The Zeitgeist of the Universe (and the SROI application)

I'll admit -- I was taken with the blog post title "I will blow your mind in 17 minutes." Its hard to ignore, especially when it comes from my collection of major dorky but all favorite social innovation blogs. Beyond wowing my technology mind, and more importantly tingling that hard to touch sense that lies between the cerebral and the spiritual, I found myself obsessing about the technology that surfaces, as I see it, the "zeitgeist of the universe."



For those without the 17 minutes to spare, I'll give you the quick and dirty such that I can connect it to my thoughts on SROI. Humans around the planet are using social media and social networking tools (flickr, youtube, blogs) as a form of self-expression and individual story telling. Jonathan Harris (and I'm assuming some other cool folks) are building software that collects thoughts and images and aggregates them for a variety of purposes).

"We Feel Fine," for example, is a program that searches text in the digital expression universe for the phrase "I feel..." The software collects that full sentence, determines what it can from the demographic of the user (male/female/age...), pinpoints the location of the user (geographic), the time of the post, the WEATHER at the time of the post... etc. You can see the aggregation of this data in a number of different forms -- a "cloud" of feelings rushing through the universe... feelings depicted in weather icons (sun, rain, snow, clouds)... feelings by geographic location. You're able to see what feelings are in abnormally high proportion, e.g. at a given snap shot people were feeling "used" 3.3 times more than any other feeling.

In short, users can tap into the soul and well being of planet earth.

What are the applications of this technology? Well, like the creator, we could transmit it, via binary code and super duper spotlights into the universe. Slightly less spiritually (though Contact is one of my all time favorite books/movies), I think there is somehow a potential application for measuring social return on investment (SROI).

SROI is all too regularly snubbed pie-in-the-sky measurement in my world (i.e. the nonprofit world). There is often the gross generalization made that social investments are not efficient simply because they can't be measured (if a tree falls...) The comparison is obviously the efficiency gained by a bottom line measure in the private sector. Its not that we can't measure outputs and outcomes of nonprofit work; its that (1) most outputs and outcomes vary by sector and program, and (2) outputs and outcomes rarely get at the uber question -- has the life for the beneficiary improved? And the problem in getting at that question is this: there is a power dynamic between funder, grantee, and beneficiary that predisposes us to distrusting any collection mechanism that would collect and aggregate that data.

Now... imagine if quality of life for a group of people could be measured by aggregating individual self expression inputted via social media tools? There are, any number of "practical" reasons this wouldn't work, e.g the targeted beneficiaries are often the most poor without access to digital media tools. However, wouldn't it be fun to ask, a la my favorite strategist, how this could work, rather than state why it won't?