Pretty powerful song / video.
Care2.com’s ROI on Social Networks
Wonder if you should spend your time campaigning in social networks?
You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.
Need some metrics guidelines? You might check out some of the online advocacy and fundraising benchmark studies. If you don’t measure results strictly by fundraising — maybe your results are based on advocacy or branding only — you can just look at the “cost per friend” or “cost per email name” to compare with the costs of recruiting people elsewhere. You can also see how that translates into cost per action or email viewed (opened).
If you would like to see the assumptions and equations behind the magical calculations, they are available on the original Excel spreadsheet. Email Justin Perkins to request a copy or to send feedback, and feel free to comment below.
Some Research Questions & Possible Methods
Questions:
What sorts of ownership and regulatory schemes best serve both the market and the the public? How do you ensure a range of public uses centered around free speech and access coupled with ownership concerns around innovation, privacy, profit, competition?
How do the market, the state, and the public interact within telecommunications policy in the US? And what space is created for CMT practices?
Do community media & technology practices contribute to stonger communities?
What are the community impacts resulting from CMT practices?
What is the role of media within a community setting?
What defines a meaningful community media practice?
Are communities with a diverse media landscape, including community media, better off than communities without such environments?
Are there ideal environments in which communtiy media thrive (i.e. certain size community, certain types of individuals and groups present)?
Rather than creating a positive enviornment, are strong community media pratices evidence of a civically engaged community?
What are the elements that comprise a strong community media practice?
What are the strongest community media practices (i.e. youth media, immigrant / ethnic media, local orgs, local gov, political / religious speech)?
Is there an indexing or evaluation system that can predict if a community will sustain a meaningful community media practice?
Would it be ideal to focus on public access, community radio, Internet, print, some or all?
Methods:
GIS to map locations – compare against population, age, ethnicity, new american population, political culture, religious affiliation, income, home ownership, crime, race, voter registration, educaiton — are the set indicators of civic engagement?
Case studies of 3-4 different types of communities as a best practice for rural, urban, suburban, and mid-sized urban
Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere
What can be done to aid researchers, advocates, and activists in producing, finding, and mobilizing relevant research and data? What can be done to facilitate the analysis of reform activities and strategies, and support the growth of broader conceptual frameworks and linkages between issues? What would a robust knowledge infrastructure for public-interest media look like?
Footprints Project
I’m working as a research assistant for Michael Johnson who has just transplanted himself from Carnegie Mellon. One of the project he is collaborating on is “Footprints” which looks at how to use a co2 personal consumption / emission widget to enliven person change. There seems to be some useful links and concepts on the site and certainly a project I’m interested in exploring more about:
Francis Hunger on Immaterial Labor
I’ve been skeptical against the Open Source Software producers community since years, skeptical against this white, middle-class, male students and engineers. For me this user/producer group is a club, which includes those who have enough time resources to create social capital through peer recognition by working on technologically oriented projects. As early technology adopters, the OSS producers community also actively shapes technology (I have to repeat: they are white, middle-class, male). The OSS producers community tested, improved and incorporated all the elements which can be found in Lazzaratos description of immaterial work above: Flat hierarchies, computerized networks, creating products in their leisure time. So the OSS producer is paradigmatic for the current overage of productivity in the countries of fully developed capitalism, which again gets induced into the circuit of production and exploitation.more here:
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002724.html
Michael Bauwens on Immaterial Labor
We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards.
We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance.
And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state.
What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm. Complex innovation needs creative and autonomous workers that are not impeded in their ability to share and learn from each other.
Read more here: https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002714.html
Paul Hertzog comments on Immaterial Labor
There are lots of good ideas surfacing through this discussion on the iDC list. I post here in full his response:
“After reading Sobol and Waxman, I thought I would chime in. So far, I find this list incredibly useful to my own work and am really enjoying the discussions. That said, I continue thus….
First, utility is tautological. If you decide that human beings do things only for utility, then you will always find the utility in any action. Even suicide can be described as a utilitarian action.
Second, the authentic, and to my mind non-utilitarian, experience of life, has and always will be, beyond theft or co-optation by “the bad guys.” When I go to coffee with my friend and discuss Aristotle,money goes to those it perhaps shouldn’t (e.g. evil coffee bean slavers). Nonetheless, the substance of the experience belongs entirely to me and my friend.
My difficulty with the analysis so far in this thread is that I find it to be preoccupied with current online tools rather than abstract concepts. An alternate attempt might go something like this:
Suppose that every moment of your life were visible, capturable,collatable, analysable, (etc.) to others. Suppose that EVERY act in your life, that YOU tried to live authentically, was also being used for other purposes by someone else. How would you live? The answer, possibly paradox, is that you would ignore it, and in so doing you would live in such a way that anyone who was watching would be incapable of seeing your true life at all. They would only see your superficial movements, but all the while your inner movement would channel bliss.
The authentic life is ALWAYS a subversion, a resistance, a revolution, against some attempt by someone else to bind it, to bound it, to define it, to constrain it. To live authentically means to create in each moment something that cannot be taken and used for other purposes because it is necessarily INVISIBLE to those who would attempt such a theft.
Consequently, in my own academic work (i.e. logically), and also in my personal preference (i.e. aesthetically), I prefer to keep my eyes turned towards new forms of subversion, resistance, and revolution enable by new technologies. To my mind, the really interesting and revolutionary things going on in the world are invisible to those who would oppose themhttps://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002708.html
Posting on MediaMix
I’m starting a PhD program in public policy at UMass Boston in a couple of weeks. As such I’ve started to track interesting research and ideas related to community media, collaborative production. etc on the MediaMix blog section of this site. —
http://www.feliciasullivan.net/mediamix
The main part of this site will be reserved for interesting tidbits, personal life, pop culture, etc.
An important point from Ladner
Stan reponds in the thread just referenced with this
“Trebor’s notions around immaterial labour certainly qualify here — collaborative media do obscure the free labour that goes into them. And also Wikis. Their collaborative veneer disguises the elitist participation in them.”
See Wikinomics discussion on iDC.
Also the discussion on the list about immaterial labor is very critcal as well. It starts in august 07 here:
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002691.html