Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

I have just entered GivingSpace as a topic in the Topic Exchange

“How it works

You make a post in your favourite blogging tool.
You classify your post as belonging to a topic, with a plain-English name. Perhaps a description as well.
The topic gets created somewhere, and given a blog and RSS feed.
Your blogging tool leaves a link to the topic blog somewhere around your post, so visitors can see it.
Now, anyone subscribed to the topic (that’s you, anyone else who has linked a post to the topic, or anyone who has subscribed with RSS or somesuch) sees this topic in a drop-down list next to the text entry box in their blogging app whenever they post.”

Also,
PyDS now supports TopicExchange
The Python Desktop Server now has integrated TopicExchange support. You can fetch the list of topics, select some topics for your use and on posting in categories, you can select topics that should be pinged with your posting!
And it shouldn’t include HTML tags now, as they should be stripped. This might leave ugly formatted text, but who cares, it’s only an excerpt …

posted at 19:26:08 # comment [0]

Apache Agoura i by Stefano Mazzocchi is an interesting visualization of social networks. It is a Java applet which displays networks of interactions. In the case of the default display, this network is harvested from the email archives of the Apache Software Foundation.

“I consider this a software-driven social experiment and I would like to see the community citizens actually using this system to confront their personal view of the community with the one presented in visual form. My expectations are not only accademic but also social: I think that such a global vision of the community might help identify information about how different communities are connected together.”

Paper from Deborah Small, Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability

“We show that a very weak form of identifiability — determining the victim without providing any personalizing information ? increases caring. In the first, laboratory study, subjects were more willing to compensate others who lost money when the losers had already been determined than when they were about to be. In the second, field study, people contributed more to a charity when their contributions would benefit a family that had already been selected from a list than when told that the family would be selected from the same list.”

Flipping the negative discourse from “victim” to “recipient” or “doer” in philanthropic relationships, this paper points out an even subtler aspect to the issue. People were more generous when they were helping a specific family, rather than one of a list of families listed as candidates… This could indicate that generosity is more than just a form of altruism, but rather an expression of a need to connect. (see Heather Wood Ion’s paper, “Can what counts be counted?”

This also bolsters the value of using a complementary currency (e.g. Friendly Favor’s “Thank You”) as a marker for reflecting these interactions. Rather than trying to monetize interchange in terms of dollars – which are based on an underlying psychology of scarcity and greed- we would use a complementary currency (the number of “thank yous” in your account) as a way of linking positive interaction. In this currency, it would be “normal” to be generous and altruistic, and traditional economics would be a “negative externality” to this approach.

I just saw the movie, “About Schmidt” staring Jack Nicholson. It was a great drama, in which Nicholson’s character spirals downward through a series of misfortunes, but during which begins supporting a foster child in Africa via a $22/month gift. The climax of the movie is a rather stunning display of the emotion of elevation as Nicholson realizes the impact of his generosity. This is an illustration of Jon Haidt’s work on The Positive Emotion of Elevation :

“Elevation appears to be the opposite of social disgust. It is triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue. Elevation involves a warm or glowing feeling in the chest, and it makes people want to become morally better themselves. Because elevation increases one?s desire to affiliate with and help others, it provides a clear illustration of Fredrickson?s broaden-and-build model of the positive emotions.” (Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-Being)

It is fantastic to see Hollywood produce entertainment with such a raw, uplifting message. An earlier film of similar genre, “Pay it Forward” had a similar uplifting theme, but they seemed to include a senseless act of violence to “balance” the message.

The pattern of giving illustrated in the movie, adopting a child in a less developed country, obviously creates a lot feedback to the donor. In my wanderings over the past few years, I have asked those in the trade what they think about this particular pattern of giving. A former VP of one of the largest organizations told me that of the $28/month they collected, “maybe” $4 made it to the child, despite tax reports showing 85% “efficiency” of giving. Another woman told me she had been sending letters and gifts to her “orphan” supported by this charity and was surprised to get a letter from a kid talking about his mother. She called the charity, and they said that the fine print didn’t actually direct the funds to a specific child; she felt that the whole thing had been a charade. Another 30-year veteran in humanitarian field work called it “micro welfare.” I watched a television pitch on the subject in which the solictor weepily told the camera how his donation put shoes on a boy in Latin America, while his sister went shoeless. Is it really uplifting to play Santa Claus to one kid while the others stay deprived? Does this pattern build dependency or autonomy in the less developed country? David Ellerman of the World Bank writes about how to create autonomy-respecting uplift practices.

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