I'm going to offer some in-line responses here to your two posts, flagged by [dbh:]. Since I don't know either of you, let me introduce myself. I founded CompuMentor in 1987 with a $2,500 seed grant. Today we employ about 150 people. You can read more about the many things these people do at http://www.compumentor.org and http://www.techsoup.org Prior to starting CompuMentor, I was a journalist with the New York Times and others, and a political activist. My bio is at http://www.netsquared.org/about/team#Daniel (although it's two years old, so I'm even further south of 50 than is Don.) Fwiw, I started CompuMentor on one of the first virtual communities, the Well, and have spent a lot of time on others over the years. Ok, on to my responses.

(Holden's post)

First off, I want to say that NetSquared has done some huge things really well, and I admire and appreciate that. There are a lot of exciting new tech tools around these days; NetSquared has sought out the people who want to use them for equally exciting purposes, people who look at these tools and see not just personal entertainment and networking but also liberation, meritocracy, and the chance to make the world a truly better place. They've found more of these people than anyone expected, and that's awesome. Both for issuing the call and publicizing it, NetSquared deserves a ton of credit.

[dbh:] Thanks.

There are also major frustrations for me, in terms of how much better this could be than it has been so far. I want to express these now, while they're fresh in my mind and before the winners are announced, so that once the announcement is made I (and NetSquared) can focus on those 20 projects. I tend to focus on the negative, because doing so is just so much more useful than focusing on the positive - I hope that people will understand that and take what I say here as an attempt to improve things, not tear them down.

[dbh:] I understand but I disagree. I have had a different experience in my life than you apparently have had in yours. Constructive criticism is of great value, but context is everything . I personally tend to focus on the positive and try to lead by example rather than criticism. So our mileage on this varies.

3 frustrations, in order of importance:

1. The extreme lack of substantive dialogue on this website. By substantive dialogue, I specifically mean criticism, because praise is cheap and criticism is how things improve. The lack of criticism here has been nothing short of shocking. Look through people's project proposals and the comments on them; look through blog posts; look at what the Net2 staff themselves have written. You'll see a ton of self-promotion; a ton of mutual admiration; lots of people tearing their hair out over having "too many choices." You'll rarely see a substantive criticism of a project, and those you see never go more than a couple lines deep. Speaking personally, almost every single friend and potential donor I have talked to about GiveWell has given me more tough questions, and more to think about, than I have gotten out of the ENTIRE NetSquared experience cumulatively. A total of 3 people asked any questions at all on our project proposal page; only 1 of them stayed around for more than one round or asked anything beyond the very most basic questions ("How much transparency?", "Why do you need money?") I specifically sought out feedback in several comments, and the only response I got was of zero value (the defining disappointment of this experience).

I got a lot of praise for our project. That's worthless. That doesn't lead to improvement. The value of dialogue is to challenge, confront, and end up somewhere better than where I started. Every dinner-party conversation I've had about GiveWell has given me more of this than the entire NetSquared community. That's a major disappointment, because I really want thoughts on our project and I hoped our project would benefit from dialogue whether or not we made the top 20. That turned out not to be the case.

[dbh:] Valid point,up to a point. No one presented Net2 as a formed community. It is a forming community. Having spent a lot of time in virtual communities, I totally agree that noise tends to drive out signal and design is important. The test of our design will be over time, as you point out below. What has taken place up to now--including the first Net2 Conference in 2006--is a preamble to what we think will be a very different kind of community in which the feedback level is infinitely higher than it has been to date. My frustration with reading your comments, Holden, is that while you seem to understand and place some value on an evolutionary process, your gist is that in the course of the four or so weeks projects were posted, the dialogue wasn't up to the level of face to face conversations you had with what I would assume are trusted sources at dinner parties. Of course it wasn't. How could it possibly be? With all the resources in the world, the Omidyar Network encounters many of the same issues you raise here after 2-3 years of operation. I don't think you're taking a long view.

To be fair, there were a lot of projects to read, and I didn't leave comments on other people's - I tried to compromise by offering feedback to anyone who specifically requested it (two people did), but it wasn't the most convenient forum. I do think this problem of little substantive dialogue reflects on the design of the forum (see below) rather than necessarily on the people involved.

