Author Archive

A Fresh Viewpoint

I was inspired recently by this post by Adrian Chan on his Gravity 7 blog.  He describes a curious social dynamic that shows up vividly in social media – flow.

In the early days of the WELL, when we were first involved in – and simultaneously observing – the participation of members in multiple conversations on a wide range of topics, we found that we could configure our software so that members could build itineraries for their visits, and that a well-designed itinerary (the so-called “conflist”) – along with some selections of conversations to visit or ignore – could provide the flow necessary for a quick, efficient and satisfying session – a min-tour of their favorite communities and discussions. In brief interrupts of their work days, WELL members could take a quick dive into the WELL with minimal distraction and maximum flowiness.

That was how it worked with the relatively tiny population of the pre-Web WELL and the comparatively primitive text-only interface of Picospan. Today, the  social flow for a typical user must map across numerous platforms and communities at a variety of paces.

The idea of a lifestream or an information stream is getting a lot of attention with the massive adoption of social software with the “status report” format. Users post their latest activity or discovery or witnessed event. Others respond or ignore and then post their own status. It all blends together in a stream of reports and responses. If you’re in the stream, you’re reporting, reading and sometimes responding or repeating items to your own audience.

Watching “from the river’s edge,” as Adrian describes it, puts enough distance between the user and the conversation that information and learning can be drawn from it. Reports flowing in the stream may contain nuggets of information – links to blog posts, to videos, to people, to websites – that can be snagged and put to use. These nuggets can be passed along to different communities, maybe outside of that particular stream or for sure outside of that community.

Flow is an important element of social interaction and there are ways that a tool can be configured or a suite of tools can be related so that the user experience brings a maximum of it. When interested clients express fear of a scattering of attention and a sinkhole for work hours, I explain the goal of flow and how it turns those concerns upside down.

In this presentation, Dan Pink at the TED conference in July 2009, makes the case that traditional carrot-and-stick incentives only work in a narrow range of business applications, and that what truly motivates workers to do better and to be more loyal are:

• autonomy
• mastery
• purpose

Indeed, using social media as a business tool, in providing the means to communicate and share at a social rather than mechanical level, offers some of these rewards.

I’ve been commenting on the social impacts and responses to the evidence for climate change for 5 years. Before that, I toyed with the idea of building a global dashboard on the Web where all the parameters relevant to the warming situation could be checked daily. But things were changing so slowly – I thought then – that a dashboard would look to static to hold anyone’s attention. Today, such a dashboard would be much more dynamic.

Today many many groups have put together programs to influence government and involve fellow citizens by displaying irrefutable evidence of change happening right now, not in the future.

Still a majority of our fellow humans are either unaware of advance of global warming or simply refuse to be concerned about it. Many of those people are unaware of acceptable alternative practices and technologies to what they are used to. They believe the question is, “Will most of humanity choose to go without electric light?”

The question the new greens are asking is, “How do we replace the coal-burning plants to ensure base power needs are met while cutting deeply into CO2 emissions?”

Stewart Brand, launching his new book Whole Earth Discipline, spoke of the need to “rethink green” and accept the lesser of two evils – small, 4th generation nuclear power that has negligible carbon footprint compared to coal plants.

I was part of a very vocal anti-Nuke group in the 70s, before and after Three-mile Island. I did research in the library of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency. I was strongly opinionated. But I’ve also seen and been part of huge advances in technology over the past 30 years. And I’m convinced that coal could destroy us.

So, I hope we will all keep an open mind and get our priorities straight. We don’t have time to argue the fine points for years on end. We need to see and stimulate real action and change.

Following up on the post about the priority of culture over strategy in organizational planning, I’m drawing from another of the acknowledged gurus, this time from the non-profit universe: Beth Kanter. I’m also a subscriber to Beth’s Blog, which is a constant treasure trove of good stories and ideas, often by guest bloggers.

In yesterday’s post, Beth was about to facilitate a discussion that she titled ”Creating a Culture that is not Afraid to Fail.” She wrote,

I’m defining failure as a social media strategy or program implementation that wasn’t perfect or didn’t work as well as you expected especially the first few times you did it.   This happens quite frequently with social media, especially in the early stages.

