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Social entrepreneurship is basically to create a social impact on different communities, but how are these communities really reacting to entrepreneurial solutions, and especially new technology? For any social enterprise it is crucial to understand the audience and even more important to understand how they will react to exposure to a new technology. I talked to a friend about another thing, and he sent me a link to a manuscript of a speech “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” that Clay Shirky held at Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003.

As intended by pointed out creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet supports lots of communications patterns. Social software may contain point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way patterns, and thus the challenge to create the right structure of the software is huge. A lot of people, such as Dave Weinberger, Ross Mayfield, Tony Perkins, Estee Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Clay Shirky and even the functional web design guru Jacob Nielsen, have been addressing these issues at different angles of attack, but I will here focus on the mentioned speech made by Clay Shirky.

Shirky first start by looking and the psychological nature of individuals in a group, based on a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups”, written in the middle of the last century. A group will strangely enough react to any external force in somewhat mysterious ways. To make a long story short, Shirky summarizes this behaviour:

“He [Bion] said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what’s going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual. “

The nature of any social software relative to the group is further explained by Shirky.

“Someone built the [social software] system, they assumed certain user behaviours. The users came on and exhibited different behaviours. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled…. As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.”

The group will self-destruct? Help! Can that really be true? Clay Shirky thinks:

“If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we’re seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do? Is there anything we can say with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived groups?”

Should we just stop this doomed road of ours then? Of course not. The above posed questions are not that easily answered, yet there must be a way to solve this? Right? Of course again, but Clay Shirky summarizes the challenges in four basic design points. Before moving on to the design points, three relevant issues identified by Shirky have to be accepted whether we like it or not:

1. Technical and social issues can never be fully separated.
2. The “members” of a community are not all the same. As trivial as that might seem it is extremely important, as any attempt to define any social software will fail otherwise.
3. The core group is a group of people that are passionate about the goal of the community and has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

Now it is time to just accept these facts. Done!

We then quickly move on to four crucial points of design of any social software according to Clay Shirky.

1. The user has to feel part of it, has an identity or handle. (Choose the word that feels right to you. The debate about identify has no immediate relevance here.)
2. You have to design a way for there to be members in good standing, that is a reputation or virtual recognition.
3. You need barriers to participation. To be part of the community you have to take action. A complete open community will quickly outscale itself, and destroy itself by the growth of it.
4. Closely connected to the previous point is therefore, that you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. This is crucial part of any social software. Conversations are killed by scale, as they require dense two-way conversations. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

The reader is referred to the manuscript of his speech for more details about these design points. (For the specific problem with scale, look at this article by him.)

What happens if you do not follow the will of the community that is more or less listen to it, so you might as well design the software this way from the beginning. Shirky says: “The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.” The good part is that the group will find a way to fulfil the needs of the group, but the bad thing is that they will do it in a way you did not intend them to.

Compare the solution in which the group is solving this process to strategic management of any new venture, which normally divides that process into four stages: conceptualisation (technology and need identification), pre-venture (technology and commercial pheasability), entrepreneurial and organizatorial. The group will go through the same kind of process to solve these issues. At first they will automatically find the problem (conceptualisation), and they quickly move on to identify the possible solutions within the existing social software (pre-venture). The entrepreneurial part of this is really the users imagination to create these structures with the available tools to find a solution inside the existing social software, and then the organizatorial is the self-assembling part of the group around this new “solution”. Misson accomplished by the community! Sounds fairly simple and neat…

If the group will solve this themselves, why is this bad? Simply because the group should not have to solve this by itself, and even more important, the group might be damaged in the process. In all social software, you have a real community and a virtual community. If the virtual community does not fulfil the needs of the real community, a tension will be created between the virtual and the real community. That tension (like every physical tension for that matter) can produce negative energy on the real community. If you on the other hand match up the needs of the real community with the right solution inside the virtual community you might create a positive energy and thus strengthen the real community by the virtual community. Great, hey? So just do it.

Conclusion
Listen to the users and define their needs, but also realise and bear in mind that exposing them to a solution might change the behaviour. The key here is to interrupt the real social fabric as little as possible, and the change of behaviour of the community will be minimized. By this you are at least increasing your possibilities to success.

Currently I am reading Nicholas Carr’s book Does IT matter? and even though I might not agree with everything, some of the conclusions made really makes sense. It has got me thinking in more general terms of how we are behaving when we are faced with (new) technology and what technology we actually need.

The thought started during a walk to Tressider (a student collection point at the Campus of Stanford University) for a coffee with some fellows in the middle of September. We started to talk about whether we had the right to give technology to extreme rural areas in the world. I posed the question: “Do we have the right not too?” We ended up agreeing that the question did not have a simple answer.

I thought more about the problem and ended up with two simple questions that should be answer in any development process of technology:

• Should we give or do we need the technology solution?
• What is the technology solution that is needed?