2. Netsquared's unexplained and unjustified faith in "its community." Bad online communities (flaming, chaos, randomness) outnumber good ones 300:1, but the good ones grow and take over the web and become famous through natural selection. That doesn't mean the wisdom of crowds doesn't exist - it means it is rare, and comes about through ingenious top-down design, not by default. NetSquared's community hasn't been designed, established, or selected in the way that all good online communities (Digg, Wikipedia, etc.) have been. Therefore, there is simply no reason to expect great things from it. I'm not trying to be a pessimist, just a realist. Good online communities are the exception, not the rule; NetSquared hasn't done any sort of investigation to determine which it's working with; yet there's been an assumption that this is a great online community (I'd argue that it isn't, at least as of now - see #1). It would have been easy to experiment - have a "crowd vote" worth 1 vote, for example - and try to assess the community before putting trust in it; but NetSquared opted instead for blind faith.

[dbh:] What you call "blind faith", I would call "iterative process." I do agree with much of what you wrote just above; I think few people are more critical than I am of the almost inevitable dumbing down of most online communities. We're trying something very different here. We thought we could access a potentially large but inchoate group of interested parties of very different kinds. We chose to 'convene' them around a specific task--the nominations and the vote. We very consciously didn't screen or qualify the community and we very consciously decided to permit and encourage projects to encourage their stakeholders to register and vote. We knew that this would tilt in favor of projects with installed user bases, but guess what. A bunch of projects with big bases *that they tried to invoke* didn't win. A bunch of projects with no discernible bases did win. And of the projects that successfully invoked their bases, I would say that the ability to motivate your base to participate in something like this is a pretty fair indicator (among others, to be sure) of success for a social web project.

In sum: Imperfect? Absolutely! Improveable? Sure. A good start on a long journey? I think so. The bloggers you disagree with think so. And if we take your first paragraph at face value, *you* think so.

3. My blogging buddies hailing this as a "watershed event for democracy" before anything has, you know, happened. This is the least important, but most surprising, frustration, because I think Phil, Lucy and Sean are all smart people and I enjoy and respect their blogs (and it should be clear that I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it). The watershed event for democracy isn't when someone proclaims an election, but when the system actually turns out to work, and that's something we just won't know in this case for a long time. We don't even know what projects were selected yet, or who voted – we have no idea whether the selection process worked well. And of course, the real test will be 5-10 years down the line, when we evaluate whether the projects NetSquared sponsors are actual successes.

[dbh:] I think we'll know something much sooner than that.

It's one thing to say (as I did at the top) that NetSquared is a great idea and has generated an impressive level of participation. It's another to declare "mission accomplished" as the troops are piling into the boat.

[dbh:] Yes, but if you didn't have a standing army beforehand, you might be entitled to a bit of satisfaction at watching the boats fill up. (end of military metaphor).

If you come away from this post with one paragraph, please make it the first paragraph. It's easy to criticize and hard to do something well, and NetSquared has done the latter. And nothing's ever perfect – I'm not surprised at all that the first attempt at building this online community hasn't resulted in good dialogue (as I said, building an online community is incredibly hard). I'm much more surprised that so many people have actively not recognized this difficulty, declaring a democratic revolution and trust in a community that doesn't yet exist. But it won't bother me as long as we abandon that attitude now, stepping back and treating the failures as learning experiences for next year. Either way, I hope to see as much discussion, criticism, and improvement as possible for whatever 20 projects are chosen.

[dbh:] Spot on. That is very much the next stage, and this is the stage when we firmly expect a very different level of dialogue and a lot of constructive tough criticism. It seemed pretty apparent, we thought, that 50, let alone 150, projects were only going to get hit and miss treatment from the gathering throng. Some projects got some real value. Some didn't. We wanted it to be deeper but we weren't startled that it was haphazard, We also knew that a public nominating+voting process would get juices flowing and result in a primed group of interlocutors for the 21 featured projects. And we have been planning on several key design elements that start now--e.g. directly linking projects with VCs who will help deconstruct and reconstruct business thinking...and lining up some really smart panelists to forego "nonprofit niceness" and really grill the projects at the Conference. These next six week are *all* about making the 21 projects better than they are now so they can make the best possible case, not just at the Conference but in their ongoing evolution. (p.s. We don't think praise is worthless and really appreciate yours.)

