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Meeting minutes with Paul (2008.7.9)

Wed, 07/09/2008 - 13:07 — Daniel Zhou
Online deliberation research:
  • Build a system like MovieLens to do research is like a 10-million-10-year project. We are not there yet.
  • One big question is how to get users to use our system (if we build it), which is itself a research question.
  • There are many Europeans doing research in this area. Half of them don't have fundings. There are lots of relevant research in the US too.
  • A forum for SI might not be a good starting point.
  • !!!GOOD RESEARCH QUESTIONS that have evaluation metrics
    • polarization
    • distill big problem into smaller issues to make policy change
    • make sites attractive for non-political-oriented readers
    • how to turn conversations into mobilization (action).
    • how far to push the conversation till regulation comes in the picture.
  • It's better to find an existing community and make add-ons, rather than start from scratch.


General research caveats:
  • Force the question: give them the question, and force them to answer "Yes" or "No". Good way to get things done.
  • Finish the rest of the 10% of work, and give people the option whether to use it or not. Don't wait for them to say yes then work the 10%, because that never happens.
  • Write data analysis code first, then we can know whether data is good or not and make changes of the data collection part if needed.
  • When we do a survey, make sure the survey is representative of the target population. Otherwise the survey is useless.
  • If your work has to rely on other parties, don't choose the approach that's easy for you. Choose the approach that's easy for them.
  • First, starts with a research question. Then think of building the tools that answer the question. Or, start with some really clever tools, and think of the research questions it can answer. Don't build tools just for the sake of the tools.
  • A good research questions should have existing evaluation metrics. That is, after the research, we can assert whether our approach tackles the questions. If a research question doesn't have such kind of metrics, we should really be careful about whether to go for the research question in the first place.

Reflections on DIAC/OD 2008 at Berkeley

Sun, 07/06/2008 - 17:47 — Daniel Zhou

What I have gained from the conference:
  • Made connections with people who have similar interests.
    • Justin Smith, a PhD student in Washington State University who is doing research on "Networked Resistance" patterns in India.
    • Brian Sullivan, a practitioner who has developed an interesting Deliberation tool at civicevolution.org.
    • The eGovernment research group at VT.
    • Peter Day from the University of Brighton who is interested in democracy in China.
    • Elisa Oreglia, a PhD student at Berkeley iSchool who is doing research about ICT in China
  • Learned some interesting ideas
    • The online deliberation process can be decomposed into 3 elements: issues (questions), options (possible answers), and arguments (pros and cons). We have also seen demo systems such as the MIT Collabortium and CivicEvolution.
    • The idea of using open source software developmen process to develope government rules collectively.
    • The idea of "Networked Resistance" patterns and anti-patterns.
  • Fueled with more ideas and passion to do research in promoting democracy in China
    • Online discussion and argumentation has a huge potential in promoting democracy in China, not only because it can educate people what is "democracy" and prepare people for it, but also it is where the government regulation is weak. Related research areas include online communities, social media, online deliberation, social network, and conversation research, which are quite consistent with my interests.
    • Drupal is a good tool in terms of building technical infrastructure for online communities.
    • Many ideas from Computer Science such as patterns, usability, recommender/reputation systems, etc, can be borrowed to this area of research, which is my advantage compared to other social science researchers.

Some caveats:
  • Research topic cannot be too broad or too vague. We need specific research questions.
  • We need either qualitative data or quantitative data to convince the audience that an idea is a good one. Merely describing the idea and assuming it is good is not convincing at all.
  • We should be careful that it is quite easy to get lost in ideals and those "big ideas" in research about politics. We need to do something that has a certain degree of feasibility rather than impractical illusions.

Trivia:
  • Surprisingly there were not so many academics attending the conference.
  • Sean and I really enjoyed the delicious Mexican food served at Cafe Duran.
  • I met Kieran Lal at Berkeley who were attending the Bay Area DUG meeting, and disccussed deploying pivots to Drupal.org.

In general, I almost made up my mind to do my Prelim research in using online conversations as an approach to promote democracy in China. I need to talk to my advisor before making the final decision. I can also do some research in other areas as my side projects (if I can handle them).

What to do next in terms of this research.
  • Come up with the research problem
    • Step one: brainstorming and find out the possibilities. I need to discuss it with Paul, Sean and probably Prof.Kenneth Lieberthal at the PolSci department who is an expert in Chinese politics
    • Step two: find out which problem has the most potential. The problem should be a good match of my interest and my advisor's interest.
  • Literature review: read articles and books about PolSci.
  • Find fundings: social media, KnightFoundation

About other research and project:
  • I'll submit a detailed report on the progress of the pivots research with Drupal.org in a later time.
  • Hope to participate in other related projects with other PhD students as my side projects.

