Brian Whitworth

Email: bwhitworth replacethisby@ acm.org

This site: http://brianwhitworth.com/ is about socio-technical design and social computing

Recent:

1. Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems, 2009 (Eds Brian Whitworth and Aldo de Moor)

2. Research Roadmap Project Developing online interactive support for thesis students and advisors.

Background:

Born in Oldham, England but grew up in New Zealand. After seven years at university I joined the NZ Army as an Officer, Psychologist then Computer Analyst. After retiring, I designed/wrote software for a PhD on how online groups generate agreement. A US. professor from 1999-2005, I now work at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand, since with the Internet the "world is flat". I research how human and social requirements can "drive" computing technology design and evaluation. The vision is that people and computers are more than people or computers.

Experience:

Registered industrial psychologist, cross-trained in modern IS:

Qualifications:

PhD (MSIS); MA (Hons)(Psych); BSc (Maths); BA (Psych); Army Officer Training; Teacher training.

Hobbies:

Everyday motorcycle rider, singing/songwriting, quantum theory dilettante.

Research:

Increasingly today’s critical IS/IT problems have a human/social component. The Internet is an emerging socio-technical system where human and social issues are growing in importance, e.g. spam and information overload; spyware and online monitoring; copyright abuse and music copying; distrust of online trade; copyright restrictions and the creative commons; plagiarism and academic cheating; pornography and online sexual predators; viruses, worms and hackers; online fraud and scams; identity theft and phishing, and massive connected databases of private data. The socio-technical gap, between what people want and technology does, is increasing. These problems need more than technology power. If we reduce the social capital of the Internet less people will choose to use it, with enormous lost performance potential. What we today call the information "super-highway" may in the future seem an information "Dark Ages", just as we today view the American Wild West as a stepping stone.

Civilization with its enormous practical benefits involved social as well as technical progress. Indeed, without a modern society, it is hard to imagine modern technology. A social system has social requirements, just as a physical system like a bridge has physical requirements. It is time to "civilize" a technologized Internet, and apply social ethics, laws and sanctions to cyberspace. In social-technical systems like Wikipedia or eBay social processes get technical support. The key social principle is "non-zero-sum" gains, where participants produce more co-operating than competing. Modern research itself is an example of how sharing creates synergy. For system designers and developers the core problem is how to apply social factors to system design? My research on the definition of socio-technical requirements has four parts:

  1. IS/IT performance and evaluation - understanding IS/IT success, failure and system performance. The Web of System Performance (WOSP) model is a new view on system performance. First published in Communications of the AIS (2003), then in the Communications of the ACM 2006, and finally a validation experiment in IEEE. This model of technology evaluation is useful, as each year IT management spends billions of dollars on company critical technology.
  2. Social requirements for technical systems: Social performance has social requirements, just as data performance has data requirements (like normalization). In physical society justice supports legitimate (fair) interactions, but online social concepts are struggling. Laws are not working because technology ignores them. Spam shows the cost of ignoring social performance, as each day over 80% of emails sent are spam no-one wants or reads, wasting bandwith, storage and processing. It is time to redesign email to be fair, and software in general to be legitimate.
  3. Psychological processes in interface design. People, like computers, are information processors, but they process information in a way validated by millions of years of evolution. Hence the nature of people should drive the nature of computers, i.e. IS designers should begin with human psychological processes and end with architecture. Multi-media is an example, as computers recognize people have many sense channels. The C3P model suggests people use three sense making processes (factual analysis, personal relations, and group identification) in online sense making. These could for example be used to organize email. Also suggests politeness is common to all cultures, and so computers should support it. See (Whitworth, et al, 2001), (Whitworth, 2005).
  4. Online group processes. Includes group functions, like generating identity, generating agreement, the group decision process (online voting), online leadership, and online democracy and governance. My PhD on how groups generate agreement online used software I wrote. It showed that voting "linkage" (many-to-many communication) was the key to online agreement, not media richness. See  (Whitworth & McQueen, 2003), (Whitworth, et al, 2000), (Whitworth & Felton, 1999).

The common theme is technology support for human processes in social-technical systems. Contrast this with some well publicized alternative scenarios:

Teaching areas:

Full C.V. http://brianwhitworth.com/cv.html