Social Actions -- Request for Proposals
Peter Deitz
I spent an hour or two this afternoon brainstorming a dream scenario for
the search interface and open API. Attached is a request for proposals
on the build-out. Please circulate it among your developer friends, if
you have any.
I've started to circulate it among Ruby developers in Canada and the Bay
Area. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns about
the document.
Most of the text will look familiar, up until I start talking about "The
Current Task."
Cameron suggested a company in Toronto, who I spoke with on Monday.
They will be submitting a proposal by the end of next week. You can
check out their work at: http://www.theworkinggroup.ca/
Looking forward to your thoughts.
All the best,
Peter
PS -- Beverley gave a great presentation of PincGiving yesterday
afternoon. Thank you Beverley. I'll be featuring it in a blog post
early next week.
PPS -- I may have more big news on the way... Stay tuned.
PPS -- Cameron offered to work on the NetworkforGood integration. We're
waiting on the testing credentials. Once we have these in hand, we
should be able to whip up a NetworkforGood integration in short order
(at least that's the plan). We currently have until June 30th to
integrate the API, in order to receive our 10k from the Case Foundation.
PPPS -- I had a great conversation with Joe Solomon earlier today. We
came up with some great ideas on how to approach the marketing mystery
that is Social Actions.
PPPPS -- Christine and I had a two hour conversation on Wednesday. Very
productive indeed. We've got a big todo list that I will share with the
group when I get a chance.
I'm signing off for the day. Enjoy! Peter
Tom Munnecke
I would suggest that an RFP or Statement of Work have more definite deliverables... just what needs to be accomplished for both sides to agree that the effort is done.
Peter Deitz
Great suggestion. I'll make sure that the contract includes more
precise deliverables. Any thoughts on the wishlist items specifically?
Or longer-term 'must haves' for bringing about a robust end-to-end
protocol for micro-philanthropy?
All the best,
Peter
Tom Munnecke
re: the architecture in general: My (admitedly fuzzy) thoughts on how this would work would focus on specific actions... the things being done. These are the "packets" that flow end-to-end through the network, analogous to the information packets that are routed through Internet Routers. If a node on the P2P goes down or becomes untrustworthy, then actions are "routed around the damage" in the same way that internet packets are "routed around" the Internet. Similarly, if a node proves to be trustworthy and effective, then it attracts more actions. So, the network becomes self-organizing and self-propagating: Effective actions by trustworthy nodes proliferate; ineffective actions by untrustworthy nodes wither away.
The internet was also based on a "smart edges" approach... the network itself just dumbly routes bits, not caring whether the content is an email, a ring tone, music, data file, or video. It is up to the end points of the network to figure out what the data means. Contrast this with the "Smart Center" model of the traditonal "Ma Bell" network: users had "dumb" peripherals (i.e. a phone), and the network had the "smarts" for making the calls. The Ma Bell network connection quality was only as good as its weakest link, while the Internet assumed unreliable links and dynamically routed around them.
As we have seen with the internet, this open approach creates immense opportunities for innovation, pushing power out to the "smart edges." This, of course, is very threatening to the "smart center" industry, who want to sell you ring tones for one price, SMS for another, and photos for another.
The folks who are thriving in the "smart center" network model are the last ones to support "smart edges". You can read a bit about this from David Isenberg's work "The Rise of the Stupid Network" (which got him fired from AT&T). http://isen.com/stupid.html
I would contend that we have a "smart center" model of philanthropy and development today. The intervenors/donors/NGOs/agencies have the intelligence, and the poor people being helped are the "dumb edges" who are supposed to do as directed. (e.g. wear the right T-shirts when donors from oversees show up. Imagine the catastrophic consequences of kids wearing T-shirts from donor X when donor Y visits).
Dependency is "baked in" to the smart center model.
There certainly are interventions where smart center approaches are appropriate. Eradicating polio, smallpox, or other public health measures DO involve superior intelligence at the center... but these are not the be-all and end-all of activities, and certainly shouldn't be used as sole role model for uplift.
Maybe I haven't looked deeply enough, but I don't see this end-to-end activity model in the current SA architecture.. It looks to me that it is simply a fundraising front end to existing fundraising sites. What if there is a negative result somewhere... who is going to tell the donor that their donation didn't work right?
Let's look at the Omidyar $100 million donation to Tufts for microfinance. If all goes well, it will trigger a thriving market in microfinance, and a portion of the profits will flow back to the university trustees. Now, let's look at a hypothetical situation in which the Omidyar's good intentions didn't actually have good effect - perhaps their donation actually drained capital and interest from the poor they were trying to help.
If this hypothetical situation arose, who would tell them about it? Would the trustees tell the Omidyars that their donation had triggered negative consequences? Would the professors, microfinance intermediaries, NGOs, or field workers? If someone dared to bring up negative results, would they be treated seriously, or would they be considered a rabble-rousing conspirator?
Such are the dynamics of the "smart center" network. Everyone is tied to a dependency tree from the funding source.
Reversing these dynamics is a challenge. Rather than assuming a perfect connection managed by the smart center, we need to presume that a certain percentage of actions will not work, will have perverse results, or will be handled by untrustworthy nodes. These "negative" results or expectation failures should be used for learning and conditioning the network, and be an active part of the network dynamics.
The design thus becomes a balancing act between positive and negative results.. and minimizing or constraining the costs/risks of the negative results. One way (I think, but haven't fully convinced myself) is to shrink the granularity of the interaction... lots of little activities. in NetGeekSpeak: a massively scalable fine-grained network. This would create a "long tail" distribution of lots of little interactions, (a power-law distribution -see also Barabasi's Scale-free network works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network ).
The key to making all this happen is to figure out a way of efficiently shrinking the packet of interaction while increasing the feedback derivable from the interaction and the chain of trust supporting the action.
gotta run now... more to come later.. feel free to blog these comments, if you like...
tom
Peter Deitz
Thank you for these thoughts! It's important to me that I respond
thoroughly to your observation/question about Social Actions being just
a "fundraising front end."
What we're building is a lot more than that, but I'll need some time to
prepare my response. Stay tuned.
All th best,
Peter
Christine
Great post.
My sense is that the “end-to-end activity model” doesen’t yet exist in
Social Actions’ architecture because there’s a gap right where the
“Third Party Integration” is described on the second page of the RFP:
"As web applications and widgets are developed that help to filter the
dataset, we will want the ability to port third party information
about individual actions back into the system. For example, this
information could relate to a Digg score, a Del.icio.us bookmark
count, or similar data."
Not until that third party information is available to port back into
the system will Social Actions begin to represent a kind of end-to-end
(or reflexive, to avoid linear metaphors) data delivery system. Until
then, Social Actions will be a simple reflection of the social actions
platform universe as a whole which, for now, is light on feedback and
heavy on the “fundraising ask” side of things.
So, who do you know that would like to start building those
applications and widgets?
And how would we ask them to identify whether an action is a part of a
scale-free network vs. a random network? Or whether the action is
embedded in a sufficiently robust “chain of trust”?
What we’re really getting at here is: How do we richly and accurately
identify the context, and not just the content, of an actionable
opportunity?
Which begs the next question: Once the context has been identified,
how do we minimize the temptation to base critiques (ratings) on the
context itself rather than on the "appropriate fit" of a proposed
action and its context (so we're not assigning demerits based on scale
alone, for example)?
Christine