CommuniShare

Perhaps I laud him too much (I see his name is quite big in my tag cloud), but here is a 17-minute talk given by Clay Shirky at the U.S. State Department last month.  It is the epitome of what gets me excited about this whole damn thing we’re living through.  “Web 2.0″ is just scratching the surface.

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Tags: Clay Shirky, media, social capital, social media

I expect that N2Y4 (the 4th annual NetSquared conference) to be the only professional conference I’ll attend this year (except, perhaps, for stuff in the Philly area).  As a Net Tuesday organizer, NetSquared generously picked up the hotel and conference registration, but I had to buy the plane ticket out to California and some meals, and, more significantly, I had to forego a week of consulting work.  So, I decided to invest in one trip this year, and this was definitely the right choice.

My strongest motivation for going was to meet and bond with other Net Tuesday organizers.  Officially, there are 33 Net Tuesdays around the world, and 14 were represented at the conference this year:  Austin (Billy Bickett), Chicago (Justin Massa and Dorothee Royal-Hedinger), Guayaquil, Ecuador (Eduardo Bejar) , London (Amy Sample Ward), Montreal (Peter Dietz and Jeremy Clarke), New Orleans (Jessica Rohloff ), Philadelphia (Ivan Boothe and myself), Phoenix (Sandy Sutton Andrews), Portland, ME (Alex Steed), Raleigh (Justis Peters, San Francisco (Rachel Weidinger), Seattle (Sarah Schacht), Toronto (Celina Agaton) and Vancouver (Eli van der Giessen and Joe Solomon).

Last year (at N2Y3) we had a hastily planned lunch with fewer Net Tuesday organizers, only a couple of whom were also here this year.  But this year, the conference organizers much more intentionally acknowledged the Net Tuesday organizers and helping us bond and share.  The kickoff was an entire day before the actual conference began just for us.  Not only did we get to know one another (particularly helpful before the conference got underway), but had plenty of time to discover similarities and differences among our programs, and to share aspirations for the future.  I felt (and feel) a genuine bond with the other organizers that I hope to maintain (we planned some collaborative opportunities before N2Y5).  Unlike last year, when the vast majority of the conference attendees had no idea what “Net Tuesdays” were, this year I felt appropriately validated.  We were acknowledged in the conference program, given specially colored conference T-shirts, and some of us played the vaguely satisfying role of “hosting” (introducing) some of the sessions.   Twice, in plenary sessions, we were asked to stand, and received applause.  In other words, we were much more clearly contextualized in relation to NetSquared.  I feel more pride in my role, and got the (much needed) shot in the arm to return to Philly and keep pushing forward Net Tuesdays and other Philly NetSquared initiatives.  The conference did its job.

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Tags: N2Y4, Net Tuesdays, phlnet2

I’ve just returned from N2Y4, the 4th annual NetSquared conference in San Jose, CA. The main focus this year was the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge, and the lion’s share of content was wrapped around that. Frankly, this was not especially appealing to me ahead of time. I’ve had a Blackberry for about a year now, and I enjoy using it for checking email, Facebook and Twitter, occasional texting, and (oh yeah) for phone calls. But I don’t regard it with the kind of essentialness and potential that made me excited about this year’s topic. I was pleasantly surprised. The top three winners give a taste of the diversity of applications being worked on.

• FrontlineSMS:Medic. First place winner. The main aspect of the project is equipping community health workers (CHW’s) in the third world with second tier (not “smartphone”) mobile phones when they go out to rural villages – many miles from the nearest clinic. Special software provides the CHW’s with access to medical records and lab diagnostics, enabling them to deliver a higher degree of service in the field and reduce the need to transport patients to a medical facility. They’ve already demonstrated this impressively in a trial in Malawi. This is cool enough, but what really blew my (and others’) mind(s) is that they are working with a team at UCLA to develop a new diagnostic procedure. Removing the lens and adding an LED light source, they plan to use the camera chip to diagnose malaria and other diseases in the field, thereby dramatically reducing the time required for diagnosis and treatment. They are looking at the mobile phone not simply as a communications device, but as a platform for repurposing its technology. And, finally, I want to recognize Isaac Holeman, one of the team, who Skyped into our Net Tuesday Philly meeting the following week – making for a great gathering. Thanks again, Isaac!
• The Extraordinaries.  Second place winner. The basic idea is to use your smart phone to identify and perform short “micro-volunteer” tasks, like translating (or transcribing) documents. The video “elevator pitch” gives a nice illustration of what they’re envisioning.
• VozMob – Mobile Voices, Voces Moviles. Third place winner. This is a platform for citizen journalism and community building. Utilizing a participatory design process, VozMob is currently deployed in immigrant communities in Los Angeles. Enable immigrants to share their stories via text, images or sound, the cell phones are being used to empower the community, to report abuses and to connect with family back home.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to get excited by some mobile apps. Some of the participants, it seemed to me, were driven primarily by the technology and finding a cool application for it. But what impressed me was how many of these folks had a deeply developed sense of progressive social justice, and saw the technology as a tool toward that end. (The VozMob folks were particularly articulate about this.) I was also impressed by the sense of mutual support and collaboration among participants. It was fun to watch and be a part of.

