Social change and economic impact are not things that can be extrapolated out of a piece of hardware. New technologies are unrealized potentials – building blocks whose eventual impact will depend on what is designed and constructed with them. The shape they ultimately take will be determined by our ability to visualize how they might be applied in new contexts.

From Nathan Rosenberg’s seminal 1995 McKinsey Quarterly article on Innovation’s uncertain terrain.

It’s probably the neatest summary of my attitude to technology and why without re-imagining the society that surrounds them, all the windmills, solar arrays and miracle-engineered crops won’t do the jobs our technologists and policy wonks think they will.

That was fun. A few months of hard work, lots of new friends made all over the world and a tonne of cash raised for non-profits doing some good work. Thanks Twestival Local. But before consigning the project to the filing cabinet, let me quickly consider some of Twestival’s more interesting attributes.

Twestival may be many things, but primarily Twestival is a network, a Latourian actor network even. It is made up of people and concepts and held together astonishingly by a large number of narrow but elastic paths/relationships on Twitter. Maybe on some other lesser social networks too. Twestival displays the classic characteristics of a network; it’s distributed (simultaneously globally, locally), it is robust (knock out one city, the rest continue unaware) and it is scalable (expansion and contraction do require relatively little resource overhead).

Look, I knew all of this before working on Twestival but actually experiencing it work was pretty special. I can’t overstate the value those Twitter paths played in management and information dissemination. Of course email and Google Docs and Skype were part of the toolkit, but day-to-day when something had to be done fast, and when exciting a volunteer as well as spreading a message was crucial, then Twitter was the medium of choice. Twestival didn’t happen without it.

Where does Twestival go next? I don’t know, ask @amanda. That’s not so important as where some of these network management techniques go. I’m going to let Manuel Castells bring the party:

Networks are complex structures of communication constructed around a set of goals that simultaneously ensure unity of purpose and flexibility of execution by their adaptability to the operating environment.

Sounds just like Twestival and indeed lots of other campaigns. Maybe it’s time we conceived some of our campaigns using a paradigm of networks rather than in the classic Euclidian manner encompassing, as it does, a start point (campaign launch) and end point (win/loss), typically in two dimensions with one axis denoting the all too quick passing of time.

What do we gain from a network approach? I’ll give one benefit right now; people. For many campaigns, finding, organising and activating volunteers is a tough job. We have to spend valuable time seeking out those who are engaged, receptive to action, capable of action, willing to spread our message and so much more. Aspects of network theory as proscribed by Castells and Yochai Benkler, may help us out here. Certainly Castells would have it that in the networks, where innovation is a valuable commodity, the innovators become apparent quickly. That for me was the beauty of Twestival. Innovators coming to the fore, engaging, taking the project framework and iterating.

So two jobs now for campaign (network) organisers. 1) Be aware, you are creating networks, not a-to-b routes. 2) Figure out how to find the innovators. Both of these warrant follow up posts.

Clay Shirky on the Middle East. He admits over-egging the social media influence omelette but more credit to him for it. Then he gets into it. Here’s the pay-off:

“Governments have systematically overestimated access to information,” Shirky said.

“They’ve also systematically underestimated access to each other. Access to conversations among amateurs is more politically inspiring than access to information. Governments are afraid of synhronised groups, not synchronised individuals.

via SXSW 2011: Clay Shirky on social media and revolution | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Twestival’s global comms centre. Photo (cc) allofoto

Do you work on a campaign, an event or maybe for a global company? How do you communicate minute to minute with your co-workers and volunteers if they aren’t in a cubicle beside you?

Tuesday’s are the fun days at Twestival. I start with a 9.30am Skype call to Twestival Australia and end about 11pm with a call into the US. In between there are Skype and GoToMeeting calls with other regions, maybe a webinar with local organisers, lots of Twitter and Facebook updates, a tonne of e-mail, and maybe a phonecall or two if absolutely necessary. I imagine that’s pretty standard for anyone organising a global event or campaign, it’s coming towards the end of International Women’s Day as I write this and I bet the organisers are still knee deep in digital communications.

The question arrises, or at least it does for me, what’s the best channel to use in different situations. And pertinently for campaigns, or volunteer led (and I mean led) events, how do we convey enthusiasim, excitement and urgency in a digital space without pissing people off who are busting their ass for our cause. In particular I’m referring to those moments when we need to communicate digitally one-on-one or one to a small group. I’ve had to think about this a lot over the last couple of months and it is safe to say Twestival is rubbing my nose in some new insights.

• Twitter: @cian has been active for four years but Twestival has totally opened my eyes to how effective Twitter is at one-on-one active engagement. Particularly with people who want to engage more but aren’t sure how. An email is too much hassle, Skype too invasive, but sending a public @ message shows social recognition, trust and can enthuse in a big way.
• Skype: Simply the best way of pretending your virtual coworker in in the vicinity. You can decide if that’s a good thing.
• GoToMeeting: Want to conference call, share screens and maybe pull someone in to a call whose timezone means she’s already in the pub? Bam. Diary management overhead is high, but maybe you’re an organised type.
• E-Mail: Ugh, want a permanent paper trail, fine, but don’t expect anyone to thank you for it, or be able to find that password you sent three hours ago.
• Facebook: Want to start an avalanche of enthusiastic chatter? Facebook is the goto place. Check out the Twestival Local logo gallery for a prime example of an initiative which allows that 1% of creators to engage the 99% of commentators and observers.

