My analysis of #annahazare movement!

We all witnessed what started on 5th of April 2011 by a single brave man, Anna Hazare and picked up as a national movement. We at MixORG were all the time on our toes to spread the movement using social media as this is what we specialize in. 

Also, during the movement and later, we had this huge itching to go into details for doing the analysis of the movement (contribution of social media and how different brands benefited out of it) . So, we started investigating for the different tools available on the web. (I will be sharing the list of tools we used later in the article)

Some of the highlights of the movement from social media point of view: 
1. More than 14K tweets during the movement [ Link ]
2. Avaaz.org ran a petition campaign, which when I am writing this discussion topic successfully got 500K entries under two days. [ Campaign Link ] One can see what it took for them to achieve this target using different mediums like Facebook, Twitter and Email campaign to achieve this number in a viral fashion.

Analysis of the movement: 
1. Power law like distribution: [ Link ]

If you search for #annahazare tag on Google and look for real time results you can see a time line. If you choose the month view you can see a clear rise and drop of a power law. However, if you go into deep analysis of every day. You will start seeing a pattern.

a. There was a pattern in the peaks and low in the activity of people which was repeating.
There were three peaks which were again like power law in their nature.

• Afternoon time around 1 PM 
• Evening time around 9 PM 
• Late night around 1 AM

Time line from Google Search Real time results of #annahazare tag

2. Gains by the organizations who aligned themselves with the movement:
If you use http://twittercounter.com/ to see the particular twitter handle follower growth. You will notice a significant jump for following handles during the movement days. 

• @Avaaz
• @ndtv
• @timesofindia
• @mtvindia etc

Avaaz.org on Twitter

MTV growth

If you look at their contribution in the movement in form of tweets you will find them active and quiet influential. Which resulted in higher fan growth for them which otherwise would have taken a month at their normal pace.

Meanwhile, the analysis will continue but I wanted to share this in open and tried to answer the question for myself on ,  

how much social media contributed in the victory of this movement? Also, asking the Facebook question on our page : [ link ]. Any thoughts are welcome! What is your take on contribution of social media in fueling this movement?

The other tools we tried were [ Link , Link ] but due to small sample size of tweets. I am not including them in the analysis.

Cheers

Sachin, 

MixORG TEAM 

Some trends on change

Recently I have been spending lot of time and energy to understand the new form of organization structure. The question bothers me a lot because at some point I want to have my own StartUp and I want to know the 'ideal' for my own setting.

First I would like to mention some of the influence which I have been picking up from other people.

1. Clay Shirky:
Talks about Collaboration vs Institutions: Shirky predicts that in 50 years the current form of hierarchical organizations will go away. 
Talks about cognitive surplus: Decreasing work hours and increasing leisure time over the years with new 2-way technology we have immense possibilities with people's time. 
2. Nasem Taleb: argues about being big and complex.
3. Fritjof Capra: In hidden connections book, relates that how organizations are lively through their informal networks and Communities of Practice. How living social systems (organizations) cannot be changed but disturbed and they take only the message which is meaningful to them.
4. Christensen Clayton: tells us how a company built by innovation is killed by innovation and also a possible remedy to it.
5. Robert Burgelman: About innovating within a company. He talks about the role of middle management (variation) and the role of top management (selection) and role of strategy in it. 
6. Paul Romer: with his concept of Charter cities.
7. Muhammad Yunus: On building Social Business.
8. Some other talks on Change and new trends:
a. Sridhar Vembu on teaching school kids
b. Creating cultural change.
c. Malcolm Gladwells books like "The Tipping Point" and mention of a company which has only 150 employees per office.

Based on the above mentioned links and borrowing from my other practical experience probably I can qualify to think of a proposal. (I have always been interested in volunteering for student chapters and other adhoc setups. Like the one in which I was involved recently has fared quiet well. The setup is mostly non-hierarchical and voluntary basis )

Although I am not yet able to completely systematize the understanding of such setups, which are decentralized and voluntary contrary to the setups of the organizations we have now. However, it seems that there is an emerging new order to it!

You could argue that, why even ask these questions of change and new organizational structures and why not do things the old way! 

