Category: Live Blogging

When I go to a conference, I usually take notes. Here they are.

Lift11: Hasan Elahi, Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

As an artist, sometimes you just get opportunities thrown on you and you have to take them.

Airport in Detroit, June 19th 2002, flying back from an exhibition in Africa. Hands his passport to the immigration guard who turns white, doesn’t say a word, leads him through a maze to a detention service. He tries to start talking to the guards, they’re just as confused as he is. Lots of other people from all over the world, fear. He’s frazzled, just got off from long flight, hasn’t bathed… Man in a dark suit walks up to him and says “I expected you to be older”.

Hasan says “do you mind explaining what’s happening?” — is answered: “you have some explaining to do yourself”. Is taken to a kind of cell and questioned. Where were you? Gives answers, but doesn’t understand what’s going on. When he says he was in Dakar for an art exhibition, he (who has a hard enough time explaining this to other artists) “I’m a sculptor”. Who funds your travel? Etc.

Out of the blue: where were you on September 12th? On September 26th? He pulls out his palm and looks at his calendar — they went through roughly 6 months of his calendar.

Turns out they’d received a report of an Arab man fleeing on September 12th with explosives — never mind he wasn’t Arab, was giving classes on September 12th, and wasn’t carrying explosives.

The guy ended up believing him and let him go home.

Shortly after he got home, phone call: “we’d like to follow up with you about your interview in Detroit”. Note the vocabulary. Spent the next six months going back and forth to the FBI building in Tampa where he lived. After 9 consecutive lie detector tests, it finally ended (you can’t use lie detectors in court, but it’s OK for national security! irony). “Do you belong to any groups who want to harm the US?” — I work for a university.

At the end, he asks for a letter saying that everything is OK. But in order to be formally cleared, he would have needed to be formally charged, which was never the case. His concern: he travels a lot, and doesn’t want to go through this again because somebody didn’t get the memo. So they gave him some phone numbers — if you’re in trouble, call.

So he ended up voluntarily calling them up each time he traveled to give the info on flights, destinations, etc. Phone calls turned into e-mails, lengthy e-mails, e-mails with pictures, web pages made for the FBI to tell them what he was doing, highlights, here’s what you should see here… and in return “be safe!”. Unbalanced relationship.

During the investigation, he told them everything. Rather than saying “this isn’t legal, I’m walking away”, he told them everything. When face-to-face with somebody who can just take you to Guantanamo without giving you an explanation… you don’t act rationally. He completely cooperated. They knew everything about him.

Massive system though, can’t possibly operate at 100% efficiency. There could be cracks in the data. So he decided to make everything public, to make sure we knew all the FBI knew.

So he wrote a little bit of tracking code. Approached telco companies saying he wanted to build a device that tells people where he is, what he’s doing, and every little detail of his life. “Are you crazy?!” — but now we’re all doing it with Facebook and Twitter, huh.

He decided to tell the FBI everything.

Hmm, record of his flights, but are they thorough enough? Back to birth (though some flight numbers are missing). Photos linked to those flights: airport, airline food… his alibi!

They should also know what he’s eating, so he photographs it all. *steph-note: this guy is good! and funny! and I like what he’s doing!*

He gives everything, but they must still do some of the work of putting the data together 😉 (ie, food records don’t give the year)

All his financial records are public. His phone records. The toilets he uses. They need to know all that!!

Decided to take it to a point of such detailed level (or even absurdity) that it generates so much information about him that he actually leads a pretty private life. *steph-note: exactly my point about putting a lot about myself online, and why I’m not /that/ worried about privacy issues — might be wrong, but hey…*

Having a little information about yourself online is dangerous. Better to bury stuff, and be in control of your own identity *(steph-note: OK, here I want to link to Anil Dash’s post about controlling your identity that I never manage to find when I want to link to it)*.

It takes almost no time to track all this. No different than sending a tweet or a text. He takes out his phone, takes a photo, adds a comment, and sends it to his server. Clunky software though by today’s standards.

Takes very generic photos — but you recognize the space it’s taken in if you know it. Does not include other people who may not be as comfortable as he is in having their whole life online. Other aspect: it’s not about people, it’s just about “data” — “it could be me”.

Yes, the military and FBI do visit his website! (screenshot of logs shows impressive amount of .mil and .gov domains).

