Part of our passion surrounding Tummelvision is stems from our desire to explore and highlight the dynamics of what is needed to create engaged  social spaces online.  Kevin and Deb led a session at the recent O’reilly Open Web Foo Camp where we intro’ed the concept to our beloved geek community.  We had a great discussion with a number of  folks including Dale Dougherty [who runs the world of Make], Sarah Novotny [program chair of OSCON] and others.  As Tummlers themselves – they commented on the need for better tools for curators,  creators and catalysts to help them connect with their community and for their community to connect with each other.

The intersection of our human selves and tech were popping up in many conversations and many sessions throughout the weekend.  We are definitely at a unique moment – where the once binary web is just starting to recognize the need to evolve into a more organic entity that better reflects who we are and how we behave – a more reflective  representation of our offline selves.  Let’s face it, we take ourselves with us wherever we are.  In one of the sessions led by Brady Forrest we discussed the need for Social Bots – sounds scary – but really it could potentially be about making us smarter about ourselves and our interactions – these bots could help us maintain our social relationships across many groups, sites, and tribes.  They could even be a personal data stream to report back to me analytics about my life in meaningful ways.  But therein lies the rub – as soon as we start heading down the “manage my life” track – it starts getting complex very quickly.  We  need to ensure that in our effort to create a more open web we provide for the likelihood of ever changing connections and the ability to set permissions and identity as we choose.

As both Elizabeth Churchill [Ep 7 Guest] and Shelly Farnham pointed out, not all of us want 100% transparency all the time.  This leads us into many complex and complicated issues of privacy, identity, control, permissions etc.  We are seeing them played out daily – everywhere – and though computers can do a better job of helping us filter and manage some of these complexities it will ultimately be up to us – the humans and the Tummlers to make it all work seamlessly and organically.  The human brain and heart – are still the best at managing the nuances of our social selves.

We thought it might be smart to give you folks some background on our guests prior to the show.  Hopefully,  this will spark and encourage and create a greater participation vibe, questions or comments.

This week’s amazing guest is Elizabeth Churchill.  Check out her recent research and writing .   Let us know if there is anything in particular you want us to discuss or ask Elizabeth on Thursday nite.

Some background on Elizabeth in her own words:

Elizabeth Churchill

In my professional life, I am a researcher, designer and observer of communication technologies. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past several years I have drawn on diverse areas to consider how to design effective communication situations—both face to face and technologically mediated. At the centre of my work is a fascination with people’s passions, proclivities and practices.

I have studied and written about mobility and mobile work, distributed collaboration, interaction in graphical and textual virtual spaces, and the augmentation of public spaces with digital artifacts. Applications designed and/or evaluated include cell phone interfaces, textual and 3d graphical environments, interactive digital posterboards and animated interface personas.

I currently work at Yahoo! Research, and am based in Santa Clara, CA. Formerly, I worked at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California in the Computing Science Lab (CSL). Prior to that I was the project lead of the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto.

My physical instantiation is usually in San Francisco.

That last line gives you a good indication of how much fun this week’s show will be. Elizabeth is also a friend to your Tummelvision host – we have discussed the art of Tummeling and social engagement a lot.  We expect this to result in some good in depth discussions on Thursday nite!

Here are some related links: Professional stuff,  Day Job , Publications, Interactions magazine