Chris Thorpe Interview Transcript

Person interviewed: Chris Thorpe Interviewer: FAR Date of interview: 12/03/09 Interview title: Thesis Research: Brave New Collaboration Towards a Sustainable Future. Program or publication: n/a Broadcaster/publisher: n/a Thorpe, Chris. 2009. "Thesis Research: Brave New Collaboration Towards a Sustainable Future" Interview by Fei Rong, Alice-Marie Archer, Rebecca Petzel. 12th March. 3.4.1 How can we know when web-based collaboration is appropriate or Not? “personally I can’t think of any situation where you couldn’t use it apart from where the audience that you’re looking for isn’t on-line”. (Thorpe 2009.06:00) “The thing that strikes me as the biggest wonder of the internet is how many people who are on it- but there’s also a sadness that there's a large number of people that don’t have access”. (Thorpe 2009.06:20) Not everyone is online: Not just places in Africa, there's areas in London where there’s massive poverty, or areas where BT hasn't managed to get cables to yet. God knows why, the internet's been around a fair while . So the only place where collaboration isn’t appropriate is where the audience isn’t able to get there. (Thorpe 2009.06:40) Not everyone is on Facebook: I hear loads of people saying, everyone is on facebook now. Well if you take a ride in the taxi cab and you ask your taxi driver, the majority of them think that facebook is ridiculous and their not on it. The internet has always been a percentages game. When it started in 1992 it was under under one percent who were there. Then grew in mid to late nineties it became 10 %….. it’s still growing and someday we’ll get 100 percent able to if they want to use it. (Thorpe 2009.07:11) Not everyone is on facebook: Even facebook they’ve got 200 million- that’s only a percentage of the worlds population and not a very big one. It can be used anywhere, it’s appropriate to be used everywhere. I don't think there's any collaborations or discussions you couldn't have there. (Thorpe 2009.08:00) Be inclusive: But If you want it to be an inclusive discussion you need to make sure that there are ways that every one can be involved, and to acknowledge the fact that some

people weren't able to join in. (Thorpe 2009.08:30) Its appropriate for everything and can be moulded into whatever you want it to be: I think it's appropriate for everything because you can do things either with your identity or anonymously. Nowadays with the way we have massively scalable server systems you can do it cheaply and efficiently as well. You can build these massive data sets and mine them without it costing a fortune like it used to 90's or in the earlier part of the 21st century. You can make it very intuitive as well, you can make it very personal or very impersonal. It’s ultimately malleable to what you want it to be. (Thorpe 2009. 09:00) What are Barriers to web-based collaboration Language Barrier – internet is English Speaking: The language barrier is an obvious one. In the English speaking world we always assume everybody's command of English is better than our grasp of their languages. (Thorpe 2009.10:00) Accessability of websites is poor: Disability is an obvious one. Accessibility level of lots of websites isn’t great. We’ve built things that probably don’t pass muster in sustainability world. (Thorpe 2009. 10:30) People don't trust using the net: There’s also barriers to do with people who aren’t as involved in the net wondering what’s going to happen to their data. (Thorpe 2009. 10:50) Terms and conditions not clear: All too often , terms and conditions are written in a way that’s not clear- or that sounds draconian. You could just simply tell people what their data will and won't be used for. (Thorpe 2009.11:00) Big forms to fill out: That’s a barrier to collaboration, when you have to fill out a ridiculous long form- so many conditions... Those sorts of forms should be outlawed. They don't help move anything forwards (Thorpe 2009.11:20) Too much identity requests: Then there is identity. Lots of sites because they want to know who you are, they want details from you. They want to know your user name and your password. The moment you start thinking about handing that over, you wonder how they’ll use it. (Thorpe 2009.11:45) Open ID and Facebook Connect make it easier: Facebook Connect, OpenID & MySpaceID will go a long way to sort this. You feel you could trust these people a bit more because you could revoke their privileges to use your identity at any time you wanted to, without you having to go through this massive process or emailing them and saying take me off your mailing list and remove me from your database. (Thorpe 2009.12:00)

