MT Rainey (043)
HorsesMouth founder MT Rainey describes the principles of reciprocal altruism in relation to public services.
Transcript:
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Q. Maybe the best thing to do is start with how you came up with the sort of circumstances that enabled you to initiate this, how did it come about what were the sort of factors that enabled it?
A. (44.01) Well, I had a media career really and lived through the golden age of broadcast television and advertising and media and could see that was all changing and became really very excited about the idea of how new media could end up empowering ordinary people and giving them a voice and giving them capabilities and opportunities to express themselves, to be creative, to produce things, to collaborate and to connect in ways that just had not been possible before. So I suppose the impetus came partly from my own passion for communication and the media and also realising that this new thing was nothing like we had ever seen before and also probably thinking that, if the whole social web was left to its natural devices, it would perhaps be entirely used just for commercial purposes and that in fact there was an idea that we could develop the same sort of social networking functions but for a non commercial purpose. That might allow us to do things faster and more interestingly than perhaps if it was just commercial.
Q. You talk about new media and the opportunities there, what do you think it offers, what is the new media and what does it offer?
A. I think the new media offers everything we have had before but distributed differently. So it is media content produced by experts and professionals but now we are able to find that and can submit on demand so that is one of the things it does but I think more excitingly, certainly for us, is the idea that now people are part of creating media and they are part of the media so and that is the most exciting thing is that just now the whole power to collaborate, to create and to connect is now with individual people. Anyone who has a computer and broadband can be a producer, a creator, a contributor and a connecter and that is really the key difference.
Q. So what did you do with that, you had the background in business and then you noticed this power of the web?
A. I can see it coming, this real sort of shift, this real transformational shift between people being the sort of passive receivers of media content or consumers of media content to being part of the media, if you like, and I could see that coming. So I think the other important thing, though, was that I thought it would be about ten years before, really, the third sector comes to grips with this because they are typically a bit slower in responding. They certainly want more tried and trusted formula and so I had the idea really to create something that was a social enterprise rather than an commercial enterprise which would allow us to do things that were not enslaved by a formula that required lots of page views and lots of click throughs and all of that kind of thing, that really decides how commercial operations should work. So I think it was partly the impetus of a exciting new medium and also a conviction that we could do something pro-social with this media and I would try and do it before the natural market would take it there.
Q. And so what is Horses Mouth what have you set up. .............?
A. The second bit was not quite right.
Q. I thought it was quite good.......... I think I said something like so you had this background in business and you had an interest in new media as you put it so what did you then do with those two pieces of knowledge?
A. (48.13) I think my passion for media and real excitement about the potential of the way media was changing coupled with a kind of desire. Maybe it is a point in my life or this fact that I have had an successful career, I have the wherewithal to think about perhaps doing something a bit different that was not commercial really trying to see what would a opportunity be to capture this great new medium in fact social networking specifically and turning it into something that would really work perfectly and something good and really work for people's benefit explicitly for people's benefit, rather than that being a side effect of a commercial enterprise so it was really a kind of desire to give something back with an excitement about the potential for the media to do that and to connect people and to allow people and connect with each other and give something back often.
Q. And so what did you do?
A. Very good. So Horses Mouth is obviously the name means straight from the horse's mouth so it is about getting advice and support directly from another person who has been in your situation and effectively it uses all the tools of social networking that we have all come to know and love you publish a profile and the profile is found in search by other users who might type in an word like depression, having a baby or a career in engineering or having a parent with alzheimer's, whatever it might be and they might find other people who have profiled on that issue and the idea of horses mouth is, instead of connecting with people randomly, you connect with people on specific issues in a community there to help each other so effectively it is social networking for a social purpose and people are there to exchange the benefits of their life experiences, what they have learned from life and particularly through very specific experiences. So people are not profiled on Horses Mouth as generic someone to talk to. They are there to talk about specific experiences they have had in their own lives so in a way although this is people to people this is amateur site, this is user generated. There are no professionals here. People are expert in their own life experiences and I think it is arrogant for commentators to suggest that they are not so. If I have had a family member with cancer or a family member with down's syndrome or the parent of a disabled child or if I have had a wonderful career in advertising or a career in engineering or I am a heart surgeon, then those experiences I am expert in and, if I am participating in a community that talks about that then that makes me an expert in my own life experience. So I guess it is a social networking site with a social purpose.
Q. Is it a different way of looking at qualification ........... allowing people to be in quite a powerful position so life experience can be used in order to ................. positioning people's perhaps negative experiences to be something like a resource?
