Fellow Presentations: Day 1 (Greg Wolff)

Less than 1 week into the program, each of us needs to get up in front of the group and present our project plans. Fortunately, the fellows are passionate about their projects, and have interesting backgrounds, so even four hour-long presentations back-to-back can hold our interest.

Greg Wolff led us off. Greg works for Ricoh Innovatiosn, and has gotten a head start on his involvment with the Reuters program. He'd supervised a four students (2 each from Stanford and Berkeley) who had done research over the summer on the issues around obtaining social services, starting with interviews of some current clients.
Based on these 18 interviews, they created a personal journey model (basically a transition state diagram, for us geeks) that shows a bad decision (often substance abuse, crime) leading to a downward spiral, until eventually hitting rock bottom. At some point, there was an epiphany, (often due to prompting from a child or loved one) that led to a desire to change (aka "learning ready moment"). From there, improvement is possible, but the temptations are still present and often lead back to the "bad decision" state. By omitting all of the first hand stories, I'm really not doing justice to the research, but that was the core of their findings.

With this background knowledge in mind, they re-envisioned the way social services could be provided. One model was the "talent agency" approach. The main mindset shift here is to view the clients as assets rather than costs. The power of this approach is that clients can help each other rather than all being "acted upon" by the agency. There were a number of sensible recommendations that went along with this, such as having a single point of contact (your "agent") and providing a complete solution (access to all needed services in one place).

Two of the students had worked on a prototype system to support some of the interactions of such an agency using a "business card" metaphor. In addition to having contact info and references "built-in", the card recorded in a tangible, visible way, the contributions you had made to the community in the form of sharing skills, mentoring, volunteering, etc.

A final interesting point that hit home for me was the notion of college as a transition stage of "reduced consequences". Most middle-class youth have the luxury of this stage where they have more freedom (practically as much as being on their own) but guaranteed security of a dorm room and dining hall to meet basic needs. Even poor choices that result in encounters with campus police are far less likely to have permanent consequences than equivalent off-campus behavior.

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At this point, Greg started to talk more about what he planned to do next, rather than what had already been accomplished. He and I had already had a few emails and discussions, so I had a great appreciation for the challenge of presenting the framework that he's tackling. He argues that the software development process (and more generally all digital intellectual property) is a "sick ecology" like a dying coral reef that doesn't have the incentives, actors, and processes in place to yield reliable, useful products and content that society needs; nor does it adequately reward those that make contributions in this "alternative" realm.

Greg's presentation was as much advice to the fellows (as we are building digital IP and systems in this ecology) as it was his own plan of what to do. He encourgaged us to

• Choose pilot sites that are representative of the larger market, but easy to work with by virtue of proximity, attitude, and available resources
  
• Turn observations into specific, testable hypotheses
  
• Measure project results
  

He further talked about the different stages of concept demonstration, pilot, and scale-up, pointing out that each has challenges in appropriately defining the technology, business model, and use cases. As technologists, we often focus on the "easy" part, ignoring the other critical parts that will enable customers to buy and use our ideas, or even WANT to.

Greg continued with a couple of case studies of small businesses (in the construction and pharma research areas) that are suffering from the mismatch of the needs of the business (simple, cheap, easily integrated) with the goals of the vendors ("feature rich", high price tag, proprietary, annuity revenue stream). Most small businesses don't want to be (or employ) IT experts, but given the state of the industry, they have to.