lwu’s blog

MH2010

May 27, 2010
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New post on Mobile Health 2010 conference at my lwu2.vox.com research blog!

the Future of Persuasion at the IFTF

May 18, 2010
1 comment

I was honored today to briefly present a short class project (BJ Fogg's CS377v) at the "Future of Persuasion" conference organized by the IFTF, the Institute for the Future. #FoPersuasion

The IFTF, based here in Silicon Valley, was "Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, the IFTF is committed to building the future by understanding it deeply."

Quadrus

And the "Future of Persuasion" as Persuasion? Persuasive Tech has been around for a few years now, spawning whole "Persuasive" conferences, where Wikipedia cites Fogg (2002) as Persuasive Technology being "technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion".

With representatives from "Kraft Foods, Humana, entrepreneurs, academics taking leave2 work@ Facebook, Gov't, boing^2, SAP..The complexities of the SValley ecosphere" were in full-effect.

For more, search for the #FoPersuasion tag on Twitter or other social media, and follow for more news at the IFTF Twitter/web feeds.

circle circle slash

There were panels on Healthcare and Persuasive Tech, from GlowCaps that increase pill adherence from 70% to 95% with a "one pixel browser" to ARG game designer Jane McGonigal (recent work, Evoke), from advertising folk and Interscope meets MickeyDs to Dean Eckles, UCSD SMART and BJ Fogg on his theoretical models for behavior change.

I'll end now with some re-tweets from the stream, made public with a projected ParaTweet display:

----------

@samin: RT @guerillafutures: RT @kchanasyk: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~Aristotle (mostly) #fopersuasion

@kazchi: Games are the most elevated form of investigation- Einstein - think about it #fopersuasion

@1wu: OH "this is a Wookie in Star Wars Galaxy. He was my PhD student..." #onlyslightlyoutofcontext #FoPersuasion

@nitya: #tocheckout RT @mencarna Health Habits Coach for Facebook out of @bjfogg's Stanford lab http://bit.ly/dg9VTq (expand) #FoPersuasion via @accarmichael

@kxande2 I never realized how many people wanted to control my behavior, esp by having me do it for them, until this conference #fopersuasion

@1wu: RT JasonTester "the future needs us to change our behaviors today" #FoPersuasion "human-future ixn" reminds me of Dourish's ubicomp paper

@kxande2: If healthcare is like seat belts, should we legislate a safer environment by removing many dangerous foods, Fritolay? Kraft?

RT @accarmichael: GlowCaps from Vitality - embedded sensors in pill bottles remind you to take your meds http://www.vitality.net/

RT @mencarna: Great to see VR finally being taken seriously and broadly deployed in heath: B.Wiederhold treating PTSD, TBI, phobias, obesity #fopersuasion

TH2010B: RT @1wu: design pattern for persuasion: escalating calls for action (texts/calls come last) #FoPersuasion #Vitality #iftf

@kazchi: MS Project Natal will scan ur body & create avatar w same body type- what if u want to have a thinner avatar?

@1wu: Have you nudged someone lately? The Power of a Gentle Nudge to Help Exercise http://on.wsj.com/94wQkO #FoPersuasion #iftf (via @HealthConvo

*nudge*

FoPersuasion

on Sunscreen

Apr 9, 2010
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As part of BJ Fogg's CS377v, Creating Health Habits with Social and Mobile Technology, we are, for our first assignment, to target 5 users and get them to apply sunscreen more regularly.

Sunscreen song notwithstanding, I wanted to write this post to suss out my own relationship to the sun and to skin, to Vita[min] D and SPF63.

china! kind of...

My (Wu) family has been making a clockwise tour around China for the last two-thousand years, and along with other humans have gotten (stayed?) dark over the millenia.

And while I'm not as dark as many of my mom's friends and relatives who grew up in the Philippines, I can only remember two times where I may have gotten close to burned in my life, the first perhaps when I was 6 or 7 on the shores of some Philippines reef, the second a few years ago when I stayed outside in the Seattle summer sun for 8-10 hours 2+ days in a row [and then only a small patch on my shoulders were irritated].

The skin cancer foundation would have us [anyone over the age of 6] "use a sunscreen daily" since "Even those who work inside are exposed to ultraviolet radiation for brief periods throughout the day. Also, UVA is not blocked by most windows."

