Yes We Can… Experiment
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009Allan and I are back in NYC after an inspirational few days in Washington D.C. We wanted to see for ourselves the official kick-off of the Age of Obama (and the related official send-off :) Allan scored better tickets than I did, but here’s the view from the cheap seats:
Left-to-Right: Presidents Washington & Obama
The spirit of our new administration spills over into socialmarkets: we also see what we’re doing at this site as a grand experiment.
Social capital is still congealing as an idea, so creating a marketplace to quantify and exchange it is a pretty soft science. It’s exciting to be able to blaze our own trail, but it’s also dangerous.
On the micro level, we can expect wrong turns or perhaps even dead ends: mistakes will be made. However, in the grand scheme of things, we believe a proper road map to a social capital market will emerge.
The usual experimental model would have us slap a ‘beta’ label on our home page, logo, etc… but we prefer to simply declare socialmarkets to be in a state of permanent - and implicit - beta.
We’ll be mixing up different measures of art and science as the need arises. We’ll employ social outcomes data where we find it, the subjective valuations of our users when they offer it, and whatever other factors we find that can help clarify the fuzzy, complex and powerful idea called SROI.
We’re counting on a community of stakeholders to help in all these areas: to share and criticize the outcomes data; to offer opinions on the outcomes’ importance; and to suggest other dimensions of social capital we should be exploring. In other words, we’re counting on you.
Welcome to the laboratory…
