The Changing Face of Community Information: New Interfaces, New Markets, New Models
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Speech given at “Sussex Community Internet Project (SCIP) AGM”
Date: 14/02/2002
Venue: Brighton, UK
Article
Introduction
The QWERTY keyboard is a perfect example of "I wouldn't start from there". It was developed as it was to avoid key clashes between the most used letters of the alphabet; so now, two decades into the mass PC market, only disabled people and those with sever RSI use sensible keyboard arrays. For reasons I don't want to go into, particularly if there are any lawyers in the house, the PC as an instrument of information processing is equally clumsy. If your television worked as badly as your computer the BBC would be out of business by now; but, then again, it doesn't matter how bewildering VCRs have been, we have all made ourselves use them. Why? The simple answer is that there is incentive to use a VCR but most of what sits out in cyberspace isn't worth that much effort.
Of course that is going to change and SCIP is one of the key players in the kinds of changes that are being brought about. SCIP is one of the very few organisations I know that is as good with technology as it is with people. Organisations that are good with both of those phenomena can be expected to have a very clear understanding of the role of information, how you get it to people and what they do with it when they've got it; or why they appear to be ungrateful and don't do very much with it. I have been privileged to work with SCIP on the HUBS project from its inception and I see that work that we have done having a long-term effect on the way that community information is developed in Brighton. I also want to say a very brief word about the importance we at humanITy place on the recent work we have done with SCIP and ESCIS to produce a Web site that conforms to our Power of Nine specification and to thank Mark Walker and say a very particular word of thanks to Pete Mason.
Interfaces
The reason that I first started to think about dividing all kinds of classes and sub classes of information into nines was not a matter of theoretical speculation; I found it very awkward to key in hi-fi tracks on m CD player past nine. I had to press a special plus key, press two digits very quickly and then wait. The machine picked up the first keystroke for a two digit number about half of the time and then picked up the double digit about one third of the time; it usually picked up one digit or the other but not both. So I had a beautiful CD player that had a one in six chance of giving me a CD track past the ninth. It wasn't good enough. Later I found that the formula of 7 + or - 2 is the optimum choice for most people but I didn't know that at the start. All I was concerned about was the use of numeric keypads for getting hold of information.
This is why, around about 1998, I stopped being interested in computers and their keyboards and began to think very carefully about telephones and television remote controllers. I am not saying here that the only way to classify information sensibly is into nines but it is an important navigation strategy that arises from the technologies that people use. Personally, I am a great lover of key word searches and these are fine for a random search or for looking something up in an encyclopaedia, so for these you might want a standard alphabetical search mechanism. When you are trying to find the answer to a personal problem you might want to classify it according to the stage of your life that you have reached, from anti natal to funeral directors. For some functions you might want to call up a graphic or a map and click on the piece of it that leads you to your answer. This illustrates a very simple point; the idea that we can classify digital information in a variety of ways from which the user can choose is one of the great benefits of having digital technology.
So, as the number of people with computers at home as well as at work cascades down the income scale from the top bracket to the poorer end of the middle class, so sales of digital television slowly expand from those with the lowest incomes upwards towards the middle. The forthcoming World Cup will give DTV an enormous boost. Although the two markets, one for PCs the other for DTV, may be quite different it won't be long before all of us have one or the other. On top of that, though, there are two other key technologies which most of us set great store by. The first, referred to above, is the telephone, which will give us information while we are on the move. Some phones already have QWERTY keyboards; digital radio will start with a small screen for flashing up basic information; PDA's will soon receive web casting; PCs will continue to get smaller. Soon all of these technologies will converge. Because we will soon have communications protocols between all kinds of devices, we will no longer have phones, PCs, radios, televisions, PDAs; we will simply have one thing that runs our home and a smaller one that we will carry with us; and they will be customised to meet our needs and take account of our limitations because we will only have the two. Conversely, because we spend less on hardware there will be much more funding for server side applications and for telecommunications costs. This is the true meaning of hardware convergence.
