C4FCM Blog

Last time, I shared with you some of the work being done by Harvard University's Web Ecology Project, specifically focusing on the use of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran Elections and around the death of Michael Jackson.

Anyone who has read my blog long knows that I am not big on counting things. Some of it is that I have math anxiety -- a serious vulnerability for someone who spent the first 20 years of his career at MIT! Some of it is that I think people often act as if counting things is the same thing as analyzing things or that the only things that count are things that came be counted.

I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation.

Earlier this fall, the French cultural theory magazine, Poli, ran an extensive interview with me conducted by Maxime Cervulle. The interview explored a range of topics surrounding the cultural politics of participatory culture and web 2.0, specifically addressing concerns raised by European intellectuals about some of the themes I explored in Convergence Culture.

Our friends at Neighbors for Neighbors have officially teamed up with the Boston city government to launch a social networking website, allowing city personnel to better communicate with residents and hopefully address problems more quickly.

From the Neighbors for Neighbors press release:

“By providing these social networks, Neighbors for Neighbors is providing our residents yet another way to stay in touch with each other and their neighborhood officials,” said Mayor [Thomas] Menino. “We continue to use the latest technology to make government even more accessible and more responsive to our constituents. Just this week we launched the City’s first-ever iPhone application to send constituent requests to the Mayor’s 24-Hour Hotline and now we’re providing them another way to connect with city officials.”

On the networks, users create profiles and post information about themselves (and organizations they represent), and can find and communicate with neighbors. Users can also post blogs and events, participate in forums, add videos, photos, music, and create and join interest groups.

Coordinators from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services as well as District Police Captains and Community Service Officers will all have a presence on the website to answer any questions users may have about their neighborhoods from broken street lights and trash pickup to various public safety issues.

Neighbors for Neighbors also held a kick-off this past week, announcing their partnership with the city:

[If the video is not embedded above, go here]

Everyone knows that creating a startup involves a carefully-ordered sequence of steps -- eg, don't start selling your product until you have a product (actually, that's surprisingly easy to screw up). However, there's a guiding principle about designing the right sequence that doesn't get talked about enough. You need to think about designing your "Validation Trajectory". Here's the deal:

In the Pony Diving phase (see Episode #1), you're trying to put together an idea with funders, users, and a development team. But each one of these key groups is going to need to see a certain amount of proof about the viability of the project, i.e. validation, before they sign on. Of course, the killer is that these same people are going to help you establish validation, so you've got the makings of a brutal chicken-and-egg problem. The solution is a workable validation trajectory: The first key player you sign on has a low validation "buy-in". That player then produces some validation "benefit", and now you have more validation to recruit the next player. A workable validation trajectory moves you from where it's just you waving your arms to where you've got all the key players on board. A broken one leaves you needing some high-validation-buyin player without any way to get the validation to bring him/her on.

Here are pointers to a few things I called out in the video.

• Here's where Vinod Khosla discusses the Ethanol Trajectory
• Here's the LostInBoston.org project I talk about
• Here's George Eberstadt's Blog. He's my colleague who would always say "How do we get there from here?"

So now you tell me. Is this obvious? Is this useful? Is this obviously useful? I need feedback. Post it below.

Hey, the FTC just made it illegal for bloggers to accept kickbacks for writing puff pieces about products on the internet. Good. Maybe the discussion about this will make people call out for independent, non-profit, verifiable product information. I put puff journalism and greenwashing in the same sentence. Hey bloggers, if [...]

Welcome to Episode #2 of Rick's Startup Whiteboard (the video is at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4106-ricks-startup-whiteboard-episode-2-ear... if it's not showing up above). This one focuses on the importance of working with partners -- not employees, not contractors -- when you're the pony-diving stage of a startup project, still trying to figure out the key pieces of the puzzle (see episode #1 on pony diving). Personally, I learned this one the hard way in a start-up. We contracted out the design of our next generation product and wound up on the rocks. There were a lot of accusations and alibis, and a distressing lack of "we're going to keep at this until it works". Lesson learned: when the project is in the early stages, and still involves as much problem-finding as problem-solving, you need to work with people who have as much at stake as you do.

When have you been on the right or wrong side of this?

A few days ago the Iranian government completed the process of “privatizing” the Iranian national telecommunications company.

Sounds great right? Less state control, more public sector involvement, free market and all that jazz.

However, a closer looks shows that the majority stake (50% + 1 share), purchased for $7.8 billion, were bought by a consortium that is directly connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Out of the 3 groups contending, one was disqualified by the government for not having the necessary security credentials (read: probably not affiliated with the Guard).

If you are not that familiar with the Guard, here’s some background: The Revolutionary Guard, or in its full name, “Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution”, was founded right after the revolution in 1979 as an independent force loyal to Khomeini, but later became a full military force alongside the regular army.
Here’s what AP describes in their article (link below):

With the exception of the beleaguered Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no major papers are covering the flooding currently ravaging Atlanta, Georgia. I only know about it because my mother and step-father live there---they're fine, but my mother nearly couldn't get home last night because of so many downed trees, washed-out roads, and police barricades. My step-father, being ex-Special Forces, was ridiculously well-prepared (hurricane lamps, a universal charger for multiple cell phones that hooks up to his car's cigarette lighter), but their neighbors aren't so lucky: good friends of theirs have seen their house so damaged that they expect to live in a hotel for months.

Can someone explain how this isn't a news story? Where's the coverage? Atlanta received 14 inches of rain in a few days, which all goes on hard-packed clay (it's a very dry part of the country) and thousands of miles of roadway. There's nowhere for the rain to go except into people's houses. Police are rescuing people by boat. The three interstates are shut. Every school in the city is closed. And the best the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe can do is stick the same A.P. link at the bottom of their national news subsections: "Toddler Among 6 Killed as Storms Drench Southeast". And that story is 12 hours old.

I sincerely hope that it's my familial proximity to people at Atlanta that has me seeing this story all out of proportion. But if it's not, are we seeing the news industry's Katrina? Is this evidence that newspapers are unable or unwilling to expend the resources to help inform people during a natural disaster?