So…

The legendary Linus’ Law states that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.  It states that with enough community scrutiny, bad content/contribution will be noticed and taken down.  From my work on the sociology of Wikipedia and experience in Yahoo!, I would add that there are three key elements to having a successful community (which a lot of designers/start-ups seem to be conveniently unaware of).

They are

(1) the Composition of your community

(2) the Tools to empower them (i.e. the system of moderation)

(3) the Timing between noticing and taking down bad content

Let me elaborate.

(1) Composition of your community

For Linux and Wikipedia, the communities are composed of many extremely smart, technical, virtually connected geeks that are experts in online communications and are very comfortable with setting up policies and norms for their communities to follow.  They are also good at developing hands on tools to execute the policies.

For example, Wikipedia community established the three core norms: Neutral Point of View (NPOV), Be Bold, and Assume Good faith.  Its developer communities built a special app, VandalFighter, to help editors monitor realtime edits among the many other useful tools,

Vandal Fighter is software that watches Wikipedia edits in real-time and has many built-in filters (multiple regular expressions can also be used) to allow users to specify exactly what types of information they would like to see. Examples: watching custom article watchlists, watching edits by non logged in (IP) editors, ignoring edits by people marked as “ok” (or, the reverse as well), and watching comments with the word “revert” in them are just a few of the almost limitless ways in which Vandal Fighter can be configured to produce custom output.

VandalFighter screenshot (source)

Basically when you have a bunch of really smart people using your community product, the plus side is they are also the key people that will help you develop and refine community policies, and even help you develop tools for moderation.  The downside is the challenge for the product people to remain open and transparent, and be liberal enough to accommodate opinions and suggestions.  In that regard, Flickr’s done a pretty good job in encouraging communities to tell them what they want and actually responding to those needs by both (1) talking to the users; and (2) implementing new features or explain why not if it’s not possible.

The problem I see is that people assume that their community will also function like the highly technical, systemic crowds above, which mostly is NOT true.  If you have a fashion community website, people may flag a button to state if they like or hate the content, but don’t expect them to fill in a form to explain why – people are usually pretty reluctant to work so hard when they are just browsing a site.  If they keep on seeing bad content, they will leave and will not try to fix it for you.  Think about the design – how can you gather data about the quality of the content without needing your users to do a lot work?

(2) The moderation system

The key to a robust moderation system is that – you can’t rely on old school customer care services alone if you know that your community is going to grow in scale.  Traditional customer care is expensive, inconsistent, and slow in turn around.  What it means is that your community is soon going to know they know better than the people sitting behind the hot desk, on both how the product works and how to game the product.  You will need to work out a moderation system that incorporates community realtime feedback, such as the Slashdot meta moderation system, where trusted users will be empowered with more karma points to help promote or suppress content.  I encourage you to read through the documentation as I know most world’s robust systems share similar principles as the Slashdot mechamism, and here’s my favourite bits,

Who

It’s probably the most difficult part of the process: Who is allowed to moderate. On one hand, many people say “Everyone”, but I’ve chosen to avoid that path because the potential for abuse is so great. Instead, I’ve set up a few simple rules for determining who is eligible to moderate.

1. Logged In User If the system can’t keep track, it won’t work, so you gotta log in. Sorry if you’re paranoid, but this system demands a certain level of accountability.
2. Regular Slashdot Readers The scripts track average accesses from each logged in user. It then selects eligible users who read an average number of times. The homepage doesn’t count either. It then picks users from the middle of the pack- no obsessive compulsive reloaders, and nobody who just happened to read an article this week.
3. Long Time Readers The system throws out the newest few thousand accounts. This prevents people from creating new accounts to simply get moderator access, but more importantly, means that newbies will have to be part of the community for a few weeks before they gain access to the controls to a system they don’t understand.
4. Willing to Serve If you don’t want to moderate, just visit your user preferences, and set yourself as ‘Unwilling’
5. Positive Contributors Slashdot tracks your “Karma” (see the FAQ). If you have non negative Karma, this means you have posted more good comments than bad, and are eligible to moderate. This weeds out spam accounts.

