participate in "optimism and hope" project?

[chadwhitacre]

A friend of mine is applying for a Templeton grant to research "optimism and hope," and they need a "popular component." I've suggested that Gittip could potentially be a partner in this popular component, as our vision is for an economy explicitly characterized by optimism, and, implicitly, hope.

Here's my initial pitch to him:

It occurs to me that Gittip might be a possible fit for the popular component of the Templeton optimism and hope project. We arrived at a mission statement recently and it actually includes the word "optimism":

Gittip's mission is to redeem the economy.

We envision a future in which the economy is characterized by trust, collaboration, cooperation, sharing, openness, transparency, care for one another, inclusion, inspiration, purpose, generosity, patience, empathy, optimism, and love.

https://www.gittip.com/for/contributors/mission-statement.html

We've got anecdotal evidence that receiving a small amount on Gittip can inspire optimism and hope seemingly out of proportion to the actual amount of the gift:

https://twitter.com/fabien_doiron/status/357567103299121152 https://twitter.com/andrei_mateescu/status/366130815425458176 https://twitter.com/aclark4life/status/306777370604470272 https://twitter.com/tehgeekmeister/status/293086898052812802

What if for the Templeton project you gave away a chunk of money as no-strings-attached gifts through Gittip, and then looked at the effect that had on optimism and hope as well as economic productivity? The big outstanding question for Gittip is whether optimism and hope can be the basis for a productive economy. In the terms of our conversation last night, can we have technical excellence and optimism and hope?

Anyway, let me know if you think there's anything here. I'm probably off-base and this doesn't line up with the purpose of the grant, but if you do want to chat more then maybe we can try to get together for coffee before you leave.

And here's his initial reply:

My collaborator is interested, but the foundation is giving us trouble about all of our outside-the-box ideas regarding the ‘public component’ of our project. We’ll keep thinking about it, but we may have to bag everything at this point and revert to the tried and true “essay contest” (which they seem to like). I will continue to think about how Gittip (which is definitely a hopeful, optimistic venture) might be integrated into this.

To which I replied:

Ah, well. Thanks for following up. If anything comes of it, let me know! :-)

That was all two weeks ago. I figured the fire had gone out, but then tonight I heard from him again:

Chad, the thing about this is – how would we actually measure the effect of those weekly gifts on optimism/hope and productivity? Can you imagine a way of teaming up with a psychologist or sociologist to actually gather measurable results?

Still intrigued by this. Check out this “what it funds” document when you have time. Is there a way to write up Gittip that would fit with the “Freedom and Free Enterprise” part of the charter?

At this point I would be remiss, given Gittip's modus operandi, not to move the conversation here, to a public GitHub issue.

[chadwhitacre]

Sent:

Thanks for keeping this going! I didn't expect to hear back from you. :-)

At this point in the conversation I'm afraid I have to make our conversation public, due to the open way that Gittip operates. I don't permit myself to do deals in private, if I can help it. I've posted our conversation to date in Gittip's public issue tracker (on a site called, confusingly, GitHub):

https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1364

If you're up for the adventure, you could create an account on GitHub (it's a project management site currently geared towards software projects; I've talked about it, haven't I?) and we'll pick up the conversation there. I'm also happy to continue communicating via email, in which case I'll proxy your replies over to that public thread. If it's not appropriate to have this conversation in public, then Gittip isn't going to be the right long-term fit.

Are you comfortable with a public conversation? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I've heard from my friend that he's up for having this conversation here. :dancer:

(He asked me to remove one sentence from the initial post above, which I've done.)

[chadwhitacre]

[redacted],

May I encourage you to join GitHub? You'll have immense bragging rights in approximately two to three years, when GitHub has gone mainstream, and it'll make having this conversation much easier, because we won't have to have it in two places at once. GitHub issues integrate with your email, so once you're signed up for GitHub and on this thread then you'll be able to use email to carry on the conversation after all.

As to your questions:

[H]ow would we actually measure the effect of those weekly gifts on optimism/hope and productivity? Can you imagine a way of teaming up with a psychologist or sociologist to actually gather measurable results?

