Cult of the Crowd

Weekly Rundown 5/22

While researching for Cult of the Crowd I often come across thoughtful musings by other writers on the subject of social currency.  Each week I’ll post a handful of those articles here for my readers. 

Social Roadmaps has an article up entitled “The New Social Economy & Currency of Trust”.

While the importance of trust between a business and its consumers is not a new concept, its importance has certainly escalated with the rapidly accelerating adoption of social communications.

This shift from traditional to social communications has allowed online communities to become the “customer advocate”; essentially cutting through any “smoke ‘n mirrors” marketing or PR campaign that businesses used to deploy to present their brand’s trustworthiness

Can crowd-sourcing keep us safe from phishing attacks? “Facebook Partners with Web of Trust to Protect Users From Malicious Outbound Links”

Web of Trust, a crowd-sourced website reputation rating service, has partnered with Facebook to protect user from clicking malicious outbound links on the social network. When users click a link to a site with a poor reputation rating, Facebook will show a warning message.

Not quite related to crowd-sourcing but this article from Wired explores the subject of entropy which I’ll cover in COTC. “Entropy Is Universal Rule of Language”

The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren’t related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech.

“It doesn’t matter what language or style you take,” said systems biologist Marcelo Montemurro of England’s University of Manchester, lead author of a study May 13 in PLoS ONE. “In languages as diverse as Chinese, English and Sumerian, a measure of the linguistic order, in the way words are arranged, is something that seems to be a universal of languages.”

If words in text, regardless of language carry the same amount of entropy, is it possible this rule of entropy also applies to crowds?

One on my recent talk in Cape Town at NetProphet11. “Monetizing crowdsourcing platforms through collaboration”

Speaking at the NetProphet conference in Cape Town, SwiftRiver’s Director of Products Jon Gosier compares this new value-based economy to bartering marketplaces in India or Africa. The relationships between the barterers in these places determine whether they’ll interact and do business with each other to create the market in the first place.

Analysing this economy and its associated value in an online context is the core function of SwiftRiver, a data-mining platform that is part of disaster crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi. SwiftRiver aims to help companies make the data mining process more efficient by adding context to that data: who is exchanging it, why they’re interacting, what the context of that exchange is, and which individuals within the crowd companies should listen to.

Currency

In one of the busiest markets in Chennai, India, people come to buy everything from saris, to gold, housewares and furniture.  It’s a typical market as found in most places around the world. In fact, if we were to go back several hundred years, we’d find that almost all of the world’s commerce occurred in places like this.  Chaotic, busy, cramped, loud. A sea of people and the unseen connections between them. Trade at work.

What’s interesting about this scene, and in other places like it, are all the things going on that we don’t see. The person on the street who’s pick-pocketing discreetly; the people who once knew each other but who no longer speak on friendly terms; the merchant who purchases his goods from this market and then quietly crosses over to the next city to resell the same goods at slightly marked up prices.  

I was having a conversation a few weeks ago with a friend, a journalist from the New York Times who recalled a similar scene from when he was a boy in India staring out at all the masses, wondering what the connections were. We know they’re there, but these connections are difficult to see.

So as we talked about this, the conversation shifted to discussing the mechanics of all relationships, in particular collaboration and crowdsourcing where people work together to accomplish an assigned task. In essence, what makes crowd-sourcing work? Why do people do it? What are the unseen connections between the sea of individuals who do?

For some models of crowdsourcing, those that are driven by monetary reward, it’s relatively easy to figure out.  People perform a task, they get paid in return.  This scales up and it scales down. For individual micro-tasking or if you’re paying a monthly salary.  The incentive in both cases is monetary.

But what about in cases where the incentive isn’t so easily quantifiable?  I work for an organization called Ushahidi.  We make open source software that’s used for disaster response, community activism projects, election monitoring, and citizen journalism among other things.  These tools are used for data collection, curation and visualization but more importantly, they’re used to facilitate asynchronous, distributed, multi-faceted collaboration.

These tools enable people to share ideas, thoughts, messages, feelings, fears, concerns, images, videos, in real-time through time and space.  Tools like this, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (not so much MySpace), allow for this to occur, but we still haven’t answered the question of ‘why and how’ this all works.  

