I'm really looking forward to what we're able to do next year. It's going to be a great year for us all, but the other thing I wanted to point out is that we're not the only people having a 10-year anniversary. There are quite a few organizations that are celebrating this particular milestone. And Lindsay Smolling, our curator at SoCAP and the content producer, our producer is going to come out to the stage with some folks from other organizations that are also celebrating 10-year anniversaries to talk about what that has been like for and their organizations as well. So Lindsay. Good morning everyone. So with the 10-year anniversary it sort of caught us by surprise a little bit and as we started looking around we realized that 10 years ago was a pretty special time in this field when there were actually a lot of organizations that got started and these amazing folks that are sitting up here with me today are some pretty heavy hitters in terms of what's been done in this field in the last 10 years. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Not so much to look back on what the last 10 years had, but to look forward from these folks who have been doing this for 10 years and say what's really coming for this field as we all sit here today and get really excited about moving forward. So I actually want to start with you Patricia and ask when you started Varis you were obviously replying to a demand from clients to align their assets with their money. How did those conversations look then and how are they really different starting potentially in a different place now? So 10 years ago I just I want to do a quick step back just beyond 10 years is because I've been in the industry for 25 years and I really want to when I came into the industry 25 years ago they were already pioneers that were doing socially responsible investing and we really stand on their shoulders and so it's really want to honor them for many people that are new to impact investing and impact investing was one of the three pillars of socially responsible investing so there was impact investing there was shareholder activism and then there was a screening around environmental and social issues and so it was at that 10-year period where impact really became elevated and I think what really was was key what was a big transition how I talk about it or think about it it was really the transition of like now is the time to be solutions oriented and so when we look at our clients at that time the clients that we started Varis with many of them were very progressive politically and I think one of the myths people often think about impact investing is they weren't young they were most of them were either my age or older than me they were white identified most of the people in the industry working in the industry were white identified the demographic demographics were New York Atlantic Coast New England California of course and then when you look at the thematic areas that they were interested in social justice and environmental justice were really really key and so I think what happened in at that moment in time we attracted a lot of clients when we first launched and then and at that time the Monetary Institute report was coming out V lab was launching and the financial crisis happened so that all that's the other thing that happened at this 10-year anniversary I don't know if everybody remembers that but it's pretty key and so really that that that both froze people for a while and then coming out of that I think people felt they started looking at their portfolio and saying what really is in this portfolio in a different way how can it be used how can capital be used to have even more impact to provide solutions and so our clients today from a thematic point of view it's it's it's beyond the broad umbrellas of environmental social and governance issues and it's really very many thematic issues so if you even look at community wealth building or community wealth development within that within that you have housing you have issues of working around race of inclusion so our clients are driven to us you know by specific thematic areas sustainable agriculture regenerative agriculture our clients are leading us to the next opportunities and I think that's what another thing that's really changed where we were in a period where we were convincing people to do environmental social governance investing to do impact investing to do shareholder engagement and now we have clients more and more clients coming to us challenging us our clients are experts in those fields they lead us to what the next the next area thematic area that we're going to work on and then we're constantly challenged of how do we actually create this and make this happen so I think that the demographics when you look at it ours from a geographic point of view are changing some I think one of the issues that we have and we'll talk a little bit more later about it but we're still pretty as far as the investors go and the clients white identified we're seeing many more foundations come into the fold we're really seeing that explode thanks to organizations like mission investors exchange and confluence philanthropy where before you were really trying to convince foundations to do this now they are not only taking the lead in regards more and more foundations coming into the fold but they're taking the lead on the impact areas where they really want to see capital yeah deployed so you're really seeing a more innovative more client-driven demand on not just wanting product but wanting to go deep in the thematic areas that's great yeah and I wonder too so Bart you work with a lot of companies which is sort of a different part of the field but I wonder if you're maybe seeing you know you're sort of nodding your head as Patricia's indicating some of these changes how is that changing also in the group you work with sure so certainly Lindsay when we began we were speaking to the true believers right if I go back ten years and think about where B-Lab sat at its inception this was about leadership and trying to find those organizations who for decades had been leading this field of CSR sustainability social enterprise choose your your terminology in and for that community what we offered was a certification right a platform for them to have a voice bigger than themselves the truth is that leadership we still talk to them the same way right that certification has just scaled over the last decade where we now have about 2300 certified B corporations in 54 countries what's been interesting is that with the development of that community it's all the folks who now want to be like a B Corp and what we've had to offer to meet them where they are because they often show up with a listen I heard that Natura in Brazil was a B Corp or a Trito Spank in Amsterdam or Patagonia and you know what does that mean and for those organizations we need to change the way we approach them and meet them where they are and help them along this journey help them up the mountain so we've been working to try to develop a couple of tools that do exactly that one of one of which is our impact assessment right we have a tool we use for certification we've had to make that fun easy to use contagious so that people can engage we now have about 65,000 companies using that platform just as kind of a do-it-yourself free consulting tool to know where to begin to figure out the road to using their business as a force for good similarly as you know part of our work is around trying to create governance structures that allow you to align your governance with your mission and early on you know we had people jumping in to these governance structures without really understanding exactly what it meant truthfully and over the course of the decade we've been able to pass some legislation here in the states in 35 states and it's moving forward in 11 other countries and we now see more and more companies showing up without an interest in the certification or an interest frankly in the impact measurement tool they simply want to make sure that their mission is preserved long term and they use our governance structure so we have about 6000 companies now using the benefit core structure across the globe and so it it is both the who and the what that has changed over the last decade that's great yeah and then Giselle I want to ask so Patricia mentioned the monitor report and I think at that moment 10 years ago that report really catalyzed a lot of this field and the gin took up so many of those initiatives to build the infrastructure for this field take the recommendations in that report and move forward now that we're sort of 10 years in and there's been so much progress made on so many of these where do you where are you looking for sort of the critical role for gin to play going forward and an infrastructure we still need to build great and in the spirit of looking forward I'll start by just sharing or painting what the future looks like and that's the future that we're all striving to achieve with in building impact investing so this is a future where it is no longer acceptable to make investments without regard for the environment for society where we're all making investments by paying attention to long-term performance and where the transparency in the transaction is such that investors are readily able to understand and consider the positive and social positive and negative non-financial impact of the choices and we're really taking into consideration risk return impact equally well in standard financial theory and this is a future where we have all kinds of products hello and this is a future where we have products available for all types of investors so that they are allocating a portion of the assets to this important strategy of investing so so this is a future where because of the way we allocate assets we wake up every day future generations to a healthy planet to an equitable society now the question is how to go from here to there we've made tremendous progress in three main areas of work outlined in the monitor report in building efficient intermediaries to unlock capital in building enabling infrastructure and also in increasing the absorptive capacity of social enterprises and all of this is thanks to the effort of all of you in this room and the gym is very proud to have contributed to the effort including in creating the largest global community of impact investors with 250 members in 30 plus countries there's so much more that we need to do we're now in the middle of a the one of the largest global stakeholder consultation to develop a 10 to 15 year strategic roadmap for the impact investing industry the report will come out in early next year but I'll just tell and share you know what we know about three things that just need to happen one we need to make impact measurement and management easy to do and easy to understand we have to develop incentives while removing barriers to impact investing so this can be tying compensation to impact or producing developing products that meet investor needs and investing needs and last but not least we need to increase the clarity around what an impact investment is to really maintain the integrity of the practice as well as increasing the clarity of the importance of making impact investments across the risk and return spectrum so I just close by saying that we need trillions of dollars