[NEC] 1.8: In-room Chat as a Social Tool

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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture 

           Published periodically / # 1.8 / December 30, 2002 
               Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html

In this issue:

 - Introduction
 - Essay: In-room Chat as a Social Tool
    (Also at http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/26/inroom_chat.html)
 - Kazaa and the numbers
 - Worth Reading
   - EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies essays
   - Zooko and Gonze on FriendNet
 - Open Questions:
   - What is the most successful online community you know?

* Introduction =======================================================

Back to social software. 

This issue's essay concerns an experiment I ran in November during a
two-day meeting on the subject of social software. During the two
days, we had a dedicated chat room open to the participants (most of
whom had Wifi-capable laptops). This created a fascinating two-channel
experience: a live conversation in the room, and a second real-time
text conversation in the chat room, running in parallel.

Though I am generally a member of the ASCII Liberation Front, this
essay is improved by the two images that show the set-up of the room,
so you may want to read it at its home on the Web:
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/26/inroom_chat.html. (I'm
pleased to say that O'Reilly has agreed to publish this essay, and NEC
essays generally.)

Also, with this issue, NEC writings now appear with a Creative Commons
Attribution License:

  The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform
  the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.

More on Creative Commons licenses at http://creativecommons.org/

Last NEC of the year. Thank you all for reading. See you in January.

-clay

* Essay ==============================================================

In-room Chat as a Social Tool
  (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/26/inroom_chat.html)

This fall, I hosted a two-day brainstorming session for 30 or so
people on the subject of social software. The event, sponsored by
Cap-Gemini's Center for Business Innovation and Nokia's Insight and
Foresight unit, took place in an open loft, and in addition to the
usual "sit around a big table and talk to each other" format, we set
up an in-room chat channel accessible over the WiFi network. We hosted
the chat using Greg Elin's modifications to Manuel Kiessling's lovely
ARSC (A Really Simple Chat) software. 
http://manuel.kiessling.net/projects/software/arsc/

(Greg and I had used a similar setup in a somewhat different setting,
and we were determined to experiment further at the social software
event.)

The in-room chat created a two-channel experience -- a live conversation 
in the room, and an overlapping real-time text conversation. The 
experiment was a strong net positive for the group. Most social software 
is designed as a replacement for face-to-face meetings, but the spread of 
permanet (connectivity like air) provides opportunities for social 
software to be used by groups who are already gathered in the same 
location. For us, the chat served as a kind of social whiteboard. In this 
note, I want to detail what worked and why, what the limitations and 
downsides of in-room chat were, and point out possible future avenues for 
exploration.

- The Setup

The setup was quite simple. We were working in a large open loft, seated 
around a ring of tables, and we connected a WiFi hub to the room's cable 
modem. Most of the participants had WiFi-capable laptops, and ARSC works 
in a browser, so there were no client issues. We put a large plasma screen 
at one end of the room.

We created a chat room for the event, and asked the participants using the 
chat to log in using their first name. In addition, we created a special 
username, Display, which we logged into a machine connected to the plasma 
screen. The Display interface had no text-entry field, suppressed control 
messages, and had its font set very large. This maximized screen real 
estate for user-entered messages, and made them readable even by 
participants sitting 10 meters away (though it minimized the amount of 
scroll-back visible on the plasma screen.)

  http://www.openp2p.com/p2p/2002/12/26/graphics/conference-room.jpg
  Figure 1. The conference room.

  http://www.openp2p.com/p2p/2002/12/26/graphics/arsc-screen.jpg
  Figure 2. Private and public screens.
    Photos courtesy http://www.heiferman.com

We made the participants aware of the chat room at the beginning of the 
event, and set no other rules for its use (though at one point, we asked 
that people only use the chat room, saying nothing out loud for half an 
hour.) The chat room was available throughout the meeting. The first 10 
minutes of the chat were the usual set of test messages, hellos, and other 
"My hovercraft is full of eels" randomness, but once the meeting got 
rolling, the chat room became an invaluable tool.

- The Advantages

The chat room created several advantages.