These points are nothing you have not read before, but all too often we shove the right message down the wrong pipe and then wonder why our team of organisers or volunteers aren’t delivering on project goals. We spend a lot of time chin stroking over the right message, whilst doing that it’s vital to consider also the medium. I’d love to hear other insights from the field, tell me what you use in these situations.

Photo (cc) James Bridle.

Many organisations measure engagement by their target audience in two dimensions, up and down a ladder. Example:

1. Subscribing to a newsletter
2. Opening a newsletter
3. Clicking a link
4. etc.

But here’s the thing, clicking a link is super-easy, so easy in fact, modern campaigns have bred a new breed of “slacktivists”, finger always by the mousebutton. Or so the argument runs.

Amy Sample Ward tells us we should stop beating ourselves up about this; a) slacktivism has been around a lot longer than the internet and b) it’s actually a sign we’re doing a lot of things right. We want people to click the Facebook Like button, the problem is, we’re neither ambitious or smart enough to ask them to do more than that in an effective manner.

Here’s the interesting part, until we start comprehending the landscape of engagement better, we have little chance of creating better real world interventions. So ditch the ladder and go get yourself a map:

First, the ladder of engagement (refer to the slides if you want to have a visual on the steps here). Let’s take for example the fact that the American Red Cross raised $34 million dollars from the text to donate campaign after the earthquakes last year in Haiti. I want to point out two aspects of the way the engagement ladder doesn’t necessarily work as one step to the next:

• On one side, that’s a lot of people that went from bystanders to donors. But how many of them are being encouraged to continue moving up and how many of them were even bystanders of ARC vs the news of the earthquake?
• On the other, how many people in this room are aware of ARC? You don’t have to respond but consider how many of you may have donated. It isn’t about whether you gave money or not, because I imagine you may have instead retweeted or shared a link or post on facebook.

I think that the engagement ladder needs to change to not show a raising level of engagement but instead operate more as a map, showing where someone may have entered from and where they can go next. They might start out as a creator but still have low engagement (not something that really matches our traditional engagement ladder view) and never get to the donation stage, for example.

We know we have the tools to do this, the question is, do campaigns have the smarts and the willingness to invest in management overhead to step back and spend time on the analysis to go with them. If not there’s very little point in stepping down off that ladder.

Coke or Pepsi? Both will rot your teeth, the real choice of course is to choose another game, a point subtlety missed by the Irish electorate this week. Yes the Fianna Fáil incumbency has been well and truly kicked to the curb, but replaced by a solidly right of centre led coalition. The Pepsi challenge moment for the Irish electorate was presented thus; rightwing, homophobic neo-liberalists (Fine Gael) versus the post-Marxist political wing of an alleged terrorist cum-smuggling operation (Sinn Féin). Go on, you choose.  Yes there is an Irish Labour party and they did make gains. Yes there are plenty of independents from all sides. But Ireland has gone with the high fructose corn syrup option when she should have walked right out of the store. In changing one civil war party for another the country is left with a dominant political coalition that now very much resembles the one embodied by Cameron and Clegg on the Downing Street lawn almost a year ago. We may not like to admit it but there is a right wing to Irish politics and it is now in power.

So what next? Sticking out a tongue and taking the Fine Gael / IMF dispensed medicine is the easy option. Not a particularly rosy one, but it is the safe bet. Above all else the Irish are a nation of safe people. But some time over the next 18 months, it’s going to dawn on the population, particularly those on the margins already, that this government can not and is not going to be all things to all voters.  Option two, tougher, involving as it does a little more graft, guile and imagination, three qualities very absent from this election. On the ground Irish society is going to have to stop bemoaning a corrupt government (they’re gone) and start holding the current government to account. This Fine Gael government cannot be allowed make worse Fianna Fáil’s mistakes through either a) ideology or b) stupidity. With a government likely to form by the end of next week and a busy EU schedule over the next month, Ireland better be ready to move fast.

Protest movements don’t come naturally to the Irish, but two recent examples from the UK are worth noting and would seem to be shrink wrapped and ready for an Irish voice-over. UK Uncut’s ingenious creativity and the incredible speed and inclusivity of the Save our Forests campaign. UK Uncut’s triumph is its creative engagement of people who don’t normally do protest. And in Vodafone and the banks, they have picked targets beyond sympathy. SoF exemplified the power of the network, and how massively important it is to put together a coalition of common interest, even if membership is open to those with usually opposed views. And the story was bulletproof, there is nothing more noble than fighting for English heritage.

What are the Irish equivalents? What are the narratives that will spark conversations on Facebook, Twitter and Boards.ie and maybe ignite some action offline. As the bubble moment of ending 80 years of Fianna Fáil dominance implodes and Irish voters are reminded that they’re in negative equity and it’s still raining outside, it’s time for those who have not been listened to in the last month, and will be utterly sidelined by their new government to start a new dialogue. I’d love to hear some ideas how this can be done.

Zachary Sniderman writes a colour piece profiling aspects of Twestival’s global organisational structure on Mashable today. Check it out, saves me detailing it here ;-).

With hundreds of events in 125+ countries, Rose can’t possibly monitor every dollar and every event taking place. Even the regional managers can be spread thin with the volume of events and local charities they need to manage. “When you put that trust out, that’s almost the payment, that’s the ‘salary’ that people are making on this,” said Cian O’Donovan, Twestival’s digital communications manager based in Ireland [the UK - my edit]. “I guess what I’m saying is, trust is [Twestival's] currency.”

