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E-collaborating with Sigma. The measurement of the impact of social actions for democratising information

Abstract:

Social media are suffering the consequences of the overwhelming growth of the web and the polarization of information sources. Mechanisms for facilitating the categorization and the access to information are demanded by information brokers as well as by final users. This paper focuses on the analysis of measures of the quality of information based on social actions. Our aim is to determine how valuable social actions are for democratising information. A Facebook application named Sigma and an statistic module called Gamma - both open source - were used for setting a case study of e-collaboration. A measure of the value of shared resources based on social actions was defined as part of the research. Later, an experiment was set for three different scenarios of an e-collaborative environment in order to validate the proposal. A total of 10730 social actions were registered from the participation of 30 students and 5 faculty members. These data were statistically analysed. Results show that e-collaboration is highly estimated by young people and it was possible to define a fixed weight for measuring the impact of social actions for democratising information. Further, it is not verified if the absence of e-collaboration produces distortion of reality but confirmed that the distortion of reality, in an e-collaboration process, actually affects the democratization of information.