Endless Knots

The great reseau

Here's one for the history books, especially for those among us interested in how we got to the point that I can be sitting here in my study typing and you can be wherever you are and both of us are learning about this incredible, deep-history view of the web. Alex Wright has a great piece in June 17, 2008, NY Times, "The Web Time Forgot." Not to be missed. Click now or forever hold your view of when the web really started:

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

"Texting is email - only with bad grammar"

Had the chance to speak to a group of execs this week who are worried about, well, everything from their kids doing outrageous things on Facebook (one took a pseudonym to spy but the kid quickly figured it out) to how to load his iPod to what-the-bleep is Twitter. After some table discussion about their worst recent moment with technology, they reported back. One clever guy stood and said this (see subject line).

I didn't get to tell my worst. Daughter and I were watching TV a few weeks ago. The outrageously large number of clickers that seem to litter the TV room were unfortunately on the sofa between us. One of us, probably I, inadvertently grazed a hand over one of the aforementioned clickers. Disaster. Screen goes blank but not completely - it's a hazy blue with words in the corner that mean nothing to either of us: "Input 2." You tell me. Both of us were clueless, of course. We pressed everything in sight and then miraculously we got the channel back. But not before both of us were near tears. Which reminds me...when I got my first cell phone, I cried. Just looking at the instruction book.

R u worried abt dth of Englsh?

Whew. My English teacher mother is not having a conniption in heaven this morning. According to Carolyn Y. Johnson's piece in the Boston Globe this morning, "Is language dead or evolving?", students still know the difference between the shorthand they use for texting and posting (remember, they don't use email). That said, it ain't exactly my mother's English class:

A growing body of research shows electronic communications channels like instant messaging have created a kind of semi-speech - language that is between talking and writing. Some say it is evidence of evolution, not of decay.

"Languages are always changing, and that's a fact that language snobs need to get over and accept - because the only language that doesn't change is a dead language, like Latin," said Derek Denis, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Toronto. This spring, he coauthored a study comparing the way teens speak and chat online. It was published in the journal American Speech.

Denis's study, "Linguistic Ruin? LOL! Instant Messaging and Teen Language," followed the online and spoken conversations of 71 Canadian teens over three years, tracking about one million IM words and 250,000 spoken words.

Contrary to the view that abbreviations and cute emoticons are at the radical edge of English language, the researchers found that the hybrid of written and spoken language is actually more conservative than speech alone.

Some history of how we got here

Chandler Harrison ("Harry") Stevens is a name familiar to many who began their online lives back in the 1970s. The inventor of Participate, possibly the best of the computer conferencing systems ever developed (referenced here by Howard Rheingold in his book, Virtual Community), Stevens sent around a chapter of the memoir he's writing to friends last week. It's got so much good history - and so many familiar names - that I asked Harry if I could post it here. Enjoy this stroll down memory lane:

Today in 2008, blogs -- a word derived from "weblogs" on the Internet's World Wide Web -- support many-to-many communication within vast social networks such as Facebook, etc.

A decade ago in 1998, we completed developing a Web front-end and an Internet back-end for Participate, our then two-decades-old computer conferencing software, which went on to be used in Ukraine while I was in the Peace Corps (1999-2001; see http://co.net/). In 1993-1998, Participate had been used in developing CoNet community and NetCo educational networks -- funded by $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the US Department of Agriculture -- grants made to our CoNet Consortium, which consisted of the Austin Minnesota School System, Riverland Community College, University of Minnesota's Hormel Institute, and KSMQ Public Television. At that time, Participate was also being used by the largest distance learning organization, Phoenix University, among others, as licensed by Eventures Ltd.

Two decades ago in 1988, the World Wide Web did not yet exist, but in that year in Moscow I used a laptop computer to help prove that glasnost (meaning openness) was really happening. My impressions of the Soviet Union were typed into "USSR today"-- a blog-like branching topic within Participate, the most popular feature on The Source and CompuServe, forerunners to the Internet. My words typed in Moscow were seen worldwide instantaneously.

 

Holy holograms!

Stop whatever you're doing and watch this video from Cisco. I'd heard about the use of a hologram in a meeting a couple of years ago at Shell, where an executive was beamed in from hundreds of miles away for a conversation. Don't have time to do this justice but the future is here. On this video, you'll see Cisco's CEO on stage in Bangalore with two of his execs in San Jose, Calif. All on the same stage. And the whole thing is being broadcast over the Internet around the world. Musion is the company that's developed the technology. Incredible. I hope they're at Enterprise 2.0 next week here in Boston and I can see it live. Will report back if they have a demo running. Last year Cisco had its telepresence technology there.

Come on, Comcast - seat hogging at the FCC hearing?

Thanks to Scott Kirsner (on the story, as usual), you too can shake your head at Comcast's tactics when the FCC came to Harvard last week for a hearing about who controls the Internet. As per Heads Up, Netizens below, the agency that has some regulatory powers over the Internet (it can't really control the whole thing now, can it, the Internet being global and all) came to Boston to hear first-hand about Comcast's transmission policies. In short, Comcast has apparently blocked BitTorrent's use (so many stories that I'm just putting in the Google search link).

Well, now. It appears that Comcast hired people off the street to fill seats at the FCC hearing so that the public (that's us) couldn't sit in the them. Click through to the Portfolio story by Sam Gustin and see a priceless picture. Here's one telling paragraph:

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Speaks for itself.

And while we're on the subject of Comcast: last week, as I reported in Under the desk, our Comcast cable service went down. Not completely. Not predictably. Just the kind of frustrating experience that makes me want to sell the house, buy a farm, and go off the grid entirely. The finger-pointing between Comcast and Verizon, our website and email provider, was skit-worthy. That said, I had one conversation with Eric at Comcast Tech Support that bears reporting. In trying to diagnose my problem, which included not being able to send attachments, I suggested my sending two emails to him, one with an attachment, one without.

