Robert Paterson: Transforming Technology

Blogging and Society

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 14:14:24 GMT

500 years ago the communications system in the west was owned by one organization - the church. If you wanted something in writing a monk transcribed it. Few knew how to read as a result of books being so expensive. Your network news was delivered from the pulpit. The system supported the status quo of the power of God's elect, the King and his henchmen the aristocracy and above supported the most powerful multinational enterprise the world had yet seen the church itself. The church was the largest landowner in the west at a time when land was the basis of all wealth. The barriers to competition were impossibly high.

I am sure that when Gutenberg built his first press that there was a lot of chatter about font types, about gearing and pressure and inks and about the best type of paper - the kind of geek talk that is central to all new things. This is where so much of the discourse is today about blogging - RSS etc. But the true power of the printing press was something else that went way beyond how it worked. It was how it was used that was to be important.

Within a hundred years huge numbers of people could read. It was possible to run off broadsheets - personal publishing very cheaply. So what happened as a result of this use of the new technology?

The reformation in Europe, the dissolution of the monasteries in the England the the redistribution of all that wealth to secular hands, the civil war and the end of the idea of monarchy being God's anointed. The modern world was created where new ideas based on observation - such as a new vision of the universe - could not be held back by the establishment in spite of persecution.

So this is what will happen with blogging. What blogging is, is an end run on the strangle hold of our conversation and on our mindset that the corporate and institutional world has established. Until now the costs of having a human voice were set impossibly high. Only Rupert Murdoch or a government could play. But now communication costs are ridiculously low compared to the mainstream media and communications in corporations and government. Not only are the costs low but the interactive element of blogging is so much more powerful than the broadcast technique owned by the institutions. Any one of us can have a voice and groups can have power.Institutions are frightened of this voice and will fight it because it means that they will die as a result.

As at the time of the reformation - the general adoption of blogging tools will lead to the overthrow of the corporate and the institutional mind. In so doing it will release the vast treasure that it locked up in the costs of corporate and institutional life. It will free men and women from being peons in a feudal state where they had to live as liege men and offer fealty to their overlords.

We are not only oppressed by those in power in institutional life, we, like medieval peasant, are complicit. We know of no other life. Knowing no other life, like those in Plato's cave, we cannot imagine what freedom from institutional life might be like. We fear freedom because we see no alternative to bondage.

Even simple blogging can help here. It offers for the first time to each of us the potential to find our voice. At first maybe to tell the world what we had for breakfast or to recall some work idea. But I have found in myself a huge change in the last year in my inner voice and in the confidence as I discover that I am not alone in how I think.

Until now people who think as I do have struggled alone. We are by nature are not joiners. Fewer of us every day work in institutional life and cannot use that voice. What "organ" do we have to speak with a human voice? Blogging By finding so many of us out there, we grow in confidence and our voice becomes less hesitant. I feel wonder as I read new blogs every week and see how close our thinking is. This is how power is created

Technical talk is helpful. It leads to better tools. But let's talk more about how we will use blogging to change our world. It is not about making the corporation better - this type of discussion would be the same as a group of monks talking about how printing was going to help the church. It is about how to we take the institution out of our lives.

(Thanks to Dave Pollard for getting me going this week)

Blogging and Education - eBay???

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:42:35 GMT

Enrollment for the media courses at our community college is way down this year. Is this part of the dot-com fallout or is something more going on?

What is on offer is a one year full time class based course that costs $10,000 and teaches you to create web pages. I asked my blogging friends on PEI, none of whom are older than 24 and most younger and all of whom are experts in web based communication, - note I did not say experts in web creation.- to tell me how they learned to be so good.

They were all highly motivated and started to "play around" on the web when they were very young
They learned from each other and still do
None of them see learning about a tool or a technique as being central - one said that when they see a resume that states that the person has mastered a set of named software, they bin it immediately - wrong approach. They do not take a product approach but a holistic approach

So who takes these courses? Maybe folks who have no talent but who think that the web is hot. What happens when they enter the workforce - they meet the web version of Miles Davis or Dave Brubeck with a high school band talent - result they are peons not masters.

So what do you do if you are our community college? Maybe you have to link those who want to learn to those that can teach rather than try and teach the sheep. This is a huge shift. Does it only fit with IT?

What about automotive trades. Until now you could go to a college and learn how to fix a car. But what about Hybrids and soon fuel cells - who will stop the train for long enough to create a conventional curriculum? It can't be done. We will have to learn on the job as the job will be changing too fast. So what does the Community College have to do to create the learning environment. The same process is true for many areas - think even of construction - post Kyoto we will change radically how we build and the material will change very fast. You can't teach stuff that is 3 years out of date.

Who can we learn from? eBay I think. They have made a business through creating a safe community where people can do business with each other.

For me the big challenge is how can we create a safe community where we can learn from each other?

eBay have revolutionized retailing as a result. No inventory! You think that education has no inventory - think again - it is all about inventory - they are called courses and departments - they build and sell. Changes in inventory are exceptionally slow. But the pace of change is accelerating. Formal learning cannot keep up and will only fall behind.

It is also all so expensive. Canadian university fees were up 7% this year while inflation is about 3%. School costs are rising much faster than inflation and the degree is falling in value as more kids enroll. Student debt will be cancer on the next generation. But if you get out of build and sell you get out of your main costs - inventory.

So here is the challenge. What small place that knows it cannot compete with the large traditional centres will have the balls to set up the eBay of learning?

Blogging and Health

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:22:26 GMT

Are blogs just a means of telling one' own story? Are they about developing software? or are they a cheap and very easy way to create community?

Why would creating community be helpful? Here is the first of a few short answers to that question.

Blogging and health - Follow the link and see the power of self help groups. The bottom line is that doctors are good at diagnosis and acute care but little else. If you have a chronic illness say diabetes, cancer etc the research is in. Joining a self help group is the best way to health for you.

This is not confined to emotional support - god knows you need it - but self help groups excel also in providing up to date information of a technical nature. Groups of fellow sufferers know more and get back faster than your doctor. Self help groups most importantly do not talk down to members Like Amazon, your peers supply you with the info in the most accessible way.

Blogging - St Paul - The Real Needs of Business

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:57:54 GMT

New movements tend to stall when the "in group" want to keep the movement within the
"in group"

The same may be true for blogging. The number of people that know about what a blog is among my clients is very small. Intuitively I would say less than 2%. What would put them off? Anything technical. Blogging has to be made really easy.

Why do I mention St Paul? At the outset of Christianity there was a huge debate. The "In Group" as lead by the surviving disciples of Jesus insisted that to be a Christian you had to be a Jew. This meant adult circumcision for the men and backseat behind a screen for the women. Quite a "technical" hurdle!!!. Paul argued that all men and women should be able to become Christians - guess who won? Pride in coping with the technical sides of blogging is a block for take-up.

The real opportunity is when a group of "Ingroup folks" maybe like "socialtext" really engage with organizational life and find the fit. Step 1 has to be"Easy does it" Easy does it demands that anyone who can type can set up a good blog and that there are a number of great templates. We are exploring Typepad to see if we can make it even easier.

Step two has to be finding the immediate felt benefit. This is more challenging and I think demands that we find parts of an organization where building a community will help - maybe in the entire support area. This is where the whole KM issue rears its head. The idea of content management is an exceptionally stupid idea that flies in the face of how we understand knowledge. Only a small fraction of knowledge is explicit - the vast bulk is implicit - ie it is ten times better to talk to someone about an issue than to try and find what he has written about it. Who wants a manual when you can be walked through? BP has been a leader here in seeing that their key system issues is to find a way of connecting people with questions to people with answers. Each employee has a personal website that amongst other things has a lot of info about what they know. The deal at BP is that if you have question you search for the person.

Why should we care anyway? Blogging is our path back to being human at work. Blogging reveals who we are to not only others but more importantly to ourselves. For the first time mankind - the great tool maker - who has used tool making ingenuity to make the world and himself into a tool, or a thing, has created a tool that renews and brings back what it is to be human.

So like Paul - we are faced with an historic choice. We can relegate blogging to geekiness and tool making or we can work to change our relationships back from machine to human.

