Are Crowd Farmed Volunteers Efficient?

After reading a detailed background article on Caterina Fake and Hunch (the company she’s helping Chris Dixon build) early this AM, I wondered at the efficiency of “volunteer labor”. Here’s the quote that caused me to open my eyes a little wider at 4:30:

Some 7,400 power users submit the bulk of the surveys . “I mean, it’s amazing, ”Dixon says. “That’s like having a thousand times our workforce.” He points to Ryyan Joye of Annandale,Virginia, who, with over 280,000 banjos, is one of Hunch ’s most diligent contributors .

“That’ s the magic of Caterina, ” Dixon says, shaking his head. “I could never get people to do this.”

My first reaction after reading this: social networks of all kinds are grossly inefficient. Active users could be doing anything and generating more value than the parent company farms. But this was a naive gut response.

What’s really happening is a large scale society hack. Leisure time is getting converted in bulk into cash, a variant of the entertainment industry. People willingly give up their time, myself included. Users of any growing social network visit first to explore, usually invited by a friends recommendation. People return because they have free time and enjoy the activity, or perceive value derived from the network (i.e. twitter is a good way for me to keep informed on startups and web tech).

The flavor, form and pace of information is addictive in social networks or games well matched to our tastes. What large scale networks and crowd knowledge engines do is convert aggregate free time into financial value. They farm our free time, and we volunteer it willingly.

Cascading Effects of Evoking Emotional Response

As a first time founder with an engineering background, preoccuppation with building the sonic screwdriver of social information tools has been my primary concern. One thing I haven’t spent much time worrying about is sales, and its been a big mistake.

A recent development has lead me to focus on audience reaction far more than I ever have previously, and it has drastically changed my take on product ideas. The event is the Web 2.0 expo happening in Manhattan in late September. They’re hosting 30 startup demos followed by the top 3 products being shown on stage with Tim O’Reilly, Fred Wilson, and one audience favorite. Thinking about products as 2-3 minute interactive demonstrations with Q&A has shown me how boring some of my earlier ideas have been, without a thought given to provoking an emotional response.

Founders Live for Inception

The important selling moment is made in the split second when an aesthetically appealing package opens the visitors mind to the beauty of your prototype. Whatever I submit to the application process and package by September has to evoke raw emotions to have any hope of opening up a visitor’s mind for a few seconds, let alone a few minute demo.

The primary emotions I’d like to target are curiosity, surprise, excitement, wonder, and awe in about that order. I may discover there’s only enough time to effectively evoke one. It dawned on me in the past day how important the prototype story is, and how I’d like it to flow. I’ll be the guide leading a new visitor through these emotions as a designed experience. Should I take it slower building up curiosity or skip directly to the exciting part of the demo? I have to be ready to improvise based on the visitor, their experiences, and mood.

Unravelling

What we wrap most tightly, gains the greatest benefit by being let go.

The act of letting go of ideas here each morning has brought much peace and energy into my life. I’ve met fine folks who’ve influenced my worldview with their generous contributions. This lead me to wonder what else I keep bundled up, either out of fear or simply through not knowing any better.

Open Source RPG System

My friend Aakin and I (along with generous contributions from Eli and feedback from others) have spent thousands of hours creating, modifying, play testing, and finally editing a game called Children of the Ark or COTA for short. It’s a breath away from our first publishing but has been on hold since Aakin has been busy tracking down work. I’d like to release the game in a way that players can share home brewed modifications and even feed back the most popular mods to us for follow on releases.

The Hook.

It just cost you two seconds to click through and the page to render. A majority of browsers will click back or kill the tab, leaving 15% of social web referrals still reading. Each and every character and moment counts. The choice of fonts, page layout, and side bar all arouse immediate judgement in the mind of a new visitor. But all this design effort is just feeding the beast. Your question, what’s the point?

Money on the Table

There’s a white water river of value raging all around us every second. Hundreds of millions of people are creating and consuming network born content each day. Messages most often whither. A precious few signals sail between minds, propagated by an urge to share, and an instinct to prove our judgement is sound. The sum of all humanity communicating is no small thing. It is a beast with no end to its hunger, nor boundary to its being. The appetite of the crowd for (digital) stimuli is ceaseless and ever changing.

We can feed the beast now to earn a warm meal for our belly. Or we can choose to struggle, to explore, to discover, to cross impossible distances in hopes of revealing undeniable social value.

Optimize or Build?

There’s an ongoing resource allocation game and we’re all playing whether we wish to or otherwise. We can spend our time and money to cash in on existing inefficiencies, or choose to create new ones. Most successful businesses start with the latter and then optimize to the point of financial extinction while picking up a few coins in the process. If the business identifies a new high value region while optimizing its primary function, it may survive another market generation.

