Strange Systems

Recently I decided to take a systematically look at online social action sites in Korea, and whenever possible trying to arrange an informal interview with the sites' manager(s) to gain a little more insight into their operations and also get a better general sense of the landscape for online social action in Korea. How is the internet bettering the lives of the less privileged in Korea, and how is it achieving social impact?

A couple of weeks ago, I netted my first site, when I had a chance to sit down and talk with Ms. Park Jie-hyun who is one of the manager's of Cyworld's Cytogether service.

Cyworld, for those who don't know, pretty much dominates the online social networking space in Korea. Having launched in 1999 it boasts 22 million or over to a third of the Korean population as its members.

All things that go up must come down and Cyworld is no exception. Lately it has seen a noticeable decline in traffic, as it struggles to find the next generation of services that will appeal to the hyper internet-savvy Korean users. To add insult to injury, it has seen a string of failed launches abroad, due in no small part to its over-confidence in its platform and hence a failure to recognize and pay due-diligence to cultural difference in the way that users in different cultures use the internet socially. It has all but abandoned many of the markets it has entered abroad, and the US may soon be its latest casualty.

Despite its many ailments, one of the bright spots in Cyworld's traffic is its online social action site, Cytogether or in Korean, 사이좋은세상, which literally translates to: "a world of good relationships" or more meaningfully, "a world where we get along".

Cytogether uses the Cyworld platform of socially networking its members to achieve 3 main functions: online donations, online petitions and matching volunteers with non-profit organizations. It was launched in 2005, and has currently over 800 registered non-profits and NGO's in its network. Users can choose to donate to these vetted organization by giving "dotori", Cyworld's online currency, or by changing to their mobile phone service, which allows for monthly planned donations. Current stats show about USD 20,000-30,000 in online donations (monthly average of about USD 0.90 per donor), about 5,000-10,000 petition signups daily and about 20-30 volunteer matches per day. The most active issues on the site are children (abuse, education, poverty etc.) and, surprisingly, animal rights.

Ms. Park mentioned some of the challenges facing Cytogether:

• All the duties of promoting, managing, vetting, organizing and improving the site fall on the shoulders of 3 full-time and 1 part-time staff hance the site is extremely resource-strapped;
• Balancing the promotion of its 800+ member organization on its homepage is no small feat. Organization are always approaching them with "emergency" situations and demand that they be highlighted. Cytogether, to its credit does provide training sessions for its member organizations, organized on a quarterly basis;
• Better storytelling of member organization causes, activities, and success stories. It hasn't been doing an effective job communicating the human stories in a more personable voice.
  

Despite its challenges, Cytogether plans to perform a major update of the site, and focus its offering towards the end of 2008, and partner with a recruiting service to offer job matching services to the unemployed and senior citizens.

The current value of Cytogether lies in its ability to provide exposure to charity organization that would otherwise won't have the budget or the wherewithal to promote themselves. Traffic is showing steady growth over the past 3 years, where at launch, the site was encouraging its members to give a couple of "dotori" (each is worth about USD 0.10), to now there are regular donations of USD 10.00. The ratio of one-time donors to monthly donors is also on the rise, now standing at around 7 to 3 members.

To me the issue with Cytogether seems to be one of focus. It's currently everything to everyone. The argument is that it's a "platform". But I don't think that relieves them of the tough responsibility of championing key causes. Cyworld is currently too influential not to be using its influence it bring to light tough social issues. Does it want to be IKEA or Herman Miller?

It is also apparent that there is a possibility that Cytogether may outlive its relationship with its parent Cyworld. Just as Cyworld, Cytogether is a platform for activity, there really is no reason why Cytogether cannot be an independent service. If the current downward trend of traffic and popularity in Cyworld continues, it may be in everyone's best interest for the two to part ways.

