I will visit Mexico and would like to advise on the design of collaborative platforms on the Internet

As some of you know, I’ve been in South Korea for a few months. Since September, I’ve been based at the Web Engineering Lab, rediscovering and developing my academic life. Maybe I hadn’t stopped learning, because I had been working with less formal learning methods—tutorials, workshops, talks at meetups, conferences where we share best practices in software engineering. All of these also contribute to your development, but it was a bit difficult for me at first to adapt to the academic environment. While previously I was expanding my knowledge toward a generalist domain, research is the opposite. After getting used to it, I now enjoy it.

Before, I thought I was aware of what was happening with Crowdsourcing. Being aware of how platforms were used for user participation. How to promote citizen participation in open processes online. But my knowledge was practically empirical and shallow. That’s why I decided to take the first class offered by Professor Juho Kim in Crowdsourcing. It was his first class as a professor at KAIST, after graduating from MIT with Learnersourcing: Improving Learning with Collective Learner Activity. We learned by reading about 50+ papers and discussions on this topic, which was defined in 2006. We learned theoretical, technical aspects, incentive design, analysis, experimentation, collaborative learning, citizen participation, teamwork, citizen science, and perception through participation. I must say it was a significant experience to take this course and move toward greater depth in the subject. However, in Mexico, it is a topic that has not been deeply explored in Internet services. I believe that due to the scarcity of learning materials, it is timely to share it with the community of Mexican companies and developers.

During July 2017, I will be visiting Mexico, eager to contribute to your projects. I want to share what I’ve learned so we can design better Internet and software services. I would like you to write to me to share your experience and your concerns about your service. It will be relevant to you if you have a project that includes: user participation, citizen participation, or the design of collaborative platforms. Let’s talk, send me an email at poguez@kaist.ac.kr. If you are a company, we can do a training, and if there are several people, we can schedule a course. It would be a pleasure to transfer knowledge of what I’ve learned on the topic.

See you soon!

Noé.

Cover photo: Unsplash/ Jezael Melgoza