The original story, as told in first person on the Kickstarter page, is a great feel-good tale: Mackenzie Wilson talks about how she boasted to her older brothers that she could design a video game, and they didn’t believe her. So she asked her mother Susan if she could go to a STEM camp (which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics) at a local university, where she would be able to study computer games and eventually design one of her own. The original goal for the campaign was just $829.

An inspiring story that turned sour

After the campaign got picked up on Twitter and elsewhere, Mackenzie and her mother raised more than $10,000 in less than 24 hours, and that figure quickly grew to more than $22,000. As with the bus-monitor story, many people seemed inspired to donate far more than was required because they wanted to support the girl and her desire to do something positive. But what happened next shows just how quickly the attitude toward such crowdfunding efforts can reverse itself.

As reported by the Daily Dot, a member of Reddit raised red flags about the campaign with a post about Mackenzie’s mother — including the fact that she was a self-declared multimillionaire entrepreneur who sold a company she co-founded to Kinkos for $100 million, was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Georgetown University, and ran several different businesses, including one that helps banks get money back from customers who default on their loan payments.

The post also included screenshots of a series of identical tweets asking celebrities such as Lady Gaga to promote her daughter’s campaign, something that is against Kickstarter rules.

Wilson told the Huffington Post that she didn’t expect this kind of reaction, and that she never claimed the family couldn’t afford to send her daughter to computer camp. She said that she viewed it as a way of encouraging Mackenzie to stand up for herself and raise her own money for things, like a lemonade stand might have in the past. She also pointed out that there is nothing in the Kickstarter rules that says it is only for people who can’t afford the thing they are raising money for, saying: “I don’t think it’s a need-based system.”

As the Reddit campaign against her picked up speed, Wilson said she was the target of death threats and offensive comments, and that she was afraid to let her daughter find out about how much anger her campaign had caused. In the comments on the Kickstarter page, she said: “I wish I could find a way to make this stop. I’m tired of fighting.”

Crowdfunding campaigns rely on trust

What’s fascinating to look at is how the tone of the comments on the Kickstarter campaign changes over time: at first, they are resoundingly positive, cheering for Mackenzie and her mother for encouraging her to do this. Then after the information about Wilson’s background gets posted, they turn more negative — but there are still lots of people telling her she is doing the right thing. Over time, however, the number of negative responses increases, and some commenters start to question whether it was even Mackenzie’s idea, and criticize Wilson for saying she plans to identify her attackers.

For me at least, this episode feels a lot like what happened to musician Amanda Palmer when she raised more than $1 million from her fans in less than two weeks for a new album and tour. Even though she detailed exactly how she would be using the money, there were still questions raised when she started to invite musicians to play with her for free as part of the tour. She eventually had to respond to those criticisms publicly and repeatedly, and pay the musicians the standard rate.

The lesson from both of these incidents is the same, I think. If you are going to appeal to the crowd for support, then you are essentially striking a bargain with them: they provide money, but you have to do more than just provide whatever the end product is. You have to be as open and transparent as possible and do whatever you can to maintain the trust of those supporters, and that changes the dynamics of the situation completely. And once that trust is lost, the game is effectively over.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz

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In her latest post, Sullivan takes on the case of NYT reporter Scott Shane, who wrote a story about former CIA operative John Kiriakou, a man who is facing a prison term for leaking classified information to journalists, including background information about one of his CIA colleagues and his involvement in a mission to capture a suspected terrorist. The journalist who was given that information — during a series of off-the-record interviews with Kiriakou — was none other than Scott Shane, who described what happened in detail in a recent piece for the Times.

Objectivity, fairness and the “View From Nowhere”

In her post on the story, Sullivan notes that the NYT was criticized by a number of journalists and other observers — including the former director of the investigative reporting unit at the Miami Herald — for allowing someone who was involved in a story to write about it. This was a “glaring conflict of interest,” said the Herald editor, suggesting that the Times should have had someone else write the story and interview Shane to get his side of what happened. But Sullivan disagrees:

“In this case, no one could have told this important tale as well. Those who have read it know more about how government and reporting work than they did before. It’s the kind of story that makes you think; it may make you question the status quo. That’s a pretty good definition of what effective journalism does.”

