The second CommunityNext conference, held at the Plug And Play tech center in Sunnyvale today, is focused on viral marketing. The take away from the event: widgets=viral. And Facebook is the api to write them for.
Pictured here is Noah Kagan, CommunityNext organizer.
More on the event when I have a keyboard bigger than my Treo in front of me.
Consumer level devices and software for scanning and looking up UPC numbers are springing up here and there, but are by no means in wide scale use. I started using Intelliscanner's combo scanner fob and cataloging software after picking it up at MacWorld last winter, and more recently tested the Mac only application Delicious Monster, which was in the shwag bag from the TED conference.
They both do a great job of scanning and cataloging subsets of consumer products. Both handle books, CDs and DVDs.
Intelliscan also tries to handle certain grocery items too, with it's Kitchen Companion module. It's fob scanner, an OEM from Symbol, stores 150 codes - more items than any typical consumer buys in one outing.
Delicious Monster uses the Mac's iSight to scan UPC's, and has a nice cataloging interface that allows for easy annotations.
The blurry snapshot on this post was taken w/ my Treo's 700p 1.3 Megapixel camera, which explains why "scanning" with it is not quite ready for prime time - I have not been able to get Treoware's app, Barcode/13 to correctly scan a UPC label.
It's surprising to me that the popularity of these products has not skyrocketed, but maybe that fact is a reflection of consumer attitudes, which do not place much value on organizing information about our purchases. What features are needed in these valuable consumer tools in order to make them more compelling?
A study at UCSD found that students exhibit "Robin Hood" like behavior in a game designed to determine if we have a tendency to cooperate toward equality. The findings really beg the question, if we are egalitarian beings, which the study seems to suggest, why do we tolerate so much inequality? If we're genuinely interested in distributing wealth, then why are we not dropping coins into every mendicant's open hand?
The study found that a player's choice to increase another player's wealth was made when there was disparity among participants and the player could spend their own money to enrich those with the least, most often spending to "take from the rich and give to the poor".
The experiment seems to suggest that the presence of a mechanism that allows one person to take from someone with more wealth elicits the "Robin Hood" behavior. When that condition is satisfied then participants are also more likely to donate their own money to less wealthy individuals, as well as take from wealthier participants.
In the vast majority of societies such a mechanism is not legally available to individuals, and so the behavior is considered criminal. But people still commonly commit the crime. The piracy of software, movies and other intellectual property is often attributed to individuals' rationalization that they are redistributing wealth. Any petty theft might be attributed to this rationalization.
There is a degree of irony in the fact that the laws preventing Robin Hood like behavior are absolute. Protection of our right to property is intended to to promote social stability. Yet the absolute interpretation of this right has denied society's tendency toward egalitarianism, and often results in major conflicts and instability. Look at any one of the hundreds of "mineral wars" - Angola and Ivory Coast come to mind. Even the labor disputes involving Wal Mart are manifestations of the conflict between the corporation's enforced right to dominate a market and the desire to equalize.
Does our egalitarian tendency need a more central role in society? Given the increasing inequality of wealth distribution and resulting conflicts, is it time to reexamine our right to property in a more global and sustainable context? How would the rights of corporations be different?
The role of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) in measuring impact of consumer behavior is problematic due to its reliance on very extensive amounts of data. However, there may be a more efficient and meaningful way to understand the impact of a product though structured engagement of the community of producers and consumers in a transparent and objective dialog about the product.
In a 2006 article , Reid Lifset of Yale University cites problems with LCA stemming from "the tension between speed, cost and intelligibility on the one hand and comprehensiveness and rigor on the other." For supply chain managers and consumers alike, the full analysis of any product or brand is inevitably too expensive, complex and time consuming to undertake. This situation has led to the proposal of SLCA (Steamlined LCA) in which 80% of the insights obtained through LCA can be realized with perhaps 20% of the cost and effort.
The article appears in a Special Issue of the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment honoring Helias Udo de Haes, one of the key figures in Environmental Sciences, and a pioneer of Life Cycle Analysis. Haes himself has noted the difficulty associated with the extensive data collection and imperfect data classification that is characteristic of LCA, thereby contributing to the perception that formal LCA is largely an academic discipline that will likely never find its way into mainstream economic activity.
This is not to say that LCA does not have a role in the economy. Value in partial or S LCA can be realized by
producers who look for relevance to their business in the body of work
that led to ISO 14040 and related methodology. But that value could be superseded by a more agile method that relies on a
community of motivated collaborators focused on revealing the most significant factors relating to environmental and social impact.
