Re-photo (cc) Anthony Mayfield

Within the climate change mitigation discourse, a war effort is often called for. WWII is cited by some as the only time during the history of industrialization that a societal/productivity shift of the order of magnitude now required has happened. But we want to look at a slightly different point in history. Just like post-punk was an altogether better sound than punk itself, the post-war effort (in both Germany and Japan) has plenty of interesting lessons for us when it comes to the subject of societal change.

Let us consider for a brief moment the issue of social capital in post-war Germany and Japan. These countries had just been whooped ten shades of blue, millions dead, and in Japan, two nuclear craters. Understandable if the local populaces felt a bit put out and distrustful of the Allies restructuring plans. Yet the economic turnaround in each country was nothing short of miraculous. Now, we’re not going to get totally reductionist on this, there are plenty of reasons, common and independent, why the original Axis of Evil managed to get back on its feet, but one nugget provided here by Francis Fukuyama stands out in this decade old paper originally written for those friendly folk at the IMF.

Apart from religion, shared historical experience can shape informal norms and produce social capital. Both Germany and Japan experienced considerable labor unrest and conflict between workers, managers, and the state in the 1920s and 30s. The Nazis and Japan’s military rulers ultimately suppressed independent labor unions and replaced them with “yellow” ones. After their defeat in World War II, the democratic successor regimes opted for a much more consensual approach to management-labor relations that produced Germany’s postwar Sozialmarktwirtschaft and Japan’s lifetime employment system. Whatever their current dysfunctions, these institutions played a critical role in allowing the two societies to return to growth after the war, and constituted a form of social capital.

What did these institutions do? They bound society. They allowed trust to develop, crucially between workers, so that an honest day’s pay was not going to be wiped out by either hyper-inflation or schemes dreamt up by the occupying powers. An honest day’s work was rewarded and society could get back to rescuing cats from trees and whatever else they do on the banks of the Rhine.

Of course that’s not all Frankie has to say but he goes and ruins his nice ideas with a little apology for Globalisation right at the end, that’s to be expected we suppose. And while we’re on the subject, it’s 2010 and you know what, we’re still not at the end of history buddy!

Back to climate change. Post COP15, there’s a big argument that with the failure of our governments, it is time civil society, and business, stepped up to the mitigation plate. The job they have to do is huge and in order to do it they’re going to have to create even more social capital than was mobilized during the late forties and fifties in Germany and Japan, for without this social capital, the job for CSOs will be next to impossible. But the great thing about social capital is that much like economic capital (i.e. cash), surplus capital can be banked and transferred to those that need it most. Think about a trusted NGO. Let’s say the Red Cross. Over the last century the Red Cross has done a big job in warzones and natural catastrophe areas. On a whole, the world trusts them. When they come looking for money (and trust) in times of peace we happily supply. And when the shit hits the fan they’re ready financially, and in terms of trust, to get to the heart of the action.

Enter the likes of 10:10, a concept keepfakingit endorses so much we went and joined the company. If civil society organisations like 10:10 are to win the day in this battle, you had better believe they are going to have to become the Goldman Sachs of social capital, using every trick in the book to first-off generate that capital, then bank it, and have it spent in the most efficient way possible to cut emissions. Organisations are going to have to work together, and use additively created radii of trust to bring more and more people under their umbrellas of social action. This means building layers and layers of trust (thus social capital) across real life social networks, both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally from nuclear family to nuclear family, through communities, schools, businesses and clubs. Vertically through neighbourhood watch schemes, councils, religious orders and up and over international borders.
This is hugely ambitious, it has to be. And here at keepfakingit we think there’s a chance it may work.

We find patterns where we look for them in life. Right now I’m thinking an awful lot about trust, and how we emulate real world trust relationships online. So it’s not altogether surprising that trust emerged for me as the biggest theme on Saturday at SXSW.

Nobody nailed this better than Laurence Lessig in his talk entitled Change V2. Lessig claims he’s giving up the copyright war he’s been waging these past ten years in favour of a a bigger fight. Political campaign finance reform. Without the total overhaul of how politicians are funding their campaigns he claims. The thesis is pretty simple:

Dependencies weaken trust

Money /= False

BUT

Money breeds contempt

How does this apply to government? Lobbyists pay politicians, ostensibly for access rather than favours. The electorate knows this and assumes the worst. So the US is now in a situation where less than 20% of the population thinks that congress is doing a good job.

Lessig gave examples from the past 200 years of the Republic and stated his view that we are living in a less corrupt democracy than at any time in history. So this is Good Souls corruption in Lessig’s view. But perceived conflicts of interest are providing the contests that create doubt and these doubts breed the deadly meme.

The same situation exists within the world of medicine. Think MMR inoculations. GPs are perceived by their patients to be on the end of a  payola stick by big medicine. So no record number of parents  are forgoing jabs for their kids.

So with all that in mind Lessig says we need to removed the dependencies of K street and issue a Declaration FOR Independence. How: Citizens funding only of political campaigns.

In Google we trust

Charlene Li came back to the issue of trust in her talk on the Future of Social Networks. The first half of the talk I wondered why I’d made the mistake of sitting in. Inane observations that anybody in the audience could have made isn’t the reason I’m here. But Li did bust out a couple of nuggets near the end.

She argued that we’re on the brink of really stepping up our use of implicit social data to fill in gaps of closeness. Essentially one social network talking and communicating to others in order to know who are friends are and importantly, in what context they’re our friend.This makes sense. But here’s the rub. To do this Li claims we need a central trust fund. And who’s this going to be. Google.

I’m not so sure about this. Why will we suddenly start trusting Google, will it be implicit trust, or explicit. In other words will we trust them by default because they simply host more of our digital life than anyone else, or will we grab on to them as an OpenID supplier( or whatever trust ecosystem eventually emerges, I’m not so sure OpenID will be the one). Follow the money said our host and she gave the example of our banks, our government services, our stores are all starting to move onto the social web.

But let’s go back to Lessig. Money is not equal to false, but money breeds contempt. Will the migration of financial transactions and dependancies onto the social web breed the same DIStrust that exists in real life? Big question.

A follow up thought of my own from this goes something along these lines:

Online philanthropy is a booming business right now. From events like Twestival to startups like DonorsChoose and Kiva, there’s never been a better time to give, and to give online. But are there real dangers here that we miss the trust hooks when we’re setting up these new paradigms.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (was it me or was this talk a geek infomercial) talked (super nervously) about happiness. Ho hum. But one interesting point on trust didn’t pass me my. Zappos are all about company culture and happiness in the workplace. In order to achieve this they place a super amount of trust in their entire workforce from warehouse floor to callcenter to finance department. And if you were to believe Hsieh it works.

Finally, the OpenSocial Stack, which I saw at both geek (code) and non-geek (IRL ideas) talks. Four of the five levels on the stack here have implications for trust. Think about it. Google already are.

Opensocial Stack

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.