The document discusses the concept of social machines, which are processes on the web where human creativity is combined with computer administration to solve social problems. It highlights ongoing research aimed at understanding and designing effective social machines that can empower communities and improve daily life through collaborative efforts. The authors advocate for the development of a socio-technical ecosystem of interactive social machines and emphasize the importance of big data and emerging research in this area.

1. David De Roure

5. Christine Borgman

7. Nigel Shadbolt et al

8. Edwards, P. N., et al. (2013) Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and
Research Challenges. Ann Arbor: Deep Blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552

9. The Order of Social Machines
Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social
constraint – the very processes from which society
arises. Computers can help if we use them to
create abstract social machines on the Web:
processes in which the people do the creative work
and the machine does the administration... The
stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new
social engines. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)

10. Some Social Machines

11. SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice
of Social Machines http://www.sociam.org/
EPSRC Programme Grant (June 2012 - May 2017)
• Southampton Shadbolt, Hall,
Berners-Lee, Moreau (ECS)
• Edinburgh Robertson, Buneman (CS)
• Oxford De Roure (e-Research)

12. http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/J017728/1
• Research into pioneering methods of supporting
purposeful human interaction onBehaviour Wide Web, of
the World is socially
the kind exemplified by phenomena such as Wikipedia and
constituted, not
Galaxy Zoo.
programmed in
• These collaborations are empowering, as communities
identify and solve their own problems, harnessing their
commitment, local knowledge and embedded skills,
without having to rely on remote experts or governments.
• The ambition is to enable us to build social machines that
solve the routine tasks of daily life as well as the
emergencies… to develop the theory and practice so that
we can create the next generation of decentralised, data
intensive, social machines. We are interested in design
• Understanding the attributes of the current generation of
successful social machines will help us build the next.

13. www.zooniverse.org

15. Image
Classification
Talk
Forum
Citizen Scientists
data reduction
Scientists

16. Towards a classification framework
for social machines. Nigel Shadbolt,
Daniel Alexander Smith, Elena
Simperl, Max Van Kleek, Yang
Yang,. Wendy Hall.

17. Trajectories... distinguished by purpose
Trajectories through Social Machines https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13/
Kevin Page

18. http://botornot.net
Cat De Roure

19. Web as
lens
Web as
artefact
Web Observatories
http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/

20. Technical and business interface
Towards a socio-technical
system of observatories

21. Big data elephant versus sense-making network?
Iain Buchan
The challenge is to foster the co-constituted socio-technical
system on the right i.e. a computationally-enabled sensemaking network of expertise, data, models and narratives.

22. Jun Zhao
www.researchobject.org
Join the W3C Community Group www.w3.org/community/rosc

23. WOW2014 Web Observatory Workshop at WWW2014
• Fluctuation and Burst Response in Social Media
• Humour Reactions in Crisis: A Proximal analysis of Chinese posts
on Sina Weibo in Reaction to the Salt Panic of March 2011
• Legal and Ethical Considerations: Step 1b in Building a Health
Web Observatory
• Observing the Web by Understanding the Past: Archival Internet
Research
• The Design of a Live Social Observatory System
• Towards a Taxonomy for Web Observatories
• Visualising Data in Web Observatories: A Proposal for Visual
Analytics Development & Evaluation
• Zooniverse: Observing the World’s Largest Citizen Science
Platform

25. In Conclusion
1. The future is Big Data and Big Social… and with
increasing automation and machine-to-machine
2. The Theory, Practice, Design and Construction of
Social Machines are emerging areas of study
3. Try thinking about your projects in terms of an
ecosystem of interacting Social Machines instead
of layers of computer systems and users
4. There are growing Social Machines and Web
Observatory communities (join the Web
Observatory Community Group!)

26. david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
@dder
SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EPJ017728/1 and
comprises the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org
SmartSociety: Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems: When People
Meet Machines to Build a Smarter Society funded by 7th Framework Programme FP7-ICT2011-9 Grant Agreement 600854. See www.smart-society-project.eu