Cyberinfrastructure for Social Action on National Priorities

Time Magazine proclaimed in 2006 that their “Person of the Year” was “You” in recognition of the growing significance of online communities, social media, and usergenerated content. We believe that this symbolic award is a harbinger of vast technological and societal changes that will unfold over many years—just as the proclamation of the Computer as Time’s 1982 Person of the Year foreshadowed the ubiquity of the personal computer in everyday life. As Internet and mobile technology have become increasingly ubiquitous, they have also become more social. As of Spring 2010, 40% of adults 30 yr and over, 72% of young adults, and 73% of teens use social network sites, with year-over-year time spent on facebook increasing by 566% [1]. As of Fall 2009, 19% of internet users reported using Twitter , up from 11% in Winter 2008 [2]. As of February 2010 [3], Twitter users were generating 35 million messages (tweets) per day. Wikipedia has over 12 million registered users and over 3 million content pages. Many examples of vibrant communities have emerged, as well as novel forms of socialcomputational systems such as prediction markets, collaborative filtering, social bookmarking, online auctions, and network-based peer-production systems. Something very powerful is evolving and, as the collection of authors and articles in this Special Issue attest, this phenomenon is attracting the attention of an astonishingly diverse set of researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and business people. At this moment, in the primordial stages of evolution, there is enormous opportunity to harness and shape technology-mediated social systems.