It really is as simple as that, as there will always be a solution in technology, but should one might question if and how we should use it. It is very easy to get lost in the buzz about new technologies. As I have said in many blogs before this one technology is a tool, but easy. However, the exposure of technology to humans is far from free of compexity.

Looking at social entrepreneurship gives a lot of useful input in the problem. The problem is building a technology solution that can and will be used by the audience. For me that is creating a trusted solution. Social entrepreneurs use technology as tools to make a difference mostly rural areas around the world. People in thise areas are quite new to being exposure to technology and that really changes how technology should be presented and in what form they are developed. Basically if a pen and a paper is what the audience will trust, then paper and a pen is the right technology solution.

I talked to Uuve Sauga, one of the fellows, about the idea I had for this blog and during the very interesting discussion, she summarized the social entrepreneurs work as “being able to take that first look at the persons needs, desires and constraints”. Nothing can be more truthful. The right solution should bridge solution and needs of the audience via the technology. This actually mean that this development process is applicable everywhere - both in the developed and the developing world. It might result in that the solutions for our “problems” in the developed world are found by looking at the needs of the people in the developing world. Quite ironic actually, yet this “irony” have been identified previously looking at Hernando de Soto’s book “The Mystery of Capital”. In the book, he concluded the problem of “formal capital” in the developing world and the high presence of self-assembled entrepreneurs in those areas.

This topic has now been realised by big high-tech companies such as Intel and Nokia. The needs of the audience is quite different, and the requirement of the developed products in those areas are very different from the believied needs in the developed world. This process started when these companies started to look att the emerging markets around the world. Both the seminars we had with Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia, and John Sherry, Intel, emphasized this new twist of development.

Personally I salute this change in direction of the development, and will anxiously follow and participate in it. While we are at it we might even start to question to the extent that we are consuming technology. I for sure am starting to do so and trying to cut down as much as my work permit me to. I want to have the control over my life, not technology. What is so cool about it is that it really makes the development process more appealing to me.

Use the highest possible level of technology, but hide the technology as much as possible. Make the technology more personal.

To quote one of the best slogans ever written: “Mmm, I like it.”

I read an article today about teenagers and blogs. In the short article some figures are presented on the differences between the blogging by youths and adults. Only one out of 14 adults is writing blogs, while there is one out of five youths writing. Even more interesting these figures become for the reading of blogs. Furthermore is one out of four adults reading blogs online, but almost four out of ten youths are reading blogs. That is in itself interesting, yet not surprising as youths seems to be more adaptable to new techniques, which another article partly addresses.

There are however another result presented in the article that is more interesting considering there has been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere and then especially questions like What is a blog? How should we blog? The nature of impact by blogging has been discussed a lot, and especially the movement of open source journalism have emphasized the political effect of blogging. It however seems like the youths mainly use the blogging to keep in touch with each other and communicate, which might not be that surprising. Even if the social effect is not the dominating part of blogging it surely is a major part of it.

That makes me wonder if it is not so that the majority of the blogs really are “social blogs”, primarily used in the sense of online diaries, and not for the purpose of ‘marketing’ political ideas, at least not directly. Maybe the blogs are more beginning to take the form of small social communities, bond together by the people that reads and discuss blogs. Thus it seems and partly based on the article mentioned, that the blogs are not part of the new corporate blogging sphere nor part of the open source journalism such as Instapundit. That raises a provocative question without any answer from me…

Is the blogosphere really the major ‘threath’ to the Big Media that everybody says it is?

I read a blog by Nicholas Carr about the amorality of Web 2.0 with the focus on Wikipedia hype. I decided to write a blog with some reflections on it. Please read it for a full discussion of the problem. Do not get me wrong, I truly believe in the power of the users and applaud the new Web 2.0 movement. However is it free from complexity? I think everything cooks down to if we are ready for it or not. Unfortunately I at present time do not think we as humanity on the whole are fully ready yet. I however could be convinced…

Technology is a tool, nothing else. We should never forget the purpose of technology is to help us, not the technology in itself. If we want to save (or at least change the world), we have to do it ourselves, but probably with the help of technology. Yet technology in itself actually does very little, which is one component of the complexity. Another component is that "technicians" always have to reflect on the awareness and readiness of the users to be exposed of new technology of the users that we develop these new technologies for. That is the problem lies in us as well as the new technologies.

Before we can assure that we are ready to handle the new technology and we have adjusted the technology so that it reflects how we work, the ultimate vision will not be fulfilled. We are getting there, and it is the right direction to go as we are then going back the read-and-write web again as it goes back to what Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues intended from the beginning..

Only time will tell if Web 2.0 is the "salvation of the problems of the web", but I think we cannot be totally blind to the fact that it is much easier to destroy than to create, but I also know as the telling goes: “Rome was not built in a day…"  Nevertheless, I am truly excited to see what happens…

I love rocky rides, so count me in!