AIDS, computers, and organizing: part I, toward a revolution in fundraising? A report from the Planetwork conference

AIDS Treatment News, June 27, 2003 by John S. James

* A down side of referral networks is that recommendations can be traded -- you scratch my back and I scratch yours -- or even sold. This kind of activity, which can span the range from normal social process to corruption, can occur wherever personal referrals are used. For example, several decades ago scientific papers started being rated by how many future papers referenced them; collusion quickly developed and was quickly recognized, but is still with us today.

In the referral database, one way to reduce this problem would be to have rating agencies, companies in the business of investigating claims and publishing relevant findings, good or bad, on the database. They would not need to audit everyone, but might check those who are most important on the database, for example those who can change large flows of money. Rating agencies could also help with the "transitivity" problem: if A recommends B and B recommends C and C recommends D -- with all the recommendations within the same professional context and purpose -then to what extent can those who trust A's recommendations also trust D's? (If enough money depends on answer -for example, if A is a celebrity and D is a widely respected expert at a critical scene -- then an independent agency might investigate and provide its findings on how well fans of A know what they are getting with D.) Donors could follow or ignore these agencies' reports as they wish. [Note: I added the idea of rating agencies, which I not hear at the conference. Many presenters mentioned online reputation, however.]

Interestingly, the four kinds of entities on the database that have been discussed so far -- individuals, organizations, robots, and rating agencies -- all use the same format, a profile of the entity, with an unlimited number of referrals to others. The software need not even distinguish between these different entitie. (There is at least one other kind of entity -- imaginary characters that could represent factions, themes like reconciliation, or abstract themes that may be nameless -- or could serve to bring separated social networks together. These fictitious people are also handled by the database exactly like real people. Such characters have developed, totally unplanned, in existing social network software, and can become among the most popular "persons" in the system -- showing the need for this kind of device.)

Note: How to Be Useful

One of the most useful presentations at the Planetwork conference was "The Multiple Dimensions of Emergent Media," by Mark Graham, a computer conferencing pioneer who founded Peacenet and was president of Whole Earth Media, in addition to many other credentials. His talk referred listeners to over 30 Web sites of new-media tools and experiments (3). He also suggested some guidelines for successful projects in this field -- guidelines not just for technology, but for effectiveness and building constituency in whatever one does:

* Think big but keep it simple;

* Solve problems, don't invent solutions;