SWAP is a new digital product developed in 2007 by the WIDE Research Center at Michigan State University. SWAP stands for Social Writing Application Platform. SWAP is a set of modular web services, based on social networking principles, that can be combined in various configurations to assist a wide variety of users, including teachers and students. A working version of SWAP is currently available at http://tne.wide.msu.edu.

SWAP's core functions include:

• a fully relational object database that stores user-contributed content
• a user profile system that enables social networking
• a folksonomic (tagging) system that facilitates user-generated organizational categories and metadata
• faceted browsing and recommender functions that allow users' activities, interests, ratings etc. to influence what they see
• file management functions (upload, sort, full-text search)
• content management functions (collaborative authoring/wiki, versioning,
• role-based permissions and workflows
• mapping (via Googlemaps API)
• feeds (RSS)
• mail and messaging (e.g. SMS)
• custom document markup
  

Each of the functional aspects of SWAP has been built to be as portable as possible, but also to be compatible with other aspects so that these can be combined in various ways as needed to help groups who need to write together. The result: small social writing applications that help to fill gaps in an existing toolset, augment a pre-existing tool or site, etc.

SWAP components currently power several different sites/services, including the LRE, Grassroots (a community mapping service), and the WIDE Content Management System (e.g., www.wide.msu.edu; rhetoric.msu.edu).

Former WIDE Research Assistant Kendall Leon will be presenting WIDE related work at two conferences in October.
Kendall will be presenting work at “Cyberfem Civics: Reimagining Alternative Cyberscapes” with fellow MSU Rhetoric and Writing PhD students Angela Haas, Stacey Pigg, & Robyn Tasaka at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Little Rock, AK. She will also be presenting “Bringing New Community Engagement Research Into Rhetoric and Composition Studies” along with fellow MSU Rhetoric and Writing PhD student Jeffrey Steichman will be presenting at the 7th International Research Conference on Service-Learning and Community Engagement in Tampa, Fl.

Lee Sherlock (a second year MA student in Rhetoric and Writing program here at MSU and I (Douglas Walls, WIDE Research Assistant) both presented publications at this years SIGDOC 2007 along with Bill.

SIGDOC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC). SIGDOC brings a wide variety of disciplines together to talk about and understand how communication works in digital environments. This years SIGDOC took place in lovely El Paso, TX from October 22nd to the 24th . SIGDOC hosts a wide array of work from Lee's "When social networking meets online games: the activity system of grouping in World of Warcraft" to Bill's work in visualizing knowledge work, to my own paper "Distributed Value System Matrix: a new use for distributed usability testing". Here are some reflections from Lee on attending such a multidiscipline conference:

"The first thing that struck me while attending and presenting at SIGDOC this year is the true interdisciplinarity of the conference—we often employ that descriptor as a vaguely positive attribute, but SIGDOC includes all kinds of work on communication technologies and the design of communication, broadly conceived. Accompanying this is the diversity in audience; SIGDOC attendees are a mix of academics and industry professionals, which leads to fascinating questions and opportunities for conversation.

Because the conference is relatively small, SIGDOC participants can attend all (or nearly all) of the conference presentations across the three session days. For me, this was valuable not only in terms of being able to see and listen to everyone else’s work, but also in terms of the connections that were built across sessions throughout the conference. The discussions at SIGDOC were some of the most insightful and engaging conversations that I’ve been a part of, and the ability to make reference to and frame the work of the conference participants as a whole allowed these rich conversations to develop."