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michaelhopkins
FM Editor
Member Since:
06 Dec 2005
Posts:82
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16 Dec 2005 5:50 AM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Craigslist, the online classifieds once best-known for helping people find jobs, apartments, and dates, suddenly became something else in the aftermath of Katrina—as did other online communities. Craiglist.com and nola.com (for New Orleans, LA) morphed overnight, all by themselves, into sources of information, aid, and solace to countless people facing tragedy. The sites re-purposed themselves without anyone telling them to, not to mention without anyone telling them how. It was self-organized networks doing some self-organizing—and in the process accomplishing things that official, fully funded, professionally managed organizations couldn’t manage to do at all.
I heard about this secondhand—first in the news, and later through an excellent public radio program called Open Source, in Lowell, MA (you can listen to the program, which is archived, here. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, seemed simultaneously amazed and unsurprised by what happened, describing how, right after Katrina hit, “all of the sudden people were posting rescue requests on our New Orleans site [Craigslist is based in San Francisco but now has sites in cities all over the country]. But they were also posting rooms available to evacuees…and then people started posting jobs. And then, in a kind of citizen journalism mode, people are suddenly providing stories that otherwise wouldn’t appear.
Which, surprising or not, is inevitable, Newmark says. “The people who use our site re-purpose it as they need…and then we get out of the way.”
The network did what professional information gatherers (the newspapers, rescue & aid organizations, government officials) didn’t: they recorded information on the ground, lots of information. Of course, they had lots of people recording it (a huge network advantage). They knew where the levees were solid or soft, where food was available or not, which streets were passable and which weren’t. They even knew, sometimes, where your cousin was.
Open Source host Christopher Lydon claimed that Craigslist became “a forum for “finding the missing and housing the saved, and what you find on Craigslist are stories as compelling as anything on CNN. Maybe what communities want in a time of crisis is good information, and maybe detailed, accurate information makes the best story.”
The speed and effectiveness with which a haphazard, ungoverned network can shape-shift as needed is interesting. At least as interesting, though, is another question that the Katrina/Craigslist episode illuminates: how our expectations about information have changed and keep changing. We now expect to find, and find out, anything we want. We have strong feelings about what’s available or what should be available. What does that say to companies and institutions about how they’ll need to deal with customers and constituents?
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HowardRheingold
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:22
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16 Dec 2005 8:28 PM |
4 have marked this post as Insightful
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"Emergent collective response" is a term that predates the Internet, but we're seeing it all over the place. There was tsunami blog http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/, and now, Recovery 2.0 http://www.socialtext.net/recovery2/index.cgi
It's a kind of smart mob response, of course, which is why I've been tracking it.
What is needed is an effective interface between the ad-hoc citizen responders and official responders. There were plenty of horror stories of the Craig's List types meeting bureaucratic obstacles from the FEMA types.
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CAMeyer
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:1
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16 Dec 2005 9:47 PM |
2 have marked this post as Insightful
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Another instance: Colonels deployed in Iraq have created a blog to share tactical developments, insights, and responses, causing doctrine to evolve in the field much faster than it could through the cycle of after-action reviews and top-down revisions. In this case, I understand that the Pentagon has taken this blog as a valuable input and is helping to disseminate the input, rather than acting as an impediment, but that's based on one report.
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speck
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:7
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16 Dec 2005 9:56 PM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Markets are conversations. So conversations are also markets.
Blogs, wikis, FutureMonitor, and other collaborative authoring environments are just now exploring the balance between freedom and regulation. The recent news on the accuracy of Wikipedia is a case in point. On the one hand a fraudulent entry went unchecked for some time and news organizations have admonished their journalists to not use that resource, at least without cross-verification. On the other hand IBM reports that, on average, "vandalism" to Wikipedia is corrected within 5 minutes. And nearly 3 times as many unique users (almost 13 million) visited Wikipedia in September 2005 vs September 2004. With over 4 million entries and an accuracy rating not too far behind traditional name brands this seems to have reached a tipping point.
It's interesting to watch these information markets evolve. FutureMonitor included!
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speck
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:7
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HowardRheingold
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:22
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chrismeyer
Member Since:
20 Dec 2005
Posts:33
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06 Feb 2006 1:38 PM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Every successful ecology (i.e. one that generates energy and growth) develops parasites, and this certainly applies to the web. Spam is an obvious example. As the Boyd/Roush article would suggest, this does not suggest that email should be outlawed. Ecosystems develop defenses to their parasites, and Wikipedia's semi-protection plan (see Speck's post) is a sensible addition to it's immune system.
Mammals spend a considerable portion of their energy budget on their immune defenses (I've heard estimates as high as 75% for humans when they are ill--can anyone point to a good source on this question?) and we should expect, as the web continues to grow in reach and complexity, that good health will require a similar allocation of resources.