The great thing about digital information is that it has two peculiar qualities; it is provisional but eternal. It sounds like a wonderful theological formulation, doesn't it? You may start with an information system which follows an Alphanumeric pattern but you may want to re-purpose it for a numeric keypad and you might want to extract from it a couple of hundred key words so that you can use voice in technology to ask for information. Now why would you want to do that? The reason is that apart from a small number of physically disabled, blind and dyslexic people who really like voice in systems, there is one other massive market for the, namely all those people stuck in their cars who are not able to use their hands to manipulate information. In the relatively benign traffic conditions of Brighton, this may all seem just a little far fetched but where people spend up to five hours per day commuting, a lot of it in jams, they are going to want voice in and voice out information processing and will likely use a minute of key words and listening to small numbers of numerically tagged options.
So when we start looking at a basic piece of information, the more flexibility we can retain at the start, allowing us to label it in a variety of ways, the better off we will be.
We do not know the end of this story. Clearly, systems will become better at handling larger vocabularies for voice in; broad band will give us bigger and faster server side applications and almost unlimited information; systems will become increasingly heuristic, learning to model what they do on our behaviour. No matter how slow we are, we will train our processors so that they know what we usually want; it is only when we want something exceptional that we might be challenged just a little. To understand where we are going you have to travel forward facing the engine rather than having your back to it.
Markets
Since clerics could speak, read and write Latin while the rest of us could not, there has been a great deal of stratification in the way that various parts of society access information. Into our own day there are broadsheet and tabloid newspapers; serious and light radio channels; hardback books and airport potboilers. But our very brief survey of hardware shows that this rigid way of looking at things isn't very helpful. The VCR revolution was bottom up, as was the growth in dish technology, as is DTV. Mobile telephony is more or less classless. And as there is more hardware convergence and the price of interfaces continues to fall, we will have to begin to ask questions about who wants what kind of information.
This was brought home to me vividly during the work on ESCIS. The unwritten assumption of the original site was that its users were by and large ignorant, desperate and poor. These are the kind of people that go to Citizens' advice Bureaux, drop in centres, soup kitchens and benefits offices. To use two small examples: there were listings for all kinds of Council services but not private services; and although you could find unscrupulous house rental agents you couldn't find reputable estate agents. Now that kind of information ghetto with those sorts of assumptions can't by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as anything but a community of distress. Increasingly, too, as more of us use on line facilities for information we will expect it to reflect our preferences. There are going to be a huge number of middle class people who want information; and, to look at another angle, when they look up a voluntary organisation it might be because they want to help it with time or money rather than wanting one of its services. To look at an information system that has a very narrow concern but which claims to be civic is to know that you are undertaking a large piece of cross subsidisation; I will come back to this.
One of the problems of community, incidentally, is that it is a concept that the rich enthusiastically urge on the poor. The first thing that rich people buy is privacy and if they are very rich they try to buy silence. So we need to be careful, here, too, about what it is we are creating and why.
In order to build new markets for information we also have to stop thinking of different processes for different media. With radio we expect to be talked at with the occasional phone-in; on television there is less interaction; with telephones we expect somebody to speak back most of the time; and with e-mail it isn't immediate but we do like an answer. When we phone to borrow some money we might get a totally human response, we might use an Internet system with an automatic umpire or we might get a hybrid system where we answer questions put by a human being who is keying into a computer as a human intermediary; but we have to be much cleverer than that. We can develop quasi-heuristic systems that recognise when we get stuck; so, for instance, if we are doing a distance learning course and get the same piece of work wrong after four attempts we will be shown a telephone number and invited to click if we want human help.
What this boils down to is:
- A wide variety of information
- A choice of search mechanisms
- A collection of customisation and heuristic tools
- The capacity to create information that can be used for a variety of interfaces
- A sophisticated hybrid combining machines and human beings.