Walking away from the interview, my head was full of ideas for improving Cytoether's service:

• Donor's wall: If you go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to the right of the entrance there is a wall of all the top donors to the museum. Recognize that some people (organizations) like to be recognized. A page could list large donations;
• API: Go viral. Allow bloggers to promote Cytogether on their site through a widget or a badge. A widget can show causes/organizatios that they support;
• Better member profiling: After a member donates, send a follow-up email with a link to a survey that identify what issues and causes the member is interested in. It can also ask members to opt-in for alerts. Building a database benefits both the users and Cytogether to provide more relevant content;
• Targeted alerts: Based on database mentioned above, Cytoether can send targeted action alerts to those members who have opted in;
• Matching donations: Corporations and workplaces can sign up to provide matching donations for employee donations;
• Corporate badges: Cytogether can provide corporations supporting Cytogether "official" badges to indicate that they support Cytogether;
• Stronger member networking: Members of Cyworld should have tools to alert each other to causes they support;
• Better "minihomepy" integration: Member "minihomey" (which is Cyworld's member profile page) should indicate that the member supports an organization or cause on Cytogether and encourage visitors to do the same.

I have no means looked at online social action in Korea in any depth, but from initial research, it seems, like many other things in Korea, to be dominated by large corporations and their services or foundations. Naver, the online behemoth, has a service called Happy Bean, where users register to accrue a "bean" every time they use Naver's service, such as their email. Each bean is a matching donation from Naver of about USD 0.10 and users can donate these beans to a cause of their choice. This seems awfully self-serving and borders on being unethical to me. CJ Foundation (CJ is a member of Samsung extended "family") has Donors Camp modeled on Donors Choose (Charles Best of Donors Choose actually consulted on the project).

Despite this sad state of affairs, Korea does still have one of the most participatory online cultures in the world. And by all indications it seems like the online donations and participation is on the rise. My hope is that all that participation blossoms into social awareness and responsibility, and flows into growth of grassroots online social action and services.

Last week I was one of 5 speakers invited to an in-house all-day training session at Design House, one of the most prominent design/living publishers in Korea. Design House publishes a variety of well-known Korea magazines titles which include "행복이 가득한 집" (Korean equivalent of Good Housekeeping), "Design", "Mom & Enfant", "Luxury" and most recently the Korean version of "Men's Health."

I agonized over what to present, but in the end settled to cover the various intervals at which information is presented to us and that with the internet that interval is getting shorter, and its quality harder to determine.

At one end of the spectrum you have encyclopedias which take years to update and hold the most authority, on the other end you have services like Twitter that get updated several times a day and have no filter for quality. I present the various web services that lie in between these two extreme.

When there is so much information out there, how do we find the good content? To this point, I put together some short case studies of how information is being organized by various "agents" that act as content quality filters for the users.

The conclusion being, a trusted publisher, such as Design House, can leverage its brand and history of content quality to rise and become a "trusted source" on the internet. However, the challenge is to do it in a web-centric way that appeals to web users, and not in a print-centric way.

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Walking to dinner the other day I came across 3 shipping container stacked on top of each other in a parking lot. It had Kunsthalle lettered across the side. Apparently it is an art space erected in the spirit of Kunsthalle formulated in the 60's in Dusseldorf according to kunsthalle.com.

This got me thinking about another set of shipping containers that made the news recently.

There have been massive demonstrations in Seoul opposing the resumption of beef imports from the US. The main beef (pun totally intended) that the demonstrator have is concern over mad cow disease and given Korea's culinary culture of eating everything down to the bone is a cow, this is not a light concern. Trust has eroded in the fledgling administration of newly elected president Lee Myung Bak in that the deal lifting the current ban on beef imports was negotiated and signed hastily and carelessly and that stronger provisions should have been made ensuring beef safety. In similar negotiations between Japan and the US, restrictions were made on cows aged older than 30 months, but none were made in the Korea deal.

Photo: Kwon Woo-Sun, Allmynews.com		Photo: Nam So-Yoen, Allmynews.com

All through June, there have been massive demonstrations in Seoul opposing the resumption of beef imports from the US. The main beef (pun totally intended) that the demonstrator have are concerns over mad cow disease and safety, the administration's hasty and careless trade negotiations and the subsequent incompetent handling of public outcry.

All the anti-government sentiment culminated June 10th in a massive demonstration estimated with an estimated 700,000 demonstrators holding a peaceful candlelight demonstration in central Seoul.

