Lee Bryant (Part 1) (025)
View the rush: 025-Alan Cox/Lee Bryant
Headshift co-founder Lee Bryant discusses the motivations for participation in social media.
Transcript:
A. (22.37) Do you want me to talk you through this?
Q. Yes, yes.
A. Patient Opinion is a very interesting social enterprise pays based up in Sheffield and what these guys were interested to do was see how they could harness feedback of opinion about NHS services to improve those NHS services. So the way the site works is that anybody can come along and they can share their opinion or a story or some feedback about a particular experience of using any NHS service and then what we do is aggregate those and in the background we do some text analysis to work out what they are about -- you know what conditions it relates to, what services it relates to, what hospital or clinic it relates to -- and then we can organise those by any of those dimensions so you can find opinions by specialisation, for example, you can search for hearts and the system is smart enough to know which words, which terms, even which colloquial terms users have used that relate to heart surgery, lets say, or anything to do with the heart, and that is it you can find those opinions.
The interesting thing about the opinions is whilst we expected the majority to be negative, there is actually a fine balance between very positive opinions and negative experiences, which is interesting because there are many instances where people want to thank you a nurse, a team or a ward and they don't really have a way to do that so we're using patient opinion to do that which is quite neat and, also, what the patient opinion guys do is make sure that these are fed back to the people who need to see them and then obviously they can report back on site about improvements that have been made or responses that have come from the hospital or et cetera. So it is kind of neat. It is just a way of improving services by harnessing the collective and interest and wisdom of people using those services which I think is a phenomenon we are going to see more and more.
Q. Why do you think people bother to spend the time, sit in there, spend their time typing away?
A. (24.47) It is interesting. I think health is a particular area where people are very motivated to find out information and also share their onwn experiencess because if you have a health incident, you have a condition or you have a accident or something like that, then I think you really are crying out to connect with other people who have had the same experience or who can offer you advice or put you in touch with people who can help you. So I think health is an interesting area where people are naturally motivated to share information, even quite personal information.
So one of its ways we tried originally to contextualise this was we gave people like a treatment diary and we gave them some storage on system where they could, for example, remind themselves of appointments they have coming up in a hospital and they can make notes about what they want to ask the doctor. They can you know feedback to themselves, as well as to everyone else, about what happened.
Q. What do you like about it as a principle?
A. I think if you look at the NHS, there is a fundamental problem which is that, as most politicians acknowledge, we simply can not meet the expectations of users in an aging society where people are living longer, getting different chronic conditions later in life and also we just simply don't have the resources to meet the expectations that people have since post-1945, free health care movement. So you know the way I see it is that if we are to find a solution, it is a solution that has to involve the patients and it has to involve some of the work to patients. So I think we are going to see more and more self-help, we are going to see more and more community peer-to-peer assistance and I think what we have to do is focus the energy and the time and the motivation of the individuals using the service to improve the service, rather than work from the top down and do large scale consultations and pieces of research about what is happening and how the people are using the service. So I think it is really about harnessing that resource, which is for people using the system, in order to make the system better and to do so without costing the earth.
Q. Shall we just change lens?
(A short adjournment)
A. (27.51) So when you come to the site, it is a very simple route through the site. You can see the latest opinions and you can see the latest opinions by type. So these are concerns and these are thanks -- so no recent thanks -- and you can put in your post code, so, if I put in the post code of the office here, you can either go for a specific service or just look at all the services in the area and you see here that we can compare for example Guy's Hospital with the Royal London Hospital and get a sense of what people have said about their experiences of those hospitals. So Guy's has had some ratings from users in terms of standard of care, nursing, cleanliness, parking, various aspects of the experience and so has the Royal London and, if I click of Guy's, I can see services available at this hospital and if I want to feedback about a particular area of service. Then I can share my story and I can say as a patient or a carer, or a relative or a staff member, this was my experience and then what we will do in the background is, you know, annalise that, find linkages between conditions and services and so on and then make sure it gets through to the right people.
But what is interesting about this as well is that if you are looking to find services or again if I put my if I put a different postcode in, something in south London, you can drill right down to the level of individual clinics and services and be able to see other people's opinions about that place and what I like about this is that the barrier to entering a store is quite low, it is very simple. It is just a text box and, if you are trying to chose which hospital to go to for a particular service under the new chosing a book regime, you have that choice. Then you can look at other people's experiences before you book in. So one of the things I know the patient opinion guides have done is they have tried to link this in doctor's surgeries, so that when people are making their choices about different services they can also also look at those opinions before they make a choice of where to go.