What do I mean by this bold statement? We can change democracy by making it essential for politicians to be real and to listen to us. We can get the issues that make sense on the table other than spin. We can make management of organizations transparent and give organizations a human "Cluetrain" voice. We can change how we learn - from each other rather than from institutions. We can change healthcare by empowering fellow sufferers to help each other rather than to rely on the priests of medicine. We so change the world as Paul did.

Blogs for What Business?. Jimmy Guterman's new piece on business blogging (sub. required) is sure to cause a stir. He charges the blogging community as being "self-absorbed and elitist" and says its not essential for business. He cites a Forrester study to back up his claims:

You don't have to believe me on this. Finally, some data asserts that blogs are hardly a popular pursuit. If anything, blogging is more marginal than its critics contend. Forrester Research (FORR) conducted an online survey of 3,673 people and found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one. Blogs can be wonderful things, but if a mere 2 percent of Internet users read blogs, the pastime is far from mainstream. The Forrester survey notes that the typical blog reader has been using the Web for an average of six years. For the most part, blogs feature the Net elite writing to the Net elite. This continues to be the case only as long as the elite are underemployed.

I believe what Jimmy is saying is that there isn't a consumer market for blogging and that it isn't essential for businesses to address it. The problem is we are at the very beginning of a technology adoption lifecycle. Some serious companies have forecasted this market to grow and made their bets accordingly. Every time a journalist tries to wrap themselves around the existing market, what's visible are early adopters. What stands out are the leaders in using blogs for publishing, who benefit from preferential attachment as the earliest entrants. And if you take the innovator dialogue to seriously it looks like a one ring circus.

The other story folks pick up on is unclueful attempts by businesses and PR firms to market to bloggers as an emerging and influential segment. Any attempt to treat bloggers as a segment will fail. Today the influence of participants who act more as producers than consumers is the attraction. The number of participants is growing at 400% per year, and that's before AOL's entry.

But the real story in the consumer market is how increasing numbers of real people are using blogs , but as a way to communicate an form their own communities. Its that skinny tail of the power-law distribution that's going to wag the market. A way to share with friends, communicate post-by-post and remain open to new people joining your community. Conversational Networks provide the most value to your average Jane.

Rick Bruner does make the case that there are lots of businesses using blogs in the consumer market and points out this is like the web in 1995 and where the weblog as publishing market is headed. And many of them are making money. I agree that more evidence in this area would help, always does, but give it time for these new ventures to tell their story.

There is another story of weblogs and business that is less visible because the real action is behind the firewall. At Socialtext we are adapting weblogs for use within enterprises. Weblogs are one Enterprise Social Software tool, because they are necessary but not sufficient for communication and collaboration.

The enterprise market is entirely different than the consumer market. What is in common is an efficient, and dare I say fun, way of having conversations that contribute to productivity. Maybe its time we start telling more of our customer stories, but the distinction between consumer and enterprise needs to be made. [Corante: Social Software]

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 10:09:20 GMT

More Great KM Stuff.

Collaboration is in the KM toolbox.
Collaboration is the new KM

Why collaboration? I think it appeals because its less fluffy than 'KM' - people intuitively think its good (few CEO's are crying out for their people to collaborate less) - and it taps a current need: in trying to cut costs by e.g. reducing travel, people are feeling the pain of projects failing and mis-communication. 'Virtual teams' as a term has been around long enough, but few companies are getting it right.

[from Intellectual Capital Punishment]

This snippet from the middle of Sam Marshall's comments hints at why collaboration has gained new attention: collaboration = faster throughput with the same resources. He also reminds us that for this to be done well, we have to prepare for it.

As part of his discussion on expert databases last week, John Chu shared a report on the topic from Outsell, Trend Alert: Connecting People to People - Expert Databases (abstract only). Outsell surveyed a number of companies with expert databases and said some things about knowledge management and setting up expert databases. It was the conclusion that was most telling:

In our opinion, the pain won't be worth the gain if collaborative work practices aren't already inherent within the organization.

It is relatively easy to set up the technology to run video conferences and webinars. But to create a culture that takes advantage of these technologies is much more difficult, and much more interesting in the long term. Beyond saving money on travel, what does the organization expect to gain from having NetMeeting or WebEx or iSight?
[Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Not only is collaboration important and allows more productivity with the same number of people, but the final aspect, culture, is critical. Companies that do not already have collaborative cultures will not be able to utilize these technologies efficiently and will thus be at a tremendous disadvantage to companies that already are collaborative. Simply providing collaboration tools to a company that believes that knowledge is power, where restricting the flow of information is the way to advance, will result in unused tools. In companies that already value transparency and open communication, that want as many eyes on the problem as possible in order to find solutions, these tools will only enhance productivity. So, in my mind, it is worthless to try and provide the tools to a company whose culture will not allow them to be utilized. You might make a buck but your customer will not be satisfied. If their industry requires novelty, creativity and innovation to succeed, then they will eventually fail. In such an industry, not having a culture that fosters collaboration is a business model of failure. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Richard is hot! I am 100% with you Richard - the new competitve frontier is culture. Those who have a collaborative culture will learn and adapat more quickly and will overwhelm those that do not.

You can't buy this type of culture - so the leadership issue becomes critical

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:43:17 GMT

Texting blamed for summer movie flops.

In this article, the Independent says that "in Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why."

The problem, the executives say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films -- sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

Thanks to Michel Dumais for the pointer

[Smart Mobs]

I just love this. The movie studios know that even for a bad movie, marketing can buy them some attendance. The right marketing campaign could at least hold the hope of recouping some of their investment. Since word of mouth takes some time, the first weekend might make some money. But now the prime market, teenagers, is thwarting this process using cell phones and txting. Word of mouth is not measured in minutes not days. Obviously, this sends chills down the spines of movie moguls. No hope for bad movies. I expect this to have a big effect on the movies they greenlight. Look out for more sequels and pre-sampled pablum. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

I also hear that boys are staying away from action moves in droves. Why? because they have more control in games.Crap is going to have a bad time.

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:01:50 GMT

Missing the Librarians for the Trees.

The Myth of Generation N

"For decades, social scientists and technologists have alternatively predicted the emergence of 'computer kids' or a 'net generatio'”—a cohort of children, teenagers, and young adults who have been immersed in digital technology and the digital way of thinking since their conception.

This new generation, the thinking went, would be everything that their parents weren’t when it came to technology: They would know how to type, partake in electronic communications, and be able to rapidly figure out how all this stuff worked. They would be so adept at using computers that calling them 'computer literate' would be an insult. They would see society as something to be mastered and hacked, not something that they need to fit inside.
Certainly, a lot of evidence supports a 'net generation' effect. Although there are no reliable statistics on computer literacy, good figures do exist on Internet usage, thanks to the Pew Internet Project. According to its survey released earlier this year, 74 percent of people in the United States age 18 to 29 have Internet access, compared with 52 percent of those age 50 to 64. Among the over-65 set, Internet access plummets to just 18 percent. And in my own age group, 30 to 49, 52 percent have some kind of Net access. These figures certainly argue for the existence of a 'Generation N.'

But the more time I spend with the kids who should be members of Generation N—today’s high school and college students—the more convinced I am that the notion of universal computer competence among young people is a myth. And the techno-laggards among us risk being relegated to second-class citizenship in a world that revolves around, and often assumes, access to information technology....

Experts in human-computer interaction say that the real difference between teenagers and their elders is teens’ willingness to experiment with computers, combined with their acceptance of the seemingly arbitrary conventions that are endemic to contemporary computer interfaces. In other words, teens aren’t worried about breaking their computers, and they’re not wise enough or experienced enough to get angry at and reject poorly written programs. The teens just deal with computers, as they are forced to deal with many other aspects of their lives. These strategies, once learned and internalized, are incredibly effective for working with today’s computer technology....

...Unfortunately, with the changes overtaking our society, today’s kids who don’t have tech experience and tech aptitude are going to be left behind much faster than their elders.

And that’s the danger in believing that time will give us a population that’s completely computer literate. Remember, the Pew study found that 26 percent of young adults do not have Internet access. An even bigger determiner than age is education: only 23 percent of people who did not graduate from high school have Internet access, compared with 82 percent of those who have graduated from college.

