I’m trying to find my replacement for V-Day. If you know of anyone in New York that’d be interested, let me know!

JOB TITLE: Online Organizer (Part-Time)

LOCATION: New York, NY

REPORTS TO: Executive Director

WORKS MOST Worldwide and College Campaign Directors, Executive Director,
CLOSELY WITH: Technology Consultants.

DESCRIPTION: The position of On-Line Organizer is classified as an exempt half-time position. In general responsibilities include: Moderate discussions on V-Day list-serves and manage broadcast messages to V-Day organizers around the world; Participate in the design and implementation of technology to support communication with and among organizers; Facilitate volunteer activities of organizers, translation services, on-line promotions and other on-line, web-based extensions of V-Day’s work; Work closely with the Directors of the College Campaign and Worldwide Campaign, and other staff on technology and communication issues; Such other tasks and duties as may be assigned.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES:

– Manage and update and sometimes build the V-Spot (The V-Spot is the internal site for all of our organizers. It is a HTML/PHP/mySQL system)
– Manage Contractors
– Tech support for Organizers
– Create reports
– Update material on vday.org
– Manage Atof.net and make certain our boxes stay up
– Serve as system administrator V-Day staff
– Envision ways in which technology can be used to enhance V-Day

An ideal candidate would have (in the order of priorities):

– Good communication skills, patience and politeness
– An interest in building community in a digital realm
– An ability to design system specs and manage outside contractors
– A ability to negotiate data on a UNIX-based system
– HTML knowledge
– PHP, mySQL knowledge
– Perl, Javascript knowledge
– A strong working knowledge of Windows and Mac OS 9/10 and PC/Mac Office is desirable
– Experience troubleshooting PC and Mac computer problems is desirable.
– Any and all other technical skills

V-Day is a virtual organization. The Coordinator works out of his/her home office which should be in or around New York City.

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Now, i get a lot of odd messages on Friendster, which often humor me. Since i know way too many people on the damn site, many people think i’m collecting friends and ask me to add them. I ignore these, but they make me smile.

Actually, i rarely respond to anyone who writes me on Friendster (no time..), but i utterly love reading what people write. In the last few weeks, a new trend in requests has emerged in my personal account: i keep getting messages from people asking for my suicide girl page, asking if i am a suicide girl, asking for my porn site, etc. At first, this was a bit startling (although i have to admit that i was secretly honored since i adore the Suicide Girls).

For those who don’t know, most of the Suicide Girls are “Pin-up Punk Rock and Goth Girls” (a.k.a. a really hot soft porn site for the younger funkier market). Many Suicide Girls and other women with sites are on Friendster because 1) it’s fun; 2) they can connect with their friends; 3) it helps them connect with more people who may be interested in their site. [It’s important to note that many of the Girls neither advertise their site nor their identity as a Girl.]

Browsing through such women’s portraits, i realized something. Many of them have collections of friends that consist of young punkster friends and older white businessmen…. So do i. Interesting.

[Not so private note…. Clay – your identity play is fucking with my identity play.]

Cynthia Typaldos is compiling a list of all of the different social network software services. Perhaps of interest for those in the area.

Here’s another gathering for the interested. (I will be on this panel, offering quite a different perspective – i suspect – than is normally presented.)

Cybersalon: Matchmaking for Love and Money, Online and Off
September-21

Some social interactions can’t be automated–yet, but technologies can
certainly help folks pursue a quicker denouement.

The founders of online and offline career and dating services will
explain how new technology and new social norms are changing the way
people find love and money at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, on
Sunday, September 21 (5:30-9PM).

Speakers include:

* Jonathan Abrams, CEO, Friendster
* danah boyd from UC Berkeley
* Julie Paiva, President, Table for Six
* Mark Pincus, CEO, Tribe
* Cynthia Typaldos, Principal, Typaldos Consulting
* Ned Engelke, Managing Director, North America, OIS/SmartFlirts

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I got an invite for hatester from a rather prolific and entertaining personality in the social networks space. I couldn’t help but smile and sign up.

Multiple people have responded to my 150 person limit post with arguments about how the web should help increase our ability to connect and expand this number (most notably Tom Coates’ Friendster as neocortical prosthetic…).

Tom’s right in that those who perceive our brains as a computer see technology as an opportunity for augmentation, parallel processing style. This is where i fundamentally believe that humanity matters. Keeping up social relations is not simply about remembering everyone you’ve met or having a structure to keep track of them. It is also about having the time and ability to manage those relationships, keep information flowing, etc. Social networks are not simply about people that you can store to use as appropriate. Thus, i don’t fundamentally believe that an augmented version of your network will give you the tools necessary to maintain more meaningful contacts.

Of course, i’d love to be proven wrong.