"We can't send or receive email," he said.

"You're kidding," said I.

"I'm not," said Eric.

"Comcast Tech Support doesn't have email? Isn't that kind of pathetic?"

"Our lockdown policies go waaaay beyond pathetic," he replied.

My condolences to Comcast Tech Support (Eric did figure it out, by the way, thanks).

And Comcast: tell us who made the decision to hog the seats. And please show that person/those people the door.

Metanet at 25

Metanet, the online conversation started a quarter-century ago by Frank Burns and nurtured forevermore by Lisa Kimball, is celebrating with a party in Washington, DC, at the end of March. Lisa is such a prodigious networker that we profiled her in The Age of the Network (see "All the way to New York to buy a modem," Chapter 7). Wish I could be there. Metanet was the second online community I joined (EIES was first). Over the years, many good ideas and, more importantly, deep friendships have grown from the connections it's spawned. All will miss Frank at this celebration, whose laugh I can hear just typing this. Congratulations, Lisa, and warm fuzzies to all my friends from Spirit, the women's conference there.

With Lisa's permission, I'm posting the anniversary party details here as I know at least some friends from those days are reading:

MetaNetwork is 25 years old this spring and we're having a party!  You and all your family are invited !

It will be held in the afternoon of March 29th - probably around 2pm ...at the home of:

Lois Mandelberg
6303 Waterway Place
Falls Church, Virginia  22044

mamalois[at]hotmail[dot]com

703-658-7776 (h)

Plans for pot luck are being organized in the MetaNet25 conference on Metanet ..

Hope we'll see you there!  * lisa

Heads up, Netizens

Tomorrow, Monday, February 25, 2008, is a big day for the Internet. The US Federal Communication Commission - the FCC - is taking a field trip to Harvard Law School to hold a public hearing on the fate of the Internet. Will telecommunications companies (Comcast, for one) be allowed to decide what information can be transmitted over the net? David Weinberger, an early and perceptive digital sage (see The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything is Miscellaneous, his blog), explains how high the stakes are in "Beyond net neutrality," an op-ed in yesterday's Boston Globe.

It's worth clicking through to get the full effect of David's thinking. Here are 410 words from his piece, under the copyright limit of 500:

...The idea behind Net neutrality is simple: Decisions about what information should move over the Internet most expeditiously should not be made by those who benefit financially from those decisions. The companies that provide the bulk of the nation's Internet connectivity should not be allowed to decide that, for example, YouTube videos are less important than their own Hollywood blockbusters. They should not be allowed to skew the market in favor of large companies by charging for delivering their bits faster than those of a start-up. Net neutrality is basic to keeping the Internet the greatest seedbed of innovation in history.

Comcast has gained FCC focus because it seems to have been blocking the Internet service BitTorrent, which is useful for downloading large files. But what's at stake isn't simply the value of BitTorrent. Rather, it is a struggle between two visions of the Internet...

Comcast and the other major Internet access providers see the Internet as a way to broadcast content to users. Its value comes from what is on the Net. This suits the providers, who come from the world of telephones and cable TV, and are structured to make money by selling content and services to subscribers.

The other vision, and the one that has brought a billion people onto the Net and has stirred hope around the world, says the value of the Net comes from who is on the Net. The "who" isn't a solitary face; the "who" is us, together. The most exciting developments on the Internet have been about how we are connecting with one another, touching one another, and building ideas, services, and new social forms together...

...An Internet delivered by a tiny handful of old-technology providers, even if constrained by Net neutrality, doesn't get us to the second vision. It doesn't give us access laid like a blanket over the entire country, rich and poor alike. It doesn't give us a Net that we make together, rather than a Net the contents of which we consume.

For that, we need more than Net neutrality. We need a structural change.

We gave the incumbent providers their chance. They have failed. The FCC could decide to once again require them to act as wholesalers to local Internet Service Providers, which would offer genuine competition on price, access, reliability, services, and whatever other differentiators an open market would devise.

We have to have Net neutrality, but we should not settle for it.

Under the desk

For the past two days, the unthinkable: I couldn't get online. Since early yesterday, things have been going increasingly dead. First, beginning around 6 AM yesterday, I haven't been able to send attachments. Throughout the day, I periodically couldn't get my mail or use the web. Then this morning, no access at all. Had it not been for a few other items -- a flash drive, a computer in our office, my Blackberry (so there all you loathers of it) -- and Annie's major problem solving, I'd have been out of business. Thus, I've spent a lot of time under desks, tracing wires and cables, disconnecting, reconnecting, screaming...I think, I think, it's the wireless router, the blinking device that connects to the cable modem, that allows online access throughout our house. And all it may require is a download of new firmware but that would mean tinkering with the configuration of another person's machine, another person who's been lucky enough to be swishing down a mountain these past few days while I toil away...........Fortunately, a sometimes-member of our family is here, Sola, the 'Linden Boulevard" ('cause that's where she came from) Retriever who cares not about online anything but does enjoy a brisk walk.

Fast! Live! Blogging!

Our friend Bill Ives is live-blogging from Fast 08, a whole conference dedicated to "search" technologies and their close relatives. Among the speakers, another Endless Knots fave, David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous. Don't miss a chance to hear David speak. He does it the old-fashioned way with pictures not bullets and it's really effective.

"This isn’t your father’s [or mother's, ahem] telecommute"

Jennifer Sutton, a "virtual friend," as in we've known each other online for 15 years but have never met in-person, alerted me to a couple of very good posts from A List Apart, an online publication for website designers. This article, "The Long Hallway" by Jonathan Follett, draws an interesting distinction under the section head (which I love and am impelled to edit), "This isn’t your father’s [or mother's, ahem] telecommute:"

On the surface, the long hallway of the virtual company shares characteristics with the well-established practice of telecommuting [as they use similar tools and processes].

