Digital Capital Week

HashPop Programming and Design Challenge: Supporting Information Diffusion and Popping the Filter Bubble
Get nerdy. Be innovative. Make a difference.

Date: Friday, November 11, 2011
Time: 10:00am – 1:00pm
Location: Artisphere, in the Lower Town Hall area, 1101 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22209, http://artisphere.com/visit.aspx
Project site: http://www.hashpop.org – Coming soon…not yet live.
Tags: social issues, filter bubble, machine learning, text analysis, data science, topic modeling, getting nerdy

Agenda
10:00-10:30 Introductions
10:30-11:00 The Challenge
11:00-11:15 Brainstorm
11:15-11:30 Groups
11:30-12:30 Design/Hack
12:30-1:00 Presentations, Prizes, Next steps

The task
We want YOU to help us develop a tool/system/interface/application that helps bring new types of information to underserved individuals who use Twitter (or other social media platforms). It’s our hope that we can add this new tool/system/interface/application to an existing website called BRIDGE (http://www.thebridgeprojectdc.org/), which uses traditional methods of information and resource gathering to support DC’s most vulnerable populations and community based organizations. Though our focus will be on an initial case study of the online homeless, this project will be transferable across domains from politics related to upcoming elections or social movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street..

The challenge
In the Information Age, the “filter bubble” impacts all of us (http://www.thefilterbubble.com/). However, there are certain situations in which the stakes are higher for not receiving “new” or “unprejudiced” information. Consider extreme cases such as a rare form of cancer or experiencing homelessness for the first time due to the recent recession in the United States. These examples highlight situations in which the user needs access to new and specific kinds of information while transitioning through a challenging life experience.

Social media has paved new roads for civic engagement and empowerment for marginalized populations, particularly as access to broadband connections through public libraries, computer labs, and mobile phones becomes more prevalent. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook give new meaning to “getting connected” to information and resources. Our research shows a growing number of self-identified homeless individuals, homeless advocates, and homeless support organizations are using the Twitter platform. We have also found that these individuals may be communicating in a vacuum, sharing the same information to the same people, or “preaching to the choir”. This is what we call a societal filter bubble, which can also be shaped algorithmic filter bubbles. The challenge is to develop innovative tools/systems/interfaces/whatever you come up with for popping these bubbles. For example, how could we use existing communication features on Twitter, such as the hashtag and @mention, to promote information diffusion in order to allow the broadest range of useful information to get to the people who might need it most?

An example
A man in California lives in his car. Though homeless, he has a job and accesses Twitter at work and on his mobile phone. He’s part of what call the “21st Century Homeless” to help shift traditional perceptions of homelessness away from the stereotypical view. He was a victim of the home foreclosure crisis and is experiencing homelessness for the first time. He has become part of a community on Twitter called @WeAreVisible. He tweets to this group daily and uses hashtags like #homeless, #poverty, and #socialjustice. Others in the network do too. What would happen if we joined some of those hashtags with completely different ones, like #bananas, #sale, or #freeroom?* Could we make sense of this new information (some sort of human validation, maybe using Mechanical Turk)? Could this new information help get new types of information to people? Homelessness is just one example where this type of tool could be helpful. Imagine scaling it up to political debates and helping individuals stay informed of both sides of a debated issue?

There are many ways that this problem could be tackled and this is just one idea. What other innovative and creative ways can we come up with?

How you can get involved
For this project we need people who have all sorts of programming skills, who may have experience developing third-party applications for social media, who have linguistic or text mining skills, who know recommendation systems, and who are just generally interested in out-of-the-box thinking, or just want to hand out.

What we have
We have data sets to get us started as well as research and practitioner backgrounds in social network analysis, information diffusion theory, and the social services domain in the United States. We have research to show how this idea could have a broader impact on society and an existing platform to layer this tool onto (BRIDGE – http://www.thebridgeprojectdc.org/) for testing and implementation.

What we need
A diverse group of creative individuals with an array of skills: machine learning, text analysis, natural language processing, social network analysis, user experience research, user interface and interaction design, etc.

About the organizers
Jes Koepfler is a PhD student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool in College Park. Her research interest include online communities and networks; human-computer/information interaction; and information design, access, and diffusion among marginalized populations. http://uxrconsulting.com/about/jes

Christopher Mascaro is currently a Ph.D. student at the iSchool at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His research interests focus on technologically mediated group formation and how individuals in these groups interact, form identity, participate in discourse and evolve structurally over time. http://christophermascaro.com/

Natalie Kaplan recently graduated with her MPA from George Washington University in D.C. and is the Director of BRIDGE, an information and resource sharing platform for social services in DC. Her research interests include data sharing among social service organizations, innovative strategies for empowering vulnerable populations, information literacy, and civic engagement. http://www.thebridgeprojectdc.org/

Connect with us!
socialmedia4socialgood@gmail.com
@jeskak, @maizeandblue, @natakapa

*The example idea described above was part of a design competition at the 2011 American Society for Information Science & Technology annual conference. Credit for the idea goes to our design team: Jes Koepfler, Univ. of Maryland; Chris Mascaro, Drexel Univ., Tamara Heck, Univ. of Dusseldorf, Nicole D. Alemanne, Florida State; and Ulrich T Houzanme, Indiana Univ. The concept of the filter bubble more generally was the topic of the challenge.