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Question 191 of 365: What is the skeptic’s option?

Published on July 11, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Skeptics
Image by wburris via Flickr

Everyone who asks questions is a skeptic in one way or another, which is to say that everyone is a skeptic.

I once found my bicycle up in a tree in the woods. It had been placed there by some naughty older kids. They wanted to play a trick on me, although I am quite sure that they had no idea who I was. They just saw my bike in the woods behind my friend’s house and decided that it belonged in a tree. They carefully perched the handle bars on one branch and the back wheel on another. It hung about 8 feet up in the air, which was pretty far out of my 5 foot height at the time. So, I walked home.

I was skeptical about whether or not I would be able to convince my mother that this wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t been careless about leaving the bike in the woods in the first place. I asked myself questions about who could have done such a thing, all the while cursing both the people who had done it and myself for being so trusting of an obviously hostile world.

If Twitter and smart phones and Fail would have exited back then, you can bet that the entire escapade would have been chronicled first by the older kids as a viral video contender and then by me so that I might chronicle the improbability of my bicycle in the tree. I would have tweeted something like “So, my bike decided that the beaten path (or any path) wasn’t good enough for it.” I would have put the twitpic in there too, just for good measure. There would not be much skepticism just then about what had happened or disbelief by my mother. We could have looked up the whole thing and probably gotten a geotagged play by play, complete with facebook profiles on each of the perpetrators because their faces would be tagged.

I tell this story not so that you can pity my former self, but rather so that I can outline just how little skepticism there is for the things that we can see, and how this is bleeding into ideas well.

Right now, it is very easy to like something on the Internet. It is easy to share it and to link to it. It is easy to do pretty much anything except for be skeptical. Sure, there are contrary opinions and lots of snarky comments on Twitter, but don’t really found those and true skepticism. Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

I want the ability to not believe again.

Now, all of my choices are to either support or not support (and most of the nonsupporting options are burried in comments). I want the ability to not believe as well. I want to be able to stare wide eyed at the things that hold untruth and disbelieve them. Imwant q universal skeptic button.

This button will be the equivalent of the Facebook “like” button, but instead of converting to page promotion or demotion, it will have the effect of allowing me to highlight the most offensive portion of whatever I am looking at and call it to account. Any time that someone hovers over that text in the future, it will have my record of disbelief and whatever comment I cared to make on why it was untrue. The button will be in ebooks and blog posts, on videos and podcasts too.

The skeptic button will finally make the process of making a case against an idea easier because it will cobble together each and every comment offered and aggregate it for a common purpose.

In the end, I dint want to like/dislike things or even merely comment on them. I want to believe them or disbelieve them. The things that I believe in should be shared in all of the spaces that I inhabit and the things that I do not believe in deserve to connect me with all other nonbelievers. I feel as though we would have a common bond, a network of skeptics.

Right now we are scattered. Someday soon, though, we will rise up and state our intentions for making belief a part of our metadata. We will make asking questions a part of every online interaction.

We will look up at the bicycles in the trees around us and we will start to walk home together to tell someone else the story from memory.

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Question 188 of 365: What did we buy?

Published on July 8, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
First 4 digits of a credit card
Image via Wikipedia

Credit card companies are stupid. Not for any of the crazy backwards pricing structures or 0% percent nonsense that they send out 100 times a year in the mail. Not for the hope of fre money or the predatory lending that happens every day.

They are stupid because they haven’t turned spending money into a game, at least not any more than playing with a piece of plastic and getting people to give you objects for swiping it into a machine.

If credit card companies were smart, they would create a virtual representation of everything that is purchased and put it into a virtual house for you. If they really had everything together, they would make The Sims into a carbon copy of everything that we buy.

On the one hand it would make people realize everything that they are consuming because they would have to lug it around their virtual world. On the other, it would allow us to start setting up an economy that is a direct copy of everything our real economy values. It would allow us to trade what we cant trade in real life, to own what we have always owned and what we will own in the future.