Certainly, more kids today are growing up wired—but millions of them are not. Meanwhile, we’re rebuilding our society in ways that make things increasingly difficult for people who aren’t online. For example, people who don’t want to (or can’t) buy their airplane tickets on the Web now typically have to wait on hold for 30 minutes with the airline or go through a travel agent and pay an agency fee—sometimes as much as $50. When I needed to renew my passport, the local post office didn’t have the form: they told me to download it from the Internet.

This is a problem that won’t be solved through more education or federal grants. As a society, we need to come to terms with the fact that a substantial number of people, young and old alike, will never go online. We need to figure out how we will avoid making life unbearable for them." [Technology Review]

First of all, bad title because when you cite statistics such as "74% of Americans ages 18-29 have internet access," that's pretty much a "generation." Did every member of the "greatest generation" fight in World War II? No. Did every member of the "baby boomers" smoke pot and protest the war? No. But yet 74% of a generation that has internet access doesn't qualify as a critical mass.

Actually, I don't even think of kids ages 18-29 as netgens. My personal definition would be kids age 15 and younger. If you're generous and figure that the internet has been mainstream for six years, then you really need to look at netgens as kids that have grown up during that six year period and their younger siblings. I know the 18-29 age group came of age with computers, but the internet is a whole new ball of wax. Email, the web, and instant messaging are changing our society even faster than computers did. And these kids that grow up taking this stuff for granted are already ahead of my 35-year old self in how they assume and assimilate an interconnected world.

I know folks like Walt will sigh when they read that, but it's true. The way we take time-shifting technologies like VCRs and walkmans for granted is how these kids take the internet and wireless access for granted. It's just there, as it should always have been there. You mean it wasn't always like that? As I've noted before, my kids think every laptop can connect to the internet, and at high speeds, too. They have no idea that you might ever need a cable to do it, either. They think every camera can instantly display the picture it just took and pretty soon, they'll think that all cell phones can take pictures.

But what about the author's original point that 26% of this generation won't be computer or net-literate? Well, my question is how sad is it that he doesn't note the single most important support net for those people - libraries? Who could teach them information literacy in the digital age, either in school or in general classes at the public library? Who can provide them with free access to purchase that airline ticket or download that form? Who can provide them with the backup print resources that they need? Who can find information for them when they can't do it themselves?

The same folks that are there for every other past or future generation - librarians. And you know why the article's author encounters high school and college kids who aren't information literate? It's because politicians keep cutting library budgets, insisting that they're not important anymore. In some states, like California, they cut school librarian positions until there are almost none left. In some states, like Florida, they decide that critical institutions like the State Library are expendable and no longer need to be funded.

So how come Technology Review doesn't mention that?

[The Shifted Librarian]

I have been talking about the low levels of traditional literacy on PEI. This article and Jenny's comments reveal an even greater need to be able to read. If you cannot read - you cannot participate in the online world. Soon there will be no alternative. Government services, business and social communication will increasingly go online and the alternatives will dry up. Maybe the Libraray will be the home of the illiterate? What a concept!

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 12:09:07 GMT

Penthouse comes unstuck. Media: The publisher of troubled Penthouse magazine has filed for bankruptcy, possibly spelling an end to the top-shelf title founded 38 years ago by the flamboyant Bob Guccione. [Guardian Unlimited]

Oh! Part of my boyhood gone. The first pubes I ever saw were in Penthouse. I suppose when you can see everything - I mean EVERYTHING - for free on the internet, why buy a magazine like Penthouse. Does this mean that Playboy is a gonner as well?

Universities - Where next?

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:32:51 GMT

We live today in one of those periodic times, when shifts in beliefs and in communication technology drive a fundamental change in how power is defined and exercised. What are these trends and how do they manifest themselves in the lives of universities? How can universities, with their unique cultures and management processes, cope and even prosper in this type of environment?

What is going on? What are these trends and what do they mean for managing a University? In particular, what do they mean for the social and human aspects that HR will have to plan for?

A revolution in demography - By 2020, most people in the developed world will be over 50. This is a unique demographic event in the history of nature. This aging of society will affect all aspects of the social and work world. It will be especially challenging for organizations that rely on a stream of young customers or those who rely on the young to replace the old as participants. Universities are vulnerable in both ends of the age spectrum. Who will teach? Who will be the students? How will we attract and retain staff and students? Our previous assumptions about the answers to these questions will have to be revisited.
A revolution in values. There is a pronounced shift in organizational values in the developed world. The shift is from an acceptance in organizations of a top down and process driven approach toward a new set of values that built on self-expression and dialogue. This values' shift is proving a challenge to all organizations In particular, all "customer" interfaces in every field of service delivery are being challenged by this new values set. There is no reason why institutions of learning should be exempt from this shift. where the managerial culture is authoritarian. For academia, the shift is especially challenging as it demands also a shift in pedagogy from where the teacher and content is the centre piece to where the student and dialogue is the centre piece. What is meant by this shift? What is the right course to take? How will we get there? Our current approach to delivery and to teaching itself has to re-evaluated.
A revolution in technology - It is not an illusion, the pace of technological change is accelerating in a non-linear manner. The web revolution has however only just begun. The impact on society will be similar to the advent of the railway which radically changed how and where people lived and worked in the 19th century. We can expect no less of a revolution today. While the new design for society is not yet clear, the new design for service delivery is emerging with some clarity. New technology enables the customer to access the service provider on his terms and at times that suit the customer. The new manufacturing process, as developed by Dell, has turned the Ford model of make and sell on its head. The adversarial customer relationship of the transaction economy, is being replaced by a community and relationship based model as exemplified by eBay and Amazon. How will this affect education? Many say that education is different. This may be a dangerous assumption. These technological and cultural forces are located already on the edge of the Academic world and are becoming ubiquitous. They fit the new values and they fit the new service/cost criteria as we are seeing in the airline industry. They will bear down on how universities operate. What will happen to high cost, place and content based universities when an educational equivalent of Southwest Airlines or EBay emerges? Other organizations in other sectors that have not thought about this threat now face extinction.
A revolution in educational costs and service expectations - A generation ago, post secondary education was an elite process. Now it is expected to be accessible to most young people. This has lead to a massive expansion in the scale of universities and to a new and challenging relationship with government. Governments, in many parts of the developed world, see universities as engines of economic and social development. As Governments pay many of the bills, their social and economic expectations are becoming important parts of the university agenda. In response, Universities have had little choice but to adopt many of the features of the industrial workplace. Mass production of content and mass processing of students has enabled student participation to rise but at the cost of a significant increase in infrastructure costs and a corresponding reduction in organizational flexibility. Development and fund raising have become critical skills of the President. Coping with Unions and labour relations has become an important Presidential skill. As a result, the culture of business is seeping though the academic world. Paradoxically, as more students participate and as the direct and indirect costs of education rise for the student, the value of a BA is devalued in the work place. The average student can no longer afford a 4 year term at university away from home. Something in the cost mix will have to break. The current system cannot deliver the price and the quality that the student can afford and that the staff can tolerate. The result is a growing conflict between the internal stakeholders. All the stakeholders intuitively sense that something has to give but have circled their own wagons to defend themselves. How can Universities break the deadlock between their constituent parts? Is it likely that the conventional process of fighting this out at the bargaining table will work? What new process would give us the chance of reconciling the fears of the competing groups?

What operational issues will be exposed by these trends? -

Bearing in mind, a very small pool and a huge demand, how will we attract and retain the key academic and specialist staff that we need? Rank this issue in importance? Is this a survival issue or just a tough one to deal with? What are the financial implications of getting this wrong? What are the reputational issues of getting this wrong?
How important will dealing with the subset issues such as pay and work place culture be to the attraction and retention issues? Is money the only issue? What can you afford bearing mind the pressure on the cost front?
Is transforming our costs merely about finding new cuts or will they come from a redesign of how we do things? How will conventional cuts affect the ability of the university to deliver? What will happen to morale and to students? What will increasing risk of more internal conflict mean?
Will finding more effective and ways of teaching more for less be about the application of new technology or is it about finding a way to change our mindsets about how to do this differently?
Is affecting change itself an issue of power or is it an issue of understanding how we change from a psycho-social perspective. How important is being able to change?
How important is it to reduce the centrifugal forces that are affecting our university? Can this be done as a matter of power or are there social and organizational design issues involved?
How can we reduce the inertial and complexity drag of our union environment? How important is this in a rapidly changing world? Can we use power to do this?
Our health and benefits costs are growing at a non linear rate. How substantive is the threat to our financial health? Is solving this issue a matter of power or design?