So, yes, it is a neat project and I think you know whilst we were involved in the build of this and some of the ideas, it is really the patient opinion team who have made it work and it is their project, so we have lots of respect for what they are doing.
Q. Lens lens lens spare lens? Okay so could we have a look at Do The Green Thing?
A. It is called Green Thing.
Q. What is that about?
A. (31.08) So Green Thing is a really interesting idea. What they have done is they have tried to harness the creative talents of people in the advertising sector and the creative industries in order to persuade people to take very, very small actions in favour of being carbon neutral or not generating so much carbon dioxide. So what they do, every month, they have a theme -- so the theme might be eat less meat, it might be buy an old thing, not a new thing, it might be walk once -- and they will illustrate that with a video and some supporting content and some fun ideas and then, on the site, what you can do is you can say when you have done it so, if you have taken the stairs, which I did earlier, you can say you have done it and it says 'I absolutely promise I have done this particular green thing or may my soul frazzle to is a crisp in a globally super-warmed hell of my own making' which is an indication of the fact that we are relying on trust to do this -- we are not going to go around monitoring people to do this. That is basically it. You can say that you have done it and if I sign in -- lets see I am notoriously bad at remembering pass words words -- there we go. So now that I have said 'I have done it' it says 'great, you are the 1396 person to have done this action and those people saved a total of 698 kilos of CO2' and you can say where you did it, so I did it in a building, for example.
And the principle of Green Thing is a really, really simple which is that you use peer pressure and your friends to essentially keep you on the straight and narrow and keep you doing these actions. So you will see here on my profile, I have saved 134 kilos of CO2, which is not very much, and here are some of the actions I have done -- so walk in comfort, get better light bulbs, wrap up your home, walk once, go easy on the food miles(?) and so on -- and you can see my friends. So, if I look at some of my friends, like Andy, I can see how many of the green things he has done. So he has done each of these actions, which are represented by their own characterers. These are like little Tamagochis, so if you don't do the action again next month, your creature starts to fade until eventually it goes a sepia colour and then it asks you to do the action again otherwise it is going to die. So a simple principle of keeping people interested. And you can also see what Andy has saved. So his carbon dioxide savings are probably a lot higher than mine. There we go 263 kilos and you can see what he has been doing on the site, so it is a bit like facebook -- it is a sort of a friend's feed of activities, so you can see what he is doing, and the idea is, if you can see what your friends are doing, that should persuade you that you need to carry on taking these actions and being a good boy or girl.
But what is also neat about Green Thing is that you can obviously have a blog, you can contribute to the blog, but you can also upload videos of you doing the Green Thing. So some of these are quite good fun, like easy on the meats, somebody has put together a video. This is called meat balls with attitude which is meatball rap which I wrap which I rather like.
(Video shown)
A. (35.39) You get the picture. You can also -- people share photographs on the sights showing themselves doing the Green Thing and they can also share audio as well. So you can upload spoken word, you can upload poetry, you can upload what you want really. So it is a lot of fun.
What we are doing now with Green Thing is widening it out so, rather than it just being a web site it is a hub of activity which takes place on a lot of different sites and so we are building a facebook application where people can do the Green Thing on facebook. Similarly with other widgets on other web sites and I think we will also involve for example SMS triggers so that, when you are out and about, you can send an SMS and say you have done it and it will update your profile and profile on Green Thing and so on. But the basic principle is quite simple, as I say. It is really about using the power of peer pressure among a group of friends or people in the network to keep you doing the right thing. So the idea is, if you don't do it, then your friends will see that and you will slip off your profile and so on.
Q. Is it implicit that you are able to get that thing going in the first place because you are actually changing the things you are talking about are it is not easy things to do necessarily they are not very difficult but to get a load of people doing these things it is very difficult. So you really are changing peoples behaviour.
A. I think the thing is, in the field of personal actions for, you know, for carbon and being green, it is an area which is beset by scientific debates, ideological debates and what looks like great complexity from the point of view of an individual user and so people are lacking very simple outlets for doing the right thing or changing their behaviour and I think the view that the Green Thing people took is, rather than seek to completely transform people's lives, which is obviously a big commitment, if they get people into the habit of taking small actions which are roughly going in the right direction then actually what you are embedding is a kind of behaviour change and, even if the results might be quite small at the beginning, you know, if everybody does that then obviously the impact will be quite great and the obviously the impact they had which is really interesting was to apply their experience in the world of advertising and communications to make this a delightful thing to do. It is fun. It is not about guilty tripping people. It is about having a good time. It is about sharing relationships with other people and indeed making relationships with people based on a common interest or a common commitment to change so I think that is why it is working quite well.
