Actics Blog

Hurrah- Actics is exploding in China! According to Google Analytics, we’re attracting tens of thousands of visitors a month from all corners of the People’s Republic and are rapidly moving towards six-digit figures. Great news, isn’t it?

Well, not exactly. As our in-house Sherlock Holmes Henrik realized, something didn’t make sense. How could it be that Actics had so much Chinese traffic but not a single Chinese user? When you have tens of thousands of visitors you would expect at least one of them to sign up, wouldn’t you? It seemed like an insoluble mystery, but Henrik put on his deerstalker, had a quick last puff of opium, and then went out and discovered the answer: 

Actics has been copied! A Chinese site by the name of exnb has stolen our design- and as a result their traffic is now popping up in our Google Analytics reports.

Maybe we should be upset about such blatant theft. But then again: we’re not exactly alone. As I discovered in an article in the Economist, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube all have hordes of Chinese copycats. And on a funnier note, even Harry Potter hasn’t been spared. If you want to find out more about such contemporary classics as:

• ‘Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl’
• ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince’
• And the best one of all: ‘Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’

then check out this hilarious piece in the NY Times.

What do you do when you’re sitting around in Dubai and have a couple of minutes to spare? Exactly- you log in to Actics!

That’s what our intrepid reporter Neils Peter from experience design lab did. Or rather: he tried to, but then he got hit by the following message:

That’s right: Actics has been banned in the United Arab Emirates!

But why? What is it about us that is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates”? Eager to find some answers, I checked out the OpenNet Initiative, which is a great site on internet filtering and surveillance, and had a look at their country profile of the UAE.

As it turns out, the UAE are extremely active on the internet filtering front. To give a few examples: they block all sites in the top-level domain “.il” (no prizes for guessing what country that belongs to). They pervasively filter pornography, gambling, and sites promoting alcohol and drug use. And they also selectively filter sites that “express alternative political or religious views”. So is that what they found so objectionable about Actics: the fact that we “facilitate ideas” that are potentially “in breach of the general order”?

Whatever the case, the whole affair certainly adds a nice dose of glamour to Actics. YouTube is blocked in Iran and the BBC in Myanmar- and now we have made it into the big league, too! I’m tempted to say that it calls for a drink- but since that might get us banned by another 7 countries I should probably keep quiet.

Do women and men live by different ethical values? I suppose the stereotypical view would be that women care more about ’soft’ values like Gentleness and Empathy, while men are more concerned with ‘hard’ values like Honour and Perseverance. So is this picture supported by the data from the Actics Community?

Not exactly… Or to be more precise: not remotely. Here are the five most popular values, arranged in alphabetical order, of one of the sexes:

• Empathy, Environmentalism, Integrity, Openness, Tolerance

And here are the five most popular values, again in alphabetical order, of the other sex:

• Empathy, Environmentalism, Integrity, Strength of Character, Tolerance

It’s not exactly what you’d call wildly divergent, is it? One tiny difference- that is all the Actics data turns up. And now for a little quiz for anyone who’s interested: which way round do you think it is? Is it women who live by Strength of Character and men who live by Openness, or vice versa?

In any case, the conclusion we can draw from all of the above is clear:

Men Are from Somewhere Between Mars and Venus- and So Are Women

But I guess that’s not exactly the sort of catchy long-live-stereotypes title (besides, the capitalization gets a bit tricky) that will catapult a book to the top of the bestseller lists.

What is the most popular ethical value these days? I have to confess that when the Actics Community started, I expected to see a neck-and-neck race between about a half dozen values. And if I’d had to put my money on any single one of them, I would probably have gone for Integrity.

That much for my instincts… True: Integrity doesn’t score badly in the Actics Community, but it doesn’t get close to the winning value. This winning value in fact leaves all other values standing and sweeps the field in every category you can think of:

• 36% of male community members live by it (ahead of Integrity with 25% and Openness with 21%)
• 44% of female members live by it (ahead of Integrity with 24% and Empathy with 19%)
• And a whopping 53% of company members live by it (ahead of Integrity with 20% and Openness with 19%)

So is the situation any different when we look at countries? Not really. Right now most community members are from Denmark, the UK and the US- and only in Denmark does the winning value get something of a run for its money:

• 27% of Danish community members live by it (ahead of Integrity and Openness with 24%)
• 48% of UK members live by it (ahead of Tolerance with 17% and Integrity with 14%)
• And an astounding 56% of US members- our largest geographical group- live by it (ahead of Integrity with 21% and Openness with 17%)

So what is this all-conquering value I’ve been talking about? Well: I’d like to think that I’ve kept you on the edge of your seat until now, but you’ve probably already guessed: it’s Environmentalism.

And I wonder: is this just an Actics Community phenomenon or has Environmentalism truly become the dominant value of our times?

