Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0

Yesterday I spent the day at Princeton with Steve Schultze and the rest of the team at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic of my talk was “Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0” — something I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past several months, but haven’t yet written a ton about.  That will change soon. In a nutshell: we are seeing an explosion of “peer networks” — networks of people, powered by the web, collaborating and consuming in new ways (think: Etsy, Airbnb, Skillshare, Kickstarter, etc.)  As these network-oriented communities touch more and more real-world sectors (housing, transportation, health, education) they are running into regulatory trouble, as many of them don’t fit into traditional categories (is Airbnb a Hotel? a phone book?  a real estate broker?  Is Skillshare a university?), often operate in legal gray areas, and often disrupt incumbents. I’ve been working with many of these companies, and with folks in academia and in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what this means (for our economies, our neighborhoods, etc) and how we might approach it.  There is tremendous opportunity here — as networks tend to produce solutions that are lower in cost and more scalable than traditional approaches — but there are also new kinds of risk, as the barriers to production and consumption decrease.  All of this presents really interesting public policy questions. Perhaps the most interesting idea that came out of the discussion is the notion scale.  When peer networks are just starting out — often in new sectors — they have relatively little overall impact on the economy or society.  But as they grow, their impact increases exponentially.  The idea of some sort of safe harbor for smaller, earlier networks, that would allow them the freedom to innovate and to explore new opportunities, is an interesting one. Here are my slides from the talk, and here is the video: (unfortunately there were some audio problems right in the beginning, but the rest is fine)

#policy#regulation-2-0#strategery#talks-decks-graphics#tech-design-internet

Internet Centrism

This morning I am heading down to the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy to talk about Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0.  The pitch goes like this:

“Peer Networks” are bringing new organizational and economic dynamics to every sector — unlocking tremendous opportunity and potential. At the same time, they threaten incumbents in the private and public sectors, and present new challenges for regulators working to protect the public interest. Please join us to discuss the dynamics of peer networks, the opportunities they present to our economies and societies, and the political and policy challenges facing their advancement.

So it’s fitting that my morning reading kicked off with this critique of the Peer Progressive worldview (as embodied in Steven Johnson’s recent book, Future Perfect) by Evgeny Morozov.  If you’ve read Future Perfect, or other books about how peer networks & open collaboration are changing our society & economy by folks such as Benkler, ZIttrain, Weinberger, Shirky, etc., go read the article as well as Steven’s rebuttal now. The gist of Morozov’s argument is that Future Perfect is Internet-Centrism / Cyber-utopianism in a box - conveniently omitting many tough questions and cherry-picking historical examples to fit a pre-determined viewpoint.  Johnson’s response is that Morozov’s critique misses many of the nuances of his argument. I don’t have time to write a proper response right now - but my starting point for thinking about this is pretty obvious.  I’m describe myself as a “student of cities and the internet”, this blog is named after one of the ideas in Steven’s previous book, I’ve written about Steven and his ideas many times before, he and I are working on a project together right now, and my interest in all of this stems from reading Jane Jacobs in college.  So I am hardly an impartial observer. That said, I welcome Morozov’s critique, and find it tremendously useful in shaping and sharpening my thinking.

#strategery#tech-design-internet

Backing into your network

Today, we announced that USV is investing in Hailo.  I am psyched about this for a number of reasons, but primarily because it’s infrastructure that connects people to their city in new ways. What’s most fascinating is that we almost certainly don’t yet know what those ways are. I want to point out one quote from Fred’s interview in the Wall Street Journal.  He says:

“We think this is a kind of Trojan Horse to get people using a large network on their mobile phones to actually transact and get real stuff,” said Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures. “From there, I think lots of interesting things can happen. Alone in the taxi cab market, there’s a pretty big business to be built, and the fact that there’s potential beyond that gives us a lot of confidence.”