This would be fantastic! I just read a behavioral economics paper, "Effort for Payment," (ht @unbracketed via Twitter) about social and monetary markets, and the characteristics of each with regard to rewards and productivity (tl;dr: unlike in monetary markets, productivity in social markets is immune to changes in reward). The authors there are James Heyman and Dan Ariely, and someone with their expertise would surely be great to have on board. Unfortunately, my network amongst psychologists and sociologists isn't very deep. I've tweeted at Dan, fishing for recommendations. Can't hurt? :-)

Still intrigued by this. Check out this “what it funds” document when you have time. Is there a way to write up Gittip that would fit with the “Freedom and Free Enterprise” part of the charter?

Though it isn't, "freedom" could very well be one of the characteristics of the economy explicitly mentioned in Gittip's vision statement. Just this afternoon I did an interview where I went off on themes related to freedom (and also said, "You know?" way too much :-) ). Here it is, about two minutes long, queued up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq2EUKZtyEU#t=21m50s

On a first pass through "What it Funds," I find a strong resonance between the positive character traits that JTF focuses on and the Gittip vision statement. Certainly Gittip has a strong story around innovation, as well, which is another keyword in "What it Funds." Gittip also hints at a religious overtone with our mission, "To redeem the economy." Gittip wants to transcend current distinctions between free enterprise and social reform. If Gittip doesn't match and exceed the productivity of free enterprise, then it will have failed. The very question Gittip is asking is, Can we have the benefits of free enterprise (as laid out by JTF in "What it Funds"), and dampen some of its drawbacks, including, perhaps, lack of optimism and hope? I'm not sure I'm the right person to draft the language that will speak to JTF, but I think the possibility of alignment is genuinely here.

What would next steps be? Can you help me understand the process we'd be going through to bring a partnership to fruition?

chad

[chadwhitacre]

One way to go about finding a behavioral economist to work with would be to systematically contact Ariely's coauthors.

[adchignell]

Okay, I think I've succeeded in joining and watching this conversation, though I'm not sure whether I should also 'star' and 'fork' it. I'll bone up on Git tools soon, but the grant proposal is due on Tuesday! (Just to clarify your intro above, I'm not directing the research yet, I'm merely applying for the grant. I hope (wouldn't yet say I'm optimistic that) I'll be co-directing research starting next June).

It's important to JTF (and to the professional social scientists we'll fund) to have what psychologists call "measures" that we can use to mark change, so that's why I was asking the question above. Apparently a 'measure' is just a series of questions that are refined through trial and error in an effort to pinpoint precisely the character trait, feature, phenomenon etc that the psychologist is targeting, and bracket out all the noise (hard to do in human psychology obviously). Thus something called the LOT-R (Life Orientation Test - Revised) is now thought to be the best measure out there for optimism. There's nothing like it for hope yet.

[chadwhitacre]

You're a brave man, @adchignell. Welcome to GitHub! :-) "Starring" and "forking" apply to the repository as a whole, and aren't necessary for you to do here. By commenting on this thread you should have implicitly started watching it. If you get this message in your email inbox with a link back to GitHub then you should be all set. Thanks for jumping in! :-)

I've tweaked the opening description of this ticket to reflect that you're still in the application process. Thanks for the clarification.

Gittip's mission is to redeem the economy, so that it becomes characterized by collaboration, trust, optimism, and love. I can imagine few things awesomer than having our progress toward that goal robustly measured. Do people using Gittip become more or less optimistic over time?

We've got 18,000 total users right now, 1,600 of whom are weekly active users (either giving or receiving money, or both, each week on Gittip). At a minimum I'd expect that to double by next summer. Is it too simplistic to suggest that we could apply the LOT-R to a sample of Gittip users periodically? What if we extended the LOT-R with a single extra question:

• Using Gittip makes me optimistic about my future.

By the way, my former employer, YouGov, offers academic-quality Internet polling. If it ends up being valuable to bring that sort of vendor into the mix, let me know and I'll introduce you to them.

[chadwhitacre]

I heard from @adchignell last weekend that they got the grant and the project is kicking off this summer! Unclear yet whether there's a role for Gittip ...

[chadwhitacre]

Closing for now. Will reopen if I hear something.