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.