Paul Resnick's Occasional Musings

Rewards program for social networking activity

Tue, 27 May 2008 18:38:27 GMT

As part of the CommunityLab project, for the past five years I've been doing research related to incentives for participation in online communities. Now one of my colleagues, Yan Chen, is working with a startup company, urTurn, that has created a cross-platform rewards program. That is, you accumulate points for posting photos or making friend links in social network sites like Facebook and MySpace. Then you turn in the points for prizes.

I'm not quite sure what their business model will be (what do they get from having people accumulate points on their site)? But it will be interesting to see how motivating the points are for people, and how they will prevent various attempts to game the system.

So, sign up, help Yan with her research (she has no financial stake in the company), and win valuable prizes!

How newsgroups refer to NetScan data

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:53:29 GMT

Reflections and Reactions to Social Accounting Meta-Data. Eric Gleave (U of Washington) and Marc Smith (Microsoft Research). At C&T.

In 18 months, there were about 5000 messages that explicitly referred to "netscan.research". Analyzed/coded 952 messages.

Basic findings:

Half discuss groups. 80% of those linking to the Netscan report card for the group, 17% explicitly discuss the group's "health".

22% discuss the message's author, such as saying that the author is #1 in the group.

31% discuss others, including their stats; 5% of these are "troll checks"

48% discuss the Netscan system itself

Some discussion points:

Helpful for comparisons between competing groups on similar topics

Reduces costs of monitoring and sanctioning

Facilitates construction and maintenance of status

Identifies people who are trolls

Rhythms of social interaction at Facebook

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:18:37 GMT

Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network. Scott A. Golder, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman (HP labs).

Scott Golder presenting at C&T. Log analysis of Facebook messaging patterns, from 496 North American universities.

The college weekend goes Friday noon to Sunday noon. Message traffic follows the same pattern Mon-Thurs. Friday morning is same as Mon-Thurs. morning. Sunday afternoon/evening is same as Mon-Thurs. Saturday all day, plus Friday PM and Sunday AM, have much lower traffic.

45% of messages and pokes went to people at different schools. However, this percentage was much lower in the late night/early morning hours.

Perhaps the most surprising result is the seasonal variation in the percentage of messages that are within versus between schools. During vacations, the percentage of within-school messages increases! The authors give the plausible explanation that the messaging is substituting for in-person communication between the same people that would occur when school is in session. This seems surprising to me, however, as I would have thought that the complementarity effect would be stronger-- you send a poke or message to someone that you saw earlier today or expect to see later today. It would be interesting to see some future research that explores more directly the complementarity/substitution effects of various communication modalities with f2f meetings in everyday use.

Group Formation in Large Social Networks

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:01:11 GMT

L. Backstrom, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg and X. Lan. "Group Formation in Large Social Networks: Membership, Growth, and Evolution", Proceedings of KDD 2006.

Datasets on membership in LiveJournal groups and explicit "friend" relationships; and on publishing in conferences and explicit citations between authors.

Question 1: How does the probability of joining a group depend on the friends who are already in it?
A: 'The data suggest a “law of diminishing returns” at work, where having additional friends in a group has successively smaller effect but nonetheless continues to increase the chance of joining...' But if a greater percentage of the friends are linked to each other, the probability of joining is even higher. They suggest that a "strength of weak ties" argument would suggest the opposite of this finding (you're more likely to find out new info from weak ties who don't know each other). But I think decisions about joining require much more than just finding out about the community. (See next blog entry on what makes people commit to/stay in a community.)

Question 2: Which communities will grow over time?
A: Here the characteristics provide a little less predictive power. One obvious one, given the result above, is if there are a lot of people who have a lot of friends in the group, then the group will have larger growth in the next time period. Somewhat more puzzling is that the more three-person cliques in the group, the less the group grows. This could reflect that stagnant groups eventually develop more links among members and hence more cliques.

Question 3: "given a set of overlapping communities, do topics tend to follow people, or do people tend to follow topics?"
A: More frequently, people active in a conference where a topic is hot start going to other conferences where the topic is already hot, rather than the transplantation of people causing the topic to become hot.

Kraut: Developing Commitment Through Conversation

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:19:05 GMT

Today I'm at the Communities and Technologies conference, at the workshop on studying interaction in online communities.

Bob Kraut is discussing some of the data analysis issues in his study in Usenet newsgroups of what independent variables predict whether a message would get responded to.

They first did some machine learning techniques to identify the signature of messages that have a "self-introduction". Then they used that as a regressor, along with some directly measurable variables like using first-person pronouns.

