Nexteritis – Opposition to FcNext

SharingIsGiving.org Directory Survey March 20, 2008

SharingIsGiving.org (“SIG”) has been operated since early 2005 by Ken Hedden, Sr., proprietor of the Wayfarer Motel and Believers United Christian Church meeting at the motel in Schroon Lake, NY, in addition to being a Motorcyclist for Jesus and Patriot Guard Rider and a leader/moderator of the FcNext Yahoo! Group.

SIG purports to be a centralized network or directory of freecycling groups, offered as an alternative to the dominant freecycling network, Freecycle.org, operated by The Freecycle Network, Inc. (“TFN”).

We counted 459 entries in the two SIG directory pages for groups in the United States.  The two directory pages examined were:

Links to Fellow Free Recyclers A-N USA

http://sharingisgiving.org/linksa_n.htm

and

Links to Fellow Free Recyclers O-Z USA

http://sharingisgiving.org/linkso_z.htm

Of those web links listed in the SIG directory, 220 are “officially” affiliated with SIG (i.e., using the SIG “brand” name in their group name and/or URL, and the SIG graphic logo).  The others are non-SIG groups listed presumably as friends of SIG or other groups seeking to be publicized through the SIG directory.

We made two passes through the list randomly selecting groups to review.  On the first pass, we randomized by picking every sixth group from the order in which they appeared, regardless of whether it was a SIG-named group or not.  This created a random sample of 76 entries constituting 17% of the U.S. listings.  We call this “SIG Cycle One.”

On the second pass, we picked every fourth SIG-brand-named group from the order in which they appeared.  This created a random sample of 55 entries constituting 25% of the SIG-branded groups.  We call this “SIG Cycle Two.”

In Cycle Two, there were two randomly selected links in the Texas section that we skipped (just went to the next one on the list instead), because they were redundant links to the same URL we had already evaluated, just a different name for the same site.  Later we looked further into this and found that there were ten SIG-brand-name entries in the Texas section, each named for a different geographic location, all having the same URL for a non-Yahoo! bulletin board service named “San Antonio Neighborhood Sharing Is Giving.”  The ten SIG directory listings tied to this URL were named for the geographic locations of Boerne, Cibolo, Kerrville, Luling, McQueeney, New Braunfels, Richardson, Scherz, Seguin and Universal City.  “San Antonio Neighborhood?”  Perhaps, in the sense that Cuba is in the “neighborhood” of Miami.  This list of Texas locations ranges from 18 to 289 miles from San Antonio.

OBSERVATIONS FOR CYCLE ONE (17% random sample of all U.S. groups in the SIG directory):

1.  Of the 76 groups sampled, 39 of them (51%) appeared to be viable, legitimate, active freecycling groups, or at least marginally or potentially so.  (We tried to be liberal and generous about what we counted as viable groups.)  The remaining 37 of them (49%) were not.  They were either not truly freecycling groups, or were too inactive to be viable, or just “dead,” or they allowed buying, selling or commercial activity (antithetical to freecycling), or were bad links (inactive URLs).

2.  Like Eric Burke’s Freesharing.org, Ken Hedden does not exercise quality controls on his directory, and uses it inappropriately.

OBSERVATIONS FOR CYCLE TWO (25% random sample of all SIG-name-brand U.S. groups in the SIG directory):

1.  Of the 55 groups sampled, 15 of them (27%) were viable, legitimate, active freecycling groups, or at least marginally or potentially so.  The remaining 40 of them (73%) were not.  They were either too inactive to be viable, and/or never were active, or just died out, or they allowed buying, selling or commercial activity, or were bad links (inactive URLs).

2.  We noticed that many of the sampled SIG-brand-name groups were created in clusters with essentially identical home page descriptions (all but the location name) on or near the same dates as others in each cluster.  It also appeared that groups not created within these clusters tended not to have identical home page descriptions, indicating independent creation or editing by someone other than the cluster creator.  This led us to go back and look at the creation dates of ALL SIG-brand-named groups.  (See tables below.)

Among other examples of batch group creations on the same or close dates with the same home page descriptions, we identified these:

- 34 groups created on almost consecutive days between 10/15/05 and 11/3/05

- 6 groups created on 11/16/05

- 11 groups created on 3/9/06

- 9 groups created on 3/16-17/06

- 9 groups created on 8/7/06

- 9 groups created on consecutive days 8/11, 8/12, 8/13/06

- 24 groups created on consecutive days 8/15 to 8/20/06

- 4 groups created on 8/24/06

October 2005 and August 2006 were periods of “amazing growth” in the SIG brand name group network.