So the end result is a pool of eligible users that represent (hopefully) average, positive slashdot contributors. Occasionally (well, every 30 minutes actually) the system checks the number of comments that have been posted, and gives a proportionate amount of eligible users “Tokens”. When any user acquires a certain number of tokens, they become a moderator. This means that you’ll need to be eligible for many of these slices in order to actually gain access. It all works to make sure that everyone takes turns, and nobody can abuse the system, and that only “regular” readers become moderators (as opposed to some random newbie ;)

Basically when you start to develop a new system with communities of users, remember to add the above top five variables trackable into your backhand – even though you may have only a handful of kitties using your site, if in the fortunate even of your community taking off, these data WILL come in handy.

(3) Notice and taking down time

Cannot emphasise this enough – remember when you were a kid at school, there were teachers that pupils respected as opposed to those who were bullied by kids or just completely be ignored?  What made the difference?

The answer is the consistency of treatment and the responsiveness in delivering rewards and punishment.  Forgive my Pavlovian tone here, but online communities rely even stronger on fairness, consistent treatment, and timely response since people cannot see one another in person.  Lots of emotional information is missed out, hence collective community behaviors are shaped by the system, not just by the people.  If you let a few trolls take over your sites, your community suffer.  In the normal life cycle of events, communities will moan and seek help, and if nothing happens, they may stay and tolerate the bad content, which would leave a sour taste and encourage people to act in a uncivilized manner – trolling the trolls.  Other light-minded members will leave because it’s not fun anymore.  So – when you design your community – make sure you have factor in the notice and take-down time by incorporating first two points by defining the nature of your community and tools for empowerment first.  These are not nice-to-have – these are necessarily conditions for any online communities to succeed.

Okay I’ll be a bit hardsell here and repeat myself – If you’d like to hear more on community management, please vote for my friend’s Sacha SXSW panel

Living in the Matrix: Communicating past Agent ‘Smith’
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4414

I am probably missing a lot of the core details as well, will be filling this in from your comments and links and hopefully this will build into some sort of useful documentation.  ;)

• World: belongs to everyone
• Wide: no boundary
• Web: links everyone together.

But my romantic interpretation has been interrupted by the not so romantic everlasting online abuse problem and hence the proposed CAPTCHA feature in a work meeting.  Now here’s my view (supported by some research)…

1. Captcha punishes a vast amount of people

…(and money they make) who deserve extra consideration on web accessibility

Isofarro has helped me dug out some useful stats:

Between 15% and 30% of the population have functional limitations that can affect their ability to use technology products (50 million in US, 750 million worldwide). It is estimated that people with disabilities control a discretionary income of over $175 billion annually in US alone.

US$175 billion discretionary income?? Now accessibility is not a fancy ‘feature’, it matters to your business and you can tell your boss that quoting CSUN, in case they have ‘no time’ for egalitarian beliefs :)

2. All in all – I just see that CAPTCHA should not be a feature requirement

…or at least clear warning should be given to the publisher before they decide to implement for two key reasons: (1) accessibility: it keeps good users away and (2) CAPTCHA is easily solvable by those who want to: it does not stop the evil spirite to contrary to most people’s belief.

(1) Accessibility:

Users hate CAPTCHA. In our user research many told us that they would not bother to comment if they have to go through CAPTCHA. So CAPTCHA essentially turns away the light contributors who are pivotal in enriching the community with a more general, diversified tone of voice, while retaining the more troll/spam-ish users who would do anything to make themselves heard. In all, CAPTCHA turns users away as an extra step to contribute when sometimes your product already requires a sign-in system to comment.

(2) CAPTCHA would NOT help the problem of spam:

Multiple research has demonstrated that CAPTCHA is known to not helping in deterring spam. I am citing two academic research to illustrate.

(I) Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

‘It is important to note that, like seemingly every security system that has preceded it, this system can be defeated by those who benefit most from doing so. For example, spammers can pay a programmer to aggregate these images and feed them one by one to a human operator, who could easily verify hundreds of them each hour. The efficacy of visual verification systems is low, and their usefulness is nullified once they are commonly exploited.’

I easily found something is hiring CAPTCHA solving team, http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/NET-Website-Design/fast-captcha-project.439814.html, for instance.

