All paper parts due on Google Docs by Friday night.  Visualizations due by
Thursday / Friday

Sub-team will do final composition of paper on the weekend.
Saturday 4:30 PM online meeting

Outline for presentation prior to Sunday’s meeting – Andrew

Initial meeting for presentation on Sunday (6:00 PM at AMER’s on Church St.)
Meeting on Monday (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM at AMER’s on Church St.)

Presentation Monday night 5:00 PM 409 West Hall  !!!!

Introduction – Jason

Visualizations – Aakash / Gaurav / Moon
Describing how the data is being represented and why.

Budgeting / Return on Investment – Andrew

Mitigation of Risk – Aakash
Legal liability

Conclusion – Rachel
Can we count on your support???

Bibliography – Rachel

And we even developed the beta version of our mock-up for HR:

Human Resources Interface

Human Resources Employee Screen

Employee Interface

We have partitioned the paper and other work for the deliverables:

1. Andrew, Rachel and Jason are working on the paper this week
- Jason working on the “Our Solution”
- Rachel working on literature review
- Andrew working on Budgeting and ROI
2. Moon, Aakash, Gaurav working on the visualizations this week

1. See where everyone’s at with their subtasks (Aakash & Guarav =
Visualizations; Rachel & Andrew = client UI; Jason & Moon = Magic)
2. Decide on “unified” UX for consistancy sake (Gaurav, I think you’d be
a good candidate to do this) between client UI and the various
visualizations
3. Determine who needs Photoshop help to get some mockups ready to go. It
will be up to each group to ask for help and determine times
4. Determine deliverables for next week (I think we should start to draft
the final paper, continuing with what we have on Google Docs).

Our first Twine mock-up is complete:

User Prompt Widget

Additional Media  below.

Magic of Twine

More images after the jump.

These sketchs represent a general outline for the proposed visualizations we will have in our final proposal.  Rachel has also started an outline for our report.

Our high-level design schematic for Twine

Meeting minutes are given below.

Jason and Moon’s “Magic” Meeting – February 10, 2009 @ 3:30pm

Purpose of this meeting is to discuss exactly how the system is going to make useful information out of the tweets we get from employees.

1. From the meeting with Dr. Winfield, we decided that there should be an anonymity option when submitting a tweet – a check box perhaps for anonymous or not.

2. Identified three “models” in OOP lingo (tables in a DB)

   1. Tweets

      1. Attributes:

         1. Score

            1. Computer by:

               1. Submission addtribute (positive, negative)

               2. Parsed Text

                  1. Throw out common of unbeneficial words, such as and, or, but, it, and, etc..

                  2. Word Proximity and Pairing

                  3. Word Frequency

                  4. Punctuation

                  5. Correct misspelled words or make a guess as to what they meant

         2. Content Analysis

            1. Parsed Text

               1. Throw out common of unbeneficial words, such as and, or, but, it, and, etc..

               2. Word Proximity and Pairing

               3. Correct misspelled words or make a guess as to what they meant

               4. Determine verbs, nouns, proper names

               5. Assigned a relevancy score to an issue. Can be part of more than one issue.

   2. Issues

      1. Attributes

         1. Total tweet score

            1. Summation of both positive and negative tweet scores

         2. Positive tweet score

            1. Summation of positives

         3. Negative tweet scores

            1. Summation of negatives

         4. Controversial score

            1. Based on the variation among the scores… standard deviation

   3. User

      1. Contentment Score

         1. Summation of the user’s tweet scores

3. Issues we need to address

   1. People post single word tweets

      1. “Crap”, “Wahoo”

   2. How to handle unintentionally or intentionally high value tweets

      1. “I HATE MY FREEKING JOB!!!!###$#@%$#”

Rachel and Andrew presented the results from their meeting concerning the incentivation and motivation of microblogging in the enterprise, as well as client-side user experiences.

• Name displays and public recognition for contribution
• Options for anonymity and privacy options

Aakash and Gaurav presented their findings about user interfaces for HR and clients.

For employees:

• Auto-completion possibilities
• Provide feedback and contextual actions
• Easily accessible (i.e. integrated) interface and subsystems
• Limitations to prevent excessive use and potential for abuse
• Rewards for contributions

For HR:

• Information aggregation provided over historical time frames (monthly, weekly, etc.)
• Critical mass of information should engender action
• Visualizations should provide apt information (long-term tracking, live feeds, morale rating, graphs)
• Critical mass itself should be deterministically calculated and respond possibly organically to user input

Moon and Jason’s findings will be posted in the next topic.  Minutes after the jump.

• Security is a potent issue for any organization and particularly those in the health industry
• Anonymity would annul HR’s ability to respond to individual concerns
• Introduce sampling techniques to elucidate information from noise
• Distraction is a significant problem that needs to be addressed

Dr. Winfield also gave us contact information for Tim Wood, Senior HR Director for UM who might be willing to sit down for an interview with our team.  Minutes are given below.

Meeting Minutes – February 10, 2009 – Dr. Winfield Interview

1. Dr. Winfield is the manager for UHS employees

   1. Coming at this from Healthcare professional perspective

2. Healthcare professionals are paranoid about IT security

   1. Given that they’re dealing with confidential patient information

   2. Discourage, essentially BAN, unencrypted forms of instant communication

      1. No AIM

3. Brought up a really good point about the value of an “anonymous suggestion box” if the HR person can’t respond to person directly…

   1. If someone anonymously posts “I wish I had a snickers bar!”, and you had a snickers bar to give them, the system fails in that it gives you no way to give them the snickers bar.

