Category: social graph

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.

Comments closed

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?

Comments closed

Spitting Images & Systems of Difference

Published January 19, 2009 by cgerrish

“I’d swear he was the same guy. He was the spitting image.” It’s a saying that speaks of two being as one, and yet being fundamentally different. An apt phrase for the messy business of representing identity. These thoughts are provisional, but have been triggered by pondering the ideas of Internet Identity and the Semantic Web. Any discussion of representation taps into a long historical dialog.

We look to the photograph to clarify, to lift the fog of ambiguity, to testify. Muybridge’s photos settled a bet by revealing the manner in which a horse truly runs. Speaking of the power of photography to capture the image, Susan Sontag said:

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a foot print or a death mask.

Visual evidence is highly convincing– we say seeing is believing. The voice can testify to the facts of the case. The written word, except for the wet ink signature, is open to many interpretations. But both seem to rely on conveying what is physically seen with the eyes.

On the Network, we try to create a tapestry of unique numerical endpoints– and we assign names to the space so that we may become conversant with it. It’s a supergluing of a signifier to the signified. It’s a kind of attachment that doesn’t happen in natural language. It’s like saying “I mean what I say, and I say what I mean.” It’s the ambiguity in language that lets the future in. A simple way to understand this is to consider a chart in Sean Hall’s book on Semiotics: This Means This, This Means That:

Signifier		Signified
Apple	means	Temptation
Apple	means	Beatles
Apple	means	Healthy
Apple	means	Fruit
Apple	means	Computer
Apple	means	Gwyneth’s kid

Signifier		Signified
Apple	means	Apple
Pomme	means	Apple
Apfel	means	Apple
Manzana	means	Apple

The truth value of the table? True in every case, and the size of the table is unlimited. There’s a slipperiness to language that allows a play of meaning across a field of usage.

A namespace relies on coordinates in space as opposed names and language. We claim a name in a particular space to take it out of circulation. We preserve its uniqueness with technology and the law. As we apply Occam’s Razor across the technology of the Network, we might think about where we can allow the signifier to play freely.

For instance what if your display name (not your login name or your opaque database key) on a social network didn’t have to be unique or even singular? What if it was identifiable through its relationships, connections, geography, avatar, and activity streams? Allow the messiness of the world to be mirrored in the messiness of the Network. In the wild, Identity isn’t created through unique identifiers, but rather through the intersection of different lines of activity flows through time– the collection of differences. Or as Saussure calls them a system of difference. Laclau explores the idea a bit more:

We know, from Saussure, that language (and by extension, all signifying systems) is a system of differences, that linguistic identities, -values – are purely relational and that, as a result, the totality of language is involved in each single act of signification. Now, in that sense, it is clear that the totality is essentially required – if the differences did not constitute a system, no signification at all would be possible. The problem, however, is that the very possibility of signification is the system, and the very possibility of the system is the possibility of its limits. But if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot be themselves signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification. Thus we are left with the paradoxical situation that what constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system – its limits – is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility – a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification.

In the technology of language and the language of technology, we imagine a kind of systematic extensibility that can capture meaning and the play of signification in real time. But can it?

Comments closed

Category: social graph

I’ve Always Depended Upon The Kindness of Strangers…

Identity Data: My Brother’s Keeper

Spitting Images & Systems of Difference

Talk Show