My expertise has been applied to the design, development, and evaluation of both real-world communities and online social technologies, across world-class industry, government, and startup organizations, including Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, the City of Seattle, the Town of Skykomish, O’Reilly Media, Pathable, and Zillow. As a researcher working primarily with early-stage, interdisciplinary incubation teams, my role is as  much that of creative director as social scientist.

My research interests include community, communications, creative collaboration, interdisciplinary art, civic technology, social media, online community tools, social networks, identity management, social engagement, mobile social, and social data.

Below are recent or notable projects.  Please see my CV for a full list of related publications.

• strategic planning (visioning, goal-setting, prioritization, participatory planning)
• community research (surveys, interviews, field studies, lab studies, focus groups)
• community and social data analytics (behavioral analytics, social network analysis, statistics, instrumentation, data mining, data curation)
• web development and prototyping (proof-of-concept, web user interfaces, algorithms, backend-databases, .Net/Javascript/SQL, content management systems)
• research management (research projects, and people management including researchers and interns)
• knowledge sharing (lectures, workshops, publications, conferences, exhibitions, mentorship).

See https://ThirdPlaceTechnologies.com/consulting for an overview of consulting services.

Dates: 2024-2025
Location: Skykomish, WA
Project Lead: Shelly Farnham via Town of Skykomish
Project Type: Technical Assistance for Tourism Website Design/Development/SEO
Funded by: Port of Seattle, matched by Town of Skykomish

In 2024 Shelly Farnham worked with the Town to define a project based on community needs, applied for the grant, and then administered the project through a partnership with the local design group Seco Design / Karen Molesky.

Website Development and Promotion with Social Media Integration

For this project, in order to support local tourism our primary task was to perform a tourist website redesign based on community feedback. We started with a community focus group of key stakeholders to articulate the site goals, profiled our target users, and mapped out the informational elements, such as Skykomish’s attractions, activities, and amenities. We then developed design recommendations including the new information architecture of the new site, with high quality photos, engaging content, and user-friendly navigation. At this time, the first draft of the site is now complete, and we are currently engaging in another round of feedback and site revision. Next steps will be SEO, and social media integration.

Small Business Assistance

A secondary task for this project was to engage in small business assistance, with “Internet Clinics” and workshops that help small local businesses including artisans and community organizers get up to speed with communication, collaboration, and social media tools so they could strategically engage with online marketing on a small budget. Shelly Farnham has already hosted an introduction to Google Docs workshop, and Genevieve Tremblay will be hosting an introduction to Instagram workshop in May.

Dates: 2018-2020
Location: Seattle, WA
Project Leads: Shelly Farnham at Google via Planet Interactive
Project type: Community Research and Analytics to Inform Innovation Practices

Background
Shelly Farnham was hired for a two-year, Senior Researcher consulting contract at Google to perform mixed-methods research that informed the design and deployment of Google’s internal collaboration tools, including next generation ticketing, endpoint management, community platform systems, and Chrome media experience. Shelly worked with various teams to develop and implement dashboards for key metrics for internal processes. She also performed assessments of internal social structures to help inform leadership practices.

Organizational Community Leadership and Communications – Project Summary
Shelly Farnham performed an analysis of Google’s existing leadership practices and how that may or may not be impacting the development of Google’s internal culture of innovation. This particular project spanned six months, and started with an intensive literature review of related organizational and leadership psychology, summarizing relevant research in the field and developing predictions. The project then included working with internal teams to articulate hypotheses impacting team meeting and networking practices, and performing analytics to test these hypotheses. The analysis included diverse Google datasets such as internal survey data and meeting structures to assess the impact of social practices on innovation outcomes in the context of meetings and other internal networking tools. Findings from this research were shared to help teams optimize internal meeting dynamics for collaborative outcomes.

Note, this was internal research and under NDA, so details and findings are not shared.

Multiple dataset for this project was acquired and pre-analyzed using Google SQL, with final statistics performed using SPSS, and summarized and shared as a slide presentation and a Google document report.

Dates: 2020-2021
Location: Seattle, WA
Project Type:  Literature Review, User Research, Behavioral Analytics in Social Media

On a six-month Senior Researcher contract at Facebook, I studied the predictors of international fraud in the context of Facebook’s business management tools, and particularly patterns related to hackers as a community of practice.  This project included a literature review, user research, and behavioral analytics. This was internal research and under NDA.