Pic from kieranmccarthy.ie

The Shannon scheme of the 1920s was Ireland’s great leap forward. With its completion, the lights went on up and down the country. Or at least in the cities and bigger towns they did. But by the end of the second world war fully two thirds of a 3 million population were still without power to the home, the reason, good clean country living.

Rural electrification was very much down the list of political priorities. Significant forces opposed electrification, and even supporters of the scheme often had motives that were less than inclusive. A number of forces were at play here

• The Catholic Social Movement (rural fundamentalists)
• The Gaelic League (cultural fundamentalists)
• De Velera’s discourse legacy of self-sufficiency (never, ever realised IMO)
• Catholic fear of socialism and individualism (a fear not confined to the shores of Ireland).

Many of these forces, certainly during the first half of the 20th century, presented cities in Ireland as being of “foreign” culture, a local Other to be shunned. Yet despite these interests, despite a country with less than zero budget following WWII, despite the requirement of one million wooden poles (surely more wood than there were trees in the country), the job of the Rural Electrification Scheme (RES) got the go-ahead. To study how is a fascinating examination of social, technical and cultural change. Ultimately 1.75m people were served by the scheme, 2% in towns and villages, the rest in open country, illustrating just how scattered the population at the time was.

The Structure of Change

Let’s examine the organisational and geographical makeup of the the Rural Electrification Organisation (REO). Significant from the start is the fact that the REO was almost a totally independent organisation from the national electrical utility (the ESB), which itself was a semi-state profit making (in theory) enterprise. The toughest initial hurdle to overcome was the granting of subsidy from central government, but once achieved, the REO was at the races. And because it was hived off from its parent, it could make big ambitious decisions quickly. The first of these was to decentralise as much of the design and implementation process as possible. There was some central procurement, such as wood from Finland, and knowledge sharing, but little else.

Ireland was broken into ten regional hubs.

• Athlone
• Cork (rural)
• Dublin (rural)
• Dundalk
• Galway
• Limerick
• Portlaoise
• Sligo
• Tralee
• Waterford

Each of the district REO offices had three divisions, materials, technical and development The latter was essentially a consumer outreach/care department, which was to play a hugely important role on the ground. Located in each district REO office was a Rural Organisation Engineer (ROE) who supervised three to five crews. The crews were the teams of skilled workers, linesmen, engineers and between forty and one hundred hyper local casual labourers, the men who got their hands dirty. At its peak the scheme had ongoing simultaneous operations in up to fifty locations around the country.

The parish was the granular unit of geography each crew worked on, typically 25-30 square miles, containing 300-500 premises. A crew would move into a parish to start the electrification work, opening a local office, bringing with it 40 REO staff, and hiring 40-100 locals. This movement of labour, knowledge and culture for Ireland at the time was unprecedented. Not only did the crews bring with them light, heat and the ability for shops to sell ice-cream for the first time, they brought employment, an influx of men from around the country (with obvious consequences) and a power structure that up until now had centred around the local parish priest.

Typically it would take six months to wire up a parish, or at least those who had opted in. Prior to a crew moving in, advance survey work would be done to ascertain which premises in the parish wanted to be connected. Parishes with a large number of potential customers were connected first, or at least that was how it was meant to work, petty local and national corruption had a part to play too. Séan Lemass for example pushed many Gaelteacht (Irish speaking) areas to the head of the queue. And even with favours, local parish refusniks could hold up work for years creating pockets of darkness in an ever increasing quilt of light over Ireland’s landscape.

Culture and impacts

I hope to see the day that when a girl gets a proposal from a farmer, she will enquire not so much about the number of cows but rather concerning the electrical appliances she will require before she gives her consent including not merely electric light, but a water heater, an electric clothes boiler, a vacuum cleaner and even a refrigerator.

Seán Lemass, Dáil debate, March 7th 1945.

Rural Ireland was not a cash society. Farmers didn’t have bills to pay, for anything. They didn’t make money, they didn’t spend it. Electricity was the cultural intervention that was to change that forever, for the first time, farmers were being asked to make a regular payment for something initially they thought they did not need. Perhaps this shift, more than any other single impact, drew rural and urban Ireland closer together, the socio-technical co-prodution of society plain to see.

But the biggest impact overall was probably on Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland. No longer did they have the drudgery of fetching dozens of buckets of water from the well (Ireland at the time was renowned for its small bucket size), electricity allowed for the widespread introduction of motor powered pumps, thus water straight to the kitchen. Which meant of course that all of a sudden, women had some free time on their hands. To listen to the wireless and even, in the 60s, to watch TV.

The BBC and RTÉ broadcast their first radio services within four years during the 1920s. The BBC was churning out television by the mid thirties, yet it was not until after the bulk of the RES’s work was done, 1961, that Ireland’s first TV service was launched. And anyone who has spent time watching RTÉ’s subsequent output will admit that the state broadcaster is still someway behind its Anglo Saxon neighbour.

In 1951 73% of Ireland’s 200,000 male farmers were over 45. A quarter of these were unmarried and less than 5% had attended secondary school. There were no socio-economic development agencies for these people and outward rural migration was huge. It was these people, generally subsistence farmers who didn’t make money, but similarly had next to no outgoing costs, that the folk from the RES had to convince. And it was the bringing into the electrical fold of these farmers that was to allow Ireland enter the EEC in 1973, and finally, by the 1980s, start questioning societies power structures, that had for so long kept Ireland a small, dank, inward looking place.

