ACM Creativity & Cognition 2009

PROMOTING SOCIAL CREATIVITY: A COMPONENT OF A NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR SOCIAL PARTICIPATION

PANEL CHAIR

Ben Shneiderman

Dept of Computer Science & Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

PANELISTS

Elizabeth Churchill

Yahoo! Research Santa Clara, CA, USA

Gerhard Fischer

Dept of Computer Science & Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

Ken Goldberg

Berkeley Center for New Media, College of Engineering & School of Information University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

PANEL ABSTRACT

This panel will discuss group processes that promote social creativity in science, engineering, arts, and humanities. We will offer positive and negative examples of social creativity projects, while suggesting research directions for dramatically increased social participation. The goal is to develop strategies that would expand resources and opportunities for research and education in social creativity. This requires our community to develop a unified position, then reach out to national science funding agencies, while building the case for the importance of this topic beyond our own community. How can social creativity, collaborative discovery, distributed innovation, and collective intelligence be framed as a national priority in many countries, while proposing a clear set of research challenges?

The theme of technology-mediated social participation is outlined in the white paper for a National Initiative for Social Participation. The white paper suggests that successful research challenges should have three key elements:
(1) compelling national need (healthcare, national security, community safety, education, innovation, cultural heritage, energy sustainability, environmental protection, etc.),
(2) scientific foundation based on established theories and well-defined research questions (privacy, reciprocity, trust, motivation, recognition, etc.), and
(3) computer science research challenges (security, privacy protection, scalability, visualization, distributed data handling for massive user-generated content, network analysis of community evolution and cross network comparison, etc.).

©2009 ACM Creativity & Cognition Sponsored by: ACM SIGCHI In Cooperation with: SIGMM, SIGART, and SIGSOFT