A. I think people all of us go through life, we all learn through life actually we don't all codify what we have learned we don't all all think very hard about what we have learned but if we were explicitly asked to think about what we have learned from the big stuff we have had in our lives and then we are explicitly asked to talk about it to other people who might be facing the same challenge or opportunities then I think it is a form of kind of informal qualification. If you take the time and trouble to think reflectly learn about your own life to publish that in the form of a profile and our profiles are quite in depth then it is a form of saying I am expert in these experiences in my life. I am not going to tell you what medicine to use what doctor to see or what education or qualification to get because there are other professionals who will do that but I can tell you what it was like to be me in those circumstances and I can help and support other people who are going through the same thing so it is a form of being allowed to talk about certain things.
Q. So from the point of view of a user of Horses Mouth, whatever you refer to them as, someone who wants advice what is that experience like?
A. (52.41) Well we would hope they would come across Horse's Mouth if they were interested in talking to a person based on their real experiences so we would like to be able to be found when someone searches for certain topics we would like to to be found in the connection of finding someone else who has been in this situation to talk to so if someone coming on to our site had typed in say being a parent of a down's syndrome child they would find lots of people on Horses Mouth to talk to about what that feels like what that experience is and some of the support issues they might be looking for help with. So that is how it would help. They might type in a search term the system would yield lots of profiled people, people can browse the profile see what kind of people are most like them, that they might have most in common with circumstancially and all of that happens on a hosted platform so none of it is happening in anyway that allows people to identify each other so it is very safe it is a hosted platform a direct email platform.
Q. You are giving I suppose a lot of responsibility to the user. .......... everyone is given the responsibility to find a right answer for them?
A. Yes it is very user directed so most things will yield a few profiles. Some searches will yield hundreds of profiles but it is up to the user to look at the profiles and see which kind of people are most like me or actually maybe which kind of people are least like me, because I don't want to be anyone like me -- I want to see what someone's different experience is. So, yes, it is very user driven. There is no right answer, obviously there is no right answer. Because this is all just entirely subject active. However it is does not make it less authentic and it doesn't make it less valid so people's experiences are very valuable and I guess it is just allowing us to you know find a way to magnify the whole strangers on a train syndrome where you meet someone remandly and get to chat with them for about an hour and you never see them again but in that hour you have made a deep connection on a issue and you have had an great conversation or they have said something really valuable or you have unburdened yourself to them in a way that you perhaps would not with a person that you know so in an way it is picking up on that phenomenon which hardly ever happens and allows it to happen much more often and much more pointedly and deliberately in a safe online environment.
Q. You are also trusting people to give good advice and also to have some sort of way to look at the advice they are receiving themselves and judge it in some way.....
A. (56.00) Yes I think what we have found is that in discussions forums, there are plenty all over the web where you can find lively discussions happening on almost every subject, certainly almost every subject you would find on Horse's Mouth. I think the difference is that this is not a forum, this is one-to-one. We do allow people to publish to the community on Horse's Mouth but basically it is one-to-one and what we tend to find is people, once they have signed up to the idea of being in a helpful community or an constructive community where people are left to help, explicitly to help not to whinge, wear a kind of badge that says I am a mentor which is rather an glorified word for what they are but it is in fact in an informal sense exactly what they are, but once they wear that hat and badge they take a huge amount of responsibility, so we have 16 year old people kids taking you know sending such wisdom and we see a lot of this, such wise words to other people asking for help, clearly very considered clearly quite well researched because often they are referring other secondary professional resources and they are always doing that out of their own personal experiences but they take it very, very seriously and I think giving people that additional context of being in a explicitly helpful community and giving them a bit of status -- which they don't get automatically they have to go through an system where we have to approve -- a bit of status and responsibility, they absolutely rise to it and we find that the advice given and the support given is hugely helpful to our members and they are helpful to each other. It is a community where everyone gives and gains.
Q. Can we talk a bit about the motivation in general for that type of giving, people are giving a lot of their time for free. A lot of the other things we are looking at are couching surfing, things like people giving out local advice and mums. net ......... why are we seeing this so much at the moment and what is the motivation of people to get involved in this type of giving?
