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Culture Atlas Infrastructure: A Participatory and Collaborative Perspective*

Andrea Wei-Ching Huang and Tyng-Ruey Chuang

Institute of Information Science

Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan {andreahg, trc}@iis.sinica.edu.tw

Abstract Recent past has witnessed a proliferation of online maps and resources that, with their machine- accessible web services, enable the tech-savvy to mix-and-match these services to create web applications of novel utility. Many of these applications, so-called mash-ups, again are online resources that attract large populations of users and receive voluminous user feedback. If the Web is to be seen as the platform for building the next generation culture atlas, who are the contributors and what motivate them? In this presentation we contemplate these questions from the perspective of user participation and collaboration. We will identify the key issues and propose ways to address them. We have been building a prototype system called Web3P ("A Web of Place, People, and Participation") to experiment with various design elements and implementation techniques to facilitate collaborative geospatial mapping. We will present our experience from using the prototype to map the geographic and cultural landscape of Orchid Island (Lanyu), the home to the Tao aborigines of Taiwan.

Keywords: Collaboration, Community, Collaborative Technology, Collaborative Mechanism, Culture Atlas, Participation, Web3P.

INTRODUCTION Based on our study “Online Community Mapping” presented in PNC2005 Hawaii last year, a considerable development in the level of understanding two essential components of the emerging Web phenomenon: Participation and Collaboration in geospatial domain is on demand. In this study we put in a picture as the PC phenomena. However, these two components are basically developed from a general Web emerging observable trend. This observation gives rise to further questions in a non-geospatial concern, namely who the contributors are and what factors motivate people to participate and collaborate. What is the value of

user-generated content? What are the problems for users to participate and collaborate online? How to make participation and collaboration work? An extensive range of issues associated with these two components is now the subject of public, academic, governmental, as well as business and industrial concern. And, in respond to the early meeting of CAA/ECAI this year when discussing the role of the culture atlas and the future of ECAI, here we will try to answer the question of what the implications are for the Culture Atlas Infrastructure from a participatory and collaborative perspective. It must, however, be stressed that the “PC assumption” we articulate in this paper is still in development. The idea for our generalization is to provide a comprehensible overview on vivid but diverse P and C landscape. Our prototype system Web3P is on its second-phase development, and yet to incorporate participation and collaboration experience from end users. A more definite study and prototype experiment would have to come in a later study.

The PNC 2006 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings Aug 15 ~18, 2006, the Seoul National University Library, Seoul, Korea.

Figure 1: Participation & Collaboration Perspectives by Huang & Chuang (2006).

*This work is released under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Taiwan” license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/tw/).

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1. The Emerging PPCC Phenomenon

THE PP PHENOMENA The P phenomena includes a mixture of P-phrases1 like “Personal Publishing” , “Photo sharing”, “Post online activities”, “Podcasting”, “Peer ratings” as well as “Peer-to-Peer” applications. From the media perspective, terms like “Personal and Participatory Media” and “Participatory Journalism” are to describe the new emerging trend2. Meanwhile, many people are now accustomed to understand a “Permalink” as a permanent link, and are now used to “Ping a blog” so as to “trackback” a blog entry. This particularly brings us to take an IT angle appreciating the proposed Web 2.0 concept which sees the Web as a whole “Platform” and highlights the “Architecture of Participation” for all3. The Economist in its April 2006 issue further portrays this era as “The Age of Participation”; business sees the transition of the role of producer and consumer being transformed into as a one “Pro-sumers”; research topics like “Place and People”, “(Public) Participatory GIS”, “Public Empowerment”, as well as “Participatory Research” are getting more attentions and discussions to various domain knowledge. Again, the “Platform” analogy is used to portray the social tie of networking society as seeing “the Internet as a Platform for human connection”4. All such concerns have a fundamental dimension in explaining the radical changes and enrichment of the network. Specifically the “Peer Production” of information, knowledge and culture now focuses on the interaction of individuals. Further, it also concerns the quality and revision of group production. In other words, it is similar to the peer review concept which the academic have long been familiar with. This extensive online “quasi Peer Review” phenomena has transformed traditional markets, individual freedom and culture diversity profoundly5. Indeed, at this writing moment, the online world is if certainly to be depicted as “The Age of P”.

THE CC PHENOMENA Continue to draw our attention is to the C in the Cyberspace. Inevitably, we move to the “Computer-mediated Communication” (CMC) study which considers how people use "computers" in

1 In this study, all the P-phrases and C-phrases are identified from the Web with their numerous appearances when we conduct this research. Although some of them have their originality, we do not aim to provide an overall analysis on all these P- and C- phrase collections, but offer a general picture of this trend. 2 Bowman and Willis (2003). 3 O’Reilly (2005). 4 Benkler (2006), Chapter 10. 5 Benkler (2006, 2002).

communication. In addition, “Computer-supported Collaboration” (CSC) research focuses on what outputs and impacts technology have affected people. Indeed, these two computer-oriented C are often discussed in the context of “Community”. It is worth noting that analysis on “Computer System Supported Community” are variable in terms: “Computer–mediated Community”, “Network Community”, “Web-based Community”, “Online Community”, “Virtual Community”, “IT-enable Community”, “IT supported Community” or ”Cyber-Community”. In addition, investigations on “Community-based communication” and “Community-driven services” so far have focused on the level of common interests and collaboration issues like “Collective intelligence”, “Collaborative Publishing”, “Collaborative Communication tools”, “Collaborative tagging”, “Co-authoring Tools”, or Amazon’s famous “Collaborative Filtering” mechanism (people who bought this item also bought that).