if you're really going to address all the challenges outlined and the aspirations outlined in the sustainable development goals and we really need to scale this practice so with the gym we're committed to developing the infrastructure and tools that I mentioned as well as actively bringing new investors especially large institutional asset owners and help move them in this journey of participating in impact investing that's great yeah and I mean those are some pretty big shifts that I think we're already starting to really see with some really large mainstream financial players sort of entering this space which is great because that has to happen for this for us to reach that scale but I'd ask Patricia you know how does that change the position of Varis and sort of how Varis is long standing role in guiding clients in this way in sort of a changing financial advisory landscape overall what does that look as we try to look like as we try to move all this capital well ideally I mean I we're very excited about the growth of the industry and the main streaming streaming of the industry I think what we bring is to what a Varis brings is a firm that the individuals in the firm are clients we're very committed to all of these issues we're independent we want to stay independence and if as best we can is independent so we're focused on our mission of growing impact investors and having positive impact so I really think what differentiates us is getting continuing to be smarter to get better at what we're doing already to be looking at the issues and staying on top of it I think that the future impact advisor needs to really be able to integrate and clearly integrate and understand the issues of finance of capital how capital could be used differently and the issues that we're working on and I think that that's going to require I think that the impact advisor is going to become a field of its own designation a career that is going to be different than what it is today and that there will really need to be the rigor and understanding of the issues that we're trying to solve I think the other thing that we're really going to want to see as I mentioned a little bit earlier I mean the going forward I mean which is fantastic we're really seeing more and more women millennials younger people driving this driving the innovation we want to be able to build ways of communicating faster with women more information because they ask more questions they're more inquisitive our new investor knows more about investing and impact investing than yesterday's SRI client much more one of the things I would really like to see we're seeing you know focus on work of advisors having more women advisors we're doing well there and our firm you know six of our eight wealth managers or women seeing more people of color and women have ownership of capital firms that are placing capital but what not what we are not seeing yet I think is where what are we doing about we're seeing more focus on the investor base being women how are we working towards that investor base and bringing them in they'll be there but how are we including more people of color in the investor base because women and people of color coming in is going to change the way we look at capital and how it's deployed because their relationship with the capital markets has been is very different than the current relationship with capital markets so we need to be innovative and open and I think that's what's going to differentiate us is we're going to be looking constantly forward is how do we have the most impact and how do we integrate that with capital in a way that is going to meet the needs of the communities and have the communities leading the direction that we're going that's awesome and I think you know Bart you've mentioned some of this as well to me is that that these common the community really is changing you sort of said it in your earlier comments too and when you talk to these business leaders how are they sort of preparing for the future how are they staying ahead and responding to the different needs of their employees the different needs of their clients what does that look like for business leaders so I do think I'm so glad you brought up the 2008 financial crisis because I think it's important as we also look look forward to recognize that the 2008 financial crisis truthfully was a gift to this community honest to God right it changed the narrative to talk about companies with higher standards of transparency accountability and purpose became no longer fringe and so it for belab it believe it or not was an accelerating moment I think Lindsay we're at another historic moment that this room should honestly capitalize on because I would tell you in our interaction we're an a political organization we are neither left nor right when we work with legislators the commonality that we find over and over again as they all believe that business can play a larger role in solving the great challenges in front of us and so I do think despite the chaos that is swirling around all of us there is a silver lining and the silver lining is we are seeing a surge an absolute surge of interest from leaders who want to have a platform who want to have the ability to influence the greater good and so right now we're super excited about what we've seen from a leaders across the globe about wanting to engage and fill the void so that's one's secondly you also mentioned millennials what we're finding that interest is not only because of their desire to lead but also frankly a bit responding to their employees to their staffing what millennials expect from work is very different than what the vast majority of this room expected when you graduated from college they expect both money and meaning from their jobs and so there is an absolute surge we're seeing from millennials looking for organizations that are values aligned which increases attraction and retention for those corporations. Finally I'm glad you mentioned the SDGs because if I if I look more broadly at what could harmonize all of our efforts there seems to be ice I can't be in a room where people don't talk about you know how they relate back to the SDGs and so we have all been looking forever for that right what is the backbone what is the centerpiece upon which we can all rally around we are currently mapping our impact assessment to the SDGs it seems to be a common theme across the front we're working with the UNGC on that to deliver something that a lot of companies to manage a set and improve on the SDGs and so I do think there is a a thread moving forward that we can use through a common platform. It's great it's sort of on the same line you know that it does feel like the time is now it always feels like the time is now though that's what it felt like ten years ago and it feels really like more needed now than ever what is from the Jin's perspective it's sort of unique about this time and let's rally this crowd to get this moving. Yeah sure and you're right I mean that I think that the scope and the urgency of everything that we're trying to solve for is has always maintained the same but I would say what is indisputable now and but you mentioned this historic moment is we can no longer say that we and I don't mean folks only folks in this room but our collective we that we're unaware of all these vast challenges influencing and affecting the communities be it in our backyard or across oceans and we can no longer say that we don't know how to mobilize all the resources that we have to do something about it we do we knew we know how to direct investments to build more affordable housing to power rural villages with clean energy and to increase economic well-being of small holder farmers. So I would say you know what we think of is is what Mark Greer the Jin's chairperson who is the vice chair at Prudential Financial one said that when he sees the difference between now and a decade ago it is the idea that all the problems and the challenges facing the world are someone else's problems that is giving way to the notion that I can do something about it too and I can do it in a way that makes financial financial sense and for all of us in this room who play a role in building this impact investment movement he also said we have an obligation to lead because we know that it works we know that it impacts investing works across asset classes and sectors and geographies so I think this is a truly exciting moment to really think about we get to do this we get to think about how to scale capital in a way that is a powerful instrument for social good. That's awesome so I think that's a great note to end on the magic of StoCAP is that we get groups like this have been around for so long plus all of you who this is your first StoCAP welcome and I'm excited to be celebrating this 10-year anniversary congratulations to all of you on your 10-year anniversary thank you let's give them a round of applause.


What's up everybody, it's Jayce here for jaspyscasebrakes.com just sold out 2019-20 mosaic fast break pack one pack break number two random teams and again This is the giveaway two spots in the random number block for pick a team number 16 And again the way this works guys 30 total spots randomized customer names and teams open up the one pack here of fast Break distribute the hits out and at the end of the break will randomize customer names again in a separate dice holder Randomizer and the top two names will win a spot each in the $550 pick a team number 16 random number block So let's do the break first guys. Let's roll it and we got ourselves a four to five nine times one two three four five six seven eight and nine Steven Nine times one two three four five six seven eight nine Nick's done All right, so Steven with the nicks as well as 76ers pelicans grizzly is nothing of the Pacers wars nets do the wizards clippers jazz Thunder or sorry Cavaliers Jared with the T wools son Steve with the bucks brown with the spurs Steve with the Celtics magic Joe and juicing with the Blazers doing with the Mavericks nuggets Johnny with the hornets Jared with the heat Steven with the Hawks pistons and Lakers Joe with the thunder Stephen with the kings Joe with the rocket Stephen the rafters Nathan with the bulls all right guys close the trade window and um Rip it open and then we'll see who gets spots in that r&b tide Jerome Disco and we got a Zion Williamson base There you go pelicans for Steve There's garland and Bruno Fernand There you go, man Very nice little pack break Now let's see who gets spots in the r&b two spots being given away here Good luck. Let's roll it and we got a full 12 six and a six one two three four five six seven eight 10 11 and 12th and final time 12 times Joe and Stephen look at that congratulations Joe. I think you won spot mulch with this man Congrats and Stephen Congrats You played the odds game Both of you guys are now in the r&b and one more way to win spots Numbers three and we're done a 13 left guys and that unlocks mt. Appreciate you guys jaskiescasebrakes.com


