Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Making internet communities work: reflections on an unusual business model
In 2000 and 2001 (during the height of the internet bubble), Bernie Krieger and I wrote an article at the University of Maastricht focusing on a fairly undeveloped concept: online communities. The article, Making internet communities work: reflections on an unusual business model, was finally published in 2003 by the ACM SIGMIS DATABASE (Volume 34, Issue 2), a fairly high impact information science journal. The abstract now sounds rather quaint:
Building Internet communities has been hailed as one of the major strategic innovations of the New Economy, both as a stand-alone model or as a supplement to sustain competitive advantage for normal business models. Community based business models aim to profit from the value that is created when Internet communities solve problems of collective action, by controlling access, aggregating data, or realizing side-payments.The current literature on community based business models relies on methodological individualism to explain why members join and leave Internet communities. However, such an approach cannot sufficiently describe and explain communities because they are by definition more than an aggregation of its members.We, on the other hand, offer a metaphorical approach to conceptualize communities. Metaphors have a double function for communities: to explain the community to its members and thereby legitimize and reproduce it, and to describe the belief of community members to outsiders in order to operationalize it.With the metaphorical approach we develop a framework to build profitable Internet communities. If an internet community can be legitimized and reproduced community-value is created. However, that does not yet mean that it can be translated into profit, as many I Internet entrepreneurs had to realize. To translate the community-value into profit, the communal entrepreneur must position it in its competitive environment.
It is impressive to see, how the idea of building communities online has been mainstreamed in only seven or eight years and what valuation community platforms have achieved. However, it is also impressive in how far the question of positioning a community in its competitive environment has not been solved. Will online community building continue to be the fashionable thing? And will somebody be able to skim the profits of such ventures? – If you want access to the underlying article, please do send me an email!
Social Media Literacy
Probably we overstretch the metaphor of literacy when we want to talk about what it means to participate in networked societies. However, as the amount of media that we can use explodes (think twitter, facebook, dropbox, wordpress, or typo3), we see the world through the eyes of a toddler. Questions to think about: What are the limits of specific media in doing specific things? What are the limits of our imagination how we can act collaboratively? How much time should we allocate to learn new modes of interaction? What do we do with the people “that just do not get it?” What does this mean for society? Do we need a 19th Century type of literacy/schooling campaign? Howard Rheingold argues,
I see that the use of Twitter to build personal learning networks, communities of practice, tuned information radars involves more than one literacy. The business about tuning and feeding, trust and reciprocity, and social capital is a form of network literacy that we discuss in my classes. Knowing that Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy I started to blog about knowing that it takes ten to twenty minutes to regain full focus when returning to a task that requires concentrated attention, learning to recognize what to pluck from the flow right now because it is valuable enough to pay attention to now, what to open in a new tab for later today, what to bookmark and get out of my way, and what to pass over with no more than a glance, are all other aspects of attention literacy that effective use of Twitter requires. My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter stage every day – an essential foundation for participatory media literacy.
Network Mobility
The NYTIMES has an article on a German suburb to Freiburg, where people do not use cars. It shows in how much, moving from a car-centric world to a mobile people world is an epistemological challenge. Our family just did not buy a car, when we came back from Mexico (we had to give up our wonderful big old Ford Explorer and the cute little Jeep Wrangler) and we never looked back. In a workshop on traffic congestion that I organized several years ago in Monterrey, Penalosa, the brilliant former mayor of Bogota introduced the concept of “mobility” as a way to think about transportation, because as soon as we introduce the dichotomy of public and private transportation, the discussion will get ugly. How do you organize your mobility?
