Working Paper: Social Computing and Social Capital: Exploring the Links

INTRODUCTION OPAL (IST-2000-28295) is an EC funded project that has recently started at Napier University. It offers an opportunity to explore links between social computing and social capital. The objective is to build and evaluate a computer application that may improve the quality of online partnerships.by allowing new candidates to acquire an extensive understanding of a range of potential partners before a contract is signed in situations where time is short and physical interaction is limited. The project focuses on the early stages of interaction where rapid and robust assessments must be made of partners’ competence, compatibility and confidence in each others’ future performance. The proposed application must support ‘best matching’ searches in order to perform at least as well as existing ‘matching’ technologies. It may also support reflective practice by broadening the field of view, and the decision parameters for informed choice. It does this by providing profiles of a range of partner attributes that are extracted from a number of sources: questionnaires, interaction patterns and conversation threads, ‘awareness’ logs. The sources reflect real-world experience. Interaction scenarios will be constructed to reflect the ‘social ordering’ described in user stories, that, with hindsight, show where assumptions about future conduct were misplaced, or where the processes that allow online work to proceed smoothly were subject to breakdown. The relationship between ‘social ordering’ and ‘social capital’ is highly contingent: tradeoffs must, for example, be made between disorderly conduct and availability, or competence and compatibility.