This video I've been meaning to make for so long probably as like since we started over three years ago finally got around to it so it's Do you set your bricks the right way up when I was the apprentice one of the first things I got taught was You've got to put your bricks the right way up, and I thought that was like Tartan paint or a left-handed screwdriver or skyhooks. I thought I was getting a wound up But it's true. You've got to set your brick the right way up So here's a few examples Um I mean different parts of the country's called these different things, but it's called the feather of the brick which is the pattern So have you come this side Alex? These are all set the right way up so as you can see apart from that one obviously as you can see they all have a distinct Like a crease in it, but you look at if you look down the crease it's smooth If you look up the crease you have to bring it around here. Yeah, let's get some light on it Do it again. All right If you look down the crease your bricks smooth You look up the crease You'll see and it's rough as well. This means if you set that brick that way up There's a chance water can gather in the in the feather and then it can Soak into the brick and they can be blown by the frost That one's quite a small one This one on the other hand is very rough See again You can you can really it's really distinct when it's the long way up So that's it and the other thing is You've got to learn for speed is uh Is spinning the brick which sounds daft but it's something that becomes second nature so Same as the same with your common obviously your frog up.  So Let's back up The other the other way people do it is Oh, no, um, let me think back to uh, yeah, if you want it If you've got your you pick your brick up and the face is away from you Spin it on your on your wrist Spin it around on your wrist It's on your finger To send it the other way That bit sends it upside down um Yeah, so it Obviously at first when you're looking at them you've got to check first This one here I think this is called an Aldridge multi rustic or a Staffordshire multi rustic. They're very similar brick Nice brick as well, but with these when you look on the back They have it stuck written on them and it stock is printed the right way up Now there's uh, there's some very similar bricks to these we made in upolland years ago. They called up the pollen rustics And on the back it was always print always stamped in the back upho Russ Which is up holland rustic and it was always printed the right way up So that was christian ringing up then that's our own special ringtone So I've just noticed while editing the video. There was no outro to the video so basically It's mainly for beginners and DIYers who don't know You don't always get taught it should do So um keep keep an eye on that if you're doing a wall There's loads of different bricks and they've all got similar kind of faces So if you're a DIYer or a young apprentice or just starting out make sure you check those bricks and make sure that faces the right way up And if you're any more experienced bricklayer You may not have known so you know now And if you do know and you don't bother you should know better I've seen a lot of slashes on site that throw them in and not bother which way up they go And it does make a difference and it does look better when the right way up And last one is also when you're doing soldier bricks as well if you keep them the same on the soldiers It always looks better So that's it if you if you like the video make sure you click the like button, which we always appreciate Subscribe if you're new to us There's getting on for 200 videos now and um Yeah, click the notification button so you'll always know when we're uploading a video So thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one


We continue today with Chapter 29, God's Witnesses. Condemn your Savior not because he thinks he is a body, for beyond his dreams is his reality. But he must learn he is the Savior first, before he can remember what he is. And he must save who would be saved. On saving you depends his happiness. For who is Savior but one who gives salvation? Thus he learns it must be his to give, unless he gives he will not know he has, for giving is the proof of having. Only those who think that God is lessened by their strength could fail to understand this must be so. For who could give unless he has, and who could lose by giving what must be increased thereby? Think you the Father lost himself when he created you? Was he made weak because he shared his love? Was he made incomplete by your perfection? Or are you the proof that he is perfect and complete? Deny him not his witness in the dream. His son prefers to his reality. He must be Savior from the dream he made, that he be free of it. He must see someone else as not a body, one with him. Without the wall the world has built to keep apart all living things, who know not that they live. Within the dream of bodies and of death is yet one theme of truth. No more, perhaps, than just a tiny spark, a space of light created in the dark where God still shines. You cannot wake yourself, and you can let yourself be awakened. You can overlook your brother's dreams. So perfectly can you forgive him his illusions. He becomes your Savior from your dreams. And as you see him shining in the space of light where God abides within the darkness, you will see that God himself is where his body is. Before this light the body disappears, as heavy shadows must give way to light. The darkness cannot choose that it remain. The coming of the light means it is gone. In glory will you see your brother then, and understand what really fills the gaps so long perceived as keeping you apart. There in its place God's witness has set forth the gentle way of kindness to God's Son. Whom you forgive is given power to forgive you, your illusions. By your gift of freedom is it given unto you. Make way for love which you did not create, but which you can extend. On earth this means forgive your brother that the darkness may be lifted from your mind. When light has come to him through your forgiveness, he will not forget his Savior, leaving him unsaved. For it was in your face he saw the light that he would keep beside him as he walks through darkness to the everlasting light. How holy are you that the Son of God can be your Savior in the midst of dreams of desolation and disaster. See how eagerly he comes and steps aside from heavy shadows that have hidden him and shines on you in gratitude and love. He is himself, but not himself alone. And as his Father lost not part of him in your creation, so the light in him is brighter still because you gave your light to him to save him from the dark. And now the light in you must be as bright as shines in him. This is the spark that shines within the dream that you can help him awaken and be sure his waking eyes will rest on you. And in his glad salvation you are saved. And from the workbook, lesson 227. This is my holy instant of release. Father, it is today that I am free because my will is yours. I thought to make another will. Yet nothing that I thought apart from you exists. And I am free because I was mistaken and did not affect my own reality at all by my illusions. Now I give them up and lay them down before the feet of truth to be removed forever from my mind. This is my holy instant of release. Father, I know my will is one with yours. And so today we find our glad return to heaven which we never really left. The Son of God this day lays down his dreams. The Son of God this day comes home again released from sin and clad in holiness with his right mind restored to him at last. Amen.


Hi everybody, my name is Mary Gray and I'm a permanent researcher at Microsoft Research over in Cambridge, Kendall Square, so I came up, hopped a couple of squares and I'm also on the faculty at Indiana University in the anthropology, gender studies, American studies and media school. So those are all separate departments and then a school. I like to collect those affiliations, you know, like box tops. So I have the great pleasure today to introduce to you the PhD interns who are working with Microsoft Research this summer in the New England lab. And they're all pretty amazing stellar emerging scholars and I want to save their time and not necessarily repeat bio information they're going to share with you. But Ifeoma, Stacey, Nathan, Alina are here to talk with you about the work that they've done and how it connects to the work they're going to do this summer. I wanted to just share with you some information very briefly about our internship program because I think these emerging scholars, their scholarship really represents something we I would say desperately need in academic and industry settings and that's folks who can do bridgework. People who can work between industry settings, university settings and remind us all about how and why we need to connect with each other. Eventually their projects are also taking a tack that is not common in media and technology studies. It's a more social critical approach so you're going to hear mostly about qualitatively driven projects. So I think our group is particularly interested in showing the value of taking an approach that isn't the more familiar methodologies that we see in industry and in university settings that look at technology and media. It's a 12 week program and though it's sometimes called a summer institute or summer internship program we do have folks who will apply for this. So I'm saying this generically as though there might be potential applicants in the room or people who could share this information with their peers but we are always looking for people who are interested in taking this more critical qualitative approach and we will usually post our announcements in October on our blog about the internship program. We have labs all over the world and each of those labs accepts up to around 100 PhD students to do this work and it can really range in terms of what kind of proposals people want to pitch and probably most importantly and maybe sadly Microsoft research is pretty unique in that whatever a PhD student does it's available for public consumption. It's not hidden behind a walled garden, the expectation is that you're sharing it with your peers and building on a scholarly conversation. So it's a pretty unique opportunity to be able to do some work that both feeds academic conversations but also might give scholars a chance to connect with product groups or other groups that could really benefit from their expertise and their insight. So let me stop the promo of the Microsoft research internship program that I hope many people in this room will apply for and remind you that for these lunches we will be doing a webcast of the presentations that will be available on the Berkman website within a few days. It's pretty miraculous. It's like magic and part of today's conversation is you, so will at one point after the presentation be able to turn to questions, discussion, I'll be moderating that time and I'll be looking for bringing as many of us to the table as possible so I'll just be picking folks and trying to draw out voices that may not always be heard at the table so just be aware if you have your hand up and you've spoken a couple of times I might ask you to step back and let others speak. We'll also be recording your responses so please make sure to ask your question into the mic so that we can get your question on the webcast so that people can hear it. There's a back channel as well, is that true? Is there a back channel for Berkman for this discussion? Oh, hashtag Berkman for those folks who like to hashtag things. So please feel free to share out what's said here because it is