   2. Made me think about having a check box for “Anonymous?” so they user can decide if they want their post to be anonymous.

      1. Now we have the following options for user input:

         1. Positive (submits tweet)

         2. Negative (submits tweet)

         3. Anonymous (attribute for tweet)

4. Brought up the idea of sampling

   1. Beneficial because

      1. Less “noise”

         1. Although our system would supposedly make sense of that “noise” or just ignore it

      2. Higher quality input

         1. True, but again supposedly our system would generate quality output from lots of individually somewhat meaningless input from the employees

   2. I think we are implicitly doing this with the idea of a little bubble popping up after an hour of inactivity and asking “How are you doing?” or something along those lines

5. Brought up the idea that he thinks any person in a management position would be hard pressed to purposefully implement something that is a distraction to their employees.

   1. Likened our system to “AIM” or instant messaging and how his kids are always on it and never listening when he’s trying to have a conversation with them.

   2. Made me think about how important it is that we design this system such that users don’t get “lost” in it’s content.

      1. Shouldn’t be an endless pit of replies to other tweets.

      2. How can we provide incentive for people to contribute to a system in which they don’t get much back, except a soapbox at the water cooler?

6. Gave me the name and number of Tim Wood, Senior HR Director for UM who might be willing to sit down for an interview

   1. Wolverine Tower: 734-763-5431

Aakash

• Tweetscan – “Improve your signal/noise ratio”
• Re-tweet Radar
• Comcast utilizes tweets externally
• Enterprise tweet mining; shows that companies use microblogging to assess employee states

Rachel

• Computer aided interviewing gives support for anonymized tweeting and weighting of responses
• Privacy risks include: adherence to record-keeping, undercutting potential gains, anonymous tweets
• Twine would give employees a soapbox on which to announce grievances
• Employee motivation and attitude is variant and can be better addressed through something like Twine
• Reasons for HR failure: user involvement, HR is underutilized and not consulted, a social and information perspective
• Employee reward system – a behavior-based recognition program
• Myth: that employee camaraderie engenders a reduction in complaints
• Possible metrics for HR success: operational cost reduction
• Argue for release of HR statistical information
• HR dilemma: how to balance managing the bottom line while providing employee-centered services

The previous night, we were able to redraw our diagram for Professor McCord.  The fruits of our labor:

A refined diagram for Twine.

Action Points:

• New meeting time: 4:30pm on Tuesday.

• Andrew will make room arangements.

• Rachel and Andrew will be working on client UX

• Aakash and Gaurav will be working on what HR sees.

• Jason and Moon will be working on the “Magic” behind the scenes.

• Jason and Moon will meet with Dr. Winfield on Monday.

Our initial concept of Twine

Minutes after the jump.

The minutes follow:

Rachel -

Individual users would use existing architecture to input twitter feeds within the enterprise.  Popups are a good idea, but could be an annoyance during the workday.  Their responses would go to a central HR server, that would collect them.  Algorithms could sort them in various ways, by person or department. We can assign certain values to certain words of importance.  Everyone agreed that a plug and play design would easily be adopted.  Users would assign positive or negative values to their comments to help with the sorting.  News feeds and tag clouds would be used to illustrate their contributions.

Aakash & Moon-

Vision is similar to Rachel’s.  We need to figure out how users will interface with Twine, and how HR will use the information.

Jason-

User Interaction:

-inputs

What Twine Does Serverside:

-word pairs
-negative and positive determination
-tweet affiliations

What HR will get out of it all of it:

-what issues need to be addressed
-company wide moral
-more efficient task completion
-increase in company cohesion
-more involmed with company issues

HR’s Interface

Using graphs to create visualizations to show people frequency of issues.
Have longevity of issues trend-lines graphed to track improvment.
Live twitter feeds.

How should we handle anonymity?
How to get info about a single data point?

Possibly be able to respond to tweets, but then would turn from microblogging to blogging.

Moon-
IBM uses “sametime” intranet chat to track what people are doing.

Rachel-

What would be some potential pitfalls of this system?
-algorithms can be wrong

Meeting ended: 3:50pm

Items Discussed:

1. Group member responsibilities
2. Weekly meetings
3. Research roles
4. Deliverables

Action Items:

1. Andrew and Moon joined the group. Welcome!
2. Rachel suggested the name “Twine” for our product: Twitter + whine. Brilliant!
3. Andrew will send out e-mail with their e-mail addresses, and each Andrew and Moon will make sure they are part of the EnterpriseTwits google group.
4. Andrew will reserve one of the SI study rooms for our weekly meetings.
5. Our weekly meeting will be on Wednesday from 3-5.
6. Moon and Jason will be going into an HR dept to collect primary research data. Will present meaningful information to the group on Wednesday, the 4th.
7. Aakash and Rachel will continue doing their literature review and present meaningful information to the group on Wednesday, the 4th.
8. Jason will contact Information Visualization class to see if there is the possibility of cross-course collaboration for the information visualization bit.
9. Moon is going to set up the “Twine” wordpress blog to document our process. (Sounds familiar..)
10. Our deliverable will be an “interactive” presentation of a mockup of our system with a demonstration of the system itself and a walk through of our design process.
11. Next meeting is Wednesday, the 28th @ 3pm.
12. Everyone will come to the next meeting with visions of how and what the system that we’re proposing is… just to get the ball rolling.

Meeting ended @ ~8:10pm.