Solvation

In order to get trial, you have to help people try

At the 50th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival, iTunes gave out a free playlist, to be used on iTunes.  It went over like a lead balloon, and it was obvious why: this was not a typical young silicon valley music event crowd.  People refused the cards to the point where the distribution "girls" (young women) told people to just take handfuls.  With two or three people asking "Really?!" and grabbing handfuls, onlookers kept on walking by.  In the women's bathroom, people left their iTunes cards on the ledge, confident that someone would want them... just not them.

A simple solution, and one that's often used when launching breakthrough technology -- which this is for 60 year olds, by the way -- is having a kiosk or a demo running. But there was no demo, no kiosk. Just a lot of people wondering what they were supposed to do with this card thing.

For the records, the 65 year old retiree who sat near us is on the computer regularly with his 8 year old grandson, who is showing him YouTube.  So it's not about lack of computer access or aversion. It's about getting trial by helping people try.

Why the Free Cell Phone project isn't in the US

This highly rambly post is inspired by Jamais Cascio's much tighter one at Open The Future, where he contemplates a Futurist's role as a civilizational therapist.

I realized that what he talks about reflects the same concept of sense-making that's important to me as well. I am using it here to describe the underlying reason why I find the changing conceptualization of wealth to be so critical to solving many challenges, local and global, including addressing the issue of the Digital Divide.

At the most fundamental level, money's a medium of exchange. Beyond that, it's frequently used as power: if you have a lot of money, you can buy things. It's not the only way to have power, but it's one way, and since money's fungible it's pretty effective for a lot of things.

The confusion occurs when people attach value judgment to money.

Social Entrepreneurialism vs. Charity

Sunday morning, and I woke up with an analogy.

Social Entrepreneurialism is (currently) like building a gym.  It's great - people can combat everything from osteoporesis to stress, can keep physically fit, and can even meet people and meet up with people to reinforce social community.

Charity is when someone in the gym yells out "spot."  The charity-giver provides the little bit extra necessary for the person to finish their set and move on.

Some charity is analogous to the physical rehabilitation work that goes on in the gym: it's not just about a spot. It's about having prolonged interaction that (re)builds range of motion and function.

It's not enough to build a gym and say "go use it!"  It's not going to work to say "I'm here to provide a spot if you need it" when there is no gym, or it's the stairwell in the office building.

This analogy rose because of a thread on Cooperation Commons "Is Free Cell Phone Service & Internet a Panacea to the Digital Divide?"  While I've said several times that I don't think it's a bad idea, I've also been struck by the disconnect.  In this case, the cell phones would be the socially entrepreneurial level. The early adopters will be those who maintain the status quo, just like the early gym members are likely to be people already fit or close to it, and not elderly who need to conserve bone mass, nor children who won't leave the couch.

The Experience of Prediction Markets

(Cross-post to IFTF's FutureNow blog.)

I had been co-administering the prediction market for the Open Ex program at IFTF and pulled together a summary for people interested in Prediction Markets.  The IFTF market used InklingMarkets.com as a platform.

These ideas are pulled predominantly from the experience of running the market, rather than participating in the market.

Risk Management via Monitoring Activist Investors

In the article The Subprime Meltdown and SRI: Engage, Avoid, Predict, Bill Baue describes the issues and relates how activist investors expressed their concerns about these dangers by such methods as tying executive compensation to fighting predatory loans.