The same skincancer.org page says that "[while there is] some controversy regarding this issue, few dermatologists believe (and no studies have shown) that sunscreens cause vitamin D deficiency. Also, vitamin D is available in dietary supplements and foods such as salmon and eggs, as well as enriched milk and orange juice."

And who is this Skin Cancer Foundation? Well their Corporate Council lists AVEENO and Banana Boat, Coppertone and Jergens, Shiseido and P&G.

The wikipedia Sunscreen page has this to say, that

Medical organizations such as the American Cancer Society recommend the use of sunscreen because it prevents the squamous cell carcinoma and the basal cell carcinoma.^[4] However, the use of sunscreens is controversial for various reasons. Many do not block UVA radiation, which does not cause sunburn but can increase the rate of melanoma (another kind of skin cancer), so people using sunscreens may be getting too much UVA without realizing it. Additionally, sunscreens block UVB, and if used consistently this can cause a deficiency of vitamin D.

where User:Gerriet42, a self-identified photochemist also contributes heavily to the Sunscreen controversy wikipedia page.

Skin Cancer Statistics

The skincancer.org fact page mentions that "The majority of people diagnosed with melanoma are white men over age 50", citing the SEER 2008 report. Less than 9,000 people [Americans] will die of melanoma, compared to about 40,000 for breast cancer, 50,000 for colon cancer, and almost 160,000 for lung cancer.

In contrast, 1/3 deaths occur to due cardiovascular disease, about 800,000+ deaths per year [2006] compared to less than 600,000 for all cancers and about 12,000 for HIV/AIDS.

The median age for death for melanoma of the skin is 68, and white men are 20-30x more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma than black women or Asian women, and white men are 10-15x more likely to die of melanoma than black women or Asian/Pacific Islander women.

So, in sum, if you die from melanoma, you are probably 60+ and probably white and male.The relative survival rate for 5 years is over 90%.

The Controversy

Going back to the controversy, labeling concerns, nano-scale chemical toxicity, free radicals and endocrine disruptors aside, the FDA 2007 report (p. 49079) mentions that

"although FDA has concluded that the studies support the conclusion that exposure to UV rays

increase the risk of premature skin aging, the study data fails to show that sunscreen use alone helps prevent

premature skin aging and skin cancer for several reasons (see section III. F., comment 17 of this document)..."

"Likewise, FDA is not aware of data demonstrating that sunscreen use alone helps prevent skin cancer. Like skin aging, these are studies examining the effects of sunscreen drug products on short-term factors for skin cancer, such as sunburn and other cellular damage. However, it is difficult to extrapolate these short-term adverse effects of UV radiation to a long-term, chronic effect such as skin cancer. In addition, like skin aging, the complete action spectrum for skin cancer is not known at this time." [emphasis mine]

On the flipside, the Sunscreen_controversy wikipedia page mentions that

"The use of sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of 8 inhibits more than 95% of vitamin D production in the skin.^[56]^[57] Recent studies showed that, following the successful "Slip-Slop-Slap" health campaign encouraging Australians to cover up when exposed to sunlight to prevent skin cancer, an increased number of Australians and New Zealanders became vitamin D deficient.^[58] Ironically, there are indications that vitamin D deficiency may lead to skin cancer.^[59]"

^{mentioning the slip-slop Australian campaign, noting that "Doctors recommend spending small amounts of time in the sun without
sun protection to ensure adequate production of vitamin D.^{[6]" [emphasis mine]}}

[Interestingly, Australia's campaign lead to an increase in melanoma cases (the fatal kind of cancer).]

In contrast, about 70% of US Children have a Vitamin D deficiency, where people of color and kids who spend lots of time indoors are at greater risk of deficiency, leading to an uptick in Rickets and the like.

"Melamed recommends that children should consume more foods rich in vitamin D, such as milk and fish. "But it's very hard to get enough vitamin D from dietary sources alone," she said.

Vitamin D supplementation can help. In the study, children who took vitamin D supplements (400 IU/day) were less likely to be deficient in the vitamin. However, only 4 percent of the study population actually used supplements.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which recently updated its vitamin D guidelines, now recommends that infants, children, and teens should take 400 IU per day in supplement form."

