I’m going to be at the Reboot Britain conference in London on Monday.

Here’s the blurb:

It’s Time to Reboot Britain
An extraordinary one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them.

We face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

Here’s my personalized schedule

A month ago I was inspired to enter the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. The closing date was mid April so unfortunately if the entered app, Battfone, was a horse it would be still out there running.

But let’s not worry about trivialities like that, changing the world is more important than winning coding competitions and collecting cash prizes. So with that in mind here’s an update to what I’m still trying to achieve with Battfone.

So what’s the big idea?

Here’s the detailed application overview used on the CTW site:

It’s Saturday afternoon and Josh has some downtime so he’s laying back on the couch watching some football. He’s not particularly interested in the result so he’s got his IM open on his laptop and he’s texting his friends planning his Saturday night entertainment.

Then the BattFone goes off. Adam receives a Twitter DM alerting him to a Social Action hot off the wires from Idealist.org. There’s an asylum seeker at the local welfare centre and they need a translator in a hurry. Just so happens Adam speaks “foreign” and so without much ado he’s down there spending less than an hour making someone’s life a lot easier.

Adam is the type of guy who’ll answer a call for help but he’s not always going to go out of his way to look for the needy. That’s where BattFone comes in.

***

We want BattFone to be considered the early warning alert system for the Social Actions. An APB for the API.

We aim to combine the Social Actions API with Twitter and eventually other networks  to create a multi-way Social Actions communications system. Using http://BattFone.me users will register to be alerted via Twitter, e-mail and other means when actions they’ve specified an interest in are created.

BattFone is a filter and alert system to get the right Social Actions to the right Social Actors at the right time.
The right time isn’t always quarter a after midnight during a surfing session. It can be whenever and wherever the Action is created.

BattFone is focused heavily on the end-user. It’s main purpose is to act as an instigator of real world action. We want to take relevant Social Actions off the social networks and put them into the hands of people who will answer the call for help.

We expect BattFone to be most useful in urban environments where rich sets of actions will be targeted at the most focused set of actors possible. As the Social Actions API develops we expect location awareness to play a key role. Right now however we’re working with what we can in this regard.

Great Idea, now go build it

Part of my day job at Setanta involves designing and managing the build of applications far more complex than the one above. So Battfone was going to be a piece of cake, even for a someone like myself who doesn’t usually get their hand covered with code feces. Wrong.

First up was designing a model. The concept is straightforward enough.

1. A user registers interest in receiving Battfone alerts
2. User provides Twitter ID and states what action types they want to help with along with their location
3. Battfone polls Social Actions’ API regulary
4. Battfone matches new Social Actions’ location and action_type with user location and action type.
5. If there’s a match we compose a tweet and dm the lucky user

After taking the app through some bigtime thought revisions the bones remain pretty much as is. The order of that if statement has changed but the result is the same.

So with a model sketched out in too-soft-for-my-liking-HB pencil it was on to the application stack itself. One given was that the app was going to be hosted by Joyent. I’ve had nothing but great customer support there over the past few years and already have a ton of small blogs (including this one) safely housed there.
Next up the stack itself. One of the great rules set down by the guys at Social Actions is that all the apps end up published with an Open Source license. Add to that that to kick off there’s only going to be one developer working on this and there goes a .NET stack.

Second contributing factor was the APIs that were going to be integrated; Twitter and Social Actions. Twitter in particular has a ton of libraries and documented code snippets already built for it. Social Actions is getting there. To utilize these my choices were down to Python, PHP, Java and Ruby. I played around with Python for a while but eventually settled on Ruby. With Rails I could scaffold a working database model (I thought at the time) quickly, not worry about the front end design until way later, and concentrate my efforts on the app brains of matching social_actions with users.

I’d like to have investigated Django a little more. I really like what the guys there are building but there’s simply a lot more Rails examples and tutorial out there right now and if I was going to build this, or at least a proof of concept, on my own I was going to need to tap into the crowd wisdom already on the net.

What’s taking you so long?