I have my explanation for it: I read news on daily basis about tech-companies, recently many have failed to respond to the competition and it seems big part of the reason is that they are not able to change. (so understanding change will help a lot!) and the world which we live in now is very different (our current understanding of it seems outdated)

To me it seems that there are certain elements which are needed for this new kind of organization (which I would like to implement at some point of time)

Coming from an old school way of doing organizations, I list some of the points here which I think is one of the possible way. 

a. An old school way of hierarchical organization reduced to just as the container/skeleton/facilitator of new ad-hoc, voluntary, decentralized and informal networks.
b. For these ad-hoc, voluntary, decentralized and informal networks (Let's call it AVDI Net) there might be some properties similar to that of a startup/voluntary movement etc

1. Presence of functions like problem owner to bring accountability.
2. a strong community of volunteers around the problem.
3. Presence of community of practices (CoP) and identification of them in the network.
4. To get the dialog going in the group several functions residing either in separate individuals or all in one individual would be needed. Like: Devil's advocate- A person to act as critic, Synthesis - A person to distill the conversation to make sense, Moderator - a person to facilitate the conversation etc
5. Very efficient communication tools for the network.  
6. Ability of network to regenerate itself.

c. Co-presence of different stakeholders in and around the organization: Like Society, Academia and Customers etc. This will help to achieve user driven innovation and shorten the feedback loop  for product life cycles and improve other processes of organization.
d. Network (AVDI Net) owners as Entrepreneurs (replacing middle management) to make the evolution of organization possible and making organization leaner. (linked to point a.1.)

Maybe I will add more to the list but I also invite the readers to comment/suggest and criticize the post :)

Fighting Corruption: Wiki way!

Few weeks back when I watched this http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html , I relaized that there is lot we can do in fighting corruption. Just today I was attending a session about data collection tools, one is from Google ODK and another startup from Finland mGeoS.

And I was connecting the dots, How about a corruption reporting service. why not a data collector for mobile where the citizens report corruption, the data collector can record already location, but one can also feed how much bribe they paid and to whom.

At the backend we can collect the snapshot of corruption in realtime who is getting the bribe and where and how much.

Unused human computation in India.

If you do search on your popular engine about number of Indian engg graduates per year, you might not get a very precise estimate but some vague idea that India produces some 600K engg grads per year. This must be growing atleast for some years to come.

There are other interesting things you might find in those results, like 30% of them are computer science graduates or only 25% of them are employable by MNC's (source some McKinsey report). Number of AICTE apporved engg colleges around 2000 (maybe less than that), which means per college a batch is around 300 students. (which kind of verifies the big figure)

If I start running the numbers on the part I am interested in is the B-Tech project. I seriously think as a B-Tech graduate from India, that BTP (B-Tech Project) was 6 months of time to do some hands on, which with some proper mentoring could have done wonders. So, if I try to guesstimate the Indian BTP human computation worth. It must be straight forward :

Worth = BTP Project Time * Number of Engg Grads * Per month salary which one can give to them
           = 6 (months) * 600,000 * 200 $ (say it 200 $, which is below than what they might get in industry)
          ~ 720 Million USD (did you start biting your nails already). But maybe that is the ideal case, but it gives an idea of the scale.

Recently on my Indian trip, I gave a small motivational talk in my B-Tech college department about  doing interesting projects, which can be shaped as Startups. I started a google group to engage people in conversation but not very sure how far we can take it. We only have a handful of students on it as of now.

I also went to my other friends (who are a bit active in industry both in North and South) asking them the same question that, why startups/MNC's are not engaging with university students in the way it happens in west.(atleast it happens in Finland, which might pass on as a representative of west for this claim) I could not get a satisfactory answer. But, it seems there were two main points

1. We (industry and students) do not have the right mindset in India.
2. Our students are lacking a process/platform to engage with industry.

A very helpful person whom I met in Bangalore, Akash Mahajan helped me to connect with Rahul Jha (a DCE grad) who is also trying to do some initiative in trying to tap this opportunity. Their initiative is known as Step2 (for which they also have a website). I managed to have a chat with Rahul and it seems that our ideas have synergy.

Now my head is boiling with a platform concept which can tap into this opportunity and help connect the two parties. Industry and Students, and as a side effect can give India more tech startups and over all quality improvement for Engg students.

Please contact me if you think you have some suggestions/criticism for the same. Or leave comment on the blogpost.

My analysis for Nokia Money service

Using value chain dynamics and STOF model, I did analysis for the design choices for Nokia Money service which is to be announced in emerging markets in early 2010.

Let's see how many of my predictions would come out true.

