Human Complexity Lab

CitySourced app finally launches in L.A., aiming to help city clean up graffiti and potholes

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I recently stopped in at an event at the HMS Bounty. It was hosted by a little Facebook group called HiddenLA. (little? ha ha) What is remarkable about this group is it started with a blog of about 30 friends wishing to celebrate what Los Angeles had to offer. Now in less than a year has 140,000 fans via Facebook! Really it was a brainchild of a marketing executive in between gigs. But after meeting with W.Lynn Garrett and listening to her passion, I realized this is a great example of Network effects, Information Cascades, Surface Credibility and Social Coordination Problems. And it relates to recent decisions by MeetUp to make changes to their interface and features that to some seemed insane but in light of this event at a dingy dive bar in Korea Town makes more sense than ever. I am going to discuss several theories here, so here is the simplest recap of them: Network Effects / Network Externalities / Small World Networks The idea is simple people are connected, value from the connection expands with the number of people connected. I tell two people a story, they tell two people each and the geometric expansion of message distribution spreads. (Granovetter) Information Cascades People follow what is popular. If something gets popular even by initial sheer random choice by any number of factors that popularity is compounded by others seeing the popularity and following suit increase the popularity of the initial random choice (Duncan Watts / Mathew Salganick Princeton) Surface Credibility As we developed (cognitively via evolution) we developed an ability to make snap judgments about everything. Though, we can override those decisions through rational thinking, we operate on those judgments continually. Credibility or Trust is a component that enables our social brains to cooperate briefly in an "Open Savanna" based on just a assemblage of a few visual/auditory/olfactory bits of data. Web sites have the clues too, recently updated blogs or posts, ownership etc. ( BJ Fogg Stanford) Common Knowledge / Social Coordination / Theory of the Mind The idea is social coordination requires knowledge of shared knowledge.. Easy example, as children we lack that skill. At 3-4 we move a stool and begin climbing to reach the cookie jar. Our mother sees us and we see mom staring back. But we have no idea at 3-4 what her frown means and no idea what she is thinking. By 7-8 the cookie jar is higher, but this time if she looks at us the same way. We know that she knows what we are thinking.. We want cookie.. Social Coordination works the same, Sally: You going to the Political Rally? Bob:Yes, if your going..Sally: If your going I am going..(Micheal Chwe UCLA) Meetup recent changes to their in interface. Though I know its a work in progress and I doubt the engineers have studied Information Cascades or Surface Credibility tests. They are on to the right thing. And here is why... Getting rid of the friends feature. Many MeetUp Organizers thought this was a death blow to their existence. At first I thought not sure it that was wise. But after last night with HiddenLA I realized it was critical. MeetUp is not Facebook. And Facebook has a robust API that MeetUp has yet to fully harness. That said, MeetUp friends was a closed network. And when you want Network Effects to take hold, closed networks don't work. Not at all... What that means is as the MeetUp CTO mentioned in the future they may implement Facebook. They have already done so with baby steps by allowing signing in of MeetUp events on Facebook. Well, every social network platform is a moving target. But Meetup has qualities even Facebook can't touch. So focusing on MeetUp strengths and not its weak closed friendship service was a wise move. Especially if they hook into Facebook. Remember, HiddenLA started with 30 people and now have 140,000 fans via Facebook.. No MeetUp Group on earth can grow that fast. It added 60,000 fans in two weeks! So we see that network of Friends moves fast... How and why that fast? Is it just a Big Network? Yes and no. I worked the room of 50-60 people who showed up for the HiddenLA event. All came through Facebook, all found out about it via Facebook. Despite the fact HiddenLA has a great blog.. But more about that later. Facebook provides streams, of as some call them "LifeStreams" lists of data updates from video, events, foursquare, twitter, and beyond. So if one person signs up to be a fan, that person's network gets the update. Its shared. If ten people sign up and each has different set of 100 friends. Imagine the diffusion after those 10,000 friends sign up? Quite a few mentioned that they saw their friend join via the Facebook stream and joined too. The majority of blogs don't have a single follower. HiddenLA started rather quickly with 30 or so friends. Those 30 were friends who happen to be Jazz musicians. A distinct and close knit group, but also people who get out and meet and perform. So in terms of a Information Cascade, when Lynn took the Blog Idea to Facebook she had already 300 members. Larger than say my favorite mistake for a fan page LampsPlus a national retail outlet. This initial popularity gave HiddenLA a foothold most groups never get. A real, though at first small, dedicated fans of nostalgic LA. MeetUp has its own cascades, it lists the "Most Members" or Best Match. While Best Match can be tweaked by adding topics that are popular and listing the zip code to more dense areas of meetup members. Most members groups require some help not only from Information Cascades but also surface credibility. What helped HiddenLA was the Blog. This was a well crafted informative blog about Los Angeles. The design was professional and the content well crafted. Web Credibility is something that has been studied over and over. Although HiddenLA does not hit every point outlined by the researchers and academics the one they do hit they do very well. They list their members, update with recent posts and have a well organized layout with some depth of information. This gives a sense of authority. Authority that MeetUp lacks in some respects. MeetUp does not provide much in terms of content. Video is small and at the bottom. About pages are not indexed and linked to the front with excerpts, so some surface credibility could be improved. Meetup does have clear identity to who is running the group and why. Where as HiddenLA does not. It is unclear who is running the show. But the recent moves to create a stream of events adds to each groups credibility. It shows that this MeetUp is a live active group with things going on under the surface, by bringing it to the surface. Now I have a group of 2,000+ members. I regularly get between 50-150 people showing up. Lynn Garrett has 140,000 members and got around 50 people to show up. That is in part I believe to her credibility gap, as constrained by Facebook features and Wordpress feature sets. Her events are not persuasive enough. Though thankfully she does not get 8-10% show up. I don't think HMS Bounty could handle 12,000 people. But here lies the problem... MeetUp needs to focus on surface credibility while opening up its network. Lynn now has to deal with spammers on her site. She has a full time job. And its only going to get more complex. MeetUp is providing tools (slowly) to help event organizers organize. But it is precisely by adding those streams to Meetup that enable the sharing of Social Coordination. MeetUp members can see who is going, what activities they are doing. This enhances common knowledge. Her Blog lacks that. And the HiddenLA is now full of spam comments about other events and locales offering events.. This hurts the credibility of the group. And is certainly a justification of why MeetUp holds such tight reins in on group feature sets. And yet they are wisely opening up to letting a MeetUp be a Verb, as in creating and sharing the common knowledge of "You Going?" "Yea,If your going" "Okay I'm Going!". But its the transition, community organizers will need to handle the chasm between Facebook and MeetUp to deal with the issues of Information Cascades, Surface Credibility, and Network Effects. Links: http://www.Hiddenla.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Los-Angeles-CA/Hidden-Los-Angeles/112328562792 WebCredibility: http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/web-credibility-reports-evaluate-abstract.cfm http://credibility.stanford.edu/ Granovetter Mathew Salganik http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/musiclab.shtml Michael Chwe Duncan Watts