Q. Have you had a look at Horses Mouth and see if there are similarities about that do you know anything about that?
A. I know a bit. Some friends of mine are served in that.
Q. They are a similar ideas I think going on. I think recognition, peer pressure, may have a look at the way the meants things things like that similar things to them?
A. (39.13) I think in theory, much the same thing is happening. So if we look at an individual mentor here you can see that there is very clear recognition for the involvement that they are having in the site and so that does give them an incentive to carry on helping people which is a very good idea.
What is different about all that he is sights I think is, in the old world of charity and non-profit organisation, it was instructed in a very basic way. So the idea is to get money, set up in a organisation, try and go out and do good. But actually the outcomes of non-profit organisations or something trying to, I guess, engage collective action are much wider than just the specific actions that they take or the ways they spend the money or the projects that they do. It is about culture. It is about bringing people together and it is about giving people this sense of being connected and I think that is what something like Horses Mouth does and it is certainly what Green Thing does and it is what Patient Opinion does as well.
Q. What about something like investigation information all these sights are vulnerable to people either writing nonsense or lying in the case of green thing you know they are all making themselves vulnerable because they are TOEP to people communicating with them that is why I am really interested in couch suffering because you are putting yourself at the most vulnerable could we have a look at that and you can share your understanding of how that works how people don't sort of ruin it I think is it is quite impressive how many people are doing this every night and not having problems?
A. So lets have a look at somewhere close to here on Couch Surfing. What is really I think interesting about anything like this is that -- here we go: several thousand people making themselves available. What is interesting is that any system that tries to apply rules to human behaviour leaves itself open being gamed. So we know this from school that people set very strict rules about what you can and can not do and if you are between the ages of 12 and 16 then you are probably very adept at finding ways of reinterpreting those rules or working around those rules and so you get into this kind of arms race situation, where people are making up rules and you are you are beating the rules and so on and so so on and what is interesting is to flip that situation and to look at a completely open culture like something like Wikipedia for example or something like Couch Surfing or Green Thing and so on and if you show trust then what tends to happen is you reduce the incentive to game the system substantially. So just by being open and showing trust, you can actually protect yourself to a certain extent. There will always be freeloaders and people that abuse that trust, people who vandalise Wikipedia pages or lie on Green Thing or even worse on couch surfing but I think, when you apply the oversight of a community to their behaviour, then it becomes harder for them to do that and it is easier for the community to self repair and find ways to overcome that bad behaviour.
Q. How does that work for in this for example if we maybe look at someone's profiles it is that sort of thing I suppose that people being able to look at each other and find out real things about each other and also the photograph does give it a bit of accountability?
A. (43.13) Yes, thay's right. I think that is it and when you start to apply Ebay style feedback and ratings or so and on and you can say this person has not really fulfilled their promise and this person, whoever, was a bit weird, whatever it might be, then you give people signals that they should avoid that person, thereby they reduce the importance of their bad behaviour in the system as a whole. But I think it is also a question of expectations because we have grown up in a world of customer relations and government relations where we have these expectations. We almost behave like children and say, 'I want my jelly and ice cream and I do not want to pay for it and if you don't give it to me I am going to phone you up and shout at you.' This is a more fuzzy world. There is a great deal more ambiguity in this kind of world. You have to have the expectations that things will not necessarily work every time. So for example if you go to Couch Surfing and you have one bad experience that should not necessarily (telephone ringing) be a massive surprise because it is that kind of world. It is a imperfect world and it is a world that works on the basis of people trying to come together and do the right thing and that doesn't always work.
Q. Maybe we should move then to the other thing if that is all right room if that is all right.
(A short adjournment)
A. (45.12) The good thing about the business is we have no illusion that anyone is managing it. We just have all the other people in the room and business comes in people sort it out and it goes out the other end
Q. Amazing (something something) different organisation?
A. Oh yes, totality. We have no -- for example we are about five years old but we have never done any sales work at all so nobody actually asks for business at all. It is just people come here and give it to us or whatever and we have always had about double the amount of work than we can actually do and you just have to find your own solutions to that problem and necessity is the mother of invention and so people find ways of organising their work and then we get it done.
