What if we imagined search as integrated with social media from the ground up? So.cl is a web application from FUSE Labs that combines web browsing, search, and social networking for the purposes of sharing around topics of interest. Across several research projects we are currently exploring the role of interest networks in supporting interest discovery and informal knowledge sharing. How can we enable people to find similar others around their interests, share with each other using lightweight curation and creation tools, while at the same time negotiating the public sphere online?

Farnham, S.D., Lahav, M., Raskino, D., Cheng, L., Laird-McConnell, T. 2012. So.cl: An interest network for informal learning. In Proceedings of ICWSM, AAAI Publications.

Social media is increasingly playing a powerful role in how every day citizens engage with both local and national civic activities. Through ongoing collaborations with the City of Seattle we have been exploring how tools for citizen journalism may increase youth citizen engagement. Across several studies, we have examined how citizens, news media, governments, and criminals use social media in the Mexican Drug War. Most recently, we are applying lessons learned to develop a tool for fostering civic communities at the hyperlocal level.

Hu, Y., Farnham, S. , Monroy-Hernández, A. (2013). Whoo.ly: Facilitating Information Seeking For Hyperlocal Communities Using Social Media. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). Best paper honorable mention.

Monroy-Hernández, A., boyd, d., Kıcıman, E., De Choudhury, M., Counts, S. (2013). The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare, CSCW, 2013

Monroy-Hernández, A., Kıcıman, E., boyd, d., Counts, S. (2012). Tweeting the Drug War: Empowerment, Intimidation, and Regulation in Social Media, HCIC, 2012

Monroy-Hernández, A., Kiciman, E., boyd, danah, and Counts, S. (2012). Narcotweets: Social Media in Wartime. Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

Farnham, S.D., Keyes, D., Yuki, V., Tugwell, C. (2012). Puget Sound Off: Fostering youth civic engagement through citizen journalism. In Proceedings of CSCW 2012, ACM Press.

The Internet, social media, and user generated content affords exciting opportunities for creative collaboration, accelerated innovation, and learning as people share and remix everything from code to photography to storytelling online. At FUSE Labs we are engaged with ongoing investigations into the design of systems to enable people to connect, share, and remix around their creative interests. Research projects have ranged from Kodu, a creative game lab for kids, to studies of teen use of social media for creative extracurricular activities, to tools for sharing in social networks, to prototypes instigating remix activities.

Hallacher, S., Rodenhouse, J. , Monroy-Hernández, A. (2013). Mixsourcing: Exploring Bounded Creativity as a Form of Crowdsourcing (poster and video).. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13).

Hill, B.M. and Monroy-Hernández, A. (2013) "The remixing dilemma: the trade-off between generativity and originality." American Behavioral Scientist.

Hill, Benjamin Mako and Andrés Monroy-Hernández. (2013) "The cost of collaboration for code and art: Evidence from a remixing community." In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '13). Best Paper Award

Monroy-Hernández, Andrés, Benjamin Mako Hill, Jasmine González-Rivero, danah boyd. (2011). Computers can't give credit: How automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community. In Proc. of CHI 2011. Honorary Mention.

Farnham, S.D., Turski, A., Halai, S. (2012). Docs.com: Social file sharing in Facebook.Short paper in Proc. of ICWSM 2012, ACM Press.

Wong, C., Zaragoza, R. (2012). VOLLEY: design framework for collaborative animation.In Proc. of CHI 2012, Extended Abstracts. ACM Press.

McLauren, M. (2011). The design of Kodu: A tiny visual programming language for children on Xbox 360. In Proc. of POPL'll. ACM Press.