From payslip to personal crowd-funding

During yesterday's class we discussed the issue of crowd-sourcing - how can an organization, company, or any other entity can leverage the power of other people in fulfilling their objectives.

If we look at this term with a broad view, crowd-sourcing can take many different forms:

- P2P micro loans that allow people who can't access banking services to start up their own business

- A company that out-sources certain tasks to many individuals. The collaborate work is fast and efficient in this manner.

- Leisure and dining review websites that present crowd opinions and more.

Recently, I have come to learn about a new type of crowd-sourcing: direct customer funding by the Patreon platform. 

In general, people who work are either employed by a company or act as free-lancers offering their services to individuals/companies. In this sense, a free-lancer needs to offer some sort of product or service to an individual. The individual than pays for that long-term service or product.

With the evolving of internet and social platforms, people have started offering their services, wisdom, creations, experience online for anyone to consume. 

Take me for example - I'm a software developer in intermediate level. My latest desire is to combine my interest in data vitalization development on the web using  D3.JS with the newest tech available for web development -  React JS. The two techs don't play well together out-of-the-box.

This one blogger, Swizec Teller, has started writing a book and numerous posts about combining these two together. Swizec mentions that he gained some insights about combining these two technologies from other persons, but mostly he's done alot of research and trail-and-error attempts. 

Thanks to Swizec, I'm able to learn new skills. However, while it might take time to Swizec to publish a book, I think he should be credited for his efforts. He puts alot of effort into his work.

Patreon allows me to back him up by, let's say, 5$ a month. 

Combined with other people direct back-ups, Swizec can put more effort into his work which in turn benefits everyone else with new knowledge and skills.

Apart form techy people, artists such as designers, musicians, authors and others can establish a successful crowd base that can back up their publicly available efforts.

Hopefully, with enough backers, Swizec can be less dependent on his payslip and more on his crowd of back-uppers.

After 15 years, does IT still don't matter?

Back in 2003, Nicholas Carr published his article “IT Doesn’t Matter” where he states that as IT become more ubiquitous and easy to consume, they become more invisible. During today’s class, we discussed the question whether a CEO needs to address IT the same as the electric network, as an example of a commodity service.

Today, following 100-150 years of development, electricity is consumed as a service – a person, or a company, contacts the electricity company and gets connected. This is thanks to years of practice that got us to a point that electric lines and infrastructure are taken for granted in new buildings and considered a must-have everywhere. So, a CEO doesn’t need to concern herself with the way the power is supplied, as long as it does in a reasonable price.

If we cast this analogy on the IT era, even though it’s been 15 years since his publication, I don’t think that Mr. Carr is quite right (yet). If we look at IT companies, such as software companies, mobile app developers and other, the CEO must be involved in IT processes as these are the main product or service produced by her company.

What about other companies that are not focused around IT? 

Well, the world is still in a transition towards a 100% IT-as-a-service. Let’s leave aside the possibility that we might get there, we can see that some services are already provided as a service while others don’t. Any company can get computation and storage services using AWS. In the past, the IT manager would have to get the CEO’s approval for server equipment and other high-detail decisions. But with AWS and similar services, the “rails” that run the service are not interesting – only the price and quality. The risk is lower for a waste of budget, as the physical infrastructure risks are out-sourced to Amazon.

And yet, CEOs are expected to still be involved in IT-related decision making that might have strategic implications. Shufersal, a major food retail company in Israel has been trying to go online for more than a decade. The company has an online supermarket website, developed solely for the company. The website is a bit old-fashioned, but was developed as one of the first websites of its type in Israel:

                                                

Recently, Shufersal announced it’s going head-to-head with the upcoming entrance of Amazon retail services in Israel. This decision includes launching of a new website that will offer commerce options that do not rely on food products, but general commerce including imports. This is a strategic decision that requires a huge IT effort and investment – it’s unique for Shufersal. This is the upcoming website current status:

                                              

The CEO must be involved in the details of the effort required for this kind of transition.

On the other hand, other food retail companies in Israel are not interested in going head-to-head with Amazon. Tiv Taam and Mahsanei Hashuk apparently want to focus on their current domain. If you go to the online version of supermarkets that belong to these 2 companies you immediately see they have a really similar user interface:

                                                             

The companies are totally different with different stake holders – we can only conclude that their online supermarket is a product of an online service that allows food retail companies to out-source this need.

So in this case, the investment and risk in establishing an IT support for online retail is probably lower than Shufersal in past days and now.

CEOs cannot still treat all IT aspects as a service, but we’re slowly going there.

Fake News - now and in the 90s

My name is Shaked Kaufman, a Master’s student in Industrial Eng., Ben Gurion University.

This blog is hopefully going to allow me to express my views and opinions about Knowledge Management theory and practices as part of an academic course.

It’s interesting to see the role of “garbage” data in our daily life and how it may influence it greatly.

The term “Fake news” wasn’t coined recently, but it became really popular during the 2016 US presidential elections. Looking at Google Trends (https://g.co/trends/VScNw) we can see that since 2004 the use of this term was pretty sparse, but a surge took place at 2016.

Take The Onion website as a great example for actual fake news. Since 2007 (and even before as a printed edition), the website publishes satiric articles about a wide range of international, local, cultural, political and other issues. All the articles are humor and convey a distorted and sarcastic view of reality. 

What makes The Onion unique, compared to other sources of amusement and humor, is that its articles look genuine as if they were actual news articles. For the casual Joe that bumps into one of their pieces, this might look like very odd news.

Myself, I failed for some time to understand why עמ;לק summarizes such strange articles!

As it dawned on me, there’s a cool service called אמ;לק, the equivalent of TL;DR. The service allows readers to summarize posts and articles for the benefit of other users that want to get the bottom line.

עמ;לק is a satirical service, however, that with a single change of a letter entitled itself with a sophisticated name in Hebrew (referring to an biblical arch-enemy nation of the Israelites). It summarizes real articles in a humor and totally incorrect way.

So no harm there - after few posts I understood my mistake and confusion.

And while sites or services like עמ;לק or The Onion are only meant for humor and fun, in 2016 we learnt that Fake News can be very not amusing and also very dangerous.

Allegedly, it has been reported that Russia intertwined in the US elections using fake posts and news generated in order to influence on the American people opinions and views.

In other cases, men were accused in India for rape or other criminal acts in a WhatsApp message. The messages spread quickly and an angry mob killed those. Whether or not these men actually committed the crimes - they were taken to drumhead court without proper justice measures.

Both the tech companies and the society should address the issues of fake news and the ease which they can be conveyed without cross checks.