Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

I’ve Always Depended Upon The Kindness of Strangers…

Published March 2, 2009 by cgerrish

Arts organizations and charities swallowed hard when they looked at the fine print of President Obama’s budget. Tax deductions on charitable donations from the wealthy are to be further limited in the new plan. The New York Times reported on the ire of the charity industry.

Under the administration’s proposal, taxpayers earning more than $250,000 will have their ability to deduct contributions to charities reduced to a rate of 28 percent from a rate of 35 percent, according to an analysis by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations.

Professional fundraisers, while concerned, took a different view:

“Research has shown again and again that for major donors, taxes are at the bottom of their list of reasons why they make these gifts,�? said Margaret Holman, a fund-raising adviser in New York. “They make these gifts because they love, are intrigued by, want to invest in their favorite charities.�?

Most, if not all, of our country’s museums, symphonies, regional theaters and opera companies depend on the generosity of large donors. In this severe economic downturn large arts organizations have also seen a sharp reduction in the income generated by their endowments. And as people cut back on their expenditures, the sale of season’s and individual tickets will fall as well. While we focus on the nation’s banks and core industries, there’s a lot of collateral damage being done to our cultural institutions and working artists.

While there’s no such thing as a contribution limit for charities and the arts, one can’t help but compare their predicament with the campaigns of presidential candidates. Historically, winning campaigns have attracted the support and contributions of large donors. This is a continuation of a patronage model that is deeply rooted in the political economics of our history. The largess of the few was the only method of raising the significant sums of money required to run a national political campaign or a major arts organization.

The Obama presidential campaign changed the equation. By reaching out to everyone, employing the Network and lowering the cost of managing a very large number of small donations, Obama was able exceed the results of the traditional fundraising model. A simple way to think of it is to imagine the size and complexity of the social graph of the McCain campaign compared to the Obama campaign. The math is pretty simple, to raise equal amounts of money– how much, on average, needs to come from each node on the network?

To some extent, public broadcasting follows the model of casting a wider net with their pledge drives. The problem is that this method of fundraising is widely perceived as annoying and unpleasant. Donations are often simply made in exchange for bringing the pledge drive to a close. We pay our public broadcasters to stop dragging their fingernails across a blackboard and return to regular programming.

As the business models for public and private broadcasting (including newspapers) begin to converge, we are in dire need of some innovation in how funds are raised. Doc Searls has shown us one possible future with his PayChoice program.

PayChoice is a new business model for media: one by which readers, listeners and viewers can quickly and easily pay for the goods they use — on their own terms, and not just those of suppliers’ arcane systems.

The idea is to build a new marketplace for media — one where supply and demand can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by thousands of different silo’d systems, each serving to hold the customer captive.

At minimum an opportunity needs to be provided to donate after a great experience with an organization, as opposed to donating to make a bad experience stop. PayChoice is trying to make donations a user-initiated event– where value is paid for when it’s experienced. Needless to say, it’s easier to imagine complex systems than it is to lay down the pipes that would allow those kinds of transactions to flow.

In this era of transformation, arts organizations will need to examine their social graphs and the quality and frequency of the events transacted through them. They’ll need to decide whether they consider social media to be a mere toy, or the foundation of their future.

While we’ve been waiting for the convergence of media devices, we haven’t noticed that the media itself has already converged. We are all broadcasters now, whether in live performance or live over the Network. The potential points of connection have multiplied greatly, but remain largely unused and unappreciated. Just as Barack Obama’s campaign was able to connect and activate a very large network and benefit from those economics– arts organizations, and many businesses, will need to execute the same maneuver. Our relationships just got a little more complicated: they’re connected through the Network in real time, time-shifted, two-way, mobile and always on. The times they are a changing.

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Paint, Print, Stitch

Published March 2, 2009 by cgerrish

paintprintstitch-300x199

Christine Cariati, Deborah Franzini, and Victoria Kirby are participating in a three-part show at Back To The Picture Gallery where each artist explores nature in her own media. Through use of texture, juxtaposed subjects, color, and technique, the artists invite the viewer to contemplate what it means to observe and be inspired by the natural world around us, even as we dwell within cities and constructed environments.

Paint, Print, Stitch
Reflections on Nature

February 28 – March 27
Back To The Picture Gallery
San Francisco, California

Opening Night Reception
February 28th

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Identity Data: My Brother’s Keeper

Published February 23, 2009 by cgerrish

There was no particular reason that the anthropologist Robin Dunbar and the technologist Doug Engelbart ever needed to meet. Their work doesn’t need to be connected explicitly. As part of our daily struggle to survive, we constantly try to extend and augment our capabilities. Engelbart made a career of exploring the ways that personal computing could extend human capability. Dunbar established the limit against which augmentation would be applied in the social sphere.

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.

Businesses manage larger numbers of relationships through a management structure and their customer-facing employees. It’s an organizational technique developed by Daniel McCallum. If each employee can have a meaningful relationship with 150 other people, a business builds a management system around that limit. Ratios can get much higher when a business is unconcerned with the quality of the relationships, or the relationships are purely anonymous and transactional.

To increase both the productivity of employees and the quality of the customer relationships— and augmentation of human memory was required. The customer relationship management system is an extension of the salesman’s customer preferences notebook. The salesman kept reminders of what this customer or that liked or disliked. Jotted down some personal information to jog the memory for use at the next sales opportunity. This extension, or augmentation, of human memory results in better quality interactions with very large numbers of people— the required relationship information is ready-to-hand, it can be retrieved with a few keystrokes.