However, there is a fundamental difference between telecommuting and the long hallway. To be a remote worker means that the core function of a company lies elsewhere. Telecommuters work remotely for businesses that already possess an established culture and physical buildings. They are satellites orbiting a larger concern. For virtual companies with long hallways, the company exists wherever its people are—and nowhere else.

I concur that this is a vital difference and one that creates different cultures in both types of concerns. Those working in "the long hallway" are culture-creators from the get-go, while telecommuters, no matter how sensitive their home enterprises, are adapting to norms and mores (more-ayz) that already exist. Good distinction, Jonathan. The whole piece is worth a look.

The virtual 48 hours

OK, so I literally never thought of this when I signed the contract. Happily asked to consult to a prestigious educational institution on the design of its new course on virtual teams. My role on the team of eight is "subject matter expert," which basically means I'm supplying the content (in point of fact, NetAge signed the contract and I'm the NetAge person working on supplying NetAge content, just to be absolutely clear).

There's a short window for pulling all this together, which means they want fast turnaround when the "developer" or the "instructional designer" or the "portfolio manager" or the "graphic designer" or the "project manager" (you get the idea, team of 8) needs help. No problem, I thought. I'm quick, am generally accessible online (ask my family or my addiction counselor - jussst kidding), and what could happen that would take me out of a 48-hour response time?

However, just to be safe, I specified in the contract that there were certain periods when this provision would not apply, times when I know I'm traveling in the months to come.

Then yesterday morning, Sunday that is, I got my first request for info, which is the majority of the material I have to submit. Pages and pages, way too much for even Ms. Speedy Fingers to return in 48 hours even if I didn't already have a full plate and several other deadlines looming.

Got me thinking about what I hadn't considered before signing the contract: When does the 48-hour clock start ticking in the virtual world? When the email is sent to me? When I open it? When I respond? Do weekends count? Holidays? Emails sent at 11 at night or 3 in the morning (yes, I've received such from other clients, especially those on different clocks altogether)? What if it's sent from tomorrow (someone in New Zealand, for example)?

Anyone else had to think about this? I've suggested that we include this dilemma in the course itself. And just for the record, the developer understands completely and is not expecting anything unreasonable from me.

Could BookCrossing lead to world peace?

How many meetings have you been in where someone says sarcastically (and as if you're the organization's idiot): "Well" (huff, huff) "we're not trying to solve world peace?" Well, huff, huff, some of us--call me naive--would like to. Thus, the second in my new series on things that might (see "Why Twitter may lead to world peace").

Thanks to Nathan Brandsford's cheeky and helpful blog for writers (he's a literary agent at Curtis Brown), I've learned about BookCrossing, the brainchild of Ron Hornbaker. In the effort to "make the whole world a library," Ron came up with the idea to create a website where people register books (which means obtaining a "BCID"--BookCrossing ID) then leave them in public places. Someone else picks up the book, notices that it's got this special marking on it, then goes to the BookCrossing site and posts where the book has traveled. That person, in turn, drops it elsewhere and long/short in its six or so short years of existence, BookCrossing has registered 633,242 (with me) members who've registered some 4.5 million books traveling around the world.

Of course, there is a huge online community that's grown up around BookCrossing with members stretching from the Antarctic to the Arctic (may they forever remain cold).

Incredibly, the second most traveled book? A Passage to India by EM Forster, within which is my favorite phrase from all literature: "Only connect," my Rx for world peace.

Green teams begin the year

Bill Ives, again, captures the heart of what I tried to say in Carbon neutral teams (below) in his New Year's post, Will Green Teams Become Prominent in 2008? This phrase, "green teams," has been running through my mind since I first posted. Think we should write a book about it? (Googling reveals that lots of folks are using the expression.)

P+T: "paying it backward"

Because you are reading this post, you are connected to the people I'm about to describe.

Back in the 1970s, a young couple in Oregon had some unique and visionary ideas. They thought a new class of software would develop, one that would allow people to work together better, to talk and brainstorm, to become more attuned to one another. Calling their idea "groupware," they began to publish papers, an early one of which, "Groupware: The Emerging Art of Orchestrating Collective Intelligence," received a lot of attention after its presentation at the First Global Conference on the Future in Toronto in 1980.

We met the authors, Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz, known in the online world as P+T, in 1979 when we joined EIES, one of the earliest online communities. We were so taken with what they were doing that we profiled them in Networking, our 1982 book. For the P+T excerpt, click to the jump page.

Over the years, P+T's groupware vision has been the guiding force behind many software companies, whether those enterprises realized it or not. P+T named a phenomenon, developed their own software, and consulted to many of those who picked up speed in their wake. I wish they could have patented the fundamentals of groupware.

Which is why I say, because you are reading this post, you are connected to P+T. Without their pioneering ideas and frameworks, this kind of connection, between you and me right now, would be very different.

Now's a good time to thank them. This past Tuesday, Trudy tripped on her way back from the post office and fell, hitting her head, as Peter says, "hard." So hard that a few hours later, Trudy was in neurosurgery at Oregon Health and Science University Trauma ICU. Happy to report that she is recovering at what one of her neurosurgeons says is "the quickest and most complete" rate he's ever seen.

That said, as self-employed creative types, P+T's catastrophic health insurance is severely limited and will not cover either the medical or the true costs of full recovery. Thus, Lisa Kimball, another old time networker, has mounted a campaign on their behalf. Here's Lisa's letter. Hoping you too can say thanks to two of the people who've made the online world a true community.

