Research Meeting Notes

Notes from Meeting on 10/29

• Before / after with VRM implementations
• Self-tracking - what sorts of changes occur
• Look at companies that are willing to share info and what changes this brings to them
• Game: profiles of companies (mirror existing companies) - users interacting and measuring
• User research around learning perceptions and actions
  • How does behavior change when people are ignorant vs. once they understand
  • Increase visibility around what users "give away" + then add-in control
• People's willingness to give data with control vs. without control
• Max - existing research: ranked shopping list based on privacy levels
  • Can we use real money? Mechanical Turk?
• Testing what people say vs. what they do
• How do we do the "invention is the mother of necessity" aspect of VRM - can we test something that doesn't exist yet?
• Research Hypotheses:
  • Will people be more willing to yield their information if they control it?
  • How will people behave if we give them more control over/with their data
• Realworld retailer - at checkout, they're given some choices
  • give up information in exchange
• How do we test removal of guesswork?
• Turk experiment with movie recommendations
• Test
  • 1st group: You have money to buy some movies (simulated stores)
  • 2nd group: Create basket and share with stores
• Education of customers is an important aspect of example
• Problem with secondary markets, e.g. users aggregating data without vendor buy-in
• LastFM, scrobbling test (e.g. what will people do with their data?)
  • What would you pay per song? Then collect data and present it to them, will it change what the song is worth?
• Don't forget about selection bias with these types of experiments

Notes from Workshop on 10/13

Should be...

• testable, concrete, measurable
• of use for doc in his new book
• appease the berkman gods with productive research efforts
• relatively easy and completable with volunteers, internal resources and a limited time-frame
• provide businesses with fodder that they need to help make the case internally for opening up user control
  • Ben from Zeo needs a list of benefits to openness to bring to his investors: We need to provide that!
  • What are the benefits to vendors of VRM?
  • What is user data control? Define.
  • Relationships -> what are the vendor benefits?
    • eliminate guesswork

For example...

• Talk to organizations who have opened up and have them describe the http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/edit/VRM_Research_opportunitiesbenefits
  • What's measurable here?
• Test the hypothesis: A free customer is worth more than a captive one
  • "worth more" means defining customer value and measuring it
  • is the customer valuing the vendor more?
  • what is free vs. captive?
• before and after giving users their data
• altimeter group
  • engagementdb.com: report that shows that those who do social media are most profitable
• case studies (e.g. HBS format)
• backward analysis?
• report on personal informatics
  • what data comes out of personal informatics?
• Company experiences with launching api's?
• interviews, surveys
• What are some open data efforts?
  • VRM spotting -> what are some user-driven organizations?
• What are possible frameworks / scenarios for measurement / testing / research
• What are the intention economy principles?

What is VRMness (user-drivenness?) that might be testable?

• individual is the POI
• individual gets a copy of their data
• individual controls use of data
• users initiate
• user contribution is a core value
• user choice
• belongs to user - user owns / controls the system
• service portability / substitutability