Constructing Collaborative Online Communities for Visualizing Spimes Timothy Maciag and Daryl H. Hepting Department of Computer Science University of Regina Regina, Saskatchewan Canada maciagt@cs.uregina.ca, hepting@cs.uregina.ca Abstract—The digital age has brought about new platforms for collaboration which have provided interesting and effective ways of enabling people to engage in a wide variety of socially- driven activities. One only needs to observe the many free/libre open source software projects on the web, where millions of connected individuals actively participate in the development and deployment of a wide range of software applications and tools. For many of us, there is a great appeal to this ideology, one comprising of a more transparent and open culture of collaboration. Such activities encourage freedom and shared learning which could be considered essential to human growth and innovation. In this paper we describe research with such goals. Specific to our research includes the development of online and mobile user interfaces for the visualization of food “spimes” (informationally-rich food-based data), seeking to understand how best to enable and encourage people to share information/knowledge, visualize/compare choices, and under- stand different aspects of food quality. By democratizing food knowledge in such respects, it is the goal that we develop a more satisfying food culture, enabling people to collectively realize more healthy, socially acceptable, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective food choices. Keywords-Web-based support systems; Online collaboration; Modelling; Visualization; Social shopping; Interaction design I. I NTRODUCTION In today’s highly connected world, there exist many socially-driven communities that have emerged engaging people in collaboration and cooperation efforts in support of enhancing our growth and innovative capabilities as a society. One only needs to look towards the many collabo- rative communities that have emerged as a result of the va- riety of F ree/L ibre O pen S ource S oftware (FLOSS) projects in current use and development, e.g. Ubuntu 1 (http:// www.ubuntu.com), Drupal (http://drupal.org), and Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com) [1]. Such collaborative commu- nities, made up of people from a wide range of backgrounds; developers, writers, and users alike, enable individuals to connect, volunteer, collaborate, cooperate, and become more engaged in topics of interest. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a successful online collaborative system in such regards. Here we have an online repository of information and knowledge about everything 1 The following link describes interesting social activity and communica- tion of the Ubuntu developer community for the release of Ubuntu 10.04, http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/04/23/lucid-community-team-review/ that is voluntarily and willingly developed and maintained by millions of individuals from all around the globe. Although quality is at times suspect [2], the success of Wikipedia cannot be understated as it provides an excellent example of how to successfully design and develop a model that en- gages people to contribute (share), collaborate, and consume information and knowledge accordingly. Building from the Wikipedia model, we are interested in researching similar models and processes with the goal of constructing collaborative volunteer communities for visual- izing product information in the form of spimes, specifically food spimes. Bruce Sterling defines the concept of spimes as [3]: Manufactured objects whose informational sup- port is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are informationally-rich, trackable objects, things that generally go through some sort of manufacturing, pro- duction, and consumption process and that which have the capacity for emitting information about both themselves and their lifecycle. Imagine a bottle of ale (Alexander Keith’s for example, a Canadian brewed ale: http://www.keiths.ca). The bottle itself is nothing special. However, on further interaction with the bottle, its spime may become more visible. Upon inspecting the label, information about the brewery could be listed, it’s alcohol content displayed, the stamped date and location of it’s production provided, the ingredients used in its making listed, a link to its website printed, and a recommended method for bottle recycling provided. Delving deeper into the bottle’s spime, focusing strictly on the bottle’s contents, the spime may become even richer. Information about the type of barley used in the ale’s production could be provided (local or otherwise), how and where the hops was cultivated listed, complete with geo- locative tracking of each ingredient provided, etc. In relation to whole food spimes, we could consider a tomato - a thing not really manufactured as in the criteria outlined by Sterling [3], rather cultivated - the idea of spime could still apply. For example, the spime of a tomato could include a vast number of its food-based characteristics, such as its price, type, seasonality, alternative types, location 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology 978-0-7695-4191-4/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/WI-IAT.2010.297 436