We set unrealistic outcomes, don’t have a methodology for learning or sloppy strategy implementation.  We get poor results.  We’re quick to proclaim that social media doesn’t work, feel some shame, and drop it.  We look at the wrong measures or unrealistic outcomes. We don’t value the learning and use that insight to improve the social media strategy the second or third or fourth time around.

Like riding a bicycle or a horse, you can’t call it failure the first, or second or third time you fall off. You only learn to ride either of them by getting back on and trying again. Some of this persistence must live in the organization’s culture. If its social foundation isn’t strong enough, the first failure of a social media initiative may lead to abandonment. In an organization where social learning is recognized as precious, failure is regarded as part of a learning process. New approaches – maybe new tools – will be tried. There will be patience for social changes to adapt to the technology and sharing of observations.

On Facebook and on Twitter, Beth posted this query: ”How do you create an organizational culture that is not afraid to fail? “

Read her blog post for the details, but in summary the responses suggested the following:

(1) Must come from the top: reward learning

(2)   Unpack the fear of failure through internal discussions

(3)  Make learning the norm

(4) Emphasize what works

(5) Start small, early, and reiterate

I’ve been subscribed to Luis Suarez’s blog for almost a month now. I usually give a blogger a month’s trial to convince myself that they’re worth following. His job is to help educate, encourage and guide IBM employees in using social tools productively, but much of what he does is expose other peoples’ work and discoveries for his blog readers.

I’ll probably be commenting on his writing from time to time because – on a much greater scale than mine – Suarez is going about the same task – supporting better organizational use of social technologies.

The current article has an irresistible title: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.  I’m in complete alignment with Suarez when he says:

To me, social computing within the enterprise is about everything, but the tools. It’s a philosophical and social corporate movement, a lifestyle, a new way of connecting and interacting with people, both inside and outside of the firewall; one where the main focus is not on the technology itself, but on the people behind it.

He’s talking about the culture of organizations and how they are changing to adapt to the evolution of business, technology and culture beyond the organization. This is the Big Shift I refer to on the Context page of this site. Suarez posted his thinking about “how collaborative your corporate culture needs to be in order to embrace these social tools. ”

As he tends to do, Suarez uses his writing to lead to someone else’s article or paper or video presentation, which you may or may not find as enriching as he does. But his truth in this case is that social computing and the culture of the organization will have more impact on strategy than the other way around. So when an organization talks about putting together a social media strategy, their starting point should be a frank assessment of their culture and its compatibility with what the strategy would have them do.

What is XC ?

• The convergence of local needs with global media
• The next necessary stage of local collaboration
• Proactive and urgent local engagement to build resilience in a fast-changing world
• Awareness that all local communities can and should share new knowledge

Extreme Community is going beyond simply living in proximity; it is a consciousness of local interdependence and shared fortunes.

Extreme Community is self-aware, not taken for granted. It asks its members to participate in influencing the collective destiny.

What is “3.0″ ?

XC Version 1.0 – people settle in villages and towns, fill complementary roles, build physical and social infrastructure, collaborate for survival an sustainability. Communities focus on what happens in their geographic sphere of influence.

XC Version 2.0 – people gather in virtual meeting places. They transcend their physical distance and isolation by forming “mind communities” through electronic connections and computers. They explore common interests and form relationships that bring real value and a sense of community lacking in their lives.

XC Version 3.0 – people living in proximity and facing threatening change meet and collaborate in both physical and virtual environments. They share knowledge and coordinate activities, build online tools and workspaces to extend their collaborative powers. They share and learn with other local communities facing similar challenges.

Where am I going with this?

Think locally, act locally. Then go regional, then global.

I’m beginning with where I live and building out from there.

I’ll report here. Once we achieve escape velocity, we open the x-community.org site.

October 17 will mark the 20-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake here in the Bay Area. Though most of the damage happened south and east of Marin County, we got a lot of movement nonetheless. I had just gassed up the car on the way home from the WELL office in Sausalito and was walking over to the pay booth (before remote payment kiosks) when the pavement began to feel more like the deck of the Sausalito Ferry en route. My eyes locked with those of the cashier. Holy Shit, this is the real thing.

Soon after, as I was driving into the hills above Mill Valley, I could see the smoke rising from the burning homes in the Marina District. I could even see the collapsed section of the Bay Bridge. What I didn’t know as I hurried home to West Marin to check on my kids, was that the WELL’s CPU had survived the temblor and, after power was restored, was rebooted by David Hawkins, our sysadmin.