Rather than bogus rewards systems, we could be rewarded with the game of life. The real one, the one we pay for every day.

Think of this:

The gas that we buy for our real cars will make the virtual cars go. The fast food that we purchase will show up in our guts in the online game. The electronic devices that we purchase are forever in existence, long after their usefulness is gone. We could see the entertainment costs and the costs of not entertaining ourselves at all. We could see how happy our virtual counterparts are and reflect on the way our real selves feel. We could actually see what our debt gets us and the real affects of our consumption have on the world around us.

Most people still find the idea of purchasing virtual goods to be ludicrous, but purchasing real goods that have virtual counterparts just makes sense. We do this when we buy cd’s and get mp3 files as well. We do this when we buy neopets and farmville slushies. W just need to do this for everything. We need to have a way to publish all of our purchases for the purpose of creating a more intimate relationship with out goods and services.

The way I see it, the first bank to do this will be the one that gets to dictate the price of goods and services from that point forward. Because once everything is both virtual and physical, the virtual economy will become just as important as the one that provides us with sustenance and substance. Once a single bank doubles our buying power by duplicating every line item on a receipt, they will literally be printing their own money. They will own the game and every transaction could me monitized.

The only question I still have, is why aren’t the credit card companies so stupid as to not see this?

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Question 182 of 365: What is the benefit of an extreme position?

Published on July 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Scenic Railway at Luna Park (Melbourne, Austra...
Image via Wikipedia

Carnivals were a common occurrence during my childhood. The Blossom time parade and carnival over memorial day was perhaps the most memorable. Every year it meant something else. For a while, it meant games and prizes. For one year (before I realized that roller coasters made me feel quite ill), it meant rides. For a couple of years it meant finding a date to go and hold hands while walking through the grounds. And later on, it meant singing the Battle Hymm of the Republic with my choir at the cemetary after the parade was all over. This carnival changed many times for me, but all of the elements stayed the same. It never got any bigger or smaller. It was just a fixture of a single weekend every year.

Less of a fixture were the other carnivals in the towns surrounding Chagrin Falls. I would sometimes venture to the Holloween carnival in West Geauga or the 4th of July festivities out by one of the local lakes. These events never were set in my mind as having a single purpose for any given year. They were always about something other than what was completely comfortable for me. The haunted houses were never my idea, nor were the 4H style animal areas of many of these fairs.

The most uncomfortable situation at one of these “other events” was when a friend of mine wanted to go up to one of the religious tables and have folks give her tracts and preach directly at her. I waited a few paces off while the man attempted to save her all over again. When he was finished with his prepared speech and had handed over at least 5 different pamphlets, she we left the oversized barn. My friend told me that it was like going to summer camp, church, and a retreat all rolled into 10 minutes. She was transformed, at least for a few minutes, by the extreme position and unbridled passion that the man exhibited. It was then that I realized the power of fanaticism.

While I relied on my standard issue carnival every year, it was only at this significantly different event that my friend could be changed. It wasn’t that she went in looking to be changed, but afterwards she felt as though there wasn’t any other purpose that mattered. That carnival would now always be about the table in the barn with the man holding out his tracts and spitting his absolute truth, for both of us. I couldn’t make it be about something else because of the way my friend looked and how uncomfortable it made me feel.

And perhaps, that is why the events that cause us to feel transformed are not the ones that we would want to look back fondly about as if they were the backdrop for all that we are. They are not the events that stayed with us, year in and year out. They are not the moments that we can make into whatever we want because there was something that reached out and grabbed our attention and bent it toward a single purpose. Sometimes these transformations are good, and sometimes they are hideously bad.

I guess that is why I don’t think that going to the same conference or event every year will bring about real change. I don’t believe that people are ever going to create something divergent if they don’t seek out opportunities to find fanatics or be fanatics without the need to temper their opinions for a wider audience. Sometimes, we need a specific purpose without having to explain how it relates to all of the other work that we are doing. Sometimes we need to get caught up in the moment without worrying about how it looks or the implications of what it might mean for the future. Sometimes, we need to let ourselves be changed.