I’m going to save an actual code overview for another time. Some big problems I’ve faced so far aren’t issues with my conceptual problems, but simply knowledge gaps associated with using any stack for the first time, in my case Rails. It took the best part of a week of evening to get MySQL’s local paths sorted on my dev environment. Twitter has been turning OAuth on and off for the last month meaning that testing any Twitter functionality has been hit or miss. It’s still out and I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle to re-engineer Battfone to handle password logins that are soon the be deprecated anyway.

Right now I’m at the stage where I have just about every individual class working independently.  I have a scaffolded app running with a few bugs and I’m trying to add in the classes and functionality one by one. I’ve no front end work done but that’s the fun part so I’ll sail through that in a couple of nights.

If there has been one hold back on the API side though it’s been with the location attributes of each social_action coming through the Social Actions API itself. For the vast majority of actions the location attribute is not set at all. This makes sense in many cases, why should a petition for example need a real world location set for it. However in the case where locations are set they are not always easy to parse and match up with a user. I know this issue is still under development on the API side and it hasn’t stopped John Brennan building his fantastic Google Maps mashup at http://www.imdoingmypart.org/community/map.

imdoingmypart.org

I can only commend Joe and Peter from Social Actions who have been super encouraging during the whole process. One of their aims with the competition has been to incubate a developer community around the API and that’s certainly happened.

So onwards!

There’s alot more to come on the onwards applications of Battfone, I’m hoping to have a working version online in the next couple of weeks. You can follow the test Twitter account @battfone to get a good idea of the state of play. And of course if you have any feedback, ideas, offers of free coders and so on please shout.

Because I don’t have enough to do with my time right now I am thinking about entering the Social Actions Change the Web Challenge. Closing date is Friday 3rd April so it’s all hands on deck right now.

Needless to say the app I’ve got in mind right now will integrate with the SocialActions API along with the Twitter API and I’m also hoping to add in some magic web 2.0 ingredient, time’s the big issue though. It’s been a while since I waded knee deep into code torrents this rough.

Social Actions are attempting to become the world’s clearing house for actions run by charitable and philanthropic organziations. By the looks of things they’re going about it the right way, building a central API that can communicate with a whole ton of online bodies in the charitable space. Through the Change the Web Challenge they are also incubating an interesting Developers Network here. More power to them.

That’s right, change the web, change the world. Now, back to the code.

There’s a trust deficit in society. Technology can play and is playing a huge role in rectifying this.

I’ve just read Causewired by Tom Watson. The book is Watson’s attempt to summarize the current state of play in the world of online philanthropy, social causes and network based social action organization. Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World as the tag line suggests.

I’ve a lot more to come about the subjects Watson tackles but right now I’m going to take on the subject of trust, particularly in light of the last two posts on this site concerned as they are with Digital Britain and Modern Liberty. There’s a gaping trust void in society right now. Our government clearly don’t trust us and in the midst of a  recession the likes of which none of us have know before there’s a danger that society fragments and turns away from the most needy, and from the most grave causes.

The central thesis of Watson’s book is this:

New Technology and the human urge to communicate will create the basis for a golden age of activism and involvement, increasing the reach of philanthropy and improving the openness of politics, democratic government and our major social institutions.
[BUT, working against this is the current global recession. Governments are running into budget shortfall and cutting spending in all social areas.]

So, just as our governments are failing us by cutting back on spending that increase social cohesion, we are coming up the the technology and the ideas to bind ourselves together in social economies without our governments’ help. I’m going to have to leave my reaction to government responses here to another post, needless to say it’s a big issue.

Whether our governments get it right with initiatives like Digital Britain, Watson’s point is that there’s a whole ton of people in the doing-something-that-matters space that aren’t waiting for their government. And why should they. Private (and open source) enterprise has given an historically unprecedented number of people the tools and inspiration to take action in a whole host of fields.

For now I want to take a look at some of studies in Causewired and see how they are tackling matter of trust.

What technology is allowing us do

A quick overview of what this technology is allowing us to do is in order. Watson’s beat is online philanthropy. That means free giving. And by free I mean free as in speech, not beer. Giving of one’s own volition. So who’s giving and who’s getting? Watson hones in on some prime time examples: DonorsChoose, Fundable, Kiva and Facebook Causes.