Another shortcoming of current LCA practice, which was not cited in the article, is that it does not directly involve end consumers. The consumer's personal experience and observations about the product are not accounted for, yet for the class of products purchased, transported, operated, stored, and used up by consumers, such data can be very useful in a broader analysis of product impact.
Accepting that the single largest driver of product design is that
of consumer demand, then product impact analysis should be focused
on a desire of the consumer to understand the impact of their consumer
behavior. This is not a universal desire of consumers, but it certainly exists within a growing class of conscious consumers who are woefully underserved in this respect. I estimate that this desire is sufficient to be a strong economic force once it is tapped effectively.
In this context, a collective impact analysis, even if it's only a partial inventory of impacts compiled by observant consumers, may be enough to change downstream consumer behavior in such a way as to influence the producer toward a more sustainable design. A basic MIPS analysis, for example, would be useful to discerning consumers who want to understand impact of their purchases.
Further, in the present economic view of worker as consumer, a meaningful, if less rigorous, analysis might be possible if performed by the consuming public. Mechanisms have been proposed for enabling consumers to share their knowledge of a product's impact. In cases where the consumers are themselves the producers, this model can lead to very specific and accurate data about a product's impact.
Related approaches are coming online as we speak:
Approaches like these, combined with consumer driven analysis in a participatory network forum could lead to improved awareness of product impact at the point of purchase, ultimately influencing producers much more efficiently than proper LCA.
What is the business model behind such a community driven consumer resource? How can investment be attracted to the development of this model?
If the folks present at the CommunityNext conference last weekend have anything to say about it, the wisdom of crowds will dominate our future. This emerging industry alternately known as Social Networking and Online Communities, has produced some of the most compelling modes of interaction available to society. And we're only just beginning to understand the significance of, what can only be called, a major social movement.
Sun Microsystems, who sponsored the event, is perhaps the most visible and largest commercial enterprise to declare its support and integral role in advancing the build out of Social Networking. Sun anticipated the importance of this movement to its business model by proffering that the Age of Participation is upon us and the build out of IT infrastructure to make it possible will be led by the companies that operate as online communities and understand what it means to belong to the network.
Here are my telegraphic notes from the event:
Community Next, Saturday February 10, 2007, Stanford University
Organizer: Noah Kagan
designate a community manager
create an area for advertising discussion
seek advertisers in your niche
be willing to customer for advertisers
con't insist on the highest CPMs
be lexible - timeframes may slip, creative implementation may be complicated and campaigns may be cancelled
expect to have advertisers closely monitor delivery
August 29, 2010
It's hard to imagine that just five short years ago it was not uncommon
to encounter strongly held doubts about the role of industry in global
warming and environmental degradation. Imagine having a conversation
today with a colleague who didn't believe that business has a primary
responsibility to account for all of the environmental cost throughout
the entire lifecycle of their products. Hard to imagine, isn't it?
We only have to look back to mid-2005 to find a well documented record of such ignorant opinions in the fossil record.
Writing for the Canada National Post in an opinion piece in the summer
of 2005 (Part1 | Part 2,) Peter Foster gave one of the last great examples of the then
widely held bias against environmentalism at the end of the Age of American Awakening that characterized the nearly 60 year period that began in
1949 with the publishing of A Sand County Almanac, which shocked the American conscience with accounts of the rapid disappearance of wilderness, and ended with
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which scared Americans into action. Gladly, the sort of industrial posturing practiced by Foster,
designed to protect business-as-usual practices of take-make-waste, has
all but vanished from popular social discourse. The rapid transition
toward a business climate where industry takes direct responsibility
for environmental impact was aided by none other than Ray Anderson,
Founder of Interface Corporation, and the very person who Foster
accused of chicken-little preoccupations with industrial impact on our
finite biosphere.
Foster's diminution of Anderson's sudden awakening to the problem and
his role in solving it would not be a popular angle on today's Op Ed
page. But in 2005, before the effects of climate change were witnessed
by so many, and before the impact of industrial practices were widely
understood, Foster's position on environmentalism was common place.
One can hope.
Today, 15 months after Foster's attacks on Anderson, we business people who embrace the belief that industry can be a force for improving the biosphere continue to be challenged by skeptics like Peter Foster. And in the face of the slings and arrows we can take comfort in Machiavelli's sage words:
Incidentally, the most egregious offense in Foster's articles was not the attacks on
Anderson, but his superficial, uniformed slander of Paul Hawken's seminal work, The Ecology of Commerce. If Foster's salacious attacks left anyone wanting for
confirmation of Hawken's credibility, take a listen to the audio of his
brilliant segment in the Seminars on Long Term Thinking posted under
the 2004 archives at:
http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/
What are the forces that will drive the change toward this vision for 02010? How does industry, government, and society adopt the principles set out by Hawken and reward corporations like Interface? How do readers expose opinion's like Foster's as part of the problem?