So, what are those divergent events? Who are those people that will leave me feeling so energized by their obsessions that I can’t possibly ignore them? More recently I have seen the gradual expansion of the same ideas. I have noticed the evolution of what has come before. I wan’t someone to make me feel uncomfortable, to approach me with tract in hand and challenge me to look away.

Right now there is too much backdrop. There is too much yearly festival and not enough fanatics. The soap boxes have been shaved down to almost nothings so that everyone just looks like a carnival employee trying to get you to try the latest game or ride.

I’m not looking for pure excitement. Instead, what I am after is simply something different enough to change what I think. I’m tired of what I think. I’m tired of following these ideas to their logical conclusion. If they really matter, they will be sharpened by a fanatical change. If they don’t matter, they will go away and I will start working toward something else.

The benefit of an extreme position is that we remember them. Always.

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Question 173 of 365: What should an interview be?

Published on June 23, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
An animated cut-away cross-section of the 24-cell.
Image via Wikipedia

I am on a panel to help choose the next Director of Online Learning at the Colorado Department of Education. The panel itself is an cross-section of interests, from higher education to non-profits to multi-district online programs, each of the people who are interviewing the candidates is looking for something  different. And, truly, that is the way it should be. If we were all looking for the same thing, there probably wouldn’t be any need for an interview at all. We could just decide based upon the resumes alone.

The interviews commenced today and all 9 of us were able to ask our predetermined questions. We listened as this candidate answered to the best of his ability, and we feverishly scribbled notes on the official document, our own personal notepad, or (in my case) typed in a few thoughts on a brainstorming app on the iPad. The hour it took to hear all of what this person had to offer was not an undaunting task for either side. I’m sure that he struggled in some of the questions more than he let on and I’m sure that there was some struggle on our part to really see how well we could get to know him in the short time we were allotted.

The more that I thought about the process we underwent and the process that happens in so many conference rooms every day is incredibly strange. We sit together and grill someone on questions that will ultimately decide their fate, but are incredibly inadequate to determining if they would actually do a good job in the position for which they have applied. The questions we asked, about vision and communication and specific data and standards, all of them were in an attempt to paint a picture of who this person is. But, what we really want to know (or at least what we should want to know) is who this person would be in this position. Because we had no crystal ball today (neither the candidate or the interviewers), no one could really see what it would be like to have him leading the department.

Even though we do not have such a gift of seeing into the future and predicting the fit that a particular person would have within a given position, I think that we have the tools for which we could create a much better process for getting the right person for the job. Here is what I have in mind:

  • Day in the life: I would like the candidates to take us through a day in the life of what he or she is doing currently, showing us concrete situations that cater to their strengths. The easiest way to do this would be to collect some objects that are of significance to their work (reports, documents, presentations, etc.) and show off their workflow within them in a synchronous format (live or in a virtual setting0. I would also like to demonstrate a day in the life of the position they are applying for. This would allow them to get a feel for exactly what they are getting themselves into. I think the easiest way to do this would be to take a snapshot of the director’s computer screen every few minutes and then do a time lapse of activities. I could also see this working for the candidate’s demonstration as well.
  • Real problems: Rather than asking generic questions, I would really love to see how a candidate would solve an issue that is concerning the current stakeholders. I think that the products from this type of collaborative work to solve a single issue would provide a much better comparison of applicants than simply asking them about a problem they have solved in the past.
  • Learning Network: I would like to know more about who these people turn to for advice and learning. I would like to see who their learning network consists of. To me, each of these candidates should have to demonstrate just how they go about dealing with a question that they don’t know the answer to. I would actually like to watch them put in a request to their learning network and see how long it takes to get a series of responses. A decent set of responses in a short amount of time would say to me that this person actually has set up a system of support that will be of value to the whole organization. It says that we are not only hiring this person but also all of the people that she or he knows.