(II) A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/jeff.yan/msn_draft.pdf

‘It took on average ~80 ms for the attack to completely segment a challenge on a desktop computer with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 CPU and 2 GB RAM. As a result, we estimate that this Microsoft scheme can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%. ‘

60% success rate in hacking the system is almost as same as success rate from average users, so again, CAPTCHA does not keep spammer away while making our sites inaccessible to.  My own sucess rate of CAPTCHA is probably 50% haha.  I’m worst than a bot you see.

But What are we gonna do without CAPTCHA??? Recommendations:

Why do we need CAPTCHA? It’s because we want to get rid of spam. With all the research I have put together and discussing with engineers from all cross of life, I’ve distill the following potential routes:

1. We’d need some sort of reputation system that will surface trusted users content (algorithm based, factoring in variables such as membership length, history of abuse/content removed, human-filters such as community manager assigning special reputation levels).  Askimet does this rather well and they offer both commercial and free to use API for private use.
2. Comments with similar syntax and semantics should be analysed with a variable confidence level for spam filtering

Of course this is a filtered version that I can share openly.  At work I have been documenting everything to a point where I am called the ‘abuse lady’.  How I love my job! :)

Okay finally I have noticed new strands of suspected Wordpress spam:

‘Dear there! how are you?
thanx for such opportunities to readers.They are with very appriciable advantage in changing readers mind and makes them wise-men.at the same time I want to appriciate for the one who gave comment in no3 above.I hope such persons stand to be globalistic and fully rational.
Thanx once again’

‘Hi there !how are you ? are you fine? I hope so .Here below is the comment I want to give for your advise shared me>these words of the wisemen shared to readers are realy valuable.They are just like daily shool room concepts like a good teacher giving you course in the class.I understand this in such a way that i am happily saying you are realy great men and make this your custom to share us as daily breakfast so that we can have global concepts.’

It took me a few serious moments to consider if they are actual comments or not, but my conclusion is that they look too much like machine generated text based on my blog content, similar to those generated by Dada Engine (created by Andrew C. Bulhak at the Monash University)* – an engine that randomise phrases to create post-modernist text.

Hmm.. now that get me into thinking how an open source, global, scalable solution would be like…. /headache

*Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (2004) Fooled by Randomness. p73. Penguin Press

1. A professional window to share your knowledge and join the conversation

Social Media Gurus like Jeremiah Owyang use blogs as his professional medium for outreach and aggregates information as well as shares knowledge.  By opening up his blogs on various topics, he manages to attract a critical audience of the social media industry while also puts himself in the spot light among the social media practitioners.

To me it’s a bit like what Chris Rock says about relationship, ‘For the first three months, you are not you.  You are a representative of you.’  Probably blogs are not an ideal medium to fully represent who you are (i.e. no drunk photos, please), but blogs are much better medium as the representation of one’s professional self.  Great for networking, industrial visibility, connection with the like-minded.

2. A scrapbook on what you are reading and interested in

Christian Heilman (aka CodePo8, Yahoo! Developer Network’s EU evangelist) sees blogs as a place where he tosses all the pieces he thinks of in one place where he may have to refer back to. Blogs to him are his scrapbook (and obviously the world is his playground). :)  Umber lady geek DivineMissN (who dearly saves delicious bookmarks for me, literally thanks!) is definitely a queen in blog-cious-streaming. Whoops.  Did I just create a new word?

3. A platform for you to keep in touch with people that works better with pull information rather than push

Remember those friends that call you at 11:30 pm and keep on rambling about how their lives are (completely disregard of whether you are busy or, dare to say, care or not)?  Blogs are great medium to share what you are up to, especially for geeks on the go – you might not have the time or enough drives to call someone up and talk about BarCamp London and how it’d go – but once you blog about it, people who care will find you and will keep in the loop on what you do.  And better yet – it only takes them 2’secs to leave you a comment, or track-back if they’re blogging anyway.  Great for keeping in touch with people that you kinda care, but not enough to pick up the phone.  (Note: I am not saying that calling someone or meeting someone for a coffee is bad – but there are friends that you do truly care while you just really want to know that they do well, and you are perfectly aware that they work 14 hours a day!).  However, it seems that Facebook does serve very well for this purpose for the non-bloggers in this world… So does Twitter.