1. It changed interrupt logic

Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone 
is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite 
with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict 
the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are 
often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up 
comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed 
by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People 
who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts 
before speaking are at a disadvantage.

Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite valuable, so 
if an absolute "no interrupt" rule were enforced, at least some material 
of general interest would be lost, and the frustration level among the 
participants consigned solely to passive listening would rise 
considerably.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the 
conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential 
material in the chat room while listening in the real room. It was 
remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to finish a complex 
thought without being cut off. And because chat participants had no way of 
interrupting one another in the chat room, even people not given to 
speaking out loud could participate. Indeed, one of our most active 
participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation 
and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.

2. "Note to self" became "Note to world"

The more successful a meeting, the more "note to self" moments happen, 
where a light goes off in someone's head, and they are moved to write the 
insight down for later examination. The chat channel provided an 
interesting alternative to personal note-taking, which was group 
note-taking. By entering "notes to self" into the chat, participants could 
both archive thoughts (the chat was logged) and to share those thoughts 
with the rest of the room to see what reactions they might spark. This is 
slightly different than simply altering interrupt logic, and more along 
the lines of Cory Doctorow's "outboard brain" idea, because in this case, 
the chat was capturing material that would not otherwise have been shared 
with the group.

3. High-quality text annotation

What the spoken word has in emotive quality, it lacks in precision. Much 
interesting material thrown out during the course of group conversations 
is difficult to capture in an ideal form. When taking notes, it's easy to 
misspell a name or mis-punctuate an URL, and things committed solely to 
memory can be difficult to retrieve later ("Somebody said something about 
a researcher in Oregon? Uraguay? The name began with a G ..."). Comments 
in the chat log solved these problems -- if the attendees were talking 
about Gerd Korteum's work, or the Kuro5hin website, the spelling and 
punctuation were unambiguous.

There were two additional effects that improved the quality of the text 
annotation. Because everyone was connected to the Web, not just the local 
chat, the participants could Google for Web sites and quotes before they 
posted. (At one point during the Friday session, a fierce rain started, 
and someone pasted the US Weather service advisory for the area into the 
chat.) And because ARSC turns URLs into links, the rest of the group could 
click on a link in the chat window when it was added, so that new material 
could be glanced at and bookmarked in context, rather than hours or days 
later.

The annotation was also affected by the one-way relation between the real 
world conversation and the chat. Though it's too early to know whether 
this was a bug or a feature, themes from the real world conversation were 
constantly reflected in the chat room, but almost never vice-versa. This 
suggests that the participants regarded the chat as a place for ancillary 
comments, rather than a separate but equal conversational space.

4. Less whispering, more \whispering

People whisper to one another during conferences, sometimes for good 
reasons ("What does UDDI mean?") and sometimes for not-so-good ones ("So 
this Estonian guy goes into a bar ..."). Like interrupting, however, a 
blanket "No whispering" ban would throw the good out with the bad, and 
would reduce the quality of the experience for the attendees. Furthermore, 
even when there is a good reason to whisper to someone, the larger the 
conference, the likelier it is you won't be seated next to them.

The \whisper command in ARSC means that, topologically, everyone is seated 
next to everyone else. By typing "\whisper Rusty," a participant could 
send a point-to-point message to Rusty without disrupting the meeting. 
Though the whispers weren't logged, an informal poll at the end of the 
second day showed that a large majority of chat room participants had used 
\whisper at some point.

Ironically, the effectiveness of the \whisper command was somewhat limited 
by the "split screen" focus between the room and the chat. Because 
\whisper requests went to the invitee's laptop, if someone was looking 
away from their screen for a few minutes, they would miss the invitation, 
since \whisper requests didn't go to the plasma screen. One user suggested 
the addition of a \pssst function of some sort to get someone's attention. 
Another possibility would be making a second \whisper-only window, so that 
\whisper conversations could be more asynchronous.

5. Alleviated boredom

Groups of people have diverse interests, so no matter how generally 
scintillating a meeting overall, at some point someone is going to find 
the subject at hand dull. The in-room chat helped alleviate this boredom, 
while keeping the participants talking to one another about the subject at 
hand.