It didn't take long for business to take advantage of the economic global recession. Two trends I am researching are the Migrant Content Farm Workers and Sweat Shop Crowdsourcing. Both being handled by legitimate companies. One is a worldwide brand and the other produces and pushes out content around the globe to major distributors like Yahoo, Hearst and various other regional newspapers. MTurk.com is run by Amazon.com and the other is Demand Media. Both use concept of crowd-sourcing to drive the capital cost of content creation down. As the internet has driven the marginal costs of content distribution to zero, the race is on to tackle the upfront cost of actually creating content. What is particularly fascinating about these two enterprises is the brazen way they wish to devalue content and human intelligence. Check out Amazon's SweatShop: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Check out Demand Media Content Farming: http://www.demandmedia.com/ Crowdsourcing now has a slick high tech slum... And its brought to you by Amazon dot com.. More on my investigation later...

I have been always interested in Apple and any announcement of new technology coming out of Cupertino. And today the announced the iPad. Which I agree with some female twitters is a poor choice of a name. Regardless of its nomenclature, the thing exists in a space that many critics, such as those at TechCrunch feel has no need to be filled. Such that there is no space for it. But I disagree. As someone who fought the lean forward lean back arguments in interactive TV, that was the argument of who would control the Living Room. Well, in my mind Apple decided to not necessarily leave the Living Room but rather go into the room next door. The den. The Den is that space between the living room and the Kitchen. Its that home office nook, that space where it might be near the entry or tucked into the rear looking out to the backyard. Its where you lounge without the 40-50 inch screen. Its where you sort bills quickly without opening Quicken. Its where you answer the phone and decide where to eat. The iPad is a den product. Its where that magazine rack might be if I were not connected to the net. There are times I check my iphone and think god this screen is tiny... That right there is the space that TechCrunch did not get. And maybe many won't. If you live in a small studio apartment in SF or NY, dens don't exist. But Steve lives in a house that has one (presumably). As do many people who have Macs and iPhones. He doesn't sell anything cheap, so he knows what his market can bear. The question is will it resonate? Is their enough specific behavioral vibrations (as it were) that will make the object amplify its power to the user? This is something I will be working on in the future. I believe massive social actions require resonance to make them tip to massive scales. But I digress. The iPod powered by millions of songs / TV and iPhone powered by 100K apps found many resonant frequencies. Places and spaces where that app or capability was exactly what you needed. And felt more powerful because of that need. I driving around and I am lost in trying to find a bar. I google voice search it. Get a map problem solved. Or I see an actor undercover leave a print shop and think dam what's his name. IMDB in seconds solves it for me. But its not just the object's resonant frequency that matters. Think of the famous opera singer that can sing a note that cracks a champagne glass. Little off here or there in temperature or not the right kind of glass, or more importantly the ambient sound is too great it doesn't work. But that singer knows the exact pitch to break glass. To create a vibration that in and of itself creates a powerful moment only if everything is perfect for that to happen. And that is the conundrum of Apple's iPad. Can it survive the attacks from HP/Dell/Acer from a very capable Windows 7 and from the bottom up from Google's Chrome OS. I would venture yes, but only in so much as macbooks survive. It will not be a dominant player in the future of slate computing as their iPod and iPhone are. Why? Intel and Arm players do not sit quietly. So the edge on power consumption may be short lived. Both other OS and hardware configs will have ebooks, OLED or LED backlits, they will have more options like SD slots, web cams, and USB ports. No they will not be slick and as stylish as an iPad. And that is the problem, more options create more opportunity to find that resonant pitch. Its not easy, its not printed in acoustic manuals or physic books on sound. That sound that internal "Aha" is mysterious at best. The iPad requires three things to find that resonate frequency: 1)Fairly reliable wifi or 3g in large homes. Remember small homes of tech already have roku, boxee, laptops, netbooks, iphones, etc. Large homes don't always get great wifi due to walls and windows and multiple floors 2) A Space where no laptop, desktop or net connected TV exist. My Samsung blu-ray has net connection ability built in... Though its no substitute for an iphone or ipad but it will get me my netflix and youtube.. 