archive.Joe Lamantia.com

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.

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:

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.

We’ll be upgrading to MT4 in the near future. Apologies for any technical difficulties that result.

Related posts:

I just read Dan Brown’s post­ing Web 2.0, refram­ing Web 1.0 on metaphors for the new Web.

I had three thoughts when I read this (nicely done) piece for the first time:

1. Web itself is or implies a metaphor — I’d start with this when con­sid­er­ing any of the poten­tial metaphors of Web 2.0
2. I think many metaphors will be nec­es­sary to give us some set of (barely) ade­quate lin­guis­tic tools for shar­ing our think­ing about some­thing as emer­gent, com­plex, and inter­con­nected with daily life as Web 2.0
3. How about: WEB AS ENVIRONMENT (“the cir­cum­stances, objects, or con­di­tions by which one is surrounded”)

“On average, a new record is added to the WorldCat database every 10 seconds. Watch it happen live…” Watch WorldCat grow
According to the About page:
“WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.”
Here’s what went into the system while I was typing this entry out:
———————
The following record was added to WorldCat on 08/10/2005 9:08 PM
Total holdings in WorldCat: 999,502,692
OCLC Number: 61245112
Title: Theological and cultural studies in honor of Simon John De Vries /
Publisher: T. & T. Clark International,
Publication Date: c2004.
Language: English
Format: Book
Contributed by: SAINT PATRICK’S SEMINARY LIBR
———–
Some impressive WorldCat statistics from the OCLC site:
Between July 2004 and June 2005:

• WorldCat grew by 4.6 million records
• Libraries used WorldCat to catalog and set holdings for 51.9 million items and arrange 9.4 million interlibrary loans
• Library staff and users conducted 34.7 million searches of WorldCat via FirstSearch for research and reference, and to locate materials

Also:

• WorldCat has 57,968,788 unique bibliographic records
• 53,548 participating libraries worldwide use and contribute to WorldCat
• Every 10 seconds an OCLC member library adds a record to WorldCat
• Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat
• Every second a library user searches WorldCat using FirstSearch

For us information types, it beats the hell out of the old population clocks that the U.S. Census Bureau still runs for the US and the world.
BTW, for the curious, “According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 08/11/05 at 01:24 GMT (EST+5) is 296,854,475”

Related posts:

A recent arti­cle from ZDNet — Researchers: Metcalfe’s Law over­shoots the mark — reports that two researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota have released a pre­lim­i­nary study in which they con­clude that Metclafe’s law sig­nif­i­cantly over­es­ti­mates the rate at which the value of a net­work increases as its size increases. The study was pub­lished March 2, by Andrew Odlyzko and Ben­jamin Tilly of the university’s Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­ogy Cen­ter.
Here’s some snip­pets from the paper:
“The fun­da­men­tal fal­lacy under­ly­ing Metcalfe’s (Law) is in the assump­tion that all con­nec­tions or all groups are equally valu­able.“
I’m always happy to find a dec­la­ra­tion in sup­port of qual­ity as a dif­fer­en­tia­tor. Of course, qual­ity is a com­plex and sub­jec­tive mea­sure­ment, and so it is no sur­prise that Odlyzko and Tilly first recall it to rel­e­vance, and then con­tinue to say, “The gen­eral con­clu­sion is that accu­rate val­u­a­tion of net­works is com­pli­cated, and no sim­ple rule will apply uni­ver­sally.“
It makes me happy when I see smart peo­ple say­ing com­pli­cated things are com­pli­cated. Odlyzko and Tilly are aca­d­e­mics, and so it’s in their inter­est for mostly every­one else to believe the things they study are com­pli­cated, but I think that there’s less dan­ger in this than in bas­ing your busi­ness plan or your invest­ment deci­sions on a fal­la­cious assump­tion that a very clever entr­pre­neur trans­mo­gri­fied into an equa­tion — which some­how by exag­ger­a­tion became a ‘law’ — in a moment of self-serving mar­ket­ing genius. I know this from expe­ri­ence, because Im guilty of both of these mis­takes.
Mov­ing on, as an exam­ple, Odlyzko and Tilly declare,“Zipf’s Law is behind phe­nom­ena such as ‘con­tent is not king’ [21], and ‘long tails’ [1], which argue that it is the huge vol­umes of small items or inter­ac­tions, not the few huge hits, that pro­duce the most value. It even helps explain why both the pub­lic and deci­sion mak­ers so often are pre­oc­cu­pied with the ‘hits,’ since, espe­cially when the total num­ber of items avail­able is rel­a­tively small, they can dom­i­nate. By Zipf’s Law, if value fol­lows pop­u­lar­ity, then the value of a col­lec­tion of n items is pro­por­tional to log(n). If we have a bil­lion items, then the most pop­u­lar one thou­sand will con­tribute a third of the total value,
the next mil­lion another third, and the remain­ing almost a bil­lion the remain­ing third. But if we have online music stores such as Rhap­sody or iTunes that carry 735,000 titles while the tra­di­tional brick-and-mortar record store car­ries 20,000 titles, then the addi­tional value of the ‘long tails’ of the down­load ser­vices is only about 33% larger than that of record stores.” {cita­tions avail­able in the orig­i­nal report}
This last begs the ques­tion of value, but of course that’s also a com­plex and sub­jec­tive judge­ment…
And with this they’ve intro­duced con­text as another impor­tant cri­te­rion. Con­text of course can take many forms; they make most use of geo­graphic local­ity, and then extend their analy­sis by look­ing at how com­mon inter­est in con­tent on the part of aca­d­e­mics func­tions as another index of local­ity, say­ing, “Com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works do not grow inde­pen­dently of social rela­tions. When peo­ple are added, they induce those close to them to join. There­fore in a mature net­work, those who are most impor­tant to peo­ple already in the net­work are likely to also be mem­bers. So addi­tional growth is likely to occur at the bound­aries of what exist­ing peo­ple care about.“
The ref­er­ences alone make this paper worth down­load­ing and scan­ning. Read more of Odlyzko’s work.

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