Lesson 1: Organising for a new modernity

Some lessons. In my piece on capital projects at a time of empty treasuries I sought to make the point that big ambitious projects . Classic New Deal territory. I think the lessons of Irish rural electrification are slightly more subtle, but perhaps more important, certainly for campaigners. The organisation and execution of the REO was at this 66 year juncture, simply phenomenal.

1. Follow a vision, and you can affect real societal change.
2. Local counts. Change does not have to come from the centre. It can and often does come from the dispersed bottom. The REO harnessed this in hundreds of Irish communities, it showed off a better tomorrow individually at local level and millions bought in. There was no nationwide advertising campaign, or celebrity endorsements. The work was done on the ground, parish by parish.
3. Be incessant, go where change is actually wanted first, then return to the neigh-sayers.
4. This future probably exists somewhere right now. Find it, bring it home.
5. This is going to take a while. So what. Arguments at the time that this would be a 70-80 year project. These weren’t actually ridiculous, the final offshore island to be turned on finally got the electrics only as recently as 2002. But the majority of the work was done in a 15 time scale. But 15 years seems like an eternity in the lifecycle of a campaign, but if we’re to think big, we’re going to have to start thinking long.
6. Values, beliefs and getting the job done. If someone has some MSc or PhD time to spare maybe they could go find out whether it was Common Cause type belief interventions or Maslovian needs selling that did it for the REO. The rest of us can just get on with getting the job done.

Lesson 2: The history of cities

Maybe its time we looked again at distributed dwelling patterns in rural communities. This deserves a full post but here’s the quick overview. The telling of the story of the flight to the city is for the most part painted as a straight forward march of progress. Since the industrial revolution all roads have led to the metropolis. That billions have walked this road is presented as a fait acompli. It’s not. Three articles over the last month give some insight.

• Casaubon’s Book on scienceblogs reminds us that the food crisis hasn’t gone away, is getting worse, and that 175m new starving people are living in cities, having left the country only a generation ago, or less.
• The Guardian yesterday painted a colour piece of Delhi, a small government town literally cracking up because the infrastructure of the city can’t handle the population.
• And the New York Times ran an incredibly thought provoking piece just before Christmas. Entropy, biology and the growth of the city are all linked with some scary hypothesising; “After a city doubles in size, it also experiences a 15 percent per capita increase in violent crimes, traffic and AIDS cases”.

So maybe, the lessons of rural electrification need to be retold, maybe this race to urbanity that we are running is treadmill going nowhere. It certainly cannot be any harm in exploring the alternatives, which may well begin with a new form of electrification.

Pic (cc) JesseYounger1.

Reading Zygmunt Bauman at the moment. In Consuming Life he lifts this great quote from Mary Douglas‘ In the Active Voice:

Unless we know why people need luxuries (that is, goods in excess of survival needs) and how they use them, we are nowhere near tackling the problems of inequality seriously.

I like that Bauman is ignoring the standard Maslovian psychological approach to consumerism (which seems to my over addled and under educated mind so self-serving and self perpetuating, a form of back slapping almost from marketing types) and bringing the whole discourse out into a much broader societal and sociological space. Because, the consumers’ wants not only affect them, but their relationship to the objects/subjects they are consuming, and the rest of society. Bauman this time:

In the society of consumers, no one can become a subject without first turning into a commodity, and no one can keep his or her subjectiveness secure without perpetually resuscitating, resurrecting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable commodity.

Bauman gives some great examples of how in our networked age, technology is allowing the consumer to be (reflexively?) turned into the commodity. Exhibit A: The call centre software which filters high spending shoppers straight to the head of the queue whilst low-spenders are doomed to spend eternity in the great touch-tone void; “For instructions on how to fix the lump of plastic technology you are paying us £45 per month on an 18 month contract please press ’1′, for all over services, please press ’0′…”

Three things to cover. First off Andrew Jamison’s essay in the latest issue of WIREs Climate Change, which has just dropped. Second, values versus behavious and a little bit of Common Cause versus Chris Rose. Third up, networked society yo. From policy nudges to policy change through network effects.

>>>>1

Andrew Jamison, where were you and your history paper on the history of climate change in the context of social movements six months ago? No really, I spent the summer trying to connect the dots between della Porta, Touraine and Beck. Jamison’s done the job in a manner more elegant and readable than I could ever manage. And something that immediately that tallies with my own experience is Jamison’s contention that there is a serious dearth of academic study out there on climate change and social movements. Jamison does a good job rounding up what is available and bringing in some relevant literature from the more general social movement field. It’s invaluable for anyone working in this area right now right now. We’re an an impasse between the social sciences (read Mike Hulme in yesterday’s Guardian) and the ongoing and seemingly hardening stance of the natural sciences (great round-up of important papers in Climate Progress).

Jamison outlines three waves of social movement. The traditional 19th and 20th century movement that worked on big ticket issues, such as women’s rights or the labour movement. Then post ’68 there were the New Social Movements (NSMs), in the North these were “lifestyle” movements, you choose feminism, I choose the environment etc. Emerging at the turn of the millennium are a new wave of movement focussed on the negatives of globalisation and perhaps even technology. Environmental justice fits in here too, as do anti-GMO, airports and roads.