3) Free time to veg comfortably. I would never write this blog post with one.. Why? I walk into my office and use my 24inch iMac. Add a keyboard to iPad? why? Students may rejoice on it as they already use iphone and evernote to snap whiteboards for lectures. But serious writing is done in an office with a big desk and comfy chair. But this last issue is critical. Steve sat in a comfy chair and just fiddled with it. Perfect use for one. But I am not Steve Jobs, I do video editing, I do statistical analysis of social issues with SPSS, I do photo editing, and web research.. But would I like to read my textbook in an iPad in bed or in my den sure. Would I like to have it downstairs to check a movie and get tickets for show for me and my wife absolutely... But then of course I have a den.

2,000 to 2,009.. Society accepts Complexity I was listening to a podcast on technology. The subject was what is the big tech idea of the decade...Some said Video on the Net, others said the network and speed of ideas, while others talked about objects like the iphone... My idea of big tech is grounded in the birth of big science. How players in the vanguard can shape many players in many different influential positions. The reality is, we are involved in working with complex systems not conceptually or academically but thoroughly. The idea of Newtonian cause and effect is gone, no matter who still tries to hang on to it. The concept of warped time and space and acceptance of matter into energy and back is commonplace, as we speed electrons around a circuitous track of copper... Besides Relativity as a philosophical tool, is not especially usable despite early attempts to make it so. But what has shaped this decade is Complexity. Our acceptance of it, our understanding of it, and our harnessing of it. You can not have facebook without it because you need emergence and self-organization. Therefore, you can not have Iranian revolution without it because you can have one without thousands of autonomous agents making millions of decisions to cooperate or compete. You can't have American Idol without it...You can not even understand 9/11 without accepting the powers of complexity, especially Complex Adaptive Systems theory. There is no blow-back, feedback, loops, disruptions, chaos, there are no connected nodes without it. There are no power laws that explain network effects of growth or information diffusion. You now live in a world where Complexity Science rules. Don't try to escape it. Twitter won't let you. Neither will your iPhone, or your TV, and you can't even drive away from it. Its all connected, the nodes pass information be that node a person, a router, a GPS empowered car, you can not escape the power of complexity. Why is complexity so apparent now? Well, the micro-chip is nearly totally ubiquitous. And complexity is a tricky little devil. Its Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men, You Need him on that Wall... That wall between the old billiard world of a single ball that hits another ball to explain cause and effect or world war I or your grandfather clock and another world of Web like Billiard game of millions of balls hitting an bumping each other in such a random mass that is looks like little order exists yet explains the rise of a youtube video. But order does exist, patterns can usually be found. People though all selfish looking for their own goals and desires do create groups. Markets are not predictable, but do follow patterns. You can not look at the last 9-10 years and escape to find a single moment of simplicity in our history. I dare you... Its not that simplicity does not exist. Or that simple cause and effects are not around to be observed. We have changed. We no longer look at the world without including networks of people, or networks of machines, or networks of anything... The days of single moments can't exist. Look at our Cinema, the artist putting an ape on a empire state building to focus the world will never happen again, because we need loops of different angles of camera shots or foreign correspondents taking different shots, because we know that each country will have a different reaction, some similar, many different. All those different ideas streaming around, that's not the idea of putting chimp on the tallest building... Every defining moment we experience from here on will be defined by complexity. Loops, feedback, network effects, disruptions, power laws and chaos. So sit back post a blog, twitter a concept, or breathe a sigh of relief, the world just got a little simpler to understand its complexity.