Equally, the above Cs concerning about Community and Collaboration have been researched in topics like “Contributions” of the Public, Citizen and Consumer as well as associated property or license alternatives such as “Creative Commons”. As mentioned before, Yochai Benkler has observed the appearance of “Commons-based peer production” (CBPP). “Commons-based” indicates that people participate by their free will to create and to contribute. It is driven by the non-market motivation and non-propriety strategy. It is also leading to the emerging cooperative and coordinate effect overwhelmingly. As such reasoning about motivation factors will be discussed in the next section, here we portray “the Age of C” as consisting of factors including at least Community and Collaboration. 2. Contributors and Motivations

CONTRIBUTORS Who are the contributors? What kind of behaviors do they have in the online participatory and collaborative environment? The study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that more than half of online teens (age 12-17) are content creators 6 , defines the rough size of the U.S. blogosphere at about 12 million bloggers and 57 million blog readers7. Also one empirical survey8 indicates that participants who are not direct content creators are still participating in flagging/tagging /rating content. The P phenomena is described above

6 Lenhart and Madden (2005) 7 Lenhart and Fox (2006) 8 Wei (2006)

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as for personal and participation; the C components is for community and collaboration. Based on this level of understanding combining with current prominent applications, we try to further describe the principle of the PC phenomena from observable patterns. In this study, we attempt to differentiate them as “Me-Participation” and “We-Collaboration”. MMee--PPaarrttiicciippaattiioonn: Since the major P elements are more toward personal and participatory activities. We further distinguish the P as a Me-Participation style. It mainly describes the individual participation activity such as individual blogging. This type of participation is more toward one-to-many form and includes two types of participation, namely the initiative and the passive participation. (1) The initiative participation refers to individual active involvement by creating, contributing and sharing information with others. Examples include (American) blogosphere which is mainly constructed by those who use their blogs as personal journals9. Web services like Yahoo! 360° and Windows Live Spaces which allow their users to control and manage their blog mainly by their own choices. Social networking services like Friendster and MySpace are also designed for personalization and customization for generating individual’s content. (2) The passive participation: It’s mainly hold by other’s input as a result of content enrichment. Examples like the “tracback” function of most blogging software which depends on others’ willing to notify the original post that the post has been cited. Or, when one subscribes others’ RSS10 feeds, he/she

9 The Pew Internet Project Blogger Survey (2006/07/19) finds that the American blogosphere is dominated by those who use their blogs as personal journals. 10 RSS stands for terms “Really Simple Syndication”, “Rich Site Summary”, or “RDF Site Summary” which depend on the version of

needs to rely on others’ content, and on it being updated frequently. Although the content from other sources will be enriched automatically by software, the process of the participation is passive in nature and mainly relies on others’ choices and activities. WWee--CCoollllaabboorraattiioonn: This expresses a group of people who participate and collaborate for their common interests by creating, contributing and sharing information together. In contrast to the Me-Participation type, the We-Collaboration is many-to-many in form, community-driven in orientation, and collaborative authoring in paradigm. Below we elaborate in detail the collaborative mechanisms, as well as the models of collaborative creation. (1) The collaborative mechanisms enclose collaborative communication technologies and collaborative rules/policies. The open source process and social software play key roles in such technical tools. Among which the Wiki technology is one of the most sound and popular co-authoring and collaborative publishing tools. Others like peer-to-peer technologies (e.g. BitTorrent) and social tagging tools are also in development. The other mechanisms for collaboration are associated with the rules and policies. These mechanisms guide, moderate and manage participants and collaborators in online collaboration environment. Key factors include authority models, openness policies, reputation systems (rating, voting, karma designs), as well as community responsibility system. (2) Models of collaborative creation: The Slashdot Model: This mode refers to the aggregation and filtering of web resources including individual posts, comments, multimedia contents, and suggested links. Examples include sites that are technology in nature (i.e. Slashdot, Slashgeo, and Digg), are about business and entertainment (i.e. eBay, Amazon, IMDB, Flickr, YouTube and Cragilist), are for social bookmaking and aggregation (i.e. CiteULike, Connotea, and del.icio.us), or are repository of web directory (Technorati and the Open Directory Project). These cases aggregate Me-Participation contents to form what we call We-Collaboration results. The Wikipedia Model: This model refers to coordinated collective content creation and production. Here are three examples. PlanetMath is an open collaborative mathematics encyclopaedia that adapts the owner-controlled authority model11(which will be discussed below) to succeed

the RSS. The difference and the related issues can be seen at Wikipedia: RSS (file format) and RSS History. 11 Krowne and Bazaz (2004).