Weekly report (5.26~6.1)

Mon, 06/02/2008 - 09:09 — Daniel Zhou

What I have done in the past week:
*. The pivots block was enabled on d.o only for the site maintainers and CVS account users. You can also logon d.o with the username "pivots_test" and password "drupal.org" to take a look. For example, http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce. Some feedback can be found at http://drupal.org/node/265450. The plan is to have those advanced d.o users review the code, and then we can migrate the pivots code from scratchvm to the production d.o. servers, and then we can make it available to all d.o users. We have to follow this process due to the d.o policy.

What I'll do this week:
*. Publish the code to the develpment mailing list for security review.
*. After the review, help the infra team migrate the code to d.o servers
*. Work with Nate on the AnnoCPAN/Perlmonks data transfer.

Weekly Report (May.19~25, 2008)

Sun, 05/25/2008 - 12:38 — Daniel Zhou

I'm still in China this week, and I'm still not in the very right mood of working. But I'll call it a stop in the coming week.

What I have done this week:
*. Picked up the pivots work.
*. Read a few papers.

What I'll do next week:
*. Finish the "survey" code, and get it work on d.o.
*. Read a few more papers.
*. Switch to the right status of working.

Impression on Boston

Thu, 03/06/2008 - 21:37 — Daniel Zhou

I love Boston. It's almost my favorite city of the east coast. My favorite city in the west is San Francisco. The reason I like it is probably because of its size is just right. Not too crowded like NYC, or too quiet like a small town, Ypsilante for example.

One thing I noticed is that 2 out of 10 people are reading books while waiting/taking the subway. Perhaps it's because the city has Harvard/MIT. I love cultured, highly intellectual cities.

Goodbye Boston. Hello Montreal.

Day 3,4 @ Drupalcon

Thu, 03/06/2008 - 21:33 — Daniel Zhou

Drupal is AWESOME. That was my opening comment addressing to the "D.O. Redesign Panel" audience. I gave a 10-min presentation during the session and introduced the "Conversation Pivots" to the community. Hopefully, it will go live on d.o. soon.

To prepare the presentation, I didn't go to bed until 3:30am, and I'm tired now. So I'm not going to write a lot in the blog. Paul really helped a lot during the session. Learned a lot from my advisor. We had dinner together Wednesday evening.

The panelist had a dinner together on Day 2. It was really a nice group, which included Angela, Nedjo, Tiffany (w/ George), Derek, and Larry.

The bus is leaving for Montreal at 11:45pm. Goodbye Boston.

Day 2 @ Drupalcon

Tue, 03/04/2008 - 23:34 — Daniel Zhou

The second day of the conference was interesting too. I went to 2 site building sessions and 2 programing sessions. The "Best practices in development environment..." session and the "Performance tuning" session seemed to be particularly useful. I met with Angela Byron, Nedjo Rogers, Derek Wright, and Tiffany Farriss, and we had dinner together. They are going to lead the d.o. redesign panel on Thursday.

Tomorrow there will be some interesting discussion sessions in the Birds of Feather track, such as the ApacheSolr project. The schedule of BoF can be found on the whiteboard in front of the conference room. The general schedule is here: http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/files/fixedkeynote_schedule.pdf

Day 1 @ Drupalcon

Mon, 03/03/2008 - 21:09 — Daniel Zhou

The first day of Drupalcon was exciting! There were so many people from all over the world and the sessions were well arranged. I learned quite a lot from it. And I met Kieran finally (he was quite busy coordinate the sessions, and we didn't talk too much). And my new friend Ben made a 10-min presentation on his RelatedContent module in the Knight Foundation session, in which he mentioned our pivots module.

The three things that impressed me most in Day 1 were:

1. The Drupal community is flourishing. There are both a large number of experienced old users base and an increasing number of enthusiastic new comers. From the SI884 perspective, It's a good sign of a healthy community. I am deeply impressed by the enthusiasm of the community, and I believe the community will continue to grow quickly.

2. Dries' keynote address was inspiring. It summarized the current status of Drupal and the community, and it also pointed out the future of Drupal. I think the slides will be online soon, which is worthy to look at.

3. The Knight Foundation offers 5 million dollars each year to support Drupal/community/journalism related research. Last year's winners are listed here: http://www.newschallenge.org/winners.html. I think our Pivots, Trackers and Recommenders research definitely fits their application criteria. Maybe we can apply fundings there.

Other than those, I went to the "U.Mininesota Libraries usability testing" session, the "Converting mock-ups to Drupal themes" session, the "Drupal for fun and profit" session, and the "Drupal in China" session. All of them were quite interesting.

Looking forward to Day 2! :)

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