While these may be a radical shift away from current interviewing practices, I actually believe that an emphasis on these three things is going to allow us to compare apples to apples. It will also show just how hard it is to fake your way through actual work, rather than just being able to interview well. It will show exactly what we value as well, which I think is important in any economic climate, regardless of how desperately the candidate is for the position or how desperate we are to fill it. In the end, our values are what will cause someone to stay with a job long enough to create lasting change and sustained growth. Let’s make sure they match up.

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Question 170 of 365: What is the benefit of rubber handled safety scissors?

Published on June 20, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
two scissors for Left-hand and Right-hand. Cle...
Image via Wikipedia

The inconsequential saved my daughter a lot of pain today. It probably saved us a trip to the hospital. It definitely saved us finding out the hard way if electrocution is possible using nothing more than a pair of scissors. Frankly, that is not something I ever care to know, at least not first hand.

Today, my daughter cut the power cord on a lamp that was plugged in.

As I rushed to her to figure out why she and her brother were being so quiet behind the chair, I saw her make the snip and I watched as a spark and a cloud of smoke immediately came off of the metal. She knew something was wrong, that she had really provoked a response from the environment around her. But until she saw my face, she didn’t flip out.

After I started to look her all over for signs of burns or brain damage, she started to wail. I snatched her up and held her as close as I have ever held another human. As I consoled her, I looked at the scissors. They were blackened and a bit had broken off. She had just enough time to cut through the cord without me seeing that it was her intention to do so. She would have been injured if it were not for the rubber handles on her scissors. The purple grips that I found cute when we bought them turned out to be a rather important feature.

I feels it is something they should put on the packaging, actually:

“If your child cuts a power cord clean through, she will not get electrocuted. Guaranteed.”

That, for me, is going to be the key feature on every pair of scissors I buy in the future. I won’t even look at metal only or plastic handle scissors. Those won’t keep my children from this particular tragedy. No. The only scissors for me are the ones within which I can feel their electricity diffusing power. And, as I look at the burns on the metal, where my daughter made her cut, I can feel nothing but grateful that I unwittingly made that choice.

And it is always that way. The feature that seems inconsequential becomes essential.

When camera phones came out, I thought that they were a ripoff. I couldn’t imagine any reason why someone would want a subpar camera in their phone and pay a premium for the privilege. Now, though, they the extension of our brains. They capture what we can’t text. They grab bar codes and do searches. They Evernote the world and do video conferencing. They have probably saved a few lives too, simply by being a witness when everyone else isn’t around.

It is our responsibility to find the things that don’t mean anything at first and then take on life giving qualities. It is up to us to seek out the features that provide hope to desperate circumstances. These are the ones that go unnoticed for years but take on massive importance just as soon as someone figures them out.

I am a feature that is in need of finding too. At some point, I hope to save lives like the rubber handles. I may end up with some scars in the process like the metal blades, but at least I will be of use. I will be essential then, and everyone will know that I have been built this way for a purpose. That I work on what I should day in and day out in the hopes that someone will choose me rather than someone else, someone less prepared for the risky tasks. I’m not looking to be a martyr, but I would step in the way if I knew that someone or some idea I loved was going to be hurt.

I fight to be in the tool drawer for when I am needed. I just hope the people that pick me will be as discerning as we were with our choice of scissors.

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Question 167 of 365: When does the game change?

Published on June 17, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Image representing Flowr as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I wrestled for 2 years when I was in elementary school. I was never all that good at it, but I did manage to win a few matches. Mostly, I only remember trying to sit against a wall in an invisible chair.

We were supposed to put our backs up against the wall and bend our legs into the sitting position and hold it for as long as we could. We would line up by age along the wall, with the youngest by the water fountains in the cafeteria. We could only hold out for a minute or so, and we would complain the whole time. Our muscles just weren’t ready for that kind of stress. The middle schoolers, though, could take it for upwards of five minutes and they didn’t make a sound. Somehow, the invisible chairs that they were sitting on held them up much better than ours did.