3.4.2 How can collaboration be designed to incentivise participation i.e. what governance structures work best for collaborative projects in your experience? Clear Vision: Part of the incentivization just needs to be in the proposition of why you’re collaborating. You’re not going to be able to incentivize people for doing something they don’t believe in. No matter how good you interface, or your terms and conditions or how easy you make it. (Thorpe 2009. 13:00) Herd orientated user interface: Any good user interface is one that works well with the people on the other end of the conversation. All sorts of websites are built without thinking about that. There’s lots of simple rules of collaboration and how to work with the herd behavior that humans have.(Thorpe 2009. 13:45) Social Proof – following the crowd: So things like social proof- the concept where if you think about restaurants: where do you want to go? Do you want to go to the one with the queue outside it or do you want to go to the one where nobody is eating there. Of course you want to go to the one with the queue because it looks great and other people are using it: it seems positive. Surfacing what other people are doing incentivizes people to join the crowd. Thats one way of getting people involved. Another way is to build in highscore tables... Everybody is slightly competitive in some way shape or form. If you look at the Obama for America iphone application which was a really groundbreaking piece of democratization of the phone in a way or use of the phone in the democratic medium. It had a little tiny bit in the details where it said go to Obama for America website and see how your call totals compare to others across the country… (Thorpe 2009. 15:20) Obama For America's online 'game' motivational: Tom Armittage wrote a blog post where he said: 'Obama for America' has just created a a massively multi-player online game and nobody noticed. Effectively what they'd done was to put a high score table for people out there calling other people to encourage them to vote for Obama. Really clever sort of thing to do. (Thorpe 2009. 14:40) Point at it: Then sharability is the other thing. Once you’ve made your comment, you probably want to share it with other people, so make sure that you can always just point at it. Tom Coates and Jyri Engstrom have blogged about this quite a lot in the past. (Thorpe 2009. 17:06) The age of Point at things: Tom Coates in 2005 was talking about: 'we’re living in the age of 'point at things'. And Jyri Engstrom wrote a lovely blog post about social objects and how to build really good social objects. Those are really key in terms of making these collaborations work. (Thorpe 2009. 17:20) Keep interfaces clean and clear: There's no hard and fast rules in terms of look and feel, but there are hard and fast rules in terms of the wiring of peoples brains and how

they like to interact with the world and the online world as well. Work with those ruleskeep your interfaces clean and your propositions clear as possible. (Thorpe 2009. 17:40) Progressive engagement: The key thing is Progressive engagement: this idea that I give quite a lot is sharing tea and biscuits with people. No one hands you a form at that start which asks you what you want. You don't have to tick a load of check boxes. Its a conversation. Would you like a cup of tea, yes. Would you like a biscuit to go with that? Yes please or no thank you. It happens piece by piece rather than in a big long form with a submit box at the bottom… you can get people to tell you a lot more about themselves if you just ask them questions one by one and give them something in return every time. (Thorpe 2009. 18:00) 3.4.3 What is the role of motivation, vision and trust in successful collaboration - and what kind of leadership is needed Trust is everything: Trust is everything. That comes back to terms and conditions and identity and licensing. You need to be open at the start: what’s going to happen with this data that you're asking people to provide you with, and what the potential outcomes could be: where it will end up. Trust is everything. You’re either motivated to do something or your not. By asking people to collaborate on something, and they agree to it, they're motivated in some way shape or form. All you have to do is try and keep them motivated.(Thorpe 2009. 22:20) Social networks are empowering people to speak up: These collaborative networks that form, they’re pretty much self forming and self governing or they should be. I think lots of people nowadays are wanting to feel like they have a say – a lot more. Social networks are enabling this. Certainly in UK at the moment, more people are being politically active as result of social networks... part of that is probably as a result of the Obama campaign.(Thorpe 2009. 23:00) Allow for little cells with leaders to develop: But you couldn’t point to one particular person and say that person is the person who is leading this charge. There are lots of people all around and you can maybe point to one person amongst your group of friends who influenced you, but they're not necessarily the leader of that organization, they're just the leader of your little cell or node of that organization.(Thorpe 2009. 23:38) If you look at what happened in the UK recently- all the MP’s had agreed to expose their expenses to the public, so the public could see where all their money was going. All the sudden they decided they weren't going to do that. And they were going to have a vote in parliament to block this high court action that said you must expose them.(Thorpe 2009. 24:00) Don't necessarily have leaders – just influential people: What happened was a few