Demonstrations of this scale obviously make the authorities nervous. Anticipating being grossly outnumbered, in desperation the police erected a wall of shipping containers 2 high, 4 across, secured with cables outside and sandbags inside to block a march on the Blue House, the president's residence.

The bigger issue here is obviously the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Korea, of which resuming beef imports is a part of. The stiff opposition to lifting the current ban on imports which was put in place during the last outbreak of mad cow disease in the US and calls for renegotiation of the terms of the current agreement can only hurt the FTA agreement that still needs to be ratified by the two governments. The prospects of increased trade and cooperation seems to be fast fading.

Photo: joins.com

Was I the only one to see the irony in the police's use of the shipping containers? Whether the police had intended it or not, blocking the path of the demonstrators who are in fact opposing FTA with containers which symbolize trade... the juxtaposition is almost surreal. A case of life imitating art.

I am relieved that the demonstrations have been so peaceful, a far cry from the violent pro-democracy movement preceding the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Whether or not one agrees with the demonstrations one things is clear - Korea has come a long way in its path in democracy.

Update: This post received a short mention on platoon.org's blog.

Ever since I moved to Seoul last year, I've begun to post to Twitter more regularly. It started as a means to stay in touch and update friends I left behind in the US. I expected people I know to follow my feed, however I really didn't expect people I didn't know to become followers. Who would be interested in my mindless ramblings?

When I received notifications that total strangers were following me, at first I was a little distressed... then intrigued... then somewhat comforted in a strange way. They started to respond to my updates. Here were people who discovered me through search, or through other followers, with whom I share a passing interest which may be that we are English-speakers living in Korea, or interested in technology, music, or even Firefox3 etc., who track my comments and with whom I could hold casual conversations.

Jason Kottke made a really interesting observation that there is a trend towards making private conversation channels public and permanent. Blogging is thus a the public form of emailing, Flickr is public photo sharing, YouTube is public home videos and Twitter is public form of instant messaging (IM).

I always thought that with Twitter, I was just broadcasting my thoughts into the wind but when I started to get comments and followers, it did indeed feel more like public instant messaging.

The barrier for someone to respond to a Twitter post is really low. You don't have to know the person, and they don't have to approve you for you to follow their feed. This makes for looser more casual relationships, but no less interesting ones. The potential of services such as Twitter seems to be in its "discoverability" - the ability to find others who share you thoughts and start casual conversation, just by the fact that you broadcasting your thoughts publicly. One of my favorite Twitter spin off services is Twistori which simply track Twitters that begin with "I love...", "I hate...", "I think...", "I believe...", "I feel..." or "I wish...". It's addictive to watch people random yet actual thoughts scroll by.

The dominant social networking site in Korea is Cyworld, and from stats, most of the traffic on Cyworld is between "Il-chon" or "approved friends/family". This reinforced the notion that Koreans are very closed in their relationships, and prefer closed social networking sites like Cyworld to more open ones such as MySpace. The Korean version of Twitter, Me2Day challenges that notion to a certain degree. Here is a site, much like my experience with Twitter, where users form loose relationships with other users they "discovered" leading me to think that the internet is a greater enabler of social relationships than I thought.

Now that Cyworld's popularity is on the decline, they are fishing for new ideas. They had a terrible launch of Cy2.0 which was supposed to Cyworld's next generation but after a lukewarm reception, they hastily demoted to being a lowly "blog" application tab. They are also in beta version of a 3D service not unlike Second Life. I've contended for a while that it would have been in Cyworld's best interest to move more agressively towards mobile, because that's where all the action is occurring, by acquire a service like Me2Day and moving towards shorter, more casual sharing of thought and comments to complement its more established social networking system. Instead they created a service called Tossi which is similar but doomed to fail, lacking strong integration with Cyworld and more so because it's a paid service (you have pay for data usage). This is due in no small part due to a rift between SK Communications who operates Cyworld and SK Telecom which is its parent mobile operator. Sad.

I never thought that a service like Second Life would ever have much of a chance in Korea, but I am seriously having second thoughts (no pun intended). Cyworld is showing strong signs it's losing steam and If my original assumption about Korean being adverse to open, casual social relationships can be overturned by services like Me2Day, maybe it's an market just waiting to be tapped. We'll have to see.