A. I think we are seeing just the very beginning of this. I know there seems to be a lot of this but it is just the beginning of this fantastic phenomenon. It is really a very powerful force for good. The potential for people to connect in this way partly because it is incredibly easy to do -- you don't have to go anywhere you can do it entirely at your convenience in your own time, at any time, so there is a massive convenience factor that allows people to do this. There is also I believe a real basic altruism inside people which feels good about saying I learned that and if I had my time again I would make sure this happened or I would make sure I avoided that and that kind of advice people accumulated in life and they love to give that back to someone. I think there is an element of ..... in it and so there is no question of the web and all these places on the web where you are allowed to post an opinion post a profile you are asked to your opinion there is an element of display in that but that is absolutely fine but there is a natural element of genuine good well and genuine interest in helping other people particularly when it is someone else who has been in exactly the same circumstances as you so this is not a lot of dogooders out there wanting to help people generically. These are people that have been through very specific things that have meant a lot to them in their lives who are connecting and can absolutely identify and emote and empathise with other people facing a similar thing. So it is not generic dogooding. This is highly specific, highly individualised and therefore far more powerful than generic wordiness it is much more meaningful than that.
MT RAINEY (044)
Q. If you could talk a bit about mums net and what sort of powers are at work behind these types of projects?
A. I think they are not all the same. They are, interestingly, all using the power of the web for people to connect with each other on an highly relevant basis as opposed to just a big generic discussion forum but I think they are probably driven by novelty by the fact that this is exciting, that we can do this now and that will certainly be driving some of it. They are definitely driven by community and emphasize thinking so you have people connecting on the fact that they are a mother or the fact on a Horse's Mouth they could be two business people, two entrepreneurs, two (inaudible), they could be a young person and an old person suffering the same health condition, it could be across a number of barriers but they are connecting on the basis of highly relevant similarities and the power of the web through to really search .......... to connect people on that basis is huge and there are few better ways to connect than with someone who shares a highly important issue with you so I think they are all doing that, tapping into virticals that are all really emotionly important to people, whether it is travel or travelling on a budget, being a mother, being someone who feels they need a bit of help from a friendly stranger who has been in the same situation. So I think they are all driven by that. I think also they are all starting to meet an unmet need, to fulfill an unmet need because I would definitely say that what is emerging from the kind of content we see the natural gravity of content on Horse's Mouth is probably two or three big areas which are clearly never really been catered for in the past which are now able potentially to be catered for and they are massive areas.
One is the whole area of careers guidance. So kids coming out of school absolutely, who knows what to do with your life, I do not remember having any really good career advice god knows how I ever got anywhere but it certainly would not be from the benefit of careers advice so the whole area of people, kids, coming out of school not knowing what to do with their lives, many children not having any role models or experience or direct knowledge of any careers other than that that they see around them that may not always be positive. It may not always be relevant or in in any way as operational to them or even meeting their talents the skills that they have inherently. So the idea that we should funnel careers advice through a highly narrow professional funnel when in fact kids could go and do anything, you know -- the potential for children to participate in many different options of careers and jobs and industries and enterprise is huge. That can not possibly be the expertise of a few trained professionals. They will be expert in providing certain forms of advice and guidance and direction but in terms of what is it like to be a engineer, what is it like to be a psychologist, what is it like to be a train driver, what is is it like to work in new media what do my skills lend themselves to, I would like to talk to people that actually do those jobs. So the whole liberation of connecting people who want to understand what to do with their lives with people who are very successfully doing something with their lives in different job sectors, industries is one area where it would absolutely meet an unmet need, you know. You cannot just as a kid growing up in a council estate in Glasgow -- you just don't know people who work in all kinds of areas you might never meet so its crossing those boundaries and there is a huge application there. So the skills agenda the talent agenda everything can be fulfilled by allowing people to help each other by taking out that middle class of professional or at least not fake taking them out because they could be valuable but allowing there to be this they have to be safely managed and it has to be designed in a fit-for-purpose way but allowing people to help other people and inspire other people and allow people to aspire to things they would not previously have known about so I think that is one big application. Another one is health and particularly mental health and emotional health which is all tide up in health. So you might postulate that a large percentage of what takes up GPs time is people seeking reassuranse, they want some kind of emotional re assurance. Perhaps people want to meet someone else who is suffering from the same health condition. Well clearly the web allows those people to connect with each other in a way that doesn't require them to go through the professional services for those occasions when what they are seeking is purely emotional support and emotional reassurance so that again is an unmet need. That is currently an unmet need. It is clearly a need because you see so much of it already on all of the web 2 forums the social net works all of the various verticals that are springing up are so much about people connecting on issues of health, mental health, emotional health, emotional well being. So this is already starting to fulfill a big unmet need so that is another huge area that it will be fantastic for and it already is.
Q. Do you think there is something going on with trust in all of this as well because I think, I do not know, maybe this is just me but I think it feels like over the last 20, 50 years we have been told to trust each other less and less.