Figure 2:

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as a collaborative writing knowledge database. The other example is the NASA World Wind project, which not only attracts millions of contributors to collaborate on examining satellite images but also quickly improves the quality of programme itself12. The MIT OpenCourseWare Project13 is yet another example that widens the impact of teaching materials. The three examples all aim to enable collaborative content creation, and each focuses on a specific topic in a collective effort. MOTIVATIONS The reason of why people participate and collaborate online is not a simple picture. Literatures often cite or borrow from the success of Open Source Software (OSS) movement to explain why people want to participate and collaborate online. Although the specifics of the OSS example are unique, at a more general level it is a representative of common Web phenomena that the Web itself is participatory and collaborative in nature. One recent speech by the technology futurist, Simon Phipps in the eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) at Portland, Oregon pointed out that open source is all about14: ① altruism without sacrifice, ② licensing without lawyers, ③ controlling the community without control, and ④ staying because I have the freedom to leave. Thus, let us begin by understanding the reasoning from OSS communities. The two main factors affecting participation and collaboration are individual motivations and the social networking

12 http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ 13 http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html 14 Phipps’s Keynote: The Zen of Free is summarized at http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/07/28/189249.shtml?tid=18&tid=138

norms. First, individual motivations of accounts believe in the sense of “scratching programmer’s itch”, “technically coolness” or “the art and beauty of clean code”, ego-boosting of themselves and gaining reputations from others toward a better career. These are further empirically verified by the leverage of creativity and intellectual stimulation. Second, further explorations on social motivation analysis highlight issues such as learning by sharing, battling with the joint rival (like Linux community v.s. Microsoft), sharing identity and belief systems within communities, or building relationships and socializing15. The above reasoning is compatible with the analysis of Wei (2006) and the 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project survey on blogsphere16: that people participate online are pursuing for meaningful sharing as well as social networking. More toward the community sense, the community-exchange factor for mutual benefit as an incentive for users to contribute has been explored17. Specifically in the media perspective, Bowman and Willis (2003) put in plain words that “The intent of (the) participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”

Different perspectives from the economical lens are clarified in three reasons: (1) Economic logic of the collective good is perceived with “nonexcludable and nonrival good” characteristics in OSS. The human resource scarcity is compensated by the OSS culture (like gift economy) and the abundance of computing power. (2) Opportunity costs, such as programmer’s individual time and energy, shift from commercial industries to OSS works might be compensated by delayed payoffs (such as people’s long-term incentives discussed earlier), and (3) Free-riding is not a problem in OSS process because the more people to use, the more value to the system in a market environment18.

3. Value of User-generated Content User-generated content consists of text-based forms such as articles, comments, feedback, reviews, calendar events, etc. User-generated content can also be multimedia-based: images, photos, audio and

15 Hissam et al, (2001); Weber (2004); Ghosh (2005); Lakhani and Wolf (2005) Scacchi et. Al. (2006). 16 Lenhart and Fox (2006) shows: 76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others. 64% of bloggers say they blog is to share practical knowledge or skills with others. And, when asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is "my life and experiences". 17 Figallo and Rhine (2001). 18 Weber (2004); Lerner and Tirole (2005).

Figure 3:

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video. Other forms also include tags, ranks, polls, surveys, links and geoinformation or maps. They are created by the users and are published or aggregated in a distributive manner. A number of consistent findings about the value of user-generated content have emerged from these studies below: (1) From the media perspectives – Bowman and Willis (2003) summarised the function of participation mainly on the enrichment of quantity and quality of the content such as commentary; filtering and editing to valued news and information; adding fact-check capabilities; first-hand accounts of grassroots reporting; annotative reporting 19 ; open reporting and peer review before official publishing; and audio/video variety which makes alternative/niche content created and distributed by the public. More specifically, in events like September 11 terrorism, the Iraq War, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and the Hurricane Katrina, distributed user-generated content play an important role to supplement the insufficiency of the government and traditional media. The value of user generated content has drawn attentions of BBC, CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times, etc. to take the initiatives to partnership with their readers20. (2) From the social perspectives – While community produces data together with accepted community norms, it is not only to encourage community’s self-policing behavior but also to increase social consequences like community capacity building, various ideas integrating as well as providing participants with a means for self-representation 21 . At the same time, user- generated content helps reduce administrative time and costs22, and with the non-centralized editorial publishing characteristics, the collaboration of distributed user-generated information also has been marked as a democratization of information effect23. (3) From the economic perspective – Benkler’s influential “Commons-based peer production” (CBPP) hypothesis (2006, 2002) has challenged economist Ronald Coase’s theory that production is most efficient in firm-based market environment. Benkler believes that if the problems of motivation and organization can be solved, then commons-based peer production has two major advantages: (1) aggregation of individual human creativity, and (2) identification and allocation of human creativity are improved. 19 Some reporters use participatory forms on the Web to annotate their articles, calling them “transparent journals” by publishing the complete text/transcripts on the Web. 20 Bowman and Willis (2005). 21 Pain (2004). 22 Kelly, Sung and Farnham (2002). 23 Wallace and Van Fleet (2005).