More here

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:56:10 GMT

collaborative learning and institutional culture. There have been a few interesting posts lately about collaborative learning. Many of them spout the relentlessly cheerful “we tried it and it was amazing and I wish more teachers would shift their paradigms because the students love it so much” line. (Hmmm. Perhaps my frustrations are already leaking through, eh?) Happily, Seb Paquet pointed me to Martin Blanche’s post on “Obstacles to collaborative learning.” (Permalinks are broken, alas, so go to his main page for now.) I’ll take the liberty of quoting them here: * Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don’t... [mamamusings]

More good stuff on the shift or not the shift to a more collaborative learning model. One thing I am sure of, try the transmission model on adults who have been away from school for a while. They hate it!

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 02:30:57 GMT

Thoughts on the Intersections of Social Capital, Virtual Networks, Enterpreneurship and Innovation

I had mentioned a few days ago that I had to write a short essay outlining the main issues to be confronted in any attempt to understand the role of virtual networks in enhancing enterpreneurship and innovation, especially with respect to how social capital accumulates and impacts upon business dynamics.

Here goes then:

***

For the project to achieve fruition, there is a plethora of issues that need to be clarified. I will shortlist a few basic issues that pervade the work of leading researchers and practitioners and whose significance cannot be overlooked. First and most obviously, how could social capital be measured, especially within the context of virtual networks? Social Network Analysis tools are widely employed for such purposes, however, their effectiveness is limited due to the difficulty inherent in specifying which criteria should be used. Most analyses based on such tools (ie. Inflow) value the connections between disparate nodes of the social network in which they belong. When the social network consists of a relatively small number of nodes, the analysis will definitely unveil how frequently the nodes communicate and will choreograph the information flows among them. What though the analysis cannot tell is whether the relationship between the nodes in built upon strong or weak ties. Put otherwise, we can infer the existence of a relationship between two nodes, but we cannot determine the exact dynamics upon which the specific relationship is premised, and frequency of communication is not the best of criteria since it may denote hierarchy rather than intense team building or project work [1]. This difficulty aside, the Internet is bound to impact upon the process according to which social networks are formed, and hence the way social capital is accumulated, as “social capital is about networks, and the net is the network to end all networks” [2].

Secondly, the process of innovation is continuously changing in scope due to the amplifying character of all – pervasive communication networks, and this further hinders an analysis based on conventional metrics. For example, the nature of consumerism online can be radically different from the respective consumption modes observed in the physical world. Unhindered by physical matter constraints, users of file-sharing networks, such as the legendary Napster music file sharing network, redefine consumption as an essentially peer activity, which extends far beyond typical paid-for commercial experiences. In a similar vein, economists have a hard time explaining why people share information online without the requirement of quid-pro-quo relations [3][4]. Or in the case of Linux and collaborative software development on the Internet, the boundaries between producers and users are so blurred that this dichotomy between production and consumption loses its meaning. Some have argued that this is where the innovative potential of the Internet actually lies: networks of users providing help to each other without expecting anything in return, in much the same way that mutuals in the UK operate [5]. This peculiarity of the model has led many to assume the prevalence of a gift economy [6], however, it is a mistake to categorise the Internet as a mosaic of gift economies, despite that it arguably promotes the proliferation of certain kinds of gift economies. We should not neglect to bear in mind that the Internet is primarily a collaboration and communication platform rather than a marketplace aimed at co-ordinating exchanges of goods and services. Hence, it should come as no surprise that B2B e-marketplaces, which are geared toward communication and collaboration and aim at co-ordinating supply chains, are far more successful than B2C/e-tailing ventures that initially dismissed the inherently collaborative character of the Internet. And this is also reflected in the success of those early pioneers who have managed to stay afloat despite the current economic downturn.

Amazon.com and eBay are probably the most succinct examples as they have both embraced the contribution of end-users and have continuously rethought their strategy in order to morph from e-tailers to platforms where people could do a lot of things [7][8]. eBay still portrays as the most gigantic marketplace in the world, however, its real strength lies in its ability to build a massively decentralised database of member profiles, which constitutes the pragmatic leverage point of the platform. Users of eBay rank other users they have engaged in some sort of transaction through eBay, and this ranking mechanism emerges as the definitive asset of eBay because it enables users to evaluate the credibility of other users and this is the least-hassle route to reputation building in a dematerialised world [9]. Amazon, on the other hand, invites users to submit reviews of books they have read, and in so doing, a conversational effect is evident throughout the Amazon platform with users seemingly carrying out conversations and forming temporary communities of interest [10][11]. The underlying technology or process, called Collaborative Filtering, has drawn quite some attention as it is reckoned to be in the epicentre of a radical shift away from content based e-commerce models toward user and community centric models. What is more important though, particularly with respect to innovation and social capital, is that the very same process of collaborative filtering enables the formation of social networks at a scale the world has never experienced before. Witness the success of community sites such as Slashdot.org, which recycle the web in real-time, and which rely upon their members to create content and generate value. This genre of websites is also known as weblogs, although the genre is as well defined as peer-to-peer to say the least. Semantics aside, the technology that powers weblogs is not really novel, but the impact on innovation and network formation is dramatic. Nowadays, scores of companies like Macromedia, Microsoft, Apple, Demos, Groove Networks and Jupiter Research to mention but a few, have started experimenting with weblogs in an effort to connect with their market and benefit from end-user innovation.

Perhaps, the greatest challenge and promise at the same time of seamless communication networks revolves around work organisation. As knowledge workers no longer need to be physically located in a specific workplace, and they can co-ordinate their creative output regardless of geographical constraints, the role of organisational structure loses its historic role of managing power relations at a distance. In much the same way, organisational boundaries tend to become more elastic and flexible, and it is not rare to confront organisations whose strategy is defined by their structure. Put bluntly, although at first glance conventional structures seem to gradually evaporate, the overall importance of structure is as important as ever. In a sense, structure precedes strategy [12][13]. In fast-pacing industries fraught with technological uncertainty and galvanised by rapidly changing consumer expectations, the only way to compete is by elaborating on a fluid organisational structure that allows for quick adaptation to environmental disturbances. Thus, strategy becomes of secondary importance, and day-to-day management is what matters now. Under such circumstances, a rigid structure is bound to result in managerial lethargy, and to ease this tension, organisation around teams and projects becomes the norm. Nevertheless, this is not to say that the boundaries of the network can be easily defined, as many organisational actors may not be even conscious of those very swiftly adjusting boundaries.

Furthermore, when average job tenure lasts for no more than a couple of years as it is the norm in the Silicon Valley, and the emerging model of organisation is modelled on Hollywood, where individuals form ad-hoc, temporary, project-based business networks and once the film – the project – is completed, the temporary network disbands, then the corporate world is certain to undergo for a major restructuring [14]. Needless to say, this process is further accelerated by cyberspace and the new legion of e-lancers that discover new opportunities through always-on communication technologies [15]. Some speculate that the prevalent organisational entities of the future will not be mega-corporations the size of countries, but small clusters of e-lancers brought together for a single project and continuously reconfiguring their dynamics and components [15]. So far so true, people no longer need to see each other in a face-to-face context in order to work together. But, how can they trust each other if they have never physically seen, touched, and handshaken them? And this is perhaps the greatest obstacle that virtual organisations face: how to establish trust in a exclusively virtual context where relationships and processes are in flux, and the lifespan of the temporary organisation is meant to be so short that most organisational actors will never get to really know everyone involved? The importance of swift trust [16] and weak ties [18] has been proposed as the antitode, however, the Hollywood organisational model, again, offers a glimpse of the future to come: intense team building through a shared goal and trust building through webs of trust. First, there must be no ambiguity as to which purpose the organisation seeks to fulfil, and most importantly, you trust the people whom the people you trust trust. After all, centralised trust systems have always been inherently risky.