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Just for laughs, I stumbled upon a hilarious role-playing conversation in Twitter between Starwars Characters (see screenshot below).

The Culture Code: An ingenious way to understand why people around the world live and buy as they do.
by Clotaire Rapaille

Having spent substantial portions of my life in 3 very different cultures on 3 different continents (US, UK, Korea), I found "The Culture Code", very insightful, entertaining and surprising.

The Culture Code. as defined by the author, is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing - a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country - via the culture in which we are raised.

The author uses the Jeep Wrangler as an example of how different cultures have different codes when relating to it: Chrysler didn't know what direction they should push the Wrangler, and asking people hadn't helped. The author didn't ask what people wanted, he asked what their earliest memories ("imprints") of Jeeps were. Many recalled open land, going where no normal car would go. This reveal the code for Jeep in America is "horse". Hence Jeep didn't need luxurious touches, such as soft leather seats. It needed removable doors, and an open top. In contrast, the code for Jeep in France and Germany is "liberator" since many associated the Jeep to the liberation of Europe during the Second World War.

It had always puzzled me why Americans love carry their coffee around, drinking it on the go - on streets, in cars. I would see American exchange students on campus in Korea, faithfully carrying their big travel mugs heading to class. Only American students seems to do this. A sure sign of an American student was his/her coffee, backpack, sandals and large water bottles.

This, I learned, was because Americans equate health with movement, (the American code for health is "movement") and that Americans have a strong ethic for work and getting things done and have no patience for taking a backseat or enjoying things for its own pleasure. Therefore consumption of coffee (= productivity), on the go (= movement, efficiency) makes practical sense to the common American where it would puzzle your average European or Asian.

The books goes on to explore various codes for love, beauty, fat, health, youth, home, work, money, quality, alcohol, shopping and towards the end the code for America itself.

The book was somewhat therapeutic for me. I never imagined that a branding/marketing book would end up being a self-help book. It helped me understand how growing up in different cultures informs the way we think and helps explain some of the differences between my wife who grew up in the States and I who grew up in the UK. Why I read instructions and she doesn't.

The study of how Americans perceive quality was also informative. American code for quality is simply "it works". What this says is Americans prefer basic function over design. American are very forgiving towards design as long as it performs it expected function (How else would you explain the abundance of such bad car designs coming out of Detroit). In the mobile phone industry, this attitude is perfectly exemplified in the Verizon ads with the bespectacled man who goes around simply saying, "Can you hear me now?" In comparison, Koreans, Japanese and British people are far more conscious about the way cell phones look.

The author bring all the observations around cultural differences to a conclusion about global marketing:

Global strategy requires customizing for each culture, though it is always important that the strategy embrace "American-ness.

The author suggests that branding needs to be tailored to cultures however when a brand is global, it is always in its best interest to project an image of its local roots:

Cultures perceive globalization as a direct attack on their survival. If the world becomes truly flat and we all exist under one huge planet-wide culture, then we lose the individual cultural identities that have defined us. When brands extend themselves into the global market by championing their village of origin, they accomplish two tasks at once: they perpetuate their own culture and they celebrate everyone's cultural identity.

Think Mini Cooper. They are owned by BMW, but they are branding (rightfully, successfully) as a British icon. Think Evian or Levi's. These are global brands, but still have something very local about them. Evian is water from the Alps and Levi's is the icons American apparel.

In the end I had to wonder about Korea. How Koreans perceive themselves. Also how Korea is perceived by others outside Korea. What is the code for America in Korea? How should Samsung, LG, Hyundai be market themselves? What is uniquely Korean about these brands?

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On this heels of one book that explores the differences between cultures comes another: I just started reading: The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why. This book promises to be more of an academic read.

At some point in the near future, the term mobile "phone" will be too limiting to describe what we'll be carrying around in our pockets.

Take the iPhone (or any smartphone) as an example. Currently there are 8GB and 16GB versions available, but at the rate memory is increasing and coming down in price, soon we'll be getting 32GB, 64GB and 128GB versions in the next few years (or months?). What will it mean to carry that much capacity on a mobile phone.