Fresh from the press. One of our Actics members - Morten Østergaard the vice-chairman of the Danish Social Liberal Party - was interviewed by a Danish newspaper on his use of Actics for political purposes. A well known Danish academic offered a critique of such ‘spin’ use a couple of days later here. Judge for yourself whether the critique is fair and relevant.

In the aftermath of the Kathy Sierra affair, Tim O’Reilly felt called to propose a general code of conduct for bloggers last month. Although I understand and sympathize with O’reilly’s urge to react somehow (I agree that some people loose decency in online communication and handle anonymity extremely bad), the choice to suggest a general code of conduct as known from old fashioned CSR is totally futile and highly untimely as well. Here’s why:

1. Bloggers are highly heterogeneous. If codes are not to be vacuously generic and abstract, they stand no chance of being sufficiently operational to change conduct.
2. As such, codes will remain dead tombs of half harted morality and empty gestures. Most welcome for those convinced that all talk of ethics is hypocritical and poison to the effort of actually bringing about ethical changes.

Instead? It can be of no surprise to you that my alternative is putting an Actics widget on your blog, stating what kind of ethical values you personally live by and how. If you for instance live by the value ‘respect’ you could state the action ‘Always remove comments with no positive intent’ or ‘Only allowing comments not insulting other readers’. Then your ‘local’ ethical criteria on your blog is much more personal and concrete. AND it allows your readers to feedback on relevance and your ability to walk the talk.

I’ve just finished studying the recent Edelman report on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the blogsphere. Both interesting and then not surprising at all. The blogsphere is still in its infancy when it comes to CSR. Few posts are specifically tagged with CSR terms while a lot actually covering CSR topics. That means that bloggers do not consider themselves active CSR agent. Moreover, the job of raising CSR issues and bringing new information to the table is still left to mainstream media. Bloggers mainly comment reactively on existing stories. But the report agrees with us that the imporatance of the blogsphere for CSR in general is growing. Main findings of the report:

• CSR issues are not among the main subjects in the blogsphere. Still there was over 3.5 Million post on CSR related subjects during 2006. That’s one post on CSR related matters every 10 second or app. 0,75% of all blog posts. And the number is growing.
• Posts specifically tagged with a CSR keyword were only 120.000 during 2006
• Environmental issues make up 75% of CSR related posts
• Blogs specifically tagging with CSR terms are professional blogs (like this) and typically not very influential.
• CSR topics are still identified, researched and published by mainstream media. Bloggers only reactively comment and sometimes provide perspective.
• NGO’s and CSR institutions are still bad at engaging bloggers by being still kept in an old school paradigm for one-way communication. Besides, the number suggests that bloggers have caught ‘activism fatigue’.
• The major CSR influencers are individuals, not institutionalized voices. The blogshere notoriously distrust institutionalized voices.

Actics is all about aiding the transition to civic CSR engagement for people and companies alike. We believe they need each other. To see our perspective on these matters, check out the paper in progress ‘CSR 2.0′ under the working paper section, I’ve just uploaded a new version.

I was suddenly thrown into a meeting yesterday with a coming up online community focused on facilitating business development in Africa members’ investment. C4 aims to ‘Eradicate Poverty through Business’ in support of the UN 2015 millennium developmental goals and it has already been featured in influential trend spotting sites and Danish media. It’s a very interesting concept and one of the better business models I’ve seen for web 2.0 ventures. I’ve signed up as a ‘MyC4 builder’ to test and help develop the service and there’s still a few vacant spots left for you to do the same. Welcome C4 and best of luck!

A new report from McKinsey documents the growing corporate interest in harnessing Web 2.0 tools. Most companies already deploying Wiki’s, blogs and social networking are overall satisfied with the investments and keen on exploring Web 2.0 tools further. However, no revolution is underway. First, interest is careful. Second, the report documents preference for the ‘technological’ over the ’social’ aspects of Web 2.0 with ‘web services’ being a clear number one. In fact, one could argue that web services defined as “software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions” is only a marginal aspect of what Web 2.0 is.

There are no explosive results in the report but a couple of interesting findings:

• Blogs are not prominent in the findings although corporate blogging has been much talked about.
• Early adapters are generally more satisfied with investments than followers. No explanations are provided but one could speculate that first movers are also the most engaged and providing for the organizational changes necessary.
• India is most enthusiastic about Web 2.0 with other regions following evenly.

All in all the report mirrors the moderate optimism of the recent Forrester report concluding that companies want Web 2.0 tools but rather as full suites and from big vendors. Again, not very true to the underlying currents of Web 2.0. But all changes take time.

The foundation for P2P Alternatives, the world’s perhaps most prominent (thanks to the admirable efforts of Michel Bauwens) resource of information and debates on P2P systems, the information economy, new media developments and new possibilties for technology enhanced social activism now has an actics widget on their blog (a must read for anyone with these interests)

Check them out at blog.p2pfoundation.net