Moreover, consumer evaluation attracts business to value the opportunities of the user-generated content which will impact consumer’s buying decision. Example like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist are well-known Consumer–to-Consumer (C2C) e-Commerce cases which utilize user-generated content to business flow cases successfully24. Other applications in social networking like MySpace, YouTube and Friendster may grow to be killer applications that the new 3G networks are looking for.25 Even the participants would like to give feedback by money donations so as to value the content. The successful Korean citizen journalism, Ohmy News creates a “tip-jar” system, which encourages audience to reward good work by mobile-phone or credit-card account, is one of the most promising stories (The Economist, Apr 20th 2006). The community-driven news site Newsvine (launched in March, 2006) also offers user-reporters 90% of the ad revenue which directly comes from their personal Newsvine columns. (4) From the Geospatial perspectives – Empirically findings show that most internet interaction occurs in situations where people live within an hour’s drive26; and for most travellers the restaurant reviews by local citizens are more valuable than others’ comments27. In the last PNC meeting, we have presented finding of an emerging convergence of web-based, geographical, and participatory personal interaction in everyday life that we characterize as “online community mapping”. There is a strong evidence to support the initiative in the economic, political and social diffusion of geospatial information and communication technologies. Moreover, the concept of Naïve Geography proposed by Egenhofer and Mark (1995) stressing the common-sense geography of the world has been identified empirically by the recent online mapping services by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. An interesting informal estimation about the comparison between the traditional GIS company, ESRI and Google Earth shows that from 1969 to 2006, ESRI has one million users in 200 countries, but Google has one hundred million users in less that a year’s release28. The leading business magazine, Forbes, has chosen the Google map mash-up as one of the Web’s promising user-sharing trend application29.

24 Figallo and Rhine (2001). 25 O’Shea, D (2006). 26 After Wellman, B, Quan Haase, A, Witte, J & Hampton, K (2001)’s citation. 27 Figallo and Rhine, (2001). 28 Glennon , A. (2006). 29 Lidor, D. (2006).

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4. Problems and Solutions What are the problems of user participate and collaborate online? How to make participation and collaboration work? Questions like these are inevitably while we are dealing with the PC issues. Problems like content accuracy and completeness, doubts to contributor accountability, and users’ motivation and incentives to participate and collaborate have been identified. The suggested ways to deal with these problems are: collaborative communication tools, technical mechanism designs, as well as policy and social mechanism which are analyzed below. Problems 1: Content Accuracy & Completeness Critics question the quality of user-generated content as the product of the amateur and often toward rants and hobbyhorses 30 . Moreover, doubts on the informational knowledge of inequality may leads to some obscure topics lacking accounts for generating and/or “eyeballs” for checking the quality31. A lot of worry also goes into the questions of tools like blogs and wikis which do not provide ways to indicate the completeness of content32. (Some might argue that the advantage of the PC contents is for their always-updating status.) Problems 2: Contributor Accountability Generally the problems associated with participants and contributors have also been discussed in online community literatures. Problems like identity deception (anonymity or people changing identity) and online trust (with three characteristics as reliability, predictability, and fairness) have been explored. Research further indicates a three trust-developing stages: from calculus-based trust to information-based trust, and then goes to the transference-based trust stages33. Meanwhile, trolls, flame-warriors & lamers are difficulties for the PC designers to consider over. Problems 3: Motivations & Incentives While we are asking why people want to participate or collaborate online, the other way to answer it is to understand why people do not want to. In the study of Preece. et. al. (2004), they have conducted a survey on 375 MSN bulletin board communities and asked why lurkers lurk. Their findings are summarized below: (1) there is no need to participate, (2) people want to know more about the group/community before participating, (3) they are

