Frank's single-wide was cozy with both the propane furnace and the wood burning stove blazing against the -20°F night. Warm cinnamon buns, hot chocolate and blankets made up for the trailer's thin insulation as we talked almost until dawn about the Internet and Montana's native people.
Frank ran The Big Sky Telegraph - an early community network effort dating to the late 80s brining Internet connections and expertise to rural Montana. Frank's notion was to train the trainers and find uses that would get communities to warm up to this new fangled Internet thing. Maybe enough to fund links to more schools and libraries isolated homes with a special focus on native peoples.
Vijay had just joined AT&T Research out of Xerox PARC. He had a deep interest in education MOOs having seen good success with one in the Phoenix school system and we were talking about this and other reasons why native peoples might want to get online.1 Our Human Computer Interaction department had an interest in social virtual reality systems and community networks, so we jumped at the chance and found ourselves in Dillion, Montana. It was Vijay's first exposure to serious Winter.
When traveling in snow country it makes sense to have a backup plan. Our hotel was in Butte, but a storm made travel treacherous. A big basketball game managed to sell out all of the rooms in Dillon, but Montanans have a gift for taking care of fools and strangers.
We began to flesh out ideas - a MOO would built for students students where we had human connections - New Jersey, Montana, France and India. Everyone would be exotic to each other and there would be language and time differences in the mix. We needed to do something for the adults. It started with a bulletin board and chat system for sharing resources. Community sharing has long been deeply embedded in rural Montana. I grew up with gasoline and other supplies from a non-profit community cooperative. The hope was to build something lightweight where the unit of transaction would be karma.
The sun rose and the temperature soared to 0°F by noon. We had a lunch meeting at Dillion's best steak house before driving up to Butte. Not seeing anything suited for a vegetarian on the menu, I asked if they could throw together something. The server said they weren't that kind of restaurant and shortly the manager appeared You order steak if you want to eat in their establishment. I congratulated him for having standards and got a photo of the two of us standing together. Over the years I've been able to get something even if it is rarely good. This includes restaurants one would assume are completely meat oriented. Perhaps only in Montana.
How the kids used the MOO turned out to be rich in learnings. Similar constructions with better graphics have mostly replaced the text based realities - Minecraft comes to mind. The karma barter system managed to get off the ground, but it remained small. There was a bit of expertise and physical goods sharing along with a few commercial trades. Not terribly surprising in retrospect as people had been doing this with newspapers and church bulletins. The communites it served were too sparsely populated for it to take off, but it was better than nothing.
About five years ago I was listening to As it Happens on CBC radio. Alberta and Saskatchewan were in the midst of a serve drought. A farmer in Manitoba called and said he had extra hay and could ship it West - free to a fellow farmer if someone would pay the shipping. The act touched the Canadians and within a day dozens and then hundreds of farmers were making similar offers.
About the same time the US Farm Service Agency created Hay Net - roughy the same idea with a very simple interface. Farmers would show if they had or needed hay so a deal could be made. The service expanded to include grazing land. The community of farmers had expanded beyond the local.
A few months ago I was invited to join a Switchboard site. Hay Net for trusted communities. The idea is to put a ask/offer mechanism in a community of trust - a space where most people are closely connected to each other by at least one common bond. The software is very simple and the middleman can be completely eliminated. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are generally terrible at supporting tightly bound communities and communities of trust. They are more about lose associations often filtering and focused on getting you excited about transactions that are outside your trusted community.
The switchboard I'm on is associated with a college - Students, faculty and alumni. It is one of the few online social constructs I've seen that actively brings together multiple generations. I've seen trades of musical performances for (long) rides to the airport, original music composed for a 75th birthday , lots of free career counseling and even a bit of direct farm to home sales. It is up to your imagination and some people are very imaginative. People are encouraged to write up the successful transactions - there is an online sharing of gratitude.
I won't comment on the viability of the business model, but this sort of operation can be extremely inexpensive and could become important in some communities. People who study trusted community suggest there is a size sweet spot between a few hundred and about ten thousand depending on engagement. It is a natural augmentation of the types of communities I identify with and a very different niche than what is exploited commercially.
from the Switchboard site
snip
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Last week I spoke at a panel on the sharing economy. I was on stage with with an employee of AirBnB. I felt a bit out of place. Long before AirBnB there were independent bed and breakfasts across the country. My mom ran one out of my childhood home. And although we’d receive notes in the guest book along the lines of, “Thank you for sharing your home,” for my mom it was, “Thank you for sharing your money. We we can now pay our mortgage.” She never continued a relationship with a single guest.
It seems there are transactional economies with monetary exchange, and there’s sharing (full stop), an economy of gift giving built from the simple, primal, inexhaustible, currency-free activities of communities giving, receiving, and reciprocating. In my mind, there is a gulf that separates the two. It perplexes me that we lack the discernment to recognize the difference. As Lewis Hyde put it, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establish a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection…a gift makes a connection.”
We at Switchboard are often asked what our product “does.” “What’s the value proposition? What would people have to share? How is this different from a Facebook group?” This question is one of the hardest to answer. What it “does” is a reflection of the hearts of the people who use it, and the connections they make there. A web is formed from Camas to William to the Payne family to Rosanna to Daniel to Dante to Ethan to Ethan’s grandmother to Sarah to my fellow grape pickers to Martha to me. I’m not Facebook friends with a single one of these people, nor have I the desire to be. These types of webs aren’t built or maintained there. This web is different. It was built by kindness, generosity, and grace, and constructed within the practically invisible doorframe of Switchboard. The value proposition of this doorframe is our belief that sharing and receiving these necessary gifts is our reason for being alive.
...
__________
1 A MOO is text based online virtual reality system that allows several users to be connected and lets them talk to each other as well as create and manipulate virtual objects.
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Recipe Corner
I've heard parsnips can be substituted for carrots in cakes. I didn't go all the way - a mixture of parsnip and apple. Easy and delicious!
Apple-Parsnip Cake
Ingredients
° 175g butter
° 250g brown sugar
° 100g grade B maple syrup
° 3 large eggs
° 250g AP flour
° 2 tsp baking powder
° 2 tsp autumish mixed spices (like pumpkin pie spice - I mix my own, so use what you like)
° 250g parsnips peeled
° 1 medium apple (I used a regular Fuji) cored and peeled
° 50g pecans or walnuts coarsely chopped
° 1 small orange - zest and juice
° cream cheese icing (it seemed appropriate - I made one with cc and maple syrup)
Technique
° preheat oven to 350°F - use the middle rack
° grate the apple and parsnip (a food processor is the way to go)
° grease and line two 8" cake pans - a single 10x10 square would also work
° melt butter, sugar and maple syrup over a low heat and then cool enough to work in eggs
° whisk in eggs and then stir in everything else
° pour into the pans and bake for 25-30 minutes until the top springs back
° cool and frost
Hm, very very interesting. I'm interested in the Switchboard model from a knowledge sharing/application perspective. We have all these loosely connected and coupled networks in international development that seem like an enormous untapped potential. I have to think about the invitation one would have to make to use Switchboard this way. Thanks!
Posted by: Nancy White | 11/04/2014 at 10:54 AM
I think the key to a workable switchboard is a community of common interest with established trust.
Posted by: steve | 11/04/2014 at 11:13 AM