That was the game, though. Sitting in an invisible chair with our matching wrestling uniforms on. The chairs were pretend, as were most of the grunts and grimaces because we knew that we were going to give up at the first sign of real pain. We knew that there wasn’t any real point to powering through because there was no winning. The chairs would always be fake and we would always lose the game. It would always be more work than it was worth.

That is kind of the way that I feel about social networking within an organization. I can see the huge benefits to sharing information around an institution, allowing everyone to feed off of the smartest ideas and the most efficient workflow. The value of communication and collaboration is clear whenever an important document is created or a new feature is floated. And yet, it just feels like sitting in an invisible chair to try and get people to share information or collaborate with one another. It feels as though it is more trouble than it is worth, like I am exercising a muscle that I am never going to actually get to use.

At least it did, until today. Today, I saw a glimpse of what institutional social networking really could be if it was done right. This afternoon, I realized that lowering the barrier to entry was possible. I could be talking about Google Buzz or Wave coming to Google Apps or I could be talking about Facebook or LinkedIn really branching out into the business space. I could also be referencing Yammer or Ning or some other well known piece of social software. Instead, I am talking about a product that hasn’t been out more than a month and has none of the press of these much larger players.

I am talking about Flowr.

More accurately, though, I am talking about the fact that Flowr just created Google Apps integration with its social networking package. The software on its own, allows users to share status updates, ideas, polls, files, and events. Couple with the system that many institutions are already using for e-mail and collaboration equals WIN. It is mind-boggling that I will be able to login to a single space and share information with everyone in the institution via a social stream and then share different information specifically with groups that can then connect that information to Google Docs or Google Calendar Events. It is as if someone pushed a really comfy chair underneath me while I was trying yet again to lean against the wall with my knees bent.

I’m not saying its the holy grail, nor could any web application deserve that moniker. What I do mean to say is that by making such a vital part of connection in modern life that much easier, I believe that institutions may actually start to focus on what will actually cause them to succeed: valuing their humanity. By this I mean that companies will finally see that it is people sharing information and that the people are the ones that will add to the understanding and institutional knowledge and culture. While their is great lip service paid to this idea, it really is only when faced directly with the possibility of searching through (via a great search bar in Flowr) or filtering out (via tags) all of the contributions of an organization that people come to their senses about what is truly worthy of pursuit.

So, the game changes when the things that we thought were impossible become possible. When things that were once invisible become things you can depend upon. It is when you now need things that formerly didn’t exist. This will happen with enterprise social networking, but I think that it probably isn’t the biggest invisible thing that we will come to rely upon in the next few years.

More likely, our invisible chairs and muscle strains will become clearer with age. Just as the middle schoolers could hold it longer than we could in early elementary, we will start to realize just how valuable those chairs are going to be just as we need them to support the weight of our work.

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Question 166 of 365: How can we scrape better?

Published on June 16, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
A social network diagram
Image via Wikipedia

I guess I might as well go on the record for stating that the future of networks is in scraping. I know that some people are calling it the social graph and the power of the connections and links and liking and all of that, but I think that it is much better to just call it scraping. Turn on the full twitter or facebook firehose if you have access, but it doesn’t mean anything unless one person sees significance in the data that is being scraped and served up to them.

Just so I am clear, scraping is something that is done with the links part of sharing. It is done with the location part of publishing, the metadata about all of the things that we are passing around. It is in the description of the thing rather than the thing itself.

The benefit of such a thing was made real to me by a single product called DejaPlay. This video pretty much sums up its features:

Suffice it to say, though, this iPad app makes my network real again. I can sit back and watch the things that all of my friends and colleagues have been talking about and I can finally engage in the process of catching up on the inspiration that everyone around me has been calling upon. This app simply scrapes all of the youtube and other video links from your facebook friends and twitter followers and then creates a video playlist for you to enjoy. It does this one thing incredibly well. So well, in fact, that it makes me never want to click on a link again without it being served up to me in a better format.