Sullivan also tackled the broader issue of transparency vs. objectivity a few days earlier, calling it “an increasingly important subject, and a complex one.” She described a conversation with Rosen in which the NYU journalism professor talked about how a rigidly objective piece can become a useless “he said/she said” exercise. “The View from Nowhere is slowly getting harder to trust,” said Rosen, whereas the disclosure by a writer of his or her viewpoint can actually make that person’s work more trustworthy rather than less.

The NYT public editor said she wasn’t prepared to admit that “transparency is the new objectivity” (a phrase coined by David Weinberger of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society), but she agreed that the idea has merit — at least insofar as it means that journalists should “let readers get to know their backgrounds, their personalities and how they do their jobs.” And she agreed that the “view from nowhere” should be tossed out. But she still maintained that expressions of opinion on public issues by reporters was a problem, and that the Times shouldn’t allow it:

“The Times should continue to enforce its rules that bar journalists from the most visible forms of partisanship: contributing to campaigns, joining rallies or making public shows of support for candidates or causes. It would be hard for readers to believe that a reporter who contributed to a campaign or carried a sign in an abortion-related rally could report without bias.”

Transparency doesn’t replace other journalistic virtues

The only problem with this approach is that it’s like King Canute ordering the ocean to stop advancing: banning reporters from rallies is one thing, but what about expressing opinions on Twitter? Is everyone going to get a NYT editor appointed as their dedicated social-media nanny, as Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren recently did? Should reporters be blocked from joining Facebook groups or “liking” certain things? Why is Shane allowed to talk about his reactions to things, but Rudoren isn’t? In a follow-up post to Sullivan’s, Rosen argues this particular horse has already left the barn:

“Viewlessness as a means of trust production in news came with voicelessness for the individual author. That is now ebbing away, especially with social media and two-way interactions between journalists and users… The costs of sticking with the default model in trust production are visible and mounting, and increasingly journalists are looking for a way out.”

Rosen’s larger point, as I understand it, is that transparency and intellectual honesty shouldn’t be seen as antithetical to the other virtues of journalism — things like fairness and accuracy, for example — but should be seen as worthwhile additions to the modern journalist’s approach. Alex Howard of O’Reilly Media wonders whether journalists should adopt a kind of scientific method, by providing their hypotheses and evidence as they construct a story, and that is certainly worth further discussion as well.

In the long run, it’s worth asking what we can gain by allowing reporters to be human beings while they do their jobs, instead of only asking what we lose by doing so, and Sullivan’s posts appear to be a step in that direction — albeit a small one.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Donskarpo and Getty Images/Mario Tama

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But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that price transparency alone could lead consumers to risky conclusions about their need for certain medications and procedures. As part of the study, the researchers, Janet Schwartz of Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business and Adriana Samper of Arizona State University, gave two groups of people two different flu shot prices, $25 and $125.

They found that consumers associated lower medication prices with a greater communal need and, therefore, a greater sense of personal risk and they associated higher prices with less need and less risk. The potential implication: consumers may forgo more expensive medication and procedures on the false belief that they’re less important.

“Price and risk should be very independent from one another, when you think about consumers making informed health care choices,” Schwartz told Kaiser Health News. “But now we see that they are very dependent on one another, in the same way that price and quality are very dependent on one another, and that can lead to some inconsistencies in health care purchases.”

As consumer advocates, policy experts and a growing group of startups try to open up the black box of health care costs, it’s an interesting study to keep in mind.  And the authors argue that more education about risk and need should accompany price transparency efforts.