References

[1] Preece, J. Online Communities: Designing usability, designing sociability, John Wiley & Sons, NY, 2000

[2] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2000, p.171.

[3] Richard Barbrook, The high-tech gift economy, First Monday, 1998, at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/index.html

[4] Felix Stalder, Beyond portals and gifts: Towards a bottom-up Net economy, First Monday, Issue 4, No 1, 1999, accessible at

www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_1/stalder/.

[5] Charles Leadbeater, Up the Down Escalator: why the global pessimists are wrong, Penguin, 2002.

[6] Kollock P. The Economies of online cooperation: gifts and public goods in cyberspace in Smith M and Kollock P (Eds) Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge, 1997.

[7] Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Case study #1: amazon.com - a business history, in E-Commerce Management: Text and Cases, 2002.

[8] Tapscott, D. Digital Capital: Harnessing the power of business webs, McGraw – Hill, 2000.

[9] Boyd, J. In community we trust: online security communication at eBay, Journal for Computer-Mediated Communication, Issue, no 3, April, 2002, accessible at http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol7/issue3/boyd.html

[10] Locke, C. Gonzo Marketing: Winning through worst practices, Perseus, 2001

[12] Langlois N. Langlois, The Vanishing Hand: the changing dynamics of industrial capitalism, University of Connecticut Working Paper, Version 3.02b, 2001.

[13] The McKinsey Quarterly Reader, “Strategy=Structure”, May 2002.

[14] Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: how the shift from ownership to access is transforming modern life, Penguin, 2000, pp.24-29.

[15] T.W. Malone and R.J. Laubacher. "The Dawn of the e-lance economy," Harvard Business Review, volume 76, number 5 (September-October), 1998.

[16] Meyerson D., Weick K.E. and Kramer R.M. “Swift Trust and Temporary Groups” in Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research. (Eds) Kramer R.M. and Tayler T.R., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp.166-195.

[18] M. Granovetter. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1973.

[George Dafermos' Weblog]

Excellent stuff George

Tired of Blogging?

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 12:07:59 GMT

Matt and Paolo are wondering if they are tired of blogging after a year. I too seem to have hit a one year wall. I want to shrink my blogging world. Why?

Then I remembered my 3 years at University and I wonder if there is predictable pattern here. When I went up to Oxford, I knew about 2 people who had been to school with me and I did not know them very well. My first year was an orgy of networking. There were girls to meet - a novelty for me then - and a host of amazing people. Like blogging, I too had to have something to offer and making one's rep was important in that first year.

Then in year 2, I found that I could not keep pace with all these contacts and I actually had to start to do a bit of work. By year 3 with finals on the horizon where the entire degree depended on three weeks of solid exams, I cut back to about 12 very close friends. These men have been the cornerstone of my life ever since.

Is there a pattern here that is familiar to you? Maybe the DNA of it is as follows:

When you enter a new world, you have to develop your "name" and you explore widely all the new social possibilities - This is the investment phase
After a while, you move to the discernment phase where your work life and your existing social links exert a restricting force on this new world forcing you to choose from the host of the new, the few that can fit inside your finite capacity for close relationships
Finally there is the consolidation phase when you make the selection of the few new who will enter your circle of maybe 35 total relationships that you can handle at a level of some intimacy.
If my university model works then these people enter the group who you become linked to both in terms of ideas and values but also in your personal lives.

What is so interesting about this new world is that unlike all others, school, your neighbourhood and work that this group is not bounded by place but solely by the link

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:58:23 GMT

Paul Martin has a Weblog. "Paul Martin (quite possibly Canada’s next prime minister) has a weblog. I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me thinks it’s great that weblogs can be used in mainstream politics. Another part of me is finds it creepy and suspicious. To their credit, the writing is good. It appear..." (155 words - posted by steven) 5 replies [Acts of Volition]

Well if Paul Martin can blog - the rest will sooin.

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:52:53 GMT

It is likely that there will be an election on PEI this fall. I wonder how blogging will fit. My sense is that while it may be a slow start, that the tight community here will be ideal for Island Politics. I can imagine the type of connection that will build and the opportunity for real dialogue.

I think that Ross is on the money here - Blogging and the net will transform our democratic process.

One thing is for sure. When Dean showed he could raise money on the Net, politics changed forever.

Previously the Net had demonstrated its ability to influence decision makers through individualize pluralism, beginning when Kevin Werbach set up the first citizen feedback email address. Over 2 million emails were sent by citizens on the issue of media ownership, at last count according to Reed. Blogs have also demonstrated the ability of an influential deliberative network to force the media to play their role as the 4th estate, Lott being the poster child.

But now the Net has become a constituency. Decision makers like to say they are accountable even the poorest residents of their districts, but money is the source of their power and the group they serve is the group that elects them with it. Dean has shown the Net as means to money. And now every politician is finally paying attention.

Reed's talk last week was on the digital polity vs. the analog polity. He spoke eloquently about the rising constituency and how its "not just that things reoccur, its that they get better." There are core ideals, parties are means towards those ideals, but are largely ineffective. A new party of a digital polity is emerging that holds certain core beliefs:

We know more than our leaders
We pay nobody to say what we want to hear
Information is percipient and wants to be free
We are build on systems and networks, not organizations
We synthesize the whole instead of constructing barriers and silos
We believe in truth and civil debate

Now I may not have everything word for word (thumbed it into my Palm). He also stated digital polity principles of privacy, representation, honesty and equity. He implies that leaders still have utility and a role to play, but they need to engage the digital constituency and build trust. We don't depend upon the media because we are skeptics and experts, we are global and can engage in collective action without government. That said, digital needs to negotiate with analog. But these are powerful and re-occuring themes.

What is encouraging, if not remarkable, is that Reed is a civil servant, nay, politician, who undertands his new constituency and its reasonable demands.

At the end he did casually remark that we should abolish the US Senate, as they are a distortion of representation, serving only 15% of citizens. The point he is making, though, is that leaders fall behind their citizens (especially in times like these). Perhaps because they are not engaged with their constituents. Perhaps because their interests are conflicted. But the difference is our representatives need to recognize our new found powers to deliberate and represent ourselves at a pace they need to understand.

Which brings me back to Dean. If a candidate and causes can raise money on the Net, they can engage in institutional pluralism. Direct participation within the social network of decision makers. This scares most policy makers, as the game has changed.

Its a grass roots game ripe for changing minds and policy. Valdis forwarded a paper, Encouraging Political Defections: The Role of Personal Discussion Networks in Partisan Desertions to the Opposition Party and Perot Votes by Paul Beck, that I found absolutely stunning. We are bi-polar in our political views by nature, tend to filter out news we can identify is from the opposition and are comfortable in the absence of change. But when an issue is socialized we have a greater chance of changing our minds. When our social network provides new ideas and affirmations, we are more likely to take new positions.

Perhaps that's the power of Dean's use of Meetup. Meetup collapses time and space for deliberative groups to get together. Inevitably, some participants are strong ties for affirmation and weak ties for new ideas. What Dean is doing is opening up discussion at the social level to enact political change. How neofunctional of him. What Dean needs to do, however, is get more of us to debate -- instead of the candidates.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

The retail revolution - eBay

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:09:54 GMT

Why Ebay Works.

Meg Whitman:

"We make our money one dollar at a time, literally $1.72 per listing, and a final value fee if the listed item sells."

"our users are on track to trade $21 billion worth of merchandise. "

"what eBay does is create efficient markets where there were quite inefficient markets before. We’re the major player in the two inefficient parts of the overall [product life cycle] bell curve. "

If you want more details and don't my slogging through powerpoint check out the latest corporate presentation.

[Micah's Weblog]

I think that eBay is the best example of the Support Economy yet. Anyone who cannot see the power of creating a trusted place and facilitation as the new way of doing business - look out. Check out the PPT has a gold mine of stuff - Adam Cohen's Book - see link - is great too.