What are the most pressing issues facing the world?
The answer to that question depends on how far you peel the onion. If you accept that the most pressing issues all stem from human behavior, then you might say that the existence of humans is issue number one. That answer doesn't leave much of an onion to peel though. The sheer number of humans is not a very interesting answer either because it doesn't get at the root of the problem; absent excessive affluence, there's no obvious reason that Earth cannot sustain 9 billion people. No, the most interesting pressing issues are the ones that get to the heart of things.
Here's one: the absence of a collective understanding among
industrialized society that our consumer behavior is destroying our
habitat.
... (pause while Ayn Rand rolls over in her grave)...
Anyone who ever consciously made a sustainable choice - riding a bike instead of driving, choosing the tilapia instead of the swordfish, holding coffee in a ceramic rather than disposable paper cup - only to have the proverbial Hummer drive by and toss a styrofoam container of processed food on the pavement in front of you, has felt the futility of acting sustainably in a world where most people don't know what sustainable behavior is, let alone act that way. That's a stark demonstration of the absence of a collective understanding.
Sustainably minded people leading by example will not win the race with
extinction. And phylogeny doesn't move fast enough for us to wait while
our brains develop an inter-neural synapse across
which we can
mind-meld our understanding of this pressing issue. A tail-spin calls
for immediate action. We need to accellerate large scale influence
through existing paradigms in order to build an understanding of the issue and
our individual roles in it.
History proves that, given a catalyst, we have the capacity to transform society in profound ways. Perceptible degradation of global living conditions is proving ample catalyst for change. And we have a powerful tool to connect us in ways we have only just begun to understand.
The Internet has emerged as the single most powerful medium for social participation across the globe. It's influence and reach expands every day. With serious efforts underway to bridge the digitial divide, we can hope to have over half the world's population connected and participating in the global conversation within our lifetime. The Internet is the medium across which we are building this collective understanding.
The potential positive influence of global participation is not assured in a network that favors one community over another. The Internet today is essentially destination neutral. But some network service providers have proposed charging content providers for higher quality of service to deliver their content, which would result in diminished choice for consumers of content. Throttling choice of content will reduce the net to the equivalent of television where virtually all content is delivered with the express intent of driving consumer demand for products and services. The Internet has been a safe harbor for universal access to content, but would rapidly deteriorate into another platform for big business to dominate society's mindshare, if service providers were allowed to practice "non-neutrality". We must preserve the network's
neutrality in order for the global conversation to reach everyone who has a stake in the design of our future.
At this critical juncture in humanity's social evolution, can we afford to have corporations throttling some voices and amplifying others?
Reading the book Natural Capitalism for the second time was a very different experience for me than the first time. The first reading filled me with optimism, and attuned me to the vectors and telemetry I would monitor for progress toward sustainability as the envisioned revolution unfolds. Six years hence I am having difficulty reconciling my previous optimism with achievements to date. No doubt there have been advancements in the possibilities for sustainable enterprise in the ensuing period since the book was first published, but the chasm between the possibilities and the realities yawns before us as wide as ever. Businesses continue to be driven by factors that prevent them from crossing the chasm.
One thing I've learned from reading NatCap and then watching the progress, is that the power structure propped up by the materials intensive, wasteful, badly designed pursuit of unrelenting economic growth is the single most important barrier to pervasive natural capitalism and sustainable business enterprise. Industry that profits from the use of effectively free natural capital has little incentive to change. To be sure, change is occuring as scarcity of natural resources eats away profits, and as nations' policy dictate efficiencies. But becoming more efficient doesn't mean using less resource. It means getting more out of the resources used. Industrialized society has a knack for expanding markets at breakneck pace. We can't count on efficiencies to reduce demand for natural resource because the efficiencies will only free up capital to be used in expanding markets.
The book cites a 1997 assessment that demonstrates how $36 trillion of the $39 trillion annual gross world product flows directly from natural services to industry's bottom line. In this context, industry's working capital is declining rapidly as it accumulates tremendous long-term debt while depleting assets at an accellerating rate. This is what an armchair economist would call "throwing good money after bad".