Comparison shopping in health care is still in its earliest days, but sites like Castlight Health, ClearCost Health, Clear Health Costs, HealthInReach and PokitDok are trying to give consumers more clarity into health care pricing. Getting the data straight from the providers is tricky (although PokitDok and HealthInReach attempt to do this) but using claims data, many of these sites try to provide consumers with the spectrum of price options for a given procedure or visit.

And some already try to give consumers more context – such as physician ratings, outcome data when available and patient reviews. That information may not necessarily give patients more insight into their risk around a particular kind of medication or procedure, but it’s a start.

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What it shows is that censorship varies greatly across the world — some of which stretches the definition of what people usually define as censorship. For example, since the reports began in 2010, the United Kingdom has led the way with 97,891 removal requests, 96,280 of which were for Google’s AdWords.

But the majority of the U.K.’s removal requests occurred in 2010 at the behest of the U.K. Office of Fair trading, which asked for “the removal of fraudulent ads that linked to scams,” according to  the July-December 2010 report. Google removed nearly all of them, more than 93,000 items.

Other nations engage in a much more traditional — at least in a Western sense — censorship. Thailand, for example, has far fewer government removal requests (431), all of which are directed at YouTube for criticizing Thailand’s king. The latest numbers show in the last six months Turkey and the United States have led the world in data removal requests.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the data are the reasons Google was asked to take down content. They provide insight into a government’s priorities and rationale. While Brazil and Hong Kong are diligent about copyright requests, they are so for different reasons: Brazil had 11,613 removal requests directed at Picasa Web Albums, Hong Kong directed its 381 at YouTube. Countries across the world cited pornography as a reason for removal, with Turkey as the most aggressive (557).

And while defamation was the leading worldwide excuse for removal requests, the products that caused the defamation varied greatly, from Web Search to Blogger to AdWords. Take a look at each country to see its frequency and reasoning for petitioning Google.

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Software services and applications are becoming increasingly intertwined with users’ lives. And this connection is leading to increasing concerns about privacy. We have already seen service-to-user dissonance with the recent privacy controversies at Google, Apple and Path. As the co-founders of Glassmap, a real-time location sharing service, we have first hand experience with trying to resolve this dissonance.

Robert Scoble recently criticized Glassmap’s registration process as a severe violation of user privacy. If the “Post to Facebook” option was left checked, an invitation to join Glassmap would show up on the user’s timeline. Glassmap has admittedly benefited from the additional virality. But we also believe that in a boisterous, loose-sharing Facebook landscape, our target market of college students and young professionals benefited from attracting their friends to the service. (We are now eliminating this feature because Facebook told us to.)

However, a minor controversy like this hinders honest discussion regarding the more important issues at hand. Instead of giving into Silicon Valley sensationalism, we’d rather have a real dialogue about online privacy.

There are four things that really matter: real-time adaptiveness, transparency, the right amount of privacy, and user-service symmetry.

1. Real-time adaptiveness

Privacy desires and demands are much more dynamic than Internet companies currently account for. In the real world, we constantly shift privacy thresholds when we move from home to work to shopping to clubbing. Facebook has introduced “lists” and Google has introduced “circles” to more finely tune the complex temporality of users’ privacy preferences. However, even these attempts are curated on static, a priori information. Future services must find ways to dynamically adapt to their users’ shifting privacy thresholds.

2. Transparency

Users should be able to very clearly see what their actual privacy settings are (who they’re sharing with, what they’re sharing with them). They should also have straightforward, simple and fine-grained control of those settings. Social discovery applications like Highlight remove control from the user, allowing anyone the service deems acceptable to obtain your information. “Friends of friends” feels deceptively innocuous, but if your 500 friends each have 500 friends, a quarter million people might have access to your information. This lack of clarity results in the creepiness that is widely associated with these products.

3. The right amount of privacy

As social networks have shown repeatedly, more privacy is not necessarily better. Products cannot assume the user’s privacy preference lies at either extreme (share-everything or share-nothing). Instead, they must try to find the sweet spot in the middle of the continuum. Actions that adjust a user’s settings towards that optimum should therefore be made as easy and automatic as possible, so long as transparency and control are preserved.

