SoCS: Collaborative Research: Information Farming: Intelligent Interfaces for an Online Production Community

社会生产社区可以成为强大的引擎，利用许多个人的努力来生产有价值的工件和知识。然而，他们的成功在很大程度上取决于成员有效贡献的能力。随着社区规模和复杂性的增长，成员对内容和协作的理解也面临挑战。这些挑战降低了团队协同工作的能力，以及工作产品的质量。研究人员建议将人类与智能界面结合起来，以提高贡献效率。他们将创造智能算法和界面，超越支持人们简单地寻找信息，而是支持信息农业。在信息农业中，社区成员共同努力，种下社区需要的信息种子，培育这些种子成长为有价值的信息，并剔除那些减损农场价值的信息。这项研究以人类信息处理理论为基础，并将这些理论扩展到人们产生信息的环境中。研究人员将在扩展理论的基础上探索新的算法和接口，并将开展研究以了解理论在实践中的工作原理。社会生产共同体在经济上和社会上都很重要。开源软件在我们的经济中占很大比重；维基百科正在掀起知识生产和消费的革命，它提供了人类历史上最大的知识体系之一的免费访问。拟议的研究将直接改善维基百科，并将有助于理解社会生产社区如何运作。

Social production communities can be powerful engines for harnessing the efforts of many individuals to produce valuable artifacts and knowledge. However, their success critically depends on members' ability to effectively contribute. As the size and complexity of the community grows, so do challenges to members' understanding of the content and collaboration. These challenges decrease the ability of the team to work together, and the quality of the work product.The researchers propose partnering humans with intelligent interfaces that improve contribution effectiveness. They will create intelligent algorithms and interfaces that go beyond supporting people simply foraging for information to information farming, in which members of the community work together to plant the seeds of the information the community needs, nurture the growth of those seeds into valuable information, and weed out the information that detracts from the value of the farm.The research is based on theories of human information processing, and will extend those theories to environments in which people are producing information. The researchers will explore new algorithms and interfaces based on the extended theories, and will carry out studies to understand how the theories work in practice.Social production communities are economically and socially important. Open source software runs large parts of our economy; Wikipedia is revolutionizing knowledge production and consumption, providing free access to one of the largest bodies of knowledge gathered in human history. The proposed research will directly improve Wikipedia, and will contribute to understanding how social production communities work.