is it just me

Today I received the invitation to join the PC of the “Research 2.0 and Software Engineering (R20SE)” workshop, organized by Jean-Marie Favre and his colleagues Dragan Gasevic and Pieter van Gorp. They describe Research 2.0 as:

Research 2.0 (aka e-Science or e-Research) refers to new approaches, techniques and tools to support collaborative research efforts taking profit of new Information Technologies. From an historical point of view, Research 2.0 (R2.o) can be considered as an evolution of Small Research (aka Research 1.0) and then Big Research (aka Research 1.5). In terms of goals, Research 2.0 lies however between Small and Big Research: through unprecedented means of connectivity, computing power, storage space, and tool versatility/flexibility, R2.o adds scalability to Small Research but also agility to Big Research. Simply put, R2.o allows emerging and agile groups of researchers to communicate, collaborate, share scientific information and scientific tools in new modes. This impacts not only the way research is done, but also on how research is perceived and managed.

In practice, Research 2.o corresponds to the progressive emergence of new scientific repositories, new scientific networks, new research products (including new form of “publications”), new research processes, etc. It is likely that this will lead in the future to new evaluation schemes and new research policies. Though Research 2.0 should be considered as a medium to long term vision in an historical perspective, short term vision are also of interest. In fact current practices already exibit some R2.o flavors. For instance Web 2.o technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks and twitter already have an impact on collaborative research. We can only expect this impact to grow in the future. Interestingly, in the last couple of years, Research 2.0 has received much more attention in disciplines such as Physics, Biology, Mathematics or Social Sciences than in Computer Science. Building on the great success of the IBM CASCON workshop on Research 2.0 and Software Engineering 2.0 (SER2009), this workshop aims to further explore how Research 2.0 could benefit the Software Engineering (SE) community and vice versa.

The topics of the workshop include:

• Integrated Research Environment (IRE) and personal research portfolio,
• Collaborative and distributed repositories of software artifacts or information about research eco-systems.
• Techniques and tools for on-line demonstration, collaborative experimentation, collection and archiving of research information, etc.
• Interoperability and standardization of research repositories, tools, platforms, and standards  for research collaborations
• Mining research repositories, analysis of software engineering communities and their history
• Ontologies and classifications of software engineering fields and their evolution
• Usage/development of Web 2.0 tools for the software engineering research community
• Concepts and techniques that goes beyond the notion of Software Engineering “publications”
• Analysis of R2.0 success stories or failures (in SE but also in other fields) including lessoned learned and recommendation.
• Social, political, economical and ethical analysis of past and/or current research practices and recommendations for the future

Furthermore contributions that are not directly connected to the domain of software engineering are also welcome. You can submit your contribution until April, 20 2010 at the workshop site.

Popularity: 3% [?]

On wednesday our workshop Social Software Engineering takes place and we finished the program. You can see it online at the website for the workshop.

Presentation 1: Towards Social Information Systems

Presentation 2: weHelp: A Reference Architecture for Social Recommender Systems

Presentation 3: Towards Assisting Software Engineers in Switching Artifacts by using Personal and Shared Context

Presentation 4: Bringing Semantics into Social Software Engineering: Applying Ontologies to a Community-oriented Requirements Engineering Environment

Presentation 5: Diagnosing Inconsistent Requirements Preferences in Distributed Software Projects

Presentation 6: User-Driven Requirements Engineering for Mobile Social Software

Keynote: The use of social engineering in software projects

Popularity: 6% [?]

It is my pleasure to announce the call for paper for the first workshop on Using Microblogging to enhance communication within Communities of Practice (MicroECoP) which will take place at the WCC 2010 conference in Brisbane, Australia. I organize this workshop together with my colleagues Steve Wheeler, Graham Attwell and Johannes Magenheim. You’ll find all the necessary information at the workshop website.