What Mexico and the US need to learn from Europe after 1990
Larry Rohter writes about Mexico and the US in the New York Times today,
Today, like it or not, the two countries are bound together inextricably in ways that would have been unthinkable during my time here. There is an old expression here, originally applied to economics and trade, that says “when the United States sneezes, Mexico catches cold.†The events of the last month suggest that the reverse may also be literally true. Or, as Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister who now teaches at New York University, put it: When it comes to living together, “Mexico has no choice, and Washington has no choice, period.â€
This seems a fairly obvious point. However, it is underappreciated in policy circles of both countries. Mexican and US policy makers need to push their historical pet grievances to the side, spend more time studying the integration of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other Central and Eastern European countries into the European Union to figure out, how to move foreward. What is really needed to make this possible?
Wrapping our minds around “Free”
In October 2004, Chris Anderson developed the concept of the long tail to describe the niche strategy of businesses that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities:
the distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of “non-hit” items is the demographic called the Long Tail (Wikipedia).
It took several years for the strategy to be mainstreamed and there is still a serious debate on its viability, however, most probably in 2009 we will be confronted with another strategy/business model Chris Anderson is working upon: The Power of “Free.”
Kevin Kelly, who has done constitutive theorizing on internet-based societies since before his New Rule for the New Economy, argued in a blog post in early 2008, that if the internet is one enormous copying machine, and if all our economies run on top of it, we need to do better than free. He sees eight generative qualities that add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold:
Immediacy — Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via rental or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often de-valued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie, or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.
Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, dirty language okay). Aspirin is free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA is very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset, and will be reluctant to switch and start over.
Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free — and becomes valuable to you only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting your copy of your DNA is very expensive, but soon it won’t be. In fact, soon pharmaceutical companies will PAY you to get your genes sequence. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.
Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was indeed actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.
Accessibility — Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. We’ll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us any musical tune in the world, when and where we want it, as well as any movie, photo (ours or other photographers). Ditto for books and blogs. Acme backs everything up, pays the creators, and delivers us our desires. We can sip it from our phones, PDAs, laptops, big screens from where-ever. The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.
Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today — which may draw ticket holders to a big theater — may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won’t have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.
Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s recent high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good.
Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.
The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love. They bring out the good news of the “long tail” phenomenon, which we all know, connects niche audiences with niche productions. But sadly, the long tail is only good news for the giant aggregators, and larger mid-level aggregators such as publishers, studios, and labels. The “long tail” is only lukewarm news to creators themselves. But since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL)will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users’ attention back to the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. Other intermediates such as critics and reviewers also channel attention. Fans rely on this multi-level apparatus of findability to discover the works of worth out of the zillions produced. There is money to be made (indirectly for the creatives) by finding talent. For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it “guided” combined. The magazine guided and pointed viewers to the good stuff on the tube that week. Stuff, it is worth noting, that was free to the viewers. There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability — in addition to the other generative qualities.
This is probably not the final word, but we clearly need to wrap our minds around the concept. Tomorrow, The Free! Summit will start in San Francisco, it is hosted by Chris Anderson and Mike Masnick (disclosure: I am a member of the techdirt community). It will be interesting to see how the Free paradigm develops. What do you think?
Entwarnung [all-clear]: Facebook does not make you stupid!
Last month Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student at Ohio State argued in an unpublished draft article that College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, based on a pilot study at one university. This bit of news hit the main stream fast and you could find articles based on the article in any outlet from CNN, BBC, the Chronicle of Higher Education, to Der Spiegel.
In less than one month Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai responded in First Monday, a peer reviewd online publication with an article titled Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data (First Monday, Volume 14, Number 5 – 4 May 2009), where they
attempt to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14– to 22–year–olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14–23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non–users.
On her blog Eszter recounts, how academic production changes in a hyper-mediatized environments:
On Sunday, April 16th I went to bed realizing that a story would likely spread like crazy the next day as it claimed a negative relationship between Facebook use and academic achievement. I looked up what I could about it and was concerned as it didn’t seem like the study offered solid evidence of the claims, but it was precisely the time of piece the media love.
By the time I woke up on Monday, April 17th, people among my Facebook contacts had started posting the story.
