In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them? 

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot. 

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

Related Posts

• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?
• Gordon Brown Announces “Second Generation” Government
• Open Data Opens Up Gov
• It’s The Phone – Even in Crisis Comms
• In Search of the Habitat Intern

But unlike 18 years ago, this time I knew where the snow was falling, in real-time, and exactly what was happening with the trains too. How? Because of the power of mass collaboration. In a twist of fate, those new tools enabled me to embark on my journey to London this evening to listen to Clay Shirky talk about that very subject at LSE.

Clay Shirky delivers a précis of “Here comes everybody“ (now available in paperback: UK|US) in these 5 words: Group action just got easier. The book is something of a reference text for proponents of the power of social networks, and a concept will be familiar to readers of CauseWired.

Clay’s roots go deep back into the early days of the Internet. He has studied and written about them at length. Clay says that there are two things he has learnt from the last 15 years: Fast is different than slow and big is different than small. That might sound obvious, but it is actually profound in understanding these new tools.

“When it comes to networks, you can’t just extrapolate from small and slow to understanding the dynamics of large and fast.” Clay Shirky

Today’s networks, both in terms of telecommunications and social tools, are certainly both large and fast. In conversations I often frame the issue as quantitative change versus qualitative change. Technology that gains traction creates one or both of these. Quantitative changes are simply being able to do what we did before, but faster or larger. Qualitative changes are ones that fundamentally alter what we do or the way in which we do it.

It would seem logical that the linear nature of quantitative changes would make them much easier to predict (small and slow to large and fast), while qualitative changes would be more difficult, because of their disruptive nature. At least that is the commonly received wisdom. My experiences with technology say it doesn’t actually work that way.

People mis-predict technologies and put them into the wrong one of these buckets. Entrepreneurs usually believe they have something that produces a qualitative change, when it is actually a quantitative one. Conversely, many technologies that produce quantitative changes at first go on to affect society in a qualitatively way. The automobile changed how quickly we could get from A to B. Slow to Fast. Quantitative. But in doing so it changed where we could work, then our social circle and, ultimately, how society itself is constructed.

Lots of people view social media and social networking sites as agents of qualitative change. I think that doing so both overstates and understates them. Imagine, for a minute, that mass media had never happened. No radio. No TV. No newspapers. Wouldn’t it be quiet? You’d be able to hear the conversations.

Now, introduce social software. You’d have a nice linear move towards conversations that can take place across the globe rather than across the living room. From conversations with several people to ones that include hundreds. Sound familiar? They might include multimedia objects like photographs and videos too. The latter makes it tempting to compare phenomena like Facebook and Twitter to television or radio. That really isn’t a useful comparison. While they can, and do, turn into broadcast tools, with a single video receiving millions of views, they are misunderstood when viewed in that frame. What we are looking at is a return to a bigger faster version of conversations that were, rather that something that has never been.

Back to professor Shirky: We live in a time where tools like these, that lower the hassle factor of finding one and other and enabling collaboration, are changing the way that society works. Tools that started their life in the technical community have now spread out to touch every aspect of today’s society.

In the last 48 hours alone the BBC had tens of thousands of people sharing pictures and videos of the snow fall in the UK. I’ve watched myself and other Twitter users use the #uksnow tag, followed by the first part of their post code and a rating in messages to created data that produced a real-time view of the snow situation around the UK (thanks to an app built by Ben Marsh).

Another Ben, Ben Smith, has produced uktrains – a twitter feed with the very latest information on what is happening to train services in the disruption (there’s a wiki and a post about both of these on TechCrunch).

It’s all about the Benjamins, as a US rapper once said. Actually, it isn’t. These apps were both free. They might not be perfect – how do people agree on what constitutes a 4/10 rather than a 8/10 snow rating? – but they are more than “good enough” and certainly much better than the nothing that was before.

How much investment would have been required to build systems like this prior to web 2.0 and mass user contributed data? The user contribution of data is a major disruptor for traditional publishers and information services. If people are prepared to do what was once paid a job for free, that changes business models, at the very least.

We are in the midst of massive value destruction. Somewhere value creation is going on, but we haven’t quite found out where yet. On-line bulletin boards launched in the 1980′s, so the papers have had 20 years to get ready. While the world has changed around them, they have remained static.  ”This isn’t the transition from business model a to model b,” said Clay, “it is the transition from business a to business models b-z.” While a paper might report that X has happened, social media says X has happened, and this is what you can go and do about it.

Clay cited the example of the MySociety campaign, via a Facebook group, that saw Parliament reverse its attempt to conceal MP’s expenses. He also recounted the counter example of President Obama’s change.gov website. Within a short time after its launch, legalising Marijuana (for medical uses) was voted as the top public policy question facing America. As Clay notes, perhaps it ought to be a little lower down the list with matters like two wars and some collapsing banks that have to be dealt with – although I wonder if there might be some correlation there.