30 Crawford, W (2001). 31 Svoboda, E (2006). 32 Kolbitsch, J and Maurer, H (2006). 33 Ba, S (2001).

not confident enough to participate, (4) there are software design issues resulting in poor usability, and (5) socially, people do not match the specific community culture. This finding is also parallel the recent empirical survey of Wei (2006) afore-mentioned on the new participatory media community. In this survey, four reasons why people not participating online are: (1) busy, no time; (2) hostile atmosphere and low quality conversation; (3) just want to “listen” because I am unqualified; and (4) prefer just to “listen” to get information. Although the PC phenomena has to face these challenges, Clay Shirky (2002) stresses the nature of the Web itself might has offered the solution and we should focus on the logic that: “(p)articipation matters more than quality” because “there are people who are always worth reading, and people who are usually worth ignoring”. Shirky’s argument specifies that the Web is powerfully edited by itself; however the editorial function is applied at the edges after the piece of information published. The Web serves as an editing mechanism with the character of “publishing first, editing later” model, which may has offered the key to unlock the door to the problems discussed above. Alternatively, some solutions suggested in this study below may offer some directions to signify how to make the PC elements work. Implications for the PC elements discussed so far suggest the following solutions: (1) collaborative communication tools, (2) technical mechanism designs, (3) policy & social mechanism designs. Solutions 1: Collaborative Communication tools34 Features of a web-based collaboration contain free accessibility, up-to-date versions, hyperlinking, independence of platform and application. Specifically, the collaboration models over a network include at least35: (1) e-mail exchange (mailing lists, CC others, or direct exchange information), however the content cannot be edited or easily cross-linked; (2) shared folder/files which indicates that groups can directly access the same file in a common repository; (3) interactive content updating and accessing which allow community to edit the same content collectively. Further identified from the recent progressing of social software, the blog way, the RSS way, the collaborative tagging approach, and the Wiki way are analyzed below as a basic technical approach for collaborative communication.

34 A free collaborative encyclopaedia on collaboration in technology can be found at: http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Technology and a list of collaborative software: http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software 35 Leuf, B and Cunningham, W (2001).

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(1) The Blog Way: This is a form of simple web sites as its original name “Weblog” has suggested --- a log on the Web. The content of blog is often distinct in its article style (short “post” and usually in text form)36 , personal opinion orientation (“story telling”), and comments from others’ interaction. Together with its openness (accessible to all), other key components are typically identified as content management by time (the reverse chronological order in organizing posts), and updating content frequently (“dated entries”). Other unique features include Permalink: a permanent link or URL which is assigned to a unique post/comment as a specific identification (ID). The Trackback mechanism is designed to assign a unique URL to each post and to provide a method for notifications of trails between blogs37. The idea of the Trackback application is similar to the academic citation database which shows the “citation times” and “cited by whom” in direct links. Similarly, the Trackback function can be used to summarize the way an individual post has been commented or cited (number of citations, the citing blog entries, etc.). In our last “Online Community Mapping” study, many geospatial applications combined with blogging technologies have been illustrated. Projects like the WorldKit projects see “the World as a Blog”38. The MapBureau web services integrate the popular client-centered AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) style of web application development with associated Blogmapper (an RDFMapper application) 39 . Other types of technologies, like blogrolls from “feedreader” and “ping-back” to alert new posts, are also in development. Among these we pay particular interests in the RSS syndication and social tagging as a collaboration tool; these two will be illustrated in details below. (2) The RSS Way: a common, machine-readable format which is a family of related XML document for automatic content updating40. It works through a peer-to-peer distribution model that anyone can syndicate their content to anyone who has a RSS reader. Since the user-generated content have specific characters like update frequency, user-preference focus, and the fear of information overload, the role of the RSS subscription and syndication pave a promising path to meet the target users’ interest, to save users’ time in web navigation, as well as to provide features in the passive

36 Exceptions like Podcasts as audio posts and Vlogs as video blogs. 37 Holtz, S. & Demopoulos, T (2006) Chapter1; Du, H.S. & Wagner, C. (2006). 38 http://brainoff.com/geoblog/ 39 http://www.mapbureau.com/ 40 Atom is also one of the major syndication formats with more open source nature when comparing to RSS 2.0. However, we focus more on RSS because of its popularity. Details about Atom can be seen from Wikipedia: Atom (standard).

Me-Participation paradigm described above. Likewise, with collaboration concerns, there has been the case of collaborative filtering with RSS in Radio UserLand. It has combined blogroll-feeds, which information can be filtered by people with similar interests, to serve as a RSS filtering mechanism in a collaborative way. The other case showing geospatial concern is the case of publication of geocoded information in the WorldKit project mentioned above. It also allows users to receive RSS-syndicated contents regularly according to their associated location and places in general 41. Indeed, GeoRSS becomes “the simplest possible ‘Geo’ for the Web” said Rai Singh, director of Interoperability Programs at the Open Geospatial Consortium. As designed to be a lightweight geospatial expression in XML-based format, the GeoRSS is benefited by its ease of use, and with a light profile of Geographic Markup Language (GML)42. (3) Collaborative Tagging: The emergence of collaborative tagging is regarded as a response to the difficulty in maintaining useful metadata in a scalable way during distributed, large-scale content creation and indexing. Macgregor and McCulloch (2006) provide the definition of “collaborative tagging” as “a practice whereby users assign uncontrolled keywords to information resources”. Although controversial issues like the low precision problems which collaborative tagging has been challenged in general, it has been given the same weight to two constructive concerns: (1) compared to traditional categorization methods, the user tagging activities can reflect more accurately users’ conceptual models of the real world; (2) mechanisms like spelling check and tag synonyms have been used to improve the above-mentioned low precision problems. Moreover, while the potential cost-reduction view has been questioned in the high price in a non-controlled vocabulary setting for resource discovery, some argue that collaborative tagging can provide more entry points and “non-goal-directed” searching to compensate possible search inefficiency. Above all, the concern about the emerging collaborative tagging phenomena mirrors its significance as a tool or an alternative approach to information storage, organization and retrieval over the Web. However, more theoretical and empirical studies including large scale of quantity and quality research are on demand43. (4) The Wiki Way: Wiki allows web-based content co-authorship using a standard browser without the need of specialized client-side software. It is a content management system through a simple markup language and a dynamic-linking mechanism

41 Wittenbrink, H. (2005). 42 Singh, R. (2006); GML is an XML-based language for the representation, storage, and exchange of geospatial information. 43 Macgregor & McCulloch (2006).