At 7:55am ET I tweeted the following:
Based on my UIC data set (representative sample of 1K+): no correlation b/w any Facebook use or # of hrs of SNS use & students’ grades, fyi.Siva Vaidhyanathan responded soon after (at 8:18am to be precise) with this tweet:
@eszter will you blog prelim results of sns/grade correlation?I would have preferred not to, mainly because it was the first day in a long time that I had a full day for my own work. But throughout the day, an increasing number of media outlets (first in the UK then in the US and elsewhere) picked up the story. Following all that media coverage were people’s tweets plus blog and Facebook posts about the study.
I decided I should blog about it after all and posted an entry here a few hours later. There is only so much you can say in 140 characters allowed on Twitter, after all, and I decided this was worth more elaboration.
Soon after, my blog post was automatically reposted on my Facebook Wall. My contacts started commenting on it including Josh Pasek who noted that his data also did not suggest the purported relationship between Facebook use and grades (see Facebook snippet above).
Twenty minutes after posting on my Facebook Wall, Josh sent me an email asking whether I was interested in “working on a report†about all this. I said I’d be up for working on something more formal.
Josh brought on eian more from the University of Pennsylvania, we had a conference call a few hours later and Josh started writing the first draft of the paper. Dozens of emails and about ten drafts later, we sent the paper off for consideration and peer-review to First Monday. A few days later it was accepted and a few days after that, it was published.
Facebook and The Department of Mary Jones
Jerry Mechling (KSG) asked all of us to collaboratively think about game changing issues in the financial crisis at Leadership for a Networked World. Bob Knisely, former Deputy Director of the National Performance Review/National Partnership for Reinventing Government, posted a very interesting reply. I asked him, if he would allow me to re-post it and he immediately agreed. Do join the debate at his blog “Government Reform.” Here it is:
During Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review, some of the staff began to fantasize about reinventing social services to create “the Department of Mary Jones.” FACEBOOK can make that fantasy a reality. This could bring unity to the most dispiriting, inefficient stovepipes/silos* in American government today.
The idea behind “The Department of Mary Jones” was that the organizing principle of social services should be the client, not the providers of health, welfare, housing, education, etc. We were ‘reinventing government’ back then, and what would make more sense?
Our “Department of Mary Jones” (for I was a Deputy Director of the NPR) would have provided immediate access to all of the information about Ms. Jones, and encouraged/facilitated/mandated coordination among her contacts with food stamps, Section 8 Housing, the police, the juvenile justice system, her welfare case worker, the guidance counselors at her children’s schools, and so forth. Such a system would enable the social worker to find out if there was a problem with food stamps or housing, and the school guidance counselors to notify the social workers of suspected abuse within minutes of seeing a bruised child.
Last year my wife and I became CASAs – Court Appointed Special Advocates – for a dysfunctional family with six kids. They absconded from Maryland and are now four hundred miles away, in a different state. Recently my wife took a call from the principal of the “special school” where the eldest boy is now enrolled. The principal was trying to get in touch with the family’s Children and Family Services caseworker. The principal and the caseworker are less than fifty miles apart and in the same county, far to the west; my wife was in Annapolis, MD. What’s wrong with this picture?
This inability to communicate and collaborate across agencies (and within them!) is neither new nor novel. Kids can get killed because information and actions taken aren’t shared. For just one example, see “Review Finds Agencies, Nonprofits Failed to Coordinate in Jacks Case” (Washington Post, April 2, 2009), and the underlying DC Inspector General’s report.
FACEBOOK could be the solution to this problem, in so many ways. First, if everyone involved became a “fan” of Mary Jones, then whatever they posted would be instantly and automatically available to everyone else. A quick review of her page at any hour would bring each worker fully up-to-date. The caseworkers’ workloads would be more easily (and quickly) accessed, from their FACEBOOK homepages. Supervisors at each agency, also enrolled as fans, could check on their workers’ efforts just as quickly and easily. All staff could work from anywhere that has Internet access. Such a system should be both more effective and more efficient.