We talk a lot about backing into your network - in other words, starting with a thin edge of the wedge and ultimately finding a secondary purpose that may in fact be more profound than the first. For instance, we often say “twitter backed into identity” — when Twitter started out, it didn’t start by announcing itself as the de facto identity provider on the web. Instead, it became that after achieving ubiquity in public messaging. Relatedly: a few weeks ago at the election campaign tech / data postmortem event held at google, Oscar Salazar (co-founder of Uber, now founder of Citivox) had my favorite line of the day.  He said ”I hate the term ‘civic apps’.  All apps are civic.  For example, Waze has submitted more pothole reports than all of the other ‘civic apps’ combined.”  I love that. A few years ago I wrote about the idea of the Enterprise End-Run, which is related — the idea that we can cause big shifts in enterprise behavior by drawing the change out the back end, rather than pushing it through the front. I just love the idea that the direct approach is not always (or perhaps is hardly ever) the right one.  It’s so interesting to think of other areas where this is happening or could happen.

#projects-portfolio#strategery#tech-design-internet

Superheroes in the Snowpocalypse

Yesterday Uber made me feel like a superhero.

It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge.  And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service.  So my train — and every train before us and after us — dumped all of its passengers out into the freezing cold to find another way to get wherever they were going.

There were a few shuttle buses, but they barely made a dent in moving the crowd.  Every single taxi was full.  After a few minutes, there were easily over a thousand people huddling outside in the freezing cold trying to figure out what to do.

I reached into my pocked and tried Hailo, but all taxis in the area were booked.  Uber gave the same response — but on my second try I was able to snag an Uber car.  So: five minutes later, I got a phone call and a black Lincoln pulled up next to me. I offered to share it w/ the group of people directly next to me, but no one was going my way.  So I hopped in and was whisked away from an overcrowded frozen nightmare in a warm, comfortable car.

Totally made me feel like a superhero.   

But not necessarily in a “save the world” way — more of a “wow I have a superpower” way.

When I got to the Media Lab and told the story to Nate his (correct) reaction was: “well, a black car swooping in to rescue a white man is kind of the definition of privilege.  Wouldn’t it be more amazing if there were a way for everyone to take advantage of the network of transportation options swirling around?”  

Of course this is correct — while I was able to snag a ride out of the ether, there was still a huge market mismatch: thousands of people standing around looking for transportation, and hundreds of cars driving by with empty seats.  Yet no way to connect them.

Ride sharing is not a new idea — there is no shortage of startups working on the idea — SideCar & Lyft for car rides, Weeelz for taxi rides, etc. — but it is something that is culturally and technically difficult to implement.  Lyft got its start (I think) on college campuses, where sharing rides to events is a much more natural phenomenon.   

In times of crisis we are more likely to stray from our normal behavior and try new things.  NYC famously mandated taxi sharing for all trips into Manhattan during the 2003 blackout and again after Superstorm Sandy.  Nate and I got to discussing if there wasn’t an opportunity to use yesterday’s class of crisis — a medium-sized but somewhat predictable one — as another “thin edge of the wedge" to make ride-sharing more of a mainstream networked activity.

For instance, I’d gladly sign up to be part of the “boston transportation crisis network” — as a driver or a passenger, and basically pre-volunteer to give rides to people when this kind of thing happens again.  I would like to know the number of times per year when the green line breaks down at Kenmore on very cold days — I bet it’s a lot.  So there would be a decent chance of predicting it and then giving folks in the network a little bit of advanced warning.

If you think about it, weird anomaly events are perfect for launching new, behavior-changing activities.  It was during the inauguration of 2009 that Airbnb got its start — by giving people a chance to “crash the inauguration" by participating in peer-to-peer apartment renting.  At the time, it was *way* outside the mainstream to do something like that.  But the craziness of the event made it fine, and now it’s a regular thing to do all over the world and Airbnb is a billion dollar business.

My other favorite behavior-changing anomaly is snow.  My favorite place in the world is NYC in a snowstorm.  Everything changes.  Instead of walking on the sidewalk and keeping to yourself, you walk in the middle of the street and talk to your neighbors as well as strangers.  During the Washington DC Snowpocalype of 2010, there was a lot of peer-to-peer shoveling happening.

