In discussions online (particularly in Google+), there is a very interesting strand that relates to how what I'm going to call "social tech" is creating a new way.
But first, a matter of definitions.
Social tech, to me, is that entire system of technologies that makes social interaction with peers far simpler. Sharing ideas, information, knowledge. Building friendships with people that you would most likely never have met, being exposed to new ways of seeing as a matter of course. The value of networks.
Search, and especially semantic search, to make the retention of knowledge less valuable than how it is dealt with. All ever so slightly related, and all building a web that becomes "social tech".
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| The value of networks. Source: The Upcoming |
As is my wont, I tend to see how social tech flows directly into waste management, or more importantly, resource recovery.
What is waste?
Waste is generated because there is a failure to connect people who generate byproducts with people who can use those byproducts. With nobody available to use the byproducts, they can only be thrown away. That failure to connect may be related to a whole array of factors, some of which are:
- price (the cost to take it to somebody who can use the byproducts is greater than the cost for throwing it away)
- information (generator doesn't know that the byproduct has an alternative to disposal, potential users don't know that the byproducts exist)
- time (time mismatch between when byproducts are generated and they are needed)
- quality (byproducts are not of sufficient quality for others to use)
There are, no doubt, more.
Reframing waste
The point is that, in reframing waste as a problem of connection, we open up a whole new set of tools to resolve it. The metaphor shifts.
Rather than seeing waste as a part of a process of logistics, we can now consider is as a process of understanding. It's not a matter of optimising a single path, but instead optimising the means to find many paths. It is not waste, but a byproduct.
If we can overcome the shortfall in knowledge (as search has achieved in social tech), then the metaphor of social media may become increasingly real. Having increasingly perfect knowledge of the production of byproducts around a place means that the next step is to knit that information into a web connecting producers and users, delicate but incredibly powerful.
Rather than trying to create this web from a point of controlling all knowledge (an impossible and fruitless task), the social tech metaphor can continue. A central coordination falls away in favour of a peer-to-peer coordination and processing of data.
Connections and synchronicity
Just as happens in social tech, people are tagged in to information that they need to know, and the quality of their experience hinges on the depth of their networks. We hunt for serendipity, not efficiency. We look for ways for radical new ideas to emerge.
Tying into some work that quantifies serendipity, the greatest driver of serendipity in human networks is the number of connections. Many local connections makes serendipity more likely. That is kind of intuitive. Perhaps the same applies to byproducts. Having a large swarm of people around data may make it more likely that a new idea will emerge.
The objective to all of this is to reduce friction in the transfer of byproducts from producer to user.
This is not (yet) a well rounded argument, but I find it a fascinating field of enquiry. I don't quite know if social tech as a solution for waste management is just loopy utopian thinking, or has the kernel of something truly incredible. I tend to think the latter, and want to continue to explore the ideas in future posts.
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