Towards Executable Representations of Social Machines

• Published in: Diagrammatic Representation and Inference Vol. 10871; pp. 765 - 769
• Main Authors: Murray-Rust, Dave, Davoust, Alan, Papapanagiotou, Petros, Manataki, Areti, Van Kleek, Max, Shadbolt, Nigel, Robertson, Dave
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Diagrammatic interface; Prototyping; Rapid assembly; Social machines
• ISBN: 9783319913759; 3319913751
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-91376-6_77

Human interaction is increasingly mediated through technological systems, resulting in the emergence of a new class of socio-technical systems, often called Social Machines. However, many systems are designed and managed in a centralised way, limiting the participants’ autonomy and ability to shape the systems they are part of. In this paper we are concerned with creating a graphical formalism that allows novice users to simply draw the patterns of interaction that they desire, and have computational infrastructure assemble around the diagram. Our work includes a series of participatory design workshops, that help to understand the levels and types of abstraction that the general public are comfortable with when designing socio-technical systems. These design studies lead to a novel formalism that allows us to compose rich interaction protocols into functioning, executable architecture. We demonstrate this by translating one of the designs produced by workshop participants into an a running agent institution using the Lightweight Social Calculus (LSC).