Clearly mass collaboration isn’t going to solve every problem. For the first time in public, Clay said, “I don’t think the technology is ready for the mass legitimisation of initiatives… …There need to be checks and balances applied”. That is a big, and wise, shift from his previously utopian view of what could be achieved. I’ve posted about crowds not providing the wisest answer for every situation before. When we think about the idea of direct access into the political process, we might want to think carefully about what exactly we are wishing for. The tools are fantastic for gathering feedback and generating content, but decision making requires a degree of sophistication that the tools do not provide, yet.

The problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it? On-line we can’t do “one person one vote” – the basis of the democratic franchise – so we can’t legitimise it.

The problem is one for business leaders too. The answer may end up coming from government. What (now President) Obama started on the campaign trail, he will have to continue into the Whitehouse. Having opened the door to mass collaboration, that crowd is still looking over his shoulder and will not accept being shut out. Once you build a community, it doesn’t conveniently go away when you no longer have a need for it, it has a life of its own (something to note for businesses that just dabble in social media). 

This will be a new and interesting phase for the tools of mass collaboration. ”It is not just about politics, it is about government, and they are subtly different things,” observes Shirky.

Related Posts

• Social Decision Making – Shirky JP and Democracy
• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?
• Going Hyper-Local – Location Based Internet
• Caught by CauseWired

Social media smashes all of these worlds together in a wonderful way. It can be challenging at times, as most of the people I interact with come from that funny bit in-between the two worlds: the applications. This post draws on a talk I gave at Social Media Camp London, under the tongue-in-cheek title “six-degrees-of-separation-now-3″ – It is also a clarification of the Twitter exchange between myself @timoreilly and @monkchips and subsequent RedMonk Post: “Asymetrical Follow: A Core Web 2.0 Pattern“. Just for good measure, it also includes some thoughts from the film US Now, which I had the chance to see at the RSA this week:

I’m not going to touch on the eGov issues raised in Us Now – that’s a whole other post. I do want to share some thoughts on the way that relationships and communication are modeled in social software, and the blending of “conversational” mediums and broadcast ones.

First, let’s clarify some terms about “relationships” in social media / social software. I’m blogging, you are reading. Great. A blog with no comments is something I used to call a narrowcast model – a bit like TV (broadcast), but with less viewers. Information goes to a select bunch of subscribers. Twitter and a number of other social platforms codify this reader-driver subscription model as “following”. You follow people on twitter, or follow a blog via RSS, which means you choose to receive communication from that person.

In other platforms this type of relationship is referred to as being a ‘fan’. Whilst that term has a lot of baggage, it expresses a specific social communication desire nicely: Let’s say someone is a fan of Stephen Fry (in the traditional sense). They probably want to read all about Stephen Fry’s exploits, see photos, read stories, you get the idea. However, I’m guessing that they would be a little weirded out if Stephen Fry started asking for photos of them, etc…, etc… OK, there’s a whole bunch of issues in there, but just hold this one thought: We have a construct of a ‘fan’ relationship in society, built from the prevalence of broadcast media. It is an asymmetric relationship. Broadcast, like narrowcast, means I consume, but I can not (easily) respond. I listen, but I don’t speak. Or framed differently, you can send to me, but not receive from me. For better or for worse, it is asymmetric.

The standard relationship model in Facebook, Instant messaging systems, and pretty much every collaboration tool out there is that of a ‘friend’. I follow you and you follow me. It is a mutual agreement for bi-directional communication, a symmetric relationship. A ‘friendship’, in social media terms at least, is a mutual ‘follow’. Friends can have conversations – two way communication – in a way that fans (and broadcasters) can not. Facebook introduced fan pages to deal with ‘fans’, and create an asymmetric model. In blogs, the fan model is inherent. Unless you choose to comment on this post, I know nothing about you, aside from some aggregated behavioural data.

OK. Fans. Followers. Friends. Symmetric. Asymmetric. Broadcast. Conversation. A useful vocabulary, even if some of the terms are loaded, and you can walk around sounding like a social media ‘expert’. Let me just say something here:

Broadcast is good!

There, I said it. Depending on your background, you’ll have either shrugged your shoulders, nodded in agreement or screamed at me and immediately unfollowed me on Twitter. The wonderful thing about language: Words are more than words. They have complex mappings on to all sorts of meanings and memories in our minds. Some of those meanings are shared, and some are not. Let’s unpick ‘broadcast’.

If you want to get lots of (hopefully important) data to lots of people, then broadcast is the most efficient way of doing it. That’s why networks – from Television to computing – use broadcast. It is good and efficient. It is also one of the reasons marketers have traditionally loved broadcast. However, broadcast carries an association with asymmetric communication. Shouting as some would have it. If you have read the clue train manifesto (and you should), you’ll know that it’s all about the Conversation, not about shouting or broadcast. The difference comes in the listening – communication with symmetry.

Broadcast is bad?

