One of the stranger parts of the Collaborative Tools Project was that a few weeks into the job we accidentally landed a JISC funding grant to attempt to create something like Amazon’s “if you like this book – you’ll like these” but for people. The Jisc project is called PPPeople PPPowered and I will be blogging about it here.
The idea in itself isn’t that original, creating a browsable serendipity engine for people. Many people have tried to do this before. The basic wireframe of how it might look is shown below. What I am hoping is that I can simply make a reasonable job of assembling existing open-source tools to create something new, used and useful. A large part of my approach involves involving people in the project very early (like now) creating a site they could use every day and then augment that with mined data but also even have activities such as “Tag Yourself Day” so that we kick start the process at a human level rather than trying to achieve it all with technology.
At the moment I’m collecting tools that might be useful for working with peoples’ social media profile data, tools for reasoning about unstructured data and tools for working with large repositories like ePrints, Mendeley, CiteULike or Academia.edu AND tools for visualisation… So if you have any suggestions, do leave a comment.
Of course, one of the obvious visualisations would be something like a MentionMap network diagram (shown below).
… but then again, in many ways, although beautifully swooshy… it is something of a cliche isn’t it. What are the best methods for displaying connections, or possible connections between people I wonder?
