Clicking With Others

So we have all had those moments in which we are talking with someone we have never met before or have know for only a brief time and you feel a sense that the two of you have much in common and you enjoy the conversation. We can think of this as clicking with the other person, they just seem aligned with our thoughts and beliefs and talking with them is enjoyable. You leave the conversation with them hoping to have some time again when you can again engage in a stimulating talk with them. So what are the things that make people click with us. Can they be analyzed and distilled down to certain traits?

Well Ori and Rom Brafman have written a book all about what makes people click, it gives insight to some of the criteria that are necessary to make these connections, in a meaningful way. What facinates me is the similarities to some of the ideas of Paul Adams when he describes people and their social circles that he has observed in his work on social networks for Google and Facebook.

Let's look at some of these requirements as outlined in the Brafman's book. They refer to these as click accelerators, because they talk mostly about rapid connections. I think these also apply to long term relationships as well. They outline these click accelerators as:

Vulnerability
Showing our weakness's or how human we are can open others up to trust. Being honest and telling the truth offers others a chance to help us and share a problem or thought. Vulnerability can be considered as being shown in two stages the transactional and the connective. The first stage is made up of three steps:

Phatic, is not revealing.
Factual is only giving information about ourselves as data.
Evaluative reveals our views of people and situations, without emotion. This has limited risk of revealing information about ourselves.

The second stage the connective interactions are based more on our feelings and emotional point of view, these are far more revealing and authentic conversations. It consists of two more steps:

Gut Level, these are statements that are more emotional cues to how we feel about something or someone.
peak statements, these are the most emotional and inner thoughts and feelings we have towards others. They have the most risk of make us vulnerable to wrongful attack but are also the most valuable way to express ourselves authentically to others.

Moving through these steps of vulnerability takes our relationship and ability to click with another through different stages and levels of attachment. The more vulnerable you make yourself the more risk you take to get hurt, but also the deeper the relationship you will have with another.

Proximity
Being close to someone physically makes a huge difference in our ability to connect with them. Whether working in an office or just meeting in at a football game. People respond better when they can be in close proximity to others. Having spontaneous communication helps forge relationships. Most of the work I have already looked into talks about the creative process improving when people interact more and are closer together in a building. Paul Adams also mentions that when people communicate they seem to prefer regular small lightweight interactions. These are going to occur more often if people are near each other. These interactions need not even result in a conversation, they might be what is referred to as passive contacts such as a nod of the head or can be thought of as liking something or someone in Facebook. It merely shows recognition of that person, but it all registers as another interaction, that adds up.

Resonance
mihaly csikszentmihalyi, talks about this as being in a state of flow. Things just seem to be working, we are engaged at a deep level, with enough challenges and effort to keep us stimulated and enough progress to make us feel achievement and self satisfaction. This helps us make a connection with others when we can give them our undivided attention and listen intently at what they are saying. This level of engagement will be obvious to those involved both sides talking and responding with authentic conversation. There is a sense of agreement and acceptance of the others point of view and ideas. Much of this is about empathy.


Similarity
Birds of a feather flock together, and we are no different. We tend to gravitate to those that have similar beliefs or interests as us. This makes sense when you consider how we want to support our own inner narrative, of who we are. Again Paul Adams talks about his observation of our social circles, and how we may have 4-5 distinct groups but how each group shares common attributes with us and with each other. It would make sense that to get a good connection we would look for similarities with those we converse with. We of course want to avoid conflict and are not always looking for arguments, and especially try to avoid those that cannot accept us for what we are or think. Interestingly, when in a business environment, we tend to align ourselves with others in our group, to appear similar, and avoid conflict. So when we can control our choices we prefer to find those that already believe what we do.


Safe place
The power of our environment has a profound effect on us. This is especially heightened when there is a shared goal or reason that puts us together. Adversity can bring people closer, and having a problem that is solved as a group or team makes that team string as a unit. But this doesn't need to be a negative event. Even sitting in the home of a person from another country than your own can have an immediate effect on forging new relationships, there is a sense of being removed from the normal status quo of your natural environment, and so you look for anything that can connect you to others in the group. This is all part of the wanting to be part of something larger than ourselves and looking for our our identities.

These are just some of the great ways that people can move from ordinary relationships such as they have with work colleagues to deeper relationships built on friendship and trust. These moments of clicking with another can be enhanced by some of these observations and being aware of them can help you achieve wonderful friendships that can last a lifetime.

