My Place in the Crowd

We’re very pleased to announce that Geoffrey Desa has joined the board of the Common Datatrust Foundation. Geoff is currently finishing up his doctoral dissertation on technology social entrepreneurship at the University of Washington, Seattle, and will soon begin teaching and continuing his research at San Francisco State University. His research is on small ventures that develop and deploy technology for a social purpose, recognizing that many forms of technology can be replicated and used by large numbers of people at low cost. Geoff has studied organizations and projects from all over the world, from secure documentation programs for human rights field investigators to improved technology for Kenyan beekeepers. In particular, Geoff is interested in how these innovative organizations are launched, how they access and use resources, and how early decisions impact future work.

We’re thrilled that Geoff will be bringing his expertise on nonprofit organizational structure to the Common Datatrust Foundation as we work on creating a nonprofit that sets new standards for transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness.

Now that ads are ’specially targeted to each one of us individually, how do you feel about the ads that are finding you?

Here’s Microsoft’s take on the situation. Not exactly news, but I just found it here.

Here are some snippets from the dialogue:

Consumer:
You’re not even listening are you?
We don’t talk anymore.
You do all the talking.
It’s not really a dialog.
You say you love me, but you’re not behaving like you love me.

Advertiser
They said you would love everything I did.

Consumer:
You’re not even listening are you?
If you knew me…

Advertiser:
Know you? Sweetheart, I know everything about you. You’re 28….to 34 You’re online interests include music, moves…and laser hair removal. You have a modest, but dependable disposable income.

Consumer:
I’m out of here.

The problem is: How are advertisers going to listen more closely to consumers given the privacy models we have today? How closely do you want them to be listening anyway?

Not very, according to this article.

But what if advertising simply became a service that helps you find what you need and discover what you want? Like a personal shopper or interior decorator. Or a financial adviser or psycho-pharmacologist. How far would you be willing to go in this relationship? And would it still be advertising?

I forgot my camera the first time I saw this exhibit on a Friday night, with free admission courtesy of Target, and so the photos below don’t capture the enthusiasm and almost sweaty energy of the intense crowd that filled every corner of the exhibition space that night. These photos are from early Wednesday morning last week, with a considerably thinner crowd, and although they’re not fantastic photos, I hope they show some of the curiosity and engagement I saw on people’s faces.

An example of Mimi’s point: data of flight patterns imposed on a map, immediately conveying information as well as something nice to look at.

A sweet and funny work playing with data from online dating sites, certainly a database of societal concerns, if not as serious as the Architecture and Justice piece on prison populations.

And last, something completely unrelated to data, but probably best at conveying how fun this whole exhibition is.

Two examples of “data” becoming a mainstream consumer good.

1. Youtube launches video stats

Ostensibly, the service is aimed at the “general public” uploading videos.

“Insight gives the creators an inside look into the viewing trends of their videos on YouTube, and helps them to increase views and become more popular,” said YouTube Product Manager Tracy Chan.

But of course, such a tool is useful to advertisers as well.

“Partners can evaluate metrics to better serve and understand their audiences, as well as increase ad revenue. And advertisers can study their metrics and successes to tailor their marketing — both on and off the site — and reach the right viewers.”

2. More exciting is Patients Like Me.com

PLM is a web service that provides treatment data for diseases like Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS, collected from individuals.From the recent NYT Magazine profile:

…PatientsLikeMe seeks to go a mile deeper than health-information sites like WebMD or online support groups like Daily Strength. The members of PatientsLikeMe don’t just share their experiences anecdotally; they quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. They note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages and score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over time, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the software behind the site. And it’s all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient experience.

Why is this interesting? Well, instead of establishing a parasitic relationship between the web service and their users where the service more or less “spies” on their users, and then makes money off of the the data they collect by selling it to advertisers, PatientsLikeMe sets up individuals and web services in a symbiotic relationship where the user has a stake in the data because the user is the one that gets value out of the aggregates. This is not only more sustainable from a PR perspective, but also from a data quality perspective. If you’re trying to understand how your personal treatment profile stacks up against others; the more detailed and accurate your information is, the more you get out of the service, the more valuable the service is to you and to others.With Youtube, Google is still playing cat and mouse with their users, hoping they won’t notice or care about the data that’s being collected and sold.  PatientsLikeMe on the other hand, is part of an emerging crop of web services (Freshbooks and Wesabe to name 2 in the finance genre) that build a symbiotic relationship with their users. Of this new breed of data-driven services,  PatientsLikeMe is perhaps the most ground-breaking because the user’s relationship to the service is (for a change) just so obvious:

The community as a whole succeeds or fails on the individual contributions of its members.