JRLG's Report

The Report:
The paper shows a point of view about how the software designer can create a social product based on a conceptual model and a framework methodology, in order to have the software be a tool that triggers mechanism to improve the user experience into the society instead of try to make social software social. Therefore, the paper tries a deeper understanding of the contribution of the multifaceted concept of sociology towards the work of social software designers.
One main question in the paper is, how does the concept of sociality contribute to the design of social software systems?, The authors try of answer the question with a conceptual model and a framework methodology for show how the concepts of sociology can represented in terms of software development. In this regard, in the conceptual model there are four main social concepts for this paper: enabling practice, mimicking reality, building identity and actualizing self. These four realms allow for a more complete perspective on social software. Also propose a framework where they expanded the traditional design kit filled with the usual tools for sharing and connecting such as tagging, blogging and collaborative editing, by incorporating design principles, parameters, criteria and dilemmas stemming from the four sociality realms described. A designer can use these insights to create social software more systematically and more rooted in theory.
Also is important to mention that the authors used real examples of social software like Last.fm, Twitter, LinkedIn and Friendster for to do a better explain of the concepts into the methodology.

The Realm of Sociality
What are the issues you found more innovative in reading Bouman et al. (2007)?
In my point of view the topic more innovative of the paper is how to create software system with an approach in the human behavior, how the little things that go unnoticed are very important if the objective is to create a good product of social software.

Do you understand Wenger's (1988) claim that "Sociality cannot be designed; it can only be designed for"?
Yes, I understand that as designer or developer, we cannot create the mechanism to make the software have a social behavior, we can only create a trigger mechanism which give support at the people and their behavior in the society into our software.

Look at the list of references in the bibliography. Are you familiar with the System Theory sources they cite?
No, I’m not familiar with the sources cited in the paper, but I can identify some terms used, most of them due to my own experience into the society. What do you think of having blogs as references in this work? I think that is a good idea to have blogs as reference because the reader can give and receive feedback about the topics of interest.

Did you visited any of those blogs?
Yes, only a few links, and I think that in the time elapsed since the paper publication, the blogs are growing step by step and today exist many blogs with a lot of topics of interest, for example alt1040.com, in my point of view is a very interesting blog.