All of this is possible and once we can assemble all these things we will have a large, though diverse and complex market.
Models
During the .com era people thought that advertising would pay for the information revolution. They were wrong but it does not mean that Internet advertising will not be a factor in the revenue mix. The mistake was to think that there was only going to be one method of collecting money and that would provide the whole substance of the business plan.
Here are nine ideas about revenue raising. I will only make very brief comments on each:-
- Entrance fees
- Site construction and maintenance
- Page impression
- Booking commission
- Charity donation commission
- External sponsorship
- Reciprocal sponsorship
- Proxy Searching and Purchasing
- Advertising
Entrance fees
Everybody should pay an entrance fee to a well-organised, regularly updated site. Here I want to make an immediate comment which may be controversial. If you go into a greengrocer's shop you don't expect vegetables at half price because you are poor; it isn't the function of the shopkeeper to cross subsidise poor people, that is the function of the public sector and of philanthropists. Equally, there is no reason why commercial organisations should be subjected to a flat cross subsidising tax, expected to pay for their part in a system and to cover the costs of non payers. They may wish specifically to cross subsidise one or more participants explicitly but the assumption that they should automatically cross subsidise is wrong. Entrance fees can be charged according to number of Web pages, financial turnover of organisation or some other clear, measurable criterion.
Site construction and maintenance.
This is obvious enough. Many organisations are building very poor sites and you may want to establish some minimum criteria for inclusion, such as basic accessibility and you may well find that people would prefer to pay you to sort it than to sort it themselves.
Page impression.
Again, page impression is obvious but it needs to be based on economic reality. A web site visit is much more valuable to some organisations rather than others, not just because of sales as shown below but also because of the value of word of mouth. Again, we need to establish rational criteria for charging for this activity.
Booking commission.
This is familiar and much more satisfying for all concerned than general advertising. Commission rates are usually reasonably well established. Because the middleman vehicle is virtual there is some genuine cost saving here which should be split between the provider, the information system and the consumer.
Charity donation commission.
One of the key functions which most community information sites ignore is their capacity as fund raising mechanisms. You may want to provide a common credit card facility for all participating businesses and charities with an automated attribution and distribution system. Whatever the strategy, charities should be encouraged to raise funds and we must not be squeamish in taking a cut. After all, charities pay their fundraisers and all the backup support that goes with that function.
External sponsorship.
It may be that certain organisations want to provide sponsorship either for particular sites or for various events. You can imagine, for example, in the Brighton context that certain organisations might want to get their sponsorship to run during the Brighton Festival.
Reciprocal sponsorship.
I like reciprocal arrangements. These arise when you take, say the top 100 business in Brighton and you ask them whether they would like reciprocal links on the site with the top 100 not for profit organisations in exchange for which they effectively pay all the on-going costs of the not for profit.
Proxy Searching and Purchasing.
I have just come across an organisation called insiders. Disabled, housebound people who are, therefore inside, search and shop for people who don't know how to use the Internet or don't have time. Of course, you must make money on the service but I think it has a lot of mileage.
Advertising.
And then, of course, there is advertising.
Conclusion
In conclusion I only want to say that we have to prevent ourselves from living in the new age with old ideas. One of those new ideas has to be our understanding of community. There are communities of interest and communities of sorrow; but in the world of the Internet they do not need to be ghettos of interest and sorrow. We cannot expect the mass of the population of a place like Brighton to place any great credibility in a system which is clearly exclusively for a small number of people; and you certainly cannot expect businesses to sponsor systems which are largely used by people who don't have any money.
Finally, then, we have a new chance to reinvent our ideas of community. This will not be difficult because of the technology but because of prejudice. The public sector can get very fixed in its ways; people are very dedicated to their conservative (with a small c) comfort; many people in what is called the community development sector rather resent businesses; but without a vibrant profitable sector there would be no taxation and no not for profit sector. It won't be the technology that lets us down, it's much more likely to be ourselves.