Twenty-four (53%) of the forty-five SIG-brand-name entries for New York were all created on 3 dates, two of them only 8 days apart:

- 6 on 11/16/05

- 10 on 3/9/06

- 8 on 3/17/06

The Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Plano, TX SIG-brand-name groups were created on consecutive days from 5/25/05 to 5/28/05.

Nine of the SIG-brand-name groups in Texas were created on 8/7/06.  That’s 24% of the total 38 entries in the SIG-brand section of the Texas list all created on the same day.

3.  It appears that Ken Hedden may have named this cluster group creation scheme something like “hotlisting,” if the ALT tag in his graphic group home page logo means anything … img src=”http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y16/Kmoran02/newlogo.gif” mce_src=”http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y16/Kmoran02/newlogo.gif” ALT=”[HOTLIST]“

4.  A popular theme in FcNext is to decry TFN’s use of Interim Moderators (IMods) to create replacement TFN-affiliated groups in locations where a former group disaffiliated from TFN.  FcNexters complain that these IMods are not truly local volunteers running these groups, which the Nexters call “Astroturf” groups, because the IMod volunteers are not local people, and traditionally “real” freecycling groups are run by local volunteers.  SIG apparently does something similar by running around creating batches of groups around the country from a desk in New York.  It’s one way to fatten a directory.  We will refrain from speculating about other motives that may seem obvious or likely, though we find cause for suspicion of impropriety.

5.  In addition to an affinity for populating the web with New York based bogus SIG-brand-name group sites, Hedden appears to have taken a particular liking to Texas.  New York has 45 “groups,” Texas has 38.  No other large state has nearly that many SIG-brand group sites.  California has 6.  Florida has 5.  Illinois has 5.  We doubt there is anything about New Yorkers and Texans that attract them especially to SIG, especially when the evidence indicates that three quarters of them are not really legitimate, viable groups run by local volunteer moderators, but were largely batch-created by Ken Hedden to fatten his directory, or for some other reason we don’t expect him ever to provide.

Survey data tables are shown below.  Explanation of columns:

1.  “Avg. Posts” column is the average number of posts in the group during the past six full months, Sep. 2007 – Feb. 2008.

2.  “Unmod Joins” column answers the question, “Does this group allow new members to join without moderator approval?”  This was not a factor in determining group viability in the “Viable” column.

3.  “Unmod Msgs” column answers the question, “Does this group allow unmoderated postings?”  This was not a factor in determining group viability in the “Viable” column.

4.  “Sell” column answers the question, “Does the home page description or visible posting activity of this group indicated that they allow or encourage buying, selling, or commercial activity in the group?”  If yes, the group was disqualified for “viability” as a true non-profit freecycling group.

5.  “Trade” column answers the question, “Does this group allow barter/swap/trade?”  This was not a factor in determining group viability.

6.  “PMA” column answers the question, “Does this group have a public message archive?”  This was not a factor in determining group viability.

7.  “Viable” column answers the question, “Is this a truly active, legitimate, viable freecycling group?”  The comments column helps to explain the viability decision, where not obvious.  We were liberal and generous in assigning a “Yes” entry in the “Viable” column, giving benefit of doubt where we felt we could within basic, generally accepted freecycling principles.

TABLE 1 – SIG CYCLE ONE SURVEY RESULTS.  Random sample of all U.S.-based entries in the SIG directory:  Seventeen percent of the list sampled.

TABLE 2 – SIG CYCLE TWO SURVEY RESULTS.  Random sample of all U.S.-based entries in the SIG directory whose group names/URLs use the SIG “brand” name.  25% of the SIG-branded groups sampled

TABLE 3 – LIST OF ALL SIG-BRAND-NAME LISTED GROUPS, SORTED BY CREATION DATES SHOWN ON THEIR YAHOO! GROUPS HOME PAGES

TABLE 4 – LIST OF ALL SIG-BRAND-NAME LISTED GROUPS, IN THE ORDER THEY APPEAR IN THE SIG DIRECTORY

TABLE 5 – LIST OF NY-BASED SIG-BRAND-NAME GROUPS SORTED BY DATE CREATED

TABLE 6 – LIST OF TX-BASED SIG-BRAND-NAME GROUPS SORTED BY DATE CREATED