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to support the notion of a writable web and collaborative writing. It incorporates functions like authoring tools, hypertext information system, personal information management, blog/forum, knowledge management, groupware, and database, while at the same time it embeds social process in the design concept. Here we mainly concern what incentives are driving people to participate and collaborate in the Wiki Way. Motivations have been explored as (1) collaborative writing is a playful creation for coolness, (2) people are encouraged by less modification pressure while conducting collaborative writing with complex topics, (3) the diversity of participants is regarded as a enrichment both in content and relationship, and (4) people can have their self-determined work principles while are co-authoring a work. Above incentives of the Wiki collaboration way are further facilitated with mechanism designs like flat hierarchies and a system with simple rules to which an environment of openness can be reached44. Taken together, the new emerging Mash-up tools have facilitated the PC phenomenon more profoundly. ProgrammableWeb categorizes more than 100 Web services APIs and produces a huge cross-table including the most popular mashup applications45. For example, it identifies “Google Maps + BBC = [BBC News Map] [gTraffic.info] [myjam factory][sport map] [TVMP] [UK Traveldata]”. A general comparison between Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other mapping services is available online at CNET.com46. Solutions 2: Technical mechanism designs Early technical mechanism designs to facilitate online community management like cooling-off mechanisms which built delay loops and time intervals into the communication system is to prevent emotional communication conflicts47. More designs learned from the success of open collaborative paradigm of the open source software process make online collaboration achievable. Designs like small independent and manageable modules, flexible and transparent devices, revision-control tools, bug-reporting databases, computer-mediated communications (record-keeping for consensus), and governance structures (support asynchronous communication and decision-making) all support distributed management of collaborative content creation. Cases in point are tools like Bonsai, Bugzilla and Tinderbox for Mozilla; Apache email voting system based on a consensus principle; and

44 Leuf, B and Cunningham, W (2001); Ebersbach, A., Glaser, M., and Heigl, R. (2006). 45 Programmableweb (2006) (generated daily). 46 Wenzel, E (2006). 47 Etzioni, A and Etzioni, O,(1999).

Linux group carrying a semiformal hierarchical structure like a pyramid which the upper level group will carry more responsibility48. Equally, open source development in geospatial infrastructure is entering a new phase of refinement inherited from the core of open source practices. Open source tools based on the C programming languages include GDAL/OGR, GEOS, GRASS, MapGuide, Mapnik, OpenEV, OSSIM, QGIS, PostGIS, Proj4, TerraLib and UMN Mapserver; while tools based on the Java language include DeeGree, GeoAPI, GeoServer, GeoTools, gvSIG, JTS, JUMP, UDig, and WKB4J. These tools have been reviewed by both the open source and the geospatial communities49 lately. On the other hand, we are well aware there is a social need perspective to the three problems we outlined in the beginning of this section. Research has suggested through trusted socio-technical system design, the gap between system capability and social expectation can be bridged. Issues that have been discussed so far consist of fairness, privacy, intellectual property right, censorship, etc50. Solutions 3: Policy and social mechanism designs Benkler (2002) has been aware of that no one has the power to organize collaboration in the use of huge online resources. However, he also suggests two distinct analyses which might solve some obstacles. First, mechanisms can be designed to offer social-psychological rewards from material compensations. Evidence of such designs can be found in Ohmy News and Newsvine. Second, projects of any size need to be cut down into little pieces for individual participation of which little-effort contribution and short-time investment are key mechanisms. Not being professional journalists, most people would rather like to participate in small and meaningful ways especially on subjects that traditional media overlook51. This is also identical to the OSS project development in which small modules can be produced independently. These small contributions can then be integrated with little cost to the system using some quality control technical tools. (1) Openness Deign Openness design concerns levels of openness and access rights. We use the categorization of Bowman

48 Hissam, S; Weinstock, C.B.; Plakosh, D. & Asundi, J, (2001) ; Weber, S. (2004); Scacchi,W; Feller,J; Fitzgerald, B; Hissam,S. & Lakhani, K (2006). 49 Ramsey, P. (2006). 50 Whitworth, B and deMoor, A. (2003). 51 Bowman and Willis (2005).