people started a group on facebook saying this is wrong. It was started by an organization called MySociety. Very soon it was being fueled by people who didn’t know MySociety were, they could probably all name which of their friends got them involved in it. You don’t necessarily have leaders- you just have one of your friends who sits at the forefront of each of these things, who gets you involved. (Thorpe 2009. 24:30) Empower people to share their thoughts and bring others: It’s not necessarily going to be the same leaders all the time- its just empowering people to share their thoughts and bring others along for the ride. (Thorpe 2009. 25:14) 3.4.4 What are your recommendations for designing a business model around successful web based collaboration? What is the value added for participants of collaboration, and how is that value realized It depends: It comes back to what the intention is. Collaboration is a very broad church. If the collaboration was intended to come up with a better source of clean drinking water for Africa, then you don’t really need a business model you just needs lots of people who will come together and make it happen and will give time or money or lobbying power or technology or voice to it. (Thorpe 2009. 25:40) Reward your contributors: Where you allow people to keep their intellectual property if you want to and where you offer some sort of profit share... If you find something that saves the world- it would be nice if people who contribute get to share in any money that comes out of it. (Thorpe 2009. 26:00) It depends very much on what the outcome of the project is. It could be that somethings don’t require a business model- they’ll just do it because they want to change part of the world. (Thorpe 2009. 28:02) 3.4.6 What is the role of openess? You need to share – give and take: Sharing is a two way equation: it’s both you giving something and the anticipation of something in return...approval or recognition. Lots of people talk about when you’re in social networks and you want to share some content then, you have to think of it a gift rather than just a piece of content. Normally with gifts you get some sort of thankyou if you give them... for collaboration networks it would be nice if there’s some recognition that somebody's contributed something at the least…. That forms a virtuous circle with regards to social proof. Both thanking me for my idea and also promoting me to my peers. You can very simply give people a reason to share again effectively by attributing ideas to them.(Thorpe 2009. 28:40) Depends on the intent: It comes back to 'what the intent of the collaboration is'. If you're being asked to pitch a idea to company for a product, you may not want it to be open. You might want to say this is my idea and I don't want other people to see it until

its approved. (Thorpe 2009. 30:20) You don't always want things to be open: If you have a site that was asking for new product ideas for a computer manufacturer... you may not actually want your ideas to ever be made public, unless the organization took you up on them. You may well want to make them open if you want to get the most people collaborating... Depends on what you want to get out of the situation, both as a participant and as an organizer. (Thorpe 2009. 30:50) 3.4.5 What are your recommendations regarding legalities for web-collaborators? Are the commons always the answer? Do we have the legal structures available today to deal with international, web-based collaboration on a grand scale?

Its down to the individual and, you need a structure to control data: On one hand everyone owns their own opinion and so if you’re asking someone to give them your opinion that opinion is still theirs even thought they've freely given it to you, so it’s up to them to decide the license of it. But you have to have some sort of opening gambit for this and you have to have some kind of structure for who owns the data once its been given or who controls it. (Thorpe 2009. 19:20) CC is the way to go: I do think creative commons are the way to go with these sort of things. They’re really simple, really easy to understand. You can by default give people a chance to decide which one of the licenses they want, whether they want it to be share-alike or whether they want it to be a remixable one, or whether they want people to cite them (Thorpe 2009. 19:50) Be nice and pick the most open liscence you can: Lawrence Lessig and their team of done a great job…..coming up with a set of them that allow you as a content creator to decide how you want other people to use your comments. In a way the nice thing to do would be to pick the most open license at the start of the collaboration and then let people restrict their bits of it later on. That restriction would then trickle down through the branches of the collaboration.(Thorpe 2009. 20:00) Open, but credit me is best: If you gave people the license that says... you're welcome to take it and remix it and create your new derivative of it, but you have to credit the original. Then that to me is the best license there is. (Thorpe 2009. 21:20) 3.4.7 What does your ideal e-collaboration tool look like? Do you have any favorite collaboration tools that exist? How can we overcome the limitations of current collaboration technology? Make it user centric and appropriate for the job: User-centric. It has to be about the