Q. Do you have a position do you have people who are project managers?
A. Not really. I mean the consultants in the other side of the building the consultants try and run their project and they try and act as a point for their project and they try and gather the resources they need either internally or externally, but we don't have much in the way of management.
Q. Is that a sort of, I do not know, ...is it?
A. No no it is just incompetence I think. Haha.
Q. It must be a bit to do with the way, I mean --
A. Yes it is. The thing is it is amazing how, if you leave things alone, they become self-organising, so what we find is if you all communicate really well and all support each other then actually problems find solutions and people find a way of organising projects that suit the client and suit the timeline of the project but we don't have a very strict method or process that we use.
Q. It is also probably a bit more fun?
A. (47.06) Yes, it is fun. It is scary. Not everybody can cope with it but I think ultimately it is more fun.
Q. And do you think people have more autonomy?
A. Yes, definitely.
Q. And that is something that also is something to do with related to the web site because if you give people the ability to do something they?
A. Exactly if you are supportive and respectful and you try and help, then most people will step up to the plate and deliver good work.
Q. I think a lot of the changes in web sights being created and the things that are happening absence are looking at people in slightly different ways to sort of 20 century he can TPHOPLS EUBG PH-LGD model of people want to take sufficient for themselves and do everything for free who you would you carry that way?
A. (48.15) It is interesting, if you look at large organisations, so we do -- we work with consultancies and corporates and law firms and so on and what is really interesting there is that they higher the brightest and the best, they invest in them but they sit them down and actually think they make them operate within a factory model. So it is 1930s US management thinking, you know, being applied to the work of 21st century individuals and that is are real disconnect I think and it is really inefficient and it is really demotivating and I think it requires you to have a great deal of management and structure in order to make that work. I think that is changing. What we are seeing is most of the work place models we have in the 20th century are basically, yes, you can say it is related to 1930s management thinking in America but it is also fundamentally related to feudalism. It is a very, very old fashioned way of organising collective action and what happened I think is partly a cultural change but also partly now we have the tools and the communication devices that we can organise differently. So the Linex kernel was put together by a distributed group, a very core, but then a very wide group of people collaborating. Lots of other projects are international collaborations. They are, you know, non-organisational based forms of working together and I think we have seen enough examples now that that can work. Look at the classic stories of Wikinomics, Don Tapscott, about how the Chinese motor bake industry organized in order to compete with large players by just joining together lots and lots of small players on an kind of ad hoc basis. This is possible now, so I think we can now finally move away from 20th century organisational models and be a lot more flexible.
Q. Amazing. I mean I do not know I totally agree and it is a massive change what you are describing what is the change that has come that has allowed this to happen why is it all taking off now if you agree that it is?
A. (50.30) I think with the internet and with technology, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that change is instant but it is not. It takes time. It takes basically a decade for any major change to become embedded and mainstream enough that it can have an impact on society. So email has been around for a long, long time but there are still many, many people that can not use email properly so only now, you know, really we are seeing like a universal adoption of email among people in the work place, for example, and that being used properly and I think, if you look at Wikis and blogs, they have actually been around for quite a while now but still they are not mainstream and it is just getting to the stage that they are mainstream enough that people are used to them and they become invisible and through ubiquity they become almost unremarkable and when that that happens then you can see proper social change I think.
Q. I think could you describe then organisational formally the instruct that you are talking of and what are we moving towards in terms of the getting rid of the strict hierarchy where everyone is feudal strict HARBG where everyone is given their own strict department?
A. I think what we are moving towards is what, in the 1990s, people described as network individualism. So a greater focus on the individual incentivisation and self interest models for the individual but in the network environment. So, for example, if you look at Wikipedia or you look at Delicious the social book-marking site. People book mark things for their own reasons, for their own benefit, and then find them later. But then, by aggregating that the results of that together at scale, you get this remarkable collective intelligence that develops around links and book marks and so on. So people are driven by individual and centralisation models and that is what we need to bear in mind but you do it in a network environment where you can see network effects and, you know, social affordances emerging from that individual action and I think that, in a way, that is the fundamental model that we are seeing. Individual action aggregated to scale based on self interest creating collective benefit.
Q. But how does that work with something like mums net which people are relying on the level and the quality of information that they receive is credible they are comparing it to the services that they get from the NHS?