Microblogging has become a very popular social networking activity in the recent years. The limitation of 140 characters constrains the user to send concise messages. Twitter and other popular microblogging tools have acted as catalysts for a flurry of new and fast exchange of thoughts and artefacts, and from these activities a new area of research has emerged. There are case studies for the application of microblogging in scientific conferences, educational courses, distributed software engineering teams and corporate project groups.

A number of questions are emerging from the early use of micro-blogs as social networking tools that connect communities of practice and interest. These include: How can microblogs support the development of professional communities of practice? How can microblogs be effectively incorporated into formalised professional learning? How can we measure the optimum levels of engagement necessary for microblogs to be successful social networking tools within professional communities of practice? How are communities of practice enhanced or enriched as a result of the application of microblogs? What about issues of security, privacy and intellectual property – how can these be protected? Do the filtering features on microblogs constitute semantic tools?

The workshop focuses on current research trends in the application of microblogging in various domains. The workshop seeks to attract quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. The workshop also seeks papers that comment how the application of micro-blogging can impact on real life experiences in diverse communities. It aims to bring together scientists and engineers who work on designing and/or developing the above mentioned solutions, as well as practitioners who use and evaluate them in diverse authentic environments.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Design and development of microblogging tools
• Application of micro-blogging in teaching scenarios
• Application of micro-blogging in software engineering scenarios
• Communication and interaction issues using microblogging
• Understanding the dynamics of microblogging communities
• Harnessing the semantic filtering capabilities of microblogging
• Visualization issues of microblogging
• Evaluation issues and case studies
• Smart devices for microblogging in education
• Using microblogging for enhancing creativity in education
• Digital identities and microblogging
• Ethical and safety issue
• Harshtagging and tweckling
• Developing pedagogies around the use of microblogging
• Live microblogging and micro-narratives
• Language Learning with microblogging
• Engagement analysis and microblogging

Papers up to 12 but no less than 8 pages are solicited. All submissions should be original and not published or under consideration elsewhere. Papers must correspond to the WCC 2010 conference format requirements, as they are described at the conference web site (http://www.wcc2010.com/call-for-papers/submission-instructions). All accepted papers must be presented at the conference by at least one of the authors. One of the authors of accepted paper needs to register for the workshop.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Yesterday I attended the Science 2.0 workshop at the EC-TEL 2009 where we had some really interesting talks about future research tasks in the field of Science 2.0. As I like visual representations of content a lot, I wondered if there is a simple way of visualizing the content of a paper and the different research themes of a workshop. I used Wordle to create a very simple visualization of the content of Martin’s and my paper about Twitter in conferences and one of all papers accepted for the workshop:

This is the wordle of my own paper.

This is the wordle of all Science 2.0 workshop papers.

Maybe we can implement some kind of such visualizations in conferences such that BEFORE a conference you can visually browse what will be discussed in workshops and thus select where you go. I also would prefer to have these automatic tag clouds for all papers so I easily figure out the main topics of it.

Sure these simple tag clouds cannot be the final step because there is no interactivity, so you cannot click on a keyword and see its occurrences in the paper or all workshop papers – but hey it’s just an idea so far… Tell me what you think.

Popularity: 23% [?]

I just submitted a paper for the 3rd International Workshop on Building Technology Enhanced Learning solutions for Communities of Practice held in conjunction with the ECTEL2009 in Nice, France.

Here’s the abstract:

Communities of Practice (CoPs) have been widely recognized as effective environments to support learning among professionals, organisations and educational institutions. In this paper we introduce an application that analyzes written communication within Communities of Practice on the microblogging platform Twitter and allows the visualization of dynamics of the communiaction. As example we analyze and visualize the Community of Practice of the JTEL Summer School 2009.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just submitted another paper for the special track “MashUps for Learning“ at this year ICL conference in Villach, Austria. Here is the abstract:

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus they are not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and enhancing developer awareness. The approach presented uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with a sophisticated development environment.

Let’s see what the reviewers think about our community-embedded CDE approach and the architecture of eCopSoft.

Popularity: 3% [?]