This is the advantage hardest to understand in the abstract. When I talk 
about the in-room chat, people often ask "But isn't that distracting? 
Don't you want to make people pay attention to the speaker?" This is 
similar to the question from the early days of the Web: "But why have any 
outside links at all? Don't you want to make people stay on your site?"

Once you assume permanet, whether from Wifi, Richochet, or GPRS, this 
logic crumbles. Anyone with a laptop or phone can, if they are bored, turn 
to the Internet, and the question becomes "Given that attendees will be 
using the network, would you rather have them talking to one another, or 
reading Slashdot?" The people who gathered in NYC came to converse with 
one another, and the in-room chat provided a way for them to meet that 
goal even when they were not riveted by the main event.

- The Context

Chat as a meeting tool isn't a universally good idea, of course. Every 
successful use of social software has environmental factors working in its 
favor.

First and foremost, the attendees were tech-savvy people who travel with 
WiFi-capable laptops and think about novel uses of social software, so 
they were inclined to want to use something like ARSC, even if only as an 
experiment. There was no resistance to trying something so odd and 
unproven, as there might be in less-techie groups.

The group was also self-motivated. Because their attendance was optional, 
they largely stayed on-topic. One can easily imagine that in a meeting 
where attendance is passive and forced ("The boss wants everyone in the 
conference room at 5:45") the contents of the chat would be much more 
tangential (to say nothing of libelous). Since most parliamentary rules, 
whether formal or informal, begin with the premise that only one person 
can speak at once, and then arrange elaborate rules for determining who 
can speak when, the presence of an alternate channel could severely 
disrupt highly-structured meetings, such as client conferences or legal 
negotiations. Whether this would be a bug or a feature depends on your 
point of view.

The goals of the meeting were in synch with the experience the chat room 
offered. We were not trying to forge a working group, get to consensus, or 
even converge on a small set of ideas. Indeed, the goals of the meeting 
were explicitly divergent, trying to uncover and share as much new 
material as possible in a short period. The chat room aided this goal 
admirably.

The scale of the meeting also worked in our favor. The group was large 
enough that sitting around a table with a laptop open wasn't rude or 
disruptive, but small enough that everyone could use a single chat room. 
At one point during the Saturday session, we broke into small groups to 
brainstorm around specific problems, and though there was no explicit 
request to do so, every single member of the group shut their laptop 
screens for two hours. Groups of six are small enough that all the members 
can feel engaged with the group, and the chat would have been much less 
useful and much more rude in that setting.

On the other hand, whenever things got really active on the chat channel 
(we averaged about four posts a minute, but it sometimes spiked to 10 or 
so), people complained about the lack of threading, suggesting that 30 was 
at or near an upper limit for participation.
Meeting Structure

There were also some more technical or formal aspects of the meeting that 
worked in our favor.

The plasma screen showing the Display view was surprisingly important. We 
had not announced the WiFi network or chat channel in advance, and we had 
no idea how many people would bring WiFi-capable laptops. (As it turned 
out, most did.) The plasma screen was there to share the chat room's 
contents with the disconnected members. However, the screen also added an 
aspect of social control -- because anything said in the chat room was 
displayed openly, it helped keep the conversation on-topic. Curiously, 
this seemed to be true even though most of the room was reading the 
contents of the chat on their laptop screens. The plasma screen created a 
public feeling without actually exposing the contents to a "public" 
different from the attendees.

During a brief post-mortem, several users reported using the plasma screen 
for chunking, so that they could mainly pay attention to the speaker, but 
flash their eyes to the screen occasionally to see what was in the chat 
room, taking advantage of the fact that most people read much faster than 
most speakers talk. (Viz. the horror of the speaker who puts up a 
PowerPoint page, and then reads each point.)

There were two bits of organizational structure that also helped shape the 
meeting. The first was our adoption of Jerry Michalski's marvelous "Red 
Card/Green Card" system, where participants were given a set of colored 
cards about 20 cm square in three colors, red, green, and gray. The cards 
were used to make explicit but non-verbal commentary on what was being 
said at the time. A green card indicates strong assent, red strong 
dissent, and gray confusion.