(Don's Post)

Frustrations shared

Yes, a virtual community does not work like a real community, and your harsh but just and important criticism should put this wanabee community to grow into something real.

When reading your blog, I tried to reflect on my own behaviour in Netsquared. Why didn't I get involved in substantive dialogue, why accept the emphasis on process and not on content?
First of all, it became clear to me that I don't feel part of a community: I get the picture that some Netsquare people know each other (maybe even in real life), but I still don't know anybody. Yes, I have had some communication with some of the other nominators; with one (Sandra) I even shared some rather lengthy comments, but communication to me is more than electrons flying around. Indeed, I am on the other side of 50 (just), so I am not used to a virtual second life, nor do I feel like I miss something terribly nice or important. Real communication for me is only possible when you know the background of somebody, when you can trust the person, when you know what drives him or her to say and act like he/she does. From many of the proposals I could not get the feeling, nor of the blogs (which often indeed were self-promoting; why having to put almost every day a blog with nice pictures of people in need to help us support H.E.L.P? Is this really the level of discussion/promotion we need when trying to evaluate proposals???). I tried to contact several nominators of other proposals; by e-mail I even tried to make an appointment with some nominator from Peru, because I will be visiting the country soon, but I did not even get an answer.

[dbh:] Don, my basic response to this is: Yes. I think you're right on all points. I would only qualify by saying that this level of churn seemed to us inevitable and not all that bad for the first phase. Now, I would say, there is a greater (though still not huge of course since we're all pretty new to each other) amount of mutual familiarity and a winnowing that will enable real attention. Let's see what the next six weeks brings on this level.

Anyway, if Netsquared want to really get something going, a lot of attention will have to be put on community development.

Secondly, I did not feel comfortable critisizing even the proposals that in my opinion are complete nonsense or worse. For one, being a nominator myself, I don't want to be seen as someone that wants to put others down in order to get himself on top. Secondly, of several topics I did not judge myself capable of making sensible comments as I had no clue about how realistic the proposals were, or even whether they were not a plain scam. Of one particular proposal I tried to figure out whether the nominator could be found on the web related to the things he/she referred to in his proposal: I could not find anything convincing. This does not mean that there is indeed something wrong with the proposal, but there is no easy way to check whether there is or is not something wrong. I reported my doubts to the organizers, but what can be done to safeguard quality and ensure honesty?

[dbh:] Once again, Yes. I shared all these concerns. We thought the upside of getting to where we are now (and, remember, the volume of interest generated, with the consequent infrastructural demands, exceeded our expectations--and capacities--by a lot) warranted the downside of having an admittedly mixed bag of projects. I basically followed the same course you did. With twenty projects (not that *they* aren't a mixed bag) to focus on, I think the dynamic changes a great deal. Let's find out.

Also, having worked in multicultural environments for quite some time, I am a bit carefull with giving criticism: being Dutch I am often considered too blunt.

[dbh:] Yeah, you Dutch guys... (which reminds me that 10% of the Featured Projects--yours and Nabuur are Dutch. We're going to reexamine the vote right now.)

You never know whether a suggestion is seen as indeed a suggestion or as a statement trying to kill the project of the other.

Regarding NetSquared unjustified faith in its community; the basic idea is here that quantity will result in quality: when more people chose their preferred project, the more likely it is that the better projects will pop up. This is not necessarily true: people with a lot of contacts, dependents or means to put others to work for them can rig the vote; secondly, some promiscous and capable self-promotors may make people loose sight on projects of nominees that are not so good at marketing, or that are more reluctant to misuse the given opportunity.
So a kind of decent behaviour is needed or voting and promotion should be arranged in a different way.