going beyond this room. So just keep that in mind when you're asking questions or making a statement. So with that, let me pass it over to our first speaker, Ifyoma. Good afternoon. So hello, Berkmaniacs, Berkin Turns and the Cambridge and Boston community. Many thanks to the Berkman Center for agreeing to host this talk. To introduce myself, I'm a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department of Columbia University. And writ large, my research is preoccupied with data. Notably, the privacy ramifications of our voracious appetite for data, the legal issues presented by the inelegant analysis and interpretation of data, and the ways that data could be employed to widen the divide of inequality. And as an FYI, for all the computer scientists, I tend to think of data as a collective singular noun. So bear with me. So almost everything we do generates data. This was a quote by Gary Wolf, who is a proponent of the quantified self movement. However, in the book, Data and Goliath, Gary Schneer writes about the government and corporate surveillance that Americans are subjected to in their daily lives. And similarly, in the Black Box Society, Professor Frank Pasquale writes about data miners and data brokers who trawl the internet for our data. And how so much of big data is fed through algorithms, secret algorithms, right, that determine how financial institutions and order corporations choose to interact with us. But what about the data we generate from logging our own lives? The quantified self movement is to believe that self tracking or self logging as it is termed can lead to greater self knowledge and can provide solutions for health and work productivity. But should we be concerned that this small data could be corrupted in ways that are ultimately detrimental to our agency and personhood? How can we allow for the autonomy and personal expression that is life logging while protecting against the laws of privacy and the new opportunities for discrimination? For the computer scientists in the room again, I would say that this problem is hard, maybe not NP hard. Let's call it quantified self hard. So today I want to talk about the ways that our data may be used against us, right? As Kate Crawford recently wrote about in The Atlantic, small data from a fitness tracker has been introduced into the courtroom in Canada. This time the data was introduced by the plaintiff's attorney as part of a personal injury case. But imagine that next time it could be your insurance company asking for your fitness tracker data before they will agree to ensure you or determine how much to charge you for premiums. It could also be your employer asking for the same data to determine whether they should continue to retain you as an employee. So I see the quantified self movement as a manifestation, right, of a societal desire for certainty and accurate prediction of risk. But we should not be so seduced by the shiny apple of knowledge that we neglect to inquire as to the cost. I ask you to consider that the quantified self may have a dual meaning. Yes, it can refer to the self knowledge that derives from tracking our most intimate and minute bio functions and processes. But it can also refer to the quantification and subsequent discounting of certain classes of people based on perceived risks. In my research, I have seen the desire for the quantification of risk result in the widening of inequality and in startling encroachments in privacy. So take for example, the plight of the formerly incarcerated. The discounting of formerly incarcerated individuals through permanent criminal records has resulted in a paucity of second chances for those individuals in the workplace. Formerly incarcerated people find themselves permanently branded with a modern day's credit letter in the form of collateral legal consequences that disqualify them from certain professions and that serve to exclude them from needed governmental benefits. This quantification of people also plays out in the genetics arena. As the technology of genetic testing progresses, Americans now experience genetic coercion, which is an overwhelming compulsion to scrutinize and police the genome. Consider that since 2008, all newborns in America have been required to undergo genetic testing for disease. And that 85% of American consumers express a desire to engage in genetic testing. The quantification of individuals also plays out in the workplace. In my current research work at Microsoft Research with Kate Crawford, we focus on the quantification of workers. Louis Brandeis is credited with popularizing the term scientific management. This term was then adopted by Frederick Taylor for his theory of management. Also known as Taylorism. But unlike Taylorism, where the focus was on the job task itself and breaking it down into my new compartments that could then be mastered. The focus now is on the individual worker's body. And in the organizational corporation, mastering the individual worker's body for greater productivity. Or better yet, inducing the individual worker to master their own body for the benefit of the corporation. Yet, in what Professor Julie Cohen has identified as a surveillance and innovation complex, organizations seek to remove this process from the regulation reach of the state. By presenting the increased surveillance of individual workers bodies as enabling innovation and economic growth. Our research at MSR focuses specifically on workplace wellness programs. Which is a $6 billion annual industry dedicated to promoting healthy behavior among workers. These programs encourage healthful diet and exercise and they track people's weight, people's smoking, and people's spending habits. Our research then seeks to understand the standards applied to the data collected from these programs. And how this data and the interpretation of this data could impact the worker from whom it is generated. As computer scientists, as social scientists, as lawyers, we must keep asking, how can we make technology work for us, rather than against us? How can we harness the computing power of both big and small data, while being vigilant that such power does not create divides and inequality or open new avenues for discrimination? Thank you very much for your kind attention. I look forward to your questions. Hello everybody. All right, well, talking with Nathan took up what he called an opportunity to introduce myself to the Berkman community of interns and scholars that are here. I'm excited to be here in Boston. I'm a PhD candidate from the University of Illinois in Chicago. And I'm in the communication department, but I have this really unique opportunity there, where I'm in a fellowship program where we bring together computer scientists, computer engineers, the health school, and communication scholars to study issues of privacy. So the opportunity to come to MSR, which also has a very similar environment of people coming together from different fields to look at different issues in computing and social, particularly the social media collective. It was a great opportunity for me to tie together some of my previous research. So I take privacy research and from that perspective, I'm usually looking at how do people enact privacy? So when you go on Facebook and you think I'm going to post this scene of me celebrating the Blackhawks victory last night at the bar. And I go, well, do I want my mom to see this? Do I want my dad to see this? Do I want my boss to see this? And so we look at the behaviors that people do online, and then the considerations that go into those behaviors. But what I found doing that research was that we're kind of ignoring the platform that these behaviors take place on. And we're treating them as very neutral. So that's kind of led me down this path where I started looking at, as you mentioned, the data that is collected in the algorithms that then in turn use that data to provide information to us and personalize what we see on the web. And I've taken the opportunity here at Microsoft to work with some people who specialize in very qualitative discourse analysis, which is something that I'm here to learn more about how to do and do well. So this is an opportunity for me to move away from some of the more quantified stuff that I do and move into this discourse analysis arena. So the project that I'm going to do while I'm here involves looking at the Facebook News Feed algorithm. Facebook put together a page that they call Facebook Tips. And this is a public page that hosts, you can go there and they'll provide you information on how to look at who's around you with your friends and use icons. And they also post a lot of information about how the News Feed works. So I'm going to be taking a look at this page, and particularly several videos that they posted. These are actually all the videos that they posted and all of these are tagged under the headline News Feed created by you. So there are several different examples. We have men, women, different ages. What was interesting about these is Facebook pushed them out through the sponsored posts. So they did generate a lot of views. In the larger world of Facebook, it might not be a lot, but in terms of millions of video views, it got a lot of traction. So I've collected those videos and in addition I've collected all the comments that were posted on those videos. And I'll talk a little bit about that more, but I want to give you an example of one of the videos. So we'll see if this works. Through my News Feed, I actually found an amazing gym and I made a commitment to change my life for good. I was able to surround myself with so many inspiring, ridiculous, crazy people with so much knowledge and expertise. And I was like, I just want to know what you know. So I made my News Feed about wellness, nutrition, and just how to live your best life. A community that I can look forward to seeing every day. So Tim is completely and solely responsible, apparently, for creating the News Feed that he gets to see. And what I'm hitting at is something that several of the researchers at Microsoft focus on, and it's that discourse matters. It's very important the way that companies present themselves to users. It's very important the way that users then understand how these things work in their lives and make sense of them. So the focus of my research is to look at the discourse going on between Facebook and the users, both in the videos and how they present these algorithms to be working. And then also, interestingly, Facebook, as you can see on the, I guess it would be your right side, Facebook responded to most of the comments that were posted in the first week of each video going up. And these videos were posted in late 2014. So I was hoping I would be able to read the screen from here, but here's an example of a video, or a comment, sorry, the user says, this leads me to believe I have control over my own feed, I don't. Facebook is constantly making things disappear and rearranging the timeline. I don't want to see something from six days ago when I can't see one thing I did want to see from an hour ago. And Facebook replies, hi, Darrell, in order to see stories of your new feed in the order they were posted, please follow these steps in our help center. We hope this helps. That one's kind of sterile. That response is very corporatey feeling to me. But the responses change depending on the types of questions