Keep Talking The Power of Social Networks

Paul Adams who works on the product team within Facebook, has many great and wonderful thoughts on how and why people share content online. Certainly the experience and knowledge he has from working at Google and now Facebook places him at a wonderful vantage point to see how people use the social networks he has helped to build. He recently gave a talk and outlined many useful ideas and insights that can be utilized in designing for social media and networks.

Most importantly he emphasizes that people don't really share or like things what they are really trying to do is talk. Talking is the foundation on which most social media is really based on and the objects they share and comments they make are merely tools to help start those conversations with others.

So why do people talk? 

We talk to make their lives easier. They have am issue and want feedback, they have a thought and want to gather others opinions on the ideas they have.

We talk to build relationships. we have always since early days of tribal living wanted and needed to be part of social groups.

We talk because we like to help others. People usually like to help other people, especially if they have an experience or knowledge that maybe someone else doesn't.

We talk to craft our identities. The things we talk about and the people we talk with help us establish our self identity, and help us gain a great appreciation of who we are what we believe.

Paul mentions that people don't like and comment on social sites because they have a deep liking for the link or statement someone has made, but because they actually like the people behind the information. People look for commonality among others in their groups, jokes and humorous uploads can help see a match with like minded individuals. Most conversations we have are part of our reputation management, conversations help us define who we are.

Talking requires good listening and response. Today's conversations online are mostly what Paul calls Lightweight interactions and especially companies should be having many lightweight interactions with their customers. Talking and conversations are much more natural and long lasting into the future if they last for shorter periods of time but more frequently. The days of having deep and meaningful conversations are becoming rarer in our always connected world.

So who do we talk to? We mostly talk to people just like ourselves. People we have strong ties with. Most people Paul suggests have 4 small independent groups, in which 80% of the conversations are with the same 4-5 people. We are most influenced by the people we are closest to. People in each group are very similar to the person at the center of the social circle. Things that are interesting to friend in one group, will most likely be interesting to another group in your social sphere



So what do people talk about?

Personal experiences. 70% of talk is about this. This is one reason to build experiences around brands, it gives people more to add to their daily conversations.

People talk about other people. Not always in a bad way, but as part of what makes our lives, interacting with others. These form social norms, and gossip can help teach us how to behave with each other.

We talk about what's around us. Stuff in our Worlds, and in our current environment.

We prefer to talk about feelings not facts. We like to tell emotional stories.

So if you plan to build a social network or site that always social grouping and talking Paul suggests the following considerations as among the most important.

Why: Help people build relationships
How: Create lightweight interactions over time.
Who: Optimize for strong ties
What: Feelings not facts.

Brainwriting the New Brainstorming

In his post Bob Sutton suggests that brainwriting has proven more effective than brainstorming at producing ideas. So of course, I was intrigued what this new technique was all about. After a quick bit of reading here is the summary of the steps for this technique.

1. Members of the group write down ideas on pieces of paper in silence


2. The pieces of paper are passed between each other and then the individuals add to the idea their own thoughts. Different color pens help in this distinction between ideas.


3. Once each piece of paper has been shared with each member then the pieces of paper are placed in the center of the table for all to see.
4. These steps are repeated up to 25 times. depending on time available.


5. Then the group divides up an individuals go away and try to recall as many of the ideas as possible.


6. Finally each individual works alone to generate more ideas

This technique has been shown to be more productive in idea generation and can help reduce group think that can occur from some brainstorming sessions.

Brainstorming 2.0

Fast Company and Jonah Lehrer, have recently written some interesting ideas around the value of brainstorming, and whether it even works. Is brainstorming really a waste of time?

Brainstorming as a tool for creative people has been used since the 1940's when Alex Osborn (BBDO) came up with this process for idea generation for his teams of advertising gurus. This was part of 6 phases he proposed for creative problem solving.

  1. Mess-finding (Objective Finding) 
  2. Fact-finding 
  3. Problem-Finding 
  4. Idea-finding 
  5. Solution finding (Idea evaluation) 
  6. Acceptance-finding (Idea implementation)Idea generation is a vital part of each phase, as is deciding which ideas are most relevant to carry forward to the subsequent phase.