4. An alternative medium outside emails and phone that helps open communications and reduce correspondence volume

Luis Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post.  Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to refute the idea that we save time to build information on top of existing one, rather than to create information from scratch.  Wikipedia is a good example.  Documenting information about Hong Kong on Wikipedia is likely to benefit thousands of internet users, as opposed to those junior highschool projects where you start from scratch and only your parents and your teachers get to see what you’ve accomplished.  Not to mention no one else can build on top of you brilliant work.  Because of the hypertext-trackable nature of blogs, it is obviously a great medium for knowledge to be documented and grow on one and others while benefiting anyone who care enough to check out the strain of information.

5. A personal yet paradoxically open space for you to share emotions that you might not share with your mom, but in a form of poems with people you may never meet

Are you ready for this?  I’m getting contentious, as usual.  Blogs can be an environment similar to the Alcoholic Anonymous clubs – where you meet people that you never knew, but who are going through the same kind of issues at the same time as you do and would really love to hear about your emotions, experience and feedbacks, vice versa.  A good use of blogs in this context is MacMillan’s use of blogs for cancer patients and their family to share what they go through.  Just like [hypothetically example, totally] your highschool best friend might take no interests in your stress in planning for a Bali holiday when she’s about to be sacked from her investment bank (and hence you go to tripadvisor instead of calling her), blogs become this paradoxically open space for people to share their most intimate reflections, thoughts, doubts and dreams.

Now, what is your blog? Probably this question is much easier to be answered in retrospect than when you set out to start a blog.  For me (yup it’s all about me me me here, I’m sorry), I am stuck because my blog has always been my personal playground, scrapbooks, and thinking pads to share some very naunced reflections.  But working in the social media industries, gathering all the insights and learnings, I feel bad not sharing those with a wider audience outside my firm.

You might ask, what’s stopping me?  Well, being a keen observer on the sociology of collaboration, and as someone who is hyper risk adverse (which makes me a good social policy paranoid), I have, frankly, no appetitte for unfriendly strangers.  Let me give you an example. Kathy Sierra, an amazing techkie lady who founded the Creating Passionate Users blog, attracted an amazing crowd of followers and supporters, and I was truly very inspired and concurred with her observations and learnt a lot from her.  Sadly she stopped her blog at the peak if its development due to malicious personal threats.  Why?  In Chinese, we say that ‘Being at the peak also brings you frosty chills’.  It’s great to have the attention of the people that think alike, who care about the future of technologies, pursuing our passions, being people closers.  But we must not forget that there are those who are hurt, angry, and frustrated.  The more prominent you are, the more likely you attract those attention as well.

All in all, I feel comfortable enough back to blogging now.  And probably there is no point about pre-determining and risk-assessing everything you do.  Or perhap there is?  Don’t have the answers here.  Thanks for bearing with this long post.  Hope you have a great time blogging, sharing, and learning from one another.

For those who’re interested in the presentation on Wikipedia’s Community deep dive, check out the deck here:

| View | Upload your own

It’s been almost 4 years since I started observing and learning from the growth of the Wikipedia community… so the deck is actually pretty dense, and I’ve been too swarmed to do any fancy ppt magic – forgive me!  Any comments/questions, just give me a shout!

Oh and Rain requested me to post a photo of me playing with Diablo under Ian’s patient instruction,

Incidentally the one and only one computer game I was addicted was Diablo I – I killed Diablo when I was 14! Probably more than just once as well.. Thanks Ian for bringing back my Über geek memories…

A while ago I wrote about the buzz around Fire Eagle, and I’m happy to announce that Steve Marshall is giving a presentation on Fire Eagle, at the Over the Air hack day here at Imperial College.

In nutshell, Fire Eagle is,

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy, [...] We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.

An interesting example Steve started with is a Wikipedia-Geo app wikinear.com – which finds Wikipedia pages near you geographically. That’s pretty awesome – the brilliant thing is the results – such as ‘Tokyo Diner’, ‘West End of London’, ‘The Ivy’ etc when you’re in London. Pretty cool, imagine when you’re strolling in new city – you literally become a walking Wikipedia :) :) :) One person asked how Fire Eagle knew where you were, and Steve mentioned that some Nokie updaters worked with Fire Eagle, and since it’s completely open, users can actually play around and check out how your phone can sync with Fire Eagle.