It’s not just about devices, it’s about what we do with it. We’re good at collecting information but we’re very bad at analyzing it, and putting it to use. Imagine if everybody in the US was doing this? Would have to rebuild the system from scratch, overflow.

*steph-note: I’m already at the point where I generate so much information I can’t deal with it myself.*

Lift11: Yuri Suzuki, Music for dyslexics [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Is a dygraphic designer.

Book with no words, but bar codes that you can scan and then it reads out to you.

Pencil with a microphone and a magnetic tip. You can record sounds and read them back with the pen.

Yuri used to play trombone but couldn’t read the score. Had to translate the scores into the numbers he needed to memorize to play.

Picture that you can play by moving a captor on top of it. Other idea: line with colours and then some kind of tiny car drives on it and plays the music corresponding to the colours. *steph-note: hard to explain, but available downstairs!*

Lift11: Simon Redfern, The Open Banking Project [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Is going to talk about corruption.

Weave some web 2.0 stuff into banking? Greece: lots of EU funded projects! Lots of corruption. 2 years later… Greece is in trouble. Link?

Distorts markets, undermines the law, breeds cynicism, etc…

Corruption and fraud is one of the reasons foreign aid failed in Africa. World Bank StAR initiative to try and recover stolen assets.

Add to that all the banking and finance scandals over the last ten years. Enron, BCCI, Lehman Brothers, Irish Bank, Vatican… Just google “banking scandal”.

Charities have their fair share of scandals. Fast car of the German charity boss. *(steph-note: one reason I admire small structures like the Ashraya Initiative for Children in Pune, who refuse to grow too much to keep things in control)*

Replace information deficit with more timely transparency. Empower the public rather than let them become distrustful.

Corruption and fraud would be easier to spot if we had “financial debug tools” (like Firebug).

Original idea: what about a bank where all accounts are open to see? (5 years ago).

Challenge the taboo of financial privacy.

And what about a bank which allows easy integration with third party tools and services?

That’s the open bank idea.

  • all accounts open to the public
  • members form a community
  • open source tools
  • transactions are transparent
  • community can make better deal suggestions
  • new business models can form

Financial privacy or disclosure doesn’t have to be on or off. We can add privacy and disclosure settings. [photo coming]

Aims to open transactional data to groups of large people and raise the bar of financial transparency, through open internet standards and transparency.

API: external developers come up with ideas the internal ones didn’t think of.

They are looking for more banks to join them.

Lift11: Philippe Gendret, Monetization of media [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Solve the monetization problem in 3 points.

Who is making money online with news? Not that many. The business model for news is advertising.

Second part: classifieds. Business model is the transaction.

Third: services. Easy to be profitable.

Readers are focused on strong established brands in Switzerland. But traffic is stagnant, and hard to draw new audiences. Stuck with office hours.

Problem: revenue is from advertising, not the value of the news per se. There aren’t enough home pages to provide space for the banners needed to attract enough money from advertising.

Consumption of other media is growing. Mobile, nomad devices. Last year was the year of the mobile, in terms of traffic and revenue (after 3 years of hard work). Two-thirds news, one-third services. Trend due not to quality of news, but more smartphone sales in Switzerland.

Mobile peak times are different from “normal web” peak times. It’s becoming a little hard to classify devices now (iPad: mobile or…?)

Now: tablets.

Survey: 200 answers to FR and DE speaking readers. 80% return within a day! Very interested in being part of the design of a new design. This was just around the launch of the iPad, and the tablet in question was prehistoric (IREX). Simple, cheap, easy to use, focus on reading.

People are ready to pay for quality content, rich media, easy navigation *(steph-note: I’d put that first — interface)*, quality device.

End of subscription model? Want to be free to choose what they want.

*steph-note: interesting, a lot of this seems to be going against what I thought were the trends now*

E-paper: not attractive *steph-note: could have told you that, it was a horrendous user experience*

BILD is offering a variety of apps for their content, and not one is free. NZZ: pay for e-version and get an iPad.

Conclusion: work with iTunes store, and hope for a direct link to the customer.

Lift11: Brian Solis, Social currencies [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Here to talk about the sociology and the psychology of what is happening because of social media.

We each lead three lives in the real world: public, private and secret lives. But online, we’re all guilty of blurring the lines between the three: sharing, oversharing, and TMI.

What can the future do for you? No, what can you do for your future. It’s in your hands. Your reputation is already working for or against you online. What you don’t know about your reputation is what is hurting you.

In the US, schools check people out on Facebook, and debt collectors hunt them down there to expose them publicly.

Welcome to the Egosystem. What you say online contributes to your social capital (term borrowed from traditional economics). None of these services are really measuring your reputation or influence, your capacity to trigger cause and effect. They’re measuring a semblance of your social capital — a credit score for the social web.

Brian is concerned. Worried enough about his credit score in the real world! Now he has to worry about his credit score online? Businesses and media are taking these “ratings” at face value.

There is a hotel in Las Vegas who ask you for your Twitter handle or Klout score, and they give you special treatment if you have a lot of followers or a high score. They want to borrow your social capital. Maybe not bad, but misperceived in the value they add to the space.

So, pretend that is your real credit score. Brian is there to help you figure out how to make that number rise. *steph-note: where is the limit with gaming the system?*

We are measured by what we say and the company we keep. Guilt by association. Even scarier: big banks are already using social media to assess credit risk. Who is connected to somebody on Facebook they do not know?

What works against you also works for you. Be mindful of what you’re sharing and how it contributes to your score. The fact is that businesses are starting to use these numbers to treat people differently.

Says Brian: on Quora, you’re encouraged to boost the number of followers and upvotes, which boosts your social capital. *steph-note: is that really how simply it works? I would have hoped it would be more subtle — use the maths that allows to factor out popularity…*

Social capital is measured by the amount of trust and reciprocity in a community.

What do you expect to get in return for what you share online?

Your stature within a community is based on your investment in it. Measures:

  • Trust
  • Relationships
  • Reciprocity
  • Authority
  • Popularity
  • Recognition

Brian shares less, but always being mindful of what it contributes. Various accounts to experiment.

The hotel in Las Vegas is not the only one to reward “influencers”. We’re being rewarded for stuff we’re not even cogniscent that we’re doing.

Problem: we’re being measured in every network differently. Take Twitter: 140 characters, missing context, and you’re going to measure me on a tweet and whether it’s going to be retweeted? The currency of social media is action: how can I trigger action with my tweet?

*steph-note: action is not the only valuable thing in the world — or is it? are ideas without action worth anything? could one argue an idea is an idea in potentiality?*

There is value in sharing experiences together, for example on Twitter. But is it measurable?

Influence vs. social capital. Plot Reach vs. Relevant. Difference between trust, authority, reputation, influence, social capital, etc… How to use these social tools to our advantage?

Giving back is the new black. American Express open forum. Toms shoes.

Not just boosting your score, but benefiting your social graph.

The Twitter box is your opportunity to invest in your value, your social capital.

Key message: it’s in your hands.

Privacy as we knew it is gone.

Lift11: Michel Jaccard, Governances of multi-author and open source collaboration projects (best practices and legal tips) [en]

Lift11 Workshop notes. I do my best but all this is filtered through my sometimes imperfect brain.

Practical and legal issues. First, defining the scope.

Common question faced in their practice: what do I do with my employees who are spending paid time on Facebook? Can I run commerce online?

What are we talking about? Open collaborative projects. Two types:

  • OSS (software)
  • R&D and knowledge-sharing projects (Wikipedia, standard-setting bodies, consortiums, WTO, etc)

We’re going to focus on Software projects.

Basic question: is there a necessity to think differently in the online world compared to the offline world? Most of the time, in regulation, it’s not needed. Most legal rules can be applied, with some subtleties.

What makes open collaborative projects different from more traditional creative work efforts? IP laws have been designed around the idea of a single creative mind (Shakespeare and Mozart), but today, most projects result from a collective effort. Mismatch.

Issues — practical and legal.

Practical: massive number of participants, continuous updates for long-term projects, hard to keep track of all contributors (case of company unable to contract with a US company because they’d outsourced part of their work to an ill-defined community and it had become impossible to get back to the various participants), lack of control in cross-border projects, funding/sale of project (who does it?), enforcement of rights.

Legal: international => different legal regimes, no unified set of rules applicable to the project, numerous legal fields (IP, contract, corporate)

Multi-author (=> joint work, article 6 Swiss Copyright Act or “joint works” pursuant to section 101 of the US Copyright Act) — does each author detail a copyright on the joint work? Which law is applicable? you can’t claim ownership of part of the work. Default system in copyright law is unanimous agreement of all co-authors for what you’re going to do with the work… tricky. (This means it’s a little dangerous to launch into a collaborative project without some kind of agreement.)

Private international law: which is applicable, which jurisdiction, special local protection rules, privacy issues?

Contract law: who is party, is there a contract law relationship? Who is accountable of what towards whom?

When it comes to businesses you can put pretty much what you want in an agreement, not so with individuals.

Is having a “lead person” sufficient an agreement to interface with other parties?

Not securing the IP aspects of a software project can negatively impact the valuation of the company. Have agreements in place before anybody starts writing a single line of code…

IFOSS Law Review — took them 2 months to figure out a name, and 3 months to get funded, and the editorial board is a bunch of experts on the topic — couldn’t open a bank account! They ended up being funded by the Mozilla Foundation.

Needs: centralization of rights on the project to overcome some legal issues, minimum quality standards, governance on the general project.

What can be done?

Do everything beforehand. Governance. Make an agreement, but do you have the authority to do so? Everything need not be negotiated — acceptable rules for contributors, can be 3-4 pages. Just to say that the rules governing the community will be those the community comes up with.

*steph-note: sorry, going a bit fast and the topic is “out of my jurisdiction”, having trouble following*

3 types of governance rules (access, …, …)

  • access (no legal access regime by default)
  • assign IP to the community (= sale) — vs. license, which is very difference

Under Swiss Law, ToS that are 34 pages long are not enforceable, even if you make people click “I read and agree”. Will not stand in court. It needs to be concise. Good faith: if I don’t understand, I am not bound. It’s up to the person making you agree to make sure you understand what you are agreeing with. Swiss market is a bit difficult for online purchasing — often the terms are just in German! *steph-note: this sounds too good to be true, not 100% I understood this completely correctly*

Important to set up governance that will allow an exit.

WIPO. Approved “Open collaboration projects and ip-based models” project in nov 2010. Will analyze and compile existing models of Open Collaboration projects.

In 90% of situations Creative Commons works, but what’s missing is something similar to CC but which includes governance.

Badmouthing (with authorization): Business Model Generation, co-created with 470 ppl, but copyright Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, and designed by a third guy. Trick question: who owns the IP? On the online platform, it says copyright Alexander. Now that they’re starting to be famous with the book, they’re pretty suable. It’s a total mess in terms of ownership. Would be problematic for derivative works where you need consent of all authors. But actually they even made people pay to be co-creators, and told them they’d get credit and receive a free copy. Nothing however about IP…

Wikipedia: another nightmare. user-generated and user-controlled. 5 pillars, but any user can modify the policies. Foundation reserves certain legal rights. They realized that the consensus stuff didn’t work and had to put in place committees etc. — would have been less trouble if they’d put it in place at the very start. *(steph-note: @anthere disagrees — might also be me not understanding well what was said, so take with a big grain of salt)*

Other example: Mozilla project. Governed as a “meritocracy”. Policies. 3 aspects: definition of roles and responsibilities, transparency, reciprocity.

Lift11: Memi Beltrame, Artypedia — The free view on Art that anyone can edit [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Pet project about art which is an art project in itself. What makes art art?

Sooner or later, it becomes very clear what art is:

  • it is really hard to explain
  • it is really hard to understand
  • it is something everybody has an opinion on

Let’s challenge our opinions and views about art, in a fun and open way.

Artypedia. Copy articles from wikipedia. The main term of the article is replaced by “art”. Nice! *steph-note: excellent! love the definitions!*

Lift11: Azeem Azhar, Online communities and reputation management [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Reputation and its importance for communities. Azeem has known Chris for 11 years on a mailing-list, and this is the first time they’ve met in person.

The reputation graph. Plays a very important role in helping markets function.

History: initially we all came from very small communities. There was no trust/reputation problem, we knew everybody. No issue. If you didn’t know somebody, chances are they were a threat. In that world, we could hold all the relevant and necessary information in our heads. (cf. Dunbar)

The world has changed for most of us. Hyperconnected world. Facilities to connect to almost anybody we want to.

The cost of connections and making connections has really drops. So we have lots of connexions to a lot of people that we don’t really know. Azeem has 130 friend requests on Facebook from people he doesn’t know.

We’re pushing past the barrier where maybe it’s not that useful to have so many connexions, because the trust element diminishes.

Stock market: lots of people who don’t know each other very well transacting with each other. How does that work well? (1) Regulation (highly regulated! penalties for people who break the rules). (2) Contractual: standards bodies saying what things must mean when you say them. (3) Reputation rating: looking at activity in a firm and coming out with a rating from AAA to BBB or below. This lets a participant look at a complex company and evaluate the risk of making a trade.

What happens when people stop believing in ratings? that’s what happened in 2007-8 in financial institutions. “JP Morgan, I don’t care what your rating is, I’m not lending you money” => liquidity dried up, huge crisis requiring government to step in. This gave us an experiment to see what happens in a market where reputation systems break down. Answer: it’s really really horrible.

Other context: chess world, rating players. Determines what kind of competition you can enter, and what you stand to win or lose in any given match.

Academia: ratings help you win grants or attract talent.

When I buy a coffee at Starbucks, I can’t trust the person at the counter because the person is a good person, but because of the trust and reputation that Starbucks has built over the years. But we’ve learnt that this kind of reputation is built around other objectives and can break down easily.

Trust ratings in the web, Google. PageRank *steph-note: breakdown there I’m suffering from right now with CTTS, pages being unindexed because my site was hacked a few months ago and pages were full of spam*

But now the web is about people connecting to each other, not just about pages. What we need is a PeopleRank, to make sense of the connexions between people. Cf. Quora. We can think about doing this because now we all live in public. Huge set of data to make sense of.

Foursquare: move towards rewarding people on platforms by giving them badges, but it rewards activities and hoop-jumping — artificial activity. Reinforces the business model of the platforms (use the site more and more and more) but doesn’t really tell you anything about how trustworthy people are or if they really know anything about art galleries because they have the art gallery badge.

eBay: nice but not portable. Very context-dependent.

Other approach: get your friends to recommend you (LinkedIn) — but friends can be bribed. Recommendations cluster around the time people leave their job.

Azeem thinks we’re moving towards a single currency. Portable, handles different contexts, and has value. It’s what happened in the corporate bond market.

Peerindex. *steph-note: mine is 40 seems very limited and skewed towards Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn — doesn’t take into account my blog where most of my reputation is built, and I for example neglect linkedin recommendations completely*

What are the bad applications of reputation? Health insurance discrimination.

We get a fantastic benefit from Facebook etc, but once the reputation stuff starts working, a lot will start happening in matter of transactions.

Bond ratings: a single number, but tries to predict one thing — how likely is the company to defect on its bond payments?

We’re starting to feel a move towards quality of contacts rather than just hoarding them. Path for example, which allows you only 50 friends.

Popularity does not equal trust. But there is maths that allows to factor popularity out.

Lift11: Chris Heathcote, The invisible communities [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Communities that aren’t Facebook!

History of the internet is a history of community.

Usenet, for example. Let people talk about stuff they were interested in with anybody in the world. Very well-designed.

Mailing-lists. Used in academia a lot to collaborate for the first time.

As usenet slowly died and turned into a place where you can download pirated movies, web forums took up. Vbulletin, phpBB & discuz. Huge part of the internet, way bigger than Tumblr etc. But nobody talks about them anymore.

On the web, but often invisible. Sometimes Google can’t see them, so they don’t exist to us.

Chris is seeing a lot more communities like this, for example community game-playing in Japan. 22 mio users (2 communities) — maybe the reason Facebook isn’t taking off in Japan. Pseudonyms and important life/persona separation, stark contrast with the over-sharing identified user that Facebook wants.

Korean messaging apps. Hugely popular, but the community is completely in-app.

Image-sharing: Instagram for example — you see the pics on the web, but all the rest is only in-app, and it feels private because it’s on your phone. Other example: Path.

All of these things are of the Internet, but not of the Web.

Unexpected communities: Grindr.

Gay dating application. No login, your physical phone is your identity. You just see the photos of the 100 nearest people. Works well, compare to Gaydar where you probably never get past the first screen because you’ve forgotten your password. Grindr is very limited!