4. User-service symmetry

While a lot of effort is spent on the design of both asymmetric and symmetric user-to-user relationships (subscribing, following, friending, etc.), less effort is spent on the relationship between the user and the service. As users offer their information to the service, the service must also present that information back to the user. Many privacy concerns revolve around simply not knowing what information a particular service has collected. Because social products now often act as proxies between users, openness between the service and their users becomes even more important.

This is how we think about privacy. We are optimistic about the power of information, and we are hopeful that a deeper understanding of it will result in meaningful and beneficial technologies for users.

Geoffrey Woo and Jon Zhang are co-founders of Glassmap, a real-time location sharing application available for iOS and Android. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Sean MacEntee.

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The recent furor over NPR host Lisa Simeone’s involvement in a Washington-based offshoot of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests has drawn attention again to the issue of whether journalists should be allowed to have — and express — their opinions about social issues. Some believe that “transparency is the new objectivity,” in the words of author David Weinberger, and that this is appropriate in an age when the web allows for a multiplicity of voices. Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer also falls into this camp, and says the days of asking journalists to pretend that they are automatons without opinions should be coming to an end.

One of the most alarming aspects of Simeone’s case is that she isn’t a political reporter for NPR or even involved in anything political at the public-radio station in Washington she was freelancing for: she hosted a musical documentary program called Soundprint for WAMU, from which she has apparently been dismissed, and was also a host of another show called World of Opera for NPR. Why would NPR or any other public-radio affiliate care whether someone hosting a music program was involved in a social protest? Because the issue of journalists — of any kind, but especially the government-funded kind — having political opinions is still fraught with controversy.

Why shouldn’t journalists be able to express opinions?

There have been plenty of other cases that make this point as well: Last year, for example, CNN Senior Editor and Middle East expert Octavia Nasr was fired after more than two decades at the news channel because she posted a sympathetic comment about the death of an alleged terrorist leader to her Twitter account. As I wrote at the time, these kinds of events force media outlets to confront the myth that journalists are objective — and that reporters can’t have or express opinions about the topics they cover. If anything, I think news consumers would be better off if they expressed themselves more rather than less, so that everyone would know where they stand.

Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said something similar during a live discussion about objectivity and journalism hosted by the Poynter Institute on Wednesday. As Shafer put it:

We’re kidding ourselves and kidding our readers when we pretend that journalists have no opinions and no biases. My view is that journalists can’t be objective, because as human beings we are all subjective. What we can do is employ an objective method in the reporting and writing of the news: To be fair, to be accurate, to be comprehensive. If a reporter pledges to do that, I have no problem with them having opinions.

Unfortunately, Shafer says, many editors remain “deeply invested in the idea that their reporters should walk through life like un-biased zombies,” which leads them to question everything from whether reporters should be fans of specific Facebook web pages to whether they should be allowed to express opinions on their Twitter accounts. These kinds of fears are what lead to the kind of soul-less — and also ultimately unenforceable — social-media policies that many media outlets come up with, which prevent their reporters and editors from engaging with readers in any way, including in the comments on their stories or in Twitter discussions about the topics they cover.

Readers can make their own judgments about bias

Shafer said that he was sure his new employer, like most established media entities, likely restricts the ability of its journalists to belong to political parties or express political opinions, but that he thinks this is wrong. But won’t readers be misled by the biases of the journalists they listen to or read? Shafer doesn’t think so:

I have great faith in the average person because I am one. I’m of normal height, normal IQ, I went to a school that once called itself Western Normal College. So, yes, I think average readers can calibrate for bias.

In some ways, Shafer seems to be advocating a position similar to one described by The Economist earlier this year, as part of a package about the evolution of journalism in an age where anyone can be a publisher and a reporter — thanks to what Om has called the “democracy of distribution” provided by blogs, social networks and tools like Twitter. As The Economist noted, the disruption of media has created an environment much like the early days of journalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of mass media forms like the newspaper or the radio program.