[There does seem to be some debate about how much Vitamin D should be recommended (current recommendations, as for fish oil, err on the side of being conservative).]

In the end, what should we do, or encourage? "Slather with sunscreen or let the sunshine in?"

I think I might recommend that folks, particularly white people, put on sunscreen 2-3x/wk, especially if they are likely to burn. But I'd also recommend Vitamin D supplementation, and in general would prioritize that (1) people get outside and move more whereas (2) supplementing with Vitamin D is secondary (and less important than Omega-3 / fish oil if possible) and (3) sunscreen use in moderation, perhaps depending on skin color, acknowledging the potential risks and benefits of chemical slathering over your skin.

2009+1

Apr 9, 2010
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It's been some months [a year+ actually] since I've updated this blog--I've been putting my efforts towards UltiTraining.com, my tumble log, and I suppose perhaps Twitter, my blogspot & PrecisionNutrition.com training logs, and the Unofficial Stanford Blog.

That said, I just revised my graphics.stanford research page and will be headed out to CHI 2010 in just a couple of days.

I'm taking two CS classes this quarter, one to fulfill a remaining "comps" (comprehensive exam) argument, with Ullman on Automata, and one by BJ Fogg, CS377v, on Creative Health Habits with Social and Mobile Technology.

In a different world, I might have gotten to know BJ earlier, but have been really put off by the name "persuasive technology" and the way it just comes off as marketingspeak--way to get folks to buy your wares, but BJ doesn't come across as cloyingly commercial at least in person.

cool

One new turn for the quarter is 549--the discussion element of 547 that focuses on design this quarter, and in the slide above Larry L talked about his practical and academic inquiries into design. I'm still struggling to deal with how I feel about how patriarchy intersects with design culture, in theory and in practice, and it's telling that Larry talked about how the d.school is not about teaching folks how to design but to have empathy for (the 2%, he says) designers. And who gets to be that top 2%?

It's something that comes up here and there again at Stanford, where half of the undergrads come from families that make more than $300k USD a year, and presumably many of these aren't of the noveau riche, but rather from either old money bloodlines, colonizers / immigrants that have been here for a few more generations.

I guess I reflect on a few things these days, that one should "be the change you want to see in the world" and yet at the same time, remembering that "power is not given, only taken". And yet, "an unexamined life is not worth living". These three, perhaps, and the way they struggle and intersect, perhaps have shaped my life in these last months and years...

on Algorithmic Designs for Nourishing ur Body

Jan 11, 2009
3 comments

(x-posted from Facebook.)

I'm going to start this note, intended as a draft for version zero of the Stanford BAN (Bathroom Activation Network, pronounced VAN ), with a story of Self (nod thx to EqualityCamp sF).

I grew up really picky about food, not far from the streets of New York, albeit picky in a way that better nourished the agro-industrial complex and my father's latent artherosclerosis. I identify as a supertaster, even though I have yet to double-check this through supralingual, visual inspection, but when I was younger, I used these powers tacitly and unknowingly for Ewil rather than fer Good, as I tried to find my foodie way through the intricacies of Chinese, American, Filipino, and Canto-American-Filipino-NY cuisine. That is to say, when I was younger (pre&teen yrs) I chowed down on anything which had the HFCS-bit--mountain dew and coke, hamburg buns and all manner of junk. I didn't grow out of being picky, but I grew out of (un)knowingly using food to abuse my body (at least in the mainstream way), and directed my picky- predilection to becoming a connoisseur of food, from peasant food pizzas (New York or Chicago? Been there, ate that :) to legit Kobe beef, from artisan breads to good ol' Salumi (Seattle) Salami. Needless to say, I wasn't vegetarian at the time, although I remember the time I was interning at Extreme Blue and had two vegetarian teammates (ethics and health- respectively) and the final fourth who kept Kosher hard (Jewnix-hacker) core. And of course some of my most amusing roommates have been militant vegans/veggies, or just vegan-eating vegetarians :) I learned hella lot more last year at Columbae, steeped in the culture of 70s era activism, where I spent six months leveling up as a bread-baker (after which I spent six months teaching/training myself into bad-ass shape), and learning as much as I could about these other aspects of food. I went to Slow Food Nation as a Youth Delegate (shout out to Miss Wires and Miss Gaines), hit up a Food & Fair Trade convergence in Santa Cruz, and started to master vegan-only cooking with help from a Vegan with a Vengeance, Isa, hailing from Teh Post Punk Kitchen. So, I'm still picky, I just try to transform that predilection toward making the world slightly better (read: sustainably delicious!) along the way.