He and Moira Burke have a paper tomorrow where they did a controlled experiment. They found that the key ingredient is saying that you're part of the community, not that you share the interest/condition around which the group has formed.

Collusion-resistant, Incentive-compatible

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 13:17:23 GMT

At EC-07, Radu Jurca presented a paper extending work on eliciting honest ratings to consider situations where a set of players may collude to increase their payments for ratings. The setting is the same as that of my paper with Nolan Miller and Richard Zeckhauser, on the "The Peer Prediction Method". That is, a set of raters are scored based on comparing their reports to the reports of other raters-- there is no ultimate ground truth of whether the item is "good" that can be used to evaluate the raters.

Our paper showed that it is possible to construct payments that make honest reporting a Nash Equilibrium (i.e., best thing to do if others are doing it) while creating an expected reward large enough to encourage effort required for the raters to acquire a quality signal about the item. The technique is based on proper scoring rules, applied to the posterior distribution for a reference rater, computed from the prior distribution and the rater's report. Jurca and Faltings considers whether it's possible to make such incentive payments resistant to collusion (e.g., all raters agree to report that the item is good).

Interestingly, the authors find that it is useful to make incentive payments based on the ratings of more than one reference rater. Instead of just adding up the payments determined independently by each of their reports, which I assumed would be the most effective way to do it, the payments are tied to a count of the number of reference raters who report that the item is good. Consider, for example, if the implied probability distribution for each of the reference raters is that each will report "good" with probability 0.6. Then, the number who will report good follows a binomial distribution. By carefully choosing the points a rater gets for reporting "good" or "bad" when n other people report "good", it is possible to rule out some forms of collusion. For example, with 10 raters and a prior probability distribution that each will report "good" with probability 0.5, it is easy to see that we can make the payoff be 0 when either none or all report "good", yet make the payoff for 6 total "goods" when you report good be high enough that you will want to report "good" whenever you see it, if you think others will report honestly. Nolan Miller, Richard Zeckhauser and I had the basic intuition that we could punish all the raters if there was "more than the expected amount of agreement". This fleshes out that intuition with a concrete way of setting the incentive payments.

The most interesting result in this paper comes in section 7, which considers "sybil attacks". One person controls several raters, which I'll refer to as sybils (split identities of the person). They each acquire a real signal. The person is trying to maximize the sum of the expected payoffs of the raters. The authors find that, depending on the particular prior distribution, if one or just a few reference raters is assumed to act honestly, the incentive payoffs can be constructed so that even if the rest of the raters are sybils controlled by a single entity, they cannot do better than to report the same number of "good" ratings as they actually perceived. The technique is a brute force approach (automated mechanism design) that just writes down each of the incentive compatibility constraints (for each possible number of good ratings perceived, the expected payoff given the distribution of ratings from the honest raters, is higher for honest reporting than for any false report) and then solves the linear programming problem to find the smallest expected payment subject to those constraints. It would be nice to get some stronger intuitions about what kind of payments will be selected by the brute force approach. That is, how is it leveraging the small number of honest raters to drive the colluding raters toward honest reporting? Still, I laud the authors for fine work in demonstrating that it generally is possible to resist such collusion, so long as they expect there to be a few honest raters around.

Radu Jurca and Boi Faltings, "Collusion-resistant, Incentive-compatible Feedback Payments", Proceedings of ACM EC'07, P.200-209.

Recommenders and Sales Diversity

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:14:44 GMT

At the EC '07 conference, Kartik Hosanagar presented a paper modeling the impact of recommender systems on sales diversity. Do they contribute to a long tail, where lots of products get a few sales, or do they reinforce blockbusters. The paper suggests the latter.

There are actually two effects that we should expect from recommenders. One is discovery-- once one person discovers an item, some other people with similar tastes who would not have found that item do find it. The other is reinforcement-- an item that many people have sampled will be more likely to get recommended.

The paper provides a simple two-item, two-player, two-urn model in section 4. Unfortunately, it begins with an assumption that both players have the same probabilities of choosing the two items, in the absence of a recommender. Without diversity in what people who choose without the recommender, it doesn't seem to capture the discovery effect for recommenders.

