Yesterday Uber made me feel like a superhero.

It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge.  And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service.  So my train — and every train before us and after us — dumped all of its passengers out into the freezing cold to find another way to get wherever they were going.

There were a few shuttle buses, but they barely made a dent in moving the crowd.  Every single taxi was full.  After a few minutes, there were easily over a thousand people huddling outside in the freezing cold trying to figure out what to do.

I reached into my pocked and tried Hailo, but all taxis in the area were booked.  Uber gave the same response — but on my second try I was able to snag an Uber car.  So: five minutes later, I got a phone call and a black Lincoln pulled up next to me. I offered to share it w/ the group of people directly next to me, but no one was going my way.  So I hopped in and was whisked away from an overcrowded frozen nightmare in a warm, comfortable car.

Totally made me feel like a superhero.   

But not necessarily in a “save the world” way — more of a “wow I have a superpower” way.

When I got to the Media Lab and told the story to Nate his (correct) reaction was: “well, a black car swooping in to rescue a white man is kind of the definition of privilege.  Wouldn’t it be more amazing if there were a way for everyone to take advantage of the network of transportation options swirling around?”  

Of course this is correct — while I was able to snag a ride out of the ether, there was still a huge market mismatch: thousands of people standing around looking for transportation, and hundreds of cars driving by with empty seats.  Yet no way to connect them.

Ride sharing is not a new idea — there is no shortage of startups working on the idea — SideCar & Lyft for car rides, Weeelz for taxi rides, etc. — but it is something that is culturally and technically difficult to implement.  Lyft got its start (I think) on college campuses, where sharing rides to events is a much more natural phenomenon.   

In times of crisis we are more likely to stray from our normal behavior and try new things.  NYC famously mandated taxi sharing for all trips into Manhattan during the 2003 blackout and again after Superstorm Sandy.  Nate and I got to discussing if there wasn’t an opportunity to use yesterday’s class of crisis — a medium-sized but somewhat predictable one — as another “thin edge of the wedge" to make ride-sharing more of a mainstream networked activity.

For instance, I’d gladly sign up to be part of the “boston transportation crisis network” — as a driver or a passenger, and basically pre-volunteer to give rides to people when this kind of thing happens again.  I would like to know the number of times per year when the green line breaks down at Kenmore on very cold days — I bet it’s a lot.  So there would be a decent chance of predicting it and then giving folks in the network a little bit of advanced warning.

If you think about it, weird anomaly events are perfect for launching new, behavior-changing activities.  It was during the inauguration of 2009 that Airbnb got its start — by giving people a chance to “crash the inauguration" by participating in peer-to-peer apartment renting.  At the time, it was *way* outside the mainstream to do something like that.  But the craziness of the event made it fine, and now it’s a regular thing to do all over the world and Airbnb is a billion dollar business.

My other favorite behavior-changing anomaly is snow.  My favorite place in the world is NYC in a snowstorm.  Everything changes.  Instead of walking on the sidewalk and keeping to yourself, you walk in the middle of the street and talk to your neighbors as well as strangers.  During the Washington DC Snowpocalype of 2010, there was a lot of peer-to-peer shoveling happening.

I wasn’t in NYC after Sandy, but I have to assume that there were similar kinds of networked behavior that were positive but would have been hard to imagine under normal circumstances.

Maybe the idea is that people become more open to networked / peer-to-peer solutions when our infrastructure fails us — because they have to be.

If you think about it that way — it’s a pretty profound idea.  Not to be pessimistic, but in our current environment, many of our institutions are failing.  And we will have to become comfortable with other ways of solving our big problems.  Health, education, energy, transportation, etc.

So maybe there’s a launch lesson in here for folks building peer network businesses that rely on cultural change that’s difficult to achieve under normal circumstances.  Think about the traditional infrastructure you’re replacing — and think about the moments or events when they are most apt to fail, giving people the most natural incentive to change their behavior in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.   

And give people a chance to become superheroes.