• Dates: 2019
• Location: Skykomish, WA
• Project Lead: Shelly Farnham via Town of Skykomish, Karen Molesy Seco Design
• Project Type: Technical Assistance / Website Development / Fundraising
• Funded by: Port of Seattle, matched by Town of Skykomish

In 2019 Shelly Farnham worked with the Town to define a project to support local tourism, wrote and secured the grant from the Port of Seattle, and then administered the project through a partnership with the local design group Seco Design / Karen Molesky.

For this project, in order to support local tourism our primary task was to create an online walking tour that integrated with Town’s pre-existing historic walking tour. The online walking tour integrated with the physical locations through signage and QR codes.

• Dates: 2013-2016
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Michal Lahav (Cornish)
• Project type: Field Study and Community Analytics

Spokin was an online web site with community-curated networking, allowing you to connect with your local communities — your neighborhood, city, or nearby interest groups — so you can work together to get things done. This was an experimental internal project, we expired Spokin in 2018 to shift our focus to collaboration spaces and events. Shelly Farnham created prototype with design by Jeffrey Larson, building on the community well-being report pages project. See Spokin Intro Slides.

As a part of the Data Science for Social Good summer incubator program at the UW eScience Institute,  we created neighborhood community report pages in the context of our hyperlocal, crowd-sourced community network (Spokin). A key aspect of this project was to explore novel ways to leverage diverse social media and open data sources to dynamically assess community-level well-being. Shelly Farnham was lead for this project with interns in the summer incubator program.

See our end of summer project summary slides or Spokin Intro Slides.

• Dates: 2014-2015
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham (Microsoft Research), Genevieve Tremblay (Cornish)
• Project type: Community Engaged Research for Strategic Planning

To help foster the growing community of artists/technologists in the Pacific Northwest, we organized a workshop bringing together key stakeholders in the region, as a collaboration between Microsoft Research, Cornish College of the Arts, and the Genius Foundation. The workshop was structured as a focus group including a brief questionnaire to generate feedback for how to best support this community.

See paper or slides.

Farnham S., Brice, J., Tremblay, G., & Pinto da Silva, A.  (2015).  Fostering a Community of Innovation at the Intersection of Art and Technology in the Pacific Northwest.  ISEA 2015.

• Dates: 2013-2015
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Michal Lahav (Cornish)
• Project type: Field Study and Community Analytics

In this study, performed by Shelly Farnham and Michal Lahav while at Microsoft Research, we adopted a multi-method approach to examine whether the growing use of social media as a channel for hyper-local conversation may provide meaningful insights into the well-being of neighborhood communities. First, through interviews and a questionnaire we explored what are indicators of neighborhood level well-being, and what are current communication practices around the use of social media to support community well-being. Second, through an analysis of neighborhood-level Twitter messages we examined the extent to which Twitter conversations corresponded with our neighborhood well-being indicators.

See paper or slides.

Presentation Summarizing Research

As a citizen, a community organizer, or a local business, what can you do to improve the wellbeing of your neighborhood community? This talk outlines the most impactful ways to improve your neighborhood based on our years of research. Presentation by Shelly Farnham.  See youtube video here.

• Dates: 2013
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham (Research), Yuheng Hu (Prototype)
• Project type: Prototype and Study

While at Microsoft Research we developed and evaluated Whooly, an experimental web service that provided neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whooly further automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a lab study.

See paper or online prototype (now Spokin Updates).

Hu, Yuheng, Farnham, S., Monroy-Hernandez, A. (2013). Whoo.ly: Facilitating information-seeking for informal hyperlocal communities using social media. In Proceedings of CHI, 2013. Honorable Mention.

• Dates: 2012
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Michal Lahav at Microft Research
• Project type: Deployment Study

Microsoft Research

So.cl is a FUSE Labs, Microsoft Research experimental web application that combines web browsing, search, and social networking for the purposes of sharing and learning around topics of interest. We performed a deployment study examining existing learning practices around search and social networking for students, and how these practices shifted when participants adopted So.cl

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Lahav, M., Raskino, D., Cheng, L., Ickman, T., Laird-McConnell, T. (2012). So.cl: An interest network for informal learning. In Proceedings of ICWSM 2012. Best Paper Nomination.

