Question 209 of 365: What is the difference between a leak and a link?

The wikileaks papers are exquisite. In their scope and its specificity, they are immense. I don’t fully understand all of their implications, but I know that they are not ordinary. They represent sharing on a magnitude that we have not seen for years. Or, at least that is what many mainstream media outlets would have us believe.

To me, there is a much bigger leak that is happening every day now. It is so massive in scope that it makes the wikilink papers look like a children’s book of content. The leak that I am referring to is the newly public Google Docs.

A few months ago, Google Docs decided to change the default settings for how public documents would be indexed into the Google search engine. At the time, Google was telling everyone that if they wanted to maintain anonymity for their documents, they should “unpublish” the content. What was still up in the air was how all of the public documents would be made available to anyone who cared to search for them.

I have been spending the last few days looking at public documents that include intricate notes of meetings, planning documents for major projects, and simple to do lists. It is amazing to me to seen just how many people’s ideas are indexed in their unfiltered form. The difference between a web page or a blog post and a google document is that people use documents for more intimate communication and collaborative purposes. They use them to plan things that perhaps only a few people would find important. In fact, they use them much like many of the military personnel used the wikilinks documents. The public Google Docs are the types of communication that were formerly private but now have been given searchability in a way that only Google can do.

And I think this is good. I think that much of our communication is too private. The default for collaborative notes should be public and published. The minutes for our organizations shouldn’t have to be vetted before they are posted. They should be saved every half second as they are in Google Docs.

In other words, this type of leak should continue. We should continue to tell the stories of successful collaboration and creation. We should continue to share drafts with the world, complete with comments and unedited passion. The instinct should be that we leak our communication as often as we can. I know that we aren’t trading secrets of national security, but perhaps by doing this we will be able to rise above the secrecy that has plagued organizations the world over since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Finally we will be able to harness our institutional memory and momentum and move beyond doing the same things over and over again. We will start to build upon one another and through the process of simple sharing and searching, we will all become reporters on the major story of our time: Information, when attained through learning and collaboration, is the largest power there is.

Oh, and just in case you don’t know how to search the public google docs, go to google and type site:docs.google.com and then whatever search terms make sense. You may be surprised by what you find.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The WikiLeaks Paradox: Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity? (slate.com)
• Wikileaks Afghan War Document Leak Again Raises Questions: Treason Or Whistleblowing? (techdirt.com)
• WikiLeaks Founder: Document Leak ‘Only Scratched The Surface’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• “The WikiLeaks documents may not be as harmless as they first seemed: The Times of London discovered…” (ihatethismess.tumblr.com)

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

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:

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

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Difference Between Collaboration and Projection (code.kynetx.com)
• Social Network Site Guidelines (slideshare.net)
• Can Google Create A Collaboration Society? (mediabullseye.com)
• Web 2.0 Next: Companies Place Bets on Consumer Relationships and Collaboration (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)

Question 118 of 365: When can efforts truly dovetail?

My grandfather didn’t yell. He never really felt the need. His authoritative voice was so awe-inspiring that trying to do anything against his wishes was ill advised. I knew him as the man who built and fixed computers and read every science fiction book in the library (literally, he only read the new arrivals because he had been through the entire backlog of SciFi books). The one time that I heard him raise his voice in reference to me was when I was trying to shove a hair brush into a glove compartment. I tried to push the door closed as hard as possible, slamming it in order to try and get it to shut. My grandpa forcefully told me to stop. With equal force, but a little less volume, he proceeded to show me that there was something in the way of me shutting it. He said that I should never force something to work. I should figure out why I won’t work, fix it, and then try again.

I was humbled by this particularly astute advice, as if it should have been something that I innately knew. Being all of nine at the time, I’m not entirely sure why my embarrassment was so acute. It was always been hard for me to not try and force things to work. In the end, I always thought that it would be easier to force them instead of figuring out the root cause of the discord. On that day, in my mother’s van, I knew what it meant to be wrong and to know it. I knew what it meant to take a step back and reflect on what I was doing and then change my action to produce a better result. I also knew what it meant to see that someone else might want the same things for me and that it may take their advice in order to get those things to happen.