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Tags: FrontlineSMS:Medic, mobile technology, N2Y4, The Extraordinaries, VozMob

I had coffee the other day with John S. James, a very interesting person who has come to a couple of Net Tuesday Philly events.  We met primarily to discuss his idea of “smart accounts” – a sort of alternative compensation scheme for enabling online consumers to get something for free – while simultaneously compensating the creator (or whoever).  It’s hard to describe in one line.  In fact, it’s hard to understand from the web page – even though John takes pains to write clearly.  It’s easiest to grasp by example, and John’s example of a musician receiving micropayments of 25 cents/download was very helpful to me.  To my amateur ear, the idea sounds interesting, and technically quite feasible.  If it worked, it could be a big deal – i.e., used by millions of people for gazillions of micropayments and other transactions.  But would it work?  Would “the dogs eat the dog food”?  I can’t say.

Actually, though, I’ve been thinking more about the idea of the idea (the “meta-idea”?).  In other words, the generalized situation I see is this:

An intelligent person (“originator”) has an idea that is:

• personally meaningful
• potentially “big” – in the sense of finding wide acceptance and/or making the world a better place
• not immediately intuitive (it’s complex enough that it probably requires more than an “elevator speech” to adequately convey it to most people)
• at a point at which the originator needs perspectives and expertise from other people in order to validate the idea and move it forward (or, alternatively, to become convinced that it should be abandoned).

I believe that this accurately describes John’s situation with smart accounts.  It also describes my own situation with a couple of ideas, but especially an idea for which I’ve been using the name “Dissemination Station”.  And, I’m sure it applies to many other people and ideas as well.

It seems to me that the challenge for John, me and other such originators is to:

• articulate the idea
  • in sufficient detail and clarity that it conveys its essence
  • briefly and simply enough so that people will bother to read it (or view it, listen to it…)
• attract people to learn about the idea, including those who would:
  • have valuable and needed perspectives and expertise
  • be willing to share their insights with the originator

John has articulated his idea on his website, as well as by submitting the project to the NetSquared conference.  He’s out there and pushing it.  I, on the other hand, have yet to articulate my Dissemination Station idea publicly – even though I first articulated the original version of it as a confidential product proposal to Telebase in 1995!  I suppose my own reticence to “out” this idea is rooted in a long-learned, hard-to-shake sentiment for proprietary knowledge (“It’s ‘my’ idea”), combined with the insecurity that it may not really be as good an idea as I’ve thought.  But a lot of good that silence has done – for me, for the idea (meme) itself or for the world.  Well, fuck that.  I’m gonna out the idea, starting on this website, and risk the embarrassment of imperfect description, the pain of discovering it’s really a dumb idea, or the frustration of losing “credit” to somebody with more ambition and fewer scruples.

Heads up.

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Tags: Dissemination Station, John S. James, meta-ideas, phlnet2, smart-accounts

Well, I’m starting a new blog here.  I’ll be pulling over posts from the previous Blogger blog I shared with Bob Leming, and  staking out some turf to express myself.  I feel like I have a lot to say.  So, now I have to say it.

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Tags: blogging, getting started

The NetSquared “think tank” topic this month is:

What do you think the role of nonprofit organizations is in the changing world of social media?

When I first read it, however, I mentally transposed “the changing” to “changing the” and read it as:

What do you think the role of nonprofit organizations is in changing the world of social media?

The two questions have different meanings. The first one asks about the role of nonprofits in the world of social media (a world which happens to be changing). The second question implies that nonprofits are actually causing that change. And I find this second question more provocative. (Answering one question kind of answers both, but I’m focusing on the second.)

One reason I find the second formation interesting is because many of us (NetSquared folks and others) are focused on how to use social media to benefit the world of nonprofits. But I never thought about asking the opposite question: How can nonprofits be used to benefit the world of social media? (And why should they bother?)

Well, as social media become more pervasive in our society, and as ever-new forms of social media emerge, I believe they will continue to create new opportunities for helping nonprofits that we can’t anticipate beforehand. And, if that’s true, then maybe it’s in the “self-interest” of nonprofits not just to utilize social media to help their own causes, but also to promote the use of social media in general.

