LEYF, social entreprenurship -- June O'Sullivan

June O'Sullivan talks about LEYF at the RSA.

The lady knows her buzzwords, and uses them well. Fast speaker. The buzzwords capture key concepts-- they are not just buzz when coming from her lips.

She heads LEYF, the london early years foundation:

Established in 1903, we are the UK's leading childcare charity and social enterprise; our ambition is to build a better future for London's children, families and local communities through a commitment to excellence in Early Years education, training and research.

LEYF nurseries mix across social levels/income brackets. Variable pricing means more well-off families subsidize childcare for their less well off neighbors. Note that London has the best mixing of rich and poor of any city in the world. The London buroughs are (historically) built around a central estate belonging to the wealthy, with concentric rings of decreasing poverty around it, in the back mews, etc. If a London nursery draws from a 5-block radius, the lowest/highest income ratio for people living in that circle is the highest in the world.

They work to bridge communities. It isn't just leaving your kids from 8-5.They open their locals for wider hours, offereing courses and activities into the evening.

June spoke about social ROI. Wanting to get LEYF completely off of government funding, yet with profit as a secondary objective. Glossed over that England does not yet have a legal form of incorporation which allows this; technically LEYF is still a non-profit. Discussed in more detail that because non-profits people generally have a hard time talking about making money, they almost universally have poor business skills. She feels this needs to change.

She also has problems scaling up her vision. She wishes to franchize the LEYF model, which presents a number of difficulties. But franchizes better allow for local control, which is a key component of the LEYF vision-- each LEYF center MUST be a vital part of its local commmunity. Further, she is keenly aware that local control provides a better test-bed for innovation-- good ideas often come from the fringes, and can be tested there with much lower risk.

She wants the children who pass through LEYF to develop social capital. Trust networks, etc, the things which count for as much success in life as money capital.

And I reflect on the franchise model as a species type form for social evolution.

I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping social behaviour-- Mark Earls

Mark Earls and Alex Bentley at the RSA 2011, promoting their new book.

Central thesis: as social animals, humans are predisposed to copy others.

They map human decision making using a 2-by. The axes are "number of options" and "who/how we copy". Given that this 2-by is the core tennant of their idea, I find it odd that it is damn difficult to find an image of this map.

Of course I did find it, buried in a research paper published by Prof. Bentley ("Quality vs mere popularity: a conceptual map for understanding human behavior", Mind and Society 2011)

Boring figure, x axis on wrong margin, and no data plotted.

The four corners are:

1. NW: classical rational actor. Assumes a discernable (and predictable) difference between the options. Popular choices are high quality/high payout.
2. NE: Copy the leader/expert. Copy if better. He relates it to Watts' 2002 innovators, early adopters, and late majority model.
3. SW: Overwhelming choice with little/no difference between outcomes--275 different types of breakfast cereal??
4. SE: Copy the crowd. Power law distribution of outcomes, with the winner a matter of luck.

Timeline evolution popularity of items in the quadrants:

1. NW: r-curve of adoptation. Rapid growth in popularity of the "better" option.
2. NE: a slightly smoother adoptation curve, since the quality of an item is partially based on how many others have chosen it
3. SW: no trend, distribution is uniformly random
4. SE: Best predictor of popularity is current distribution. He links it to a previous paper of his, "Evolving social influence in large populations" Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2010

Camilla Power points out some serious flaws with the book

[the book is] a random scatter of cases and anecdotes ... [which] makes the reader feel equally random: scatterbrained, as if you've been doing idle searches on Google or browsing Wikipedia all day. The kind of theoretical coherence found in the elegant, simple propositions of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene or Amotz and Avishag Zahavi's The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle is not evident.

and views the model as applying mostly to

low-cost decisions on tree-like algorithms that matter little to the decision-maker

The authors respond to the last criticism by saying that true, that is the corner of the map the book focuses on, but only because that is the kind of data they study. The map should apply to all decisions.

But they miss Ms. Power's point. If indeed they mostly apply their model to the SE corner, then she is right, that is what the model examines. And at this corner, the profound impact of the book applies mostly to marketing people. It does not suggest how to create the large-scale social changes the authors wish it to. To smoke or not smoke is a classic Northern question, as the choices are binary with strongly discernable outcomes.