Dear friends of P+T,

If you're reading this it's because I managed to convince Peter to send it which makes me very happy even tho I'm sure it makes Peter feel uncomfortable.  I'm sending a check out to Oregon today.  We all know about "pay it forward" - this is about "paying it backward."  P+T's work has influenced and enhanced my thinking for years and years.  I've spent hours reading their profound work and exploring experiments they've created.  They've contributed huge amounts of value which is priceless so I feel that I owe them far more than I could ever afford to pay.  If we all lived in a physical village the way we're living in this global one we'd be bringing Peter healthy snacks to the hospital, shoveling their walk, filling the fridge, and doing whatever else we could to support them during a very difficult time.  Since most of us are far away, we can't do much of that but we can provide some cash to reduce the stress of figuring out how to deal with the day-to-day while they're dealing with something way more important.  I'm betting that any amount would help and be very much appreciated... If others have some creative ideas about more ways we can enact our network being - count me in!    * lisa

Their address: P+T Johnson-Lenz, 8340 SW 6th Avenue, Portland, OR 97219

Brainstorming? Try doing it virtually

Nuno Sebastio, who's keeping an eye on things virtual and collaborative at  Blogcast, picks up from a Marc Andreessen post from last July about "the virtues" of brainstorming virtually, which Marc pulls from The Medici Effect, a book by Frans Johannson. (Following all that? I barely can.)

Point is that it works and there are studies to prove it, including one we helped conduct several years back. Here's the quote from Marc's post that ought to send you right back to your desk next time you're pulled into a conference room for brainstorming:

Brainstorming [is] used in nearly all of the world's largest companies, nonprofits, and government organizations. And the reasons seem obvious... "The average person can think of twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone."... But is it true?

In 1958... psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year. These people were called "real groups" since they actually brainstormed together. Next, the researchers let "virtual groups" of four people generate ideas around the "thumb problem", but they had to brainstorm individually, in separate rooms. The researchers combined the answers they received from each [virtual group] individual and eliminated redundancies... They then compared the performance between real groups and virtual groups...

To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many ideas as the real groups.

The result, it turned out, is not an anomaly.  In a [1987 study, researchers] concluded that brainstorming groups have never outperformed virtual groups. Of the 25 reported experiments by psychologists all over the world, real groups have never once been shown to be more productive than virtual groups. In fact, real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently generate about half the number of ideas they would have produced if the group's individuals had [worked] alone.

Endless Knots: the apocryphal story

As promised, here for your late-night enjoyment, my short story, Endless Knots, the completely fictional (oxymoron?) tale of a young woman, skilled with needles and yarn, who starts a dot-com and survives. An ode to knitters everywhere, to spirited entrepreneurs, and to the angel investors who believe in them. (Unbelievers, click elsewhere.)

As stated below, the story appears in Global City Review, Fall 2007, Number Eighteen. Order your copy here.

Click on the picture to read the first page; click below to download the whole story:

Download EK-GCR_Fall07.pdf

"If you died, would your online friends know?"

Here's a thought-provoking, if not a bit chilling, article, If you died, would your online friends know?, from Esther Schindler, who writes for, among other places, CIO magazine (Nov 14, 2007, issue). Her friend died and she didn't find out until nearly a year later. Why? Because nowadays few of us keep a hardcopy address book anymore and in our paranoia most don't even allow anyone else to have the password to our computers. Think about this:

For the last 25 years, I have lived in TCP/IP packets more than I do in the real world. I do have personal connections; I'm involved in community activities, and I have warm-blooded friends who would notice if I quit breathing. Those people have my phone number and physical address... but my virtual correspondents do not. If I disappeared from one of those online communities, would they notice?

I knew Elliot for 15 years. He showed up at every user group meeting of the Phoenx OS/2 Society, he participated in its discussion forum, he always wanted to help. Elliot died during an open heart operation. Now, a year later, his mom wants to invite people to the unveiling ... and she has no idea how to reach his friends. Elliot's computer was, of course, password protected, and she didn't know where he stored his contact information. He didn't have a "regular" address book. So she spent hours on switchboard.com and other services trying to find addresses for people. I got a plaintive phone call last night, asking if I was Esther and I used to know someone named Elliot...?

Jeff Stamps on Teams of Practice

Jeff Stamps has taken the time to reply at length and in depth to Mike Gotta's response to my post on Teams of Practice. Here's Jeff's thinking:

Mike, this is a terrific post on "Teams of Practice". I'll take a crack at it in the knowledge management context in which we coined the term.

At a high level, we see KM in three phases of collaboration. 

Phase 1 is the capturing, storing, and making accessible knowledge objects generated elsewhere in the organization, the Knowledge Base, for shared use.

Phase 2 added Communities of Practice to source knowledge directly from people. CoP systems of conversation follow Etienne Wenger's observation that people pass practices, their "how-tos," along informal pathways of tacit knowledge exchange, propelled along by questions and answers and held together by social relationships of community. Here, the conversation itself is the knowledge base.

Phase 3 adds Teams of Practice to source knowledge directly from teams. We mean to capture both what "a team of practice" is, and how they inevitably connect as "teams of practice," a network of ToPs.

Teams are the working units of the organization, both strategic (executive) and tactical (line) teams at all levels. The team context allows people to collaboratively pursue concrete goals, test ideas, make decisions, develop and execute tasks, and produce output. As teams go online, they create and capture knowledge objects, generate focused conversations, and produce a wealth of contextual "how-tos" in agendas, task lists, time lines, etc. Hence, knowledge captured in the context of an online team room is the actual tacit practice of the organization.

