(apologies for cross-posting) Extended deadline: 18 July 2010 2nd International Workshop on Quality in Techno-Social Systems at the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems SASO 2010 - September 28, 2010, Budapest, Hungary http://qlectives.eu/qteso Techo-social systems are ICT systems in which many people collectively coordinate and cooperate to achieve their goals without central control. These systems, for example Wikipedia, eBay, Web2.0 sites, social networks and peer-to-peer networks, have both self-organizing and self-adaptive aspects. In this workshop we aim to put the quality aspect of these complex systems into focus. Quality outcome can be produced by the individual users through selecting, producing and rating certain kinds of content. For example, trust and reputation may emerge among a community and be used to enhance quality. The workshop will consider mechanisms by which individual peers can be brought together automatically into collectives whose members share interests and agree about the evaluation of quality in the domain. The SASO conference focuses on how to make computer systems operate autonomously in a reliable, efficient and useful way with minimal user or operator intervention. The workshop addresses this very problem narrowing the focus down to techno-social systems. The question we ask is: how can one let a system self-organize to a high quality, desirable state, where users and their behavior form an integral part of the system (i.e., a techno-social system), and where self-organization at the system level has to be aligned with self-organization at the social level. The workshop is centered around the following technical issues: * incentive mechanisms for self-organizing and self-adaptive systems * evolving social interaction structures for quality * ranking, rating, reputation and recommendation in distributed systems * conflict and consensus detection, correction in distributed systems * realistic models of user behaviour and the dynamic social structures that they create * analysis of empirical and experimental data for quality * computational sociology of online communities * distributed social networks * quality metrics - how to measure in distributed systems Papers are welcome from the fields of theoretical and algorithmic foundations, algorithm design and simulation, as well as empirical data-sets collection, processing and validation. Audience The workshop is inherently interdisciplinary. Relevant areas include: sociology and psychology,in particular, the evolution of cooperation, opinion dynamics, the evolution of norms and trust relationships, etc; physics, in particular complex (social and technical) networks and models of the dynamics of group behavior; computer science, in particular P2P systems, data mining (ranking and recommendation), information retrieval, and distributed systems. Paper Submission Authors are invited to submit original unpublished papers that are neither accepted nor submitted elsewhere. All submissions will be carefully peer reviewed by the program committee. Inclusion in Proceedings The proceedings of all SASO workshops will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press as a bundle with the main conference proceedings, and made available as a part of the IEEE digital library. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission: July 18, 2010 Acceptance Notification: August 6, 2010 Camera-ready version: August 20, 2010 Early registration deadline: August 13, 2010 Workshop: September 28, 2010 Author Guidelines Submissions should not exceed 6 pages and formatted according to the IEEE Computer Society Press proceedings style guide and submitted electronically in pdf format. Please register as authors and submit your papers using the conference management system that will be linked at the http://qlectives.eu/qteso website well in advance of the submission deadline. Organization Comittee Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey, UK Mark Jelasity, Hungarian Academy of Science and University of Szeged, Hungary Tamas Vinko, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Program Committee Fred Amblard, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, France Nazareno Andrade, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Alastair Gill, University of Surrey, UK David Hales, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Sergi Lozano, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Matus Medo, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Andrzej Nowak, University of Warsaw, Poland Johan Pouwelse, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Camille Roth, CNRS, France Dario Taraborelli, University of Surrey, UK Yi-Cheng Zhang, University of Fribourg, Switzerland -- Dario Taraborelli Research Fellow Centre for Research in Social Simulation University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH United Kingdom http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk http://nitens.org/taraborelli Editor, Review of Philosophy and Psychology http://www.springer.com/13164

Ah hah, thanks Paolo, this I did not know, in fact as I received this I was following up Amy's suggestion of the database telling if it's > 30 which i think was leading to this tool :) I've posted on that guy's talk page, perhaps this can be done historically, in which case I can build up a (small but random) sample time-series, compare to editing counts and have some vague idea of the ratios/tracking. Thanks all (but if there are other suggestions or even experiences keep 'em coming ;) Cheers, James On Jul 1, 2010, at 15:39, paolo massa wrote:

I have always been willing to share my watchlist, even publicly, and I think it should be provided as an option. I can see two reasons people might not want to: not to show what all of their interests are, and not to show who on Wikipedia they may be tracking. As for me, I do such a variety (in both) and for multiple reasons, that I see no reason not to share it & I think that many of the more active users might think similarly. However, it has now grown so large that I almost never look at it. On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

Thanks to all for a great discussion on this. I appreciated all the suggestions, including people discussing their own practices. Fantastic. I just never would have thought of things like checking the bug tracker to learn about practices :) Just wanted to update you on discussions I had with the author of the watchers tool on toolserver, MZMcBride. I include the full thread below (with his permission), but the short story is that even Wikipedia doesn't collect data on when people add a page and remove a page from their watchlists, they only maintain who has what pages on their lists at any one time (data which they don't release). So the only way to build up a true empirical picture of this would be lots of rapid snapshots of the watchlist table. It's an interesting example of the challenges in doing research on systems designed to run a busy website as opposed to collect research data! OTOH if you are just interested in watcher counts below the minimum of 30 watchers, then it seems there is scope for that data to be released to researchers. Most likely I will run a sensitivity analysis looking at the robustness of our results to different assumptions. Thanks again, James On Jul 6, 2010, at 17:58, MZMcBride wrote: