Category: Networks and Systems


Obama Crowdsources Election Campaign Funding

June 19th, 2008 — 12:00am

The NYTimes reports today in Obama Opts Out of Pub­lic Financ­ing for Cam­paign that Sen­a­tor Obama ”…raised $95 mil­lion in Feb­ru­ary and March alone, most of it, as his aides noted Thurs­day, in small con­tri­bu­tions raised on the Inter­net. More than 90 per­cent of the campaign’s con­tri­bu­tions were for $100 or less, said Robert Gibbs, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor to Mr. Obama.“

Obama’s suc­cess rais­ing money with small dona­tions is a clear indi­ca­tor that crowd­sourc­ing is a viable approach to financ­ing what is prob­a­bly the most expen­sive and demand­ing type of elec­toral con­test ever seen — a U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign.

The old ways aren’t going away just yet — wit­ness McCain’s more con­ven­tional reliance on a mixed palette of pub­lic finance and unlim­ited dona­tions to the RNC — but suc­cess­ful crowd­sourc­ing of an elec­tion effort of this scale and dura­tion proves other mod­els — net­worked, dis­trib­uted / decen­tral­ized, bottom-up, etc. — can be effec­tive in the most chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tions.

“Instead of forc­ing us to rely on mil­lions from Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ists and spe­cial inter­est PACs, you’ve fueled this cam­paign with dona­tions of $5, $10, $20, what­ever you can afford,” he told his sup­port­ers in the video mes­sage. “And because you did, we’ve built a grass­roots move­ment of over 1.5 mil­lion Amer­i­cans.“

And that’s a good thing. The rel­a­tive elec­toral stale­mate we’ve had in the U.S. for the last decade echoes the trench war­fare phase of World War One; grind­ing bat­tles of attri­tion between nom­i­nally dis­tinct com­bat­ants that con­sume much, accom­plish lit­tle, and yield no sub­stan­tive change for the peo­ple involved.

The next step is to apply this net­worked / crowd­sourced / dis­trib­uted financ­ing model to sup­port a cam­paign by some­one out­side the (dis­tress­ingly) com­pla­cent major par­ties. We’ve man­aged to change the feed­ing mech­a­nism, now we have to change the ani­mal it feeds.

Comment » | Networks and Systems

New Organizational Architecture & UX Group on Slideshare

April 8th, 2008 — 12:00am

I’ve just started a new ‘Organizational Architecture‘ group on Slideshare, to explore links to user experience, and questions like these:

  • What is organizational architecture?
  • How does organizational architecture relate to user experience?
  • What can user experience practitioners borrow from OA to become more effective?

Join now!

Comment » | Information Architecture, Networks and Systems, User Experience (UX)

Video of My BlogTalk Presentation

March 11th, 2008 — 12:00am

Video of my BlogTalk presentation ‘What happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas’ is available from Ustream.tv. The resolution is low (it was shot with a webcam) but the audio is good: follow along with the slides on your own for the full experience.

More videos of BlogTalk sessions here.

 

 

Comment » | Ethics & Design, Networks and Systems, Social Media, User Experience (UX)

IA Summit Talks on Ethics, Experience Design, Social Networks

March 4th, 2008 — 12:00am

Thanks to Facebook’s public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year’s Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design – experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you’re interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn’t?), both sessions look good. I’ll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

Comment » | Ethics & Design, Ideas, Information Architecture, Networks and Systems, Social Media

Blogtalk 2008 slides available

March 3rd, 2008 — 12:00am

My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are available online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to follow along at your own pace…

FYI: This version of the deck includes presenters notes – I’ll upload a (larger!) view-only version once I’m back from holiday in lovely Eire.

When Everyone Is A Designer: Practical Techniques for Ethical Design in the DIY Future from Joe Lamantia

Comment » | Ideas, Networks and Systems, User Experience (UX)

The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is A Designer?

November 19th, 2007 — 12:00am

I’m post­ing the abstract for my clos­ing talk at the Ital­ian IA Sum­mit, as well as the slides, below.

Hope you enjoy!

Abstract:

Broad cul­tural, tech­no­log­i­cal, and eco­nomic shifts are rapidly eras­ing the dis­tinc­tions between those who cre­ate and those who use, con­sume, or par­tic­i­pate. This is true in dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences and infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments of all types, as well as in the phys­i­cal and con­cep­tual realms. In all of these con­texts, sub­stan­tial exper­tise, costly tools, spe­cial­ized mate­ri­als, and large-scale chan­nels for dis­tri­b­u­tion are no longer required to exe­cute design.

The ero­sion of tra­di­tional bar­ri­ers to cre­ation marks the onset of the DIY Future, when every­one is a poten­tial designer (or archi­tect, or engi­neer, or author) of inte­grated expe­ri­ences — the hybrid con­structs that com­bine prod­ucts, ser­vices, con­cepts, net­works, and infor­ma­tion in sup­port of evolv­ing func­tional and emo­tional pur­suits.

The cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal shifts that com­prise the oncom­ing DIY Future promise sub­stan­tial changes to the envi­ron­ments and audi­ences that design pro­fes­sion­als cre­ate for, as well as the role of design­ers, and the ways that pro­fes­sion­als and ama­teurs alike will design. One inevitable aspect con­se­quence will be greater com­plex­ity for all involved in the design of inte­grated expe­ri­ences.

The poten­tial rise of new eco­nomic and pro­duc­tion mod­els is another.

The time is right to begin explor­ing aspects of the DIY Future, espe­cially its pro­found impli­ca­tions for infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and user expe­ri­ence design. Using the designer’s pow­er­ful fusion of ana­lyt­i­cal per­spec­tive and cre­ative vision, we can bal­ance spec­u­la­tive futur­ism with an under­stand­ing of con­crete prob­lems — such as grow­ing eth­i­cal chal­lenges and how to resolve them — from the present day.

Here’s the slides, avail­able from SlideShare:

The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is a Designer from Joe Lamantia

Comment » | Everyware, Networks and Systems, User Experience (UX)

The Value of the Network: Links As Social Capital

August 30th, 2007 — 12:00am

This is a small site with modest traffic. But it is still the case that a substantial set of inbound links lead people from diverse origins – search engines, blogs, content aggregators, feed readers, directories, etc. – to many destinations within the site every day. Some of these connections are visible in the del.icio.us tag clouds that appear with individual postings, my contribution to the Web’s ongoing collective experiment with tagging and social bookmarking.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named this set of connections and the social relationships associated with them in the early 1970s, coining the term social capital, and thereby inspiring legions of civic and international organizations to create development, investment, and management strategies for this new valuable kind of resource.

But what is the value of the network?

Fast forward a bit, and we can see that no matter how you choose to calculate that value, Google has built a business relying the new resource of cumulative social capital, using it via mechanisms such as latent semantic indexing.

And we can see that in giving form and focus to the idea of social capital, Bourdieu set the conceptual stage for the recent explosion of social media and networking applications. Simultaneously destinations – albeit of unknown lifespan – and business ventures, the social networks are recent exemplars of longtime cultural movements of reification, virtualization, and visualization of fields – another key concept identified by Bourdieu.

Behind the scenes, the information architecture that solidifies the limited social capital of this site in physical / digital form is a motley collection of disparately named HTML files, tag destination pages, cgi-powered content streams, RSS feeds, local search results sets, etc. The prospect of getting another publishing platform to mimic this miscellany was – like tuning an instrument to play songs composed with notes from another music system – not something I could do as quickly and cheaply.

And so in combination with the perpetual urgency of the DIY mindset, the imperative of preserving the value of the existing store of social capital made the decision to upgrade along an existing path to MT4 simple.

Architecturally, this is the equivalent of sticking with the brand name you know well.

Comment » | Networks and Systems

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