Shifts and Devices

I’ve just come back from the excellent annual Web of Change conference, held on Cortez Island in BC. Always thought-provoking and often passionate, the conference has sparked a number of thoughts and follow-up projects, some of which will appear on Shifts and Devices over the next few weeks.

One topic that resonated with several of the conference participants was the concept of thresholdware.

Thresholdware is my term for software that stores transactional commitments, then acts on them when a specific critical mass or threshold has been reached. The point of thresholdware is to allow users to commit to an intention that can be carried out successfully only when this predefined tipping point is reached.

Perhaps the clearest example is in fundraising, where a $100,000 project might be built out of many small donations. Using thresholdware allows users to rack a $50 donation onto their credit card, with the knowledge that it will not be processed until enough donations have come in to make the project a success. By using thresholdware, the risk of your donation disappearing into a black hole because a project does not raise enough funds to succeed is eliminated: every donation is actualized in the real world, and donors can be confident that their contribution will make a difference.

The economic concept behind thresholdware is outlined in some detail in Harel Barzilai’s essay ‘On Funding: A Plan to Put the Movement on Solid Financial Basis’. As far as I know, Harel is the originator of the concept, though I would be glad to post other links to similar approaches. It’s the sort of powerful but simple idea that likely has multiple origins, and has just been waiting for the correct conditions to crystallize.

Personally, I consider it a key interface/functionality enhancement, straightforward to code but socially very powerful, with applications that go well beyond fundraising – one of which I will discuss in an upcoming post: ‘Queue|Cue the Revolution’.

Shifts and Devices is reflections on environment, technology and communications.

The title comes from a travel guide from Victorian era that I ran across once in reprint: something like “Shifts and Devices for Travelling in Wild Lands”. Or maybe not – Googling Shifts and Devices does not bring up any such book.

I do consider the emerging future to be a ‘wild land’, as our technological civilization bangs into the limits and constraints of climate change and energy resource depletion, and we make adjustments and try solutions both personally and globally, and these topics will be core to Shifts and Devices.

Since much of my work involves online learning, communications, and the use of Internet technology to support communities and social change, there will also be a strong thread of reflection and comment on software and the web as part of the Shifts and Devices mix.
The intention cloud below shows the blend:

Actual mileage will vary, so it will be interesting to see how the Shifts and Devices tag cloud evolves.

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