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So apparently, the Mailing List sign-up has not been working since early July. Doh. Just fixed it.
If you tried before and it wasn't working please try again!
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on August 13, 2010, at 02:39 PM
South Wood County Shout Out
Thanks to the Community Foundation for their generosity, kindness, and vision! I had a great experience in Wisconsin Rapids.
Special thanks to Tim Krause for going out of his way to make me feel at home, and to Liz Everson for all of the planning that went into arranging those meetings.
Kristy good luck with school and career. I know you'll go far, but hopefully that doesn't mean you'll never come home. Special hugs to all the rest of the ladies of CFGSWC!
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on August 05, 2010, at 06:56 PM
Knight Batten Notable Mention
Red Ink received a notable mention from the 2010 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism
Andrew wrote a very nice post about it on the Civic Media blog.
Big Up!
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on August 13, 2010, at 02:47 PM
MIT Knight Future Of News And Civic Media
If you jump to just before the half-way point in the video timeline, you'll see a recent 10 minute talk I gave about Red Ink at the MIT/Knight Future of News and Civic Media Conference 2010.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on July 22, 2010, at 12:41 PM
Dollars To Data
Here's a snippet from the Dollars to Data workshop that Charlie and I ran at the C4 conference.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on July 12, 2010, at 02:39 PM
Innovate 100
Thanks to the organizers of Journalism That Matters: Detroit and Time Life for awarding Red Ink a grant to attend the Reynolds Journalism Institute in August for the Innovate100 pitch slam.
I'm going to use the opportunity to promote Red Ink, see what investors think of my crazy ideas, and try and improve Red Ink's messaging to general audiences.
Communicating the potential of Red Ink to serve communities has always been a big challenge. Not because it is not capable of doing so, but because just explaining what I'm doing, especially for people not familiar with web based personal finance applications, can be a lot to wrap ones head around in a 2 minute conversation. It is also very challenging to reduce to a paragraph or a few short sentences without sounding high level. Open Source Consumer Analytics for People in Communities is as brief a phrase as I was able to wordsmith.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on June 24, 2010, at 08:15 PM
The Case For Oversharing
Chris O'Brien, a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News, participated in the "Dollars to Data: Online Financial Tools and Civic Media" workshop that Charlie DeTar and I ran on at the MIT/Knight Future of News & Civic Media 2010.
Apparently, he liked what I had to say, because his most recent article, The Case for Oversharing cites Red Ink as an example where "the benefits and social good that may flow from that impulse may far outweigh the downsides."
Cheers! You could have pulled those words from my own mouth. Thanks Chris, for the props in Silicon Valley!
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on June 20, 2010, at 04:40 PM
Personalized Food Menus
My friend and associate Kwan, from the Media Lab's Viral Communications group, has been working on financial transaction data for a while in his PhD research. I wish he was still working on getting product level receipt into the transaction stream, but for now he's got a new project about using interactive digital menus in restaurants.
Support Kwan's research! Eat at Legal Sea Food! Be more digital! I think he's giving away some Amazon gift certificates to incentivize you.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on June 24, 2010, at 08:17 PM
BP Coytt
Here's a module that Josh and I threw together at Chris's request. It looks at our research group's spending at gas stations owned by BP, on the occasion of their recent oil spill. Now, we can track our impact on these businesses as a whole, rather than just as a individuals.
Imagine connecting that information to a social network. Individuals could track their effect on the flow of money across that network by correlating outreach efforts with the spending changes of their network. We could begin to quantify in financial terms the strength and value of a social network.
Its questionable whether or not people would be willing to connect themselves together in this fashion or share data down to that level, but the potential is there at many gradients of granularity.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on June 13, 2010, at 05:32 AM
I Can Has Permissions
Here's what it looks like if an embedded module has been set to private. Only users who are logged in and members of the campaign may see its embedded version.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on June 13, 2010, at 05:32 AM
We Have Embed
What you see below is a live embed of a Red Ink chart that tracks my research group's spending at lunch establishments around Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.
I still need to work out permissions and logic for publishing the modules publicly versus viewing them privately, but this is a good first step.
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on June 13, 2010, at 05:33 AM
Flot
We just finished renovating modules to have a unified filter and visualization UI. That included re-implementing the visualizations with Flot, an elegant HTML 5 + JQuery + JSON graphing library. It supports javascriptable interactivity with the charts, including popups and zooming.
While not as flashy as our old graphing kit, flot seems better conceived and easier to work with. I like that it's json based and the fact that it's just javascript and html means it will work across a variety of platforms, especially mobile.
So far, thumbs up!
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on May 08, 2010, at 05:00 PM
Four Square Heat Map
Recently, I've been trying to work out the Red Ink UI and the campaign visualizations. I've been inspired by a few different designs:
I saw this mash-up, Where Do You Go?, at the last NYU ITP show. It takes your FourSquare check-in info and turns it into a geo-correlated heat map that shows how frequently you visit restaurants in given area.
I'd like to be able to produce something similar for campaigns, but sourcing the heat data from the volume of money being tracked by a campaign. I think this will be a simple way to visually compare between the success of campaigns.