Jamison identifies some important issues:

1. The intellectual tensions between the traditional social movements (such as labour movements) and the New Social Movements of the seventies and eighties. Despite some progress, environmental NSMs still regard climate change primarily as an environmental issue. Ee-k-er!!!
2. Progressives have misread some of the skeptics concerns. People like Al Gore, essentially neo-liberals, are commodifying science/academia. They are taking techno-social solutions to climate change and attempting to make a buck out of them and they are dragging universities along with them. Jamison’s point: let’s admit this and understand why skeptics get wound up by it. I know I get wound up by it.
3. To not only “solve” (ha!) climate change, but to start tackling fairness in society, we need to not only cross pollinate scientific disciplines (particularly as Hulme suggests between the social and natural), but we need also to cross fertilise activist and academic knowledge. To create a commonly shared theoretical and conceptual framework.

Sounds great right? Of course, there’s a catch, the reason suggests Jamison is cash money. There simply is not the funding in universities, or more to the point, into universities, to get this done (Jamison would have it that this is because of expedient commercial demands).

But all of this begs the question more generally of progressive movements and institutions. Are we cooperating as best we can? Do we have a common cause. Funny you should ask, onto part two.

>>>>2

Beliefs versus values. Y-fronts versus boxers. Chickens versus eggs. Tom versus Chris. Right yeah, boring. The point is, both are important. Obvs.

Tom Crompton and the merry band of NGOs behind Common Cause would have it, (after George Lakoff mostly), that the way to take on societies BIG problems is through value interventions. Emotion trumps fact in judgements runs the arguement, so change the emotional levers, through framing, and you change the outcome. Deep frames define one’s overall common sense and if we can redefine common sense, then we have a powerful underlying tool for change on our side. QED.

Chris in his lengthy smack down of Common Cause almost takes offence that a campaign would attempt to “alter” an individual’s value system. As if a person was normatively outside of a social network (of the original kind), in which value altering vectors were not assailing her every waking minute. My contention is this. As mostly rational beings we feel our (capital ‘v’) Values are important. We feel these Values will lead to a happier, more productive life for the majority. Well you know what, if that’s the case I’m going to try and share (note Chris, not “force”) my values with my friends down the pub on a Friday night. Hopefully they’ll pick up a few of them. And maybe buy me a drink. Chris in fairness to him sees this argument coming way down the track.

“And most obviously but apparently ignored by Common Cause , no decent campaign strategy should set out simply to convert an entire population, one by one, as in the manner of government social marketing schemes.” Why? Because who amongst us has the resources to possibly succeed at this.”

Now Chris is right, of course we don’t have the time or resources to stop people one by one in the street and . It’s taken the neocons 40 years, from Goldwater to Fox News, to establish their platform (Lakoff lays this out nicely). Maybe if we get our act together it takes us a decade or two. That’s no good for climate change though right. But pleaase, hold that thought for one minute, I will come back to why that may be changing presently.

For the most part I agree with Chris, show people change, show them success, and they will follow. And dealing with climate change, we know that we need to get results now. But to move on and not learn the lessons that Lakoff through Common Cause can teach us would be folly. For connected to climate change are issues of fairness and social justice have have always been with us. Crompton et al. offer a caveat ignored by Chris that allows us to examine each campaign opportunity and assign a weighting to the value intervention / behaviour adjustment ratio intinsic within. That surely offers us a place to start. And whilst we are doing this, surely creating a common progressive epistemological and resource infrastructure á la Jamison 3 makes total sense.

>>>>3

Last night I saw Paul Ormerod talk at the RSA. Policy change by increments is over claims Ormerod. David Cameron’s Nudge-based initiative is its last hurrah. Offering incentives (e.g. tax breaks to encourage low-carbon behaviour) to society’s actors has only so much road left. The future is much more uncertain affair, where networked society takes over and has the potential to create social interventions in big steps. Ormerod’s bottom line: society is now more networked than it has ever been. Using network effects, we just may be able to instigate cascading change through networks, thus society, at a faster and more ambitious scale than ever before. And to do this we need to spend far more time identifying those most likely to adopt change (whether that’s value or behavioural change is not important according to Ormerod).

Okay, that’s the very very condensed version. As an example, Ormerod said that if he was IDS right now looking to alter the welfare state, he’d be trying to throw policy grenades into networks. Sure, the hit rate is going to be low (lots of these grenades come without fuses) but when it does blow, it’s going to be a whopper. Right now policy drives in general are big and risk averse, Whitehall policy wonks don’t like taking chances. And these initiatives cost a lot for only marginal gains. Ormerod’s suggestions are the opposite on all counts.

Why is this important? Well look at one of Rose’s main points I’ve highlighted. Given limited resources, we cannot hope to create widespread value interventions. Well not by traditonal means no. But working to a network paradigm, and working with those with access to these networks (IDS?!?!) maybe we see before us the beginning of a new strategy.

I would contend the level of influence bouncing around online networks has taken a marked step up over the past month with the launch of Facebook’s new messaging system and Path, the highly-influential-friends-only network. As such the ability to measure and track influence through networks of all types is perhaps growing and opens up opportunities unimaginable to the likes of Greenpeace and WWF 10, 15, 20 years ago. Opportunities to impact values faster whilst simultaneously showing as real behaviour changes. Surely this approach, and not a tired black and white debate over values versus behaviour should be central to our common cause.

UPDATE:

My friend Shilpa just sent me this link to a rebuttal of Rose’s newsletter by Martin Kirk, Oxfam’s Head of Campaigns, UK. Shame it’s the same tedious pdf style that Chris uses, but maybe that’s the point. Anyway, Martin rightly takes issue with the fact that Chris could find no common ground in Common Cause. Real shame. Go read it.

