[Cs5500] Fwd: The Scientific Community Game: A Socio-Technical System to Cooperate and Compete

[Karl Lieberherr]

As you are working on the final touches, I would like to bring this message
from a research group at CMU to your attention.

They find our system: "very cool stuff".

-- Karl


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Howison <jhowison at cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:27 AM
Subject: Re: The Scientific Community Game: A Socio-Technical System
to Cooperate and Compete
To: Karl Lieberherr <lieber at ccs.neu.edu>
Cc: Jim Herbsleb <jdh at cs.cmu.edu>


Hi Karl,

(Apologies for the delayed response; I was out traveling for a few days)

Very cool stuff.  I've scanned the poster and the site and have
printed out the SCG.pdf paper [1] for more in-depth consideration.

Recently we've been thinking about the potential role of competitions
in scientific software development, so this comes at an opportune
time.  The focus of my thinking has been on "(given the current state
of the academic reputation economy) how does one identify elements
which are amenable to this mode, and encourage architectures which
enable the absorption of the results."  I've been looking at little at
InnoCentive's consulting business [2], where they work to craft
elements of people's problems most amenable to challenge competitions:

http://www.innocentive.com/innovation-solutions/innovation-challenges

Hope to chat more with Jim on this during this week.  Did Jim share
our qualitative analysis of software production systems in science
(focusing on incentives)?

Howison, J. and Herbsleb, J. D. (2011). Scientific software production
and collaboration. In Computer Support Collaborative Work 2011.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958824.1958904&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=16161426&CFTOKEN=23519795

Best regards,
James

On Apr 9, 2011, at 16:54, Karl Lieberherr wrote:

> Hi Jim:
>
> I look forward to have an interaction with James.
>
> A good starting point is:
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/evergreen/specker/scg-home.html
>
> -- Karl
>
> On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Jim Herbsleb <jdh at cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
>> Hi Karl,
>>
>> Thanks for sending this along.  I'm going to share it with my postdoc, James
>> Howison, and think about how these ideas might apply to our context.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Jim
>> ---
>> Jim Herbsleb
>> Carnegie Mellon University
>> http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 5, 2011, at 6:03 AM, Karl Lieberherr wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Jim:
>>>
>>> I enjoyed our discussion on the way to the natural swimming pools in
>>> Recife.
>>>
>>> Enclosed is a poster about our game.
>>>
>>> I really like your mechanism design question:
>>>
>>> Maybe we should ask
>>> How can I set up the socio-technical ecosystem that will allow users,
>>> developers, businesses, and everyone else to cooperate and compete to
>>> build what everyone needs?
>>>
>>> =====
>>>
>>> We have an answer for the task of solving computational problems:
>>>
>>> The Scientific Community Game is a socio-technical ecosystem that will
>>> allow users, developers, businesses, and everyone else to cooperate
>>> and compete to build software that solves a computational problem in a
>>> domain.
>>>
>>> We are open to suggestions. Please let us if you see applications in
>>> your domain.
>>>
>>> -- Karl
>>> <SCG_Expo_Poster_PDF[1][1].pdf>
>>
>>