Section 5 seems to provide a more promising simulation framework. Consumers have different "ideal points" in the space, and thus are likely to select some distribution of items in absence of a recommender. The recommender that increases the salience of some items to people that are little farther from their ideal point. Even here, however, it doesn't quite seem to capture the phenomenon that the recommender makes salient an item that is in fact closer to the consumer's ideal than what the consumer would have found. It seems to me that you'd need a variant of the Hotelling model where there's a separate model of item salience that is not completely determined by the distance from the customer's ideal. Things that are already blockbusters would be more likely to be noticed and chosen, even if farther from the customer's ideal. That's kind of how the recommender is modeled, but I think it needs to be applied to the base choice model, not just the effect of the recommender system.

D. Fleder, K. Hosanagar "Recommender Systems and Their Impact on Sales Diversity", Proceedings of ACM EC '07, pp.192-199.

Peer Prediction Method with Reduced Payments

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:34:05 GMT

ACM EC 06. Jurca and Faltings

Work extends my "Peer Prediction" paper, written with Nolan Miller and Richard Zeckhauser, on eliciting honest reports, by comparing reports between people.

Automatically selects a scoring rule, with lower expected payments but still incentive compatible.

Has some mechanism for probabilitistically filtering out unusual ratings. I'll have to look at the paper to see the details of this.

Claims that the honest reporting equilibrium is evolutionarily stable, meaning that small coalitions can't attack it. Again, I'll have to take a look at this.

Collaborative Filtering with Privacy

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:21:11 GMT

ACM EC '06. Presentation on privacy-preserving collaborative filtering.

Previous approaches:

secure multi-party computation to compute eignevectors (Canny).

add noise to each rating

This paper shows that adding noise may not preserve as much privacy as you' d like. If the noise for each rating is a random draw from the same distribution, and if there is a finite set of possible ratings, then you can make a pretty good backward inference about what the original ratings were. The basic idea is...

The solution in this paper is to have users add a variable amount of noise to their ratings, not the same draw for each item.

I haven't had a chance to read the paper in detail yet, but it seems quite elegant. I hope I'll be able to use it in my recommender systems course this fall, though the math may be too advanced.

ACM EC 06: Fudenberg invited lecture

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:24:48 GMT

I'm at the ACM EC conference for the next couple days. Computer Science theory/algorithms/AI people looking at economic incentive issues.

This talk: "Stable Superstitions and Rational Steady State Learning", given by Drew Fudenberg (joint work with Levine)

(These are scattered notes taken during the actual talk. If it seems to the reader that it's getting at something interesting, you can probably get better intuitions about it, and more accurate characterization of results, from a paper, or a set of slides posted by Levine.)

Context: Learning in games. Anonymous random matching. Some history of previous papers that went too fast to capture.

"Self-confirming equilibrium"; less restrictive than Nash. No one can do better with "rational experimentation." Nash requires people to know what would happen if you deviate.

Agents off equlibirum path play infrequently, so have much less incentive to experiment. Wrong steps one step off equilibrium can't be stable, but wrong steps two off equilibrium can.

Illustration: Hmmurabi's second law. Accused person is thrown in river. If lives, accuser is killed. if dies, accuser gets their property.
Superstition: guilty are more likely to drown than innocent. This supersition is stable, because accusers rarely get to find out, because if they believe it, they won't accuse the innocent, and they don't get to find out.
Alternative supersitition: guilty will be struck by lightning. This superstition is not stable. Kids try petty crime and discover they're not struck by lightning.

Rational Steady-State Learning
Agent's decision problem: each agent in role i expects to play T times. Agent observes only terminal node each time. Agent believes faces time-invariant distribution of opponents' strategies. (This is wrong, but hopefully a reasonable model of how people would actually be thinking.) Steady states are where people play strategies that are optimal given the information they have from the previous rounds.

Results focus on characterizing steady states as T tends to infinity-- most players have lots of observations of play (but only rational experimentation in those rounds of play), and htere are few novices in the game in any round.

Asymptotic result for Hammurabi caes: there will be no crimes (in the limit of arbitrarily long lifetimes). With long but finite T, some crimes are committed, some false accusations take place, and people making false accusations learn that they work. But if there are few opportunities for being a witness, then there's no rational interest in experimenting with false accusation, because you won't get to do it very often even if you find out that the false accusation works.

Model highlights the role of experimentation in determining when a superstition is likely to survice.

David Parkes: question about applications to Sponsord Search design-- implications for encouraging experimentation or sharing information learned from experimentation.

NetSquared Human Rights Session

Tue, 30 May 2006 22:47:47 GMT

Patrick Ball, Benetech
Small organizations on the ground don't want to share their data-- it's their ticket of entry to policy discussions. They do need crypto and communication so they can get their data to a secure place even if their laptops are impounded.

Make it serve the local need of the person entering the data, and by the way have it do the stuff that's good for the organization and the long haul.