Organizations are inherently networks of teams, starting with the hierarchy, which is a network of interlocked management teams of direct reporting relationships. Today, many more types of teams are added to that basic set of groups to get the work of the organization done. All these teams are producing output used by other teams in the organization in a sequence of upstream-to-downstream and supplier-customer relationships feeding teams delivering to the organization's ultimate customer(s). The horizontal connections among working teams are the ones that produce large-scale organizational results. This network of teams exists whether recognized or not, and is not a stage on the way to a CoP of individuals.

What's historically new to us as a species long familiar with the complexities of small groups, as with the first two phase of KM, is the online part, the externalization of memory and learning in the global cloud of virtual spacetime. As more of a team's daily life occurs in or passes through online places, more concrete practice is captured in its natural, role-based, context. This is increasingly happening whether the team is collocated or not.

However, teams are jumping online in all manner of KM containers, most groups happily isolated from one another. The challenge is to network them in the meaningful pattern of their work, not just randomly (i.e., search across team spaces). Teams of practice would not only share across teams, but enable learning and problem-solving at the teamnet (network of teams) level of producing organizational results.

Fahrenheit 451

As a password-carrying member of the blognoscenti, you already know about Kindle, the latest from Amazon (do I have to put in the link?) founder Jeff Bezos, the man who turned writers into statistics-obsessed site-clickers. Even my friend Ellen's hubby (he's on TV, you know his name) checked his Amazon rankings every hour when his first book came out. Me too. My heart still flutters thinking of the day Virtual Teams dropped into three digits.

OK, you didn't see the 1 million blog posts on Monday about the Newsweek cover story, The Future of Reading, by Steven Levy. I was alerted when I clicked into Zoetrope as I do each morning only to find my fellow writers all in a kerfuffle about this new device. In a sentence, Kindle is a wireless device through which you can obtain and read books, 2000 of them at a time, downloadable from, of course, Amazon.

Let me repeat that. A DEVICE where you can READ.

So there's a huge debate going on right now among writers and readers. As a writer who's many times enjoyed the delectable moment when the first copy of your manuscript lands in your hand as something that will take its place on a shelf with its lovely cover and endorsements on the back, well, I just don't think that getting a link to my newest is going to feel the same. As a reader, well, I can take a pill for my nutrients too but...

Yesterday, Steven Levy appeared with my friend (and secondarily, of course, brilliant writer) Sven Birkerts to debate the merits of Kindle on WBUR/NPR's On Point. Last night, I spyed a few moments of Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose. This morning, my friend (and brilliant blogger nee hospital-runner) Paul Levy is conducting a "consumer poll" on Kindle. And, early in, the incomparable Seth Godin states his objection: it oughta come with pre-loaded books.

So I may be eating my words, so to speak, but even though I've been online forever and spend inordinate amounts of time online (just ask my hubby), count me out. It's hard enough packing now to go on a trip, what with my computer and phone and IPod and mascara (ooops, that doesn't need a plug). You know. And what about the sweet scent of musty books and the pleasure of lying on the sofa, feet on your beloved's (or your pet's) lap (or v-v), turning pages? Somehow with a blue glow, it doesn't feel the same.

Teams of practice

We've been hanging out at the collaboration bar for a bit of time now, which means that we've seen a few different customers take stools, saying *theirs* is the only drink to order. They down a few and poof! they're gone.

Some have stuck. For at least a decade and a half, communities of practice have held their seat. Ever since Etienne Wenger (hello, old friend) coined the phrase in his and Jean Lave's 1991 book, Situated Learning, savvy organizations have been promoting their use. Among the first was Bob Buckman, then CEO of Buckman Labs, the specialty chemical company, who turned his entire organization into one gigantic global community of practice years before most reading here even had email accounts. We documented Bob's story in Virtual Teams--and, perhaps more importantly, he documented it himself in Building the Knowledge-Driven Organization.

Not long after people in the collaboration community (which will have to be a subject of another post someday) started to use the term "communities of practice" came its partner-in-crime, knowledge management, whose history Karl-Erik Sveiby, the Swedish writer and consultant, has been tracking for years.

Comes then a whole sector of the tech industry focused on making it easier for people to "manage" their knowledge, a concept that bears reflecting upon elsewhere (is knowledge manageable as, say, people are? - I'll let that one go for now). Also comes then all manner of upstart efforts within organizations to swap learning as fast as possible, often without their employers' imprimaturs.

Among these were two majors in the US Army, Nate Allen and Tony Burgess, who, without sanction or budget or business plan, started Companycommand.com. There soldiers could exchange, well, war stories. A good summary of their experience is documented in the Government Executive article, "Managing Technology Linked in the Fight," which was laid out in detail in the 2005 book, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Professional, which the two majors along with two others co-authored with Professor Nancy Dixon.

All of which is a windy introduction to the fact that the US Army has a long, rich history in communities of practice with now probably tens of thousands of online forums where soldiers of every rank can exchange information in a timely way.

So it was that the Army held its 3rd Annual Knowledge Management Conference last week, where we, along with Dr. Dixon and others, gave talks, ours titled The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams. Lots of discussion about communities of practice, knowledge sharing, semantic webs, and all the other topics that IT professionals, learning experts, and the top brass, whether those with stars on their shoulders or big paychecks, worry about.

OK. What's next? Jeff and I came away thinking about this: perhaps the era of the community of practice needs to morph a bit. Aren't we now in the time when teams, not just amorphous communities or lone-ranger individuals, need to share practices? And isn't the technology up to the task, what with virtual (or, if you prefer, global) teams exploding everywhere and wikis for teams going up on the web faster than their IT departments can track them? Teams, we think, are the way to work (without diminishing the genius and creativity of the individual), the hope for solving the seemingly intractable problems that sometimes make it hard to get up in the morning.

