INSEMTIVES - Incentives
for Semantics
It seems that, although there are many opponents to the badge-oriented mechanism to involve users, considering it non-sense (see the comments on the TechCrunch’s blog entry), badges are an effective mechanism to get users participating. The point seems to be adding value to the “simple” fact of badge gathering.
You can read the whole article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/brightkite-badges/
Applications are invited for the position of “Post-doctoral Research Fellow” as part of a joint research project between the Masdar Institute of Science& Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project’s Principal Investigators are:
The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.
For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf
In this article recently appeared on FirstMonday, Viola Krebs illustrates the motives behind the willingness of a large community of individuals to volunteer computing power to help solve a medical research problem. What I find mighty interesting for our endeavors is:
a) the literature review section of the paper (it looks like we are doing a good job in tracking the relevant literature even though we apply it to a different domain!)
b) the methodological section in which they present a fine method for discriminating Implicit and Explicit motivation mechanisms.
You can read the whole paper here:
firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2783/2452
Supun Dewaraja, an undergraduate student of the University of Westminster, is currently researching on building a scalable approach to collaborative ontology alignment. The aim of this project is to use a crowd sourcing approach to ontology alignment. Considerations will also be made as to how to motivate the public to take part in ontology alignment. Furthermore the scalability (number of people, number of concepts) of the solution to the Internet as a whole rather than a specific expert group of knowledge engineers is also investigated.
The questionnaire contained in the link below is a short survey to gather the requirements for this approach.
http://ecustomersurvey.com/dsm/ViewSurvey.do?id=d23138e6-ac89-4e6c-9f43-bc91c11ab433
I guess we have something to say filling this survey and as a way to help Supun 
TITLE OF THE TALK: “The Mozilla project and its communities: how communities are key to the project”.
ABSTRACT:
With more than 300 million users gained in less 5 years, the Mozilla project is today one of the most improtant open source project in the world. Based on a worldwide community of developers, translators, promoters, beta testers and enthusiasts, Mozilla has one of the most efficient and passionate community backing the creation of its software products and promoting innovation and the open web. This talk will explain how the various mozilla communities are organized into a global project and what is motivating a large variety of people in the world to collaborate in an open source project like Mozilla.
SPEAKER’S SHORT BIO:
Mozilla Europe co-founder and board member, Pascal Chevrel manages Web localization (worldwide) for the Mozilla project and community growth in Europe.
Mozilla press spokesperson for the Spanish market, Pascal is also a contributor in the French and Spanish communities as member of the Mozilla Hispano and MozFR projects.
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