All my music files are about 50GB, all my photos 30GB, my email 5GB, and another couple for all the movies files shot on my camera. That means I can be carrying all my digital possessions with me on my phone. The term "phone" refers to a communication device. With high-quality camera and movie capture capabilities along with massive storage, it is something more that a mere phone. At this point it become a life caching device.

Nokia and Samsung have already been busy exploring this concept, however they are still in very early stages of development. I always thought that Cyworld needs to move in this direction in order for it to remain relevant - i.e. provide a life-caching service closely coupled with mobile service, but I digress.

For a life caching mobile device/phone to be useful/usable, it needs to address some pretty fundamental challenges:

• Powerful Search When you have so much stuff on such a small device you need something more close to Apple OS X's Spotlight to find the stuff you are looking for.
• Rapid Browsing Browsing photos on a traditional cell phone is pretty painful with the key-mapped interface. Touch interfaces (à la iPhone) with flicking provide faster access and browsing experience to photos, music, movies, email and message lists.
• Logical Cross-Referecing It's still a communications device after all, and it makes sense to be able to access content via people. When you find a person in your address book, you should be able to view all the content related to that person.
• Easy Backup Heaven knows what will happen if (or is it a matter of when) you lose you life-cached possessions stored on your device.
• QWERTY Keypad You'll need to do a lot of typing to tag all the content coming into your device and well as for posting and sharing your content with others.
• Web-PC-Device interoperability Your portable device is good for capturing precious moments, communicating and transporting content, but for sharing the web is still king. As for editing all the movies and photos, and backing up, the PC is still your best bet. Each device has its merits and content should be easily transferable between platforms.

The Point is a simple website with a clear purpose: making things happen. The way they do it is helping users formulate a campaign statement for action with a clear goal. Users can then choose to participate in the campaign. When the goal is met (or "the point" is tipped), an email is sent to the participants to act. For example:

Stop Zippy Oil from polluting Lake Apache Zippy Oil must stop dumping waske into Lake Apache or else we will boycott ZippyPump when 100,000 people join

The campaigns can be serious or silly, which is a nice twist:

Bow-tie Tuesday Andrew Mason will wear a bow tie every Tuesday if 8 people do the same.

The site has a collaboration section for brainstorming ways to approach a problem and also a social networking component to connect people with similar interest.

Aside from a few companies such as Amazon, Google or Facebook, the value of Web2.0 for the business world is still unclear, and return on investment still seems murky at best. However for the non-profit world, the value of Web2.0 is clear - the more the users are empowered and congregate around interest that they share, the better the opportunities for action.

In Korea, where I work, there is a lot of businesses coming online based on Web2.0 models, and a lot of talk around using Web2.0 to enhance service offerings and user experience, but little talk about the social impact that Web2.0, which to me is missing the whole point of Web2.0.

Tim O'Reilly said back in 2005, Web is a platform. A platform to do what? We should at least consider the potential of it becoming an agent for change and the betterment of society as a whole.

What is encouraging is that there are already many services by the big players in the Korean online space that make online donation easy and fun. Korea's leading social networking site, Cyworld has its online volunteer matching and giving site called Cytogether where you can donate your time or "acorns" to a cause. Naver, the Korean search engine / online portal behemoth has a service called Happy Bean where you collect "beans" worth about 10 cents for every email you sent through their email service. You can donate these you causes and donations are matched by corporate sponsors. CJ Foundation (CJ is part of the Samsung conglomerate) has its own version of the US site DonorsChoose.org called DonorsCamp.

A culture of donation doesn't spring up overnight, but if you look at the numbers, citizens who are online (or "netizens" as they are called here) are beginning to donate generously.

But these services are only limited in their scope and potential and only scratch at the surface of serious change. In one of the most wired places on earth, shouldn't we expect more innovative services that enable and empower people to think differently.