Somewhere along the line, I started to discover how nourishing your body, both in spirit and in food, in training and in rest, also affects the mind. I learned about how Omega-3 fatty acids are essential to our brainy chemistry, and yet are missing from our Industrialized Western diets. I take O-3 fish oil pills from CostCo, but hope that one day when we stop factory farming our fish and our livestock, pills won't be the only way to get one's "O-3s". It turns out that as we start feeding our livestock things they shouldn't be eating--corn and each other--they eat less grass (for our leggy friends) and less krill (for our finny friends), both of which are rich in O-3s. Iowa corn farmers may be the most effective farmers in history when it comes to caloric output per unit spacetime, but there's something lost along that linear regression line. We feed corn to our livestock, who can't digest it and, to prevent them from dropping like [insert insect species] we (America) spend most of our antibiotics on our livestock to stay them from their corn-stuffed deaths. How screwed up is that? Anyway, I'm early up on this Saturday morning not only because I have conditioning practice in 45 but because I couldn't sleep much last night or the night before. At least it's not like that time over break when I stayed up three days, made myself crash by training hard / consuming livestock prepared at Sprout Cafe / watching "Wanted", slept three hours, and then stayed up another three days without trying to (actually, trying not to!). But still, I'm wondering if it has to do with how my Warrior Diet intersects with my vegetarian-ness this Terran quarter, and how both of those sacrifice food biodiversity and perhaps micronutrients such as vitamin B12... I don't know, but I do buy the theory/evidence which supports the use of controlled fasting (not starvation) to reduce inflammation, which makes me want to know more about how it might also manage inflammation-of-da-brain as well, which some posit explains the underlying mechanism of depression. Well, that's a long story to tell, but I'll get better at telling it, don't you worry :). It was supposed to be an intro to my summarized "Designs for Nourishing ur Body" but that guide will have to be cut short in the interest of time (practice in 40!). So here we go.

---

Designs for Nourishing ur Body If you want to keep it simple, listen to Michael Pollan (who paraphrases well-known NYU professor of nutrition Dr. Marion Nestle) when he writes: Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much. Marion Nestle also adds an exhortation to Move but Loco-Motion is beyond the scope of this lil guide :). Avoid the reductionist extreme of nutritionism, as we know so little about our bodies and yet so much at the same time. Worry about the big picture before you worry about the trees--the macro- and micro-nutrients and their relative compositions. That said, once you get a hang of Eating food, Mostly Plants, Not so Much, it doesn't hurt to learn a little about macronutrients (but don't obsess?), and a little about micronutrients. That tis my current philosophy, my idiolect-equivalent in idio-syncratic and idio-socratic terms, to keep it simple, but add in a few bits of my own. What are these bits? Eating Heuristics When in doubt, maximize Fiber, minimize Sugar. HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) is the high-order bit of junk food. If you avoid HFCS, you probably have enough money and/or wisdom to stay clear of the food-like items that pervade our culinary lives. Concerned about mental health? Seek out Omega-3. (Still researching the impact of Vit B12 on mental health.) Unless you're a Varsity-athlete Vegan, don't worry about protein... as long as you eat a diverse set of foodstuffs. Advanced Algorithms Eat like a Bodybuilder? 5-7 smaller meals. Max Fiber, Min Sugar. Eat like a Warrior! If you're devout enough, I do recommend trying the Warrior Diet. For the secular crew, I'm not so sure. Consider the application of Periodization Strategies--mesocycles and macrocycles--to your eating programs. Lance Armstrong('s coach) does this. As an aside, he also suggests that just 24 hours of carb loading that follow a short high-intensity training session in that final day before a tourney is as effective as carbo loading throughout the week, but that's a minor point I just wanted to remind myself to try out :) Okay kiddos, time to gear up for practice. Peas and love out!

tempeh reuben

EqualityCamp, a story from

Jan 4, 2009
4 comments

[cross-posted from an email I sent to a marriage_equality mailing list at Stanford]

Hi Amanda,

Thanks for the forward re: the EqualityCalifornia scorecard!