A. (7.03) I think there is clearly an issue of safety and trust online and this is the single biggest kind of negative that people bring up when they think about this whole area but I really think there are a number of ways you can get around that I think you do need to design some level of culture. You need to design a culture around the site that is very explicit about what it is there for. So in doing that I think you can create a community of trust but also I think there are other things that you can do technologically and in terms of allowing people certain permissions and certain visibility that will make your site more or less trusted and people can see that when they are there but I think the whole issue of trust has always been vested in people we know or institutions in we learn to trust for whatever reason and we have all heard about the crises of trust in institutions and I think that is happening. I do not think there is suddenly a culture of trusting people on line. I do not think people do trust people online but I think it is possible to and I think that good sites that really understand permissions about entering the culture of the site when you are there, the things that you are saying to people, the things that you allow people to do and not to do. You can very quickly see that certain sites have that covered. They are very unlikely to be condusive to bad behaviour and there is someone with a duty of care looking after the community in terms of giving it the power to look after itself in some cases but also who is actually looking making sure that bad things are not happening to the best of their ability so I think there will be a new definition of what trust is on line and but it is certainly possible to trust people that you encounter on line within certain network context. I think it is more difficult to do that when you are in a unmoderated forum very easy to join. That is harder to do and you should probably retain some element of caution, I am not saying you could not trust people there of course you could, but you should retain a cautionary element over what you say and do and think but some sites actually do build, ours certainly does, build significant degrees of security and they are not all in terms of barriers to access and behaviour some have to do with the way the site looks and feels so we have no photographs on the site. That is certainly takes out any kind of grooming behaviour or any trope towards dating or the sense that people are only going to talk to someone who they fancy. It takes all of that out of it and allows people to connect on a much more meaningful basis. Certainly more meaningful for the purpose of the site.
Q. I think the exciting thing about it is that we are showing that actually it is possible for people to be good to each other. Your immediate reaction if someone speaks to you on the tube, your reaction is what do you want from me are you mad, something that they have to sort of prove to be not true before you start listening to them before you let your guard down. Now it seems that on line people are actually willing to start listening first, people are much more open.
A. (10.50) In some ways you can say the internet is an unsafe, unknown, uncontrollable place but actually it is a incredibly safe place. You are talking to people you are really never going to meet, never going to see each other, don't ever want to necessarily meet, how is that unsafe. Now of course it can be unsafe at the margins and of course there are predators and charlatans and of course we must construct safe places to be on the web. But in general the reason why we would say what we would not say to the stranger on a train who we would never meet can you help me with my impending divorce, unless you were there for quite a long time, and you would happily say that to someone on a web site if you thought that person had just been through a divorce or felt themselves to be an expert in the subject from their own personal experience so you can definitely see that people are able to trust within certain contexts on line. I do not think on- line is anything like the street but in general I think that I have a very positive view of human nature anyway and we contend to take a distopian view of what the street is like and what the web is like. Actually they are both kinder gentler places than we on the whole portray them to be and I think we have unnecessary fear in general. It is right to be afraid -- it is right to be cautious but it is not right to have fear of each other in this world. I think that is the wrong thing and I actually think the way connections can be made on line, we see it on the site all the time people being astonished by the kindness of strangers astonished at their willingness to give of themselves for no benefit other than what they derive from doing that and the power of that to change your view of human nature quite quickly is huge and that could be a incredibly positive thing. Always maintaining the kind of great caveat that it can not happen just willynilly you have to create safe places. Or you have to create secure cultures online otherwise it would just be chaos and it is not chaos. We have built a society we don't live like savages. We won't be like savages on line either. So we need to build safe places but within that I think we can trust each other and I think the power of human nature to do good and to help each other and to lift people out and help people up and so pass on knowledge and wisdom is intense and people can very easily be impressed by that.