When nonprofits employ social media tools they are by definition promoting social media. But, maybe they could go further. For instance…

• When inviting people to join your Facebook cause, provide links to resources about how they can get more out of Facebook for other purposes as well.
• While encouraging people to comment on your blog, provide links to services where they could start their own blogs, or where they could learn how to blog more effectively.
• On your organization’s podcast page, include information about how you made the podcast (tools, techniques, problems), which not only humanizes the process, but may inspire the user to take a leap and create her own podcast.

I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but I’m starting to see how nonprofits and social media exist in a sort of symbiotic relationship. And the lifeblood of that symbiosis, IMHO, is empowerment. Social media, of course, are the epitome of empowerment. (It’s more empowering to put your video onto YouTube than to simply watch someone else’s.) And nonprofits are about empowerment also – either directly (microlending to help a poor villager start a new business) or indirectly (realizing that your single voice is important in stopping global warming). So, as we all work to transform our world, perhaps we should be more aware (well, I am, anyway) that we should be thinking not just about how social media can benefit the world of nonprofits, but how nonprofits can benefit the world of social media. Ultimately, they may be one and the same.

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Tags: empowerment, net2thinktank, nonprofit, social media, symbiosis

I really enjoyed an interesting Philadelphia Knowledge Management group web conference last week, led by Steve Ennen (Managing Director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative) on Measuring Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World. At one point in the session, Steve referred to a recent paper by some folks at the HP Social Computing Lab, entitled “Social Networks that Matter: Twitter under the Microscope”. So, I fetched the article, and was looking forward to reading some current research from such a well regarded source. Although I didn’t intend to be critical, I was shocked at how strongly I disagreed with their assumptions, methodology and conclusion.

Focusing on Twitter, the basic theme of the paper is that within any large social network, people tend to interact primarily within a small subset of more strongly connected, reciprocal relationships –which the authors refer to as “friends”. It’s hard to disagree with that basic premise, which we can readily observe in all our social networks, from the workplace to the neighborhood.

But, I have a lot of trouble with their conclusion. I don’t doubt “the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and folowees, and a sparser and simpler [“hidden”] network of actual friends”. But then they assert that

most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus, we need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend. [emphasis added]

The authors show lots of statistical associations, but I think it’s a big leap to assume that degree of “influence” necessarily resides within that “network of actual friends”.

It is particularly ironic that the authors cite Mark Granovetter’s groundbreaking 1973 article The Strength of Weak Ties (which Philly networking pioneer Stan Pokras introduced me to nearly 30 years ago, and which Wikipedia refers to as “one of the most influential sociology papers ever written”). My understanding of Granovetter is that he would regard these “networks of actual friends” as exhibiting “strong ties” among themselves, and that many of them also have “weak ties” with members of other “networks of actual friends”. His main thesis is that weak ties can have disproportionally strong influence because they help to bridge between otherwise unfamiliar networks.

In my own experience (admittedly without the statistical backup) new social networks like Twitter only validate and reinforce Granovetter’s insight that so-called “weak” ties can have unexpected “strength”:

• Some of the people I follow on Twitter are my favorite authors and thinkers, who don’t have any idea who I am (a weak tie). But they’ve influenced me greatly with some of the ideas and references to resources from their tweets.
• The authors don’t even mention “retweeting”, the fairly common practice of “forwarding” a tweet. People retweet posts specifically in order to bridge from one of one’s networks to another. (Retweeting has little value within one’s own “network of friends”.)
• Because of the profusion of hyperlinks within tweets, it’s really easy to follow-up on any weak-link tweet that seems even a little interesting, thereby enhancing their potential influence.

Maybe my experience clouds my perspective, but I truly believe that Twitter and other Internet-enabled social networks make weak ties more important and influential than ever before. It’s great to have a circle of friends; and it’s really cool to also have a much, much wider circle of potential friends.

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Tags: Mark Gronovetter, strength of weak ties, Twitter

In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, James Boyle devotes Chapter 4 to “the Internet Threat”, which is the way of thinking that “Big Media” (my term–not his–for publishers, music labels, movie studios…) use to justify continuing their grip on power. His explanation helped put things into context for me. The Internet Threat, he explains

… is beguilingly simple. The Internet makes copying cheaper and [so Big Media] must meet the greater danger of illicit copying with more expansive rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections. … [w]ithout an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries.

This has a certain logic – but it also sounds way wrong. Why? Boyle is clear that he does not disagree with the basic idea of copyright, and admits that Big Media are harmed by illicit copying. But, he goes on to show how this thinking is “dramatically incomplete” – and bad for individual freedom and cultural expression.