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.

Missed this on Friday. Tom Raftery at Greenmonk posted this overview talk by Doug Neal (Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum – Executive Programme and is responsible for research into Innovating through Technology). Doug was talking at the 2008 it@cork Green IT conference.

Tom covers the big points on Greenmonk so I’m going to mention just one area that’s super-interesting for me. At 18 minutes Doug talks about leveraging social pressure, some would call would call it CO2-guilt, through social networks. It’s not a hugely original idea, but, in this case one we can pump an awful lot of creativity into. I’m not talking about the Dopplrs of the world, great though they in particular are. But rather burrowing into people’s social graphs on their already existing networks and laying the problem/solution right there right then.

I know The Carbon Account tried this with their Facebook App. Who else is in this space? What can we do to push it on? Too late in the night for answers right now I’m afraid.

-edit-

Really what we’re talking about here is connecting the social graph to the grid. With smarts. Who’s doing it? Who’s up for it?

I’m halfway through Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Forrester backed study on social technologies “Groundswell“. Their definition of groundswell:

A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

100 pages in there hasn’t been anything earth shattering in terms of unexpected insight, though the case studies and different approaches of different industry are worth reading. What is great is the raw data that Li and Bernoff have access to and expose.

From a European perspective some of this data is more than a little troubling. Some hard facts:

Percentage of online consumers using RSS in 2007:

• US: 8%
• UK: 3%
• France: 5%
• Germay: 4%

And some figures on blog and UGC usage (US – UK):

• Read blogs: 25% – 10%
• Comment on blogs: 14% – 4%
• Write a blog: 11% – 3%
• Upload UGC video: 8% – 4%

Yet the percentage of users visiting social networking sites is much more evenly balanced with the US at 25% and the UK at 21%.

Again usage rates differ significantly when it comes to participation in discussion forums and postings ratings and reviews:

• Participate in discussion forums: 18% – 12%
• Read ratings and reviews: 25% – 20%
• Post ratings and reviews: 11% – 5%

And again when various social media roles are looked at the level of engagement of UK audiences are roughly half that of US audiences. Why is this? In some markets lack of broadband is cited as a reason, but it doesn’t take a 2 meg connection to use Google Reader. Similarly, engaging in review cites such as CNet isn’t a high bandwidth task.

Is there then sociological reasons at play? Are Brits simply less inclined to both complain and applaud products and services online? Are they less willing to experiment with new media and plaster the results all over Flickr and YouTube? It would appear so but keepfakingit isn’t so sure why.

Li and Bernoff ( or maybe I’ll call them Charlene and Josh, this is after all social media) point to the reasons for participation in groundswell technologies. Going through these let’s see if there are any pointers to this great Atlantic divide. So, we participate to:

1. Keep up friendships (Facebook etc.)
2. Make new friends, lovers, one night stands (Facebook etc. again)
3. Succumb to pressure from existing friends
4. Paying it forward (you use a review site so feel eventually obliged to submit your own review)
5. The altruistic impulse
6. The prurient impulse (Showing off is fun)
7. The creative impulse (UGC etc.)
8. The validation impulse (we all want to be assured of our place in the world, the rationale behind many blogs)
9. The affinity impulse (Big use case for sports fans).

Nothing in the above jumps out at me as the reason behind this US/UK drift. Let me know your thoughts.

A week ago I was on a web seminar call with Nick Carr, journalist, dismisser of corporate IT and author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Google to Edison.
Having just finished reading said TBS I was looking forward to getting up close to Carr’s ideas. The seminar was hosted by Google but so what, a lot of things are hosted by Google. What transpired though was an unfortunate sales pitch for Google’s cloud services. You get nothing for nothing so not much complaining coming from keepfakingit, but it would have been good to see Carr get stuck into some of the real issues he addresses in TBS.
Issues such as: Thomas Schelling’s theory of self selecting neighbours as applied to online communities and social networks.
Schelling’s thesis was that a randomly placed collection of nodes in a network, when given the ability to move independently at random, will eventually choose more like minded neighbours. for nodes and network replace ethno-racial families in city boroughs to get a real flavour for the social theory here.
Carr agrees with Schelling and points to examples of this happening in real life online communities. He argues that whilst many “Net defenders” points at a rich tapestry of life and opportunities online, the reality is an even bigger ghettoization of thought than happens on our streets. Net communities are more homogeneous  and polarized.
A great example is the inward looking nature of the political blogosphere in the US. A study of blog coverage of the 2004 presidential election found a clear split in red and blue blogs. Republicans talked about their issues, trashed Democratic policy, but for the most part only quoted and referenced their on blogs. And vice versa.
Crowd sourcing is another danger area. Take for example Amazon’s auto recommendations. I bought a Nick Cave album from Jeff Bezos six months ago so now every time I login to Amazon I get offered random selections from Nick and his Bad Seeds’ back catalogue. Not a bad service and it’s getting better all the time. Or is it? Is it not the case that what Amazon have created is the ultimate pseudo-AI feedback loop. Instead of refining, Amazon is narrowing my choices and the more I use it the narrower it gets. If I were to pay attention to Amazon I’d have all 14 Nick Cave albums in my collection within a few months but not a lot of other additions. And there’s only so much Anglo-Aussie guitar slinging anyone, or their neighbours, can take.