When I was recently asked to give a 1 hour presentation at OpenTide China, in Beijing, on a subject of my choice, I chose to put together a presentation highlighting some of the work that I was involved in while I was working at Forum One Communications (my previous place of employment), that involved innovative use of Web2.0 for social action. I ended up giving the same presentation again to staff at VINYL, Seoul, where I currently work. The presentation outline Web2.0 principles and then introduces 4 "stories" or projects I was directly or indirectly involved in. The projects are CARMA, Changemakers, Ask Your Lawmaker and DonorsChoose (I didn't have direct involvement but know the project well because I good friend worked on the Korean counterpart DonorsCamp).

Here's the presentation I gave:

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I've been struggling to define exactly what "convergence" means in today's wired world. I think I've found the best definition yet.

Convergence is sometimes viewed as the consolidation of multiple technologies towards a singular uber-device. I prefer to define convergence as the tendency of technologies, as they grow in complexity and scope, to overlap (and consolidate) functions. Convergence therefore refers to a trend wherein devices and functions take on commonly shared traits, but this doesn’t mean that this trend ultimately ends with a single multifunctional mega-device, no matter how cool and ‘mad scientist’ that might sound.

The article goes on to describe "7 considerations for convergence". An excellent read.

Although I have visited Hong Kong, this was my first trip to mainland China. My first impressions of Beijing was one of scale: We entered through the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, designed by Foster + Partners and ARUP. The building is said to represent a dragon in motion, with its undulating roofline. Stepping through the passport control, you see the building on axis for the first time and the way the columns extend out reminded me of drawings of the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia at the turn of the century, in the way it celebrates modern transportation infrastructure. According to Sir Norman Foster in a presentation at the DLD Conference, Munich in 2007:

[The new Terminal 3] is physically the largest building on the planet at the moment... larger by 17% than every terminal put together at Heathrow [London].

The scale of the building is also reinforced on the exterior, by using an optical illusion to make the building seem stretch out into the vanishing point.

As we were landing at the airport the pilot informed us that there was about a 3 mile visibility. I thought it rather odd that he was disclosing this information, the first time I'd ever heard it being mentioned inflight. Driving from the airport to downtown, I realized why this information was relevant. Although it was a clear day, there was a haze all around. "Yellow dust" or "hwang-sa" is what they call it in Korea. It's the dust being blown across East Asia from China's Gobi desert (See NOAA satellite photo).

Although the trip was primarily business-related, I did get a chance to visit a few local attractions. The Grand National Theatre of China in Beijing, was designed by French architect Paul Andreu, and completed in Dec 2007 after 6 years of construction.

It's huge - the dome houses 3 freestanding building inside it: the opera, theatre and concert hall. They didn't allow any cameras through security (but they did allow cellphones with cameras) so I wasn't able to take any interior photos.

The entrance goes under the moat surrounding the building and you can look up through glass at the water as you enter the building. The dome surrounded by a moat make the building an easy target to be called a "egg" - a fried egg in this case.

798 Art District in Northeast Beijing is a thriving artist community, studios and galleries housed in former weapons factory. The "798" comes from the factory number.

The Chinese government seems to give artist a lot of breathing space these days, allowing open criticism of the government, its open market policies and the negative effects of capitalism on their society. In a way, Chinese artists have it easy, since they have an easy focal point upon which they can base their creative energy, unlike art in the west, which has lost its ideological focus and now can only resort to critiquing itself. My friend put it nicely: it seemed like the Chinese artists were like students in art school, trying to find their voice, uninhibited and full of raw energy.

When we visited it was under heavy construction and renovation in preparation for the tourists that are going to flood Beijing around the Olympic Games this summer. It a shame that the artistic character of area will soon be gentrified beyond all recognition. It will be yet another Soho, Greenwich Village or Williamsburg in New York, now full of galleries and shops with few traces of the artists who pioneered the neighborhood and made it possible.

One thing I found missing from Beijing that I expected was the presence of bicycles. I always remember photos of large cities in China full of masses of people riding bicycles. My friend told me when he first visited Beijing 10 years ago, there were thousands of bicycles on the streets, but now it's hard to see any due to the ban on bicycles that has gradually been enforced since 1998. They say that China is the faster growing market in automobile sales, and public transportation infrastructure is growing. However I can't imagine the effects of all those people switching to carbon producing cars will benefit the already fragile state of China's environment.