Organizational complexity - A New Math Required and New Tools

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 18:54:16 GMT

I am doing some OD work for a university. One of the issues confronting all universities today is a quantum increase in organizational complexity. My ingoing sense is that the mechanism's for managing complexity are poorly understood and that as maths changed at the turn of the century to take complexity into account, so we have to look for novel ways of managing complexity at universities.

My thesis is that we manage today as if cause and effect were our universe. Our systems are too complex for this midset and if we remain in cause and effect, conflict will be the only result. Some type of systems tool is required. A start may be some type of council that brings all partiers to the table - but I get ahead of myself.

Let's look at the world of 1969 when I went up to Oxford and then at the world of 2003 for a modern urban university in Canada

When I went to Oxford 35 years ago, my college, Christchurch was mainly an undergraduate college attached to a cathedral. The Dean ran both. He and the Dons ran the college with a handful of secretaries and a lot of servants and he and the Canons ran the Chapter again with a few secretaries and a lot of servants. Christ Church was part of a Coop called the University where a few Dons sat on committees and set policy. That was the University - a few committees.

Our world was really the college. Small and compact. 90% of the teaching was in the college. We all lived in college. Each college had a its own funding. Christ Church was immensely wealthy with large endowments of land that had accrued over hundreds of years. There were few of us. All of us that went paid fees and it cost me then about L1,000 a year in fees and I spent about another L1,000 on having a good time. We were heavily subsidized by the college but it also lived well within its means. Our accommodation, though splendid, was also spartan as only an all male place of the time could have been. In my quad, the only toilet was on the ground-floor, and the building was 6 stories high. We used the sink for most things! The only baths were in the basement in one corner of the quad. When this was pointed out to the dean who built the quad, his reply was that " they are only here for 8 weeks at a time". I think I only had a handful of baths in the 3 years that I was there. I would go home on the weekends for a clean up.

Again my point - a simple set up with not much money flowing either way and almost no government involvement. The world was the college and the faculties. Being small there was little managerial complexity. All who were not faculty were in effect servants or students. There were no money problems and, apart from maintenance, little need for capital investment. The money fit inside the capital envelope of the college. The university ran a few libraries and exams. The simple college was our world where everyone knew everyone perhaps better than they wanted too.

I use Oxford as an example because it was the model for many other universities. But now what is the university world?

Money and social engineering are compelling drivers. The state has entered the game in most countries and has funded a huge increase in enrollment which has driven a huge increase in the capital requirement. Coed is the norm and modern plumbing has entered the male preserve at great cost. Equipping my college with toilets and bathrooms on every floor cost over L20 million! Imagine the plumbing issues in 16 -1 19th century buildings.

So what are the issues in many Canadian Universities today. They have a president whose job is to fund-raise and to deal with governments. His job is mainly a business role. He has to get the budget and make the money work. He has to compete for capital donors and he has to lobby government for more research and operating funds. He is supported by a staff that would not be out of place in any large commercial enterprise. But he has no power to tell the faculty what to do. The Product end of the university has not changed much since I was an undergraduate or indeed since the middle ages. The faculty is divided into separate disciplines who jealously guard their turf. Now usually unionized, my Tutor Charles Stuart must be turning in his grave, they hold back the online world as they know that this will destroy how they work. They do not want to teach because they move up the tenure track and in status by publishing. So they employ armies of servants, TA's to you and I, to teach and mark in their name. In my day all the dons in every discipline met every night over dinner in hall. Today they all go home to their SOS's and children. So the linkages between them are poor. All the fertile research ground has been tilled and new entrants scrap for weeds deep in the mud.of their field. There is little sense of collegiality.

They fear that the president will make their university into a BUSINESS - horror of horrors! They sense that undergraduates already pay too much but that is the President's problem. They sort of know that demography will send fewer young their way - but that is the president's problem. After all they don't want to teach them anyway. . They reject any idea of using technology to teach differently - they fear that their precious IP will be lost if they make what they do accessible. So reducing the cost of teaching is the-President's problem. They have their heads firmly in the sand but will not give an inch of thie power up to help.

Governments want every one to have access to university. They have set up a loan sharking business to facilitate this. The average debt for BA is about $30,000. The theory is that BA's get high paying jobs and will easily pay this off. Not so. Most are caught and flip hamburgers or some double up and go onto graduate work. Students will find new ways of getting what they want and will turn away from the traditional delivery and costs - they have no choice.

While the students are finding university too expensive. 50% of the faculty will be in the retirement zone in the next 10 years. Already a bidding war for the new talent is happening. In key areas, new hires are earning more than the old guard. resentment is building and costs are going up.A classic squeeze play is emerging. Costs are too high and rising. Each party balmes the other.

Universities have become huge. They now have armies of Administrators and Technicians who are still treated like servants by the faculty. They are unionized as well and have a deep sense of bitterness and entitlement.

So who would want to be a University President?

How can universities reduce this complexity. Maybe they can take a lead from our Provincial Politicians. They are recommending the formation of a council where the premiers meet as a matter of course with the Prime Minister. The underlying idea is that there is no process other than confrontation to meet the complex needs of a diverse set of groups who live under one hat, Canada. So maybe for universities. Currently each powerful group has to attack the others. The poor President is stuck in the middle.

Maybe this is true for all organizations? Management and the rest was OK for simpler times. The 3 body problem demands a more sophisticated process. It recognizes that once there are more than two parties, then using cause and effect as the metaphor leads to conflict and failure. Most organizations are more complex than two body systems now. Understanding complexity and chaos will become essential tools for managment. More later

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 17:17:43 GMT

The meta-message: Information sucks.

Matt Richtel in the NY Times: The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? Several people wrote pointing me to this piece. A sample:

The ubiquity of technology in the lives of executives, other businesspeople and consumers has created a subculture of the Always On — and a brewing tension between productivity and freneticism. For all the efficiency gains that it seemingly provides, the constant stream of data can interrupt not just dinner and family time, but also meetings and creative time, and it can prove very tough to turn off.

This is high-priced Orlowski stuff, lathering about yet another red herring issue, all but calling for a detox center for the overwired. BUT he said technology dependence could have its down side, Richtel snarks.

Here's what's on TV right now: Nothing. Trust me. You can store it for later suckage off your TiVo, but it'll still be Nothing.

Here's what's in your magazines right now: Lots of Something you're not interested in. Same with your newspapers.

As for radio: Forget it, unless you're an amen-corner conservative, a sports junkie, an NPR addict, or in need of a traffic report in the next fifteen minutes.

Yes, there's lots of stuff in all those media you might like or use. But you have to wait for it if it's on a broadcast outlet or root for it in a publication. And you're not in charge. They are. And to Them, you're still just a consumer. A gullet for gobbling "content" and crapping cash. (Thank you for that perfect metaphor, Jerry Michalski.) Even if They are NPR and the New York Times.

On the Web, most of what you want, including informative friends and cyberneighbors, are right here, providing stuff you can learn in a time frame as close to Now as you're gonna get.

Here on the Net, we get to inform ourselves, and each other. No, not all information is here. Is it a perfect system? Far from it. But it's a human one. And human beings are learning creatures, after all, even if they do like to watch television.

Of course there will always be a need for libraries and conventional media of all kinds. Again, AND logic applies. But there's no substitute for learning stuff. Call it an addiction if you like, but consider the alternatives.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Doc is right - it is a year now since I have been blogging. I have almost stopped watching TV. I have stopped listening to the radio and hardly read the paper. I do spend a lot more time using my news aggregator but mainly to follow my new friends and less to pick up on News in the classic sense.

I am becoming very fond of my little group of blogging friends and I wonder what our relationhsip wil be like in 10 years. Some of us will no doubt drift away but I am certain that some of us will become very close indeed.

Real versus fake relationships - friendships aimed at mutual growth and learning!

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 01:12:16 GMT

Some news: John Robb is leaving UserLand. This is part of a bigger transition, one that we're not ready to talk about yet. It should be, net-net, good news for Manila and Radio users, and for the weblog community. We weren't ready to announce, John surprised us by writing about his departure on his weblog. He's a surprising guy. Anyway, part of my reason for being in Calif next week is business. I think UserLand will do fine, although things are still uncertain, but that's life in the big leagues. Thanks John for all your help, and best wishes to you and your family for much continued success. Onward! [Scripting News]

Userland is a great product. But all organizations depend on great people. Best wishes John. Dave I hope that you find the right person. It would be such a tragedy to let all this go

Are we neanderthals? How can social software help?

