I'm a social software researcher with an activist bent. My work focuses on the design, implementation, and study of online communities that make a difference in people's lives, from senior citizens to open source developers to teachers to gamers to kids. I particularly like taking on projects that have social relevance. My artifacts have politics. cv/resume . publications . blog Social Software // Social Activism // Videogame Culture CURRENT WORK Social Computing for the Next Billions Five of the the six billion people on Earth do not have access to computing technology. But that's changing. In Africa, for example, mobile phone subscribers have jumped from 10 million to 200 million in the last four years. What does it mean to make software that specifically targets these markets? Can software empower the poor in meaningful ways? I believe social software has a powerful role to play in the developing world, but tapping that power will require a radical rethink of how we design, build, and profit. read the manifesto Serious Games in Virtual Worlds Workers are becoming increasingly distributed, from the far-flung collaborators of open source to worldwide corporations. As team members move further apart in space and time, they lose opportunities for face-to-face interaction and the rich possibilities for team building those interactions bring. This project looks at ways serious games (games that are truly fun and encourage learning) in virtual worlds (like Second Life) might help bridge the gap. project website . nsf workshop . games on my blog PAST PROJECTS Social Visualization in Software Development Many software development tools focus on supporting the primary technical work – writing code, managing requirements, filing bugs, etc. Yet with large teams, managing the social aspects of a project can be as complex as managing code. Visualizing social aspects of such projects can help make it easier to find problems and respond appropriately. Papers on this work have appeared in CHI and CSCW, and a patent has been filed. chi paper . cscw paper Incentive Mechanisms and Online Community Online communities, large and small, are pervasive yet we know little about what sustains them. I believe that novel incentive structures drive a great deal of work in such communities. But how are such incentives born? How do they evolve? How are they integrated into the fabric of communities? This research aims to explore these questions. incentives workshop Palaver Tree Online An online community that supports kids interviewing elders on the Internet to build up a shared multimedia archive of oral history. This is my PhD thesis work. My advisor was Amy Bruckman. Numerous papers have been published on this work; see the project site for more. project website Babble & Loops I spent the summer of 1998 building next-generation prototypes for the Babble/Loops project in the Social Computing Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Two patents have issued on this work. babble paper Audio Aura I spent the summer of 1997 at Xerox PARC working with Beth Mynatt on the Audio Aura project. This work was published in the proceedings of CHI 98 and two patents have issued on it. audio aura paper Program Finder Before coming to Georgia Tech, I worked at the University of Maryland in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. There, I designed and implemented ProgramFinder, a dynamic query user interface for the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice that assists in the placing of troubled youth in appropriate programs. This work was published in the proceedings of CHI 97. programfinder paper BACKGROUND Biographical Sketch Jason B. Ellis is research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 under the supervision of Dr. Amy Bruckman. He is a former Intel Graduate Fellowship holder, IBM Research Fellowship holder and NSF Trainee. As a graduate student, he completed research at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Prior to his tenure at Georgia Tech, Ellis was a faculty researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, where he also received an undergraduate degree with honors in Computer Science. His research focuses on the intersection of computer-supported collaboration, human-computer interaction, and online communities. In particular, Ellis is interested in the design, implementation, and analysis of online environments that facilitate collaboration among diverse, distributed user populations. Examples include inter-generational communication, the grassroots teams in open source, and online gaming communities. Curriculum Vitae Complete work history including projects, publications, presentations, awards and the like. cv/resume CONTACT INFORMATION Jason B. Ellis, Ph.D. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center P.O. Box 704 Yorktown Heights, N.Y. 10598 jasone (at) us.ibm.com // ibm related jason (at) jellis.org // non-ibm related +1 914 784 7253 // voice +1 914 784 7279 // fax http://jellis.org/ http://socialcomp.com/