In an earlier experiment with ARSC, Greg added virtual cards; users could 
click on red or green icons and have those added to the chat. This proved 
unsatisfying, and for this meeting we went back to the use of physical 
cards. The use of the cards to indicate non-verbal and emotive reactions 
seemed to provide a nice balance with the verbal and less emotive written 
material. At one point, we spent half an hour in conversation with the 
only rule being "No talking." The entire room was chatting for 30 minutes, 
and even in that situation, people would physically wave green cards 
whenever anyone posted anything particularly worthy in the chat room.

While the no-talking experiment was interesting, it was not particularly 
useful. One of the participants whose work was being discussed in the chat 
(he had just finished talking when we entered the no-talking period) 
reported missing the actual verbal feedback from colleagues. The chat 
comments made about his ideas, while cogent, lacked the emotional 
resonance that makes face-to-face meetings work. By enforcing the 
no-talking rule, we had re-created some of the disadvantages of virtual 
meetings in a real room.

The other bit of organizational structure was borrowed from Elliott 
Maxwell and the Aspen Institute, where participants wanting to speak would 
turn their name cards vertically, thus putting comments in a queue. This 
was frustrating for many of the participants, who had to wait several 
minutes to react to something. This also severely altered interrupt logic. 
(At several points, people gave up their turn to speak, saying "the moment 
has passed.") Despite the frustration it caused, this system kept us 
uncovering new material as opposed to going down rat holes, and it made 
the chat room an attractive alternative for saying something immediate.
The Disadvantages

Though we found ARSC to be a useful addition to the meeting, there was an 
unusually good fit between the tool and the environment. For every 
favorable bit of context listed above, there is a situation where an 
in-room chat channel would be inappropriate. Meetings where the attention 
to the speaker needs to be more total would be problematic, as would 
situations where a majority of the audience is either not connected or 
uncomfortable with chat.

Even in this group, not everyone had a laptop, and for those people, the 
chat contents were simply a second channel of information that they could 
observe but not affect. Absolute ubiquity of the necessary hardware is 
some way off for even tech-savvy groups, and several years away, at least, 
for the average group. Any meeting wanting to implement a system like this 
will have to take steps to make the chat optional, or to provide the 
necessary hardware where it is lacking.

It may also be that increasing phone/PDA fusion will actually reduce the 
number of laptops present at meetings. Using social tools at events where 
phones are the personal device of choice will require significant 
additional thought around the issues of small screens, thumb keyboards, 
and other ergonomic issues.

In-room chat is unlikely to be useful for small groups (fewer than a 
dozen, at a guess), and its usefulness for groups larger than 30 may also 
be marginal (though in that case, ways of providing multiple chat rooms 
may be helpful).

Given that the most profound effects of the chat were in changing 
interrupt logic, many of the downsides came from the loss of interruption 
as a tool. As annoying as interruptions may be, they help keep people 
honest, by placing a premium on brevity, and on not spinning castles in 
the air. Without interruption, the speaker loses an important feedback 
mechanism, and may tend towards long-winded and unsupported claims. At the 
very least, the use of in-room chat puts a premium on strong moderation of 
some sort, to make up for the structural loss of interruption.

Perhaps most importantly, it will almost certainly be unhelpful for groups 
that need to function as a team. Because the two-track structure 
encourages a maximum number of new and tangential items being placed 
together, it would probably be actively destructive for groups where 
consensus was a goal. As Steven Johnson has noted about the event, the 
chat room moved most of the humor from real world interjections to network 
ones, which preserved the humor but suppressed the laughter. (Most of then 
time when people write "lol," they aren't.) Though this helps on the 
"interrupt logic" front, it also detracts from building group cohesion.

- Next Steps

This experiment was relatively small and short, having been applied to one 
group over two days. It would be interesting to know what the effect would 
be for groups meeting for longer periods. On the first day, we averaged 
not quite three and a half posts a minute, occasionally spiking to nine or 
10. On the second day, the average rose to just over four posts a minute, 
but the spikes didn't change, suggesting that users were becoming more 
accustomed to a steady pace of posting.