Twitter Times does this as well with text-based links (as does Google Reader and Delicious to a lesser extent). It creates a fully functioning newsletter for all of the links that have come through your twitter feed, but I am afraid that this just isn’t enough after watching DejaPlay work its magic. I don’t want a list anymore. I want a tactile exploration through what is going on within my network. I want to explore and have it autopopulate as new information becomes available. I want to dig deeper into what people are reading and watching and see the context for everything that they are sharing. I want to know who the people are that are creating the work I am consuming, and more than that, I want an elegant interface that shows me the path that I have taken down the rabbit hole. While DejaPlay doesn’t currently let me retweet the videos I am watching, I have received direct correspondence from them that it is coming in the next major release. In doing so, the experience would be complete: Network, Scrape, Consume, Contribute.

That is what the process should always be, not to put to fine a point on it. We network to create a space worthy of inhabiting. We find people who are a part of the conversations that we wish to be involved in. We connect to them and start thinking through the problems that we want to solve with their help. We scrape (or should start scraping, anyway) because we know that the value of their contributions is not simply in having them close at hand, but rather in knowing that they are carefully curating our library of knowledge. We have selected them in the networking phase and they are providing us with dividends simply by choosing them. Then we must consume, ravenously, everything that we can from our network. We know that it is good and so we must read and watch and absorb all of the good things that others have to offer us. This type of consumption, unlike our daily bodily intake, never leaves us feeling full. The more that we consume, the more we want to take more in. We make the connections that were always there waiting for us to make them real. Our final step is to contribute back to the network. We curate and add to other people’s libraries. But, now we need to make sure that we are remixing and recontextualizing. Here is where the future is going to come in handy.

Our stuff must get more scrape-able. When we share things, we must share them knowing full well that their contexts must be shifted a hundred times for our network. We must realize that the lists and posts that we have conjured up are meaningless without the ability to dissect them.

Here is what I want:

I would like the ability to see all of the people that I have carefully chosen as a part of my network and I would like to be able to choose what kind of media I would like to scrape from their various shared places. I would then like to be able to flick from their profiles (using my hands, of course) their videos into one corner of my screen. I would like to be able to choose certain people in my network and flick their blog posts into another corner. Then I want to flick the podcasts of those who I know to be quite eloquent with the spoken word (or have an ear for it anyway) into a third corner. The fourth corner I will save for images of those who seem to have an uncanny knack for finding the best arguments through pictures.

I want to be able to play a podcast while looking at the images and then comment on each one directly as I go through. I want to be able to watch a video and then step into the twitter conversation that it sparked. I want to be able to see the blog posts highlighted with everyone’s annotations and then copy and paste my favorite parts with a few of the images that I found and link it together with the videos that are going around in the network as well.

This is what scraping will do for us in the not so distant future. We will be able to remix any type of content into a new one with as few steps in between as possible.

We will know we have reached the point of truly enlightened scraping when we no longer have to care where things are posted (facebook, twitter, buzz, flickr, etc.). We will simply see the people in our network and we will be able to literally grab ahold of what they have shared and put it to our own uses. This will be the future, and this will be now, too.

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Question 160 of 365: When is something both good and true?

Published on June 10, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
OTTUMWA, IA - AUGUST 13: Matthew Murray of Ott...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

We have been warned all of our lives that things that seem too good to be true, probably are. This healthy sense of skepticism is bred into us at very young age. This is done so that we don’t go home with strangers and so that we don’t believe everything that we hear or read or experience. It makes sense to not get your hopes up every single time something good happens, but it is also not as much fun or as exciting as if we did.