*Privacy note: You can purge your data from Fire Eagle anytime, and you can ‘hide’ yourself as well, more information check out readwriteweb’s review.

*For developers: A Yahoo! Group for Fire Eagle Developers (at the time of writing there are 450 members).

*Update: Steve’s blog on Fire Eagle links here.

Pardon my lazy and not-so-academically-precise paraphasing – medium gets hotter if they deliver information on an one-way street, such as books. Authors decide the narratives and the rythm of wich the stories are being told. On contrary, medium gets colder if users are given more discretions in responding to it, such as the Internet, which can be quite user-oriented if you think about it.

Incidentally my movie-guru mate, Ed, had kindly reminded on tonight’s BBC program, ‘Imagine’.

It explores the potential of the Internet and interviews some of the main key figures, such as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; David Weinberger, the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined (great overviews of the New Media and its potential). It was nice seeing them as a reminiscent to the Wikimania conference last summer (actually Weinberger has kindly posted about my presentation :D) (I know I know, I’m being, well to some, a geek)… Over all it’s balanced and informative documentary on how the Internet provided opportunities for user-generated content, with prominent examples like youtube and myspace. But – their criticisms or suggested potential threats about the Internet remain a bit over-simplified by viewing the corporations as the monsters. I do hesitate to agree with this traditional dichotomization of commercial-as-being monster versus participatory-as-the-saint argument.

There are, well, various degrees of ‘evilness‘, so as to speak. For example, although Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all agreed to bend their corporate practices in China, they did it substially differently. While Yahoo had been accused of leading to the imprisonment of the Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, by giving out his personal information, Google vowed to do no evil – and so far – apart from imposing censorship, Google has not given out personal information of its users. In Zuckerman’s words,

In launching Google.cn, Google made an interesting decision – they did not launch versions of Gmail or Blogger, both services where users create content. This helps Google escape situations like the one Yahoo faced when the Chinese government asked for information on Shi Tao, or when MSN pulled Michael Anti’s blog. This suggests to me that Google’s willing to sacrifice revenue and market share in exchange for minimizing situations where they’re asked to put Chinese users at risk of arrest or detention.

Obviously I also understand that for an one-hour program, they have done what possible to fill in the information matrix. What I like in particular, is that I get to see the author of the 1 millionth article on Wikipedia as well as Clay Shirky in ‘real’ for the first time. And may I say – he’s actually quite charming. (Yes I like reading his blogs on many-2-many).

Finally – hm everyone is talking about second life now.. I downloaded it months ago and never have time to play with it. A quick yardstick would be there are already 17,723 photos on flickr. For those who are interested in knowing what it is but dont’ bother to start one for yourself, flickr is a good way to start your exploration. The only question I have is the copyright policy of the secondlife – how far can I play around with the screen captures? One prof was kind enough to share a moment of having a meeting with grad students on second life,

For more information, please visit their wiki.

I am grateful to First Monday Online Peer-review Journal for sponsoring me as a referred speaker at the conference FM10: Openness, Code and Science 2006. I am also grateful to Harvard University’s Berkman Center of Internet and Society and the Wikimedia foundation, which sponsored me as a speaker of the Wikimania Conference 2006 and enabled my presence as a ‘Veteran Wikimaniac’ :)

I am severely indebted to Prof. Andrew Lih (user:fuzheado), a New Media guru and expert in Wikipedia. Andrew has infested me with his enthusiasm and respect of the community. Together, Andrew and Mei taught me lessons not just about research, but what it takes to be happy, and to give back to others. To all the Wikipedians, in particular, Samuel Klein, Phoebe Ayers, James Forrester, Austin Hair and Delphine Ménard; for their generosity and kindness, who inspired me and made me laugh during the hardest time. Also I am grateful to the Chinese Wikipedians, in particular ShiZhao, Isaac Mao, and Titan Deng, who taught me about faith and courage.