Q. ......
A. (14.01) I think we have had had it. People do help each other and they do in communities, they do in geographies, they do in where you live, where you work -- that does happen. I think there has been more of a fear of crime and more of a fear of being out in the world and in the last few years that has been slightly detrimental to the national psyche but I think in general people are kind and good and you see instances of that all the time. What has not been able to happen -- also we have a different kind of luck you know we are rushing around we have hardly any time we are multiple tasking we have got fragmented family commitments here there and everywhere so we have not perhaps had as much time to develop these nice little personal things that happen, that traditionally happen. They probably don't happen so much now. So I think that we have definitely seen probably a bit of a decline in that, but now on line is just allowing that to happen at scale, it is just the way for that to absolutely multiply the occasions when that can happen. Small conversations small actions. Big impacts. Big personal transactions happening. 'Thank you so much it was so great of you to be there for me during that period of time or what a great suggestion I had not thought of that or how lovely to hear that you got over that situation or what an inspiring story.' You know? Big impacts from very little physical effort so the convenience, the sheer convenience, of being able to communicate and connect with people at your table or your desk or whatever coupled with the fact that it is kind of something that we like to do is why -- it is not that it has not happened before it is just now it is so easy and so possible to do it much more often that I think it is a scale issue rather than a complete culture change. We are on line able to be more the people that we are and able to to be more the society that we can be. I think to deny that and shut that down through fear, uncertainty and doubt and through bad stuff this can happen at the margins in bad places is completely the tail wagging the dog. This is a very good exciting potential way that we can completely capture people power and people wisdom and people's good will in a fantastic way that could really transform society I think. That is probably a bit much is it?
Q. But don't you think that is a cultural change as well? These things may have always been in people wanting to help each other and being able to give that time and effort .
MT RAINEY (045-B)
Q. A bit of politics?
A. Do you mean application and public services?
Q. Do you feel that the ethos behind Horses Mouth and other things you have been discussing will eventually effect government?
A. Yes I think the model of what is happening now on the web where basically people are connecting with each other in lots of different fit for purpose places on the web, where we have built frameworks for them to engage in a way that that is relevant to that issue, definitely will have an implication because people will increasingly be able to make choices to be able to express themselves to be able to be stand up and be counted as more than just a number so they don't want to just be a number in a postal address. They want to be profiling, whatever you think of it, it really does force people to think about what am I saying about myself, what is my identity, how does it appear. So I think expression of the self, people will expect to be more than just a number and an address and a vote and a tick. They will expect to be more roundly viewed so not just a demographic box. One of the things I think about what is happening with the web now is that the first generation of the web really even still we talk about consumers, we have talked about consumers for the last 50 years and I think that what the web does is turn consumers back into people. They are not just a collection of purchases and a collection of demongraphics they are much more complex rounded people with all kinds of unexpected you know oxymoronic aspects to them because people are real people and they are complicated and what the web is allowing us to do now is express ourselves in that way that makes us more people than consumers or voters or any one dimensional thing and I think it will we very interesting to see how politics targets people who think of themselves -- who start to see -- I mean it is a kind of self fulfilling prophecy, the more you create online meat on your profile, detail on your profile the more you think you are a complex human being and there is the evidence. So how will governments relate to people who are more empowered, more expressive, more used to being a collection of contradictions, if you like in many ways. So I think definitely providing platforms for people not just to express an opinion, because that is quite an old model 'I am listening to your opinion', but somehow to express themselves more as complex human beings who might have contradictory needs and contradictory beliefs. This is the great dilemma of modern politics it is the management of critics and the management of opposing agendas but people have that and feel that too. So I think definitely politics and government will have to create more platforms and fora and frameworks for people to express themselves more fully, rather than just in terms of a vote or an opinion on any given theme. So how does government and politics interact with the complex human who is able to express themselves, is going to be interesting to see and I think there will definitely have to be new ways of conducting politics, conducting debate -- public debate is an interesting thing, you know, the town hall debate we have not really had those but now there is a way that we can have those kinds of things on line so I think it will change and it will have to change for the better but I think just to simply say that it is a listening and an opinionating model is wrong. So I do not think it is just about government listening and people talking. It is more complex than that, it is much more complex than that.
Q. Is is it to do with the giving people more responsibility?
A. (4.15) Yes I mean I think in an way it is treating people as more like adults so I think that there is a ..... for applications not to expose people to the........... that are inherent in what they want. Not to act as if they were adults and would not understand the trade-off in policy and policy making. I think people need to be treated more as adults and should be and will be and I think that some kind of on line way of doing that will be how it ends up working but I think more adult-to-adult communication more exposure to the complexities of modern life which after all people feel. More admittance to that. More co-opting of people in the difficult business of what it is like to live in the modern world -- because they know how difficult it is. Governments cannot solve everything they cannot make everybody happy. We all have to make trade offs, so treating people as adults in that way, not to create a whole bunch of whingeing forums for people to say how bad it all is, I think that is, you know, that is the recipe for depression all round but a way to somehow respect the sensible adults that the population are. I think that will definitely have to change the way they do things or at least amplify I think.
Sorry I did not answer that very well but.
Q. No that is okay brilliant thank you that is really excellent. Loads of good stuff. Very, very interesting.