On a regular basis I receive tweets and phone calls that could change my life if I let them. It isn’t so much that I don’t want them to, it is just this skepticism that keeps getting in the way. I can’t possibly make myself as vulnerable as I would need to in order to explore each of the opportunities that have arisen. And yet, if I do nothing, nothing exciting will ever happen.

The truth is that sometimes true things are good and sometimes they are even spectacular. He chain of events isn’t always so easy to follow, but after a while, the events really start to take shape.

I once owned a Nerf basketball hoop that I would play with in my bedroom. It was the kind that even my brother could dunk on. We used to all get on our knees and play a half-court press game for hours on end. At was until it broke at the hands of my older brother.

He paid me back for the present even though I hwd received it as a gift , and for that I am eternally grateful. With that 20 dollars plus some other birthday money I bought my first ever gaming system (a sew genesis). After a few years of Sonic the Hedgehog and friends, I decided to trade in the Sega and purchase my first brand new computer game (Full Throttle, an adventure game). This commuter game hoped to usher in an era of exploration and experimentation with computers that has not stopped to this day.

And while that path may have been assured by many other factors, it was this single Nerf game that was directly responsible for the events unfolding as they did. In this case, the facts were both good and true.

So whenever I see an opportunity, even now, I look at it as if it might be the next Nerf basketball hoop. I know that there was no way for me to make that judgement upon sinking the first basket, but I try to see it anyway.

I try to see all of the possible ramifications of my choices and figure if they have any truth to them, or goodness for that matter. I start talking to the tweets and other opportunities as if they we ere simply plot devices, and as if I am the director of some cosmic play. Some objects are just props, but even those have meaning. All I have to do is figure out what.

I’ll let you kniw what I figure out.

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Question 152 of 365: What do we do with uninvited guests (or, the CC effect)?

Published on June 2, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

There is a disturbing trend in sharing.

We share with others (as we should), giving them the ability to edit and observe. This allows them to contribute and for everyone in the collaborative process to move forward. However, this is where the trend emerges. Once this becomes a norm within our institutions, there becomes an expectation of sharing. Ordinarily I would say that this is a good thing. I have spoken many times about the “collaborative instinct” thqt I believe to be essential. But it isn’t the people that we intend to share with that are causing the trend. It is the expectation that everyone needs access to all collaborative processes. It is the CC effect. Because so many people are being given the rights to edit and add to the conversation, everyone believes these rights are inalienable now.

We share documents now because we think we have to. We let the collaborative space be the way in which we communicate changes in direction, and we let the single act of contribution become the end all and be all. We are cc’ing the collaborative process by keeping our bosses in the loop. We are shortchanging the power of the brainstorm because we need to be setting up protocols for future times to come together. Drafting areas are becoming final solutions.

The unending email thread is no longer the worst thing to happen in office politics. Now, the wiki with an agenda that doesn’t take into account all those with editing rights, is dead in the water, as are its originators.

But, what do you do with a list of people who have access to a google doc, all of which matter but one? What do you do with a Wave that can’t get the work done that it was designed for, simply because of who it was shared with? How do we get rid of our unwanted collaborators?

We used to be able to hold meetings at awkward times to try and smoke out those with a hidden agenda. We used to be able to write one another notes and leave them on the desk of certain people. We used to not have to worry that the edit button was just a single click away from the very people who seek to derail our change or cross out our best ideas.

When the unwanteds speak up, there isn’t anything to be done other than to sit and take it. Much of the time they occupy very disarming positions of power. And they are the folks who recognize when they have been removed from the access list.

Much like my wife’s high school boyfriend noticed when she unfriended him on Facebook. She gave the logical reason that she didn’t want to be friends with him on facebook if they couldn’t be friends in real life. I can respect that, of course. But this former flame noticed his sudden unfriendly status with Kara and called her on it. She refriended, but that wasn’t fair. Clearly she could (and still can) take a harder stance with him, but she shouldn’t have to. It should be okay to set boundaries on everything that is shared.