[Direct note to Tom’s post: i’m not actually trying to justify why i’m not an anomaly; i’m trying to express why the numbers don’t make sense in the context of an articulated social network that spans time.]

Today’s Doonesbury comic has a great reference to flash mobs:

For those interested in hearing talks in the Bay Area, here’s another one perhaps of interest:

Social Networking: Is there Really a Business Model? (sponsored by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab). Reid Hoffman (Linked In) will be speaking and the panel includes Jonathan Abrams (Friendster), Andrew Ankar, Ross Mayfield (Socialtext) and Cynthia Typaldos with Tony Perkins as moderator.

Should be fun!

When anthropologist Robin Dunbar wrote about a 150-person cap in one’s social network, he was not referring to 150 people in one’s lifetime. He was saying that people can maintain up to 150 weak ties at any given point in time. [And that tie maintenance is directly related to gossip upkeep and brain size, just as monkey tie maintenance is directly related to grooming and brain size.]

When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i’m not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is that my articulated network goes beyond the relationships that i currently maintain. While a high percentage of my friends and associates are on Friendster, not all of them are. There are quite a few relationships that i currently maintain that are not represented there. Additionally, many of the relations represented are outdated or on hiatus, not because i don’t love or appreciate those people, but because we are not geographically colocated or our personal situations have created a situation where time to connect is limited. This doesn’t mean that i don’t love and appreciate those people, just that they’re not part of my current situation.

I say all of this because it’s another factor of why an articulated representation is not equivalent to the network that one is actually maintaining. By suggesting that those ties are valid and relevant, we’re suggesting that we can call on those, regardless of our upkeep. This is a bit problematic.

For example, last nite, i needed to call someone who i could guarantee would be online in order to ask them to look something up for me. This is not a heavy favor, but in choosing who to call, i made certain conscious choices. My cell phone represents one form of an articulated network. As i browsed through the people, i chose not to call certain people for various reasons.

I eliminated some people because i doubted they would be online. I eliminated others from the potential pool because i felt as though the favor would be too inappropriate given our relationship. (For example, i didn’t call my advisor because it would seem an odd request.) But the most cringeful reason that i failed to call a group of people who would likely be online was because i owed them a conversational call (social upkeep) and to call to ask a menial favor when i didn’t have time to do the upkeep was totally out of line.

Now, the limiting factor was, of course, that the task was menial. Had i been in a desperate situation that truly felt magnificent in nature, i would’ve called any one of the people in my cell phone. I knew them all. I loved them all. But the support i requested was contextualized because of the value and whether or not i’d been good about social upkeep.

This is important to realize in the realm of an articulated network. When people go through me to connect with other friends of mine, there can be quite a bit of social awkwardness when i failed to maintain that relationship. When i, as the bridge, have the ability to control when those connections are to be made, i have the opportunity to repair the upkeep gap before asking a favor. For example, when i get a phone call from an old colleague asking to write a recommendation, the conversation inevitably starts with a lot of social upkeep before the favor is requested. Otherwise, it would seem odd.

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Fernanda Viegas and i wrote a paper for HICSS called Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments and the draft was accepted. This means that we now need to edit it based on the reviewers’ comments and resubmit for publication.

I’m quite excited about this because i think that we’re getting at some interesting points in that paper. Basically, we stepped back from the two email visualization projects and reflected on their value. We realized that we have all of this social interaction in digital spaces without meaningful artifacts for remembering. Photographs are such valuable tools for sharing events in real life, but those same elements don’t exist online. When we created SNF and PostHistory, we realized that they ended up providing that opportunity accidentally. This is interesting because it makes us reflect on the value of such artifacts for social interaction. While digital communication allows us to have all of the archives of our experience, it doesn’t give us the quick coarse snapshops that let us reflect in a meaningful manner.

One of the things that i love about submitting to HICSS is that the reviews are always so meaningfully critical. Needless to say, all of the reviewers commented on our failure to evaluate our tools. And they are right: we didn’t. Of course, i still think that the value in what we built was more in the thought element than in any suggestion that this is a meaningful tool for distribution. Or maybe that’s just my excuse for not having had time to evaluate. But i really am not sure what a meaningful evaluation for SNF would’ve been. I certainly don’t think that it is a distributable tool (even if people keep asking to download it). Another common thread in the reviews was that they didn’t understand why anyone would want to use this tool continuously. This makes me think that we didn’t make our arguments strong enough. Just as people don’t use photographs regularly, they wouldn’t want to use any such tool as a means of information retrieval. Instead, these are artifacts to bring out during times of sharing or curiousity, not as a daily ritual. Aside from these two common threads, everything else in the reviews was inconsistent. Some reviewers loved our writing; others despised it. Some thought we were on to something; others thought the tools were pointless. Still, the various perspectives were quite valuable and certainly motivate me to want to publish there more often, even if attending the conference is a *huge* dent in the pocket.