This is to confirm the Social Software gathering on November 22 and 23 in New York City, at NYU.

The current list of attendees and potential attendees is

Brad Fitzgerald (LiveJournal) Cameron Marlow (Blogdex) Chris Meyer (CGEY/CBI) Clay Shirky (NYU) Cory Doctorow (boingboing) Danny O'Brien (NTK) Geoff Cohen (CGEY/CBI) JC Herz (Joystick Nation) Jeff Bates (Slashdot) Jerry Michalski (Sociate) Jessica Hammer (Kleene-Star) Jon Udell (Byte) Marko Ahtisaari (Nokia/Aula) Matt Jones (BBC) Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly) Ray Ozzie (Groove) Rudy Ruggles (CBI) Rusty Foster (K5) Scott Heiferman (Meetup) Steven Johnson (Plastic) Tim O'Reilly (ORA) Ward Cunningham (Wiki)

with a dozen or so additional invites pending.

Also, an invite to an optional mailing list called social_software will arrive under separate cover. Between now and November, this is just for attendees of the meeting, but if the discussion gets lively (as I expect it will), I imagine we'll make it world-subscribable at the end of November.

We'll be meeting over two days, a Friday and a Saturday. The Friday sessions will be about introducing our work to one another, and uncovering important themes, wishlists, and possible fruitful areas for new research or code.

The sessions will be up-tempo, informal, and conversational. We will begin each session with a few of the participants offering descriptions of some piece of software or some open problem, and will then move to group conversation. Then we'll break (where, as we all know, the counter-conference will establish itself according the the Rules of Hallway Conversations), and do it again, with a new set of problems or themes.

Among the possible topics are: - Identity, namespaces, and personality of individuals and groups - Searching, threading, and filtering of people and content - Are there interfaces that could help a user decipher the overall mood of the group? - Why are visual elements (e.g. digital photography, cams, shared whiteboards) so poorly integrated into current social software? - Why is it so hard to get a group of people to decide anything online? - What is currently hard to do in an online group that should be easy? - Easy that should be hard? - Can we get the advantages of email and BBSes (longer, better edited, more thoughtful posts) into real-time environments like IM.

and, of course, whatever else comes up while we're talking.

There will be a group dinner Friday night, at a suitably veg-friendly establishment.

The Saturday sessions will be all brainstorming -- making lists of potentially fruitful areas of research, features, as well as lists of problems to solve in future generations of social software, ending with attempts to describe possible new types of social software thatcould be built with today's technology.

-clay

-=- Social Software: The gathering and its goals

We are living in a golden age of social software. Only twice before have we had a period of such intense innovation in software used by interacting groups: once in the early 70s, with the invention of email itself, and again at the end of that decade with Usenet, the CD-Simulator (the precursor to irc), and MUDs. This is a third such era, with the spread of 'writeable web' software such as weblogs and wikis, and peer-to-peer tools such as Jabber and Groove greatly extending the ability of groups to self-organize.

Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize. One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create. Recognizing this, the Social Software Summit seeks to bring together a small group of practitioners and theorists (~25) to share experiences in writing social software or thinking about its effects.

The gathering will take place over two days in the late fall in NYC. Its goals are, in order of importance:

1. Introducing the participants to one another.

The great irony of social software is that many of its practitioners operate in a vacuum. We expect that simply by bringing a diverse and talented group together, we can generate a wealth of significant new ideas.

2. Spur new efforts.

The current generation of social software is still rough-hewn. Neither the designers nor the users have settled on the ideal interfaces, system behaviors, or feature lists for the newest pieces of software, such as wikis and weblogs, and even older software, such as email and instant messaging applications, are still being adapted to new purposes. The Social Software gathering will include attempt to articulate possible new features, interfaces and tools.

3. Improving the literature.

Too much of the literature concerning social software focusses on the 'whole worlds' model, where all-encompassing environments such as MUDs or multi-player games are treated as emblematic of social software generally. In fact, the most important social software has tended to be much looser -- mailing lists, Usenet, even the humble CC line. Likewise, many of the pieces of social software being created today do not aim to create whole worlds for their users, but to perform certain functions well. Though the content of the meeting itself will be off the record, participants are encouraged to write about their own experiences and observations (as if we could stop you), and we will be producing a conference blog after the fact to point to the work and thoughts of the participants.