Milestone notes

Gantt Chart for second milestone review. Full Version Here.

Other notes:
Beginning of research paper on Foucault, the Panopticon, and social networking, built on "Poked by the Panopticon," which will format the opening of my capstone paper for the second half.

Will has got the comment system, karma system, and paypal links working to manage a small demo with the class.

The roots of trust(risk)

In the center of town, there’s this old oak tree with a wooden box nailed to it. The box has a latch and a keyhole, and for as long as anyone can remember, townsfolk have come by and, whenever they had some spare nickels, dimes or dollars, they’d feed the oak.

No one ever knew what happened to the box. It started to get a bit of a legendary status at my school. People put money into it, but no one ever saw the thing get full. We kids called it magic. If grownups said anything at all about the box, they called it 'just one of those things', and that was that.

I never knew much about the box until a lady down the street, a widow, lost her house to a fire spurred by a candle burning without a watchful eye. The insurance man came around and talked to the fire chief and that was the end of that: The widow didn’t get a dime because the cause was ‘negligence’ and so you pay a couple of hundred thousand dollars for the sin of burning a candle while you’re in the bath tub.

When it happened, more people would make their way over to the tree every day. And then they all stopped, and then the widow was inside the grocery store buying a ham and some toothpaste instead of hanging around outside it crying with her hands out.

I asked my dad about the whole deal, and he told me he may as well tell me something because I was old enough. For telling, he didn't do a lot of talking. He takes me over to a desk and he pulls out this black key, old and narrow, and he tells me there’s something I ought to know about this town and that tree.

We go to the hardware store and dad asks for the owner, and the owner comes down and looks at the key, looks at me, and looks at my dad. Smiling, not saying a word, he retreats to the back room and about a half hour later, there’s a twin key. My dad turned it to me and handed it over like it was his genes.

We went to the oak tree that night, and he had me unlock it. Inside the old box was a black hole about four feet deep.

“It’s usually too packed to be dark,” my dad said. “Usually it’s filled with silver and copper and paper shining back the moonlight.”

I got it all then.

“We’re not the only ones with a key, are we?” I asked.

We weren’t. Dad said that his dad handed it down to him. Grandpa got a key from his boss at the shoe store when he returned a box of cash that got lost on the way to the bank. No one knows who’s got the keys, Dad said. We all get one, and we’re allowed one copy, but no one knows where they came from and no one knows where the money goes. People just throw some money in there and it stays that way until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t you either got scammed or you served a higher good. You don’t know better either way, so you may as well just trust it.

I shut the latch and locked it closed and then slid all I had, $5.23 in change, through the narrow slot. Maybe I’ll get it back some day. Maybe you will. Maybe some kids will find a key and rob the town blind. Or maybe it’ll show up in between bites of the old widow’s leftover ham. You never know. So you might as well choose to believe.

(The above, if it isn’t clear, is a work of fiction illustrating a computer-free version of my capstone project).

Demo, update on research.

A pretty simplistic demo of the project in action is available here:

http://www.umit.maine.edu/~eryk_salvaggio/mock/1.html

Found a handful of research into trust and social networking. I'll be writing about them here soon as part of the paper component.

A rough graphic outline of the Trust/Risk Project

1.Entry
Borrowing somewhat from hell.com's minimal interface, the site will be a black html document with a login screen. Not sure whether or not we'll even have a graphic or other design element on the page. After all, if you're going there, it's because you were invited by e-mail to join.

(Click here to see a larger version of the mock-up)



2. GUI












When you log in, you will be given access to two, side-by-side message boards: The trust fall, and the free fall. The separation allows users to have a simple way of gauging the extent of their risk – and allows us a way of measure differences in how trust is built.

Trust Fall: This message board will allow posts from users who have “paid it forward” in some way, ie, they've donated to others, or to a charity, through the trust/risk interface.

Free Fall: This message board will allow posts from anyone invited to the site who has not 'paid it forward' in some way.

The two 'streams' are side-by-side, with a clear label above each. Users can read both, and I hope that seeing both at the same time will elevate the question of trust vs risk and how we relate differently to the two groups.

(Click here to see a larger version of the mock-up)

In the future, I'd like to use the top portion to provide minimal statistics: How much people have donated, how many people they've invited, etc. One cool statistic would be to track 'generations,' so you could see how many of the people you invited have donated, how many have invited others, etc, so you can watch the number grow and feel good about it.

The top should also have a link to a list of charities to donate to if people want to earn trust status that way.

2. Payment
Every poster – that is, people who ask for help (or offer advice or comfort) on either the Trust or Free boards – will have some sort of .sig file appended to their name that contains a button to activate the payment process to this individual. The challenge here is that the name has to be completely unreadable to potential donors, but maintained by the server to keep track of payments. How we get the money from one account to another is another challenge.

I hope that in some way, this process also allows anonymous posters to be rewarded for offering help, even if that just means advice. Maybe one anon user says something particularly inspiring to other people – they can actually 'tip' the user, despite that the user isn't asking for it. This is a side-effect of this system, but it's one that I feel can actually add another element to the site.