Has been doing statistical analysis to estimate prevalence of Human Rights violations, based on counts and overlaps between sources.

Dan McQuillen, Amnesty International
Mashups are a great publicity/marketing opportunity for human rights organization.
The big human rights battles are about to be fought out on the Internet-- things like

Bryan Nunez, Witness
Trains human rights activists/defenders on use of video (cameras, editing, distribution). Help them use the video as part an action plan.
-------------------------------
Patrick is very concerned about Internet filtering. (Years ago he challenged me about PICS at a CFP conference. Now he's concerned about Google's community tagging and how it might be used by ISPs for filtering. Had an interesting conversation with him at lunch about this.)

NetSquared: state of Open Source Software for Nonprofits

Tue, 30 May 2006 22:16:05 GMT

Some audience questions before the start of the session:

Is Open Source relevant? Or are open APIs all that matters?

Are there underlying values for NPOs choosing tech, or is it just a question of picking what works best

David Geilhufe's arguments for open source for the non-profit sector: avoid duplication of effort; encourage innovation.

OpenBRR (open business readiness rating)-- more appropriate criteria for making decisions on open source than if you use the usual criteria that have been articulated for commercial products.

Zack Rosen on the CivicSpace ecology.
Communities:

Drupal

CivicSpace Foundation

OpenNGO-- the CRM portion

Vendors/Service Providers

CivicSpace, Inc.

CivicActions

Echo Ditto

...+20 more

In the CRM space, biggest three vendors are Kintera, Convio, GetActive. Then there's a long tail with the little vendors. But if you aggregate all the vendors, the CiviCRM community is number two, and much more profitable. Tools are advancing exponentially faster. Vendors in the OpenSource space are bidding 10-50% of commercial market leaders. One and two person shops are bidding against market leaders and winning.

The Mambo/Joomla fork. Major developers didn't like what the people in charge of Mambo did, so they left on masse, and were able to take the source code with them.

NetSquared, CitizenJournalism session

Tue, 30 May 2006 19:12:54 GMT

Dan Gillmor. Citizen Journalism is becoming the norm. Eyewitness reports from disasters are just the beginning. Digg is the darling example now because it has ratings of news stories, though he also mentions Slashdot for rating the commentary. (Look for the new interface reading comments on Slashdot, coming soon, that I've been working on with students Youn-ah Kang and Nathan Oostendorp!)

The OhmyNews story. Korea. Extremely successful; has become one of the most influential publications in Korea. 43,000 citizen reporters==>screening by news Guerilla Desk. Mostly reviews, commentary. Also 65 staff reporters, mostly hard news, analysis. But there's a lot of blending between them. Now trying an international version, and a partnership with a prestigious newspaper in Japan. 86 countries with 1000 citizen reporters so far on international version. Doubling about every 3 months.

Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices. Story of Hao Wu, blogger detained without charge in China. Effort to publicize his case got much easier once Hao Wu's sister started blogging about the case. Lesson: "Don't speak. Point." Don't try to speak on behalf of others-- just point to those who are speaking on their own behalf.

Some notes from NetSquared, Session 1

Tue, 30 May 2006 19:12:29 GMT

At NetSquared

Howard Rheingold: "Still need a residue of hierarchy, but it can be a pretty small one"

Paul Saffo: "The power of the whisper"

My summary of the morning: when the analysis gets complicated, just remember, "It's the participation, stupid."

From the floor: "a just society means 'not just my society' "

On to Calaveras for WineCamp

Tue, 30 May 2006 16:47:09 GMT

At the dinner after Online Community Camp, Greg Beuthin from ComputMentor told me about WineCamp, where geeks and non-profits were camping out for the weekend. Some of the people from CivicSpace were going to be there, and a major goal of my trip to NetSquared (starting Tuesday, today) was to connect with them. So off I went on Friday afternoon, after a day talking about my research at Yahoo!

Unlike the Online Community Camp, which had borrowed some un-conference ideas, this was the real deal. Saturday morning people introduced themselves, gave a few "tags" to describe themselves, and said what they hoped to get out of the conference. Tibba Phillips, founder of Output for Hope, which helps people find missing persons who are "off the grid", said she was looking to upgrade their website to include a more easily searchable database, so that the project could scale up. Zack Rosen said his goal for the weekend was to build Libba's database. On my turn I piped in that I wanted to watch/help him do it. It became a big barnraising activity, with about 10 people involved by Sunday.