He sheltered the ideas and creativity from criticism in the early stages so that the individuals were more free to imagine and not face criticism when ideating, which he believed would stifle input from people. Alex promoted this concept as part of BBDO's secret sauce to creativity. Now any company worth their salt in the innovation space uses brainstorming as part of the creative process. So have we be fooled?

So what is wrong with brainstorming? Is it broken, or does it just not work?

Well one argument that Lehrer puts forward is that some research suggests that people can be more creative working alone. It seems putting people into large groups doesn't increase creativity and idea generation. Instead group dynamics affect each person's contribution. This makes a lot of sense and groupthink is something that has been researched and written about by Susan Cain. I have also come across this idea in "The Innovation Killer" by Cynthia Rabe. Groupthink was an observation put forward by Irving Janus, that groups can make faulty decisions and behave irrationally even when presented with facts. 


Janus outlines some of the symptoms of group think as:

1. Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
2. Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
3. Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

People in groups have dynamics they bring to the group such as hierarchy in the team and social interactions. We like to be agreeable to fit in better with peers rather than upset the status quo. This doesn't really suggest brainstorming doesn't work, but is definitely something that can be fixed with better organisation and realization that this groupthink problem can arise. The real point is not just bringing groups of people together, but bringing the right people to the group and sessions. Outside thinkers, or zero gravity thinkers as Rabe suggest can help in this, by not having the same associations with the group performing the brainstorming these personality types might be more open to making comments and not falling prey to group thinking. Also, just being aware of the problem can help the group realize that it might be occurring and find ways to stop groupthink occuring


The next argument brings up that criticism actually improves the brainstorming process, which I think is maybe missing the point of brainstorming. Brainstorming is about idea generation not the next pahse which would be evaluation. The argument goes that in an experiment where two groups brainstormed with one allowing criticism and the other didn't that the critical group actually performed better with the number of ideas. Now of course not knowing exactly the process they used, I would assume that maybe what happened is that the criticism actually generated new ideas. This would fall inline with one of the brainstorming rules or build on the ideas of others. I don't think criticism actually was the catalyst for new ideas, but probably got people focusing on one idea at a time, as they would have discussed one idea a little further, then generated ideas from that original, just as brainstorming is meant to. 


I think adding a new rule that allows criticism is not the answer, it is going to quickly lead to resentment, of the idea generator, who will feel personally criticized and more importantly bring back the problem of quiet people not speaking up for fear of "stupid ideas". I do however think that building on peoples ideas gives this concept a positive spin, focusing people on ideas one at a time. Interestingly the Fast Company article does go on to say that criticism allows refining and redefining the problem, which increases creativity. I agree that problem definition is one of the hardest and most important steps, I am not sure you need criticism to do this but I do agree that it is an important part of brainstorming, to know what exactly you are trying to solve.


Lehrer goes on the describe that creativity is about happenstance not planning. This I agree with having a team of diverse experts working together is indeed more important for innovation to happen than having teams spread out across buildings or countries. This makes a lot of sense, there are more chance interactions and shared knowledge moments when people are closer together. I also agree that fresh approaches from new team members and outsiders can be invigorating for a stale team that is churning over the same ideas and problems for a long time. I would even consider idea pollination through collaborative workspaces. Environments are known to have a huge affect on what happens in them, create a creative space and people will feel more creative.

So the final question is do we need to drop brainstorming or can it be reworked. I believe that brainstorming is a valuable tool in idea generation and some of the rules outlined here are incredibly useful for making it work.  Yes there are good sessions and bad sessions, the real problem exists when people become complacent and think that it is some magical process to have the next big idea. Brainstorming is really a catalyst of idea creation, it can help teams bond across departments, it can fuel lateral thinking and also generate amazing ideas outside of the problem space. Brainstorming, needs to be part of your culture, the more you do it the better it gets. With the right facilitator, I believe that brainstorming can address all the problem Lehrer puts forward, all that needs to be remembered is that you are dealing with people and as such they have feelings(and don't like to be criticized) and need motivations(positive feedback) to work together problem solving. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss all the work that companies like IDEO and Stanford's d.school have put forward to make successful brainstorming sessions, these companies and teams have proven the power of brainstorming and show that great ideas can be found in these sessions. It takes work and effort but the results can be very rewarding and the process a great deal of fun.