Embedded presentation contains the analysis.

Nokia Money

View more documents from Sachin Gaur.

Some of my unrealized ideas

iScan

Inspired with the iPod and similar gadgets, I always dreamed of a similar device for scanning computers and mobiles. I tried to get some feedback from experts but it seems they are not interested.

Embedded presentation for same.

iScan

View more documents from Sachin Gaur.

Status Update

Impressed with citizen journalism, I always thought of a way which can help one reach maximum possible audience based on their social capital with minimum cost in terms of time and money.

Embedded presentation

Viral Status Update

View more documents from Sachin Gaur.

Commercial aspects from privacy research

I was reading recently a book "Internet policy and Economics", this book contains an essay, 7th Chapter, which comes from a Berkley professor, H. R. Varian (who is currently chief economist of Google)

He presents an economics solution to the privacy problem. The idea or concept is simple, let people trade(lease) their private data but not third parties (which is the current scenario). So, there must be a legitimate organization which let people buy others data and let people sell their data. (I think that it will kill majority of spammers and other people involved in identity theft business)

If you will read the chapter (which is quick and easy read) , you will find that the idea was first described by Laudon in 1996 (landmark paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=234476 ). Laudon proposed this idea in firstplace proposing a National Information Market.

I am part of a social media platform project known as OtaSizzle, and I am researching the privacy area in the platform. To me connecting the dots from the book and the project, points out an obvious demand coming out for a service, which sets up the market place for anonymous trade of user information. Where the users data is collected at one place and is transparent to Users, about what is being collected and setting up of a market place where buyers can bid for user data.

For example: The obvious customers in Finland or elsewhere would be the retailers/marketers to send directed/personalized advertisement, not SPAM! So, service could provide a mailing list to retailers for their target audience, which do not show them who is subscribing to them but they know how many subscribers are there. They have to pay service provider a fee to post to the mailing list. A part of which is passed on to the users who have opted into disclosing their data to the marketplace (service provider) to enable this kind of transaction possible.

For example: All the users who are part of group Apple :Mac Products, might be of interest to MacStore for infroming of new available discounts. MacStore has to pay to post to users, earnings would be shared with users. So, the users are involved directly in value chain. Also, their data does not go into hands of people they do not want (which, is the current case)

So users get paid for participating in the service and also reduce their transaction cost. This is similar to loyalty cards but linked to the online activity.

In past many companies have been created, which makes spyware/adware but does not include user in the value chain. One such example is Double Click, which was recently bought by Google for ~3 billion dollars. Also, in many cases such companies can be accused of being illegal.

I see this as a radical change (if we can do it or somebody else). That instead of trapping users in EULA's we let users decide whom they want to sell and at what price their own data.

Many people who will read this piece, will obviously criticize it for:

The concept has been around for quite sometime (since 1996), why there is no such service?

I would say that we have it indirectly when the essay comes from the chief economist of Google,Google must be one to do it. Google is the one obvious implementer of this concept. They have shifted the cost of services like Gmail etc to advertising. People could control to a little extent what Google stores about them and Google has created a market place for advertisers where they bid for advertising to users, without knowing the users.

However, I would say even though Google has created the marketplace from advertisers point of view but a more choiceful market from users point of view does not exist. Users get control of their data but they still have to rely on the price set by Google not market place (maybe indirectly through competition with MSFT or YAHOO, features and storage space). They get free services and nothing else. They are part of value chain but they must get more, after all it is their data, which gives Google record profit !

Also, last but not least Google has created a market place for web for the advertisers but still their user side is not touching everybody in everyform. (Search and other services are quite widespread but still there is a scope).

I would say an independent service would be more suitable which could sit on your "machine /browser" in form of a " browser plugin/desktop client/cloud service " which eats all your usage data across the services (Facebook, Google, MSFT etc) and then users choose whom to share with their data and at what price.

Last but not least, living in Finland, I must relate it to Nokia too! With the recent announcement of Nokia Money Service, I see an amazing opportunity for an ecosystem to be created on top of this payment service. Where users can opt in for a similar version of mobile service/software which can help them trade their usage data with retailers. My guess is Nokia must be very happy to work with such a startup, as it will bring down the transaction cost of users using Nokia Money, by bringing better targetted discounts/offers.

For those who like this idea, I would appreciate comments/suggestions. Or if somebody wants to take the concept for a startup that would be even better!