It’s funny that we are capable of building tools that can do just about anything*, but when it comes to producing a single instance of value, we struggle. That’s probably why most of the world’s energy is expended optimizing what already is. There’s no (hard) open ended question to answer when we focus on efficiency. Building or more often repurposing existing concepts and laying the foundation for follow on construction takes great insight (crazy) and risk ($). Good technology has an odd way of attracting other tech on top of itself. It’s easier to extend and connect complex tools with clear interfaces than it is to reinvent them. The “not invented here” syndrome that has taxed builders everywhere may finally decline with open source and even less restrictive tool sharing^.

Notes:

* = powerful programming languages, huge construction technology, genetic manipulation

^ = There are many advantages of socially developed technology. Reliability beyond the life of a single business, diverse testing and extension, and the sum of focused part time efforts being greater than its parts are just a few of the benefits of shared technology development (open source being one type)

Anxious Dreams

A merchant class manor lord had taken over my parents home and I am no longer welcome. I flee to an old neighbors back yard and a strange truck comes down the driveway, another safe haven long gone with strange voices shouting into the darkness. I rolled over at 3 am this morning after a dream that shouldn’t have been frightening, but left me wide awake and unnerved. My conscious mind painted on the perception of safeties lost almost 20 years ago. The message eerily reminds me of just how thin the illusion of stability I now entertain is*.

How much security is necessary and how much is real

Security, like satisfaction is an elusive concept. What is perceived as safe to many, is terrafying to others. A great example is how many personal freedoms folks are willing to cast aside in order to foster a feeling of safety. Ben Franklin’s famous quote captures my sentiment splendidly, Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. We’re not children and the government is certainly not our parent. So why does blanket legislation strip away individual rights to placate the illusion of safety for others (even a majority). None of us will experience true safety while we turn a blind eye to the perilous social and fiscal issues in the world around us. By casting the light of collective attention onto issues that improve understanding, we may just banish the spectre of fear. Without unbounded fear feeding a society, security can be rexamined as a rational tool.

How do you quantify or attribute security?

In the realm of network security the number of foiled intrusions to overall attempts is one metric. Generally making things harder for would be attackers is considered part of best practices. Unique, lengthy passwords with nonstandard characters capture the essence of our identity and access. Visiting only “safe” web sites with approved browsers like Internet Explorer 7-8 is a laughable defense. How can we know with confidence how many of our rituals make a significant contribution to computer security without understanding OS and application specific vulnerabilities?

Now magnify this issue into the rest of our lives. First and foremost I’m a tax paying social security number to the government. After that my life choices are free within the bounds considered socially acceptable by the majority of legislators over the past couple of hundred years. Some laws make sense, while others have no basis in a society that embraces personal freedoms. How many of our sacrificed liberties really guarantee our public safety?

Notes:

* = personal and community economic stability

Long before starting a company I firmly believed only field veterans or geniuses were capable of creating compelling products, and the even more impressive feat, breathing life into new markets. After working with and learning the fundamentals of web application development for the past 10 months (still a noob) I recognize vast opportunity in consumer facing and business to business web apps. The intelligent coordination of data gathering with organizing information, and well thought user interfaces has a wide range of real world applications. Shared and organized information has already, and will continue to revolutionize the way we live.

I’m neither a professional web developer, nor remotely a genius. What draws me to this domain is boundless opportunity and an open invitation to all who are willing to explore its beauty. I can learn from, collaborate, and eventually compete with incredibly focused and passionate entrepreneurs and artists. I can’t stress enough the importance of artistic design or social engineering in presenting an irresistible human interface to an app. I could spend a lifetime learning the nuances of elegant interface design, but I don’t have much time, I’m a founder first.

Habits that Help Lay the Foundation for Apps that Users Love

• Regular feedback with new and regular users. The moment you begin designing tools to satisfy a need, you begin drifting in perspective from a fresh visitor to your service. Each piece of feedback is only a measurement, you and your team weave the pattern that will tie it all together
• Market research is an open ended task. Know what other services are available, and what helps ensure your applications identity and utility. Its not just competition but fitting within a changing market
• Build bridges between people and businesses and then get out of the way. It’s not helpful or fruitful to guide the all manner of uses of a novel service.

Wikipedia, a Trap for the Curious Mind

I lost track of a couple of hours yesterday going down Wikipedia’s bunny trail.

It all started innocently enough with a self emailed post on an implementation of Conway’s game of life in html 5. Reading about the rules reminded me of Stephen Wolfram’s a New Kind of Science, so I explored a related page on Glider Guns, then cellular automatons, then Turing Machines, unification with Lambda calculus, and finally landed on a page that has been a splinter in my mind for the past 16 hours.