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HowardRheingold
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:22
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06 Feb 2006 7:01 PM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Speaking of parasites in the web ecosystem, check out this post from boingboing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/06/did_nvidia_hire_an_a.html
Did Nvidia hire an army of message-board sock-puppets?
Nvidia stands accused of hiring online actors to create dozens of
personae in online forums, where they won gamers' trust by talking
about subjects unrelated to Nvidia's products, and then splurged in an
orgy of sock-puppet boosterism of Nvidia's stuff.
Consumerist has notes on its ongoing investigation into the
"Manchurian Fans" scandal. A former employee of AEG, a firm that
specializes in tricking people into thinking that its employees are
regular users who talk up products because they plain like them, has
been hired by Nvidia, but he won't answer Consumerist's questions.
Nvidia's PR person won't return their calls either.
It looks pretty grim for Nvidia: I hope that if they have
something to say in their defense that they say it soon, because it
really looks like they're just waiting for this to blow over.
I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco that targeted web forums.
I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50
identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100
eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well
thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple
identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was
right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed
in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long
time poster.
(MORE AT BOINGBOING)
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chrismeyer
Member Since:
20 Dec 2005
Posts:33
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06 Feb 2006 9:50 PM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Shows you how Nvidious viral marketing can be.
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tomportante
Member Since:
07 Feb 2006
Posts:6
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08 Feb 2006 4:12 AM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Procedural "semi-protection" is something that chaps a lot of wiki
enthusiasts. For them, a useful analogy comes from talking about ways
to lessen neighborhood vandalism. One way is to create a gated
community where only friends and friends-of-friends can enter.
The other is to give everyone a front porch, a porch swing, and the
encouragement to keep their eyes open for nefarious types.
Keeping your eyes open for baddies is something that's made easy by way of one of the universal aspects of wiki software.
Every wiki has a feature called (something like) Recent Changes. You
click on it and you get a screen that informs you where and when (and
sometimes, by whom) changes in your wiki pages have been made.
It's also the place that lets you keep pre-changed versions of those
pages.
Wiki old-timers regard this Recent Changes screen as the key to the wiki immune system.
When you open up your wiki space, Recent Changes is the quickest way to
see where people have been adding comments. It's a way to scan
the (sometimes very large) collection of pages to see 'where the action
is.'
Recent Changes is also the tool you use to 'back out' stuff that shouldn't have found its way to your site.
Not long ago someone thought it was great fun to replace some of my
wiki pages with a *long* ramble on what a BAD idea it was for Brittany
Spears to have waited soooooooo long for a facelift. I was in the
habit of checking those particular pages every day - so it was
typically a matter of (1) seeing these adolescent musings (2) clicking
on Recent Changes, (3) and selecting a pre-Brittany-Rant version of
those affected pages. Total time spent? Maybe 10 seconds.
After about a week of this my wiki visitor apparently thought the
write/erase/ write again/erase again game wasn't a lot of fun. He
(or she?) left.
Twenty years ago I lived in an area of Brooklyn called Cobble
Hill. While directly adjacent to the quickly gentrifying Brooklyn
Heights neighborhood, Cobble Hill was still a place where people still
had names like Vinnie and where car horns played the first few bars of
the Godfather theme music. It was also a place with something
else: up and down the streets, peering out of second floor flats
were zillions of Italian grandmothers.
Nothing happened they didn't notice.
Cobble Hill had the lowest crime rate for any single neighborhood of all NYC's five boroughs.
If wikis have enough traffic, and if there are people who take
it upon themselves to be the immune system -- the people looking down
at the street -- wikis will work really well without some formal
approach to "semi protection."
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HowardRheingold
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:22
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09 Feb 2006 12:07 AM |
0 have marked this post as Insightful
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The "if wikis have enough traffic, and if there are people who take it upon themselves to be the immune system" is indeed key (Hi, Tom!). The first is a critical mass question. I recall Jimmy Wales saying that 500 people do more than 50% of the edits. That's not a huge critical mass. But the "take it upon themselves" part is a social dilemma that crops up whenever a public good is voluntarily maintained. If people don't know the other participants and feel that there is too much free-riding, they probably won't contribute. You need a small critical mass to get it rolling: Some people won't contribute until they see one other person contributing, others need to see a hundred other contributors. So cultivating the individual trust and willingness to participate is crucial, and I suspect that this is grown in the talk pages, in the IRC channel, in the face-to-face meetings (Jimmy travels all the time, and organizes ftfs wherever he goes).
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tomportante
Member Since:
07 Feb 2006
Posts:6
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10 Feb 2006 6:48 AM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Howard (or, as I only knew you for years 'hlr') - hi also! To
bring together some of the threads: yes -- these improvisational wikis
really do seem to do best when they add to an existing community.
A story ... Shortly after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast there was a
remarkable grass roots effort in the Washington D.C. area called
Project Backpack. At the heart of the project was the idea that
relocated kids would miss any semblance of normalcy as they were
shuttled around to new schools. One of the missing bits of normal
existence for these kids would be having backpacks filled with the
stuff of everyday school life.