The other design I'm into is from an open source web stats package called, Piwik. There is a lot of cross over between displaying the time-series data of web traffic and displaying time-series data of consumer transactions.
Actually, I wonder how complicated it would be to mash-up one of these stats packages with the consumer transaction data. Probably, not trivial, but so close to the mark!
permalink | posted by Ryan O'Toole on May 08, 2010, at 05:01 PM
100k Fail
In the last few weeks and months I've been putting a lot of thought into what Red Ink will function like in the real world. This means dealing with the fundamental issue of what business model makes sense for supporting a data sharing platform of this nature.
To that end I wrote up a business plan for MIT's $100K Business Plan Competition. Qualifying entries receive legal and venture mentors from the Boston/Cambridge area to help develop their idea into fully-fledged start-up venture. The winner of the competition receives $100,000 in money to get their vision off the ground.
Last night, I attended the first-cut semi-final round of the competition. The event was packed with Sloanies. My anxiety level was pretty high. Fortunately, they picked an entertaining and insightful Harvard Business School alum and CEO of Athena Health, Jonathan Bush (yes those Bushes), to give the keynote. And what he said was compelling. He basically told the story of his repeated failures to get Athena Health off the ground. Failure to pass the first cut of Harvard's business plan competition; failure to generate venture interest in his initial idea; failure to recruit people power to implement the vision; failure to make money with the vision. And then... unexpectedly, from a web technology they had developed internally for their own use, eureka! They kept their vision and culture, but flipped the script, and Athena Net was born, and grew, and today is a successful public company after more than 10 years of work offering Medical Billing solutions to the health industry.
Any success story can be a compelling one, but we often do not hear of the many failures and labors it takes before success comes knocking. Jonathan's story was especially compelling for me, <em>because my plan did not even make the first cut of the competition</em>! Fail! Epic Fail!
It is hard to spend so much time and energy on a vision for the future, and to not be able to communicate the value of that vision to others. I am disappointed in myself, but not discouraged from continuing to pursue a sustainable business model for financial data sharing!
permalink | posted by Ryan on April 27, 2010, at 02:45 PM
Five Ways To Use Green Data
In both of my talks, I mention that "data is powerful", but did not delve deeply into the epistemology of that idea or its practical applications. It is certainly a weak point in our discussion.
Luckily, there are people out there smarter than I doing the dirty work to make the case. "Five ways to use (green) data and make money", a recent article from the Harvard Business Review, presents several illustrative scenarios of using reality mining data to affect behavioral change.
permalink | posted by Ryan on November 30, 2009, at 12:17 AM
Media Lab Crit Day
Here's the video from my "crit day" talk. I was pretty nervous, but I think this is the best version of the talk I've given to date. Lot's of revisions from the comm forum talk. Enjoy!
permalink | posted by Ryan on November 27, 2009, at 10:11 PM
Communication Forum Video
Here's the video I promised of my talk at the Center for Future Civic Media Communications Forum. Next a more polished version of this same talk from my Media Lab Thesis Proposal Critique session from 11/16/09.
permalink | posted by Ryan on November 18, 2009, at 04:07 PM
Thesis Proposal Critique
I gave a presentation on my thesis today to the entire Media Lab (eek!) I think it went well. There was lots of good questions from my critics and readers (thank you!). I'll try to summarize:
1) David Reed seemed to think that the financial data would be self-reported by the users. Not true! Expensify grabs the transaction data directly from the banks and we do the filtering. We get direct access to the whole raw feed.
2) Sandy Pentland wanted to know why we didn't just ask for all of the data then parse out what we need after the fact. Maybe some campaigns will ask for this, but I think it would be a major hurdle for most people for adoption. My mom would be very uncomfortable giving access to all her data, especially without any constraints on what I could look at or do with it.
3) Henry Holtzmann suggested we try to aggregate as much data together as possible, even across campaigns that were not related. I tried to defend why I thought that would also be an inappropriate invasion of privacy, but outlined some scenarios were campaigns that made their data public could do something like that.
4) Deb Roy pointed out that the uses of the application are perhaps broader than just boycotts. We agree. We'll be aggregating data from across many financial institutions. In theory we'll know as much as all of them put together, while they know only about themselves.
5) Mad props to Chris Csíkszentmihályi for advice and support along the way. We feel loved.
I'll post video of the talk as soon as I get it.
permalink | posted by Ryan on November 18, 2009, at 09:45 PM
World Changing
Thanks to Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center for live blogging the Communications Forum on his World Changing Blog. Pretty concise description of what I said, with the words all fancied up.
permalink | posted by Ryan on November 18, 2009, at 09:46 PM
Center For Future Civic Media Communications Forum
Thursday (10/5/09) was the Center for Future Civic Media's Communications Forum, where sundry and varied researchers funded by "C4" got on stage for 5 minutes, talked about what their work, then got blow darted off stage by the Center's director.
There was a film crew from MIT World there, documenting the whole she-bang for all posterity, so video link coming soon.
permalink | posted by Ryan on November 18, 2009, at 09:46 PM
Blog Launch
OMG! We have blog sighting. This is the first post on the Red Ink blog.
We'll have regular postings on topics relating to finance and activism.
permalink | posted by Mike on February 06, 2010, at 11:01 PM