12.29.07

The wicked problem of poverty

Posted in marketsareconversations, wicked problems, MDG's at 7:22 pm by kevindjones

A blog of mine in a faith-based venue a network group focused on the Millennium Development Goals. How to talk across the divide to people who only measure things in soft ways, and who can see grass roots needs but not system problems. Measuring soft stuff is a wicked problem; you can’t let the measurement deplete identification they feel with the cause, with feeding the children they visited on their mission trip, etc. yet you have to get them to see broader food security issues, its relation to global health issues. The sick child and the system have to both be in the picture. And the money and the social capital at the table has to understand how they both fit into the solution set.

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Technology as an aid to the creation of collaborative value

Posted in exchanges, commonstradingfloor at 6:16 am by kevindjones

“It is risky to use concepts like commons and non-commodified relations to describe a superior
form of economic organization for early-21st century America. It runs into the teeth of the dominant
analytic paradigm, which relies on neoclassical economics to press for the strengthening and extension
of exclusive property rights–the antithesis of a commons—in all aspects of economic life. Yet, the
interest in these phenomena is driven by empirical facts that are impossible to disregard, and risky in
their own right to ignore.” from a Stanford Cyberlaw research report on collaborative economics by Mark Cooper (to get the report you have to scroll down through his blog)

Soft things like the increasing value of collaboration are getting easier to measure because of fundamental principles by which digital information now has to be shared and processed. The technological aspect of the new social value creation is a key element, and will guide the design and prospects for success of any social stock exchange that arises.  Cooperation is now a new means of production; there is a lot of interesting thinking going on about how the new medium changes the way we work and makes sharing fundamentally more valuable because digital goods are not scarce and actually increase in value as they are shared.

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Measuring meaning

Posted in meaning as metrics, soft metrics at 5:42 am by kevindjones

“I can say my measurement of my success is around how much meaning I’ve made,” ex-Apple rising star Tom Williams of Givemeaning.com in the Toronto Globe and Mail. From Gift Hub. It’s one answer to how you measure soft things. The perception of meaning.

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12.28.07

What to measure

Posted in Uncategorized, economics, India at 3:11 am by kevindjones

This is my response to Shana Ratner, whose work I admire, on what to measure. I have a house in Sonoma California. I noticed today two shops that seem to be doing well. one was consignment furniture, another was consignment couture; people selling their furniture and their high end, glittery gowns and things. I think, in light of the wonderings about recessions, peering under rugs for canaries in the mine, that those two shops numbers (number of consignment sellers, avg. dollar of items sold, throughput of retail stock, etc. factored against new car sales, by price, and new home sales, by price, factoring in time on the market for home sales and slicing in forclosures or other signs of housing distress,and then doing a similar slice by price and item in local newspaper classified ad line sales from individuals those are measurements that would be meaningful and that would let me know whether, for example, i’d want to start a competing newspaper here, or some other business. i believe in measurement where there is an outcome that results in more money flowing or more perception of trends and value over time. i believe in measuring soft things, like you do in a failing community’s assets. in social enterprise, it’s been mostly academic hand jive. additive friction without additive value. measurement should increase the flow of value, not be a net cost.

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12.26.07

Gift Hub touches social exchange

Posted in Uncategorized, attentioneconomy, commonstradingfloor at 11:41 pm by kevindjones

Phil Cubeta’s gift hub blog has touched on the underlying thread I’ve been thinking about; user ownership of what is produced online, and how that value can be exchanged.

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12.16.07

More on user generated currency/brands

Posted in usergeneratedcurrency, attentioneconomy, usergeneratedbrands at 6:44 pm by kevindjones

Pure Verticals Aims To Monetize User-Generated Content

A California-based company called Pure Verticals is developing a product it calls MUGC — which stands for Monetizing User-Generated Content, and they’ve announced they’re seeking to have it patented. It also plans to showcase the tech by Q1 2008 with a new website says this blog
So what is it, exactly? It’s a platform, that much is clear from the announcement — and it promises to enable any virtual community or social network to offer its members control over how product placements and ads integrate with member content. As opposed to providing ad space alongside content for ads generated automatically or by a third party, users can select the products to promote and apparently tailor how the ads are displayed.

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Risk models

Posted in exchanges, resilience_economics, risk, model error at 5:32 pm by kevindjones

People working on biocomplexity and resillience science are factoring in a method for including unlikely but extreme events (fat tails) in cost-benefit analyses, such as the uncertainty surrounding climate sensitivity. They are approaching it from a hard science perspective, and are getting it right, imho. By contrast, conventional financial risk models are under attack from a variety of sources, from Teleb’s Black Swan theory which began as more anecdotal than mathematical to the neglected but increasingly relevant idea by Benoit Mandelbrot that our fundamental risk model, using the bell curve, should be reconfigured as a power law, the kind of network pattern we see in everything from epidemic outbreaks to the growth of dominant sites on the internet. It’s good to see that Teleb and Mandelbrot are writing together. Social stock exchanges will need a new model of risk, since there are new, social values on the balance sheet for these companies.

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User generated brands

Posted in Uncategorized, usergeneratedbrands, marketsareconversations, cluetrain, disintermediation at 3:33 pm by kevindjones

As you look at user generated currency and other democratic expressions of value that will have to be part of a social stock exchange, you have to look at what I’m calling (I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else call it this) user generated brands. It relates to the crisis in advertising, where intermediaries positions are faltering in the wake of citizen evaluation and product and service presentation; the public’s image of value creation has slipped out of the hands of the professionals. This Business Week story talks about it. Though the line “Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking” has gotten the most attention, another quote from Intuit’s Scott Cook sums it up better for me “A brand is what a friend tells a friend it is. Not what a company tells them.”

This is a key emerging element in the first question that social stock exchanges will have to answer: what kind of value social returns create, and how can they be priced into the value of a company’s equity and expressed on an exchange. User generated brands are being built now. User generated currency might find a home on the social stock exchanges.

My thinking on this subject has been moved forward by online conversations with Nicholas Gitovsky. On the issue of what would constitute a meaningingful segmentation of online attention such that you could sell yourself or your group back to an advertiser (not through an ad agency) he suggests this. “Validated intention data coupled with certified profile data, perhaps. “Is that guy a good risk to lend a land rover for the weekend when he’s travelling on business?” Yes, because his driving record, credit report, intent to purchase and affiliations show that it’s not a 20 year old kid just looking for a joy ride, but a guy who owns a 5 year older model back home in Greenwich, where his dealer has stated a willingness to underwrite the insurance for the rental replacement”. Done.

Nicholas thinks about this kind of trade off a fair amount - and “so do people working on Vendor Relationship Management with Doc Searls (author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which asserted markets are conversations) and his posse,” Nicholas says.

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12.15.07

A dissenting view

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:13 am by kevindjones

A vote against the social stock exchange

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Shift space, commons as trading floor

Posted in Uncategorized, commonstradingfloor, commons at 5:12 am by kevindjones

Shift space is about creating a new kind of online space that people would own, an abstraction layer of digital real estate not subject to vendor intrusion, which is its own kind of value, and that value transforms the creations built on this new kind of real estate, if they can execute, if if lots of ifs, but it’s an interesting test of the market, moving out from technology to free space, a commons, the kind of place you can trade social value.

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