All this would seem to fly in the face of the logic that has made Amazon exhibit A in the case for a long tail economy but it is a social insight that must be paid attention.
This is happening throughout cyberspace. Is the internet becoming the world’s biggest feedback loop?
From first hand experience the online sports community follows similar patterns. The net has embellished and enhanced real world walls and barriers. Spurs and Arsenal fans rarely if ever congregate together. Even for an England match they’ll silo themselves. In fact it could be argued that in an online sports community the team allegiance is an even bigger social marker than it is in real life. And once marked, and outsider will find it even harder to integrate into a hostile neighbourhood. Ultimately in the case of the Premier League we’re left with 20 silos of fans who are even more divided online than in reality.
And as we spend more time online and when online in social networks the real life effects are tangible and numerous.
Of course this isn’t to say social networks are inherently bad, but as we start to port more of our real life tasks to networks (job hunting on LinkedIn, date hunting on Facebook, new band hunting on MySpace) we should be aware of the allies we’re running down. And there should be an onus on the gatekeepers of these alleys to clearly signpost them and keep them well lit.

Finally, this is something new media patron saint Marshall McLuhan warned against but ultimately was optimistic about in Understanding Media. On the subject of television he wrote that man rejects uniform integration because he becomes more deeply involved in the human condition…

 The entire approach to these problems in terms of uniformity and social homogenization is a final pressure of the mechanical and industrial technology. Without moralizing it can be said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply in one another, will come to reject such mechanical solutions.
It is more difficult to provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform patterns of mass education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity that can be fostered under electric conditions as never before.

It’s up to us to make sure that we’re constantly pushing the uniqueness and diversity envelope.

I wrote about Getty Images being on the market last week. The price at the time was north of $1.6bn. The buyout price  turns out to have been $2.4bn. The guys at Hellman $ Friedman clearly weren’t reading this website when they went all in. What were you thinking!?!

Here’s some pap from the press release. From the Getty side:

“We are enthusiastic about entering the next phase of Getty Images’ evolution by partnering with Hellman & Friedman as we continue to provide innovative offerings to businesses and consumers in a very dynamic digital media environment.”

And the H$F MD Andy Ballard said the private equity firm will work to “realise the full potential of [Getty’s] traditional businesses while furthering the evolution of Getty Images into a global digital media company”.

Can’t wait to hear how they’re going to do that. It’s certainly not going to happen by them continuing the aggressive acquisition model that has seen them acquire 50 companies in a decade, but lose serious market value over the past two year.

These guys are going to have to get out amongst the publishers, both big and super-small, and come up with a new business model. Some suggestions:
How about working with Google to rev share the yield on pages that also display ad-sense. Let’s call this one photo-sense. If a photo really does add value to an article, some ad-creative or a feature  piece let the traffic reward Getty.

On the other side, how about you let the amateurs (and pros) on Flickr tunnel through the Getty API and sell their wares straight to the  world’s photodesks.

What Fast Company are doing in terms of integrating amateur and pro content is pretty interesting. Right through their site they are erasing the boundaries between their highly paid internet A-Listers, Scoble, Israel etc, and their readers. And the truly amazing thing here is that Fast Company is at heart a magazine, the oldest of old media types.

One thing that makes this work is that the pro bloggers and writers are really pro. And the community editors are doing a good job of bringing the very best amateur content to the surface.

Jeff Jarvis weighs in with his ever definitive thoughts on FC and co here.

A lot of outlets reported last week that the sale of Getty Images has stalled. With the economies of so many countries hitting rough water right now that shouldn’t be a surprise. Getty’s market valuation is $1.6bn, that’s not an inconsiderable amount of money for a collection of photographs. But really that isn’t the real problem Getty face. The issue at hand, an old media dinosaur struggling to adapt to massive market changes.

It seems Getty has been around forever but a quick check of Wikipedia shows it’s only halfway through its second decade. But through non-stop acquisitions of smaller agencies it has become a giant in an industry now dominated by very few players, just themselves, Corbis and Jupiter Media. Sound familiar? It should. There’s a lot of comparisons that can be drawn with the music industry.

Like the big music players Getty spends a huge amount of time and money chasing real and potential customers for what they claim are copyright infringements. They send thousands of cease and desist letters to websites for unlawfully using Getty images every year. They follow these up with letters claiming damages.

Many of these abusers of Getty’s images are big and medium media. National papers, as well as professional organizations on a local level. But many are small time bloggers and social network users.

Now, I don’t think for a minute Getty are in the same league as Sony et al, suing 12 year olds for six figures worth of lost earnings. After all, Getty haven’t yet brought any of these cases to court. But they’re not a million miles off.

All this seems crazy. Let’s throw out the economic and legal arguments for a moment and just look at the actual process here. User/blogger goes to Getty, looking for an image for their purpose, let’s say they’re writing a recap on a Premier League football game. Before they even begin to search they have to decide if they want a Rights-managed (RM), Rights-ready (RR), or Royalty-free (RF) image. They then have to use a not-too-clearcut price calculator, finally downloading the image in a range of sizes that may or may not be what they need.

OK you’re saying, but the guys in Condé Nast and editors on newspaper photo-desks know their way around image libraries. Well sure they do, but what I’m driving at here is this question: are there more of them (professionals), and are they more valuable than the mass market for photos on the web. Especially in the context of social media, where image and identity differentiation are more important now than ever before. Is there a whole new mass market for Getty to tap? If so they are doing their hardest to ignore it, sticking to a web 1.0 or even pre web business model of central control and expensive limited access for customers.