Thus, we invite a new customer to the collaboration bar: Teams of Practice, the title of this post.

Building trust in virtual teams--a survey from Jordan

Frequent readers know that one of our purposes here is to help students conduct research on virtual teams, collaboration, and networks (and maybe something else if it seems relevant or appealing). One such inquiry came from Ernest Kutuk at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, studying trust in virtual teams. Thus, let me say again: students, feel free to email me with your projects and if they fit these broad criteria, you're in.

Just a few hours ago, we received our first such request from a student at the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), on the same topic as the Croatian request.

Mohamad Alsharo is studying for his master's degree in computer science, majoring in project management. As part of this work, he's doing a survey on trust in virtual teams, thus his contacting us. Here's Mohamad's note. I encourage everyone to fill out the survey. And, Mohamad, be sure to report back on your results so I can post those too:

My master's thesis is something new in Jordan. No one here has ever worked on virtual teams so this may open a new scope for our students. In my thesis, I'm trying to come up with a model for building trust among virtual teams members. I've been working on this topic for almost 18 months now and have put my results into a survey that I am distributing to both virtual teams researchers and practitioners to see if they agree or disagree my conclusion.

For this reason I have divided my survey into three parts. The first is for Researchers, the second is for Team Leaders, and the third is for Team Members. I hope you can help me in my research and I'm ready for any questions or suggestions from you.

My survey links are:
Researchers: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/Academic.phtml
Team Leaders: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/leaders.phtml
Team Members: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/members.phtml

Thank you again and I'm looking forward to hearing from you,

Mohamad Alsharo

The art of networks

If there was one persistent image that threaded through the presentations at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems, it was the network. Whether the presenter was a biologist, physicist, mathematician, or some other specialist whose field I couldn't quite comprehend, he or she showed a graph of a network. Even Nicholas Christakis, the internist and social scientist, who presented the latest findings of the famous Framingham Heart Study, had network graphs illustrating where smokers in the study have ended up (on the periphery) and how obesity patterns observed different patterns (linked to norms rather than behaviors).

These are gorgeous images, these networks. Bill Ives, whose presentation on blogs at KM Cluster's Inside Social Networks two years ago was instrumental in my becoming a blogger, points to an astonishing collection of links to network images at Trust Art, including those at visualcomplexity. Serious major wow.

Bill's work on blogs deserves greater mention. I've had the chance to talk to Bill a number of times over the past two years. Each time I do, I learn something else about blogging. In our most recent conversation, he pointed out how important it is to use meaningful words when you link, meaning that it's better to call out Trust Art for its collection of links on "trust metrics" than it is to say that they're here. Why? Because the search engines can't do much with the word here but they will pick up on Trust Art or trust metrics.

Over time, Bill has developed a method for blogging with which he advises businesses. Following his approach, hits, that all-important measure, rise, making for happier bloggers. I admire Bill's work and have benefited greatly from his generous sharing of knowledge. His description of his Business Blog Coaching and Consulting Services is worth clicking through to.

The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams

A bit of self-referential reporting here: Milestone Group has published its quarterly journal, wherein lies our "invited article," The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams. Click and enjoy.

For any writers interested in how something like this comes about, here's the backstory. Shortly after joining Facebook in September of this year, I received a "friend" request from Mark Zawacki, founder and managing partner of Milestone Group. Turned out that Mark had read The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book, as a result of his having worked at Index Systems, a consulting company where we'd done some work. Once he found me on Facebook, he asked if we'd like to contribute to his journal. Took a look and quickly agreed. This issue, for example, has an interview with our friend Nova Spivack of Radar Networks; an opinion piece by Eric Benhamou, now a venture capitalist and chairman of 3Com, where he was CEO; and an editorial by Milestone's Bill Burk with the intriguing title of Why Nine Men Can't Make a Baby in a Month.

Thanks, Mark, and to Jim Conley, blogger at On Brookline, who edits the journal.

Pen computers, digital ink, and the new paper notebooks

Stew Sutton, the Aerospace Corporation fellow who gave the presentation about Second Life that I blogged yesterday, has posted a comment so interesting that I'm making it a post of its own. Thanks, Stew!

 

Jessica, I enjoyed your replay of the material shared last week. Perhaps you should lose your notes more often if it produces such a good result. :-)

I am compelled to share what we did not get around to talking about last week that will have a profound impact on note taking. The "pen computer" is now coming of age. This is a wonderful device that works in combination with special paper (with a barely visible micro-dot pattern). The pen records the authors strokes on the paper and the traditional “ink” is put down on the paper just like with a regular (non-computer) pen. The combination is absolutely amazing. This technology is being licensed around the world by the inventing company Anoto (http://www.anoto.com/). The U.S. licensees are several.

 

Within the U.S., a couple of the digital pen providers that I found to be interesting are focused at two ends of the market. Leapfrog offers a product called the “Fly Fusion™” Pentop Computer (http://www.flyworld.com/whatis/index.html) aimed at the Junior High to High School market. I’ve had one for a month or so and my younger daughter (5th grade) really enjoys it. She is taking “digital notes” and often uses the built-in algebra programs to help he “check her homework answers.” Dad verified that it was a post-solve check. I have also been testing this technology and have several experiments in process.

At the college / business end of the market, there is a very interesting product being offered by a company called Livescribe (http://www.livescribe.com/platform/index.html). They are planning to start shipping their products in early 2008. Both Livescribe and Leapfrog are using the same base technology but their products are tuned for different applications.

The most compelling application (for us Knowledge Management types) is the idea of going back to paper for real knowledge capture. Our tools constrain the way we think and the manner in which we record our thoughts, ideas, and notes. Nothing is as unconstrained as a blank sheet of paper. And where structure is important, you can have “forms” that are printed on the paper to “coordinate” your note taking.