I wasn’t in NYC after Sandy, but I have to assume that there were similar kinds of networked behavior that were positive but would have been hard to imagine under normal circumstances.

Maybe the idea is that people become more open to networked / peer-to-peer solutions when our infrastructure fails us — because they have to be.

If you think about it that way — it’s a pretty profound idea.  Not to be pessimistic, but in our current environment, many of our institutions are failing.  And we will have to become comfortable with other ways of solving our big problems.  Health, education, energy, transportation, etc.

So maybe there’s a launch lesson in here for folks building peer network businesses that rely on cultural change that’s difficult to achieve under normal circumstances.  Think about the traditional infrastructure you’re replacing — and think about the moments or events when they are most apt to fail, giving people the most natural incentive to change their behavior in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.   

And give people a chance to become superheroes.

#products-services#strategery#tech-design-internet

Fighting for change: why and how

Happy MLK Day everyone. I just spent the last half hour reading MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  To be totally honest, I don’t think I’ve ever read it in its entirety before.  It is incredibly powerful and moving.  I encourage anyone reading this to take some time with it today. I pulled a few quotes here. King’s letter makes the case — in exceedingly eloquent and persuasive terms — for nonviolent direct action in the face of injustice.  And discusses the historical precedent and moral imperative for distinguishing between just and unjust laws (including a framework for drawing that distinction), and for disobeying unjust laws.  It hammers home the point that we can’t blindly accept “the law” if we don’t take into account the context in which it was created or the morality and justice of the ends it seeks. Part of the beauty of it is the guided tour of the history of changemaking, conflict and progress that Dr. King takes us on — all the way from Socrates, to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution, to the Holocaust, to of course the Civil Rights movement.  It’s kind of incredible the extent to which we have to learn and re-learn the dynamics of societal norms and the process by which we arrive at and live under the rule of law.   At the heart of the letter is tension between a moderate “take it slow” approach (embodied at the time by the white southern church, whose leaders the letter was addressed to) and more extreme “force change now” approach (embodied at the time by Elijah Muhammed’s Muslim movement).  King’s articulation of the rationale for a measured and pure — yet intentionally impatient — nonviolent approach is incredibly thoughtful and reasoned. It’s part inspiration and part how-to for anyone working to create positive change in the face of resistance from the status quo. I can’t equate the civil rights movement with the digital rights movement, and I won’t do that here.  But that is the corner of the activism world that I sit in, so it’s the lens that I’m reading this through.  And I can’t help but think about the passing of Aaron Swartz, and the path he charted in the pursuit of social justice, as I read Dr. King’s words.  So many of the conversations I’ve been having this past week have revolved around this question of how we view and respond to acts of civil disobedience. More importantly, I want to use today to reflect on both the (incredible yet entirely incomplete) progress that we’ve been able achieve as a nation since 1963 when this letter was written, and the profound and powerful moral foundation for change that Dr. King’s letter provides.

#awesome#personal#strategery

Moving the Ball Forward

I always spend a lot of time around the turn of the new year thinking about self-improvement.  This year is no different. Last summer, at a charity fundraiser for a friend, I bought several sessions of personal coaching. Throughout the fall, I’ve been working with my coach, Lisa Lahey, using her methodology called “immunity to change.”  The basic idea is that, given an articulated personal goal you are trying to meet, you may also have a series of “hidden goals” that you don’t realize you’re working towards — and these hidden goals may be in conflict with your positive goals. The resistance inherent in this conflict is our immunity to change. So,  the trick is to identify these hidden goals, then further identify what big assumptions (about yourself or your life)  are behind those hidden goals, and then do a series of experiments to test those assumptions.  Ideally to ultimately prove yourself wrong about the assumptions and vanquish the hidden, constraining goals. For me, the big goal is to close more loops.  One of my worst tendencies is to leave things 80% done (just ask Cescalouse about my home improvement projects).  A big part of my job is to keep momentum going — to close loops and keep energy moving through whatever projects I’m working on.  I can’t become a bottleneck or a place where ideas stagnate and lose energy. One of my hidden, competing goals is that I’m an urgency addict. I tend to procrastinate — ruminating on the size and severity of whatever I’m procrastinating from — until pressures build to such an extent that I am forced to power through in a burst of goal-line adrenaline.  I “get high” from powering through work on a deadline — and I feel the need to get high by a (presumably false) assumption that my stack of work is overwhelming and super human effort is required to get through it.  Unfortunately for me (according to the immunity to change framework), this pattern has been working for me — so the bad behavior is reinforced by a track record of getting things done despite myself.