The page describes David Hilbert’s proposal of  Entsheidungsproblem.

The Entscheidungsproblem asks for an algorithm that will take as input a description of a formal language and a mathematical statement in the language and produce as output either “True ” or “False” according to whether the statement is true or false”

source

Without a means of proving equivalence, I questioned how far we could take any computational model.

“Hey, I have this answer but I can’t tell you that it’s right”. Confidence in the truth of a solution is one of my instinctual tests of algorithm utility, otherwise it’s just mental masturbation.

For more specific conditions equivalence can indeed be proven.

Some first – order theories are algorithmically decidable ; examples of this include Presburger arithmetic , real closed fields and static type systems of (most ) programming languages . The general first – order theory of the natural numbers expressed in Peano’s axioms cannot be decided with such an algorithm , however.

As most of you are well aware, there are fanatics on both sides of the feature fence. Microsoft is known for spooky bloatware, while 37 Signals holds minimalism sacred*. While I acknowledge the benefits of rich features or dedicated lean apps, I don’t believe either of these philosophies are focused enough on my dearest design priority, minimizing constraints on creativity.

Who’s Creativity?

Myself, other developers and users can all stake a claim on constrained creativity. Much like modern publishing, the distinction between content creators (developers) and end users is becoming a matter of degree in lieu of distinct roles. So the question becomes are we maximizing our creativity as designers or are we limiting how much we constrain the imagination of end users. The answer is clearly dependent on the intended consumer – our self or others.

37 signals hit upon an interesting union of these requirements. They built Rails for themselves, but decided to share their creation with anyone else who was interested. And it took off with a life of its own, marketing Ruby as a potent scripting language and even inspiring alternative frameworks. For my personal work, I’m happy if I can free up my own ideas with well designed code, or if I put something on github that others can use.

Notes:

* =  Exceptions: Start.com was a lean project within Microsoft (referenced in Getting Real by 37 signals), and 37 signals’ Rails framework is a bit portly compared to Merb, Ramaze, Sinatra or Camping for focused web development

While exploring the relation between change and response, I struggled with how best to frame such a general idea. My thoughts gravitated to the floor decision making framework of psychology, and the key observable of personality.

The decision making portion of reaction is driven by intuition, experience, reason, and analogy. We have three broad categories of response to a change in expected plans:

• try and enforce the original plans
• adapt our schedule and strategy
• cancel participation

Motivation for a specific outcome, the importance of the planned goal, and the relationship between collaborators all weigh into the decision making aspect of reactions to change.

How Personality Relates to Reactions

A course measure of persona is to look at an average response to change. On average people are predisposed to react in a manner that reflects their personality. We have two poles of emotional response

• freak out
• calmly decide on a course of action

Most of us have personalities which drift between roid rage and ice man, but most of the time we identify with one pole over the other. Final fantasy game mechanics nailed this idea with breakpoints. We all start out calm but as events push against our desired outcomes, we become increasingly frustrated.

Retraining Instincts

The subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, as we can’t directly hack our proclivity to change response. But we can observe and eventually influence ingrained habits*. Drawing an analogy from addiction:The first step to breaking addiction is recognizing you have a problem. The first step to optimizing your reaction to unexpected change is knowing your default reaction.

* = Hacking Minds, Leverage Your Habitual Nature

Do writers recognize when their work is going to catch on like wild fire? The recent Old Spice viral video series has caused a wave of gut busting chaos induced hilarity.The strangest realization for me is that I was already a customer (since 1996) and hadn’t realized it. As I watched and listened to Isaiah Mustafa state “Silverfish Handcatch” for the 6th time I realized that I use Old Spice as an underarm deodorant. But I’d never swap because of a funny video and Old Spice aftershave sucks .

I’ve gotta tip my hat to one hell of a project marketing team. The combination of over the edge writing and actor execution/presence  made for an irresistible watch. These guys killed it. As a follow on they made comment response videos exploding in popularity after Digg founder Kevin Rose’s get well video response (staged?) and share on twitter. Pro technique to sustain a few viral videos into a series.

While the writers could be working on Saturday Night Live or other films I can’t believe their amazing effort will result in a sustained boost to product sales. In the short term their efforts will be profitable for Old Spice, but folks will quickly return to their favorite after shaves and under arm deodorants. Maybe some won’t and that’s more than the cost of the video campaign?

Update:
This Behind the World: Old Spice Responses interview captures the production process and how the team pulled it all together so quickly. It was a strategic campaign with creative folks working 3 days straight.