3.Invite
Users with logins will be able to send invitations to people they trust, or whom they feel could benefit from the help. The e-mails will be sent from our server, and will come with a message about trust – what that means, the responsibility inherent within it, etc. If people get the e-mail, the hope is that the message will make the recipient aware that a) the person who invited them is someone that they know, and that by being invited, they have been given the trust of someone they know, and that if they violate that trust, they will have violated the trust of someone that they know. It will also make clear that they will probably never know who invited them, and, straight out of the prisoner's dilemma, the person who invited them will never know if their trust has been violated.

4. Browse option
I wonder if this will ultimately be necessary, but, since we want to encourage people to 'pay it forward' somehow, I'd like to get another page for charities or something going; however, this could be done by simply creating a "splash page" between the log in and the message board that highlights a random charity every time you log in and asks if they want to donate to get 'trust' status.



That's it. That's the project. The rest of the construction will focus on seeding and developing the network.

Progress Report for 9/25: 4chan, dead leaves and Foucault

Some new stuff to talk about.

TECH
1. Jon had suggested Thwonk, a site that allows users to customize their own Web site. The issue with Thwonk is that, at this stage, it doesn't have any modules, so you basically build a mailing list with .js scripts you write from scratch. I had hoped to port a version of Trust/Risk to a mailing list community, but that's not so important right now.

2. Discovered a promising platform for the Trust/Risk backend, an open source project called Kareha (Japanese-language lesson: It means "dry leaves") which promises to provide something similar to - (hard swallow) - 4chan. Yes, the system I will be using for Trust/Risk is essentially the same as the backend for 4chan. Here's another leap: I think 4chan is a perfect example of an anonymous community. I'll probably do some deeper writing about this as I get into the theoretical backend of this project.

CONCEPT
1. Did some exploration of Foucault, surveillance and behavior on social networks to justify why this community should be anonymous, spotlighting some of the drawbacks of visibility on social networks. It's by no means a solid academic essay, just a sketch in advance of one, but I'm posting it here anyway. (Nevermind the 9/01/09 date, that's just so longer texts will always be at the bottom of the blog feed).

Proposal Outline v.02

Abstract
The Trust/Risk Project is an art-service opportunity that will create an invitation-only Web site where people can request, and grant, financial help to one another anonymously.

Why
The Trust/Risk Project draws from two streams of thought:

I. That the Internet creates an opportunity to offer direct financial help on a massive scale, with low overhead and no management of funds and their distribution, a factor that in many charities constitutes a major siphon of donated funds.
II. That these costs are directly related to regulation of the risk involved in giving away money to a stranger.

The Trust/Risk Project is based on the thesis that, as some people take on greater risk in their investments in order to reap a larger reward, the same may be true for charitable funds and donations.

The Trust/Risk Project allows donated funds to go directly to an individual who requests it, but the donor has no guarantee of the authenticity of the request or assurances of how it will be used. This requires an inherent balance of trust and risk.

The project understands that this trust can be abused. The thesis is that some may make the mental calculation to trust it anyway, in hopes of their donations having a greater, direct impact on the receiver.

Where
I have done research primarily on charitable loans to developing nations. However, the overhead and the management functions of a charitable site remove a vast amount of financial resources. By allowing an open, peer-to-peer network regulated and managed on the simple notion of Trust, we elevate the fundamental risk, but also reduce the overhead cost.

What
The site will have limited safeguards: An invitation-only interface, in which individuals are asked only to forward invitations to people whom they personally trust. Anyone interested in requesting funds must donate to another project first; this project can also include a list of charitable organizations. The hope is that this ‘pay it forward’ concept will pose a high enough barrier to entry that it will keep out blatant scammers; the invitation-only concept also forces individuals to evaluate their own sense of trust and trustworthiness.

Requests will be arranged through Paypal, or even just through cash in envelopes. It’s up to the requestor to determine their level of trust, as well. I assume that the more transparent a requestor is, the more trust they’ll receive.

As an art project, it is, to reiterate, understood that such a community involves tremendous risks and a tremendous leap of faith on behalf of donors. If the project merely causes invited individuals to contemplate and question ideas about trust and how trust works; how to weigh the risk of being taken advantage of against the benefit of directly helping others, etc., then it is a success.

For this reason, I have adopted the “Trust Fall” as a metaphor for the project: A game in which an individual stands on a ledge, and then falls backwards onto a friend or group of friends, trusting not only that these friends will catch him, but also that they know how to support the weight. The act of donating on this site will carry similar connotations.

The result is not only to help people who may need help get it; but to create something so brazenly idealistic that it serves as a commentary on the nature of trust in and of itself. In this sense, the piece exists as an artwork in which people are asked the question: Who do you trust? Why? And what are you willing to do to possibly help someone?

I'm curious to see what people do with a space that encourages their most idealistic behavior. If it deteriorates into chaos, then we've learned a bleak lesson.

When
I am still struggling to determine a collaborative process for this project. A Gantt chart highlighting a preliminary role for a coder is here.

Budget
Will be devised after conversations with collaborators.

Coming from the pool?

Feel free to peruse the blog, but the text proposal you'll want to review is here.