This is bad for several reasons.  Most importantly: it burns energy needlessly (worrying about things rather than actually doing them), and it reduces collaborative leverage (the more out in front you are on something, the better chance to get external engagement).

So here’s what I’ve been doing to combat my immunity to change: I am consciously shifting my thinking from “big to dos” (i.e., large items on my to do list which are scary and incite procrastination) to “moving the ball forward”.  Given any project on my plate, the new approach is “Ok, I’ll spend an hour and get as much done on {project X} as I can”, rather than “oh man, I really need to {item x}”. Seems like a simple thing, but it actually has been surprisingly powerful.  Yesterday I cut my whole day into hour-long blocks, where I moved the ball forward on each of my big projects for an hour.  It worked.  Items that might have otherwise triggered stress and procrastination dissolve into “getting things done for an hour”.   Moving the ball forward for an hour is progress, no matter how you cut it. In addition to (and perhaps more importantly than) reducing the “looming burden” of a large number of big independent tasks, taking this approach creates focus.  And focus is perhaps the most powerful tool we have (and often the most elusive). This is just a start.  We will see if it sticks.  But I think it is useful and perhaps it can work for others as well.

#personal#strategery

Hacking todos: daily review for Wunderlist

I have had a hard time finding the perfect to-do list system.

I am a light implementer of GTD -- I haven't read the whole book, but I get the basic idea -- capture; focus; do.  Stop working from the top of your inbox.  Amen. A few years ago, I started using Things for Mac, which is quite nice.  But I got frustrated at how long it took for Things to roll out over-the-air sync between desktop and mobile (it took them 2 years), and so I switched to Wunderlist.  But Wunderlist didn't quite feel as nice as Things, and I always wanted to switch back.  Finally, in 2012, Cultured Code released Things 2 which solved the sync problem.  Woohoo! Sync worked great, and they even added a really thoughtful new feature called the Daily Review.  Daily Review helps you manage your list of "today" tasks by automatically bumping them off of the "Today" list at the end of each day, and then asking you whether you wanted them to go back to the "Today" list, or go into the "Next" list (where tasks are parked for later review).  Basically, forcing you to proactively re-build your Today list at the beginning of each day.  It turns out that this very subtle feature was the difference between me engaging with my todo list on a daily basis, and getting overwhelmed by a todo list that just kept getting longer and longer every day, which ultimately just made me lose faith in the todo list system.

Anyway, on Things 2 Everything was hunky dory and I was *super* productive Then, I switched to Android.  Which has been great.  However, Things is mac / iOS only.  No support for Android (by comparison, Wunderlist is completely cross-platform / html5). So, once again, I was on the market for the perfect lightweight todo list system.  Here's the set of requirements that I was looking for:

  • Nice desktop experience on Mac (either through a native app or a single-site browser via Fluid)

  • Seamless syncing between desktop and mobile (for me, mac + android)

  • Really quick drag & drop reordering / prioritizing (desktop & mobile)

  • Create a task by email (in my case, by fwding an email thread for follow up)