Yesterday, I went down to DC to visit the US Dept of Health and Human Services - and presented to their Innovation Council (a cross functional working group on innovation) about opportunities to bring “networked thinking” into the health space. This is clearly such an important area, with huge opportunities for personal and societal benefit.  It’s also one that has been on my mind a lot lately (both Cescalouise and I suffer from chronic conditions: chrons, hashimoto’s / thyroid cancer, mysterious blood clots; my second puberty; two small kids, etc). In prepping my remarks, I ended up re-watching John Wilbanks’ awesome TED talk on the idea of a health data commons — a mechanism for becoming “data donors” for medical research.  The talk is great. I actually ended up using an idea from Johns talk to frame my presentation, which is this:

health = body + genome + choices + environment

My talk was about “peer networks” and health — and the framing I used was that peer networks (networks of people connected via the web) have dramatic impacts on power and  relationships.  So, what if we look at each of these dimensions of health through the lens of how individuals’ power and their relationships to one another might change given a networked approach:

(the image in the background is from this MIT study on the relationship between peer network structure and health-related behavior changes) The idea I came to is that these dimensions of health present a spectrum of relative challenge when it comes to applying network dynamics (largely due to the relative strength of gatekeepers and relative difficulty of using data):

• Environment: Easiest.  There are tons of network-oriented environmental health activities (like this one, a crowd-funded distributed air quality monitoring tool).  And I include services like Eligible in the “environment” category, as they are collecting and making accessible “environmental” information that is already reasonably accessible.

• Choices: Easier.  There are many many startups that are working to help us make better health choices.  Services like Lift, and like many of the Rock Health graduates.  The MIT study linked above is just one of many that point to the potential for structured social networks to have a real impact on our health choices.

• Genome: Harder.  You can go to 23andMe and genotype your DNA for $99, but it’s not a choice everyone is comfortable making.

• Body: Hardest.  The data associated with our bodies (lab results, etc) is locked up, fragmented, and siloed. Most of the apps which are approaching the “body” space are using hacks such as manually entering your data, or taking photos of paper records). There are no shortage of electronic EMR systems (like DrChrono) that are starting to digitize more of our health records, but there are not yet any laws or standards for accessing this data broadly.  Programs like the VA’s Blue Button (which HHS is working on adopting in some way) are an important start.

I also gave a brief overview of what conditions can help networks flourish.  Simple, lightweight data access standards, plus a system for establishing trust among apps that manage personal health data (as my colleague Albert has written about) are central. I’ve posted my slides to Speakerdeck here.  One question that came up in the conversation afterwards, which I don’t know the answer to, is: how has the financial sector able to achieve the level of interoperability that it has?  There are a lot of parallels between personal financial data and personal health data, including many common privacy concerns, and finance is way, way ahead in terms of digital access & interoperability. Another big takeaway for me was that I need to start using more of this stuff. I am a member of Patients like Me, but it hasn’t really been doing much for me.  There are lots of other tools out there and I’m going to start trying them.

Sunday night, Cescalouise's iPhone mysteriously went dark.  She had a lot going on Monday, so I gave her my phone to use, then I headed down to NYC for the day and following night. So I’ve been away from home for the last day and a half with no phone.  Not a huge deal, obviously, but also a pretty big departure from normal. What’s interesting is what I’ve missed and what I haven’t missed. Of course, I miss being able to communicate with people from wherever I am — but to be honest I don’t think that’s the thing I miss most.  The biggest thing I miss is the ability to jot down a thought on the fly.  I use Wunderlist and Fetchnotes on a pretty regular basis to capture the passing thought or to-do.  It’s an important part of how I keep my slow hunch going. What I don’t miss is constantly surfing the top of my inbox.  I use android desktop widgets and keep both of my main inboxes on one of my home screens.  Having them there is convenient, and helps me be responsive to email, but it’s bad for focus.  I will probably delete those when I get my phone back. Walking around NYC and riding the subway, my head has been up and I’ve noticed more things (but of course haven’t been able to capture / share them :-)  And of course I notice how many people have their faces in their phones all the time (probably 75% of those of us  waiting for the Amtrak in Boston). All in all, I’m glad to have taken two days off with no phone.   Feels a bit like a cleanse.  I’ll probably do it again.

Yesterday Uber made me feel like a superhero.

