2020

Conference papers

auteur

Grigorios Piperagkas, Rafael Angarita, Valérie Issarny

titre

Social Participation Network: Linking things, services and people to support participatory processes

article

ISESL 2020 - First International Workshop on Information Systems Engineering for Smarter Life, Jun 2020, Grenoble / Virtuel, France

resume

Digital technologies have impacted almost every aspect of our society, including how people participate in activities that matter to them. Indeed, digital participation allows people to be involved in different societal activities at an unprecedented scale through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Still, enabling participation at scale requires making it seamless for people to: interact with a variety of software platforms, get information from connected physical objects and software services, and communicate and collaborate with their peers. Toward this objective, this paper introduces and formalizes the concept of Social Participation Network, which captures the diverse participation relationships-between people, digital services and connected things-supporting participatory processes. The paper further presents the design of an associated online service to support the creation and management of Social Participation Networks. The design advocates the instantiation of Social Participation Networks within distinct participation contexts-spanning, e.g., private institutions, neighbor communities, and governmental institutions-so that the participants' information and contributions to participation remain isolated and private within the given context.

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2019

Journal articles

auteur

Rafael Angarita, Bruno Lefèvre, Shohreh Ahvar, Ehsan Ahvar, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valerie Issarny

titre

Universal Social Network Bus: Towards the Federation of Heterogeneous Online Social Network Services

article

ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, In press, ⟨10.1145/3323333⟩

resume

Online Social Network Services (OSNSs) are changing the fabric of our society, impacting almost every aspect of it. Over the last decades, the aggressive market rivalry has led to the emergence of multiple competing, "closed" OSNSs. As a result, users are trapped in the walled gardens of their OSNS, encountering restrictions about what they can do with their personal data, the people they can interact with and the information they get access to. As an alternative to the platform lock-in, "open" OSNSs promote the adoption of open, standardized APIs. However, users still massively adopt closed OSNSs to benefit from the services' advanced functionalities and/or follow their "friends", although the users' virtual social sphere is ultimately limited by the OSNSs they join. Our work aims at overcoming such a limitation by enabling users to meet and interact beyond the boundary of their OSNSs, including reaching out to "friends" of distinct closed OSNSs. We specifically introduce USNB-Universal Social Network Bus, which revisits the "service bus" paradigm that enables interoperability across computing systems, to address the requirements of "social interoperability". USNB features synthetic profiles and personae for interaction across the boundaries of-closed and open- ,-profile-and non-profile-based-OSNSs through a reference social interaction service. We ran a 1-day workshop with a panel of users who experimented with the USNB prototype to assess the potential benefits of social interoperability for social network users. Results show the positive evaluation of users for USNB, especially as an enabler of applications for civic participation. This further opens up new perspectives for future work, among which, enforcing security and privacy guarantees.

DOI

DOI : 10.1145/3323333

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Conference papers

auteur

Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valerie Issarny

titre

Social Middleware for Civic Engagement

article

ICDCS 2019 - 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems - Vision Track, Jul 2019, Dallas, United States

resume

Civic engagement refers to any collective action towards the identification and solving of public issues. Current civic technologies are traditional Web-or mobile-based platforms that make difficult, or just impossible, the participation of citizens via different communication technologies. Moreover, connected objects sensing physical-world data can nourish participatory processes by providing physical evidence to citizens; however, leveraging these data is not direct and still a time-consuming process for civic technologies developers. This paper introduces the concept of social middleware for civic engagement. Social middleware allows citizens to engage in participatory processes-supported by civic technologies-via their favorite communication tools, and to interact not only with other citizens but also with relevant connected objects and software platforms. The mission of social middleware goes beyond the connection of all these heterogeneous entities. It aims at easing the implementation of distributed applications oriented toward civic engagement by featuring dedicated built-in services.

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2017

Conference papers

auteur

Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny

titre

USNB: Enabling Universal Online Social Interactions

article

2017 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC), Oct 2017, San Jose, United States. pp.309-318, ⟨10.1109/CIC.2017.00048⟩

resume

Abstract —Online social network services (OSNSs) have become an integral part of our daily lives. At the same time, the aggressive market competition has led to the emergence of multiple competing siloed OSNSs that cannot interoperate. As a consequence, people face the burden of creating and managing multiple OSNS accounts and learning how to use them to stay connected. This paper is concerned with relieving users from such a burden by enabling universal online social interactions. The contributions of this paper span: (1) a model of the universal social network bus (USNB) for OSNS interoperability; (2) a prototype for universal online social interactions that builds upon the proposed model; and (3) a preliminary experimental evaluation involving 50 participants. Results show that people are positive about the solution as they are able to reach out a larger community of users independently of the OSNSs they use

DOI

DOI : 10.1109/CIC.2017.00048

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auteur

Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Cristhian Parra, James Holston, Valérie Issarny

titre

Leveraging the Service Bus Paradigm for Computer-mediated Social Communication Interoperability

article

International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Software Engineering in Society (SEIS) Track, May 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina

resume

Computer-mediated communication can be defined as any form of human communication achieved through computer technology. From its beginnings, it has been shaping the way humans interact with each other, and it has influenced many areas of society. There exist a plethora of communication services enabling computer-mediated social communication (e.g., Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Slack, etc.). Based on personal preferences, users may prefer a communication service rather than another. As a result, users sharing same interests may not be able to interact since they are using incompatible technologies. To tackle this interoperability barrier, we propose the Social Communication Bus, a middleware solution targeted to enable the interaction between heterogeneous communication services. More precisely, the contribution of this paper is threefold: (i), we propose a survey of the various forms of computer-mediated social communication, and we make an analogy with the computing communication paradigms; (ii), we revisit the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB) that supports interoperability across computing interaction paradigms to provide a solution for computer-mediated social communication interoperability; and (iii), we present Social-MQ, an implementation of the Social Communication Bus that has been integrated into the AppCivist platform for participatory democracy.

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