The great majority of the WELL’s members were local. In those days, you dialed in to online systems through modems and you paid by the minute to use the commercial communities like the WELL, Compuserve, BIX, the Source and many home-based bulletin board systems (BBSs).

If you had to dial long distance to reach our modems, you either paid the tolls or you registered with a packet switching system that cost you considerably less. Still, being on the WELL from the East Coast could cost you up to $5/hour. But in the days before digital phone communications and cell networks, long distance voice service was a fragile thing.

Friends and families of Bay Area residents were understandably concerned when viewing scenes of fire and collapsed freeways on the TV news. And with so many people calling in to and out from the area, the long distance trunk lines jammed – phone service stopped working.

To our  surprise, though, packet switching services to the WELL did not seem to be affected. WELL members in the Bay Area began making requests of those who lived beyond the area to call their immediate family members to report that they were OK. A virtual phone tree was created on the fly.

These are the first posts made after the WELL came back up:

There was a 7.0 earthquake today.  Over 200 have died.  Large fire
in SF's Marina district.

fluster and tech are OK in southern marin.  tech was in the upper deck at
Candlestick park when in hit.

I was in our apartment in Sausalito -- which sits on a steep
hillside.  I had no doubt that we were going to slide right on off.
Drove and walked over to WELL office, and we all played volleyball
for an hour while early reports came in.

Power just came back up around 11:00 or so.  The system should be ok,
but if you notice any oddities, send email about them to dhawk.

Wow! I was in the avenues, on the third floor of
an old building, and exceptn for my heart (Beat, BEAT!)
I'm okay. Got back to Bolinas, and everything had fallen:
broken poster frames w/glass on the floor, files cabinets
open or dumped onto the floor, etc. Hope you all survived.
It was pretty scary! Did anyone have any genuine premonitions?!

Courage to you all from New York.  Your reports here are more
riveting and inspiring than any other media I've seen.

Would any of you who have told stories here be interested in being
quoted in the Wall Street Journal, where I work.  I'm certainly
respectful of the privacy of Well communications, and of course
wouldn't use any of this material without the author's permission.
But since these are such remarkable stories--and the whole phenomenon
of staying in touch electronically during a crisis is itself
remarkable--I'd love to know if any of you might grant permission
to be quoted.  (You can email me at mikeym.)

There didn’t seem to be any resistance and the next morning, the central column of the front page of the WSJ contained a transcript of the first morning’s post-quake comments. It was a dramatic portrayal of a new form of community reacting to a human scale disaster, and a demonstration of how caring and compassion could be shared through a medium about which few people had knowledge.

Here’s an attempt to get quite a bit deeper into Twitter than the previous 60-second video cram course.

How individuals influence others in online environments has always been a fascinating aspect of the social Web. Twitter’s structure provides some new perspectives of how influence works, but it may not be as obvious as the follower-followee dynamic suggests.

The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter is a report written and released by the Web Ecology Project. Based on a  10-day trial based on 12 Twitter accounts, the authors look deeper into how individual Tweeters gain influence in the micro-blogging environment. Small sample, but a good start in terms of testing a new methodology.

And, no, they didn’t really find a definitive metric of influence. It remains elusive.

An attempt to define a universal concept of influence on the Web remains difficult, because we must account for the variations of platforms, fluidity of environments, and evolving behaviors of users online. Because each platform is different, this report will rely on a definition of online influence specific to the environment of Twitter. Therefore, we define influence on Twitter as the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user. The term user is defined by Twitter’s platform. The term action deserves further explanation.

Understanding the term action as it relates to influence on Twitter depends on the fundamental structure of ideas in the environment and how these ideas move. The fundamental unit of content on Twitter is the tweet (a user may type up to 140 characters and publish them to the web interface), so an action on Twitter comprises all interactions of a user and that unit of content (tweet). While we can analyze various types of influential actions (eg., a view on YouTube or a like on Facebook), this report will primarily focus on actions specific to Twitter. Our analysis of influence on Twitter, then, relies on the understanding of how actions shape behavior on the platform.

I wouldn’t give this an Emmy, but I’m a fan of brevity and I tend to pay attention to people who at least attempt to keep such explanations short. The creator says it was done in response to a challenge.