New journal article published at Informatik Spektrum

The article titled Social Machines by Claude Draude, Christian Gruhl, Gerrit Hornung, Jonathan Kropf, Jörn Lamla, Jan Marco Leimeister, Bernhard Sick and Gerd Stumme was published within the Springer journal Informatik Spektrum. The article is about:

Social machines are a paradigm for the design of socio-technical systems that use web and platform solutions to combine the potential of digital technologies with the inherent logic of social interaction, organisation and structuring in a new way. In the following, we discuss the paradigm of the social machine from the perspectives of computer science, business informatics, sociology and law in order to identify points of orientation for its design. However, the term has not yet been conclusively defined in the literature but only illustrated by examples.
In this article, we first present the following definition for discussion: Social machines are socio-technical systems in which the processes of social interaction run hybridly between human and machine actors and are partially algorithmised. We then highlight three current, mutually dependent developments of social machines: the ever-increasing fusion of sociality and machine, and the development of the social machine as the raw material of social cohesion, and the increasing algorithmization of social processes. Finally, we discuss the fact that a participation-oriented design of social machines that follows democratic values the perspectives of user acceptance, social acceptability and sustainable economic viability.

And here is the link to the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00287-021-01421-4