So, in social media, throwing the ‘B’ word around is bad. For me, it is still just a technical term, and a very efficient form of communication. Anyway, with that, now on to that twitter exchange:

monkchips: symmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking, so much so it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed for it

timoreilly: RT @monkchips: Asymmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking; it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed 

bmje: @timoreilly @monkchips Asymmetric follow is a hack in social software to enable ‘relationships’ to scale. It is broadcast, not conversation”

timoreilly: @bmje Not so. I follow 400; am followed by 16,000. But I respond to lots of people (like you) who I didn’t know before. Not just broadcast.”

bmje: @timoreilly the wonderful power off twitter and good people – its asymmetry is only partial, due to the power of @’s 

A side note, James cites my quote saying:

There are those that would would say their is something “wrong” with Asymmetrical Follow, which I would argue is just a function of the power laws you see in any community. For example, yesterday Benjamin Ellis…

I definitely don’t think I said it was wrong – quite the opposite. It’s a very useful hack for enabling conversations to scale. I’m guessing that Tim also missed what I meant, since his tweet reads like he thought I was accusing him of the ultimate social media sin – “broadcasting” – see above – and having briefly met Tim, it isn’t the answer I’d have expected from him. Of course I could be wrong. The joys of theory of mind and the limitation of 140 characters. On the contrary, Tim is a very active listener. Asymmetric follow is a way of allowing a form of broadcast, and thus allowing scaling, but all is not what it seems.

The conversation demonstrates something quite different. It shows an unusual property of the Twitter platform:- its ‘follow’ function is not really asymmetric. Tim responded to my message, but Tim isn’t ‘following’ me on twitter – which is fine by the way – although I’m sure I’d be happy if he did, I doubt he’d find me very interesting though!

So, how did Tim get my message if he wasn’t following me? Here’s the magic: If you are on Twitter, anyone can ‘@’ you – essentially directing a message towards you, even if you aren’t following them. It is actually quite a complicated hack and in the great traditions of a good hack, you can fiddle with the settings - see this post on the twitter blog - what people see depends on how they have set up Twitter and what client they use to read messages. This partial symmetry is one of the things that causes Twitter to work so well, and it gets around one of the issues that stops conversations from scaling. Twitter has cracked the broadcast problem with a clever filter.

The Broadcast Problem.

That broadcast stuff. I said it was efficient, but that isn’t the whole picture though. Back in the early 90′s I was responsible for looking after a particularly large computer network. Over the course of a month or two, something strange started to happen. The computers got slower. And slower. And slower. It was a mystery. We hadn’t changed the applications on the computers, or done anything else we thought might slow them down.

After digging around, we found the problem. Some of the applications on the network had started to use broadcast messages rather than the usual unicast (directed) messages. This reduced the traffic on the network, since each message was only sent once, rather than individually to each machine. Very efficient. However, because it was broadcast, EVERY machine on the network had to listen to all of those messages to work out if they were relevant or not. That took a reasonable chunk of their processing power. One machine sent a message, several hundred had to receive it. A little bit of processing power consumed a lot of everyone else’s. Now that is asymmetric.

Conversations Don’t Scale (well).

Imagine if everyone you knew sent you every communication they wrote during the course of their day. Your inbox might feel like that sometimes, but it is nothing compared to what it would actually be like. Now imagine that you had to reply to every single one of those messages. I don’t know about you, but I’d break out into a sweat just thinking about it. Imagine if every viewer of a TV program wrote in with a question. Hang on a minute. You don’t have to wait, it already happened “Strictly Message Board: What Happened”. The result: communication melt down. And that wasn’t even with everyone writing in.

Conversations are tricky things. Huge chunks of our brains are dedicated to making conversations work. I’m not even talking about understanding the conversation, just the sequencing of it. Conversations involve “turn-taking“. Turn-taking is one of the basic mechanisms that enables conversations. Try talking to someone and listening to them at the same time. Oh, you know someone like that already? OK. More seriously, I hope you see the issue, our brains aren’t wired that way.

Now, think about a group conversation. That turn-taking is still going on, just like an old mainframe computer switching between multiple tasks, the listening is divided between the group members. Now think about that group getting bigger. What happens to the amount of listening time? Well, the available listening time stays the same, but the number of people who want to talk grows. Everyone has to make do with a smaller slice of the pie. Conversations don’t scale. Really. Unless some of those new members are just listeners, but then we are back to broadcast.

You’re still reading? Deepest respect! Let me stitch some of these threads back together then. Do you remember “Us Now?” – scroll back to the beginning and watch at least the first few seconds if you missed it.

“More people can say more things to more people than ever in history,” Clay Shirky.

I’d not dispute that, but we must remember that it doesn’t extrapolate to everyone can say everything to everyone. Let’s not kill ourselves trying. Technology has cracked the problem of enabling someone to say something to (almost) everyone. However, we are tired of TV and of broadcast marketing.

Now, technology must find a way for everyone to say something to someone, without breaking that ‘someone’ in the process – be they a politician in government, a genius CEO, or an ever so slightly eclectic techno-psychologist. That requires some very clever filtering.

Has social media cracked the problem? I’d say not yet, but I will exit stage left with this thought from Erica Grigg, of Carbon Outreach, who said this to me (via twitter of course):

carbonoutreach: @bmje maybe social media does goodness to scale!? 

That it does.

Related Posts

• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• In Search of the Habitat Intern
• Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• Replying Via Twitter