To my external CPUs – Lokman Tsui, who has been my best friend and companion during this conquest and shows me the integrity and values of an academic. To my mentors, in particular, Li Cho and John Yang, who told me if they had a daughter they wanted her to be me. My crazy and beautiful girlfriends, Vivian and Joe, who always call me up to make sure my sanity aligns with theirs. Alex Ortolani, who has always been so supportive and genuinely interested in this research topic, and generously offered me his time when I needed it the most.

To the smartest woman I have ever met, Marissa Dean. I know it sounds lame, but my life was never the same since I met you. You show me what it means to be a responsible and loving daughter, friend, companion, wife and mother – Sammy, Emily and Theo are always my sunshine. It will take longer than a thesis to describe what you have done for me – thank you for everything – I am forever indebted to you.

During the write-up of this thesis, there are people I care about the most but get to see the least. Dad, thank you for putting up with all the unrealized ‘I will have dim-sum with you tomorrow’ promises. Bonnie and Alice – sorry for randomly yelling at you guys when I was frantically working – thank you for the moral support, and the constant reminders that sisters are forever.

Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my mother, Sandy Lo, who never ceases to amaze me. Always giving generously and never asking for anything in return, you are my role model and my muse. I hope you will enjoy this story I wrote when thinking of you. A story about humanity, trust, and the promises of a community. May everyone in this planet have access to knowledge and happiness, as much as it sounds like a dream; I hope this dream will come true.

That’s already one week in Boston and 4 more weeks before London? I only have a month in Hong Kong and I already start missing the place. But I know I will have fun in London… Just gotta round up my thesis now. Lok gave me some good advice in the importance of having a coherent framework, and by presenting in Wikimania I get to see how to explain the organizational issues using social capital as the framework. Basically there are bridging and bonding social capitals, which exert dynamic impacts on the level of transparency and rationalization that determines the efficiency in information flow and decision-making. Will elaborate more on the thesis. I know, they sound like crap right now. /smile

Wikimania was great this year for the guest speakers. I was absolutely blown away to nowhere by Lessig’s presentation. He is really talented in convincing people – the slices followed his speech and hammer the words into the audience with content, audio and video here.
One big difference between Wikimania 1.0 and 2.0 here is the concentration of the crowd. Since there is no central social arena, like an open space with cafe, conveniently located somewhere in the heart of the conference location, people were always floating around making it harder to chill with one another. But of course, Harvard is nice place to be. I was so relieved that after the first two days the weather got back to normal again.

Today studied with mom on her exam. The stuff was – dense. I never know exactly what the heck auxilary transitive bare infinitive verb froms are. I’m so proud of her, really, that’s just one amazing sweet woman there. I am lucky to have her in my life.

Okay enough bs. Got to work on the cultural studies thing tonight. Well. Three more minutes tonight. It’s now 11:53 pm already. :)

Finally I need to thank Andrew, Lok, Delphine, Sj, James, Austin, Erica, and PHOEBE for making this event so unforgettable to me :) I love you guys!!!!

with jimbo in the middle… Photo Courtesy to Andrew Lih

Jimbo started the keynote with the Colbert’s Analysis on Wikipedia and this:

/Refering to John Seigenthaler incident: ‘Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia’

/everybody laughed

He also mentioned what Wikipedia needs, especially when it comes to representativeness. With the Wikimedia Foundation maturing, it is easier to apply grant and start other projects. Introducing Brad Patrick, interim CEO of the Foundation, legal issues now have better ways to deal with (there was no legal advisor for Wikimedia projects for quite a few years). There is the dicussion of the future plans of Wikipedia and directions, such as bringing in people who share the Wikipedia philosophies and to support further development of MediaWiki, Wikiwyg and lower the technological entry barrier of Wikipedia.

Moreover it is imperative to note issue of quality versus quantity. With more than one million articles, it’s time to focus more on quality development. Also with this wider scale of articles, the amount of celebrity-entries (living biographies) increased substantially. Those are the articles that pose complaints and problems from their bio ‘targets’.

/..to be cont.

Talking about being lucky, I was being put togethr with Judith Donath, Ass,.Prof at MIT to talk about the social aspects of technology.  Man I’m now working on the presentation.  I hope I will make sense today!