How specific players of social freedom are not prepared for changes. According to Oxford English Dictionary, Privacy: The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion. Same source for Security: The condition of being protected from or not exposed to danger; safety. Something interesting is about to occur. The technology to observe, identify and report is about to hit devices that fit in your pocket. This technology used to take fairly large computers or satellite links of uber government security. But now with GPS triangulation in an "Eye-Fi" SD card, GPS, and a robust internet connected operating system in iPhones and Android based phones to name just the top two players, things are about to change radically. The Social applications abound, from Foursquare, to Brightkite, to Panoramio, and the list goes on.. Amazon, Google can identify products, buildings, and logos. Some say Google Goggles mobile app could "though switched off" can recognize faces. And of course iPhoto and Picassa already do this on your desktop or via the web I would hypothesize that 25 years ago Privacy and Security ran in a simple parallel. As you became more private, you were more secure. Hiding away from the unconnected masses was a sure way to prevent you from getting diseases ie the plague as Newton did, or not get financially washed out as my grand parents hid money in mattresses. Further from people or intrusion the further you were from danger. People with great walls were thought of as secure. But things change. We are all very connected, via water systems, electricity grids, financial markets, food distribution systems, global transportation, and communication systems. These communication systems include the wireless phone, the internet, social network services. So I would hypothesize that the equation is now not of two parallel lines but the lines cross and as they do they are inverse. That the more private you try to become, the less secure you are. The more unconnected you are the more insecure literally you are. But not to waste too much time here, to support this thesis I will mention a few important points that will lead us to an important conclusion. Knowing where my spouse is decreases their privacy. But I would argue increases their security. Knowing who they know and sharing in conversations I was not present for does not decrease their security. It does decrease privacy. No question, but knowing exactly how, when, or where to interrupt them in case of an emergency would increase their security. How to find them if we could not "Ping" them increases their security. Knowing what they last ate via a Yelp post, or where they lasted danced all helps to add to security but no privacy. And here is where the sociologist must step in. Who will fight that less privacy is less security? Interestingly it will be the female digerati who will argue that letting the universe know where they are is a danger. At first blush at this it would seem that announcing to the world where you are would be an invitation to every possible stalker in the vicinity. But is it? Do stalkers really need that information to stalk you? We the "non-stalking" 99.995% of the male population would rather follow Karem or Stephen Colbert on twitter than Girl33 ? Yet it begs another question. Digital Breadcrumbs. Would it not make it just easier to stalk? Well look at brightkite, the majority of public posts are done by men. Generally, women do not publicly post. I am not suggesting that women or for that matter men post GPS tagged photos in the nude in their bathroom. I am saying that women take precautions in public, because sadly they must. But despite all those precautions for the last 25 years still a stalker can follow a woman for one week and learn much more in that week than they could ever learn from random thoughts about restaurants, clubs, politics or books in libraries twitted or foursquared about. Yet, few women post these thoughts online in location based situations publicly. So who will lead the way for women to be strong and unafraid? It appears I don't have that answer. Women in the 21st century still feel objectified by the world. Yet most men or citizens of the 21st century are soo covered by masses of lifestream data, and mass media data smog that only the truly crazed have time to track down someone via random posts. Yet, still I listened to a Podcast about the insecurity of men letting their women be free to post who, where, and what they are doing. And the sole woman agreed that she must be fearful of letting people know where she is... Equation of Privacy vs Security surely is not a straight line. If you are alone and post who and where you are it may not be safe as if you have many friends you are out with and you post who and where you are. But as I learned in going out in the world as a woman for a gender class, and in virtual worlds as a female, women do not yet feel empowered to use the technology to make a stand or use the dynamics of attraction to generate forces that exist intrinsically in the biology of humans. Instead they are still objectified victims of technological forces that appear to them as threats to their security rather than tools for their empowerment.

Beginning in January 2010, this blog will take over all my work on Social Capital, Social Networking, and Online Community Dynamics. As Such, there will be much to discuss. I hope I can import my old blog "Bionic Pulse"> But who knows. Also my work on SubCultures in Los Angeles will be posted here too...