that are asked. So another one is why do I keep getting old posts? And Facebook replies, sometimes the story that you've already seen will reappear at the top of your new feed, because many of your friends have liked or commented on it. This helps you see popular stories that your friends are interacting with most and joining conversations around posts. What's interesting is Facebook, and I'm just starting this, so I've collected the data, and I'm at the very beginning of this project. But looking at some of the posts that we've seen, Facebook uses very awkward languages to avoid saying that we do this. It's always you do this, or your friends do that. And so it's going to be, I think it's going to be a very interesting project. But as I mentioned, I'm at the very, very beginning of it. So the analysis that I'll be looking at through these comments is the user to Facebook. And I'm looking at questions as how do the users discuss the news feed? I think there'll be an opportunity. A lot of the algorithm research keeps asking for more understandings of how people understand algorithms in society and what they know about them. And I think that this is a unique space to actually look at and see people openly discussing this news feed algorithm, which technically is algorithms. So what is their understanding? I'm also looking at Facebook's positioning to the user in those responses that they give back. And I'm wondering, where do they place their responsibility? And then lastly, user to user. So towards the end, when Facebook stops answering, after about a week of the videos being posted, they answered most of the comments, and then they stop and you see a lot of the users trying then to step in and explain how the algorithm is working to each other without Facebook's mediation. So that's the gist of my project and I look forward to hearing your feedback on it because I'm just starting, so thank you very much. Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in Center for Civic Media, as well as a Berkman Fellow. And the question I've been asking, or at least I'm retroactively forcing onto my prior work, is this question of how can we hold crowds accountable to the public? And I'm gonna be sharing three examples and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this idea and how we might take it further. The first one is peer production. How might we hold Wikipedia accountable as the public for the power that it plays in society, as often the first port of call for information? And one way to do it is to create a petition addressed to Jimmy Wales, which is exactly what this group of homeopathy advocates did after many years of trying to convince Wikipedia's editors to be more permissive of homeopathy related information. So they said, Jimmy Wales, we really need you to take an executive action on Wikipedia's and they promise not to donate to Wikipedia. This is a model that we're used to seeing with corporations. You create a pressure campaign. You petition a powerful entity and you try to embarrass the company into protecting its brand. But does that really work with Wikipedia, which is a global movement of people who are contributing often pseudonymously? Another example was this case in 2014 or 2013, where a novelist noticed that articles about women novelists were being pushed out of the novelist category and into the women novelist category on Wikipedia. And she wrote a New York Times Outbed. She wrote her colleagues. And at the end of the article, she says, well, we talked about it a lot and we've noticed that some Wikipedia's are changing the articles. Again, it's this idea that if you raise attention about something that there's maybe, maybe Wikipedia's aren't quite structured like a corporation, but if you talk about it, something might change. And this is an area that I've worked on with design interventions, with projects to broaden the diversity of Wikipedia's content about women. You'll notice that there's about the same ratio of biographies about women in Wikipedia as there are obituaries about women in the New York Times. And often when people create infographics about issues like this, they'll do it as a way to kind of prompt outrage to channel attention towards these powerful individuals. With the passing on project, we thought Wikipedia actually is something that if you disagree with it, you can join it and you can participate to change it. So we created a crowdsourcing site where people could learn more about the amazing people who appeared in New York Times obituaries, find out if they appear in Wikipedia. And through the process of reading more about those people, the system would reader source, automatically create bundles of content that could go into Wikipedia from that, channeling that frustration into a way that is compatible with how Wikipedia works. It's a project I'm continuing to explore with the Wikimedia Foundation. Another question has to do with how we hold social networks accountable for their influence in society. And when I say that, I don't just mean companies. Here's a slide from a recent Facebook study that tried to quantify different sources of bias in the news that people access. This is a chart of the percentage of newsfeed articles appearing in this particular sample's news feeds that were from bipartisan or neutral, politically neutral sources. And they identified a number of causes or reasons why someone might have a bias newsfeed. One might be the media. The media is just publishing a certain ratio across available publications of content. Another might be your friends. You choose who you are friends with and they share information and you see the information shared by your friends. Another might be the newsfeed algorithm, which we've heard a little bit about. And Facebook was keen to note that it probably had the least impact on what people were reading of all of them. And then, of course, your personal decisions. And in my research, I'm less interested in the question of the newsfeed and I'm much more interested in all of those other social factors. And what it means to hold our networks accountable, which is much trickier to figure out than what it means to hold, say, Facebook accountable for the algorithms that it has. And one example of a design intervention is the project I created in partnership with Sarah Salavitz, which is follow bias that we're currently doing tests on with journalists, which shows people the gender ratio of who they pay attention to on Twitter. We can think of journalists as a crowd that do actually have a big influence on society and it is a matter of public interest, who they choose to pay attention to and who they use as sources. And we're trying to see if providing them with a chance to be more aware of the gender ratio of who they follow and make suggestions to each other actually has an impact on how they carry out their work. And we might also think about distributed decision-making. Coming back to Wikipedia, there was a controversy earlier this year where Wikipedia allegedly was taking moderation actions, topic banning some editors from very controversial gamer-gate-related topics. And actually local scholar Mark Bernstein noticed this and wrote a blog post about it in like a classic accountability journalism style saying this is a problem, we need to do something about it. Wikipedia isn't doing enough about it. And journalists started writing about this issue very much following that accountability journalism frame. So they made various claims that they then had to retract because the journalists writing about Wikipedia didn't actually understand the various groups and processes and structure of how Wikipedia worked and had to rewrite substantial parts of that article. And it raises this question, it turns out that there's this entity in the English language Wikipedia called Arbcom who handles various controversies and arbitration issues. They only have a limited scope and suddenly people found themselves mired in the internal politics of Wikipedia and unsure how even to talk to Wikipedia or Wikipedia's or the Wikimedia Foundation or Jimmy Wells to get this issue addressed. Although since that we've started to see articles in the press that are going beyond saying Wikipedia has a problem to talking about the specific politics of Wikipedia. As in this Newsweek article that was actually reporting on the Wikipedia arbitration committee describing it as the highest court in Wikipedia land and starting to think about reporting on it in similar ways as they might report on other forms of governance in society. And so for my work here at Microsoft and ongoing research I'm starting to think more about the people that play these profoundly important roles in our online lives who make decisions about what to delete, who to suspend, what the norms are in our communities. One example of that is a report I did with many of the people at Berkman doing an audit of how Twitter handles harassment and looking at the process of reporting, reviewing and responding to harassment on Twitter. It came about because the advocacy organization Women Action in the Media took three weeks to receive harassment reports from members of the public and then forwarded them on to Twitter. And we were able to then look at the data that they collected in that process, data that's usually hidden inside of companies to get greater visibility on this kind of process. So we looked at who was reporting harassment, the kinds of harassment that were being reported as well as the experience of handling this work, which is often very taxing. It's very time intensive. In WAMS case it was volunteer driven on sites like Wikipedia and Reddit. It's also done unpaid by volunteers and can have very serious mental health risks. So this summer I'm asking two questions. Firstly, I'm looking at the work of Reddit moderators. There are over 550,000 subreddits across Reddit and over 100,000 moderators who have this official role on Reddit. And I'll be doing qualitative work to understand how they see their work, what they see as their job and not their job and how they're responding to more recent controversies around Reddit's corporate role in moderating behavior and speech on the site. And I'll also be continuing to ask further about this gamergate controversy. As I asked the question, what does it mean to hold crowds accountable for the power they have in our public lives? Thanks. Okay, hi everyone, my name is Alina and I'm from Indiana University but before introducing you guys to me, I wanna introduce you to the work that I do in a virtual game. It's an MMO, a massively multiplayer online game called Eve Online. And this is what it's like to be an Eve Online player. Where are you de-clocking? I'll have to be the second there. I'm an snippet for you right there of this massively multiplayer online game. And I'm from Indiana University. I'm finishing up my PhD there and I'm also interning this summer at Microsoft Research. So a little bit about my dissertation. I've been training as a media anthropologist and my focus is on consumer culture. So I study gaming communities. So these are people who play games together. They hang out online. They talk to each other in person as well as online about their hobbies. And what interests me about these gaming communities is how they make sense of, first of all, their personal place and role in this massive world. Eve Online is a huge