• For one thing, although new technology enables the potential for harming copyright holders, it also enables potential for benefitting copyright holders (e.g., with new promotion and distribution opportunities). It’s not clear, on balance, whether the harms outweigh the benefits. (And, even if this could be accurately measured today, the balance will likely change tomorrow.) “A large, leaky market may actually provide more revenue than a small one over which one’s control is much stronger.” Big media wants protection from the dangers, without regard to the benefits they receive.
• Another problem with the argument of the “Internet Threat” is that Big Media uses it to target the technologies which threaten them. Boyle describes the story of video recorders, which came on the scene in the ‘70’s with dramatically “cheaper copying”. Movie studios were “horrified” by video recorders, which they saw as a critical threat to their business model of tightly controlled distribution. In a famous suit against Sony (manufacturer of the Betamax), the movie studios sought to hold Sony liable because their machines could be used to violate copyright. Effectively, they wanted to be able to control the technology that threatened them. But the Supreme Court recognized that, since the technology could be used for legitimate, fair use purposes (like for time-shifting of TV programs), then the movie studios had no right to control the new technology. They had to learn to live with the existence of video recorders (and, ironically, figured out how to profit from them).

One way to view all this is that the new technological and social developments of the Internet represent entirely new “industries”. And, if established industries feel threatened by that, they can either adapt or perish. But, they should not control the playing field for newcomers. “Imagine”, opines Boyle, “if we had given the lamp-oil sellers the right to define the rules under which the newfangled electric light companies would operate”. We are, together, creating a new world of information and social relations. Exciting. Challenging. Profound.

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Tags: big media, Internet, _The Public Domain_

I attended yesterday’s Breakfast with Jeff Pulver, billed as “the only breakfast with real-time social tagging”. This was an attempt to apply some of the practices of electronic social networking to the face-to-face world. It is in line with my own thoughts about “tag tags” expressed in a previous post.

Jeff describes his process in a 4-minute video, and it works like this: Each person receives a “Personal Social Networking Toolkit”: a baggie with 2 blank, self-adhesive name tags, one sheet of blank tiny labels (about 0.5″ x 0.75″?) and a pen.

1. On the first name tag, each person writes their name, plus a “personal tag line”.
2. On the other name tag, other people affix “tags” (which they’ve written on their own tiny labels) about that person that they’ve learned from their conversation.

In other words, in the first mode, people tag themselves; and in the second mode, they tag each other. All of these tags are what I referred to in my other post as “networking hooks”. The second mode is useful — because how people tag one another may reveal networking hooks that the original person may not have considered when tagging herself. So, as the event progresses, each person (ideally) accumulates additional tags resulting from their encounters with more people. More networking hooks (and more types of networking hooks) provide more opportunities for people to strike up conversations and to make meaningful connections. Great.

I like the idea, but it felt a bit awkward, and I noticed that some participants didn’t tag anybody else. So, here is a brainstorm of ideas that Jeff or others may want to consider when doing something similar in the future.

1. Include a clipboard in the kit. This would make it much easier (and therefore more likely) to write on the tiny labels. (And the clipboards can be returned for future use.)
2. Do something to identify the tiny tags with their respective authors. Ideally, this would mean having people’s names on all of their blank tiny tags, but it could be as simple as having all the tiny tags on each sheet indicate an identifying number. (All of my tiny tags have a 17 on them; all of yours have a 22.) This is more analogous to electronic social networks (where you can see who has created a tag or comment). Not only does it tell you who wrote each tag, but it silently encourages people to be more prolific in their tagging. (”Boy, I see #22 has done a lot of tagging.”)
3. I would have needed 4 hands to really take advantage of the breakfast. As anyone who’s been to a buffet reception knows, it’s hard enough to juggle a cup of coffee and plate of danish while talking to somebody. Add to that using a pen to write on a label. It can’t all be done at the same time. I opted to keep my pen ready and got really hungry. Others ate a nice breakfast, but weren’t doing any tagging. I think an ideal environment would have a number of standing-height tables. Then, as people walk around, they can more easily put down their coffee to write a tag.
4. Finally, I’d love to see this idea applied to a speed networking scenario. You know, the kind of event where you have 2 minutes to exchange business cards and talk to another person; then move on to the next person for 2 minutes; and so on. Imagine also encouraging people to tag their partner before moving to the next one. Not only would this add useful networking hooks, it would encourage people to listen to one another in a particularly purposeful way.

I believe (as does Jeff and many others) that tagging can be a useful practice in certain face-to-face situations. How else can this concept be applied?

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Tags: Jeff Pulver, tag tags