ICS 131: Social Analysis of Computerization

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ICS 131 Social Analysis of Computerization

• Lecture 3
• Identifying and analyzing
• social issues

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Key Ideas

• Technical content operates in a
• non-technical context.
• Social context is central to technology.

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Identify Social Issues

• Goals of Project
• Assumptions
• Stakeholders
• Impacts

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Goals of Project

• Why do it?
• Whos deciding?

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Example Blog software

• Goals
• Online journal
• Rapid sharing of information
• Easy to start up and use
• Others
• Whos deciding?
• Coders

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Assumptions

• Something that must be true in order for the rest
  of the discussion to be relevant.
• Implicit - explicit
• Pre-conditions (make it possible) vs.
  post-conditions (make it relevant)
• Degree of importance/relevance (e.g., the Earth
  isnt going to stop spinning)

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Example Blog software

• Assumptions
• Pre-conditions
• Common technology.
• Networked computers.
• Freedom of speech.
• Technically feasible.
• Post-conditions
• Someone uses it.
• Interested readers.
• Others

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Stakeholders

• Designer
• Client
• Society
• Others

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Example Blog software

• Stakeholders
• Software Designers
• Bloggers and potential bloggers
• Readers
• Society as a whole
• Politicians
• Businesses

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Stakeholders

• What do we know about them?
• Backgrounds
• Goals/Motivations
• Preferences/Needs

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Example Blog software

• Stakeholder - Readers
• Background
• Technically competent
• Interested in topic
• Goals/Motivations
• Keep up with events
• Keep up with friends
• Preferences/Needs
• Seeking information
• Ease of use

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Impacts

• Intended - What does it do for the client when it
  operates correctly?
• Side effects - What else does it do?
• Externalities - Side effect to someone other than
  the intended client.

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Example Blog software

• Impacts Intended
• Lets a blogger tell his/her friends what their
  cat ate for dinner, or who theyre going to vote
  for and why.
• Lets a reader find out about their friends and
  see what other people think.

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Example Blog software

• Impacts Side Effects
• Makes bloggers famous
• Gets the word blog in Merriam-Websters
  dictionary

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Example Blog software

• Impacts Externalities
• Changes to political landscape.
• Howard Dean
• Campaign greatly helped by
• grassroots blogging.
• Until that fateful scream.
• Others?

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Example Camera

• Imagine that someone invents a small,
  self-contained, wireless, web camera, and asks
  you to write software to allow anyone on the net
  to see what that camera sees in real time.
• Questions
• What are the goals?
• What are the assumptions?
• Who are the stakeholders?
• What are the impacts?

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Reading

• Herbert Simon
• Economics, computer science, psychology, design
• Definition of design
• Everyone designs who devises courses of action
  aimed at changing existing situations into
  preferred ones. (1969)

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Software Design

• Understand existing situations
• Conceive of preferred ones
• Preferred by whom?

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A Note on Readings

• You may need a dictionary.
• Terms I looked up the first time I read this
• Club of Rome - global think tank
• Externalities - defined earlier
• Bounded rationality
• Rational - acts in pursuit of its goals
• Bounded - experience limits in formulating and
  solving complex problems and in processing
  (receiving, storing, retrieving, transmitting)
  information (Simon)
• Desideratum - something desired as essential

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Discussion

• Process
• Questions
• Talk about them with neighbors
• Several people called up to the front to answer
  them and discuss.

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Slashdot

• Summarize
• Who are the stakeholders?
• What are the impacts?

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And our lucky contestants are...

• come on down front!

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Next class

• Thursday
• Social Aspects of Technical Questions I