Each a very different application or platform but some bigtime shared attributes and functions, not least of which in my view is the way trust is leveraged, certainly in the case of the first three if not quite so strongly with Causes. For those not familiar with these companies it’s worth clicking the above links and checking their about pages real quick. In all of these examples Watson is showing us that the abstraction between the giver and receiver in a philanthropic situation is being removed. If I use DonorsChoose to donate textbooks to classrooms I know what text books and what school is involved. If I loan money with Kiva to a person or project in a developing world country chances are I have a photo and story behind the whole deal. The personalization and directness strengthens the sense of empathy with in turn cranks up the trust motor.

How is this being achieved

Watson highlights the transition from anonymity to real identity on the social web as key.
From Charles Leadbeader in We Think: Freedom is a slippery idea, but I believe that the web will be good for freedom of expression in four respects.

• The freedom to think what we like, to form and express ideas independently
• The freedom to shape our identities, to be who we want to be
• The freedom as consumers to choose and buy what we want
• The freedom to express ourselves through creating things that matter to us.

It isn’t a big leap of logic to suppose that for freedom to exist within a social space the atmosphere of that space must be made up of a large dose of trust. Example: I am only free if I trust my cohabitants to obey the rules of the social space and  thus not impinge upon my freedom. The future threat of the curtailment of freedom may in itself act as that very curtailment.

But freedom within an environment is not enough within itself. After all, if a user can have a trust based relationship only within a closed space how can a movement or cause grow. The trust relationship must expand. That may mean the expansion of the [closed] environment or it may mean the migration of the users and their attached trust outside the environment.

From an interview with Causes’ Sean Parker Watson tells us turning users into propagators is key.

“Deliberate viral engineering, how you turn your users into propagators through careful optimization was very important “

This is illustrated in another case study,  Kiva, the developing world online loan agency. By allowing users to help many causes and many users to help each cause there’s a natural urge for donors to tell more people to donate to their cause and see their cause succeed. Watson likens this to a child collecting baseball cards.

Watson isn’t afraid to be a little cynical in illustrating his point when he mentions the black tie ball philanthropy that continues to pull in big money in New York. Being seen at the ball is a big part of the play.

Causes do not spread just because they are good, they spread because people spread them. This seems simple and rather obvious but it is the secret sauce behind the rise of all the online social networks. In short, people like being asked nicely by other people they know to do things for them; that request validates the relationship.

Bringing all this back to trust

One of the most important observations Watson brings to the table in Causewired is this:

Optimism is inherent in people. Consumers will switch brands for causes, particularly young consumers.

Exampe: Every summer Coke and Pepsi go head to head with youth orientated promotions. Collect 20 bottle tops and get a free iTunes voucher. How about if these were led by social causes instead of iTunes giveaways.

83% of Americans say that companies have a responsibility to help support causes and 87% would switch from one brand to another if the other brand is associated with a good cause.

That’s a lot of brand loyalty simply migrating because of people’s innate desire to “do the right thing”. This highlights a couple of glaring facts:

1. The online social philanthropy space is potentially huge
2. Our governments need to be in there getting a piece of the action

Let’s bring this back to trust again. It’s natural to wonder why governments don’t take on this job of turning users into propagators of key services. The private sector is now shining some big fat arc lights down this road, it shouldn’t be hard for our public services to start taking some big steps here. It’s also natural to wonder what we can do to reduce the trust deficit that exists between the government and the rest of us (as outlined here). It our governments aren’t going to trust us on some big issues right away, the least that can be done is the services and applications be put in place so we can trust each other. Then let us do the hard work.

Conclusions

Whilst researching this article I came across this piece by Tom Watson.

…on one hand, people are ever more conscious of philanthropy and its role in commerce and society; on the other, these people are talking to each other more so than ever before.

If you keep talking you can change the world right? And now talk is cheap, easy and global. In theory the more we talk, the more we get to know each other and empathize, the more we trust. In the UK right now the government, through Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, is attempting to map out the digital future. It believes at the end of this future there is a Digital Dividend, the spoils of which will greatly benefit all of society. Lord Carter could do worse than spend a few hours reading Causewired and learning how that dividend is already being created.