real-time interactions. We describe and motivate design elements, either implemented or planned for Deme, that addresses this problem. We believe that "problem focused" design of software for preexisting groups provides a useful framework for evaluating the appropriateness of design elements in groupware generally.

Todd Davies, Mike D. Mintz

We describe an access control model that has been implemented in the web content management framework "Deme" (which rhymes with "team"). Access control in Deme is an example of what we call "bivalent relation object access control"(BROAC). This model builds on recent work by Giunchiglia et al. on relation-based access control (RelBAC), as well as other work on relational, flexible, fine-grained, and XML access control models. We describe Deme's architecture and review access control models, motivating our approach. BROAC allows for both positive and negative permissions, which may conflict with each other. We argue for the usefulness of defining access control rules as objects in the target database, and for the necessity of resolving permission conflicts in a social Web/collaboration architecture. After describing how Deme access control works, including the precedence relations between different permission types in Deme, we provide several examples of realistic scenarios in which permission conflicts arise, and show how Deme resolves them. Initial performance tests indicate that permission checking scales linearly in time on a practical Deme website.