While I am no expert in privacy settings, here is what I propose:

  • Along with the ability to share a document or piece of information with specific people, there should also be the ability to bleep it out for certain users. No matter if they were shared with directly or received a link, I would like to see a way to specifically and preemptively ban the people who are willing and capable of creating havoc in our collaborations.
  • I want to see the staggered share. I want he ability to edit the live document and then publish a more sanitized version of the document whenever it is appropriate to do so for a second tier of users. Right now, everyone either has view or edit rights. I think it should be edit, view, see. As in, you see what we show you.
  • I want the ability to kick people out and not have them know it. I want to keep letting them see the same version of the document or site that they originally accessed, but nothing more recent. Perhaps this is too underhanded for most communications, but I think that addressing the security of information is all about taking snapshots of what that information is and providing them as evidence of the collaborative process. Kicking uncollaborative people out of the environment is the only way that they will see just where the value comes from. An alternative to this solution would be to simply be able to tag every element of a collaboration with users who can edit, view, or see them. This may be more cumbersome, but it may allow for more transparency. Essentially, we are telling people that the web isn’t the same for everyone, and there is no one source of truth, unless you create it. I think that most folks are going to have to get used to that soon enough anyway.

    • So what do we do with uninvited guests? Nothing… Yet.

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    Question 151 of 365: How do we predict the future?

    Published on June 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
    Souris Microsoft | Tapis Google !
    Image by louisvolant via Flickr

    Everyone is trying to devine the next big thing. Reading the tea leaves on Twitter or letting the alerts drift in to the inbox of your choice. We are all looking to get in on the ground floor of the next version of the web (3.0, 3d, etc.). We are looking for what could be, in every cute logo or interesting color scheme.

    I keep thinking that I will know it when I see it, too. I look back on what was the next big thing, and I knew it then, right? I saw Google way before they were Google. I was searching with them back in high school. I should have just invested in them when they went public. I didn’t, though, and so many other people are in the same boat. And that is why we keep looking for the next Google.

    That’s not the only reason, though. We keep looking because we want to know the future. We are looking for reasons enough to invest our time or effort, if not our money. But we keep looking in the same places. We are looking toward app stores and startups with vowels missing.

    Predicting the future requires a little bit of crazy. It isn’t going to be the same companies, although they will be major players. It will be someone that sees something completely different from the same set of rules and situations.

    While I know this isn’t going to be it exactly, here is something that the future might be:

    There are a special glasses for making things appear to be in 3d, but I believe that there are new glasses coming. I believe that there are glasses that block out every other frame of a movie. The reason they do this is because there are two movies playing, interlaced so that the glasses will display only one and block out the other. The sound will match for the one you are watching. You will be able to sit in the same theatre or in front of the same screen and watch two separate films.

    This is crazy talk. It doesn’t exist, nor will it. There are two many unanswered questions. There are too many things that don’t make sense about something like this, but this is the future. The future of ridiculous technology that seemingly is more intrusive and convenient at the same time. These glasses are impractical. They are the unfortunate offspring of wanting to be completely immersed by the media you are consuming and wanting to be with others who are interested in being with you but not in consuming the same media that you are.

    The future is in sharing the same space but not the same experience. The future is in finding connections without having to know all of the same people or the same facts. Differentiation is the future, whether that is with glasses or with a single online profile that knows more than it lets on.

    The next Google is going to be the first company to let people be who they are with one another. They will present technologies to get people together. People have been trying this for years, but it is the one thing that is still severely lacking. The physical devices have presented screens to separate our learning and understanding. The ones that are coming are ones that bring it all together.

    The ones that have already had their shot at this rather elusive prize probably won’t get it quite right. Google, Apple and Microsoft pay lip service to the future, but they really are trying to shore up the markets that have made them profitable. They won’t see someone coming up on the outside with a crazy gadget such as those glasses. They will see it as something that can’t possibly catch on, and then once it does, they will try and copy it or buy them out. But it won’t work this time. This time, the future will be too interested in creating itself anew. And it will.

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