It actually turned out to be an informative dry run for the course I'm planning for winter semester, where teams of students will develop custom sites, using the drupal CMS platform, for non-profit organization clients. Saturday, when we had no power or connectivity, we did requirements analysis. On Sunday, indoors at a winery, we implemented. We only had about 3.5 hours. Zack, Tim Bonneman, and I trasnferred much of the content of the existing site. Several hackers from CivicCRM put together the database part, by using their tools to add custom fields to their basic person-data entity. WineCamp organizer Chris Messina made a new theme so that suddenly, two hours into the work, our generic drupal-themed site transformed to have the look and feel of the existing Output for Hope site that we were copying. I worked on adding help material to the site so that their web volunteer would be able to maintain it. We didn't quite get to a site they can roll out, but we got pretty close and there's a good chance that their web volunteer will be able to take it the rest of the way. Here's the work in progress.

I also connected with Laney from The Princess Project, which is trying to scale up or franchise or do a chapter model of some kind. In a quick brainstorm with Laney and David Geilhufe, we hatched the idea of an online kit that would allow people to self-organize in a new city, and have their progress tracked in various ways so that the national organization could provide appropriate resources at different points, and there could be peer to peer support among chapters. It's basically a franchising/chapter model of scalable organizing, but with some new twists made possible by technology and the peer-to-peer sharing ethos.

I think this peer-to-peer chapter organizing, coordinated by a central toolkit, could actually be the big idea about how IT can help rebuild social capital that I was supposed to come up with for the Saguaro Seminar, but never did. On the ride home, Zack pointed out that this new chapter/franchising model was pretty much what they had tried to do in the Dean campaign. It's also related to what Meetup has been trying to do. And it's sort of what BarCamp is already putting into practice.

It was also a truly wonderful experience for the senses. Wine from Ferriere vineyards, swimming through a cavern, sleeping under the stars, amazing vistas, yoga in the woods.

See photos from the Flickr feed (WineCampCalaveras):

Online Community Camp

Thu, 25 May 2006 18:08:46 GMT

I'm at an Online Community Camp.
"Camp" is the new word for conferences that are only loosely organized-- people propose topics at the beginning of the day and people go to whatever seems interesting.

Who's here:

Vendors

Consultants

Community managers, web producers at companies, non-profits, and media outfits

one student from Stanford, and me, reprenting academia

----------------
Topics they're interested in:

how to change platforms; how to select platforms

How to quantify ROI, to justify and get resources

Some inteest in reputation

Using online communities for market research

Media wants audience to talk with each other, how to facilitate that

Multiple communities, how to not require multiple destinations, cross-site integration

Practical applications of Web 2.0-- what's hype vs. useful

How to apply social networking/myspace

Extracting/summarizing from online discussions
--integration with corporate

Online/offline connection

Best practices across the board

Combining data from other sources about people with data from online communities.

Blogs and RSS vs. conventional discussion boards

A Lost Social Capital Opportunity?

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 01:33:44 GMT

Briefly, I thought there might be an opportunity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for America to generate a huge amount of bridging social capital, as people with financial resources (enoguh to have a spare suite or apartment) offered assistance to people on a one-to-one basis. There's been a huge outpouring of offers. But the official response seems to be to prefer big shelters and commercial rentals for longer term, rather than person-to-person aid. The adopt-a-family program I've heard about in Texas, where the adopting family is supposed to provide aid other than housing (like getting oriented, finding schools, etc.), seems like a nice exception.

Apparently, people with more resources and more connections have been leaving the shelter system to stay with friends and family. When they're ready for more permanent housing, some of them seem to be making use of individual offers of assistance, often found through friend-of-a-friend, sometimes with someone in the chain consulting Internet-based information resources.

It seems like a lost opportunity that the people with fewest resources, who are still in the shelter system, are not getting connected to people of greater means at a time when those people who are well-off are unusually open to a human connection accross class lines. It could have had a positive long-term impact on the social fabric of America. Here's to hoping the connections still happen, perhaps if adopt-a-family or welcome-wagon programs take off in the coming weeks.

Mapping America's Generosity

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 01:21:22 GMT

We at the UM School of Information, with extraordinary help from people around the country, have been burning the midnight oil the past week, and have now launched a very cool interface to the many offers of housing that people have made online. See http://katrinahousing.net and click on "combined search".

Resistance to Private Housing Matches for People Displaced by Katrina

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 03:21:41 GMT

Here's a story about a flashpoint in the central control versus distributed self-organization drama that’s been playing out in many ways throughout society in recent years, enabled at least in part by the Internet.