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and Willis (2003: ch3), as well as editorial control mechanisms borrowed from other literature, as the main framework to denote the different degree of openness. Revised categorizations are in five categories: ① Open Communal – The power of controlness and management are in the community itself (i.e. Wikipedia). This is similar to the analysis of structure of participation and production by Wei’s Community-Based Models (2006), as well as Krowne and Bazaz’s Free-form Authority Model (2004). The later study has discussed empirically that this is a productive and voluminous approach. ② Open, Mostly Communal – This approach is missing in the original categorization of Bowman and Willis. Although communities hold the controlness but individual editing power is restrictive in some degree. This is similar to the Owner-centric model proposed by Krowne and Bazaz, of which the creator of an entry controls its content and quality. But it also welcomes other’s participation (i.e. PlantMath and Everything2). In general, users prefer this model over the Free-form Authority Model mentioned above. Additionally, filtering and publishing power are in the hands of editors (represented in Wei’s as the Editor-based models). As an example, in Slashdot moderation is an expansion of the editorial function, but the fact-checking mechanism still relies mainly on the community at large. ③ Open Exclusive – The site owners create the primary content layer while the audience creates secondary content through comments, tracback, or RSS subscription. ④ Partially closed – Some portion of the content is created by a closed community or a specific group. ⑤ Closed – Similar to the traditional website design. Only a group of members can participate. (2) Trust Enabling & Consensus Building ① Reputation Mechanisms – Online reputation matters. It matters because reputation is a “Manifesto” for this “Reputation Society” 52 . Research has indicated some significant reputation indicators, such as aggregation of user feedback, comments, rating, voting, as well as the status and history of the participants (a hierarchy of user privileges, like Karma in Slashdot and experience points/XP in Everthing2). ② Online Community Responsibility System – It refers to a community that takes the responsibility of

52 Masum, H & Zhang, Y.C. (2004).

the individual members and maintains the approved/accepted community norms (transference -based trust process). The trust itself basically is established at the community level, not by individuals. Ba (2001) investigated some limitations of reputation system such as: (1) Fixed identity in personal level is not always attractive; (2) Cheating can always occur in the last communication, interaction or transaction; (3) A participant can take up fly-by-night strategy in which his/her reputation will not be affected by never coming back. Thus an Online Community System Strategy (OCSS) has been proposed (Ba 2001). Principally, this OCSS strategy is working out through the transference-based trust building process. OCSS is a respond to the challenge of three-stage online trust transformation process mentioned in the last section. For instance, CNET.com is an e-commerce platform which mainly serves for the IT community. Many customers transfer their believes on product information from individual e-commerce company/industry to the CNET communities, and thus they are willing to adopt their activities on the system platform. Another example is the version control and authorship of the Wiki design. It helps users to correct data rather than to take malicious behaviour. And, this design further enforces social community norms embedded in Wikipedia community that “we are writing encyclopaedia content”. Together with the community-sense which is driven to remove inappropriate content by collaborative community. Again, the content of Wikipedia is to be comparable with traditional professional-created encyclopaedia (Columbia Encyclopaedia), and this can be identified by community’s efforts in a promising way.53 (3) Online Community Framework Researchers have also proposed various frameworks to understand online community system design. For example, research has suggested that the optimal number designed for one online community is around 150 participants54. In addition, people have used the Breakout & Reassemble System (B&R System) --- which encourages participants to break out, to sublist, to hold a private discussion, and then return to the larger group55 --- to form flexible and productive collaboration among a large group of participants. As to respond to the motivation and incentive problems, one of the theory we have discussed in the study of “Online Community Mapping” last year ---

53 Emigh, W and Herring, S.C. (2005). 54 Kolbitsch and Maurer (2006). 55 Etzioni and Etzioni (1999).

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deSouzqa and Preece’s “Online Community Framework” --- has offered us a potential direction in the study of complex social environment. This framework is designed mainly to recognize how technology may be used to develop usability & sociability for online community. It also aims to prevent problems in computer-mediated communication and social interaction.56 5. A Web Prototype for Place, People and Participation Working through detailed explanations about participation and collaboration, we try to provide a web prototype for people to participate and collaborate online. The specific Place-based design case is the Orchid Island (Lanyu), the home to the Tao aborigines of Taiwan. Our prototype has been built on the concept of three main elements: Place, People and Participation. While the “Place” refers to web presentations of places which are enriched with satellite images, topographic maps, geospatial features, and gazetteers, etc., the “People” component allows places to be annotated with user-generated data. Together with “Place” and “People”, the “Participation” function enables group annotations and communications. However, the initial aim of this Web3P system focuses only on the individual participation framework which mainly mash-up open source cartography tools (built on those from the carto.net site for geospatial data retrieval and SVG map rendering57) as well as a newly developed AnnoTag system which combines annotation, photo uploading and sharing, user tagging, as well as various blog functions (Permalink, Trackback, RSS, etc.). The basic Web3P architecture (see Figure 4) constitutes two databases (DBs) and two web services (the PlaceMap service and the AnnoTag service). Web3P is built on the concept that each place has a unique URL which can be annotated and tagged by users58. We have not yet implemented Wiki-style We-collaboration function into the Web3P system. After returning from an Orchid Island survey this (2006) summer for field investigation and raw data collection, we are even more confident on the initiative of building a place-centered, rather than the usual location-based, geospatial Web system for people’s participation and collaboration online.