Why do people go beyond simply socializing to performing extremely draining tasks for free — things that they might not even get involved with in the real word? Why do people thousands of miles away spend hours or days volunteering their time to map and process data for people in distress that they’ll likely never meet or speak to, or even be rewarded for? 

To discuss that, we first need to look at two concepts.

1. Currency - a mechanism for exchanging value
2. Concurrency - simultaneous, interconnected action 

When we talk about currency, we’re talking about transactions.  Someone does one thing, and in return they get another.  Quid pro quo.  

When most people think of currency they think of what? Money. You give a restaurant money in exchange for food. Or a taxi driver money in exchange for a ride.  But what a lot of people forget is that money is just an abstraction.  It’s not real. We all put our faith into physical objects that represent a societies ability to offer that exact value back to us at a later time.

It goes back to villages and barter economies where a person might exchange a day of labor on a farm for a warm meal and a place to sleep.  Money came about to represent that trust; when a person was no longer in the locality where they generated the original value.  Put this coin in your pocket and take it with you, it represents a days worth of labor.  That person might get to where they’re going and realize that a days worth of time on one farm is actually worth two days of time on another.  

So now the laborer has done something incredible, he’s retained value by moving from one space into the next. He can now leverage the value he created here and spend it here. Again, quid pro quo.

So coming back to the idea of collaboration. In all relationships, something is exchanged.  Nothing is done without receiving something in return and thus all relationships can be thought of as transactional. If I think you’re smart, I might hang out with you because it makes me smarter (or feel smarter).  If I think you’re attractive, I might hang out with you because it makes me look better. Therefor, friendships, conversations, any social interaction…these are all mechanisms for exchange and thus they represent a form of currency.

The internet presents us with the remarkable opportunity to do what my friend and I couldn’t do while looking at that marketplace in Chennai. It allows us to reveal aspects of those relationships and subsequently some of what’s being transacted in collaborations.  We can now quantify some aspects of social interaction.

So let’s look at the typical Ushahidi deployment and the contributions made by volunteers who aren’t directly affected by the event:

1. A disaster happens in Country X.  It’s awful, I empathize with the victims.
2. That empathy is something I want to act upon, it’s my way of expressing myself.
3. I have knowledge to share about programming so I decide that’s going to be my contribution.
4. If volunteer my time early enough, I might make a small mark on the way the entire volunteer operation operates.
5. My friends who also empathize with the victims might respect the fact that I took action to help them. In fact, they might even respect me more than they did before. 

If my social groups place value in the level of respect others have for one another (as most do) then I’ve done what that farmhand just did in the previous example…I’ve created value in one place that I can then spend or use in another. 

Group collaboration creates a marketplace where things are exchanged and value is created. Online collaboration is chaotic, busy, cramped, loud. It’s a marketplace. 

Trade at work.

So, we’ve looked at currency, and we’ve looked at the ways in which social currency enables collaboration.  But collaboration is more than just the exchange of ideas and intent.  It’s also where actions occur. These interdependent actions are concurrent to each other — meaning they occur simultaneously, because of, and in spite of each other.  

Think of a soccer field. All the players are moving, but collectively they have one primary goal - win the game.  To achieve that goal they have to perform smaller tasks often deviating from careful planning to act spontaneously for the sake of the team.

They work together and individually, in unison and in dissonance, quickly and slowly. This is what collaboration looks like to them.  This is what it looks like to us:

In conclusion, crowds are motivated to work because of social currency, intangible assets that offer value for others. But the mechanics of the crowd work because of this concurrency and collective intelligence. Working together to achieve a big thing, allows individual contributions to matter more.

In this increasingly connected world, the value of monetary currency is diminished where the currencies of social exchange and collaboration matter more.  Individuals can self-organize for the greater purpose of achieving a collective task.  They can do this autonomously, in real-time, in more agile ways than governments and institutions can keep up. This is not the sole achievement of a specific company, tool or platform.  It’s an evolution of society and technology. In many ways, a return to an older way of doing things in smaller communities, replicated at macro-scale. 

People who may have less in one currency, actually have more to trade in exchange economies because they have more to give than they have to take. I feel this fundamentally represents the future of collaboration and this is where the opportunity lies for radical new business models.

Watch the Video - http://cultofthecrowd.com/post/5386417543/cult-of-the-crowd-chapter-1-currency