There are many websites where people are offering private housing, free, to people displaced by Katrina. We’ve been creating an aggregator site for those various websites (katrinahousing.net). This led us to learn that the U.S. Government and professional relief organizations like the Red Cross are not completely comfortable with this person-to-person aid from strangers idea (hosts don’t know what they’re getting into and may not be prepared to do it well; some hosts or guests might be unsavory). We learned about this concern in an abstract way on Thursday from talking to an Ann Arbor Red Cross official, but now we have a very concrete example.

Bruce Vinkemulder, a minister from Battle Creek, MI arranged to send a bus to a shelter in Mississippi, where displaced people had signed up to go on the bus. Apparently, he wanted to get official approval and kept getting bumped up the chain, until a regional Red Cross director gave a more direct “no”, and said they wouldn’t be letting people go until they’d been processed, which would probably take a week. He also got a similar answer from the National Guard in Battle Creek, which already has upwards up 1,000 people temporarily housed there, though they are letting him in to do Bible study tomorrow. [Note: turns out those people weren't there yet, but some did arrive later. --PR 9/9/05]

It’s not obvious to me whether the take-it-slow, do-it-the-professional-way approach is better than the people-to-people approach in this situation. Certainly, the human costs to people in the shelters of staying there a long time can be pretty high (even if they get access to professional counselors they wouldn’t get access to if they dispersed). On the other hand, if masses of people rely on the kindness of individual strangers, there are bound to be some bad outcomes that result. My assessment is that, on balance, given the numbers of people displaced in the current situation, it would be better to encourage person-to-person aid rather than try to put the brakes on it.

What’s new in the current situation is that our ability to coordinate that kind of person-to-person aid is far greater now, with the Internet, than it’s ever been in the past. We’ve been able to jump the boundaries of social networks, in order to connect resources that were socially distant. Consider, for example, how we hooked up with the Battle Creek minister. Someone we knew had posted an offer on an Internet site. Someone working with Bruce used the Internet to contact our friend. My wife, Caroline, ran into her on the street and put us in touch with Battle Creek group. My wife then agreed to try to find housing for six families in Ann Arbor who weren’t spoken for in Battle Creek. We are using both our social networks, Internet postings, and the newspaper, to try to recruit those additional hosts.

Anyway, I think it would be interesting to investigate how widespread the resistance of the Red Cross and National Guard is to private home placements, and what impact that is having on the overall situation.

Youth Bulges' Impacts on Adolescent Civic Knowledge and Participation

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:57:49 GMT

Hart, D., R. Atkins, P. Markey and J. Youniss (2003). "Youth Bulges in Communities: The Effects of Age Structure on Adolescent Civic Knowledge and Civic Participation." Psychological Science 15(9): 591-597.

Three studies linking age structure (percentage of youth in the population) to civic outcomes. Conclusion: civic participation and civic knowledge patterns are transmitted socially, not just by immediately household.

Starting point: youth are more likely to volunteer, but have less civic knowledge (empirical finding for U.S. population).

Question: are young people who live in communities with more youth saturation even more likely to volunteer (and less likely to have civic knowledge) than young people who live in communities with more adults?

Answer: Yes. Even controlling for demographic factors and for characteristics of the survey respondents' parents (e.g., education, income, whether they volunteer, etc.)

This result also seems to hold up internationally: greater youth population correlates with more volunteering and less civic knowledge (even controlling for GDP).

convincing people about optimal strategies

Mon, 02 May 2005 18:47:25 GMT

In some of the applied game theoretic mechanism design work that I do, and that I hear other people present, I've noticed a recurring concern. In some mechanism (for auctions, for example), the designer of the mechanism may be able to prove that some strategy (say, honest revelation of one's preferences) is part of an equilibrium (an optimal strategy given some assumption about others' strategies), or is even a dominant strategy (an optimal strategy no matter what everyone else does). But it might not be obvious to participants in the game that they cannot gain from deviating.

For example, in my paper with Nolan Miller and Richard Zeckhauser on eliciting effort and honest evaluations, honest reporting of one's evaluation of a product is a best response (in expected value terms) if everyone else is also reporting honestly. It's best in expected value terms, but in particular realizations, an individual may regret reporting honestly. And the proof that it's best in expected value terms depends on understanding: a) the logarithm function, and b) either Jensen's inequality, or the ability to take a derivative of the log function.

The issue came up again today in a talk I saw incoming SI Ph.D. student John Lin give about lab experiments with different mutli-unit auction formats.