As Shafer said in the Poynter discussion, having reporters and other journalists disclose their views and opinions actually makes it easier for readers and listeners to determine whether they want to trust their reporting — and as David Weinberger noted in his post about transparency, the web allows for the inclusion of links and other features that make it easier for users to check facts and come to their own conclusions. Objectivity, he said, is “a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” It’s time we allowed journalists to be human beings, both online and off.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rosauro Ochoa and Yodel Anecdotal

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Updated: The release will be generally available on August 17.

The “work graph” approach

Wrike is built on the idea of the work graph, like the social graph, as a key organizing feature of the tool. What’s new in this release is the flexibility and the speed. Wrike’s customers are managing up to 70,000 tasks and 5,000 projects. In the demo I saw, users could switching instantly between across task lists, spreadsheet view, timeline (Gannt chart), list of backlog tasks (tasks without set due dates), folders (attached files), and activity streams. The work graph approach means tasks can cross projects, similar to how your friends can cross circles in Google+.

I asked Filev how Wrike was in terms improving work. He replied that Wrike is more of a:

[M]anagement solution — geared more toward managing organizations and people — than just project management. Top down and bottom up. Project management works in ivory tower to create plans for next quarter and then sends those plans to “resources” (team members). In another approach, people do the work, and then managers try to figure out what is going on and aggregate.

We combine both. In our case we shoot toward real time enterprise. Real time visibility to work.

Wrike at work

Filev told me about how The Project Management PrepCast, a five-person startup, uses Wrike as a “unified collaboration, coordination and management platform for the virtual team.” The founder, Cornelius Fichtner, is a certified project management professional with 18 years of experience. His challenge was that running a startup with multiple projects is very different than running a project. The work graph came to the rescue. Cornelius is able to provide foundations, but his team can also create tasks and share them “up” then update tasks on their own — with much of it happening through Wrike’s email integration (which many users may find more convenient than visiting the Wrike site). This is crowdsourcing project management work, empowering project management where the work itself is happening.

Wrike provides an excellent platform for modern transparent and more virtual organizations. Sharing is flexible and can include everyone or just some of people on the project. Wrike can also take on underlying workflows that are very connected and complicated, but reduce the clutter through filters and search tools. Slicing and dicing seems to happen instantly and is reflecting the real time nature of the work.

The Wrike approach is responsive to the needs of people and the modern organization: Complexity can be managed, work can be shared, and transparency supported — all at blazing speed.

Image courtesy of Flickr user aresauburn™

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As luck would have it, I ended up having a coffee with Lewis Cirne, founder and chief executive officer of San Francisco-based software company, New Relic. In his past life, Lew — as he is affectionately known in industry circles — had started Wily Technology and sold it to CA (Computer Associates) in 2006.

A regular presence at our Structure events, Lewis is a font of wisdom and as an entrepreneur it is always enjoyable to talk to him, and learn from him. During our conversation last Friday at Crossroads Café in San Francisco’s SOMA district, Cirne offered some insights that are particularly important for startup founders embarking on their entrepreneurial journey.

Our conversation centered around the importance of transparency in a startup. We were talking about how many of us first-time entrepreneurs — when it comes to raising money from venture funds –tend to fall for the celebrity associated with brand names.

Instead, we should be asking ourselves some tough questions, including about your ability to talk to an investor openly, especially when it comes to bad news. “When it came to picking an investor, that was the number one thing,” Lew said. Why? Because startups don’t follow a linear path. They are unpredictable and things — more often than not — don’t work according to plan. When that happens, can you be transparent with your board member?

Josh Silverman, former CEO of Skype told me in an interview that company employees take their cue from their leader, and a confident leader instills confidence in her troops. Similarly, a founder or a CEO who is unable to be transparent with his board will make excuses. He will cut corners and create a company culture based on fear and deceit.