world. What you saw in that clip was actual player dialogue. So this is them talking on the comms. It's been edited by the company, but it's all actual people. And how they carve out their own little corner of space. My research shows that it's made sensible through spectacular branded rituals where these lights, these sounds, these human bodies and alcohol as well come together in just the right alignment for players to see, to hear, to touch, as well as to feel that they are truly part of something larger than themselves. So this happens at Brand Fest, but it also happens within the game itself. How do players make sense of the hours and efforts spent on this game and its community? Gamers, especially in this game, are really hardcore. They spend hours and hours every week building up their own little empire within the game. And it's made sensible through reward and reputation systems within the game itself but also within the wider gaming community. Some of these reputation and reward systems are designed by companies, but others emerge from the community itself. Finally, I ask, how do players make sense of this time that they've invested in the hobby of their identities as gamers and as Eve online gamers? Well, it's made sensible through discussions about work-life balance and through these expectations that gamers have, but not only them, but all kinds of hobbyists, all kinds of consumers who see their work of consumption as somehow productive. How do they create value? And by this, I mean economic value, but not just that, cultural value, social value from one's hobbies. And at the base of all these rituals, these systems, these expectations, are what I call compensatory drives where players use to get things to add up, get things to even out, and also to get what's coming to them. When you think about compensation, you may think about recompense or retribution or acquittal. And it's not the same thing as, but it's also connected to other ideas about counterbalancing of effects as well as the neutralizing of forces. At the end of the day, in the games that we play, we seek balance. At the end of the day, in our voluntary social activities, what we seek is a kind of moral equilibrium. And these compensatory forces, they are at work to connect players to this massive and yet somehow intangible world. And to give gaming communities a sense of fairness and justice. And finally, to give gaming practices a sense or a kind of aesthetic, economic, and social legitimacy. So my internship project for this summer is about Eve Online. And as you can see, it's a space game. You fly around in space, but you also work a lot with all these little, pop-up windows, almost like spreadsheets, right? And it's a hyper-capitalist world where the universe is really overrun by corporations. There are no governments, warfare, murder, theft, all these are sanctioned as long as you can get away with it. And within this really exciting world, there is a group of players who are consultants to the game company, yet they have been democratically elected by these players. These players have cost their votes to have these consultants represent their interests within the game to developers. And it's very interesting to me how this savage fictional world is somehow managed through surprisingly civilized processes. So on one hand, we have player representation. And then on the other hand, we have corporate consultation, excuse me. And it seems, of course, it makes total sense, but players have demands that are very, in a way, micro-level. They want this mechanism to be twerked in this way because it benefits their player group. Developers, on the other hand, have very macro-level concerns. They are concerned with the overall system and how it works for all the players. And of course, profits. On the other hand, there are informal systems of accountability. If these representatives or these consultants don't do their job, they don't get elected. They also get complained at all the time via email and the forums and at conventions. However, when they do this consultancy work, they have no real power to make decisions within the company. All they can do is recommend and the developers are obligated to listen. So what I'm doing this summer is that I'm gonna be looking at meeting minutes over these five years that this council has existed between the developers and these player consultants. I'm also gonna be looking at town hall minutes or meetings, excuse me, between the council members and the player base. Finally, I'm also gonna be looking at election campaign materials and responses to them. And what I'm interested in is how do these actors, council members, players, developers, how do they articulate their roles and how do they articulate their roles in relation to each other? Where does my job as a player end and where does your job as a consultant start? I'm also tracing how players learn to become council members over their term of office. Consultancy or the identity of a consultant doesn't just happen. And through these meeting minutes, you can actually trace how they become in a way socialized or trained into the language of game development. How they become trained in the language of thinking broadly for the company instead of thinking about player demands. And finally, I'm trying to map these feedback channels, not just the official feedback channels that all these online game communities have, such as forums, comms, emails, but also the informal feedback mechanisms. And most importantly, their directionality. Remember that feedback doesn't just run up the chain from players to consultants to developers. It also runs down. The consultants have this job, whether it's implicit or explicit, to in a way advocate for the company to spread corporate goodwill to the masses. All right, so finally a couple of points for discussion today. If we can think about these voting mechanisms within this player consultancy group as one kind of democratic mechanism across proprietary media platforms and consumer practices. It's not just this player council, but thinking back even to reality TV shows where there was audience voting. Thinking forward to different kinds on a smaller scale of player tribunals or player guilds that have some kind of voting mechanism involved. We can think about these in a couple of ways. We can think about them as market populism. You know, the same old story. This is neoliberalism at work, right? Consumption rituals have been replacing for several decades real, authentic democratic engagement. On the other hand, we can think about it as consumer co-creation. This is a different version of customer relations. Deliberation in this case is commoditized into a kind of very pleasurable and also very valuable branded experience, right? Giving feedback is not just to make the system better. It in fact makes your own experience as a consumer more exciting, more engaging. Finally, I think it's really interesting to think about the design of user experiences. Those of you who are designers here, you know that when you think about engagement, you don't wanna give the user what they want. They have no idea what they want. That again is a kind of narrative that developers use to in a way filter or discount popular will. Finally, the overall question that I'm asking is how are these kinds of democratic mechanisms, how are they changing the means and meanings of consumption, right? And I'd like to hear from you guys in the next couple minutes. So could I ask our speakers to come up here? I think that might be easier if you're all visible in front. Maybe bring your chairs around if that's okay. And I will hold all of my questions and comments because I get the pleasure of working with these people all summer long. So with that, let me open it up to the group. Questions or comments? Yes. Nathan, this is for you. I'm curious how you can, how crowds develop or how crowds are different from simply users or consumers or patients. You've selected Wikipedia where it's kind of obvious there's a crowd, but I don't know how to define that kind of crowd and distinguish it from other groups. I see that that seems like an especially important question that I imagine you've thought a lot about in your dispute resolution work as well as there are different parties that we think about as needing accountability. We might think about individuals or institutions. I think I'm using crowd as a placeholder term for now to refer to a variety of things that we don't quite yet know where to apply the lever to change things. And it might be like a cumulative effect of the social choices and the friendships that we have in a network, but it might also be something more identifiable as a group in the case of something like of Wikipedia's arbitration committee. I'd love to continue to figure out together what those different structures and forms are because I think that's important to understanding them as well as coming up with strategies for holding those different structures and groups accountable. Oh no, we're being able to catch the recording, sorry. And if I could ask folks to say their name and affiliation please. Hi, I'm Rebecca Wexler. I'm a JD candidate at Yale and a visiting scholar here in history of science. And my question is for the last presentation is voting or what is your model of the authentic democratic engagement that neoliberalism has replaced over the past series of decades? And I thought I heard from you that voting might be that model. Is that correct and could you expand on it? Well, my version or my utopia, if you will, would be a kind of participatory democracy, right? But I think not so much, my thinking is not so much towards official political systems. My thinking is more in terms of how can the media allow citizens to participate. And there's a lovely book that I've been reading by Nico Carpentier, right, which has a very nice framework for thinking about participation in the media specifically and how different levels of engagement and different mechanisms can be used, not just to engage users or to engage audiences, but to really give them decision-making power in the systems, but also in the content. And it's far off, but I think we work inch by inch, we'll get there someday. Hi, I'm Charlton Gillespie. I'm a principal researcher at Microsoft and I get them all summer, but I'm gonna ask a question anyway. So I was thinking, especially Nathan Alina and Stacey's project family, you can weigh in too. You're clearly looking at a place where you're trying to think about how groups of people think about their role in a place and negotiate the relationship between some platformer operator that's got a role to play. But then I think in a number of them, there's an additional thing, which is that the world is meant to be something. And it's most obvious in Eve Online where there's a kind of narrative, Wikipedia clearly has an idea of itself and Facebook is proposing ideas of itself, maybe much more quietly in the videos. So I was just curious to hear, because that's kind of a thread that goes through a lot of the projects, like that part about not just what should the group do, classic sort of governance problems and what's the relationship between that set of people and some institution, but the additional problem of like the narrative or claim or nature of the institution, is that narrative or representation? Is that masking the real problems