👋🏽 Where I've been and Things I've Learned

Seven months of the Community-based Economies project

Things I've Learned

Repetition

There’s value in repetition that’s often overlooked and set as second to novelty. For me that means establishing a writing and submission cadence. I try to submit something, be it an article, a revision, or a grant application, once a month. It's a bit of a stretch but already I can see how things are accumulating benefits.

Directions

As an early academic you will be naturally pulled in many directions. Carefully evaluate asks, requests, and the like against what you want your future trajectory to be. You are evaluated more on your research than your service but are often asked to collaborate much more on service. The National Center for Faculty Diversity covers this phenomena well and my service load here at Wayne State has been light.

The 5 T’s

Collaboration, especially in business schools, is so important. Collaborators can provide access to resources that you otherwise would not have access to. You can conceptualize what a potential collaborator can bring to you in terms of the 5 T's (thanks Cory Knobel!): Time, Talent, Testimony, Treasure, and Tools (somewhat adapted from 4 T's in Philanthropy, apologies if I got it wrong). When considering a collaboration or even reaching out, think first about which of the 5 T's you would like to explore with them. Not in an exploitative or directly stated sense but a back-of-the-mind sense of what synergies exist that can be developed. A lot of people are willing to answer questions but you have to be ready with what to ask and know why.

Variety of Funding Sources

In my job talk and dissertation defense my final slides discussed the need for my community-based economies research platform to seek funding outside of the NSF and other federal source so that the different set of expectations and needs would make the research and applications even stronger. That was pretty prescient, considering today is March 13th, 2025 and the state of the NSF.

What’s in Review and/or is Published

Happy to report that the Information Society has accepted a version of my second dissertation chapter (around pg 32). There's editorial editing that's still needs to happen and I've been waiting patiently for the editor to follow up on that; I nudged them over something unrelated this last week.

Also happy to report some earlier work involving a new kind of community-based search engine instead powered by qualitative interviews rather than PageRank, "Making Exploratory Search Engines using Qualitative Case Studies," was published in the Journal of Integrated STEM. After publishing it I considered what could be done to sped up the exponential run time and realized that you could conceivably generate a radius of sentences connected to the qualitative interviews and use that to search in parallel if you could set up the boolean search flags correctly. This would shift the run time from exponential to something linear in the number of thematic vectors, which are usually quite small (1 or 2?).

My third dissertation chapter, "Solidarity Routing," was rejected from the Journal for the Association of Information Systems as not including enough background references, of all things. And so I learned from that, turned it around, and revised the paper organization to better align with Environment and Planning A. I introduced a new concept, the Right to Route, aligned with the Right to City. It was submitted some time in January, so fingers crossed. I now try to publish against the ABCD journal list.

Finally, I’m proud to say I worked with Ahmed Mohamadean and we submitted a paper to the AMCIS, the association conference for AIS. It’s titled “From Fun to New Fundamentals: Jargon and Price Rounding in NFTs Markets,” where we explore how jargon matters in digital markets through a psychological tendency termed round number bias. It’s exploratory work but I hope to extend it to community-based economies in a variety of ways.

What’s Ongoing and Upcoming

I'm excited to report that the Solidarity Routing work is being expanded to work with vending machines, in collaboration with a Detroit farm food distributor, fellow Wayne State University faculty (Siobhan and Gary), and Artisanal Futures with Ron Eglash. It’s interesting to return to this work as an assistant professor. Many things are the same but at the same time many things are different.

I'm also considering community-based governance structures, possibly extending prior ideas of mine. There may be an opportunity to simulate them against free riders and other "tragedy of the commons" critiques while incorporating indigenous governance structures. That could easily be a IEEE Access paper.

Finally, I'm working on combining upcycling with generative AI, for what I hope to be some very powerful tools for establishing community-based economies from materials that are often thrown away and, even more, missed opportunities for businesses to collaborate with one another, where outputs of one business now become inputs to another. I'm collaborating with Zita (a WPI student) and Michael on this project, exploring ways of using generative AI to help facilitate upcycling and making new supply chains.

What I’m Teaching this Semester

I’m having a lot of fun teaching a AI, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity course this semester. It’s a wholesale revision of what was formerly taught by finance, revamped for emerging technology and applications. Here’s the description, “This course examines blockchain, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence from a business and technologist perspective, beginning with an accessible overview of the cryptographic foundations that enable secure digital business. Students learn how these fundamentals support both blockchain's decentralized ledgers and today's essential cybersecurity infrastructure. Using virtual worlds and digital economies (e.g. the Metaverse) as an ongoing case study, students explore the business implications and opportunities created when these technologies converge -- from AI-enhanced virtual experiences to digital asset markets. Through focused case study analysis, individual and an ongoing small-group whitepaper assignment, students develop the practical knowledge needed to ground strategic decisions about these transformative technologies.”

Thanks for reading!