Once a company has become a custodian of a pool of customer identity and relationships, it has obligations to protect that data. There are now laws on the books regarding breaches of client data. Notification is required, and some form of identity fraud protection must generally be offered.

In a NY Times article on the erosion of privacy, The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that:

…online service providers — social networks, search engines, blogs and the like — should voluntarily destroy what they collect, to avoid the kind of legal controversies the baseball players’ union is now facing. The union is being criticized for failing to act during what apparently was a brief window to destroy the 2003 urine samples before the federal prosecutors claimed them. “You don’t want to know that stuff,” she says, speaking of the ordinary blogger collecting data on every commenter. “You don’t want to get a subpoena. For ordinary Web sites it is a cost to collect all this data.”

Since Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’ we’ve become more aware of people who act as high volume hubs in social networks, so-called influencers. From a sheer numbers point of view, some of these social hubs are beginning to rival the number of connections a company might have.

As an individual gathers larger and larger pools of personal data on other people through social networks, custodial responsibilities begin to accrue. While some might say the contents of their address book belong solely to them, in the event of a security breach or a subpoena there may be some disagreement. And so now we must ask, are we our brother’s keeper?

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Collecting Fragments: Pieces of Beatles, Pieces of Stones

Published February 16, 2009 by cgerrish

closingtheloop

Neil Young, talking to his biographer Jimmy McDonough, divides the musical world into two poles. It’s a way for him to put aside distraction and focus on what he sees as important about the music.

“So I’d taken rock and roll and divided it into two categories. Rolling Stones and Beatles, okay? And I realized that if you divided into those two categories, color makes no difference, what part of the world made no difference. Beatles are on one side, Rolling Stones are on the other side, everybody else line up, okay? Crazy Horse and the Mynah Birds, they were on the Rolling Stones side.
–Buffalo Springfield were the Beatles?
Yup.
–CSNY?
Beatles

When you get to the “the take�? the moment when you know you’ve got the right, not just the best, but the right performance of a composition or a piece of music– it’s either loose like the Stones, or tight like the Beatles. Young puts all popular music into one category or the other. It’s a tool he uses to understand both music and the openings and possibilities within the process of making music.

But let’s step back from the categories, and look at the moment when things are still unformed and fragmentary. The small pieces that are not yet joined, loosely or otherwise into a categorizable finished piece. The fragments are identified, collected, iterated — put together in different ways, explored forwards and backwards, different styles are layered on until something solid emerges, or it doesn’t. Or perhaps it doesn’t at that moment at time, and it’s stashed away for later.

The perfect take hides the alternate universes that the moment is built upon. Before the world is divided into Neil Young’s two categories– the bits and pieces any artist plays with look very similar. It’s the process taking those pieces and connecting them up, running them through your filters that makes the finished work. Identical raw materials could result in diametrically opposed outcomes.

The shards of glass, the pieces of broken pottery, the phrase, the scraps of paper, the image, the reference– these are all pieces that go into the final product. Sometimes they’re visible and shine through in the end. Sometimes they’re invisible, a starting point left somewhere down the road.

This brings us to the idea of bricolage, we make new things from the things we collect from our environment. We carry with us a mistaken idea of creativity– a divine creating out of nothingness, new things emerging fully formed without history or context. As Wittgenstein might say, if such a thing could happen, we couldn’t understand it.

Bricolage refers to:
▪ the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available;
▪ a work created by such a process.
It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – the core meaning in French being, “fiddle, tinker” and, by extension, “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose).”

On the Network there are a lot of ways of collecting and consuming items of information. Twitter, FriendFeed and RSS subscriptions offer a raging stream of roughly filtered items for our consumption. But that’s the old model, the conveyor belt of tasty treats moving endlessly and efficiently toward our collective gaping maws. The restauranteurs of the machine of popular culture want to teach us to eat faster.

I’ve just started integrating a software application called Scrivener into my writing practice. There are a number of possible writing workflows that can be built with Scrivener– but the one that currently interests me has to do with the structure of the application’s document format. Each document is comprised of two sets of outlines: a research outline and a draft outline. The draft outline is for composing text using an outliner approach, fragments of text can be arranged, rearranged and put into hierarchies. The research outline is for collecting raw material, which can be text, web pages, quicktime files, images, audio– anything that might serve in the writing process. In my system of categories they’re called the raw and the cooked.

These days when we talk about the two-way web, we understand very little about the writing part. We’re obsessed with creating a manageable and consumable stream of information. The latest manifestation of this is the dream of the perfect dashboard with a blinking readout and summary of our online digital existence.

But one might ask, once these digital information items have been consumed and digested– what’s next? Are those selections and collections we’ve made the raw material for building something new, or are they ‘used up’ once they are consumed and partially digested– routed to the sewage treatment plants running continuously in the river of our unconscious minds?

To close the loop, the reading tools have to be connected to the writing tools. To create my research outline in Scrivener, I have to copy and paste the things I find into it. The application isn’t connected to the Network, it doesn’t have an inbox listening for items I might like to route to it. The closest thing we have to this kind of application today is Gmail, an editorial application disguised as an email tool.

I can hear the loud objections already. Not everyone needs to be able to write. Writing should be left to the professionals. And then comes the vigorous pointing to the power law curve showing participation rates in two-way systems. The only point here is if you give everyone access to two guitars, a bass and some drums, something good is bound to come out of it. Music isn’t just for listening. And remember, as music can stand in for writing, writing can stand for the research you do before a purchase or some other kind of transaction. Doc Searls might call it VRM.

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