c.Figallo

Archive for May, 2008

Americans maybe won’t vote to dial back their lifestyles, but money talks and rising gas prices seem to have reached a threshold where American driving behavior has radically changed. As Joe Romm reports on Climate Progress, “In March 2008, Americans drove 246 billion miles, compared to 257 billion in March 2007. Indeed, the March 2008 figure is lower than the March 2004 figure.”

We always suspected that Americans were capable of changing core behaviors (for what is more American than the love of driving the car-car?) but once again – after WWII, the gas crisis of 1973 and the immediate aftermath of 9/11- we have solid evidence that a significant behavioral modification has taken place.

As Joe warns, though, the learning may be extinguished if gas prices drop again to $3/gallon. As I observed with rats and pigeons, intermittent and irregular reward is a strong reinforcer. So unfortunately, I have to root for gas prices staying high and higher, which will cause people to internalize their changed habits for the long run. Now bring on the plug-in electric cars!!

Just thought I’d send out kudos for this graphic presentation of the staff at Rich Apps Consulting. Nice. Not sure, though, what the skills graphs mean next to each person’s mini-bio. Do the bars tell you how skilled the person is on a scale of 100? So you’ve got people who do four things at 80 percent expertise? Are we grading on a curve?

RAC also has an intelligent blog article about Enterprise 2.0 here. Largely quoting from Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s hard to go wrong.

This is one of the Questions of the Moment, isn’t it? Will wikis help launch your company into the creative vanguard or will they seed conflict and confusion throughout your workforce? Is it a wiki your marketing division needs or just smarter use of SharePoint? I’d like to think that my experience would be useful in helping a company find the answer to that question, but it would cost the company more than the $195 that ITA is charging for its Enterprise Wiki Appropriateness Assessment document. Helpfully, ITA also recommends, “For a more complete analysis, this tool should be used in conjunction with the ITA Premium research note, “The Many Faces of Enterprise Wikis.” That’ll cost you another $195.

I’d like to be able to evaluate this product, but I’m not gonna pay 400 bucks to find out how useful it might be. Hopefully, the documents tell you to first go and interview a lot of people within your organization to see how they currently work with one another.

The answer should not be, “It can’t get much dumber.” What I’m getting at is more focused on the social media angle. Can wikis and blogs (for example) be implemented within government in such a way that they will help make our public servants work smarter and more productively – that we’ll get more of our money’s worth?

One reason I ask is that this product review on the GCN (Government Computer News) site begs the question. Check it out and see how you feel about the recommendations for implementing the $15,000 (for small groups) Team Page 4.0 application. I’ve got no argument with the review’s recommendations of Team Page as a content publishing tool, including its ability to assign many levels of read/write permissions and staging content for selective previewing. But when applied with social interfaces like wikis and blogs, it seems likely to wash the “social” right out of the application.

Here are some lines from the review that had me scratching my head wondering why you’d bring wikis and blogs into your government workplace only to lock them down with good old “Team” Page. OK, I know…State Secrets, National Security, etc. But, still, we’re beginnig with relatively inexpensive enterprise level apps and then adding a relatively expensive enterprise application to neutralize their effectiveness.

A poorly deployed blog or wiki can do your organization a lot more harm than good. Even at open federal agencies, releasing information willy-nilly is a recipe for disaster. But with careful planning and deployment, even the most secretive agencies can benefit from this relatively new technology.

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If you think about how wikis and blogs work, they are essentially the same thing, though with different permission levels. That is how TeamPage can become all things to all people, even a content management tool used as Web server.

Beyond the important matter of permissions, TeamPage’s ability to handle data is impressive. If more wikis were designed this way, they probably would be more widely used in government, either as internal tools or for public comment.

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Pricing for TeamPage varies. On the low end, with only a few users, you can get the program for $15,000 with annual updates of $7,500. This is a little expensive if you have only 25 users. There are less efficient but far cheaper ways to manage your wikis and blogs — even some freeware programs.