  • An easy way to do "Daily Review" as created by Things

Turns out it is hard to find this combination of features, packaged in a UI that feels nice (simple & quick for the most frequent tasks). I tried everything.  Any.do, Do.com, Asana, Producteev, Wunderlist. I'm sure there were more.  Nothing did everything on the list above just right. What I really wanted -- but just couldn't have -- was Things 2, but with an Android client. So, I figured maybe there was a way to hack one of the existing Android options to get what I wanted. My first stop was Do.com -- Do is pretty good, and even has an API that lets you hack on it.  The mobile client is decent (has drag & drop to reorder, which Wunderlist doesn't, sadly).  The web / desktop UI is more complex than the others, to a fault (IMHO).  But I applied for an API key and never heard back, so so much for that. In the end, I hacked Wunderlist to be more like Things -- specifically to make work for the Daily Review / Today / Next workflow.     Here's how it works:

  • Use "Lists" to create buckets for Today/Next/Later/etc, including one for Daily Review.

  • Create a shell script that will take all of my "Today" tasks and move them to the "Daily Review" folder.  I am thankful that, despite there not being a public API for Wunderlist, there is at least some documentation, and the underlying database schema is really straightforward (this script makes edits directly to the Wunderlist Sqlite database).

  • Every morning when you're starting your day, run $ today to initiate the script. Then, work through your daily review list, moving today's tasks to the Today list and everything else elsewhere.

This is  clearly janky, and won't work for everyone (especially if you use "projects" within Things), but for me it's doing the trick so far. Here is the code on Github, with detailed instructions. Hooray for hacking!

#gtd#projects-portfolio#strategery#things#wunderlist

Bureaucracy and Trust

Yesterday, I spent the day at a meeting on "city innovation" at Harvard's Kennedy School, with 30 or so CIOs, CTOs, and other technology executives from around the country. I did a short presentation on predictive analytics and cities (slides here) -- thanks so much to everyone who sent in comments and who emailed me with suggestions. The "aha!" moment of the day came during a coffee break conversation with Boston CIO Bill Oates.  Bill was describing how frustrated he felt by the city's procurement process (this is widely known as a problem across government).  He said that he felt like he was "handcuffed" by having to prove -- up front, and before actually doing anything -- that he wasn't being dishonest, wasn't corrupt, and was serving the city's best interests.  What if, he asked, he could instead proceed ahead and prove -- after the fact -- that his actions were pure.  Using transparency, rather than bureaucracy, to establish accountability and ultimately trust. This strikes me as a big idea. What we have now -- in the era of increasing information liquidity -- is an opportunity to re-think the way we establish trust.  This idea has been proven out by web services (think Ebay, Airbnb, StackExchange), and I think it's time we start thinking about how this applies to public sector policy and regulation. After the conversation with Bill, I ran back to my seat and sketched out the idea, then quickly turned it into a slide for my presentation in the following session.  This is what I came up with:

` The idea that the purpose of bureaucracy and (certain forms of ) regulation is to establish trust is perhaps obvious. But something about it struck me as a new way of looking at things. It's an idea that superblogger David Alpert gets at in his coverage of the Uber / DC fight, which he describes as a conflict between the "permission model" and the "innovation model". I understand that it's hard to get past the permission-based way of thinking.  Before information was available in real-time, it was the best way to make sure bad things didn't happen.  But we have a new tool -- real-time information -- that makes a new approach possible.  Yesterday at Harvard, we were discussing this in the context of government procurement.  At USV, we've been talking about it a lot in the context of online privacy (I'm pushing Brad to write about his idea for this soon). Hopefully you'll find this helpful -- I think I'll be coming back to it w/ some frequency now as we continue to work on this stuff.

