If your grandpa wants to open a new e-mail account, what will you do? Sit next to him and guide him through the entire process of registration to choosing an ID isn’t it?
With many applications becoming web enabled infrequent computer users are forced to learn web applications like: Internet banking, online payment of electricity and phone bills, booking film/air/railway tickets etc.
Until today very few researchers had thought of writing tutorials on carrying out routine tasks on web. Even if tutorials are available they are not interactive and are restricted to a particular product or service.
Koala team at IBM Almaden research centre has come out with unique concept of building social scripts — a community driven repository containing information about mundane tasks to be carried out on web.
The unique features of koala social scripts are:
It is community-driven any one across the globe can contribute scripts on how to carry out a routine task on web (similar to Wikipedia contributions)
Social scripts are written in plain English.
The contributor needn’t have to know any programming language to write scripts. The contributor has to simply carry out the steps of a routine task (say opening a new e-mail account) which automatically gets recorded in the form of scripts.
These recorded scripts are available in both textual and animated format. Thus social scripts automate common tasks on web. This is made possible by a technique called programming by demonstration.
Social scripting will be particularly helpful in the enterprise set up, where activities like purchasing equipment via a procurement system, or a standard process such as transfer of employees to a different department can be automated.
Enterprises mostly concentrate on automating popular and standard processes such as the payroll, staffing policy and administration procedures. However day-to-day tasks may be go ignored as their automation might not be cost-effective. It is this gap that can be easily filled by Kaola scripting, which doesn’t require large project teams to implement workflows of such mundane tasks.
Building Koala Wiki:
Currently Koala scripts are test run at IBM research centre on Fire Fox browsers. The koala script can be initiated and saved to the repository called Koalscence.
Once the script is available in Koalescence, it can be referred to by any user in the future, just like Wikipedia.
Building a strong koala community:
According to Tessa Lau, member of research team at IBM working on koala project, “To ensure Koala continues to develop into a comprehensive repository of how-to knowledge, we are taking steps to grow the community. One of the first will be to encourage users to assume different roles.
However, creating scripts is only the tip of the iceberg. Some users could contribute by testing scripts and reporting when they fail, while others could tag scripts to create a folksonomy that makes scripts easier to find. A select few could serve as script gardeners, digging out the obsolete scripts and encouraging budding scripts to mature”.
More information about this project is currently available at:
www.research.ibm.com/koala