Making the site

A nice article to read: Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, By Jaron Lanier..

Some quotes:

“The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.”

“But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania. The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.”

“The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.”

I tend to agree with most points Jaron is making. I disagree with this piece:

“Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual, and in important cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it’s possible to map out where the one is smarter than the many.”

Personally I think there is always more knowledge available in a group than in an individual, it’s the process of processing this knowledge (aggregate) that can lead to more, or less useful information. The one is not smarter than the many, but for some problems you’ll need one person to make coherent choices. This person could aggregate the knowledge of the larger group. As I try to do for building Helpalot.

As for Helpalot itself; the goal for Helpalot is to tap into the great pool of knowledge we collectively have in our social system. I think using the social network as a basis is the best way, because it keeps people in the spotlight. Making it clear we are dealing with subjective matters. Context is king and I believe that’s the point Joran is making when he has doubts with internet collectivism.

I’ve read this book:

Hidden order

In this book a model is worked out on how to simulate complex adaptive systems. I kind of see how Pythagoras and his friends got so excited of mathematics, you can make really neat clean algorithms. I wouldn’t go so far as stating that real life can be described using math, but with models like John Holland describes in his book you can mimic processes that are otherwise really hard to comprehend. You have to be a little bit of a network/genes/math-nerd to enjoy this one.

The wisdom of crowds

At the moment I’m reading The wisdom of crowds by James Surowiecki. I’m at page 80 out of 274, and so far it seems extremely relevant for my project and thesis. It’s also easier to read than Hidden order. I’d say it’s also a good read for the not-so-nerds with nice examples and with little expected forehand knowledge.

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

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If one ant goes out to get some food for the colony, how does he know there is a need? Did he just count all food available, all the ants in the colony, did some math and then figured it was time to go get some more food?

There is no need for that. Extremely simplified; if the ant doesn’t see an ant carrying food for a long time, he figures he might as well start carrying some. The ant takes local actions based on it’s local situation. A set of simple rules applied by many ‘individuals’ on a local scale, can make for complex behaviour on a global scale. This process is called emergence.

Stay with me here, I’ll get to the charity part in a second..

For emergence to come about you only need to have a few conditions:

more- The group needs to be larger then a critical size. (Two ants can’t run a colony)

- Individual elements need to be able to receive and accept positive and negative feedback (Are other ants carrying food or not?).

- Positive feedback leading to more activity (getting food)

and negative feedback leading to less activity (not getting food).

These are the basic rules for emergence. In the book Emergence, Steven Johnson explains how emergence works in detail. If want to know more about the theory, you need to go and get the book or at least check this online interview at oreillynet.com. Here is a small piece of the interview, where Johnson explains emergence in his own words.

“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts — often there are thousands or millions of them — and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.

The book spends a lot of time with the ants as a great example of this. Colonies having this miraculous ability to pull off complex engineering feats or resource management feats without an actual leadership dictating what any ants should be doing at any time. They just follow a lot of local rules, and through those rules the intelligence of the colony comes into being.”

So how can we use this knowledge in making a better charity website?

What we like to see emerging is high level of quality. This means lots of individuals acting on the quality of local situations, creating an overall global quality assessment.

If users are being influenced by what they experience as a positive or negative signal, they should be able to send out the corresponding feedback.

This means letting go of central power. It’s not in our nature to let go of control and expect things to improve ‘by themselves’. Thankfully we have this great example of Wikipedia, so we already know the theory can be brought to practice. Who’s in charge of the Wikipedia quality? The community is, and all users of the site can be a part of the community.

As always it’s important to keep focus, so let’s get back to our main goal; facilitating people to change the world for the better. To make this happen I’ve defined a more specific goal; It should be possible for anyone to easily find a charity that corresponds to their intentions and that they are willing to trust. Therefor people can be most effective in realising their own goals of changing the world for the better.

This means that every charity in the world should be available online and that a system must be set in place to make it easy for people to judge if they can trust these charities. This means quality assessments for every charity in the world. This can only be done by the rules of emergence. So those are the rules I’ll use in designing the charity website.

Digg is a nice example of a decentralized website. It brings mostly tech related news. Anyone can post a news item and there is no central review, it’s the community as a group that bring the most interesting news items on top of the page. This simple idea made Digg quickly one of the biggest tech sites in the world.