More notes and thoughts from the Social Technologies Summit.

James Marriot from Platform argued that corporations should be consigned delicately and with grace to the annals of the museum since their raison d’etre (the production of profit from natural resources) make them a direct threat to the environment. The argument is potent but has been made more forcefully in the 2007 documentary The Corporation. However, the organisation that James works for, Platform, does look interesting:

For over 20 years, PLATFORM has been bringing together environmentalists, artists, human rights campaigners, educationalists and community activists to create innovative projects driven by the need for social and environmental justice.

This interdisciplinary approach combines the transformatory power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigour of in-depth research with the vision to promote alternative futures. (from Platform)

Ewan McIntosh has been interested in killing off industrial education for a while now. He’s engaging and affable. And although he started his talk looking at the ways education could be refashioned by adopting principles and practices emerging from social networking sites, his main interests are now wider-ranging. He touched on a number of these: privacy, trust, reputation, and emotion. What he didn’t do was delve into any detail.

Privacy: education should pay more heed to the principle that ‘the data is mine so let me keep it, see it, and keep some of it back’. My own experience suggests that Universities have not given this one any great thought beyond an adherence to various legal data protection acts. The default position – that you don’t want your data unless you ask for it – needs to be reversed. We need to appreciate how much of an asset privacy is and engage it only when the trade-off is to our benefit. The idea of transparency should work in practice as well as appearing in theory (and in the small print).

There are some interesting principles here that social networking sites are exploring and applying. Maybe universities could do the same. For example, I could imagine Facebook-style privacy settings for university students to control their own data – and that would give back to them ownership of their data. Different settings would allow different people to view/interact with different information: admin, finance, academic tutors, particular course lecturers, family, friends etc. That information would be portable/transferable and the control would remain with the person whose data it is. This would be a useful portfolio – not the kinds of control, secretive and disciplining mechanisms that I’ve seen touted as such in the past.

Trust: You can’t enforce trust. Trust can only be convened. In other words trust is only a convention that is adopted when it is mutually beneficial. Trust is based on reputation. Ewan didn’t expand on this – I wish he had.

So, very little detail in this talk. He’s obviously moving away from his more usual role as proselytising for open education towards a wider interest in public sector media. His involvement with Channel 4 is focussed on this and directly related to questions of citizenship. He did say something interesting about changing the model of ‘return on investment’ to ‘return on attention’ and beyond, where the big problem is how to get an emotional response to online content. But he didn’t really expand on this.

As trust in professional networks continues to erode, Lee Bryant asked: how do you create an ecosystem in which the network can be trusted? His answer: by learning from the social web to build human-scale structures based on intimacy and trust which can then grow to accrue benefits of scale.
One of the reasons that the network can no longer be trusted, Bryant believes, is due to the organisational culture of the IT department. As the nadir of post-industrial organisation culture, these departments are still driven by 1930s management theory and 1990s techno-thinking. In assuming that end-users can’t be trusted they invariably rely on control through ‘customer relations management’. This lack of trust actually harms all our interactions with organisations and limits the innovation such organisations can leverage. It’s not difficult to see this culture in action. The vast majority of PCs where I work are closed-down, corporate clones whose personalisation are carefully guarded/passworded by the IT Dept. Rapid innovation, beta-testing, and mistake-making, are discouraged in favour of corporate, lock-step procedures which, at best, steer change at a glacial pace.

Bryant argued that it wasn’t always like that and we don’t need to look far for models of trust-based systems. Networks of trust based on social capital have regulated trade and commerce for hundreds of years before the advent of the modern corporation (he used the example of the Jewish diamond trade in Antwerp), are visible in codes of conduct regulating professional and guild organisations, and more recently, have enabled the kinds of collaboration that have produced wikipedia, eBay and Tripadvisor. Trust, after all, breeds trust.

Such networks of trust emerge from the fact that social networks and the weak ties that are formed through them create an ‘immune system’ for an organisation: they invariably stop bad ideas from being spread.

So, organisations need to look at ways to structure social action that are informed by the success of the social web. The emerging models of sharing, collaboration and action that are now visible on the web need to inform organisational cultures that are struggling to redefine themselves. Those cultures need to move away from redundant management theories and bankrupt codes of corporate conduct towards human-scale structures built on intimacy and trust. We may have been ‘corporate sausage’ meat for a while but we’re now beginning to explore new, more personal foods. More significantly, we’re beginning to cook those foods for ourselves!

Christian Nold’s look at trust centred on the ways in which transition cities are using ‘mindful money’ to improve communities and the social capital that binds them together. The most developed of these projects to date is The Bijlmer Bank in South East Amsterdam which has recycled RDF tags from travel cards (like the oyster card used in London) and stuck them to the national currency. Users can choose to use them in local businesses where their value is higher than the value of the national currency. In other words you have the option to consume, i.e. invest, in your local café which accepts the local currency rather than in MacDonalds that doesn’t. This reminds me of an example given by Rushkoff in his new book Life Inc. His popular local restaurant ‘Comfort’ tried to raise money to build an extension to cater for more people. The bank refused to loan any money. So someone suggested the idea of ‘comfort dollars’. ‘Invest’ $100 and you get 110 comfort dollars in return which you can spend in the restaurant. The restaurant gets capital to expand and the ‘patron’ gets more meals where they like to eat. The concept is scalable and that’s what The Bijlmer Bank is doing: building local trust on top of corporate organisation. Eventually there’ll be no need for that corporate organisation (national currency) and the ‘transition’ will be complete. There is a movement of transition cities in the UK and there was a presentation by representatives of Transition City Manchester which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend. Be interesting to follow-up/invite these folk to a seminar though.

Jamais Cascio introduced me to the notion of the ‘participatory panopticon’. Asymmetric transparency (‘they can see me but I can’t see them’) is the way in which debates about threats to privacy have generally been framed. With the rise of the social web, however, we’re seeing an increase in symmetric transparency – Twitter is an example of a tool built from the idea that everyone is party to everyone else’s activity. In that sense, Cascio argues that we’re building a ‘participatory panopticon’. This raises many questions: Are we losing a traditional understanding of privacy? What is replacing it? How much do we want ‘total’ transparency? Is the corollary to participatory panopticon ubiquitous deception?

It’s back to JG Ballard.