Seems I am not the only one whom sees a flaw in the article about brainstorming, Bob Sutton with way more clout and experience than me, has a similar feeling that brainstorming when done correctly can be a very effective way to produce ideas. He suggests that giving people the problem in advance of a brainstorm can let individuals come prepared to contribute having already immersed themselves in the problem space. He makes some excellent points and more importantly knows the pros and cons of brainstorming first hand. He sees brainstorming as a combination of individual and group thinking all happening in parallel when facilitated correctly with good techniques. The switch from individual to social modes can be done easily by expert brainstorming facilitators. One important insight is that the work of Robert Zajonc, that suggests that people are unable to withhold judgement on anything they encounter.

I put together the rules of what leads to a great brainstorming session here.

Here is a summary of what Jonah Lehrer proposes would help fix some of the issues with brainstorming.

• Rather than brainstorm with the traditional “no criticism, every idea is worthy” rule, encourage debate. It isn’t pretty or polite, but team members engage more with their colleagues’ ideas. They often come up with more thoughts–many of them unpredictable and original–after facing conflicts (the conclusions of a study by U.C. Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth).

• Take a cue from the most successful Broadway musicals (Lehrer points to empirical evidence conducted by Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University), which tend to have a mix of repeat collaborators and new talent on their creative teams, rather than closed circles of long-time co-workers, or all-new groups who aren’t familiar with each other.

• Collaborate physically near others to promote better group ideas. The ideal distance? Thirty-two feet. This is based on research by Harvard Medical School researcher Isaac Kohane, who used the numbers of citations of peer-reviewed scientific papers as a metric. Those groups with the most citations for their collaborative papers were working within 32 feet of one another. Those with the least were at least a half a mile apart.

• Force teams into chance encounters in the workplace, via architecture. Lehrer cites Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Steve Jobs: Jobs guided the design of Pixar’s headquarters to offer an atrium that housed the only bathrooms in the building (later, more were added)–thus increasing the odds that writers and programmers would discuss cross-disciplinary ideas, even during their breaks.

• Consider abandoning beautiful design when attempting to create an effective creative space. Lehrer cites Building 20 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which has been demolished), originally a temporary building nicknamed the “plywood palace.” Bose Corporation used it as an incubator. The first video game was created there. And linguistic study was revolutionized within Building 20, too. It was so ugly and underdesigned, researchers who worked there were forced to customize their work spaces. The room numbering made no sense, and people got lost. So they wandered into each other’s genuinely creative, personalized labs and offices. And exchanged ideas.

• Think about it: brainstorming, for all its ostensible freedom of thought, actually asks teams to follow a script of non-criticism and free-flowing associations. Consider re-writing it.

Are we domesticating ourselves?

Whilst driving through Seattle, I was listening to an interesting broadcast from a local radio station (88.1 KPLU), in which they were discussing an experiment that was still going on in Russia that had been started over 50 years ago. Dmitri Belyeaev, a Russian scientist had setup a breeding project in 1959 to see how the domestication of dogs may have occurred, from Wolves. They went on to describe the experiment and some of the interesting results, of the domestication of Siberian foxes over 50 years. More about the experiment can be read here. I do not necessarily agree with the experiment but, the results are facinating

What is most fascinating to me about this experiment was less that indeed the foxes could be bred to be domesticated and not afraid of people, but I was intrigued by the results of what it had done to the foxes as a result of the domestication. It seems that as a result of the selective breeding of the foxes that exhibited the correct responses to good behavior, that other aspects of their physiology altered too. Their teeth became smaller, their ears were more droopy (less cartilage), their tails less straight and their bones smaller and lighter. It seems that the selective breeding had focused not only the desired character traits but has also funneled certain genetic mutations that altered their appearance and structure. Through the filtering of good behavior and removal of the otherwise necessary aggressive traits that would keep them alive in the wild the foxes had begun to alter to suit their new temperament. So of course this is very interesting, from a scientific stand, and definitely goes along way to explain how Wolves may have become domestic dogs. The next thing the talk moved on to thinking about humans and our own evolution. This was when I started to get interested what was proposed.