In part II of this one I’ll take a look at some possible ways Big-Photo® can make money in mass market, and maybe draw up a comparison with the Photobuckets and Flickr’s of the world. And I haven’t even mentioned professional photographers yet.

photography

No meta data. No way of knowing who’s read a journal or paper before. Of knowing what they thought of it. At least unless you’re the librarian or have one of those special CIA computers that track books on particular subject matter like “The Idiots Guide to making Nuclear Fission in your living room”.

Ok, it’s too late on a Sunday night to go into this in depth, but the last post has me thinking of how we use libraries, or rather why I don’t. Why can’t I go down to Whitechapel public library and have the same experience I can have looking up a book on Amazon. Why can’t I have a better experience, after all, the public library doesn’t have the same commercial agenda as a publicly listed company. And an academic library is actually there to promote and encourage the transformation of information stored in books, to useable knowledge in someone’s head.

So why isn’t there a way to capture a reader’s thoughts as they’re reading or browsing. And of displaying this to the next 12 year old looking for Deathly Hallows. Or computational chemist looking for some shit hot molecular vibration modeling information. Libraries have to start organizing information differently. Turn the card files into networks. Two way networks and allow us to rank and annotate them. And communicate through them.

There was a time music was accessed by artist name, album name or song title only. Didn’t matter if that was online or in Virgin Megastore. MySpace changed that. Now we find new music through networks. There’s a lesson and a model there for our libraries.

David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” dealt well with why this information is needed. Now we need an altruistic version of Mark Zuckerberg to build an Open Source network for Libraries worldwide to hook up to.

First off a full disclosure: I read John Naughton’s “The Networker” column in today’s Observer on printed news sheet version I bought from Hackney Road’s best minimarket, Ince. I’m sure Gutenberg would be delighted by that, as no doubt Mr. Ince was when I handed over my £1.90. A lot of money for something I’ve gone and re-read online for free. I think by admitting that I’m removing myself from the demographic this post is all about but such is life.

A couple of thoughts on Naughtons words, or more to the point, the study by the British Library and UCL on the information-seeking habits of young people he refers to. The report says amongst lots of other interesting things that we are spending as much time searching for information as consuming it. It also states that we’re not spending much time on the media once we find it. We read, then move on to the next object on the same horizontal plane.

What does this mean? It means two things: first Google, Amazon and iTunes have a ways to go in terms of getting us media easier and quicker. There’s a debate swirling at the moment about human search and what it has to offer a world in which Google are paying all the best engineers to make sure their algorithm stays in first place. Of course that assumes that finding the information is the end goal. Sometimes the search is as entertaining as the media at the end.

Take Twitter, it could be said that the micro blogging application/universe is really a passive search tool. I connect/follow all those I think will point me to useful data and hey presto, I get pointed to media I invariably find interesting. This is a form of human search. And because of the social nature of the search I enjoy the process as much, if not more than the end result. Marshall would be proud, in this case the medium really can be the message.

Second, isn’t this method of consumption very much like the way we use some social networks, and I’m thinking MySpace in particular. We connect, consume media that our new friend has posted, then move on. All the time we’re at the same rung of the hierarchical ladder.

Over the past 12 months many have looked at News Corps purchase of MySpace and wondered if maybe Rupert Murdoch in his senior years had shot his wad on Tom co. Facebook was the cool new thing led by a twenty-something year old with the best PR since Mother Theresa. But the Facebook fanboys have been quiet of late. MySpace has been getting some spring cleaning and the media-model it’s build on is looking sound enough.

So what does that add up to? Well at the end of their report the British Library team come to some conclusions. They say the days of paid-for library searches, additional pins and passwords to get into bespoke cataloguing software, and separate, non-connected databases for online and offline information are over. Users just couldn’t be bothered. Users want a one stop shop. Users want to use their Google toolbar. If libraries want to remain relevant they’re going to have to open up and let Google, MySpace or whoever it may be in.

After a couple of hours playing with the Setanta RSS feeds
everything’s ready to go. So go follow twitter.com/setanta for all your Premier League football news.

Nothing groundbreaking that other media outlets aren’t doing here, but wait until @setantacritic gets going…

Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.

The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of  love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.

Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure.  It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!

But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.

So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.

Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?

As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.

Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?

In the week that Big Brother once again pokes its nasty head out of room 101 here’s some words from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media pp 67:

Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of informations seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

Adding McLuhan’s two points together: if we get social we get rid of Big Brother and the rest of our navel gazing “reality culture”. Yet it could be argued that “reality” media is the apex of media development in the four decades since McLuhan wrote the above. It’s not an argument I’m going to make right now though. That’s one for Andy Duncan over at Channel 4.

From Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture:

The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants – and for that reason, the social functions of gossip hold when dealing with television content. It isn’t who you are talking about but who you are talking with that matters. Gossip builds common ground between participants, as those who exchange information assure one another of what they share. Gossip is finally a way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others. As cyberspace broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it becomes even more important to be able to talk about peope we share in common via the media than people from our local community who will not be known by all of the participants in an online conversation. Into that space step the complex, often contradictory figures who appear on reality television.

Jenkins mentions this in relation to building community around reality TV. But really this applicable to all relationships and Jenkins brings it up after a discussion on building brand champions/agitators in the community.
So the questions arises, how can brands and media owners facilitate this gossip? Is this where they interact with the social networks or should they even be trying to own this or merely interact with it.

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