Microsoft Research / City of Seattle

• Dates: 2012-2013
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Microft Research; David Keyes, City of Seattle
• Project type: Deployment Study

Large Scale Questionnaire Study

While at Microsoft Research and in collaboration with the City of Seattle, we performed a large scale questionnaire study examining factors that impact teen civic engagement through social technologies.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Keyes, D., Yuki, V., Tugwell, C. (2013). Modeling youth civic engagement in the new world of networked publics. In Proceedings of AAAI International Conference of Social Media and Weblogs.

Dates: 2011-2012
Location: Seattle, WA
Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Microsoft Research; David Keyes, City of Seattle
Project type: Deployment Evaluation Study

Puget Sound Off is a City of Seattle online blogging and networking site focused on helping youth connect, collaborate, and take action around local community issues. We performed an evaluation study for the City of Seattle seeking lessons learned from a real world deployment.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Keyes, D., Yuki, V., Tugwell, C. (2012). Puget Sound Off: Fostering youth civic engagement through citizen journalism. In Proceedings of ACM 2012 CSCW.

Dates: 2011-2012
Location: Seattle, WA
Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Microsoft Research
Project type: Usage Analysis

This usage analysis of Docs.com was performed while at Microsoft Research. Docs.com integrates Microsoft Office web documents with Facebook. We examined how people share docs in the context of a social network, including types of documents shared, and how people used the relationship sharing settings. We further performed a factor analysis of user activity to find four primary types of usage – sharing, creating, collaborating, and consuming.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S. D., Turski, A., Halai, S. (2012). Docs.com: Social file sharing in Facebook. In Proceedings of Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

Dates: 2010-2011
Location: Seattle, WA
Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, K. Ozenc, Yahoo!
Project type: Usage Analysis

Performed a large scale questionnaire study for Yahoo! examining how people facet their identities, and how these facets are expressed through use of email and Facebook. We found family was an extremely important context for sharing online, that email was still a preferred form of communication for private sharing across facets of life, and a higher level of facet incompatibility was correlated with increased email usage and worry about sharing in social networks. We then performed a design probe lab study to solicit user feedback for different design solutions for faceting identity across social media tools.

See slides, faceted identity paper, or life modes design probe paper.

Farnham, S. & Churchill, E. F. (2011). Faceted identity, faceted lives: Social and technical issues in being yourself online. In Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2011.

Ozenc. K. & Farnham, S. (2011). Life modes in social media. In Proceedings of CHI 2011.

• Dates: 2005
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham
• Project type: Observational Field Study

In order to better understand the challenges specific to the deployment of collaboration technologies in crisis situations, we conducted an observational field study of the deployment of Groove Virtual Office to various civil and military groups at the heart of the disaster zone over the course of ten days. We summarize both general lessons learned from observations of social and communication challenges in crisis situations that impact technology adoption, and make specific recommendations for improving the deployment process of Groove to enable cross group collaboration.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Kirkpatrick, R., Pedersen, E. (2006). Observation of Katrina/Rita deployment: Addressing social and communication challenges of ephemeral groups. In Proceedings of ISCRAM 2006, Newark, New Jersey.

• Dates: 2010-2011
• Location: Seattle, WA
• Project Leads: Shelly Farnham, Joseph McCarthy, for Strands
• Project type: Longitudinal Deployment Study

CoCollage is a placed-based community technology developed by Strands Labs that leverages the power of online social networking to facilitate awareness and face-to-face interactions in a third place (coffee shops). We performed a longitudinal deployment study with usage analysis, exploring adoption and usage patterns in a cafe, and its impact on community development and place-based attachment.

See paper (short), paper (long), or slides.

Farnham, S., McCarthy, J., Patel, Y., Ahuja, S., Norman, D., Hazlewood, W., Lind, J. (2009). Measuring the impact of place attachment on the adoption of a place-based community technology. In Proceedings of CHI 2009.

McCarthy, J., Farnham, S., Patel, Y., et al. (2009). Supporting community in third places with situated social software. In Communities and Technologies, 2009.