During the half-hour of chat only/no talking out loud, the average nearly 
tripled, to over 11 posts a minute, and occasionally spiking to 18, 
suggesting that during the normal sessions, users were paying what Linda 
Stone calls "continuous partial attention" to both the chat room and the 
real room, and with the structures of the real room artificially 
suppressed, the chat room exploded. (The question of whether the change in 
posting rate was uniform among all users is difficult to answer with the 
small sample data.)

Several additional experiments suggest themselves:

    * For conferences whose sessions average no more than 30 users, having 
each room assigned its own chat channel could let users listening to the 
same talk find one another with little effort. Likewise, finding ways of 
forking large groups into multiple chats might be worthwhile, whether 
using specific characteristics (UI designers in one, information 
architects in another, and so on) or arbitrary ones (even or odd date of 
birth) to keep the population of any one channel in the 12-25 range. (The 
lack of plasma screen as a public mediating factor might be an issue.)

    * ARSC translates URLs into clickable links. This suggests other 
regular expressions that could be added. "A:" plus an author name or "T:" 
plus a title could be turned into Amazon lookups. A QuoteBot might be very 
useful, as several times during the two days someone asked "Who said 'Let 
the wild rumpus start'?" A social network analysis bot might be 
interesting, logging things like most and least frequent posters, and 
social clustering, and reflecting those back to the group. (Cameron Marlow 
of blogdex wrote a simple program during the meeting to display the number 
of chat posts per user.)

    * The social network angle, of course, is hampered by the lack of 
threading in chat. This is obviously a hard problem, but several people 
wondered whether there might be a lightweight way to indicate who you are 
responding to, to create rudimentary threading. This may be a problem best 
fixed socially. If we had asked people to adopt the general IRC convention 
of posting with the name of the recipient first ("greg: interesting idea, 
but almost certainly illegal"), we might have gotten much better implicit 
threading. This in turn would have been greatly helped by tab-completion 
of nicknames in ARSC.

    * The \whisper function is secret, rather than private. In a real 
meeting, seeing who is having a side conversation can allow the group as a 
whole to feel the overall dynamic, so a private \whisper function might be 
an interesting addition, entering lines into the chat like "Clay whispers 
to Cameron," but providing no information about the content of those 
conversations.

    * Likewise, it might be useful to flag interesting or relevant posts 
for later review. If someone says something particularly cogent, other 
users could click a link next to the post labeled "Archive me," and in 
addition to appearing in the general log, such posts would go to a second 
"flagged comments only" log.

    * Greg provided a polling function, but you had to click off the chat 
page to get there, and it was only used once, as a test. Given this 
failure, polling and voting functions may need to appear directly in the 
chat room to be useful. Bots are an obvious interface to do this as well. 
A PollingBot could ask questions in the chat room and accept answers by 
\whisper.

    * Given that meetings generally involve people looking at similar 
issues from different backgrounds, DCC-like user-to-user file transfer 
might be a valuable tool for sharing background materials among the 
participants, by letting them send local files as well as URLs over the 
chat interface.

    * We got close to the edge of IRC-style chaos, where the chat scrolls 
by too fast to read it. A buffering chat channel might solve this problem, 
by having some maximum rate set on the order of 120-150 words a minute, 
and then simply delaying posts that go over that limit into the next 
minute, and so on. This congestion queuing would let everyone say what 
they want to say without dampening the ability of other participants to 
take it all in before reaction.

    * Finally, ARSC is server-based. With Zeroconf networking, it might be 
possible to set up ad hoc, peer-to-peer networks of laptops without 
needing to coordinate anything in advance. Likewise, while DCC-ish file 
transfer might be valuable for person-to-person file sharing, the ability 
to post "I have a draft of my article on my hard drive at such and such a 
local address" and have that material be as accessible as if it were on 
the Web would make public sharing of background materials much easier.