I wonder sometimes, if I have continued to heed his expert advice, especially when it comes to collaboration. Whenever I see that someone else is doing something similar to me or whenever I see a smart person who may have similar interests, I try and make our efforts dovetail. Perhaps this is just me wanting to make sure that we are not duplicating efforts. Maybe it is just my need to co-author ideas. Whatever the reason, I seem to find connections where others do not. Sometimes it works out and beautiful creations come, but other times the collaborations fizzle because they were based only on my perception of a situation. It is in those moments of fading collaborative spirit that I feel as though I should probably force the hair brush one more time to see if I can close the deal without too much readjustment.

Given that this rarely works well for long, inevitably I have to reassess and either change my priorities or ask someone else to change theirs. These efforts are sometimes futile, but I learn a lot from them. I learn how ideas can come together and what each one needs to survive. I learn that different perspectives can inform decisions more than identical ones. Companies and Schools were not created because everyone had the same investments and interests.

And yet, I keep on searching for those individuals and organizations that want the same things as I do. I keep on wishing that I wouldn’t have to force the door closed with any of them. And every once in a while, I stumble and fall headlong directly into one of those situations. A perfect storm of time and space where efforts really do dovetail.

It happened just this week for me:

I found Mindquilt on Twitter. Their tagline is Ask, Tag, Send, Answer. They provide software for companies to share the institutional knowledge through asking and answering questions, game dynamics, and expert-matching. This means that anyone in an organization who asks a question will be matched up with someone else based upon the tags within the question and that they both get points and badges (a la FourSquare) for the entire process of finding a solution. Finding this was scary in terms of what I am trying to do with Open Spokes. But what made everything suddenly okay was that the CEO of the company contacted me about what I was doing a few hours later. He had found me through the same mutual Twitter follower without knowing it.

Even this early on in our collaboration, we have started discussing just how our two ventures are working toward similar goals from different points of view. We have been able to start the process of dovetailing our efforts, and all because we were open to that prospect. We haven’t forced anything, and don’t need to. We have both assessed the situation and removed the obstruction for going forward. We got all of the forced work out of our systems, so now we can just talk and plan and create. I like that.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Engagement as a Universal Constant (altitudebranding.com)
• Research on Tweeting Inside and Outside the Enterprise (myventurepad.com)
• Collaboration Is More Important Than Ever: Overcoming Barriers To Adoption (socialmediatoday.com)

Question 113 of 365: Why do we need collaborative email signatures?

I feel more complete when other people come into my space than when I go into theirs. I feel as though they are reaching out to me, especially if I haven’t given an invitation that must be accepted or rejected. Mass participation in something I helped to create is like no other sensation I know. It is as if I am being chosen from all of the activities that exist and when I see other people take part and engage in the act of co-authoring something, I feel energized and warm. It is those moments of potential when I notice I am not the only one with a particularly interesting idea that seem to lead to everything else. It is as if my mind bounces sets up everyone that is engaged within my head as a pinball machine and bounces the ideas back and forth. And then when the words start to come, the transformation from idea to reality is so complete and beautiful that I pursue it like my son pursues a new tiny raisin box. I can’t be the only one who sees collaboration like this.

So, I had an idea.

What if I demonstrated my value for collaboration within every communication that I sent out? What if I showed people that I believe in crowdsourcing and co-creation within every one of my utterances? What if I left an olive branch out there for others to grab ahold of no matter whether my tone was repentant, forceful or self-abasing in my voice?

As I thought about all of the ways in which I decry a lack of communication and collaboration, I had never really given others an option of exercising their collaborative muscles without first giving them concrete parameters for doing so. Collaboration always had to be for a specific purpose, rather than just for the joy of being a part of creating something together. I knew that I had to show co-creation in the contexts that others envision, rather than just opening up the possibility of letting collaboration happen.