The premise was put forward that humans too have through group behavior and social exchange actually evolved themselves and arguably domesticated themselves. The thought is that once we were like apes in small groups and the strongest mostly survived and a strict hierarchy could be seen. Then as time moved on and we became wanders and probably grew larger groups we had more people fighting for the top spots, soon it was necessary for progress to get along the friendlier males would have more success with females than the fighters and aggressive males. Jump forward a few thousand years and today we see that we are in large groups and in very close proximity and getting along is a very valuable trait to have to survive, aggression will only get you so far. They mentioned how if you placed 100 chimps on a long haul flight across the Atlantic not many would survive they would definitely kill each other, being so close for so long. We however, have learnt to get along and can tolerate such closeness and are generally friendly. Does this mean as the radio show suggests that we have domesticated ourselves into a more passive and friendly animal just like the Siberian Foxes. Certain it is suggested that we have altered genetically in a similar way, we have smaller bones, smaller teeth than our ancestors. The concept of become a domesticated species is interesting to me, not so much that the idea of a "pet" human, but because it shows that as we grow as a society and population that lives in closer and closer proximity, we are having to alter how we react and respond to each other on a daily basis and it seems it would be fair to suggest that we are altering not only our personalities but potentially our physiology as well.

Of course this may all be an interesting parallel and really we of course are far more complex creatures with our ability to rationalize, but none the less it was an interesting radio talk show. As a follow up I discovered there is a book on the subject by Peter J Wilson called interestingly enough "The domestication of the Human Species", it is now waiting in my Amazon wishlist.

Personality Traits

When working on a project it is not uncommon to produce a persona, a persona is like a generalization of a group of people that can be reflected into one character that exhibits those common traits. It is often the result of user research. that looks at many working individuals in a specific task and considers what is common to them all. What things they share in motivation and emotional feeling in performing a task is important for user experience design. This can be very useful for planning next steps, for product or software development, as it helps to evaluate a feature or service against a list of people that might use the system. It can also help when rationalizing user experience design concepts, and bring the designs empathetic mind inline with the target user, when creatively conceptualizing. Personas are a very useful tool in the discovery stage of a project, especially if the project is going to move into the hands of a creative type that will need to empathize with a potential consumer or user.

When working on a persona, and when studying people for projects it is useful to think about personality traits and psychology has produce many fascinating studies in this area, that give a good foundation of knowledge to have in mind when working on products and concepts for people. Personality can greatly influence the way you might approach the problem. For example, making a product for an extrovert is vastly different than an introvert personality type, and if something requires any social interaction, then care must be taken to cater to the right crowd of personalities. The level of public display and private information people are willing to share and talk about will differ depending on target users and what the goal of the service or application is. People and their personalities are valuable information for any designer to understand.

A couple of my favorite summaries of personality include Myers-Briggs and OCEAN(the big 5).

Myers-Briggs breaks people's personalities up as follows:

Extraversion (E) -	(I) Introversion
Sensing (S) -	(N) Intuition
Thinking (T) -	(F) Feeling
Judgement (J) -	(P) Perception

These types can be combined into 16 possible combinations. Each would exhibit different personality traits and reflect a different type of person.

The other is the OCEAN, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The idea behind each of these classifications is that most people can be evaluated against these traits and from that you can make assumptions about how that person may behave under certain conditions and in in certain situations. Narcissists and extroverted people are good examples of extreme cases of personality types, that can be designed against.

Each of these classifications covers a broad set of people and all though of course everyone is an individual and will respond in context and situations differently, these documented personality types real help form a good impression of key personality types and help designers empathize with someone whom might be using their design.

These are only tools and in design of course we don't always want to restrict our end design to one type of person, but if you are looking for insight into behavior and characteristics then these two evaluation approaches really help.

For example, lets say we are designing for an extroverted personality type then here are some of the key characteristics they might portray versus an introverted personality.

• Extraverts are action oriented, while introverts are thought oriented.
• Extraverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek depth of knowledge and influence.
• Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction.
• Extraverts recharge and get their energy from spending time with people, while introverts recharge and get their energy from spending time alone.

extraverted people tend to think and say things like

• I am the life of the party.
• I don't mind being the center of attention.
• I feel comfortable around people.
• I start conversations.
• I talk to a lot of different people at parties.

These notes would be very helpful in designing a product or service for people that exhibit very extroverted personalities. Or if you wanted to encourage more extroverted behavior from people then these would be important features to add to the experience to enhance those types of experience and personality types.

Crowdsourcing motivations

Came across this nice list of motivational concepts that help power crowdsourcing efforts. Found here. Seems  many of these are, of course, powered by psychological concepts on human motivation and engagement, but also interesting to note a few of them fall into the realms of game mechanics and gamification of tasks, such as, leaderboards and badges. Of course, it is no real surprise when you consider that fundamentally the crowd is the same group of people in both cases, only in a different context of effort.