It was about 10 degrees in Boston, and I was on the T on my way into Cambridge.  And as we pulled in to Kenmore station the conductor notified us that all Green Line trains would be going out of service.  So my train — and every train before us and after us — dumped all of its passengers out into the freezing cold to find another way to get wherever they were going.

There were a few shuttle buses, but they barely made a dent in moving the crowd.  Every single taxi was full.  After a few minutes, there were easily over a thousand people huddling outside in the freezing cold trying to figure out what to do.

I reached into my pocked and tried Hailo, but all taxis in the area were booked.  Uber gave the same response — but on my second try I was able to snag an Uber car.  So: five minutes later, I got a phone call and a black Lincoln pulled up next to me. I offered to share it w/ the group of people directly next to me, but no one was going my way.  So I hopped in and was whisked away from an overcrowded frozen nightmare in a warm, comfortable car.

Totally made me feel like a superhero.   

But not necessarily in a “save the world” way — more of a “wow I have a superpower” way.

When I got to the Media Lab and told the story to Nate his (correct) reaction was: “well, a black car swooping in to rescue a white man is kind of the definition of privilege.  Wouldn’t it be more amazing if there were a way for everyone to take advantage of the network of transportation options swirling around?”  

Of course this is correct — while I was able to snag a ride out of the ether, there was still a huge market mismatch: thousands of people standing around looking for transportation, and hundreds of cars driving by with empty seats.  Yet no way to connect them.

Ride sharing is not a new idea — there is no shortage of startups working on the idea — SideCar & Lyft for car rides, Weeelz for taxi rides, etc. — but it is something that is culturally and technically difficult to implement.  Lyft got its start (I think) on college campuses, where sharing rides to events is a much more natural phenomenon.   

In times of crisis we are more likely to stray from our normal behavior and try new things.  NYC famously mandated taxi sharing for all trips into Manhattan during the 2003 blackout and again after Superstorm Sandy.  Nate and I got to discussing if there wasn’t an opportunity to use yesterday’s class of crisis — a medium-sized but somewhat predictable one — as another “thin edge of the wedge" to make ride-sharing more of a mainstream networked activity.

For instance, I’d gladly sign up to be part of the “boston transportation crisis network” — as a driver or a passenger, and basically pre-volunteer to give rides to people when this kind of thing happens again.  I would like to know the number of times per year when the green line breaks down at Kenmore on very cold days — I bet it’s a lot.  So there would be a decent chance of predicting it and then giving folks in the network a little bit of advanced warning.

If you think about it, weird anomaly events are perfect for launching new, behavior-changing activities.  It was during the inauguration of 2009 that Airbnb got its start — by giving people a chance to “crash the inauguration" by participating in peer-to-peer apartment renting.  At the time, it was *way* outside the mainstream to do something like that.  But the craziness of the event made it fine, and now it’s a regular thing to do all over the world and Airbnb is a billion dollar business.

My other favorite behavior-changing anomaly is snow.  My favorite place in the world is NYC in a snowstorm.  Everything changes.  Instead of walking on the sidewalk and keeping to yourself, you walk in the middle of the street and talk to your neighbors as well as strangers.  During the Washington DC Snowpocalype of 2010, there was a lot of peer-to-peer shoveling happening.

I wasn’t in NYC after Sandy, but I have to assume that there were similar kinds of networked behavior that were positive but would have been hard to imagine under normal circumstances.

Maybe the idea is that people become more open to networked / peer-to-peer solutions when our infrastructure fails us — because they have to be.

If you think about it that way — it’s a pretty profound idea.  Not to be pessimistic, but in our current environment, many of our institutions are failing.  And we will have to become comfortable with other ways of solving our big problems.  Health, education, energy, transportation, etc.

So maybe there’s a launch lesson in here for folks building peer network businesses that rely on cultural change that’s difficult to achieve under normal circumstances.  Think about the traditional infrastructure you’re replacing — and think about the moments or events when they are most apt to fail, giving people the most natural incentive to change their behavior in ways they wouldn’t otherwise.   

And give people a chance to become superheroes.