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 16:12:24 GMT

I wonder - have we become trapped in a type of culture that has turned us into Neanderthals? What do I mean by this weird statement?

I wrote yesterday

"Remember that we think that complex language was an adaptation to hunting on the savannah and hence was our start as homo sapiens - the tool maker. Our new ability to learn across tribes and across time, rather than only directly face to face in present time, gave us the ability to adapt to changes in the environment by using culture not biology.

Neanderthal did not innovate. In 200,000 years his tools' set did not change much. He could not cope with the invasion of Homo sapiens and was extinct within 1,000 years of first contact. With no complex language he could not communicate ideas in the abstract. He therefore could not cross tribal barriers. With no complex language he could not recall the past nor imagine the future. He could only work in the context of the present.

We are like that today.

In the modern organization there is no allowance for cross tribal discussion. Instead of looking across, we look up and down. This is also true of our learning organizations such as Universities. University departments are trapped inside their disciplines and find cross disciplinary work very challenging. Yet we know that the breakout in human potential came as a result of using complex language to look across boundaries. Innovation seems to demand a diverse perspective. As one human tribe found a new way to make a tool - the horizontal links drove not only adoption but improvement. Recursive loops between tribes accelerated the improvements.

In the modern organization, and in political life, we live in a fixed present - the life cycle of a CEO or an administration. There is a denigration of the past. We puff up our selves by dismissing the work of the predecessors. Because we do not look to enough to the past, we fail to see the patterns available there that tell us why and how we are in the present. Consequently, we cannot see the systemic causes of current problems. So, instead, we look for simple cause and effect - a view of causality that does not exist in the natural world. We not only do not look at the context of the past, but we seem incapable of imagining the future. Our days and minds are filled with the crises of the present. So we, like Neanderthal, are trapped in the present unable to move .

We have been trapped by a cultural meme that has turned us into Neanderthals.

So what is the way out? I think that social software will be like complex language. It offers us the chance to cope with our challenges by once again opening up the context of the past so that we can see the patterns. It re-attaches us to the power of the future to pull us forward. How does it do this? By opening up the horizontal channels and by opening up time again.

Is blogging an evolutionary tool?

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 16:26:43 GMT

CLAY SHIRKY ON THE DESIGN OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE.

I wrote a high-level spec recently for Social Networking Enablement (my term for the successor to Knowledge Management) and Social Software. The guru of Social Software, Clay Shirky, spoke to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in April and has just posted his speech. If you're interested in the subject, go read it .

Most important point, for those readers whose attention span is limited to five paragraphs, is Shirky's four critical design elements for Social Software:

Recognize Identity and Reputation -- the group needs to know who its members are
Acknowledge Standing and Provide Recognition -- knowing who knows what is a critical requirement for the group to be able to function, and recognition is essential to their willingness to do so
Provide Barriers to Participation -- manageable, efficient conversation requires different levels of increasingly elite membership, otherwise it's like giving everyone in the audience equal time during a presidential debate; the barriers also convey privilege and demand for others to 'get in', which is healthy for the group's sense of self-value
Spare the Group from Scale -- just as you may have 1000 acquaintences, 150 friends, 30 close friends and 3 intimate friends, social software needs to accommodate great facility for intimates to converse, and more modest facility for conversations with those less close, to be optimal, and to avoid size destroying the elements that make the community what it is

Some other concepts he describes which I find important and appealing:

The need to provide for soft overlap (Gladwell's connectors ?) between groups to allow ideas to cross boundaries
The importance of clustering mechanisms, the 'pattern recognition' of social software
The need for 'conversational artifacts', the critical synopsis of ideas, actions, consensus, decisions and issues that is so often missing from meetings and other social interactions today
The delightful advice to business owners and managers that users are there for one another, not for the sponsor/owner/facilitator/manager of the group; in other words, as I've always advised other managers, articulate the goals, roles and processes of the group and its members, and then get out of the way

Clay's thinking is way ahead of the curve, but look to the incorporation of his ideas as an excellent predictor of new social software's success or failure, both in the business and citizen peer-to-peer social realms.

[How to Save the World]

Dave is such a wonderful thinker and amalyst - I love the way he can summarize and draw conculusions

Not the software but the business model

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 10:39:02 GMT

Tim O'Reilly on generating value with commodity software.

Tim O'Reilly: "somebody gets a critical mass of customers and data and that becomes their source of value.

On that basis, I will predict that -- this is an outrageous prediction -- but eBay will buy Oracle someday. The value will have moved so much to people who are not now seen as software suppliers."

.... "Amazon is the furthest along this path, in a lot of ways. Amazon really understands that they are becoming a platform."

[Micah's Weblog]

Great article! I am convinced that we can now 'see" the new business model and it is made up of two components - build to order - the primary Dell focus and build community - the primary eBay focus. Amazon has both of these aspects in its model.

New entrants that pull this new model off well will destroy the traditional competition. Two areas that I think are most open to this attack are post secondary eductaion and chronic health care.

Why do I think this? More later

Fri, 04 Jul 2003 13:28:31 GMT

Extreme Mobility: a rant that I had to write after reading Tim, Dave, and this all in one day. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Did not want to lose this

Blogging and Communication Theory

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 11:53:17 GMT

I was reading Dave Pollard's great post this morning and was compelled to comment . His post caused me to ask myself, why are blogs so powerful when they on the surface deal only with text which we know is such a poor tool when used for email? My aha was connected to what I now know about a formal science called Communication Theory which was developed by scientists in WWII for radar and range finding. The issue was how to make sure your signal did what it was mean to do. Today it is used in managing networks. Few have taken its principles and applied them to human communication. I have put my toe in the water and have been surprised at how helpful it is. If you are interested in how Communication Theory works in a human context follow the link and you will find a paper on it.

Communication theory tells us that bandwidth is very important for a signal to be received correctly. Full bandwidth for humans would be face to face where we get not only the body language, but other channels that we are hardly aware of such as touch, smell and pupil dilation. Sex may be the ultimate wide bandwidth where all aspects of the human can be brought to connection. Email would be the narrowest channel with practically all but the message stripped away.

Your great tables get at this gradient of bandwidth intuitively. The more complex the message the more bandwidth we need to ensure that the correct message is received. Defined as the same intention as the sender had. I think that email is good for when we have a request - can you make lunch etc but is rotten for dealing with say a performance problem.

Adding a great visual plus voice gets us close to wide bandwidth and should be great for even complex situations. Mr G's comment about getting a lock on the eye is a very important point. We unconsciously obtain huge messages about intention and truth from the eye movements. Hence your search for such a tool. But here is how I think blogging fits and I am surprised at how powerful it is.

Blogging shares with email a text and hence narrow bandwidth issue. So it is very hard to express any subtlety. Emoticons and :) can help. But until you know the other person really well we have to be careful. Now comes my point.

Why does blogging work as a communication device when email is so poor- while on the surface the technology presents itself the same way in text that has poor bandwidth?

The issue is related to 3 other parts of the theory Context,Surprise and Power of Signal or POS.

Context leverages understanding and enables code to be compressed and for the power of the signal to be increased. As I write this in English, you can read it - you have the context for the code. With a lot of context you can compress the code. "Gd day DP how R U?". Can be understood. But if I was writing to you in Hindi you would not get a word - wrong code. If I spoke to you in Hindi face to face you would be surprised at how much you would understand provided we were talking about day to day things and not philosophy.

So context is very important for effective communication- it allows for good connection with very small code and bandwidth. My aha this morning is that Blogging adds huge context. It adds most importantly emotional and personal bandwidth in a new way. This is what Dina and I are starting to get excited about. As I visit your blog daily Dave, I build a picture of who you are and my context for you also builds - I can therefore accept a limited amount of code and bandwidth in a message because I have a huge personal context established.