- Conclusion

Real world groups are accustomed to having tools to help them get their 
work done -- flipcharts, white boards, projectors, and so on. These tools 
are typically used by only one person at a time. This experiment 
demonstrated the possibility of social tools, tools that likewise aid a 
real-world group, but that are equally accessible to all members at the 
same time. There are a number of other experiments one can imagine, from 
using the chat to accept input from remote locations to integrating 
additional I/O devices such as cameras or projectors. The core 
observation, though, is that under certain conditions, groups can find 
value in participating in two simultaneous conversation spaces, one real 
and one virtual.



* Kazaa and the Numbers ==================================================

Recently, I dug out an old Windows box for an experiment (I switched
to the Mac this spring), and while I had it running, I decided to see
what was going on on the Windows side of the P2P world. I went to
download the latest version of Kazaa, and what to my wondering eyes
should appear but the legend on download.com: 169,442,614 downloads,
more than 3 million of which were in the last 7 days.

Napster's strategy was to constantly call attention to its numbers, on
the theory that 70 million users can't be wrong. This, it turned out,
was like calling in their co-ordinates to enemy artillery. Kazaa has
pursued a different strategy, making little fuss about itself in
public, and has had a hundred million more downloads than Napster had
in its heyday. Its current rate of growth is something like 2 Napsters
a year.

The press has died down on file-sharing networks, but their adoption
is now stronger, not weaker, than before the RIAA put Napster out of
business.

* Worth Reading =========================================================

- EverQuest and Star Wars

Two interesting game articles, one on EverQuest, and one on Star Wars:

EverQuest as a Skinner Box, from an insider's perspective:
http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html

  "One important tenet of Operant Conditioning is that behaviors are
  not inherently rewarding - they are made rewarding through
  reinforcement. It is the shaping process in EverQuest that makes the
  in-game "achievements" rewarding. It is the shaping process that
  make "achievements" achievements. People who don't play EQ don't see
  the appeal in clicking "COMBINE" in front of a forge for hours."

A Star Wars Galaxies post, by one of the developers, detailing why
players will be allowed only one character per game account. Though it
is written for a specific community, it is a fascinating description
of the effects of multiple personalities in immersive environments:
http://boards.station.sony.com/ubb/starwars/Forum3/HTML/088000.html

  "Identifiability of a character goes a very long way towards
  preventing misbehavior. People are less likely to grief when it is
  their sole character at stake. People are more likely to trust
  others when there's an established identity. Anonymity is the enemy
  of community ties.  It's as simple as that. This increases the link
  between a person and their actions, creating greater accountability."

- Zooko and Gonze on FriendNet

Two brief and speculative essays on Friendnet, the overlay of human
topology on network topology:

Lucas Gonze:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2428

  "Unlike automated reputation systems like Advogato, the Slashdot
  moderation system, eBay seller ratings, and MojoNation, reputation
  management in a friendnet is a manual operation. This is a good
  thing: humans are good at fuzzy reasoning and computers aren't."
  
Bryce "Zooko" Wilcox-O'Hearn:
http://zooko.com/log-2002-12.html (Scroll down to 2002-12-14)

  "But it seems to me that the first thing we should do is go back and
  reconsider step 1: the part where you forget everything you know
  about your friends and family and treat messages received over the
  Internet from strangers half-way around the world the same as
  messages received over the Internet from your best friend. I think
  that the emergent network designer should focus on the human
  context, both because the human context is where our ultimate goals
  and values are defined, and also because the human context is the
  best source of a uniquely valuable network resource: trust."

* Open Questions =========================================================

A question I have been asking myself for a while now is "What works in
online community?" The answers are elusive, because the list of things
that are true of all successful groups is both short and self-evident.

The interesting stuff is the stuff that is true of specific
communities without being true in general. Trash talking and violence
characterize many online games, but can be highly destructive in
non-game environments. Programmers groups are often characterized by a
level of disagreement that average mailing list subscriber would flee
from. And so on.

So I've switched the question, and am asking myself "What's the most
successful online community I know?"

And now I'm asking you that question too.

* End ====================================================================

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2002, Clay Shirky