of governance? Is it distorting? Is it facilitating? Is it shaping? What's the right verb for that sentence, that those claims and that picture of what it's supposed to be and its involvement into this problem? I haven't spoken yet, so I guess I'll jump in. You know, it's interesting because my project stacked against Nathan's project shows kind of two different layers of analysis of basically the same problem and I think more evident in your work is putting the responsibility and we had a brief chat about this, so I'm informed about how in the media there's this, well one of the word algorithm is though it's a single thing and that we can just identify this one thing and maybe tweak it and then everything will be fixed and that does assume that there's, that we know how to fix what it is that we're trying to fix and I think that that is not something that I claim to know and I would not go there but I think that for my work, transparency is a word that's used as something that's lacking a lot in the news feeds that we get, in the Google search results that we get, in the algorithms that kind of mediates the information that we get and so what I'm kind of trying to look at is the way that Facebook presents it to those users to see what reality they are trying to shape for them. It's really interesting if you watched Facebook recently had its annual conference where it spoke to marketers about the news feed and the news feed is all we, we, we and this is what we do as opposed to when you're talking to the users and it's you, you, you and this is how you tweak it. So part of my larger project is just looking at those different realities based on the audiences that they're speaking to. Sure. One of the inspirations that I keep binding myself returning to in this work is Arleigh Hoek's child's work on airline attendants and there was a case where like there was a clear brand driving how these attendants would handle like tough situations and Hoek's child looked at the training process that these people went through in order to not just learn what to do in tough situations but like how to be and how to emote and how to feel in those contexts and you know in that kind of situation where there's like you're working for the company and you might lose your job there's a lot, there's like a really strong tie at least in the hopes of the company and the expectations that those things will be very close. As I look at things like the onboarding process for new moderators, there are job boards on Reddit where people apply and post opportunities. I'm really curious because Reddit has some basic rules but each subreddit also has a process where it defines what kind of norms and rules are important to it. So I think I'll be paying like special attention to how moderators see themselves in relation to the kind of expectations and their vision of their subreddit as well as their like expectation of vision of what like a Reddit community would be like. Well to the question of what is that, what is that word that we use to kind of capture what's going on between the corporate layer and the users? I think there are a couple of things going on. First of all, that's the classic sort of you know customer feedback, you know, let's gather all these ideas, filter them, see what makes sense, right? And then incorporate it into our systems. On the other hand, there is this idea of application. We want to persuade our customers or users that you know we're all on the same page. This is a win-win situation, you know? There's no us versus them, so that's part of it. And then finally there's this cultivation, right? They don't just want, it's not actually really about the bottom line. There's more things going on. Saying that is kind of a flattening out of what's going on. They're trying to cultivate an engagement that creates a sort of dynamism. They don't want people to just be happy, that's not it. They want people to fight, they want people to you know, to discuss and even to rebel against the game itself because that discussion, that's energy, right? That creates buzz, okay? So these three things I think are going on. And I hope more of it will be going on that I can find out about, you know, throughout the course of my research. Ifyoma, did you want to respond to that? Well, I guess the question wasn't directly touching on wellness programs, but I guess I'll speak to wellness programs in terms of governance. So I guess some of our preoccupation with wellness programs is the idea of whether they are truly voluntary because they are part of the workplace. Such that, you know, people are not necessarily voting, right? To say whether the workplace can have a wellness program or not. And people are not voting to say what shape the wellness program will take. And also a lot of the wellness program is really about shifting the responsibility, right? For losing weight, for living a healthy lifestyle onto the individual worker. There's not really a real discussion of whether the work infrastructure itself can be shaped to achieve the same thing. So it's basically, a lot of it we're seeing is really the corporation advocating its responsibility. I mean, I'm sorry, abdicating, right? Its responsibility for a healthier worker. And essentially forcing that responsibility onto the individual worker. And we're worried about what that means, right? If the individual worker is in a wellness program, is there then a sense that that worker must become healthy even given the structural constraints to becoming healthier. Even with those present and not really addressed. And what does that mean for workplace discrimination based on data, based on health isn't, right? Based on obesity, based on smoking. So in my course of my research, I actually found that in about five states in America, it's perfectly okay for your employer to fire you if you're a smoker outside the workplace. So you're not smoking in the workplace and perhaps it doesn't impact your job, but if they have this data on you, which they can acquire through wellness programs, they can, that is actionable data for them to fire you and you would have no legal address. So these things are concerning. And I think it's important that we continue to discuss this because they perhaps is an issue of coercion attached to wellness programs when you think that a lot of the ways they get people to join are through incentives. And the EOC recently passed several roles saying that they can do up to 30% of the premium as an incentive and up to 50% of the premium as an incentive for smokersization programs.  Can I jump the queue? Because I had a question just popped in my head. It seems like in every one of your cases, there is maybe an implicit appeal that a social need or desire work outside of market demands. So each of these corporate settings has a particular vested interest in being able to keep players playing in a particular way, keep the news feeds functioning as they are. And I think for both your cases, for Nathan and Ifeoma, there are these clear cases where market demands say the corporation has a vested interest in doing something different than what the players or the participants might want. Yet there seems to be this sense that we would, why is it that we're still seeking a certain kind of social prioritization or social good from a corporation? What is it that sends us in the direction of the corporation as kind of hopeful citizens of sorts? Rebecca, your question is really interesting in that regard. So for your different projects, have you gotten a sense of why it is that the participants see the CEO or other the company as the site of recourse for this desire for a social really extra market need? Yeah, I think that's one of the most interesting things I've seen so far in my very early analysis of the comments is that there is this inherent expectation by the users that Facebook somehow be truthful or somehow what they're doing isn't when they're not showing them all of their friends in their feed. And this has been shown by research that has been done on the news feed by Christian Sandvig and others. We're very early in this work and that's why it's a Tarleton's question. It's like, we don't know what we have yet. And so what we do know is that the work that's been done is showing that users are somewhat confused. Some of them feel like they're being lied to when they don't know that not all of their friends are showing up and the title of that paper is great. Cause it's like, I just thought that person didn't like me, something to that effect. So this shows for me that these users in this study rely on Facebook to maintain personal connections and they have assumptions about what's happening and when they're not meeting those assumptions and they feel a sense of anger at what's occurring. Well, in the case of Eve online, users or players look to the company for a kind of social justice, if you will, because the company thinks that it makes good business sense. There's a very fine line between wanting to please your user, wanting to take their votes at face value and then redesigning the system by in a way adapting mass player will. So on one hand, they have to give them what they want, otherwise they would rage quit or they would just exit from the system. But on the other hand, they have to sort of come up with something new. So it's a fine balance that they have to strike in that way. I can go on. So I think maybe the cases of Wikipedia and Reddit are counter examples to Eve or Facebook in that my impression from what I've read so far is that in the case of Wikipedia, people who are participants and active contributors do have this sense that it is a public good that by donating to it and by it not being a corporation and having all of these structures of governance like elected Wikipedians on the foundation's board and other things, that it is to some degree accountable to its participants. Where it gets tricky is when people who aren't contributors to Wikipedia find themselves affected by the power of this very unusual thing, which is when they've sometimes turned to who they imagine they might need to turn to, like following classic scripts of holding power accountable. I think in the case of Reddit, there's a lot of tension in that tension that's become very visible in the last week when Reddit for the first time started banning particular subreddits for the kinds of conversations and behavior that they saw on the site. And for a long time, they've seen Reddit as a place that has more or less hands-off policy over what is appearing on Reddit. There are competing business models in the site, one which is advertising-driven, one which is based on users actually paying the company for various perks and to literally, when you pay for Reddit Gold, like if you meet the day's challenge, there's a new server added to the farm. So it's very much a kind of membership drive-style thing and it gives you the ability to exchange gifts with other redditors. And I think that this debate over the role of moderators and what power they have in contrast with the company is at the heart of this question of what it means for Reddit to be a corporation or whether it's imagined as something else. I'll pass this to Stacey so she can help. I wanted to add one other thing. I've been reading some of the comments and the ones I've seen have been, oh, why are you doing this to me? And I want to point out it's easy to fall in that trap of only looking at the negative. But there are a lot of comments as well that say this is great. I have to be friends with this person because of this relationship, but I don't want to see anything that they post. And so these companies are in this unique position of how do we best make our customers happy, give them the information they want. And so looking at how they do that is not unique. This obviously goes in the early days of journalism and throughout all that history of gatekeeping and so on. But what's different about it is we don't know necessarily how they're doing this process. And so that's where you get users confusion and sometimes anger, but oftentimes you also get users who are very satisfied with the product as well. So in fairness, I wanted to throw that out there. Well, to get back to your original question about how we're essentially relinquishing, right, the solution for a social good to corporations. I think it's really a classic example of trying to fix a complex problem with a simple solution and thinking that simple solution is some sort of panacea, right? And the complex problem that we see wellness programs are attempting to address really is that as Americans, our lifestyle is unhealthy.  