The other issue is surprise. Our meme immune system does 2 things. It screens out what does not fit into our established world view. It hates new ideas and it hates to be lectured too. It also screens out routine noise. I lived for years under the flight path of Heathrow and after 3 months did not hear the jets.

Breaking through this immune system, in CT this is called "noise", is a critically important design issue. Email is like a hammer. It is so direct it can create resistance. IF YOU SHOUT ON EMAIL IT PUTS PEOPLE OFF. Robin got 50 spams this morning - and she screened them out immediately. I have a filter and got only about 12. We all are screening out more and more email even the good stuff. We are being overwhelmed by the noise driven by the volume of email.

But blogging is subtle. Dave's ideas seep into the network of friends and lurkers and break through the noise by the subtlety of their mode of presentation which is take it or leave it.

Lastly we come to POS, power of signal. We get so much email because it is so cheap to send - not really because it is financially cheap but it is cheap in terms of emotional and intellectual effort.

Blogging is in this context expensive. I should be working on a project but here I am thinking and writing hard on your site instead. Why? Because you put so much effort into your post that it demands a considered effort in response.

I think the best bloggers put effort into what they select and to what they say. This is the emotional effort behind the signal. It is POS. Blogging has lots of amps, email lots of volts. You need amps to break through the noise.

Have a good one Dave - I have got to do some work work now
Cheers Rob

Regular Exercise - A Habit?

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:45:48 GMT

Why is it that I am 53 and have ignored well-intentioned and factual advice for 30 years to take regular exercise? I know that it will be good for me. I know that this is not baloney like many diets are. Taking more exercise is unquestionably good for me. For a while, I buckle under the social pressure and try it. I go to the gym, buy a rowing machine. If the barrier was only awareness, I should have taken it up years ago.

Why is this important? Because our health system will buckle soon if we don't find a way of living better. On PEI 59% of Islanders are overweight and the trend for children in particular is frightening. This is a health epidemic for the developing world. We are trying lots of things and making lots of excuses for why we are making no progress - the trend is getting worse at a non linear rate.

There are lots of theories for why we participate so poorly in taking exercise. The influence of TV as a passivity driver. The lack of organized sport at school. Busing at school. The lack of time in adult life because the demands at work are so great. The lack of coaching and facilities - if only we had a community pool, gym track etc. The diversion of sport money for the masses by a focus on elite sport etc. I wonder if the answer is both simpler and more complex than this?

I have been talking to my friend Brian Chambers and our bottom line as to why we have become the most slothful group in history is rooted in two questions. - Is taking regular exercise a habit? Is not taking regular exercise a habit?

Think a bit now. Is your day not right without exercise or is taking exercise an interruption to your day? Do you have withdrawal symptoms if you do not take exercise or do you feel worse if you do? These feelings are symptoms of habits. Habits are hard to change. You are a smoker and you know you should quit but cannot. You drink more than you should but you cannot stop. Merely having a lot of information is not enough to stop an ingrained habit. Acquiring a new habit is equally a challenge.

If taking/not taking regular exercise is a habit then much of how we have approached the issue of participation in regular exercise is probably not going to work. This is quite a statement - so let's do a bit more digging.

Why is it that we see only a few of us - we used to call them Fitness Freaks or Nuts - come rain or shine pounding the roads? Why do some some middle-aged men still get out every week in the season and play hockey while most of us only watch it?. Why do some women have to go to the gym every day and others not? Brian and I believe that those who take regular exercise have a habit. They have a need to take exercise every day. It is part of their whole life - they cannot imagine not taking exercise. Regular exercise defines them - it is part of their identity - it is who they are.

I bet that the opposite is true. Some people cannot "see" themselves taking exercise. Let's look at me and see how hard it is for me to take up this new habit and to break my lifetime habit of not taking exercise.

I have never taken to the habit of regular exercise. I think I have to go back to my early days to find out why. My parents did not take it seriously. They in fact sneered at it. Any prowess in this regard was ignored at home. In my home the habit was to use the mind. This is where the family reward system kicked in. "Sport" at home was winning the argument, breaking into the conversation or being seen as amusing. Secondly I had low conventional physical skills. In particular I have very poor hand ball foot coordination. I had to play "sport sport" at school but for me with no natural aptitude, "sport sport" was for me an exercise in humiliation. In primary school the team would groan when I was picked usually - last. At Harrow, I was the star of the 5th 11 in cricket. I dreaded Sports Day at my prep school where the only event I could be in was the 200 metres where they put all the slobs. Sport was defined in my youth as a team sport that usually involved skill with a ball of some sort. I can't do this. Now if I had been introduced to yoga, tai chi or rowing I might have found a mind/body sport that fitted me - but that was not the culture of sport then nor is it now at schools.

I never developed the habit of exercise as a boy. In fact I developed another habit - a lifelong dislike of using an awkward body and a lifelong love of the world of the mind. I have instead the habit of reading - in a poor week only one book. In a good week maybe 7 books. (This has been a good week) Many of my athletic friends tell me that they do not have the time to read. I sense that we are at two ends of a polarity.

There are the habits of the mind and the habits of the body. There appear to be extreme positions for each habit. If you are extreme at one end it may preclude you having time to indulge in the other. Some manage both but I sense that there is only so much time. Then there seems to be a huge group in the middle of people who neither read nor take exercise.

Habits can be formed and broken. At the right time habits are easy to form. All established habits are very difficult to break or change. It is important to consider this if we want to find a way of increasing the overall participation of people in regular exercise.

When are many of our habits formed? I suggest to you that regular reading and regular exercise are both habits that are mainly set when we are very young? Homes with no books rarely produce compulsive readers. Homes with no trophies rarely produce folks who define themselves through the use of their bodies. I am sure there are exceptions but this is my observed experience. I point out the home because we currently look to school and to the workplace as the frontier for improving participation. I am not saying don't try there. I am suggesting that we look earlier as well.

Breaking habits is so difficult. If not taking exercise is a habit then exhortation and more information will not get us to change. How easy is it to acquire the habit of literacy as an adult? How easy to give up drink or to give up smoking? Breaking bad habits is very hard. It took my father's death to give us as a family the motive to pull back on our drinking.

Some questions for you:

Do you take regular exercise? If the answer is yes or no - Did you have a role model/support at home? Did you have a natural aptitude for ball and team sports?
Do you have a habit such as smoking or weight or drink. - Can you give this up? Has it been easy to give this up? Could you do this without a support group? What type of support group might you need - of peers or experts?
Are you a team sport person? If you are when did this begin and why
Do you like individual activities? If yes when did this begin and what influenced you?
Are you a big fan of professional sports? If so, did elite sport get you involved in taking exercise yourself ? If yes - what age were you when you gave it up and what do you do now?
Did you play pavement hockey or some kid organized sport when you were young (skateboarding?) If yes, what do you think of adult organized sport?

Please help Brian and I with these questions and with our main thesis that regular exercise is a habit. Brian is the Chairman of Sport PEI and is tasked with the challenge of finding a way to take Canada's most inactive and fattest province and making it the opposite - no small thing. We are convinced that doing what we have been doing but harder will not work. So we are going outside of the box and asking ourselves the odd question - why if we know that exercise is good for us are we not taking this advice.

If we are right and the core issue is habit, then we will have to develop strategies to encourage the formation of the habit. This implies working with the families of very young children before they get to school. It implies finding out how to motivate parents to behave differently. What would be a motivation that would work?

We know that many kids will self organize. Ball hockey and skateboarding are being surppressed in the guise of safety and order. Should we not look at the effectiveness of kid organized sport?.

It implies developing strategies to do the really hard stuff of helping people like me to change a habit of no exercise. How could we do this? What are the lessons of smoking and drinking that may help? What is it about schools and the workplace that are barriers and what can we do there to help?

What are the convenience issues? Where are all the places and where is the time? Why do so many schools close their doors and hence gyms and pools after 3pm? Whose school is it anyway? What is the reality of our climate for taking regular exercise where we have 6 months of winter? Can we take back the time between 2.30 when school finishes and say 5.30 when 80 % of parents return home and fill this with a fun time for exercise? Can we fill the 6 weeks of summer vacation when parents are working with a fun time when kids take exercise. Can we make it convenient to nip out for lunch at work and take exercise?