Social IA panel

Last Monday morning we held our IA Summit panel on social information architecture with Rashmi Sinha, Mimi Yin, Scott Golder and danah boyd. I'm still rounding up the panelists' materials, but here's what I have so far:

• Introduction (Gene Smith)
• Chandler: One Approach to a Collaborative Self-Organizing Information Management System (Mimi Yin)

Scott and Rashmi will post their slides soon. Danah had great material but it was from a forthcoming paper; I'll try to pull together some notes on her ideas. In the meantime, Flickr [1] has some photos.

I'll write more about social IA over the next few weeks, but I thought I'd mention something that didn't come up in the discussion. Prior to the panel I put a thought experiment up on the screen for people to consider:

You wake up tomorrow and everyone using your favourite social bookmarking application is a 70 year-old grandmother who bookmarks recipes and knitting patterns.

Would you consider switching? *
Why?

* Assume there are no switching costs

I think the intuitive answer to the switching question is "yes," which makes me skeptical of the view that tagging systems like del.icio.us and Magnolia are--or ought to be--driven primarily through self-interest or personal utility. Even in weakly social systems like del.icio.us, the "social hum" of being near people with related interests is important.

Mimi made an interesting point during the panel that Chandler might encourage social interactions as a way to get people to see the value of contributing tags. So maybe a social-first approach would create better individual taggers and a more robust tagspace. Either way, it strikes me that the personal and social aspects of tagging are deeply enmeshed.

[1] During the panel I accidentally compressed del.icio.us and Flickr into the unfortunate term Delickr.