Someone should do some research about how to convince users that non-strategic behavior is incentive compatible when mathematical analysis demonstrates that it is. If you know of any work related to this, I'd love to hear about it.

CHI Workshop: Beyond Threaded Conversation

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 13:32:08 GMT

At the CHI conference, we held a workshop about new ways of organizing on-line conversation, beyond just grouping messages into "topics" and organizing them based on the "reply-to" structure.

Derek Hansen, one of my Ph.D. students, did the primary lifting in organizing the workshop, and he did an excellent job of running the session. We had 25 really high-caliber participants and we seemed to have enough common background to not just talk past each other (though that happened occasionally).

The website with participants' position papers is currently password protected, but we will be removing the password protection soon.

Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 22:55:23 GMT

I've been in England this week for the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. Before the meeting in Oxford, David Halpern of the Prime Minister's hosted a meeting, and Will Davies invited a bunch of people involved in civic technology initiatives in the UK.

Sorry for the length of this post, but here are some highlights of interesting people I met on this trip:

I've been wanting to meet David Halpern for several years, because Bob Putnam has suggested it several times. Having met him, I now understand why. He's exactly what I'd want in my country for an academic-truned-public servant: thoughtful, open to new ideas, trying to get to the bottom of things, wanting to experiment but really learn from such experiments, but still action oriented. I hope I'll get to be part of some future advisory group that he assembles to design careful experimentation on civic technologies.
Will Davies wrote a very nice report last year on uses of technology for local communication.
Tom Steinberg, MySociety. Very interesting guy. He was kind enough to give me a little walking tour of the area around parliament after the Strategy Unit meeting, and also arranged to have drinks with William Perrin, Director of Strategy and Policy for the Cabinet Office e-Government unit, and also introduced me to several people during the Skoll Workshop. MySociety is incubating several interesting experiments, including PledgeBank, which allows people to "pledge" that they'll do some civic activity if enough other people join them. Sort of combines the idea of public RSVPs that I think is the power behind eVite with goal setting and "thresholds" or "provision points" for public goods. Wom, William, and I hatched some ideas about government support for a civic technologies platform, with open APIs and a free hosting service if you agree to open source your software-- once you've demonstrated sufficient usage of some service, you'd qualify for a proper government evaluation of the public benefits, which could then lead to further subsidies. It seems like a nice idea, because it would allow continual bubbling up of new initiatives, without anyone in government having to decide too early which seemed most promising.
Ellie Stonely, from UK Villages. This non-profit is a shoestring operation, with 3 staff, piecing together funding. But they've got a useful portal of local information. Several British sites have data indexed by postal code (which are very fine-grained, often identifying as few as a dozen houses), and they link into those. But they also allow anyone to post village notices. They again take advantage of geographic indexing to automatically show things in nearby towns using a distance-based search. In the U.S. these kinds of sites are all defined around hub cities, but here every town is its own hub, collecting notices from a radius around it.
Someone from the BBC's iCan project was there (didn't get cards, but Tom Loosemore and James Cronin were on the invite list for the event). This BBC-developed portal, still in beta, encourages people to organize all kinds of civic and political activities, and provides tools for coordinating them.
Alejandro Litovsky, from the Keystone project at AccountAbility. He's a colleague of David Bonbright who I met earlier this winter at a meeting in New York. David helped me connect the research I've been doing for a dozen years on recommender/reputation systems with the notion of democratizing accountability, which is an important social mission in its own right and something of increasing importance to the non-profit/civil society sector, where questions of legitimacy and accountability are rising to the fore. David is trying to figure out new accountability processes for civil society organizations that will also serve internally to enhance organizational learning. Alejandro is trying to organize a global dialogue on the question of civil society accountability and we had some interesting discussion about how to organize that dialogue in an inclusive way.
Ed Mayo from the UK National Consumer Council is thinking about recommender systems for products, especially ticket items and where there's not repeat interaction between a single customer and provider.
I caught up with Mark Moore, from Harvard's Kennedy School, who I knew from the Saguaro Seminar.
The most exciting connection (and that's saying a lot, as I look over the rest of the list) was with JB Schramm of College Summit, who I recognized because David Bornstein told a story about him during his lecture at Michigan earlier this winter. (David was also at the meeting, and I got to have dinner with him one night.) J.B. and I hatched an idea about how to use recommender/reputation systems to help more students from less elite high schools get into colleges. We played hooky from one session and spent a long time mapping out ideas and evaluation methods. Possible project pending.
