Steven D. Sheetz

Social media use by government: From the routine to the critical

Abstract Social media and online services with user-generated content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens. Significant potential exists to identify issues in real time, so emergency managers can monitor and respond to issues concerning public safety. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered in order to detect meaningful patterns and trends. Important events can then be identified as spikes in activity, while event meaning and consequences can be deciphered by tracking changes in content and public sentiment. This paper presents findings from a exploratory study we conducted between June and December 2010 with government officials in Arlington, VA (and the greater National Capitol Region around Washington, D.C.), with the broad goal of understanding social media use by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses, and the public at large. A key objective was also to understand social media use specifically for managing crisis situations from the routine (e.g., traffic, weather crises) to the critical (e.g., earthquakes, floods).

A software complexity model of object-oriented systems

Abstract A model for the emerging area of software complexity measurement of OO systems is required for the integration of measures defined by various researchers and to provide a framework for continued investigation. We present a model, based in the literature of OO systems and software complexity for structured systems. The model defines the software complexity of OO systems at the variable, method, object, and system levels. At each level, measures are identified that account for the cohesion and coupling aspects of the system. Users of OO techniques perceptions of complexity provide support for the levels and measures.

Group cognitive mapping: a methodology and system for capturing and evaluating managerial and organizational cognition

Organizations would like to capture and merge the perceptions of key individuals into an organizational memory. Various cognitive mapping approaches have been used to identify and capture these perceptions. However, merging the cognitive maps of individuals into a collective cognitive map to represent the shared perceptions has been problematic. Due to the merging problems, the creation of collective cognitive maps is impractical for many organizational situations. In this paper, we describe and demonstrate a cognitive mapping based methodology and system that eliminates the merging problem, supports data collection, and provides data analyses to uncover both individual and collective cognitive maps.

Effectiveness of traditional software metrics for object-oriented systems

An acceptable measure of software quality must quantify software complexity. Traditional software metrics such as lines of code, software science and cyclomatic complexity are investigated as possible indicators of complexity of object-oriented systems. This research reports the effects of polymorphism and inheritance on the complexity of object-oriented systems are measured by the traditional metrics. The results of this research indicate that traditional metrics are applicable to the measurement of the complexity of object-oriented systems.<<ETX>>

Social media use by government: from the routine to the critical

Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other services with user-generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Nonetheless, potential exists to identify issues in real time, such that emergency management can monitor and respond to issues concerning public safety. By detecting meaningful patterns and trends in the stream of messages and information flow, events can be identified as spikes in activity, while meaning can be deciphered through changes in content. This paper presents findings from a pilot study we conducted between June and December 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and the greater National Capitol Region around Washington, DC) with a view to understanding the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We are especially interested in understanding social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly common, such as traffic or weather crises).

The determinants of inter-organizational and internal in-house adoption of XBRL: A structural equation model

Prior research has investigated organizational adoption of inter-organizational Information Technology (IT) using the Technological–Organizational–Environmental (TOE) framework. While that research has yielded important insights into the adoption of inter-organizational IT, new technologies, such as XBRL, can be used inter-organizationally or internally. As such, testing the TOE framework in both an internal and inter-organizational context is vital because the independent variables explaining internal adoption may be different from those explaining inter-organizational adoption. Using XBRL as a representative example, the TOE framework is used in this study to investigate XBRL adoption for both internal and inter-organizational purposes. The results suggest that the drivers of internal adoption differ from those of inter-organizational adoption. Based on these results, we encourage future research to consider whether the significance of technological, organizational, and environmental variables change based on whether a technology is adopted internally or inter-organizationally. From a practical perspective, the findings can help professional associations encourage adoption of XBRL.

Understanding developer and manager perceptions of function points and source lines of code

Although function points (FP) are considered superior to source lines of code (SLOC) for estimating software size and monitoring developer productivity, practitioners still commonly use SLOC. One reason for this is that individuals who fill different roles on a development team, such as managers and developers, may perceive the benefits of FP differently. We conducted a survey to determine whether a perception gap exists between managers and developers for FP and SLOC across several desirable properties of software measures. Results suggest managers and developers perceive the benefits of FP differently and indicate that developers better understand the benefits of using FP than managers.

Cognitive activities in OO development

The cognitive activities performed by systems designers during systems development include problem understanding, problem decomposition and solution specification. One aspect of object-oriented (OO) approaches to system design that appeals to many adopting organizations is the purported naturalness, i.e. the consistency of OO approaches with these cognitive activities of problem solving. Essentially, OO aims to abstract components of the problem of system development to a high level that parallels problem solving in the world the system represents. In other words, knowing how a problem is solved in the real world informs one about how the OO system solves the problem. Thus, the OO development process and the resulting OO model are believed to be consistent with innate cognitive activities and consistent with the problem/real world, respectively. A cognitive mapping method was used to ask graduate students experienced with OO techniques about their perceptions of what is complex (difficult to understand) about OO systems. Their responses include a set of concepts, categories of similar concepts and cognitive maps that reveal what they believe is difficult about using OO techniques. Evaluating these perceptions in terms of the cognitive activities of system design reveals problem decomposition was perceived as the activity that caused the most difficulties related to learning OO techniques. Problem understanding was the goal of the participants, while the solution activity ranked lower in importance but contained many issues essential to systems development and influenced problem understanding.

Twitter use during an emergency event: the case of the UT Austin shooting

This poster presents one of our efforts in the context of the Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery Network (CTRnet) project. One topic studied in this project is the use of social media by government to respond to emergency events in towns and counties. Monitoring social media information for unusual behavior can help identify these events once we can characterize their patterns. As an example, we analyzed the campus shooting in the University of Texas, Austin, on September 28, 2010. In order to study the pattern of communication and the information communicated using social media on that day, we collected publicly available data from Twitter. Collected tweets were analyzed and visualized using the Natural Language Toolkit, word clouds, and graphs. They showed how news and posts related to this event swamped the discussions of other issues.

Expectation of connectedness and cell phone use in crisis

The wide distribution of cell phones with messaging, e-mail, and instant messaging have enabled the emergence of a culture of connectedness among segments of society. One result of this culture is an expectation of availability that exists among members of social networks. This study explores the potential for this expectation to influence perceptions of using Information Communications Technologies (ICT) during and after a crisis. Online survey and follow-up semi-structured interviews were conducted with Virginia Tech (VT) students, faculty and staff to understand whether expectations of connectedness affected their perceptions of their reachability during crises. Participants with higher expectations of connectedness also reported more problems with reachability. Those with the most problems with reachability differed from those with no reachability problems for many variables including satisfaction with cell phone service, age, number of calls/text messages and extroversion. Results suggest that these communities consider planning how to use ICT during emergencies.