Yesterday at EqualityCamp (#eqcampsf on Twitter), I met an activist lawyer who has worked at Equality California, and talked to a number of other activists working on the CourageCampaign, at non-profits in the city and the East Bay, Berkeley students and ex-(Obama organizers), designers, techies, and even hackers planning to run a SuperGayDevHouse hackathon. (JoinTheImpact tried to show, but couldn't make it.)

In this email I just wanted to (not so) briefly summarize what seems to be going on with Marriage Equality activism/organizing statewide.

EqualityCamp, an Overview

Some sixty to seventy techies, lawyers, organizers, and (often newly hatched) activists gathered at Citizen Space yesterday (2009 Jan 3) for EqualityCamp, an unconferenced organized in the BarCamp style--an "ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."

After a brief introduction from some of the organizers, we introduced ourselves to each other and got to work self-organizing to break up into theme-based sessions. As the EqualityCampSchedule shows, attendees both wanted to learn from the past--"Secrets / Lessons from the Obama Campaign", and look to the future with technology platforms for organizing (Mobile, Geospatial Mapping, and modern Social Networks). We also discussed service as a way of unifying communities, how to work with Youth / Allies / liberal communities of faith, and how to organize in communities of color and the (Oakland) East Bay.

Dream Machine: Secrets of the Obama (campaign)

Learning from the past was one theme that seemed to recur, from honoring one participant who met his current partner before Stonewall and is still kickin' to listening as organizers involved with the Obama campaign told their stories and shared their lessons learned.

As I scribbled in my abbreviated notes from Camp Obama real-time blog post (hashtag #eqcampsf), Dan Ancona described three things that the Obama campaign did successfully:

1. A structure of "Empowered Accountability", wherein you don't just give people tools, you make them into Carpenters
2. You invest in and distribute / make accessible tools such as the BlueStateDigital-powered my.barackobama.com, which integrated with the modern Voter Activation Network (or "VAN")
3. Training -- both in the technology and on messaging (more on that later)

Camp Obama may have been a different experience and set of tools for a different point in time, but it's worth contrasting the Obama strategy that worked with the "No on Prop 8" organizing which did not seem as successful.

Camp Obama sessions were generally two days, involved 300+ people, and were designed to empower people and give them tools to be leaders in the campaign.

There were three key principles. Respect, Empower, Include.

Under the direction of long-time organizer Marshall Ganz (a top field organizer for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, now a lecturer at Harvard), the goal of the training was not to train people how to phonebank (as organizers did here and across the state for Prop 8), but to get people in a room and just let them figure out how to make a million phone calls. It wasn't just about making phone calls of course, as training was not just a machine for phone calls and GOTV but a "machine for dreams"...

What might a machine for dreams look like anyway? They probably don't have the answer, but here's what they did do.

Of the 300+ people, dozens of smaller groups were formed and met separately according to the following structure.

1. Find your voice. For the first half of the first day of training you had to tell the story of your Self. Why did you decide to be active? What brought you here? Why do you care? The story of self gives you your first tool to talk and engage people with authenticity not mass-produced political plasticity...

2. Find out what your leadership ability is.

3. Finding your team.

4. Finding your set of responsibilities and who/how you were accountable.

Many LGBT-rights activists, after and during the fact, criticized the No on Prop 8 phonebanking scripts and media messaging as both too rigid--we were not allowed to tell our own stories at all, and were actively discouraged from doing so--and too abstract. While it seems like a lot of time to invest in having people find and tell their own stories, it also seems to foster a sort of person and leader-driven culture rather than a voter-outreach phonebanking machine.

It was said that the Obama campaign realized that "California was more than an ATM machine"--people wanted to do more and were given the opportunity to do so whereas many would-be Prop8 activists were frustrated at being told simply to hold signs (which they found difficult to acquire, another opportunity for entrepreneurial change).

So what do we learn, going forwards? I think what we learned from Camp Obama was that it's "not about message discipline but about organizing discipline". Rather than telling people what to say or not say, we need to remember and re-tell our own stories, realizing that when we reach out "the story of Self is a two-way street", and to tell one-way, un-Self-driven stories is a path to messaging futility.

