Towards executable representations of social machines

Abstract

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).