We eat a lot and not of the right things, right? We don't exercise a lot because we don't have time. We're working eight to 12-hour days. So this is a complex lifestyle problem. It's a complex infrastructure problem. The way our cities are designed, the way our suburbs are designed. So such that we're now trying to fix it with something as simple as a wellness program. There's going to be issues, right? It's not necessarily going to have the intended results. And what worries me most, I guess, as a lawyer, is the unintended results, which are loss of privacy and also new avenues for discrimination in the workplace. Because here's the thing. The anti-discrimination laws we currently have, they don't really address obesity discrimination. They don't really address smoking discrimination. So if we have wellness programs that are really centering those behaviors as problematic or as pathological, what does that mean for the worker? What does that mean for the rights of the worker? I mean, time check. Are we okay on time? Hi, I'm Nick Siever. I'm from UC Irvine. These are all super interesting projects, so thank you for sharing. And one thread that seems to sort of link a lot of them is an interest in what is happening to different sorts of collective kinds. So we have crowds and publics and councils and workforces and user bases and all of these different kinds of groups. And I'm wondering how much you guys see, and I think this has sort of been latent in some of the questions so far, but your role is being to identify the particularities of those kinds of things. What does it mean to be a user base? What does it mean to be a user base now? What does it mean to be a council? What does it mean to be a council now in Eve? That sort of thing, because what I've had a problem with my own work is not doing that and then landing in a place where I'm sort of implicitly endorsing some kind of collective kind that I'm just pretending is the natural way it ought to be as opposed to some sort of historically particular thing. I've been having that problem as well. This is a question of is it the same or is it different? What is the value of comparing it to things that have come in the past? For example, especially with reality television, I just thought about this yesterday. Oh wow, there's this phenomenon that's actually so similar in many ways and yet something feels different. And I think thinking about that feeling of different, at least at this stage of the research process, is really useful because what it gives us a chance to think about is not just, in my case at least, how is democracy changing or how is society changing, but how are the meanings of consumption changing? And it really is changing.  You could do so many more things. You're expected to engage. You're expected to make friends. You're expected to build an empire, have a lot of money, otherwise. What are you going to do? You're not really playing the game. People are going to ask you, how long have you been playing? What kind of player are you? All these notions of identity are sort of foisted on us in a way. I'm a researcher and people ask me, so you play Eve. What are you doing Eve as if that's my second career? No, it's not. I have a career. I think that's a question that I ask. And from using the methodologies that I have, which are interpretive, that is the best kind of question that I can have and then build it out to the system level. How does this then from this perspective, how does this jigsaw piece connect to the rest of it? Well, I think the historical context is really important. And for me, I think of that in terms of defining what a worker is today, right? And that's also defining the group I'm looking at. And I think what is a defining thing for the group that we're looking at is the technology available. So workplace surveillance is not new, right? From when there was division of labor, there also arose the need to surveil the workers to make sure that they're doing what you want them to do. And in a timely manner, they're not malingering. But what is new is the advances in technology, right? That have now enabled us to survey and track the worker in ways that were previously unimaginable and that is collapsing or keeps collapsing the line between work and non-work. So recently, there was a case where a woman was fired from her job and she sued because she was fired from her job from her job for deleting an app on her phone that was tracking her. And when she signed up for the job, she was told about this app. So here's the thing. It's supposedly transparent. What she was not told was that the app could never be turned off such that even when she had finished work and turned off the app, it was still on. And her boss could track her every movement. Not only could he track her every movement, he felt it was a power play to tell her exactly how much of her movements he was tracking, including how fast she was driving, where she went over the weekend, et cetera. So obviously, this is a huge intrusion on privacy and a previously really unforeseen one, you know, before we had such technologies. So now, really, we have to redefine what it means to be a worker in our society given all the technological investments. So your question about, you know, what is it when we talk about, like, crowds or groups, I think is one that really plagues the kind of research that I'm doing. Kevin Driscoll and I, who share an office, have been having this debate around BBSs. Like, we tend to talk about technologies and the users of a particular technology as if they are some kind of, like, group that we can identify with common interests and goals. And people, you know, talk about Twitter in that way. People talk about Wikipedia in that way. People talk about Reddit in that way, for sure. And, you know, within those, you know, platforms and in the conversations that people and relationships people have outside of them, like, their identities and communities are constituted in a huge variety of ways. I think what brings them together at the point of moderation is that there are some of these common expectations that the moderators are having to negotiate. There are common tools that they're using. And they're having to figure out how to, like, work at that intersection between what, you know, a company with less than 100 employees is defining as the space of their work and the vast multiplicity of communities that we're relating to. And, you know, I think we have yet to find the language to, like, talk about those things really clearly. And I'm very, very open to, like, hearing people's suggestions. I think there's also an aspect of work in this project as well. Like, in Postigo's research on AOL community leaders in the 90s found that the more AOL did to kind of control and track and standardize how its community volunteers did their moderation, the more those people thought of themselves as a, like, collective, the more they felt like they were workers that were uncompensated. So there's a sense in which these volunteers, like, are able to do this volunteer work or, like, feel, perhaps feel motivated to do this volunteer work precisely because they don't think of themselves as, like, reddit employees. And those are questions that I'll be untangling as I look at their onboarding process, their gripes, the challenges that they face in this moderation work. For me, a really influential work was Marvin's when old technologies were new. And it's an amazing look at technologies through history and how people reacted to them. And so for me, that's what I'm interested in. I feel like we're at this lucky time where, as you mentioned, nothing is new. The more you do research, the more you learn nothing is new. This is just a new iteration of something. And I feel it's a fortunate time to be alive in a researcher and looking at how people are starting to make sense of these things that are mediating so many of their communications. My larger dissertation work moves beyond Facebook and looks at algorithms in a bigger picture. So whenever you're getting information presented to you, Twitter, Google, Facebook, and so on, how do we make sense of these? For me, the user base question so far, I haven't necessarily answered, but I'm more interested in society and looking at it from a different, you know, broader picture, I suppose, is to a specific user base. But more or less, this technology and this mechanism, this mediation that's happening, how do we understand it? Okay, perfect. We're good on time. So with that, thank you, everyone. Thank you.


What's up guys and welcome to Trendy Update Harper SPM Bars. Now onto the trending news today is Sarah Kabu who apparently named the third child of the Bahatis. In case you didn't know, we are here to bring you the news and guys, you all know Sarah Kabu is the managing director of Bonfire Adventures and the 44 year old has of course won so many top awards in travel awards and she is the self-proclaimed goat wife and you know of course I'm going to share you know words of wisdom especially to the single ladies. Now looks like the couple Diana and Bahati were looking for names suggestion to Leona Palle with social media and Ulisawa to what should we name our third child because we have heaven Bahati, majesty Bahati and the third child they got the name from Sarah Kabu and the third child of the Bahatis is known as Malaika Nyambura Bahati. And of course the name Malaika is such a beautiful name and Sarah Kabu Aliza Kutujulisha Palle with comments section and Bapu Ali Comments Allah looks like the Bahatis loved my name. And of course the post came up after Diana Marua posted you know the Angel of Heaven Malaika Bahati born on 1st November weighing 3.5 kgs email her papa. Congratulations Diana Marua and Bahati Kenya team D finally my name won their heart baby Malaika Bahati welcome to the world we love you I can get in serious baby fever And of course that is it from right here on SPM bars that they picked the name Sarah Kabu suggested and it is indeed a beautiful name of course we wish Diana and Bahati a very hearty congratulations on the birth of their newborn baby this is trendy update Harper SPM bars