A. Yes.
Q. Why are they boring? Why are people bothering to input into that information how does that benefit them?
A. (53.31) It comes back to what we were talking about to do with health. You know, being a mum and having young kids and all that stuff. It is one of those shared experiences that really place who we are as a person. So we are much more motivated to share information about that and also you would trust other mums more than you would trust the health service or, you know, government policy or best practice papers about how to bring up children and so on. So the motivation to kind of network on a peer-to-peer basis and help each other is quite high. And so, you know, it is a very simple economic model, in terms of how you invest your time and your attention because the cost to you of sharing one piece of information is a lot less than the benefit you get back from everybody else's information. So, you know, it is like the old adage 'you have one thing to teach but lots of things to learn' and that model is present in many of these sites and these phenomena.
Q. But it is not even that exchange that exchange most of these things mums net or green thing maybe you don't actually in order to get the but quite often you don't actually.
(A short adjournment)
Q. A lot of these things you don't actually have to give before you receive
A. No that's right.
Q. You could go and say mumsnet you can take all the advice you like you don't have a give anything is there a reason that people want to give what is that?
A. (55.18) If you look at the anthropology and cultural history and so on, you will find that in almost all cultures there is a gifting ritual of some kind and people are motivated by a social status to a greater extent than they are motivated by money for example. So that is why if you reward people in a non-financial way for sharing or for gifting or for helping, they get more back than if you were to make it an explicit exchange, as in you give they me this and I will give you that. So it is like giving Christmas presents, it is like helping your neighbours or whatever. You are not looking for that explicit quid pro quo and in a sense, if it was explicit, I think it would be less motivated to share because if you had to share your story before you get the other stories I think you might not be motivated to use the services in the same way and a good example is actually on bit torrent networks. On bit torrent networks most people just don't download the episode of lost or whatever that they are looking for and, whilst they are downloading, they are also sharing that file with other people but many people will just what you call leech -- take the file and not share it with anybody else -- but there are enough people who don't do that, who share openly, for the system to work. So the system is robust enough to deal with a certain amount of freeloading without it breaking down.
Q. What does that prove though why is it happening so much now where people do want to share winning in a way people want to lead people just TWAPBT to they are being beaten in a way basically people's positive motivations are wing and Wikipedia why is that?
A. I do not think they are always winning. So, for example, spam is one of the biggest problems we have seen in email networks and spam in email networks is genuinely damaging because the volume of spam is so high that we are always having to build defences against it and having to change the way that we work. So I think we will see an equivalent of spam in other media in like Wikipedia and so on and so forth. So I would not say it is a forgone conclusion that good behaviours are necessarily set to win. But I think what has happened here is, if you look at human behaviour, we all have a inbuilt urge to socialize, an inbuilt means to connect with other people. If you look at babies they socialize before they can talk, before they can walk, you know, they are smiling, they are looking for feedback and so on and so forth. So we do have this kind of hard-wired socialisation urge within us and what we have seen in the past is just that the communication methods that we use and the communication media we use are not up to supporting that. So, for example, in the old world, if you want to communicate with a mass of people you would have to route your message through a major newspaper or through the BBC or a news agency or something. So what you are doing is narrowing down your message to get through that prism and then it can widen out to a mass audience but it is not two-way, it is one way. The only way you can actually get feedback is by letters to the editor or some similar mechanism. Now what we have seen with the rise of the internet is that it is two-way at all levels -- whether it is email, your own web page a blog, whether it is wikis, you know, it is two way communication so this urge we have to solcialise, to connect, to be recognised, to have social status, that plays out in these technologies a lot more easily than it could in a world of broadcast media or newspapers or mass communication in the 20th century sense of the term.
So I just think that, you know, technically we are able to do this now in a way that we could not do this before. I think there are other examples like the early introduction of the printing press, stanislav literature, especially in the eastern block in the 1970s -- there are other forms on a smaller scale of something similar. It is just that now we have a mass consumer technology that supports this. So we are only now beginning so discover what we can do with it. If you look at the early rise of the internet we were inventing technologies all the time, but it is almost like on Monday we invented the bicycle, Tuesday the car, Wednesday the spaceship -- but it is still takes more than a week to learn to ride a bike. So we have not really been learning the power of these technologies. We have just been continuing to invent and I think what is happening now is that blogs and wikis have been around long enough, social networking sites have been around long enough that we can, for the first time, really see what they can do.