So -- a whole LOT of kids in the D.C/Maryland/Virginia area began
buying and equipping backpacks and getting them distributed to the
children of the hurricane refugees. Project Backpack organizers
made hasty plans to create a nationwide technology-enabled network of
'kids helping kids.'
'truth is, the amazing success of the effort in the one area never really transplanted elsewhere.
I'd wager that one of the reasons for this is that the tools used to
help organize the effort was successful when there was already a
community of people who kinda-sorta knew each other. Expanding
the effort to include the whole country meant that people with no real
social ties were working with each other for the first time - and best
intentions notwithstanding - it often wasn't enough to get things done.
Social ties (or in this case, the lack of ties) trumped not only
technology but also an enormous amount of shared good will.
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HowardRheingold
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:22
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13 Feb 2006 5:48 PM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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My friend Alex Nieminen told me a great story about the mobilization of existing social networks. Many Finns SCUBA dive in Thailand in the winter, and frequent a number of dive shops. Alex ran a small website on his server, for Finns looking for dive information in Thailand. When the tsunami hit, the operators of these dive shops, who knew what was happening with many Finns on the ground (who was missing, who was in a hospital, who had just called or SMSed their location), pooled their information and posted it on Alex's friend's website. The traffic soared, of course, and it quickly became the best source for this information -- better than Finnish official sources.
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speck
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:7
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11 Mar 2006 2:11 AM |
0 have marked this post as Insightful
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Howard - I recently read your discussion about tools and found the insight "what kind of person do I become when I use this tool?" very thought provoking. It's a great question to ask as you go along in a number of situations.
I've found Christopher Carfi (who runs Mercado Software) has a good blog and his post on what he calls a "barn raising" approach to customer support dovetails with your previous writing and the discussion here.
Here's the link. http://www.socialcustomer.com/2006/03/a_customer_supp.html
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HowardRheingold
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:22
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11 Mar 2006 5:19 PM |
1 have marked this post as Insightful
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Thanks, Speck! I never cease to marvel at the utter lack of any kind of critical literacy education around media and technology at any level of the public or private education system. That post is a good one. Building an organization that works that way is not so easy. If you want to see barnraising on a daily basis, go to any only peer-support community for people with a serious disease.
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speck
Member Since:
16 Dec 2005
Posts:7
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13 Mar 2006 7:30 PM |
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I notice a similar avoidance in the private/business sphere. Companies are buying new technology, most of which they won't fully use, to replace the old stuff, which they don't fully use. Do you think this is the result of apathy/stupidity or a pace of change that wears people out? Something else?On the peer-support side your point is well taken. I've had the unfortunate opportunity to visit some online cancer-related communities since a relatively young family member has recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Among the newest orgs was WikiCancer.org, which is using software called Wet Paint. While still new, there is a good deal of content. An organized bunch! I guess that's the hard part. Getting everyone in the organizaiton on board.Thanks again. I've had some eye-opening online journeys that began with a link from one of your related sites or articles.
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Frymaster
Member Since:
23 Mar 2006
Posts:32
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05 Apr 2006 12:16 AM |
0 have marked this post as Insightful
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Your anecdotal account has a solid basis in fact, TP. I heard about this U of Chicago study reported on NPR a couple years back or so. No date, but here's clip. (Emphasis is mine.)Some important findings have already emerged. For example, the data
suggest that the most important influence on a neighborhood's level of
crime and violence — more important than factors such as race and
poverty — is what the researchers call "collective efficacy" — that is,
a willingness among residents to get involved with one another and to
act for the benefit of neighbors and their children. Yet even a
neighborhood with high collective efficacy is at risk for higher rates
of crime and violence if it is located near others with negative
environments; conversely, a neighborhood with low collective efficacy
can be "protected" by proximity to more favorable environments. Truly, the wisdom of crowds.
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Frymaster
Member Since:
23 Mar 2006
Posts:32
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05 Apr 2006 12:18 AM |
0 have marked this post as Insightful
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Posted By Frymaster on 4/4/2006 7:16:47 PMYour anecdotal account has a solid basis in fact, TP. I heard about this U of Chicago study reported on NPR a couple years back or so. No date, but here's clip. (Emphasis is mine.) Some important findings have already emerged. For example, the data
suggest that the most important influence on a neighborhood's level of
crime and violence — more important than factors such as race and
poverty — is what the researchers call "collective efficacy" — that is,
a willingness among residents to get involved with one another and to
act for the benefit of neighbors and their children. Yet even a
neighborhood with high collective efficacy is at risk for higher rates
of crime and violence if it is located near others with negative
environments; conversely, a neighborhood with low collective efficacy
can be "protected" by proximity to more favorable environments. Truly, the wisdom of crowds. |
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One man's spam is another man's art. I saw this article about a computer artist who took unwanted spam emails and created art based ...
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