user. What it looks like depends on what your asking people to put in. You wouldn’t give a text box if you’re asking them for a design for a new city So it depends on what you're asking people to do. (Thorpe 2009. 31:50) Use existing systems for public and open submissions: Conversational and usercentric are the two key things and then just carry on , design it around what inputs you want from people. If you want people to upload it to you in a really sane and sensible or if you want to make it an open submission, get them to upload it to somewhere like flickr where it can be public and shareable. (Thorpe 2009. 32:00) Get people using the technology they are already comfortable with: “In lots of cases people try to reinvent the wheel too much. If you are asking people to collaborate on things then get them collaborating using the tools and the identities that they already use… ...If you want people to submit you a video get them to submit it to YouTube ....It also saves money on building collaboration tools if you can wire them out of bits of the internet that exist already. (Thorpe 2009. 33:30) Tool evaluations I collaborate with lots of people over twitter on ideas and I think It’s a really great space for conversation. (Thorpe 2009. 34:00) Github- a site where you can as a developer you can put your code up for a project and say Ok everyone come a long and help me build this thing. It stores all the versions and does all the things that source control tools do. (Thorpe 2009.34:30) BaseCamp is pretty good. Not the final solution. I think it could be easier to capture information from people than it sometimes is- and it’s quite hard to find information that’s stored within it (Thorpe 2009. 34: 50) The thing that I think is fabulous as a collaboration tool is a Wiki. It’s just so ridiculously simple and it’s open-ended. Thats the real advantage of it. Anytime you’re forcing people down a narrow path your always asking them either to get frustrated or to try and escape from that narrow path. Wikis are great because they allow you to put in any content and edit it in anyway you like. ….in the same way twitter is wonderful… It just gives you 140 characters and you don't have to do anything at all with them. It allows you to create new and wonderful formats within it. The whole @ reply didn't exist in the original version. That came because users wanted a way to refer to each other. Hash tags weren't part of the original spec...(Thorpe 2009. 35:20) Anything that’s ridiculously open-ended to start off with is good.(Thorpe 2009.35:56) On GIT hub: If you're not a programmer then its difficult to use, but thats the same with all version control systems. When you get into a team of people building something together: what you want is to create a final version of that thing. But you

also want to be able to track all of the versions along the way that worked for different people. Thats why you use a thing called version control. (Thorpe 2009. 36:14) Zembly where you can make make little modules (of code) available to each other and then you can reuse them and build bigger and more elaborate prototypes. (Thorpe 2009. 36:30) 3.4.8 How do you see the future of e-collaboration? Do you think the web is the best tool to facilitate collaborative innovation for sustainability? Do we need something else? What real world mechanisms do you forsee necessary, running in parallel / supporting ecollaboration? Hard to say as its moving so fast: I think it depends on who builds it really. I think it’s very hard at the moment to see clearly where the web is going outside 6 months to a year because it’s moving at such a dramatic pace. (Thorpe 2009. 39:20) If you'd said 2 years ago that facebook would have 200milion users people would think you were mad.(Thorpe 2009. 39:34) If you said at our last general election that an American President who nobody had ever heard of before the election started would be elected largely because people used social media and asked the electorate who and what they wanted, and that the candidate who won was the person who asked the electorate the most about what they wanted. (Thorpe 2009. 39:45) Reverting back to a user centric society: We're so used in the 20th century, in the age of globalizaiton and mass media of being told what to think by organisations... What’s happening now is it’s reverting to a slightly more democratic, user-centric society. It’s starting to become in everyone's hands... as to what happens. I think lots of us would like to see users considered a lot more and asked a lot more about what they want to do. (Thorpe 2009. 40:20) It’s getting easier to build prototypes aswell. At the launch of the OpenPlatform for The Guardian, one of my colleagues, Simon Wallison, said that nowadays "you can build proptotypes of services in less time than it would take to have the meetings to describe them"….(Thorpe 2009. 40:57) There are lot of bits of lego sitting out there. If you’re skilled enough you can wire them up really really quickly to make apllications that would have taken us months to make even 3-4 years ago. At the same time you have people like Google and Amazon who are making parts of their service arms available for you to run these applications on. You can be a bit more experimental withou it costing you lots of money. (Thorpe 2009. 41:50) App-Engine: Most of the things I build nowadays are built on a service called appengine. Which google made, which allows me to deploy my application onto their hardware and they deal with all of the balancing of the load and sustaining the application because they know how to do it, because they run massive projects like gMail and search. So they have these systems built already so you;re just piggybacking on them For lots of people who are in this world of trying to build rapid protottypes that solve social need problems or collaboration problems, it's getting very quick to do