[dbh:] I see it a bit differently. The hypothesis wasn't that quantity will result in quality. The hypothesis was that in engaging a lot of people but using a format that encouraged people (we couldn't force them of course, but we could throw out their ballot if they gave more than one vote to any one project, and we did) to consider and vote for other projects than the one that recruited them....we would forge the beginning of a community that we could build out in a significant way. People came into N2 through various doors. Many of them will leave. Some will stay and contribute mightily. Or so we hypothesize.

Anyway, also for me (not knowing the outcome at the moment of writing this), the experience was interesting (not in the sense of 'interesting food' when refering to something you do not really want to eat..., but really interesting. Partly because of seeing what other people are doing, partly because I recognize that NetSquared is searching for something new, something promising. It is not there yet, but in a process like this it is easier to make mistakes than to do everything good right away.

[dbh:] amen

So to the organizers that read this, please see my comments as I meant them to be: contributing to the improvement of NetSquared. And please, continue with your good work.

Friendly greetings to all and thanks to those that voted for Farmer 2 Farmer Learning

[dbh:] I'm glad you wrote this post. Thanks. Congratulations and see you at Cisco

Yes, a virtual community does not work like a real community, and your harsh but just and important criticism should put this wanabee community to grow into something real.

When reading your blog, I tried to reflect on my own behaviour in Netsquared. Why didn't I get involved in substantive dialogue, why accept the emphasis on process and not on content?
First of all, it became clear to me that I don't feel part of a community: I get the picture that some Netsquare people know each other (maybe even in real life), but I still don't know anybody. Yes, I have had some communication with some of the other nominators; with one (Sandra) I even shared some rather lengthy comments, but communication to me is more than electrons flying around. Indeed, I am on the other side of 50 (just), so I am not used to a virtual second life, nor do I feel like I miss something terribly nice or important. Real communication for me is only possible when you know the background of somebody, when you can trust the person, when you know what drives him or her to say and act like he/she does. From many of the proposals I could not get the feeling, nor of the blogs (which often indeed were self-promoting; why having to put almost every day a blog with nice pictures of people in need to help us support H.E.L.P? Is this really the level of discussion/promotion we need when trying to evaluate proposals???). I tried to contact several nominators of other proposals; by e-mail I even tried to make an appointment with some nominator from Peru, because I will be visiting the country soon, but I did not even get an answer.
Anyway, if Netsquared want to really get something going, a lot of attention will have to be put on community development.

Secondly, I did not feel comfortable critisizing even the proposals that in my opinion are complete nonsense or worse. For one, being a nominator myself, I don't want to be seen as someone that wants to put others down in order to get himself on top. Secondly, of several topics I did not judge myself capable of making sensible comments as I had no clue about how realistic the proposals were, or even whether they were not a plain scam. Of one particular proposal I tried to figure out whether the nominator could be found on the web related to the things he/she referred to in his proposal: I could not find anything convincing. This does not mean that there is indeed something wrong with the proposal, but there is no easy way to check whether there is or is not something wrong. I reported my doubts to the organizers, but what can be done to safeguard quality and ensure honesty?

Also, having worked in multicultural environments for quite some time, I am a bit carefull with giving criticism: being Dutch I am often considered too blunt. You never know whether a suggestion is seen as indeed a suggestion or as a statement trying to kill the project of the other.

Regarding NetSquared unjustified faith in its community; the basic idea is here that quantity will result in quality: when more people chose their preferred project, the more likely it is that the better projects will pop up. This is not necessarily true: people with a lot of contacts, dependents or means to put others to work for them can rig the vote; secondly, some promiscous and capable self-promotors may make people loose sight on projects of nominees that are not so good at marketing, or that are more reluctant to misuse the given opportunity.
So a kind of decent behaviour is needed or voting and promotion should be arranged in a different way.

Anyway, also for me (not knowing the outcome at the moment of writing this), the experience was interesting (not in the sense of 'interesting food' when refering to something you do not really want to eat..., but really interesting. Partly because of seeing what other people are doing, partly because I recognize that NetSquared is searching for something new, something promising. It is not there yet, but in a process like this it is easier to make mistakes than to do everything good right away.

So to the organizers that read this, please see my comments as I meant them to be: contributing to the improvement of NetSquared. And please, continue with your good work.

Friendly greetings to all and thanks to those that voted for Farmer 2 Farmer Learning