Of course, this is not the financial model used to evaluate current ratios, liquidity and investment risk, since financial accounting deals with the financial condition of a business entity, and Earth is not a business entity. Or is it?
Accept for a minute that Earth is the entity under which all shares of human enterprise are consolidated, and that all humans (forgive the omission of other organisms,) have equal stake in the results produced by the original and ongoing paid-in capital. In other words, let industry keep the profits generated from its 8% contribution, and give shareholders voting rights on the other 92%.
What kind of change is required to affect such a reversal of fortune? Is the widespread adoption of radical resource productivity and biomimicry enough? Or do we need to go further? And what will compel society to balance the books? Is climate change a sufficiently clear and present threat to compel us to radically shift the power structure, forgo our current conception of the profit motive and economic growth, and give back to Earth a value equivalent to that which we extract?
This week's assignment in my Principle of Sustainable Management course at the Presidio School of Management was to submit a personal definition of Sustainability. This is what I came up with:
Sustainability is the process of continuously nourishing the systems that provide for abundant life in the super-system that is Earth.
But that's not the working definition. I'm not sure there is a working definition. Sustainability is ambiguous. It is destined, I am afraid, to remain in a steady state or an ever expanding state of ambiguity. The current popular discourse exploits sustainability's ambiguity, its actors conveniently adopting the form most suited to their position or view. The word (which is not a word by many dictionaries' account,) telescopes into and out of focus as we try to bring the future into our field of view. It seems to be receding from us in all directions. Sustainability is simultaneously at the outer edge of our perception, and at the core of our social fabric.
Implicit in the goals of sustainability is the notion of common cause. The threat of global warming has galvanized the awareness that we all depend upon, and are at the mercy of, one another in the super-system that is Earth. If we are truly at the dawn of the age of participation, then it is sustainability, in all its shapes and forms, that weens us away from individualistic naivete toward an inclusive era of global awareness.
For our species, sustainability represents childhood's end.
But is sustainability actionable? The architect needs clear priorities, stable requirements, and measurable criteria. The project manager needs scope, budget, and schedule. The builder needs a site, tools and raw material. Sustainability is too slippery. It's so ambiguous that it's nigh impossible to decompose into discrete components. Sustainability is not a composite of anything, so can never be broken down further. There is no blueprint for sustainability.
In order to get on with it, we need a better word. What is the right word (term or phrase)?
Imagine an 11 year old girl in a business suit, as she haughtily approaches the dais for the 110th Congressional session. She can barely see over the podium, yet she's got the swagger of a seasoned lobbyist. She knows that she must project confidence and clarity in the critical first words of the historical speech she is about to make in defense of her generation's future. She has been coached. As she addresses this esteemed body of educated and powerful men and women, she is mindful that hers is a future that none seated before her will know and all have the power to affect immensely. From this awareness she draws her courage.
Early in life, most humans reach an understanding that we can
expect to outlive our parents. Armed with this awareness,
multitudes of kids are now entering an age where their own future
does not look so promising. For them, it's starting to look as
if the stewards of their future were not fully up to the task.
Global warming, contamination of air, food and water supplies, depletion of natural resources, and unprecedented species die-off are entering these kids consciousness's at a time in their life when their generation wields very little direct influence on economic behavior and policy, and most significant decisions affecting their life are made on their behalf. Theirs is a bellwether generation sitting between “brighter-future” ancestors and the seventh generation, symbolic of a future to which no one has reasonable expectation of direct contact. I can't help but believe that direct representation in policy making by this youthful generation with so much at stake would bring us closer to a sustainable socio-economic system.
"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as God made it, not just as it looked when we got through with it." - Lyndon Johnson, 1965
You needn't look any further than the litany of child protection laws and "child-proof" features on products to see that the responsibility to protect children is a serious priority in the industrialized world. And in China, where, as Bill McDonough articulated in an interview with Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, parents and the government will go to great lengths to provide an education for their youth, the needs of children are clearly paramount among all social priorities. Yet, for all the effort and attention, how well is the well being of future generations being looked after? At a macro level, the outlook appears bleak, but giving voice to future generations is well underway in programs that amplify the voice of today's youth. Unicef's Voice of Youth program serves as a platform for youth opinions and advocacy on global and developing world policy, and the Millennium Campaign sponsors programs to involve youth in policy making. If more direct influence from youth on policy were possible, how would it be implemented? Yale University has compiled some very valuable research on representation of children in legal proceedings, which may be useful in the adoption of direct youth representation in government and NGO's.
If such representation were in place, what would the 11 year old girl say to Congress?