Yesterday, I went down to DC to visit the US Dept of Health and Human Services - and presented to their Innovation Council (a cross functional working group on innovation) about opportunities to bring “networked thinking” into the health space. This is clearly such an important area, with huge opportunities for personal and societal benefit.  It’s also one that has been on my mind a lot lately (both Cescalouise and I suffer from chronic conditions: chrons, hashimoto’s / thyroid cancer, mysterious blood clots; my second puberty; two small kids, etc). In prepping my remarks, I ended up re-watching John Wilbanks’ awesome TED talk on the idea of a health data commons — a mechanism for becoming “data donors” for medical research.  The talk is great. I actually ended up using an idea from Johns talk to frame my presentation, which is this:

health = body + genome + choices + environment

My talk was about “peer networks” and health — and the framing I used was that peer networks (networks of people connected via the web) have dramatic impacts on power and  relationships.  So, what if we look at each of these dimensions of health through the lens of how individuals’ power and their relationships to one another might change given a networked approach:

(the image in the background is from this MIT study on the relationship between peer network structure and health-related behavior changes) The idea I came to is that these dimensions of health present a spectrum of relative challenge when it comes to applying network dynamics (largely due to the relative strength of gatekeepers and relative difficulty of using data):

• Environment: Easiest.  There are tons of network-oriented environmental health activities (like this one, a crowd-funded distributed air quality monitoring tool).  And I include services like Eligible in the “environment” category, as they are collecting and making accessible “environmental” information that is already reasonably accessible.

• Choices: Easier.  There are many many startups that are working to help us make better health choices.  Services like Lift, and like many of the Rock Health graduates.  The MIT study linked above is just one of many that point to the potential for structured social networks to have a real impact on our health choices.

• Genome: Harder.  You can go to 23andMe and genotype your DNA for $99, but it’s not a choice everyone is comfortable making.

• Body: Hardest.  The data associated with our bodies (lab results, etc) is locked up, fragmented, and siloed. Most of the apps which are approaching the “body” space are using hacks such as manually entering your data, or taking photos of paper records). There are no shortage of electronic EMR systems (like DrChrono) that are starting to digitize more of our health records, but there are not yet any laws or standards for accessing this data broadly.  Programs like the VA’s Blue Button (which HHS is working on adopting in some way) are an important start.

I also gave a brief overview of what conditions can help networks flourish.  Simple, lightweight data access standards, plus a system for establishing trust among apps that manage personal health data (as my colleague Albert has written about) are central. I’ve posted my slides to Speakerdeck here.  One question that came up in the conversation afterwards, which I don’t know the answer to, is: how has the financial sector able to achieve the level of interoperability that it has?  There are a lot of parallels between personal financial data and personal health data, including many common privacy concerns, and finance is way, way ahead in terms of digital access & interoperability. Another big takeaway for me was that I need to start using more of this stuff. I am a member of Patients like Me, but it hasn’t really been doing much for me.  There are lots of other tools out there and I’m going to start trying them.

Sunday night, Cescalouise's iPhone mysteriously went dark.  She had a lot going on Monday, so I gave her my phone to use, then I headed down to NYC for the day and following night. So I’ve been away from home for the last day and a half with no phone.  Not a huge deal, obviously, but also a pretty big departure from normal. What’s interesting is what I’ve missed and what I haven’t missed. Of course, I miss being able to communicate with people from wherever I am — but to be honest I don’t think that’s the thing I miss most.  The biggest thing I miss is the ability to jot down a thought on the fly.  I use Wunderlist and Fetchnotes on a pretty regular basis to capture the passing thought or to-do.  It’s an important part of how I keep my slow hunch going. What I don’t miss is constantly surfing the top of my inbox.  I use android desktop widgets and keep both of my main inboxes on one of my home screens.  Having them there is convenient, and helps me be responsive to email, but it’s bad for focus.  I will probably delete those when I get my phone back. Walking around NYC and riding the subway, my head has been up and I’ve noticed more things (but of course haven’t been able to capture / share them :-)  And of course I notice how many people have their faces in their phones all the time (probably 75% of those of us  waiting for the Amtrak in Boston). All in all, I’m glad to have taken two days off with no phone.   Feels a bit like a cleanse.  I’ll probably do it again.