1) Monetary Compensation: The company outlines what you need to do to make money. You do it. You make some money (the amount varies widely). Rinse and repeat.

2) Points and Rewards (Non-Monetary Compensation): You do something good or you contribute in a certain way and you get some quantifiable but not directly monetizable reward. Many companies have some type of “points”. Keeping score matters here (see below for more on this). Sometimes these rewards in the end are monetizable either by exchange (turning them in for prizes) or indirectly monetizable (using points to get access to more of the system).

3) Leaderboards and Competitive Standing: Many companies let you know where you stand against your peers. Leaderboards usually reflect you standing using some other form of motivation (earned money, earned points, badges, etc.). What’s key is that you understand from the physics of the system you’re using how to positively affect your leaderboard status. Leaderboards are always public. This plays to people’s desire to compete publicly.

4) Badges and Goal Completion: The system you work with defines levels of achievement or specific goals to complete and you are awarded something (even just a graphical badge) that denotes your accomplishments. Necessary in this motivation (like leaderboards) is that the badges are publicly viewable (this is the boy scout badges concept and is basically the way Zynga learned to dominate the social gaming industry) and a core part of Foursquare’s philosophy.

5) Reputation: The system has some mechanism (usually a combination of all the other things I mentioned above) to help you express to others (and self evaluate) what your reputation is in the system. Foursquare uses the Mayor concept, Zynga uses a ranking system for player titles and Mahalo uses a martial arts belt system. All of these approaches make it easy for someone to understand that someone has a general standing greater or less than them.

6) Community: You can participate in and communicate with a community of similar people interested in similar things.

7) Collaboration: You can work collaboratively with other people on something larger than you could create yourself and the results are publicly (or at least partially publicly) on display. Your group effort is visible.

In another blog post, here are are some of the suggested things we are learning about crowds.

What we’re learning about the crowd:

1)    The crowd needs information about itself. Game mechanics has included this mechanism publicly, in the form of leaderboards, because it encourages people to compete with each other.

2)    The crowd needs information about its goals. These goals are applicable at both at the individual level and the group level. This is a very subtle point because crowd mechanics gets interesting when some individuals in a crowd are hitting the goal – but some are not.

3)    The goals need to be realistic. At Trada, the goal is an advertiser’s CPA. If this CPA is simply unattainable (you can’t get a 50% conversion rate to sales for visitors are your website on a $1000 product) then everyone loses. We’re learning a lot about making sure the advertisers’ goals are achievable as part of the “social contract” that exists between the crowd and its patron.

4)    There need to be known group incentives that are substantive compared to individual incentives. For example, a “group win” should not pay someone 1/100th of what they make when they win individually. As much as possible, the group win should be more lucrative than an individual win.

5)    Group wins, like individual wins, must reinforce a very small set of core incentive principles. In Trada, the CPA is king and almost all the rewards, achievements and levels are a reflection of this. Group rewards must be based on and reinforce the same core incentive structure.

6)    Groups must be able to anonymously socially regulate themselves. We call this the “shoulder tap” – a mechanism where someone in a group can effectively say to someone anonymously “please check your work, it’s way above the goal”. This form of social regulation goes on all the time around us. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this from the ‘quiet car’ on an Amtrak train to NYC. A “shhh” on the quiet car is an example of social regulation and in most cases is anonymous enough that someone in the group is willing to do it.

7)    There must be a rules-based regulator that can be called to enforce group behavior.  Any group must know that there is a 3rd party regulator (e.g. the SEC, Wikipedia administrators, CJ’s network quality group) that has the power to enforce, in a non-subjective and rules based way, final arbitration policy when someone’s behaving badly in the group (including the patron – e.g. the advertiser – in our model).

As I dive deeper into crowdsourcing, I am curious about the future of global collaboration and people sharing problems and approaches to solving those issues, especially large problems around health, environment and technology. I also like the idea of diversity of minds to generate different angles of addressing the problem being tackled. I think crowdsourcing has the potential to change how people work together and work towards the future of innovation. Of course, I appreciate it is not going to work in all instances, but I do think that for content generation and sense of community around issues and knowledge it is proving to very powerful. This investigation will be on going.