A community despite its original intentions. People are using it just to chat. Designed to minimize the time between seeing the person on Grindr and actual physical meetup, but people just use it to chat. Excellent: map of gathered weight of people on Grindr one Saturday night per London tube station. Interesting: in Grindr profiles, lots of Ping! identities.

Even dating becomes a community.

Gaydar: started as a web dating site but is now much more. Has its own radio station. Website larger than Tesco’s in the UK!

How do you get people to come back? We’re lucky, people love talking about everything and anything. Go where the people are.

If you have people doing something, you might want to add community features so they can talk.

And in many cases, don’t use Facebook Connect or Twitter login, people don’t necessarily want to tie their identity to everything they do. Don’t connect identities.

Let people to talk both in private and in public.

Moderate with personality. Moderation is really key. Passionate and interested moderators that are real people and not Google Groups moderators.

Watch what’s happening. Not every site has sociologist going through their data.

“Get them to like each other” (Rushkoff) Don’t look to monetize. Look to foster connexions between people, and let them go about their business. *steph-note: hmm, this is kind of how I roll*

  • people like to talk
  • whatever you build will be used to communicate
  • more than one identity
  • public, semi-public and private conversations
  • watch what’s happening
  • let people like each other

4chan tries to rule the world by taking down whole countries, etc — they need somewhere to organize…

One of the cool things about usenet was that there was a master list of groups. That doesn’t exist anymore. Google Groups is a great chance to try and make sense of all this, but Google dropped the ball.

Could we imagine a Facebook competitor based on the fact you have a fake identity, asks Laurent? *steph-note: connexions are limited with a fake identity — if you connect to too many people who know you it breaks down*

Lift11: Tiffany St James, How to encourage involvement in online communities [en]

[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.

Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.

Community engagement benefits: connecting with like-minded individuals, p2p recommendations, resources, stimulation, engagement with people in their spaces…

Gardening community. Craigslist. Communities of practice. Communities of circumstance (people drawn together by events).

Types of online community:

  • led by individuals vs. organisations
  • conversation-oriented vs. content-oriented

[photo coming]

But there are also risks in online engagement. Also, the engagement has changed over the last five years. “UM Social media Wave 5”.

OK, we know all these things, so what?

Trust in communications has changed. More powerful than professional sources: good contact on social network (3rd most powerful recommendation source, just after family member and close friend), author of a blog you read regularly, main contacts on Twitter.

Smart mobs, democracy in action? People are using social media on a lobbying level. Use of #cnnfail hashtag to get more coverage on CNN about Iran.

Last year: BP and pollution.

The truth will out: gagging order on the Guardian about Trafigura.

What can we learn from wikileaks? Tiffany threw away her notes to follow Tapscott: we are going to be naked in this age of hyper-transparency. So we better be fit.

Using social media for good: microloans, green stuff, human rights.

Individuals can have enormous power (cf. Beth Kanter — she’s just one person!)

Turning online action into offline action. Big businesses are also using it for good: promoting local endeavours that they want to champion. Voting causes up and down.

Connecting like-minded individuals: nike

All very well, but what does this mean for me? Should I throw a party or join one? Create a community or join an existing one?

You need to first identify relevant communities. Search google with relevant keywords.

Criteria: number of posts and topics, their date, the member list, structure and management, contact details of moderator…

Never underestimate the ressources needed to simply host a community and manage it.

Set an objective:

  • listening?
  • stimulating a discussion?
  • looking for feedback on a particular issue?
  • co-producing something?

Rule of participation inequality: 90% of people in the community are lurkers, 9% intermittent contributors, 1% heavy contributors.

Need to change strangers into lurkers. Change lurkers into commentators. Turn the commentators into creators.

Another way of manifesting a community is to develop a partnership.

Continual optimisation: not that many metrics we can use, but there are some. Some KPIs (what are we trying to achieve that we can measure?)

There isn’t enough work on exit strategies for a community. Change of government: how do you stop maintaining some of the communities set in place? If no strategy, hurt and disgruntled participants. You can’t just shut things down. Be transparent about your exit strategy: what will happen when it’s over?

5 things to look out for:

  • myth: build it and they will come
  • don’t be too too strict
  • conflict: moderator/participants (not too much ego in moderators)
  • not too complex
  • don’t neglect the community and the moderator interaction


Code of conduct: credible, consistent, transparent, etc.

Are you ready for this?