There are now over 200 million users of FACEBOOK worldwide, so there’s unlikely to be a learning curve for many workers. If you’re a user of FACEBOOK, you can readily imagine how such a system would work!
What’s not to like? Well, there’s the privacy issue. In practice, it would be trivial to put the FACEBOOK software onto secure servers, and the information could be made as secure as anything that the Central Intelligence Agency is involved with. Caseworkers already work with a great deal of confidential information.
Also, recent attempts to create an integrated case management system in Fairfax County, Virginia, have foundered on both the data sharing (privacy) issues and because “the rules” do not permit commingling administrative grants across TANF, Food Stamps, etc., to pay for an integrated system.
It would be nice to think that all we’d need is a few “Yes Lawyers” rather than all the “No Lawyers.” In fact, both the data sharing issues and the commingling of grant monies would require changes in legislation as well as policy and regulation. But the vision of a FACEBOOK-driven integrated services delivery system should not be hard to sell in an Administration as “wired” as this one!
Of course, it might be an incentive to know that Canada (and other countries are well on the road to developing such systems, with or without America’s “high tech” Web 2.0 services, such as FACEBOOK. IBM’s Center for the Business of Government published a research report in 2008 entitled Integrating Service Delivery Across Levels of Government: Case Studies of Canada and Other Countries.
If we really care about children and families at risk, we need to solve the problem of coordinating multitudinous agencies and workers. FACEBOOK could make it happen, in a New York Minute.
Robert A. Knisely robert@knisely.info
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*As we now know, only on the East and West Coasts do we refer to “stovepipe” agencies. In the Midwest, they’re known as “silos.” We can’t even agree on the same terminology for the vertical focus of most government agencies. We’re caught in the same trap!
Viennese Networking
as we are learning to walk the network society walk, it might make sense to learn from cultures that have been organized along similar lines. Venice of the late 13th Century immediately comes to mind, but also Vienna [full disclosure:Â I am enjoying a cup of Viennese melange right across from the interior ministry, where yesterday, we discussed the opportunities and political threats of social media]. If governments will wake up to the challenge of creating the platforms of collective action for the 21st Century, as they have been able to do in the last centuries through militarization/bureaucratization/statistics, they will somehow look like Vienna: Coffee houses, ministers walking between ministries, random meetings on the street, sophisticated cultures mixing, a sensitivity for the other, and a sense of purpose. The Austrian empire is alive as a focal point to be evoked, when necessary.
Vienna is the only place, where I heard a senior policy maker make the argument that if governments want to stay relevant, they need to think about bandwidth and cloud storage, because in an open source world that is where identity is constructed.
My Country is Different
in May 2009 many of “us” are getting social media and do believe that “web 2.0” has the potential to be a game changer. However, the critique of the new way of organizing collective action is to be taken seriously. Some of the points policy makers from Austria, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, and the United States have voiced to me in the last weeks are:
– in my country/company, labor laws do not allow government officials to work at 10 pm at night and if the write an email from home, we have a serious problem.
– in my country/company, journalists do not get social media, so we had to buy them 100 copies of Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) so that they would understand our politicians point.
– in my country/company, maneuvering the tension between privacy and transparency is so complicated, we would not be able to profit of increased transparency.
– in my country/company the politicians do not get what they could gain from increased transparency, collaboration, and participation.
What are the main objections you have heard in the last months? What are your counter-arguments? What will happen?
Shaping Network Society
For the last four years, this blog has been headed “living-network-society.†At the time it had been a rather preposterous title for an important conversation. Today, living network society has become mainstreamed. But policy questions about our networked environments have acquired new urgency. We need to focus again-and-again on questions like what are political theories of networked realms, what is the governance structure of such societies, and how can we achieve a better life for us netizens. Therefore, I am re-naming the blog to “shaping network society.†Please join the conversation!