How then, do we organize and organize in a disciplined fashion? Beyond the principles of Marshall Ganz / Cesar Chavez and Empower, Respect, Include? I think it's worth looking at two elements to learn from, both the organizational structure (a hierarchy, really) of Camp Obama and the way data- / feedback- / option-driven social networking web sites were used.

First, even though Camp Obama was designed to empower, it still operated under a tightly defined structure, of accountability and responsibility. I think it's worth considering the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freeman 1970) and the Tyranny of Disempowering Structure at the same time, to find some fruitful middle ground.

Second, it's worth noting how the campaign and the tech-powered sites allowed people to chose how to leverage their own talents (do you want to fundraise or phone call? Travel to another state?) and to make it easy for people to volunteer with whatever time they have.

If you'd like to learn more about Camp Obama, there are presumably folks around who have gone to one, and it's probably worth some time revisiting how Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers have organized, with an eye to how we as Stanford activists and students can also respect, empower, and include each other as we work and live towards a better future.

On Messages and other kinds of Data

In the last section I focused mainly on the structural perspective of organizing, and now I wanted to share some thoughts on "messaging" and other bits of data. While I mentioned previously that it wasn't about message discipline but about organizing discipline, it's still worth sussing out how we should craft and design our own messages. Someone at #EqualityCamp said that "the best advertising is aspirational... not a message but an ideal" and by these accounts Prop8 messaging was far from aspirational in tone, not to mention how we were discouraged from engaging our own stories of self.

And who should we send these messages to? who should we otherwise talk to or engage? A key takeaway from the second session I went to, "Mapping & Data" was the importance and challenge of organizing voter file / activation data. After each election there is often a scramble for the data gathered during the campaigns, for data (collection / integration) is expensive and information is power. Access to the Voter Activation Network (VAN) is available on a sliding scale, but at the end of the day, it still costs money and organizations are reluctant to share their voter databases with others. Geocommons and Creative Commons this is not.

Dan's article on "Power to the Edge: Obama's California Field Operation from the Future" gives a taste of how some feel the "distributed and bottom-up... way that is the clearest example of what a post-broadcast, distributed and participatory democracy is going to look like."

While we still struggle to figure out what this means, as we tweet and self-organize, network and SMS, orgs such as the Courage Campaign (who helped to fund the defend equality camp t-shirt) and working towards a world where we marry BlueStateDigital social networking sites with VAN files, allowing hoi polloi to get to voter contact in just 3-clicks.

The impression I got was that data management is a tricky business, both politically and technically, organizationally and socially. Who owns the voter data we collect? Who has access to it and by what means? It's clear that future elections will be even more savvy in their information wars--2008 was just the start.

unity in the community?

Communities of Color / Unity within the LGBT community

There's so much to write here that I don't know where to begin. I didn't take as many notes on these last three sessions as, to be honest, I was fading a little there, but I think a few takeaways include "service as a way of unifying communities" and remembering that coalitions are not built organization-to-organization but person-to-person within those organizations. It's worth remembering in the campaign for Marriage Equality that there are other worthy fights out there, and if we don't have their back when the time comes, will they have ours?

As action items, people started to self-organize lists for queer service days, others started planning for EqualityCamp Oakland/East Bay (taking childcare and diversity more into account), and folks were reminded to keep their electronic messaging professional ("details matter"), and to provide two Calls to Action with each communication. Others learned about video production whilst still others planned a future SuperGayDevHouse.

I'm going to wrap up there and cross-post to my vox blog for posterity. Write or chat if you'd like to know more!
L2

Stanford Marriage Equality activism

Jan 3, 2009
1 comment

As told by Stanford blog posts:

No on Prop 8 Rallies & Phonebanks (Nov 1, 2008)

Stanford Students Plan Continued Protest Against Prop. 8 in Student Union (Nov 14, 2008)

The Fight for Marriage Equality: 30 days later (Dec 4, 2008)

Mapping

Jan 3, 2009
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JESSE COSTELLO-GOOD on Mapping -- from howsfvotes.com

#eqcampsf (today's EqualityCamp schedule)

Neighbor-to-neighbor / peer-to-peer is the most effective.