One doesn’t have to look too far. Look at the phone hacking scandal at News Corp’s UK division, where it is becoming apparent that the entire company was taking its cue from the firm’s leaders, including Rebecca Brooks, who was arrested earlier this weekend. As a telecom reporter I saw bad behavior at Enron and the old Global Crossing, where the rot started at the top.

“If you have a culture of hiding, it is perpetuated in the company and has an impact on the business, and leads to erosion of trust,” Lew said, and that one decision leads to corrosion of the company culture. Why? If you are unable to be transparent with your investors, then you are also not being transparent with your employees, who in turn would be fearful of giving you the bad news. This leads to a culture where everyone is trying to sweep things under the rug.

Lew isn’t the only seasoned entrepreneur who has made similar arguments of keeping a culture that is open and based on transparency. A lot of companies tend to hoard their data or their metrics, worried that the bad numbers are going to erode confidence in the company. But I personally think that is defensive thinking – if your team cannot handle bad news, then it cannot figure out a way to work itself out of a hole. You lose either way. By being open and transparent, you trust your team members to not only do the right thing, but you are also including them in the process.

Sharing information means that the team is less likely to be influenced by what they hear from the outside world. More importantly, you are building a culture of trust and respect. And that in itself is transformative for a startup!

Share the love with your followers by tweeting a quote:

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From GigaOM Archives: A video chat with Lew Cirne

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Don’t you generally like to know what’s going on in your work collaborations? I know my students do. In experiential exercises we do as part of class, term after term, my working professional MBA students (they come to class straight from their real-world jobs) demonstrate that they want transparency from their collaborators. Students who are initially left out of planning sessions can become disengaged, and even confrontative. And they are less interested in participating even if eventually invited in. These experienced professionals report that they would prefer to have the news on the table, even when it’s bad, where they can better manage it and prepare for the ramifications.

On the other hand, those students playing roles in experiential exercises where they can withhold information, often do so. When asked why they weren’t transparent with their collaborators, they generally offer one of these reasons:

• It would take too much time to involve the others
• They plan to involve the worker team … once they (in the role of the management team) have planned what work needs to be done
• It would be uncomfortable to share, so tacitly acting on the information is better than being explicit

This kind of thinking is usually counter-productive. Strategist Nilofer Merchant writes in her book, The New How:

Everyone is better off when they know why decisions are made with as much accuracy as possible. It gives them an understanding of what matters and provides information on which to base the trade-offs constantly being made at every level. It also boosts buy-in and energy from the organization. When reasons behind decisions are not shared, the decisions can seem arbitrary and possibly self-serving. That is, they may seem like they are made for the good of the decision makers, rather than the good of the organization.

Warren Bennis, business professor and co-author of Transparency: Creating a Culture of Candor, offers evidence that transparency supports financial success: “Again and again, studies show that companies that rate high in transparency tend to outperform more opaque ones.” He cites a 2005 study finding that a group of 27 U.S. companies noted as “most transparent” beat the S&P 500 by 11.3 percent.

Like the effective companies in the study, teams in my class that share inevitably outperform those that do not. In one of the exercises, transparency is the difference between a creative outcome due to the unique information held by the “worker” team and a drawn-out, brute-force solution that’s worse for everyone. The faster the management team shares the task requirements, the quicker the worker team is to trigger the creative solution to this intricate puzzle building task. Performance goes from complete failure, or a 10-minute build, to as fast as 11 seconds.

So if transparency is nearly always the best approach, should you always immediately share everything with your collaborators? No. My advice is to stop and look first. Then if you can reasonably do so, share at least the main features of the situation. You’ll find that it is easier to explain the details once you understand the background and perspective of your collaborators and they understand yours. You may also be surprised that your collaborators have wonderful advice even if they are not hierarchically in a position where you would expect the insight. Finally, listen. Learn from this experience and setting in order to improve on the next collaboration.

Are you seeing a change in management practice?  Do you feel that the last few years have provided more or less transparency in your collaborations? For better or for worse?

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