So Jessica, if you had one of these last week, your notes would have been posted directly to this blog from your paper notebook. See the example from the Livescribe sight to get a peek at the new face of blogging from “remote locations”… http://www.livescribe.com/sneakpeek/clip3.html

-Stew Sutton

"A writer's best friend..."

Photo taken in Whitcoul's Bookshop, Auckland, NZ, 17 Feb 2007

I've gone on a bit here about the joys of Zoetrope for writers. Rachael King, author of The Sound of Butterflies, has a level-headed post, A writer's best friend and worst enemy, about what this online community has meant to her. First stop I made after arriving in New Zealand earlier this year was Whitcoul's Bookshop. Though the chains have made their way to NZ, small bookstores and local chains, like Whitcoul's, are everywhere. It was there that I spotted Rachael's new book, well displayed with an article and, author's dream, face out on the shelf.

Note to historians: Rachael's father was Michael King, the astounding historian who wrote the definitive work, The Penguin History of New Zealand.

You: Price tag, $300

My fellow bloggers will appreciate this problem: much to blog about, little time to blog. So it is that a compelling presentation by Stew Sutton of The Aerospace Corporation at the Knowledge Leadership Forum week before last has not gotten its due. As I've said before, one of the unnoticed benefits of being a speaker is hearing other speakers (viz. Robin Gerber), as I did at the Brookings Leadership Lab in September. Rarely does one (meaning this one) have the time but because the Knowledge Leadership Forum took place within quick driving distance, it was possible to hang out.

Stew was the person who really introduced me to Second Life, the online virtual world where people create digital versions of themselves (or of the beings they wish they were). I wrote a bit about IBM's guidelines for Second Life a few months back. In truth, I first learned about Second Life only 18 months ago from that serial tracker of new things digital, John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion. Like a couple of million other people, I logged in after talking to Stew. If you're there, you're unlikely to find me teleporting around but should you be curious, search for Pesha Linden. I chose the name Pesha for reasons known to my family and a few close friends; the name Linden was available on a list and I went right for it: my last name, original spelling Lipniak, means "linden tree" (or white wood, depending on whom you ask) in Ukrainian.

Of course, now that I have time to write this post, I can't find my notes from Stew's great presentation. He showed us all the cool things that his company, possibly the very first company to use Second Life, to support collaboration. Freed from the physics of our little planet, things fly and float and pulse and disappear in the Aerospace collaboratorium (they don't call it that but it deserves such a grand term). Astrophysicists can stand in the spray of rockets; they can invent new ways for rockets to spray. Very, very cool and apologies to Stew for the poor reportage (my early editors would be upset with me).

Here's the one fact I remember: you can have an avatar, meaning a digital version of yourself, made these days for $300. I mean something that looks like you. $300. Three bills for the virtual you.

Energy-conscious computing

Some years ago, we were in a joint venture with the dearly departed Digital Equipment Corporation. The purpose was to build a regional "computer conferencing" system, called, yes, New England Commons, that would then link to the other regional computer conferencing systems, notably, Metanet in Washington, DC., Unison, a similar system in Denver, and, in the Bay Area, you guessed it, The Well. Some day, the business plan read, all of these regional systems would meld into one national system allowing people all over the country to talk to one another online. Name of the parent company: Internetwork Communications. We called it Internet and the year was 1985.

Why were there regional systems in those days? Because the cost of connection--via dial-up--was prohibitive way back then...as in $25/hour. That's right, $25 per hour, or, if you worked a package, $22.50. (Now go complain about your montly cable-modem or DSL fee..)

For those unfamiliar with the term, a computer conferencing system was the ancestor of bulletin boards, discussion forums, and even the much-tossed-about term-du-jour, wikis.

Point of all this is that in order to install the hardware for this enterprise, we had to build a room outfitted with its own power system, air conditioning, raised floor and what I recall as a zillion other things we had to become quickly expert in. Transporting "the computer" (a VAX 11/780 plus racks and racks for the modems) to our second-floor office in Waltham, Mass., required hiring a crane. And as soon as it was operational, our power bill went through the third-floor roof.

I've been sensitive to the power needs of computing ever since and go to some effort, i.e. crawl around the floor turning off power strips, to reduce the drain on electricity when my machine is off (this in my home office).

All of which leads to a good post today that goes a bit deeper into what server farms and the like require in major operations centers, like hospitals. CareGroup's CIO "geekdoctor" John Halamka, a low-carbon-footprint kinda guy, sheds some light, so to speak, on the tradeoffs that he and his folks think about when adding MIPS. They've even hired a full-time power engineer:

Power consumption and heat is increasing to the point that data centers cannot sustain the number of servers that the real estate can accommodate. The solution is to deploy servers much more strategically. We’ve started a new “Kill-a-watt” program and are now balancing our efforts between supply and demand. We are more conservative about adding dedicated servers for every new application, challenging vendor requirements when dedicated servers are requested, examining the efficiency of power supplies, and performing energy efficiency checks on the mechanical/electrical systems supporting the data center.

Bloggers, listen up: think F

Maybe all you bloggers reading here already know this. I did not until Jim Conley, who keeps the well-read On Brookline blog, came to visit today. Though he visited for different purposes, it wasn't long until we lept off to my beloved topic of writing (and blogging). Jim teaches writing to prospective communicators at Emerson College and thus has an opinion or two about what works online.

Turns out, bloggerinos, that people read screens in what researcher Jakob Nielsen dubbed an F-pattern.

We skim the top lines relatively quickly, moving across the screen (left to right*).

Then work our way down the screen.

Reading a bit here.

And there.

So

if

you

want

people

to read...