Paul Hodgkin, of Primary Care Futures was on the panel with me. He described a system for patient ratings of health care providers that will go into beta test in one region of England next year, nicely coinciding with a big move the National Health System is making toward patient choice about which provider they'd like to go to for care. They've thought through many of the details quite nicely, including offering ongoing information to patients (e.g., reminders, directions to upcoming appointments) so that when they send a follow-up after the care, people will be more likely to fill it out. They're also offering to patients that if the comment is positive, they can have a note sent directly to care providers ("thanks to Nurse Mary on the third floor for providing such wonderful care during my recovery..."), which I'm guessing will be quite popular. They may suffer from the usual problem of grade inflation-- how to get people to express mild dissatisfaction, and not fear that others will overreact to it if it turns out not be a pattern. I suggested the possibility of letting patients volunteer to act as on-line "guides" or "mentors" to future patients. They already were thinking about ways to have facilitate support of various kinds (e.g., 10 questions that previous patients suggest you ask your doctor), and he thought that individual matching might be an interesting possibility as well. If it works, it would be an incredible example of using technology to convert potential social capital into real.
Some possible connections for students interested in international information work:
- James Fruchterman from Benetech, which develops software for human rights organizations and other tools to "help solve social problems with sustainable enterprises". (My high school soccer teammate Patrick Ball works there now. He's apparently the world's foremost statistical expert on human rights monitoring, and testified at Milosevic's trial.)
- Rodrigo Baggio from CDI, which runs a whole network of community technology and learning centers in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. He was one of the "Skoll Awardees". They had a very nice ceremony, MCed by actor Ben Kingsley (from Gandhi). It was a genuinely moving ceremony: you couldn't help but be amazed by the things these people have accomplished. Rodrigo was the first to receive his plaque, and he got things off to a good start by raising his hands above his head in genuine celebration.
- Martin Burt from Fundacion Paraguaya, which teaches entrepreneurial skills to youth in Paraguay. He was another Skoll Awardee.
- Karen Tse from International Bridges to Justice, which is establishing legal assistance networks in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam. She's thinking about a knowledge management system to connect their participants.
The first night at dinner I was seated next to Sushmita Ghosh, President of Ashoka. (CEO and founder Bill Drayton was also there and gave a very good plenary speech, but I didn't get a chance to talk with him.) She had just heard about collaborative filtering recently, as a result of an Economist article, and was very interested. I was amazed that she was able to quote something from the article about the difference between item-to-item vs. person-to-person filtering methods. For someone to be far enough removed from the tech world to have not heard about collaborative filtering until this year, but to grasp that distinction and remember it a week or two later, that's one smart cookie. I'm not kidding-- she was the first to mention the term item-to-item, not me!
Someone from the Calvert Foundation (I think Tim Freundlich) was part of last night's dinner group. Calvert Foundation runs an investment fund that makes loans to community development organizations. Caroline and I are investors, so that was kind of fun. I was surprised that he knew our investment advisor by name and had met him (apparently, the advisors are a key way that funds get the word out, so they put some effort into marketing to them individually).
A report on Evaluation in the Field of Social Entrepreneurship was just released, and discussed at one of the sessions. It's available for download at Foundation Strategy Group's website.
Brian Trelstad of the Acumen Fund, a social venture capital fund. He's just finished an article for a Stanford business publication, evaluating the non-profit org evaluators like GuideStar. I'm looking forward to getting a copy.
Melanie Edwards, a Stanford lecturer, started MediaMobile, which gathers demographic and market data in Brazilian slums, by having local residents go door-to-door surveying neighbors. Unlike low-income communities in the U.S., who sometimes are fearful of census takers and turned off by marketers, she says that in these commmunities people are generally so glad that anyone wants to hear their opinion that they answer very openly.
There were a couple interesting sessions with MBA students from elite business schools in the US and Europe. One of the emerging ideas from the session and discussion afterwards was that professional schools are really training people to be Chief Operating Officers for social enterprises, not to start them. If we want those organizations to be high-performance organizations, then COOs are going to be helpful. But we shouldn't get confused with training entrepreneurs, for which professional degrees aren't the best path. I met Beth Anderson, faculty at Duke's Fuqua school after that session.

Pew report on Internet's impact on expusure to political arguments

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 21:03:29 GMT

A report issued last week shows that Internet users have more exposure to political arguments than non-users, and even have more exposure to arguments that challenge the positions they hold.

I co-authored the report with Ph.D. student Kelly Garrett and with John Horrigan from Pew. This is part of Kelly's Ph.D. thesis work. He's on the job market this year and will be a great catch for a comm studies or information program. Ask me if you're hiring...