because you're standing on the shoulders of giants. (Thorpe 2009. 42:00) “Its more limited by imagination and getting your word out to your users than by technical challenges now... if you're switched on enough and involved in this world enough”. (Thorpe 2009. 43:18) Cloud computing is a horrible term. Its what everyone is using to describe all of this stuff. App-engine is just one example of cloud computing. (Thorpe 2009. 43:50) App Engine: App engine is a framework that google has written which powers some of their existing services.... What app-engine allows you to do is, you write code and then you deploy it to google's servers and then magically distributes across their entire cluster of servers. Whenever you get enough people hitting your particular website it just spins up another copy of that website and balances the load between those two and goes on doing that for ever and ever and ever until every user has access to it. It's actually a very good way of building software where you don’t know what the load for it is going to be, you don't know how many people are going to hit it, you don't know how much its going to cost you. It allows you to be a lot more experimental . Its also environmental pretty good because one of the biggest wastes of electricity these days is servers which are switched on in data centers doing nothing, entire streets full of PCs just being switched on and doing nothing. Its a big waste of electricity and of resources as well. (Thorpe 2009. 44:00) Security is a concern. Lots of us are working on back-up strategies for it to make sure you can data back, and you can pull it back. There’s a really easy way of dealing with that. If when you’re building your product, you build an application programming interface (API) for it – then you can simply say I’m just going to hoover my data back from the cloud. You’ve got a back-up strategy. Your just hitting your server and asking it for the latest copy of what its got.(Thorpe 2009. 45:35) You definitely need to reintroduce a hard drive somewhere as a back-up copy. The nice thing about google app engines your data is automatically placed in lots of different places.(Thorpe 2009. 46:56) You’ll automatically have a computer or you have an iphone or something like that. So you already have that so your not damaging the earth by using more resources. What is quite damaging is that there are in every data center vast number of servers that are switched on and not doing anything. At some point during one of our amazing tech booms, venture capitalists have given a firm a lot of money for a service that they think is going to change the world but hasn't, but the servers are still there sitting waiting to push out the website to an audience that never comes.(Thorpe 2009. 48:20) Cloud computing- let’s take people like google or amazon or yahoo who have to have a vast amount of servers just to do what they do. We’ll take some of the spare capacity in this vast network of servers, and we'll resell it to other people. By the law of averages it winds up that every now and then it gets really busy and the servers slow down a bit. But most of the time there’s enough out there to balance everything. Distributing the energy load (Thorpe 2009. 49:00)…. Nicholas Carr- he likens cloud computing to the invention of the electricity grid. The electricity grid came about because it’s really inefficient for people to gather power

where they are. But it’s pretty much true that it’s easier to generate in one place and then feed it out to where its needed….. the demands on the electricity system even themselves out... If you take the world of a vast collection of lots of lots of niche interests than over time everything evens itself out. (Thorpe 2009. 50:43) Trends Emerging trend – you can now use your ID wherever you go. I think the biggest emerging trend is the ability to use your identity wherever you go. Things like open id and facebook connect. In the same way that cloud computing makes it easy to build services, using your identity wherever you go makes it easy for users to sign up and use new services. If you remove that barrier to entry then people will be much more willing and they'll be in the right sort of frame of mind to collaborate with each other. If you have to go through and arduous sign up form then you naturally are a bit fed-up with that organisation before you get started. Its not a good starting point for collaborating on something.(Thorpe 2009. 52:07) Tagging and ID will change how we collaborateThe emergence of different data pieces and the ability to reconcile data to another through tagging wither be it human generated tagging or machine generated tagging, and identity are the two things that will really change how we collaborate. (Thorpe 2009. 52:50) Using the web to get us competing to reduce our resource consumption: I’m passionate about getting people to share their accessibility issues in terms of getting around cities. If I could go to cities in the world and find out how to get around with a buggy that would be brilliant. In terms of sustainability... making your electricity consumption or your consumption of materials somehow into a big game of trying to save the planet, would be a really great thing to do. You could brag to your friends how much energy you'd saved or how much stuff you've recycled or how you didn't go on that flight that you didn't need to go on. You'd then get people trying to out compete each other as to how ecologically friendly they could be. 54:58 A Great way to get people to collaboratively reduce their consumption without actually making it overt. A lot of what we really need to do now has to do with looking at surfacing peoples implicit behavior rather than their explicit behavior.(Thorpe 2009. 53:50) The internet is full of waste too. Unused websites eat lots of energy: Yes its a real waste of energy because all those servers are left on waiting for traffic that never arrives. If you're website is maybe getting 20 hits a day, then move it off of thats server and move it into the cloud. Because then those 3 hits a day will be shared with all the other millions of hits that that one server in the cloud can deal with.(Thorpe 2009. 56:00)