Enough of that. Get the point? How did people discover this? Heat tracking studies of eye movements. Ironically, or coincidentally, or neither, we happened to have a tour of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (yes, as in Fidelity Investments) last week, where we looked into one lab where they were tracking subjects' eye movements. Wish I'd known then what I know now. Henceforth, dear readers, watch for my posts to be very F-y.

*Is it a mirror F for the right to left languages? Jakob, where are you?

For a more detailed description of what he found, jump:

Shhhh...it's Tuesday morning

Ever wish you could have a day with no interruptions? Or even an hour? Intel has been running an experiment whereby Tuesday mornings are Quiet Time. So far, so good. People love it, according to Nathan Zeldes:

Many of the engineers are happy about the newfound thinking time, and are protecting it by pushing back on interrupters during the Tuesday AM slot. Not unexpectedly there are also some who complain that this isolation prevents them from getting answers to urgent questions during that morning… we are assuming the benefit outweighs this cost, and are waiting for the mid- and post-survey to tell us whether this is correct.

Next up for the engineers, Zero Email Friday, a bit of hyperbole it make the point:

In our new pilot, we encourage the members of an organic group to focus each Friday on direct conversation – face to face or by telephone – for interpersonal communication within the group...While this may seem a small thing, experiments done in other companies showed a great impact once people started exploring communication with the human voice.

Imagine the possibilities if we actually starting talking to one another again. Hello.

Mr. Gore, virtual teamer (and Nobelist)

Most know Al Gore these days as the environmental protector (and possibly the world's best Powerpoint presenter). Others know him, as he says in one of the greatest opening lines of any speaker, the man "who used to be the next president of the United States."

We "know" him (note quotes) as the designer of one of the best virtual teaming projects we've ever worked on.

In 1993, then Vice President Gore was leading the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (originally called the National Performance Review), the 500th study of how to streamline, shrink, and simplify the mammoth beast that is the US government. Gore's design was unique: instead of hiring consultants, he recruited volunteers from within the agencies and departments. They, in turn, staffed cross-functional teams that studied each government entity. If you were from the Justice Department, you might serve on the Dept of Agriculture team, along with people from what was then called Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Dept of Energy, and so on.

These volunteers were good, very good. They in turn recruited every and anyone with a new idea about organizations, business, and communication, i.e. every legitimate book writer they could lay their hands on. Tom Peters kicked off the five-month effort in Mellon Auditorium and for every Wednesday following, anyone with a book vaguely related to organizational life was invited to a brown-bag lunch.

We got our call just as our book, The TeamNet Factor: Bringing the Power of Boundary Crossing into the Heart of Your Business, was in production. Marion Metcalf, a staffer at INS and a key member of the Reinventing Government staff, read the galleys of the book, called, and said that boundary crossing was key to their work--and to their sustaining the energy behind the project. We've told the detailed story of what happened next here in our following book, The Age of the Network. The cross-boundary design of the project which encouraged, indeed required, people to team up outside their agencies' walls proved a powerful engine. For years following, NetResults, the network that we helped launch as the project came to a close in the same auditorium where Tom Peters keynoted the project's beginning, maintained connections among NPRG staffers, some of whom we're still in communication with today.

During our days working on this project, we heard only praise for Al Gore, adjectives like hard working, smart, insightful, visionary.

Highest salutes today to you, Al Gore.

Facing the facts about Facebook

If you're reading this post, Facebook is not for you. Of course, if you're reading this post, it may be because you were referred from my Facebook page.

Yes, my friends, I am on Facebook and so are a lot of my other friends. And I use the f-word without quotes.

But an op-ed in the October 6, 2007, New York Times, The Fakebook Generation, by Alice Mathias says, in short, that us old people run the risk of missing the point. What's new there? I first became aware of how much of the point I was missing some years ago when I added an article to Phish and my daughters nearly expired from laughter. The and Phish do not a match make.

Ms. Mathias, a 2007 grad of Dartmouth College (and a very good writer), explains that Facebook is for fun and those of us who've joined since the floodgates opened to the AARP gen and their younger sibs this past spring may be delusional. Again, no dispute. The question remains: Can social networking sites a la Facebook and MySpace and who-knows-how-many-others actually offer anything of value to us working hacks?

Possibly. Frankly, though, I was shocked when the head of a software company, a contemporary, mind you, wrote me a note in early July saying that he hadn't found me on Facebook, that I apparently "wasn't into that." This was about the same time that I went to the meeting where I learned that Email is for old people (the young 'uns post for all the world to see, a point that Ms. Mathias makes). Advance the calendar another month and the head of a medical center invites me to be his "friend" on Facebook. Well, I like his blog so why not follow his lead to Facebook?

So off I go, feeling rather lonely as he was my only friend...for about two or three hours, whereupon I began to bump into all kinds of people I know, seriously, people I've known for years (or, in some cases, months), business colleagues, friends from the Internet wayback machine (hello, Howard, hello, Izumi), the nephew of a mentor whom I met some years ago (rattttther well known in publishing), and, of course, my 16-year-old godson, my 18-year-old nephew, and, yes, my daughter. And then people started "friending" me, people who saw my name on someone else's list of friends, people who'd read one of our books or had been to a talk I (or we) had given or some other flattering association.

All nice but useful? Well, in just a few weeks, I've been asked to write an article for a CIO publication, a foreword to a book, AND gotten help for another piece I've just finished for FreePint (thank you, David Coleman, Michael Sampson, and Loretta Donovan).

And I find myself feeling a bit silly from time to time as I ponder how many "friends" I have and consider adding frivolous widgets to my Facebook facility. How about you, my friends?

NB: Even The New Yorker has been reporting on Facebook. See Sept 17, 2007, Icebreaker Dept: Social Studies, which, needless to say, I blogged.