However, having a large number of users involved in wikis and blogs increases the complexity and the potential for disaster — both technically and by giving out the wrong information to the wrong people. If you have more than 200 users, you can purchase the unlimited license for $60,000 with annual updates of $30,000. This is isn’t cheap, but there is no better way to manage wikis and blogs supporting multiple projects from one program.

“Thirty of the world’s seventy-five highest carbon emitters are U.S. states.”

That’s how this video from Sea Studios Foundation begins as it provides a platform for some of our most climatically progressive states to take credit for their leadership. To the extent that our federal government has dropped the ball – or even failed to pick up the ball in the first place – some of our states have been working hard to develop climate action plans that they’re committed to fulfilling.

Like ICLEI, the work by these groundbreaking states needs more exposure.

[Thanks to Peter+Trudy for the link]

Dear ICLEI,

I’m an individual, not a member of ICLEI-USA, whose members come from local governments at the small town, city, municipality and county levels. But I’m an avid fan of ICLEI because it – more than any other organization, agency, leader or government – provides practical guidance for local governments seeking mitigative and adaptive solutions to the problems and threats of climate change. Without ICLEI, I believe we’d be another 5 or 10 years behind in developing the strategies that at least some of our local governments (ICLEI members, mostly) are implementing.

As an individual and as a fan of ICLEI, I’m disappointed that as important a meeting as the Local Action Summit – recently hosted by ICLEI-USA in Albuquerque – would be able to occur and over a week would go by with only one press release referring to the proceedings. (Not to be ungrateful, thank you for that. The Green Jobs Pledge is indeed important.)

Did nothing else happen worth reporting? If so, then that’s worth reporting. It’s hard to believe, in this day and age, that no one blogged from the meeting. Since  many of my “local” governments are ICLEI members, maybe I should be relying more on them to report on the meeting to us, their constituents. But, no, Marin County’s Community Development Agency has nothing, zip, nada about the meeting.

So, perhaps someone took notes…official notes, even…that could be shared with the curious public? Would you like an offical blogger to be present at your next conference? I’ll volunteer. But for now, I’ll be glad if even a retrospective report is released. It’s not just the deliverables we’re interested in; it’s also the process that we need to learn from as we all deal with the looming impacts of climate change in our lives. When you convene a “Summit,” don’t hide it under hat. Let the world know more about it.

Cheers,

Cliff

John Nagle has been investigating the increasingly intense battle between Craigslist and spammers who insist on mass-posting in CL community spaces. His findings so far were published in this Techdirt post. It’s a real escalating battle – one that I’m sure is going on in many other places, but is especially remarkable in this case because Craigslist is such a flagship for how online community can grow and sustain itself with minimal intervention from management. Nagle ends his description with this:

It’s not clear yet who will win. Craigslist may find something that works. If it doesn’t, however, it could be toast for the success story of Craigslist.

Say it ain’t so, John. But let’s look at this in terms of the overal social life of the Net – a societal environment that seems to be able to find a point of equilibrium at increasingly large scales. Millions of people now find life on the Internet to be within their comfort zones. They’ve adapted to the uncertainties of privacy, security and identity even though the occasional bad thing happens.

Craigslist is regarded as one of the assets, one of the jewels of the Net’s social development. One has to ask why anyone would put it at risk. It’s not the place you’d think a profit-minded person would go to scam revenue. And given that one of the places where much of the spamming is taking place is in Personals, I have to think that the intention is to ruin the sense of trust that brings people to use that part of the community space. CL runs on mutual trust. If that can be compromised, people will certainly abandon the Personals section.

So is this simply a mean person? Is someone making money from this activity? Is there any other reason someone would be trying so hard to sabotage Craigslist, other than to prove that they could do it for a small competitive circle of trouble makers?

Reported in CIO, this survey by the non-profit group AIIM tells us that while so-called Enterprise 2.0 applications are deemed “imperative” or “of significant importance” by 44 percent of the companies surveyed, “almost three-fourths (74 percent) acknowledged to having only a ‘vague familiarity’ with the technology. In fact, 41 percent claimed they had ‘no clear understanding’ of Enterprise 2.0 at all.”

