Green Light Mock Exam & Quality Emergence (2)
Mock Exam
Yesterday I’ve passed for my mock exam. The mock exam is a half-way test to evaluate what I’ve done so far. Not passing would have meant not being able to do your exams in August.
Interesting remark by one of the teachers: Don’t people rather search on a topic/mission instead of a charity? For example, maybe I’m searching for a Yogyakarta help page and not for the page of an organization.
At the moment it’s ‘in the system’ to make that happen. If you have a personal page you can start a charity page. A charity page could link to other charities, so you could set up a charity page called Help Yogyakarta. Where the owner of the page writes about what charities are helping Yogyakarta and links to all the charities that have missions in helping Yogyakarta. This would then become a portal for this particular problem.
Semantics
I’d love to see this sort of self-organization emerge. And while I believe this is ‘in the system’, it does bring about a problem in semantics. Can I still call this a ‘Charity Page’? The Help Yogyakarta page has a mission for helping others, but it would only be a portal, not a charity by itself.
Do I want to design the site so that it is pointed out that you can build portals, or will that clutter the interface and the mental model people will need to build? It could be a layer for ‘expert users’ to discover. I could give people the option to set up a personal-, a charity- and a portal page. But I don’t want to pre-organize too much. If people find new ways to help others, I’d like Helpalot to be flexible enough to cope with that.
Network mechanisms
To explain further, I’m going to talk networks. Here’s the link to my earlier article on networks and emergence: Emergent quality
Network = Nodes and connections. A node being ‘that what is being connected to other nodes’. A node could be (just about) everything.
Social network = The way I use the word; total of people in the world and the way they are connected by communication. Seen from a ‘top down’ perspective on the total.
Helpalot should provide the easy making of nodes (nodes being the pages) and connections (links to other pages) and leave the content as much as possible to the people (the nodes in our social network).
There needs to be some guidance in what a page should be and what connections are possible, but in my belief, all that is more than absolutely necessary will limit the flexibility.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying it, but as long as there is the possibility for positive and negative feedback among the nodes, quality content should emerge. In this network the nodes are the pages, but they are connected to real people. So the online network is connected to our social network and the relations built online can be used offline and visa versa. The implications of this connection between the online and offline social network will be the subject of my Thesis (Thesis outline).
Node = From now on, when writing of nodes, I mean this connected node of a Helpalot page and the person responsible for it.
From the perspective of the single node there is the need to provide and receive content. My survey and interviews give me good indications that this assumption is true. If these nodes provide and receive content and are able and willing to give feedback to the other nodes, then the basic elements for the emergence of quality content are available.
Positive and negative feedback
A positive feedback is simply a connection from one page to another. It shows that this person/charity is supporting that person/charity. The number of connections will have an effect on the findability and therefor the possible connectivity of nodes. If there is quality content, there is a loop; more connections will lead to more visitors, leading to more connections. There needs to be a point ‘zero’ where a page still has no connections, so how can it ever get into this loop? For this the relations of the offline social network is important. A person/charity already as a lot of connections in the real world. So there is no point ‘zero’.
If you take the number of connections as the only indication of quality content, then the large charities still outshout the small ones. The goal was to be able to find the charity you like and can trust, no matter the size. Offline social connections are crucial for this. you can search/following your trusted connections to find smaller charities you can trust.
Another feedback mechanism is simply asking for feedback. The evaluations people can write. Our social society has a lot of rules and mechanisms to find out if someone is providing quality content. The main thing is, that we tend to trust the judgement of people we trust. So this flow of trust works as a feedback mechanism by itself. If every node that’s connected to you would be your local social context you can trust. Helpalot will provide for searching that takes this flow of trust into account.
Trust
Combined with this critical mass problem that is inherent to emergence, every node will only send and receive feedback if it beliefs that it’s useful to do so. Therefor I need to build trust. When Helpalot has not enough pages to provide for the critical mass that’s needed to provide quality content, the only reason people would be active is because they will believe that it will be useful in the future. And as there are no results of the usefulness in the beginning, they’ll just have to trust the system. And because I am solely responsible for the system, they’ll need to trust me.
Hence the existence of makingthesite.com and the reason I’m setting this article online. I want you trust me and the Helpalot system, because I need you. When I have a test version online, I hope you’ll be able to find the time to test it with me. A working example is the best way to prove something is trustworthy, so I need to test early, but only if the system is set up correctly.
I have quickly set up a test at helpalottesting.ning.com. This pre-test version only handles the evaluations, there is little social networking involved. this isn’t working so far. I’ve put in six entries a couple of days a ago, and it still is stuck at six (you can make this work anyway, by placing a lot of evalutions 
). I think this pre-test isn’t working because visitors don’t believe that it will be usefull to participate. It leads to the chicken and egg problem; I need visitors to provide content, and I need content to get visitors.
I think the real Helpalot concept deals with this problem in number of ways that the pre-test version can’t. One of the key elements (apart from that Helpalot has more roots in social networking), is that I’ll personally invest a lot more time in putting in content myself and I’ll ‘force’ my friends to help me out. If I’ll make pages for all the charities that are on www.goededoel.nl for example, there is a starting point. Remember, on Helpalot everyone can start a charity page, it is not needed for you to be the actual charity owner. This leads to the posibility of rapid growth.
You’ll probably have some questions about the downside of this; there will be a lot of duplicate sites and people might make fake pages. The short answer is that you can pass a charity page over to a new owner and on the other hand the feedback mechanisms will take care of this problem. I think this article is long enough, and I might get back on this subject in a new article.
Back to semantics
So to get back to the word charity. Personally I think charity is still the right word to use, because that’s the word people know and search for. Once people use Helpalot it should provide them with the right nodes, connections and feedback mechanisms to make the site work. The working of the nodes should be kept simple, because people need to be able to understand what’s going on so they can trust the system. So for the test version I will not deal with the portal problem, because the test should prove the workings of the basic system mechanics. A personal page and a charity page will be enough I believe.
I wanted to explain the problem of the word ‘charity’, I ended up writing about my thesis subject to explain the mechanisms of how Helpalot works. It’s complex but not difficult to understand, because we are all humans with social lives and by instinct we know how things like trust works.
I’m slowly losing the ‘flow of writing’ so I’ll stop not really knowing if I made myself clear. Maybe I wanted to explain too much in this article and I ended up with too little clarity or maybe I left out some crucial details.
Feedback would be really welcome, because it will help me write my thesis better, explain Helpalot better or (if I’m making some flawed assumptions or mistakes) make Helpalot work better.