#bureaucracy#privacy-2#strategery#trust

Predictive Analytics and Cities

It's been a big year for predictive analytics.   I've been following Nate Silver's blog on the election, and his deep data analysis cut through the noise, was consistent, and ultimately proved correct.   And to look at another (eerily prescient) example, look at this 2006 prediction of what a major coastal storm could do to the East Coast. We have lots and lots of data about what has happened, and we're just starting to figure out how to use it. Tomorrow, I'm attending a conference on Innovation and Cities at Harvard's Kennedy School, and I'll be speaking on a panel on predictive analytics and cities.  I'll be joined by New York City's Director of Analytics, Michael Flowers and Chicago's (first ever) Chief Data Officer, Brett Goldstein.  Both Brett and Michael are way deeper on this subject than I am, so my hope is to simply ask some provocative questions, and perhaps give some examples from outside the civic sector. A few weeks ago at the Ford Foundation's Wired for Change conference, MIT's Cesar Hidalgo gave a thought provoking talk on the power of big data and predictive analytics.  A big takeaway from his talk was that by looking at how data is connected -- i.e., focusing on a few of data as a network, rather than as sums of numbers -- we can quickly and compellingly start to see new trends, tell new stories, and predict future outcomes. Cesar presented some research that looked at national exports in terms of connections between products and industries.  By creating such a "map" of the ecosystem, using historical data, it actually becomes relatively easy to guess which sectors will continue to grow and how.  For example, here is a look at South Korea's export economy over time: This simple, but profound, change in approach holds tons of potential for us to understand what's going on in our cities and countries, and better prepare (for economic changes, natural disasters, etc.).  You can play with more visualizations of world economic data at MIT's Observatory of Economic Complexity. So, looking ahead to tomorrow's conversation: the specific topic of conversation is:

Predictive analytics cut across issues and datasets. When it comes to potential new forms of analytics, what are the low-hanging fruit? What are ambitious, longer-term ideas of new ways to use predictive analytics to tackle urban issues? What could/should cities do together?

I have some ideas -- for instance, generally taking an open data and open standards approach at the foundational level (to widen the audience of potential data miners).  Looking for data sets that tell us a lot about how the city works, but might not be the first ones we think of (such as taxi drop off locations, long-distance call originations, tweets, supermarket and other consumer spending data, etc.).  I'll keep noodling on it today and tonight. What do you think?

#bigdata#predictive-analytics#strategery

Community, and Why Halloween is the Best Holiday

I love halloween. I think it's my favorite holiday.

The thing that I like about it the most is that it's one of the only days of the year where you have a reason to go out and meet all of your neighbors.  I spent a while last night walking around the neighborhood with Theo and Brieza, having conversations with my nearest neighbors, most of whom I hadn't spoken to before (we've lived in our current place for just over a year).  It was really nice.

If you think about it, it's kind of astonishing the extent to which we typically don't know our neighbors.  I can't speak for everyone, everywhere, but it seems like a reasonably safe bet that most of us don't know the vast majority of people who live within a one-block radius of us.

Why is that?

To some extent, it's probably a deeply rooted sense of fear and privacy.

But I suspect it's also a practical matter -- there just aren't convenient, socially fluid (i.e., non-awkward) ways to connect with your neighbors.  That's part of why Halloween is so great.  It's a fun, easy, light-touch excuse to walk around and say hi to everyone.  No big commitment, no awkward over-staying the moment.  In the best case, just enough connection to reasonably say hi to someone next time you see them on the street.  For sure this is not a whole lot, but it's a whole lot more than normal.

Another factor here -- and another reason why this is hard -- is that you actually need to be really careful making these connections.  By and large, these are people you are stuck with for some period of time, so you want to tread carefully and make sure you don't create a situation that's weird, or too intense, etc.

So it's not surprising that no one has cracked the "social network for neighborhoods" problem.  It's hard on a number of levels - the sensitivities mentioned above, the widely varying levels of comfortability with technology, etc.  But if you look at the success of platforms like Facebook (networking for colleges) and Yammer (networking for businesses), there is a proven path of starting with an existing community and building a platform from there.  So I still think there's an opportunity here (that folks like CommonPlace, LifeAt, Front Porch Forum and to some extent SeeClickFix and Neighborland are looking at).

Maybe the way to think about this is bringing Halloween to every day? That's clearly wrong, but maybe there's something right in it.

#cities#strategery