I don’t find that surprising, given that terms like “Web 2.0″ and the derivative “Enterprise 2.0″ do a poor job of describing how the 2 evolved from the 1 in the first place. To say that they are “more social” or rely more on “user-generated content” would not explain their use within an enterprise environment. And given the fact – supported by the survey – that tools like wikis and blogs are most often adopted ad hoc by small groups, teams or departments within the larger enterprise, it’s logical that the rest of the company would lack the context to appreciate how such tools might help them if adopted company-wide.

A hierarchically managed enterprise (some redundancy there) is not going to naturally support the culture that most effectively uses social media. And yet, there seems to be a sense within at least that 44 percent of respondents that moving in that direction is “imperative.” The writing is on the wall that competition through innovation requires more fresh thinking, more brainstorming, more low-risk idea generation. These are all supported better through the social media that have come to dominate the civic forums of the Web than through the silo-structured enterprise platforms that organize information exchange within corporations.

Those of us who work in social media need to develop better descriptions for how these tools can be adopted effectively. Jerry Michalski calls our process “weaving a global brain.” One element that’s essential if social media is to work is trust. If he corporate culture fosters trust among its workers, then social media will prove useful. If not, no amount of understanding or training will make a wiki or a blog work. But will social media force its own culture to grow? That’s a challenge that only the corporate executives in charge can answer.

Want to have a great listening experience? Check out the programs found at the Mainstream Media Project, based in Arcata, California. I’ve listened to some of their stuff and to my ear, it’s better quality sound than the excellent programs found on National Public Radio.

I’ve listened to programs in the series called A World of Possibilities and found the interviews to be very intelligent, informative, well edited and a pleasure to listen to in terms of the sound quality and music choices.

Recently, I listened to “Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times” which included interviews with Crawford Stanley Holling, Dr.Brian Walker, Dr. Carl Folke, Charles Redman, Will Stefan, and Dr. Frances Westley. Some other program titles are:

• Food Deserts: Nutritional Starvation in the Land of Plenty
• Home From the War: Re-integrating Ex-Combatants
• Across the Great Divide: American Youth Reach Out to the Muslim World
• Regrowing Community (One Tomato at a Time): The Remarkable Return of Farmers’ Markets

This week’s program is “Lockdown: The Secret World of American Prisons,” which it describes as follows:

Go behind bars with us into the American prison system to see what we’re doing to others in the name of justice. We’ll try to find out whether the atrocities that horrified us when revealed in an Iraqi prison were the work of a few bad apples or whether such things are systemic and occurring here in American prisons.

Two new (to me, at least) platforms have come to my attention lately, though I can’t yet evaluate them from actual use under fire. One is Dimdim – not (IMHO) the most confidence-inspiring name, but since all the good names are owned by scammers, this is what you’re often left with. Dimdim is a live meeting space, a collaborative online space comparable to Webex, but free-free-free and totally Web-based. It supports VoIP, shared desktop, video conferencing, slides – all the standard Web conferencing capabilities. Their goal is to make such services affordable for all groups.

Then there’s Thinkature, mentioned in a tweet by Howard Rheingold, which seems to offer more of a whiteboard approach in combination with VoIP chat. Now that could be fun. I’ll have to run both of these past some other friends in the online social biz.

In essence, they both Dimdim and Thinkature sound good and address real needs, though I still find myself wondering if we’ll ever reach the point where we just settle for devoting our creative energies to using imperfect tools to solve the IMPORTANT PROBLEMS FACING THE WORLD. Perhaps you’ve heard about them.

Many very capable and creative minds seem always to be engaged in tweaking existing tools to deliver that incremental improvement in performance that will cause gobs of users to drop their old platforms in favor of new platforms. It’s a culture of creeping improvement, not revolutionary improvement. It attracts VC money and leads to what must be a vast junkyard of abandoned digital interfaces that never really achieved lift-off, or that lifted off just long enough to get attention, then disappeared from the radar.

What if half of the developers working on the next great social widget worked instead on ideas for carbon sequestration or more accurate local climate forecasting? Would we miss them for lack of a better Twitter? I really wonder.