Reach out to your base, have then reach out to undecided / persuadable / "soft yes".

We need precinct captains.

Can we combine Voter File + Social Network + Geodata? How to ensure effectiveness?

"subsidiarity" is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest / owest / least centralized authority.

Jesse is demonstrating http://p8m.howsfvotes.com/ -- I wonder if this data is in the geocommons? Precinct lines are from 2006 State data, California data not as good as SF voter data.

ca voter connect

Dan on the Prop8 campaign:

No on Prop 8 didn't do iterative feedback with voter file (too expensive, just one firm that does it). CallFire was used, but didn't set up the roundtrip to VAN? Not just geography but lots of demographic data to get phone numbers?

Decile vs Clustering approach. Make the data available to end-user activists? O'Reilly Vote Data Hacking?

Progressive developer hacker list?

Access to VAN (non-commercial) on a sliding scale.

Voter connect mission -- reach out to communities of color.

How do you give people options for how to engage? For example, a vet that wants to reach out to other vets.

See Dan's "Power to the Edge: Obama's California Field Operation from the Future".

CourageCampaign -- neighbor2neighbor (BlueStateDigital married with VAN, we are the test), recruit Obama organizers. n2n is a social network, allows you to get to voter contact in 3-clicks.

notes from Camp Obama

Jan 3, 2009
1 comment

"Obama or straight people?" #eqcampsf

Dan Ancona: notes from RootsCamp.

What did the Obama campaign do?

1. Structure of "Empowered Accountability" -- make carpenters (organizer Marshall Ganz)

2. Tools: BlueStateDigital's my.barackobama.com & VoterActivation Network (the VAN).

3. Training -- tech&message training

[VAN was easy to use but not that easy, deployed Neighbor-to-Neighbor later]

Marshall Ganz- get people in a room and let them figure out how to make a million phone calls. share dreams & strategy. not just making phone calls, but a "machine for dreams".

Mike Bonin

Why is Camp Obama different? Experience and a set of tools in a certain point in time. We're at a different point now...

Were generally two days, 300+ ppl, designed to empower people & give them tools to be leaders in the campaign.

Respect, empower, include.

"California was more than an ATM machine"--people wanted to do more--they became the phonebank or were sent elsewhere.

Structure:

1. Finding your voice. (first half of first day, tell the story of Self. why did you decide to be active? gives you your first tool to talk.)

2. Finding what your leadership ability was.

3. Finding your team.

4. Finding what your set of responsibilities were and who/how you were accountable.

See

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman (1970).

mashup Camp

Nov 18, 2008
1 comment

I went to day two of Mashup Camp today -- the "Unconference" for the "Uncomputer" -- held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I missed the panel discussion on "Making the Case for Mashups in Business", but organized my own Unconference Discussion #1, which I titled "Interactive Data Integration, Foraging for Web Services, and novel Human-map Interaction Design: Taking Map Mashups beyond Pushpins".

After briefly demo'ing d.mix, I gave my newer map design research pitch, and chatted about the use of maps on kidsdata.org. Someone pointed out that when it comes to digital cartography, there seems to have been a similar trend in the analog/digital typesetting industries, this sort of two-steps-forward but one-step-back push and tug when it comes to digitization and the loss of previously accumulated knowledge.

Alec also pointed me to tonight's WebMapSocial, where folks talked about OpenLandmark.com (which seems to have been broken all day) and Skout.com, a mobile dating site. I also met the person who had emailed me about the upcoming OpenStreetMap mapping party here in the Bay which I'll have to miss (going to a tourney in Oregon...) this weekend, and chatted for a while with an investor who works with CloudMade...

Camp

Over lunch, I chatted about sustainable foods with Rajesh from SearchYogi (how might we support data mining for the people to enable personal health decision analytics re: food), Ash from Medgle (and his new Healthy Me?), and a fellow about leveraging Recipe metadata in search (see Google Base recipe functionality).

Fred Jung (sp?) from GOOG talked about GOOG's new GGroundOverlay and GTileLayer APIs, and reminded me that legal issues probably prohibit them from doing much interesting when it comes to selective de-emphasis / re-design of map tiles.

After that, it was time to peace out!