56 deSouzqa and Preece (2004). 57 Software released by Juliana Williams and Andreas Neumann at www.carto.net . 58 Some screenshots of Web3P system can be seen in appendix. As we are still working on a better data model for PlaceDB, the online version will soon be updated after a more stable version is completed.

Below we illustrate the drawback of a traditional location-based geospatial system. We stood at a hill top positioned as (22∘02’12.97” N; 121∘33＇30.95＂E; elev_755ft) and took two photos. The two photos are shown in both systems: Google Earth and Web3P. In Figure 5, Google earth has been used to show the two “places” (the Lanyu Weather Station and Jyunjianyan, a reef in near-by water). Both are displayed in the same position in Google Earth as the two photos were taken at the same location. By contrast, the place-centered design of Web3P can be deployed to incorporate the participants’ knowledge about the places and is shown in Figure 6 to use this knowledge to position the two photos to their perspective places in the map. This experience not only reconfirms our place-centered design which allocates one unique Place ID to a single place while constructing a geospatial infrastructure framework, it also provides an implication for the Culture Atlas to reconsider the role of the place name in the design of Infrastructure while seeking participation and collaboration from the general users. Issue about collaborative gazetteer authorship and maintenance is but just one of the many that waiting to be explored.

Figure 4: Web3P Architecture

Figure 5: Photos taken for different places but at the same location.

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6. Culture Atlas Infrastructure Re-visited What is a Cultural Atlas? Ruth Mostern in the latest CAA/ECAI meeting (April, 2006) suggested that “(m)aybe historical GIS is for researchers and cultural atlases are for a user public.” This was the point we made in the introduction. In this study several questions are raised inevitably about the nature of this user-public culture atlas infrastructure. We have identified user participation and community collaboration as the key elements in building and sustaining the development of this infrastructure, taking the emerging PC phenomenon on the web as our evidence and guideline in the current investigation. At the same time, this perspective also presents us a great challenge on how better to incorporate the participation and collaboration paradigms into the infrastructure design of the public’s culture atlas. Recent development in digital library and public science research indicates that there are several reasons to employ the participation and collaboration paradigms, even in an academic research environment. First, there is still plenty of space which academic field has not filled because the limitation of time, money and human resource59. Second, the desire for access to knowledge from the public has increasingly shaped the argument in public science research when facing the challenge of reducing control over proprietary information and of starting to move from a regime of intellectual property to a system of intellectual common60. Third, from the social production perspective, making previously inaccessible expertise and knowledge available to all is probably the most important motivation for cultural, geographical, and philosophical concerns (Benkler, 2006). At the same time, the democratization of information technology has brought to people new ways and new perspectives on the creation, distribution, and collaborative production of information over the Web.

59 Krowne, A (2003). 60 Uhlir, P.F. (2003).

It is never being more relevant now to bridge web technologies with culture atlases. “Geographic information is stimulating new uses of the World Wide Web, evolving existing applications and underpinning the creation of new ones to adapt to global trend,” said Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web61. The integration of the two not only can continue what Participatory journalism and Citizen media have emerged and impacted on the society, but also implicates a new move for the Culture Atlas as a new media for participation and collaboration. The PC perspective we have indicated here is a preview of the new convergence of these phenomena. In conclusion, at the time of this writing, we have a clearer picture to respond to questions like who the contributors are, what factors motivate people to participate and collaborate, what the value of user-generated content is, what the problems are for users to participate and collaborate online, and how to make participation and collaboration work. The literature provides support for a limited number of explorations on the emerging PC phenomena. Two paradigms as our study have suggested here are Me-Participation and We-Collaboration, and for sure they are still evolving in some innovative directions. Nevertheless, the questions standing behind the PC phenomena we have discussed above include: among whom; about what; on reasons why; as well as the problems identified; with the mechanisms supported how. The continuing relevance of some implications for the Culture Atlas Infrastructure or other forms of web-based infrastructure we hope to contribute is more versatile than this initial study could offer. There is always plenty of time to improve our understanding of the emerging PC phenomena. The prospect of this work will depend, of course, on future participation and collaboration with peer cooperation, like yours62. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In preparing this writing, the most gratitude goes to the other four members of the Open Geospatial Information Team in the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica: Chin-Lung Chang, Yi-Hong Chang, Dong-Po Deng, and Chia-Hsin Huang. The Web3P system is the production of the entire team. A special thank goes to Winnie Chang for invaluable logistic support, and to Ilya Lee for many inspiring discussions.

61 A news release before an Ordnance Survey research event; available at www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/media/news/2006/aug/terrafuture.html 62 This writing is planned to be revised in a collaborative form once our project web site is launched. The aim is to bring everyone’s participation and collaboration to understand the PC phenomena in a PC way.

Figure 6: Photos for the two places are positioned correctly in the map.

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APPENDIX: Snapshots of the Web3P Prototype.

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