Frequently Asked Questions

Practical Questions
What is Loops?
What is Babble?
How can I get a Babble or Loops for my group, team or community?
I'm an IBMer who works with customer groups -- can I use Babble or Loops to support communication with and among my customers?

Conceptual Questions
What is social computing?
What is social translucence?
Isn't 'social translucence' just a fancy name for taking away people's privacy?

Practical Questions and Answers

Q: What is Loops?
A: Loops is a web-based successor to Babble.Loops is a chat-like tool that allows its users to engage in synchronous or asynchronous textual conversations, and to create multiple rooms in which participants may converse, post text on pubic bulletin boards, and store text in slide-out tabs.Loops uses a visual representation called a social proxy is to show who is present and how recently they have spoken; Loops conversations also persist (unlike most chat), so that a user who is not on-line when a comment is made can see it later, and can scroll back through the entire history of a conversation.Loops runs in a standard web browser, and requires only a publically available Flash-MX (TM) plug-in to make it work.

It retains the characteristics that make Babble unique -- a visual representation of who is present and active, and chat that persists over sessions -- and adds a variety of new features such as bulletin boards and tabs in each 'room'. For more information see the "Projects" part of our web site.

Q: What is Babble?
A: Babble is the predecessor to Loops. It is a client-server system written in SmallTalk, and has been in use for about five years. It is no longer under active development, although a few active Babble communities remain. Like Loops, we see Babble as a vehicle both for providing casual opportunistic interactions for distributed workgroups, and - over time - for capturing the knowledge generated in day to day working conversations, thus providing a deeply social approach to knowledge management, in which knowledge maintains its links with the people who create and use it. For more information on Babble see the "Projects" part of our web site.

Q: How can I get a Babble or Loops for my group, team or community?
A: If you and your group are all IBM employees (we cannot, at the moment, distribute our software outside of IBM) you might be able get a system if (a) you are willing to let us study your usage of the system, (b) if we determine that your group is likely to benefit from the system, and (c) if we have the capacity in both technical and human resources to support you. Other than participating in our research (responding to occasional surveys or interview requests), there is no cost to using one of our systems. Contact Wendy Kellogg, wkellogg@us.ibm.com.

Q: I'm an IBMer who works with customer groups -- can I use Babble or Loops to support communication with and among my customers?
A: As of this writing, neither Babble nor Loops works across the firewall. We are currently exploring a setup in which Loops could work across the firewall; we should know whether this will be possible in mid-2002. Contact Wendy Kellogg, wkellogg@us.ibm.com.

Conceptual Questions and Answers

Q: What is social computing?
A: Social computing refers to systems which support the gathering, representation, processing and dissemination of social information, that is, information which is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts and markets. Examples of systems which fall in this domain include collaborative filtering and recommender systems (e.g., firefly), online auction sites (e.g., ebay), and open source virtual communities (e.g., slashdot). The central hallmark of social computing is that it relies on the notion of social identity: that is, it is not just the data that matters, but who that data 'belongs to', and how the identity of the 'owner' of that data is related to other identities in the system. More generally, social computing systems are likely to contain components that support and represent social constructs such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability, presence, social roles, and ownership.

Q: What is social translucence?
A: In short, social translucence is the idea that we should make some (but not all) cues about the presence and activity of users of digital systems available to one another. We like to use a story to illustrate the idea. In the building where we work there is a door that opens from the stairwell into the hallway. This door has a design flaw: opened quickly, it will slam into anyone entering fromthe other side. In an attempt at a remedy, a sign was posted: "Open Door Slowly." As you might guess, the sign is not very effective -- people soon cease to notice it. We like to contrast the 'sign' approach with a different sort of solution: putting a glass window in the door. The 'glass window' approach is effective for three reasons: First, as humans, we are perceptually attuned to movement and human faces and notice them more readily than we notice a sign. Second, once we become aware that a person is present, our social rules come into play: I don't open the door quickly because I know that you're on the other side, and I've been raised in a culture that frowns upon slamming things into others. There is a third, subtler reason for the glass window's effectiveness. Even if I haven't been properly acculturated and don't care about harming you, nevertheless, I may still refrain from slamming into you because I know that you know that I know you're there, and therefore I will be held accountable for my actions. We call systems of this sort -- systems in which perceptual cues about the activities of their users lead to feelings of awareness and accountability -- socially translucence systems.

Q: Isn't 'social translucence' just a fancy name for taking away people's privacy?
A: No. That's why we use the word "translucence" -- it stands for striking a balance between privacy and visibility. Consider, as an example, how elections work. In the physical world, it is important that some aspects of elections be very private (e.g. who the voter is voting for), but it is equally crucial that some parts of the process be very visible and public (e.g. the placing of the ballot in the ballet box; the counting of the votes; and, more subtly, it should be visible that the voter is *alone* in the voting booth). For elections to be seen as valid, it is crucial that some parts be private, and other parts public. We suggest this is true of most collective processes, and a fundamental aspect of our research is to understand how to negotiate these tradeoffs in digital systems.