In the hopes of spontaneous collaboration, I have set up an open Google Doc that is now a permanent part of my e-mail signature. With every reply, I will be telling people that I would rather be contacted through collaboration than through a phone number. I am telling people the ways in which I connect must be within a co-created space rather than on “my turf” or theirs. While this may be nothing more than an experiment, I am now inviting everyone to come together rather than simply take a look at my identity. And, I encourage others to do the same.

What if we all used collaborative signatures? What if we found ways to promote the values that we say that we have signed on for? What if we didn’t point people to our websites and our blogs, but rather we pointed them to take part in branding our conversations with everything that they bring to the table? What if we learned from one another without the boundaries of a single e-mail thread? What if we created the spaces for solving common problems and what if we actually solved them?

I get why specific spaces work so well. I get why Facebook and LinkedIn are so wildly popular. You know what you are supposed to do there. You are supposed to share information about yourself and establish a presence that others can come and interact with. What I am proposing is a departure from this because I am advocating for a space with undefined identity. In fact, the way I created the link to share the Google Doc, pretty much assumes everyone is anonymous unless they login from the Doc itself. I am also proposing a space that can change ownership and focus depending on who is there and how it is being used. Because people can exist in real-time within the document’s chat area, conversations can happen and then disappear. Because people can leave semi-permanent notes and ideas for one another, it is like having one massive whiteboard that other people can add to at will.

Given that so many of us are working from anywhere there is an internet connection, we need an office whiteboard that can be doodled on and graffitied. We all need a space that doesn’t have the parameters of meeting notes and agenda items or informal sharing that drifts by in a stream of tweets. We need almost permanence. We need open-endedness. We need collaborators.

And we should show this need every chance we get.

So, here is what I am starting with. Create your own space:

This is my public collaborative document for anyone who I correspond with to take part in. It is an experiment in whether or not giving people the option of collaborating and creating together will cause them to do so, despite the very different types of people that I talk to on a regular basis.

What kinds of things can you do here?

• Leave me notes. Leave other people notes. Drop in interesting pictures.
• Ask a question or answer one.
• Throw out an idea or build something new.

Obviously, this isn’t the place where you will write the great American novel, but you can take whatever is in this document and use it however you like. I am licensing everything here as Creative Commons Attribution-Only. Go bananas.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs (readwriteweb.com)
• Crowdsourcing Is the New Collaboration (cloudave.com)
• A Passion for Collaboration (nybooks.com)
• Does Collaboration Impact Business Performance? (cloudave.com)
• The Impact of Collaboration on Enterprise Business Performance (cloudave.com)

Question 87 of 365: What looks like planning (but isn’t)?

In many ways, the working world around me is in a shambles. People have left or are leaving, transitions and uncertainty abound. I hear daily that things will get better soon, but I see many institutions with which I associate, that this is clearly not the case. The further fragmentation and agenda hunting is clear and ongoing. I see newcomers and hangers on as having basically the same core attribute, and that is for being incredibly distrustful (of what is here now, of what has come before, and of anyone who is trying to create change that they didn’t think of themselves).

And I have come to the conclusion that many of these institutions are engaging in activities that look like planning, but actually give the exact opposite effect to anyone else who is watching I would like to take a moment to explore a few examples of what I am talking about.

Powerpoint presentations- These are a really good way for a given individual, or better yet, a branded institution to look like they are in the throws of intense organizational restructuring and action. The bullet points that are coming across the screen seem to hint at a greater depth if one were only permitted to ask a few key questions. The intentionally business-only themes chosen aim directly at just how serious everyone is taking the current economic situation. The fact that these presentations are given at a break-neck pace also gives the illusion that there is just too much going on to slow down and talk through the details.

While a good presentation lets us see how carefully crafted words and images can persuade an audience to rally around an idea, these presentations seem to only be about conveying information that could have been put into an e-mail, or even more likely, a single tweet.

Putting Draft on Everything- I have seen this on so many documents recently that it makes me think that I’m beta testing a single piece of paper just to find out that the only revision that is happening is the removal of the “draft” watermark. I have seen the full page DRAFT background recently so as to not confuse folks that anything on the page is worthwhile. I have seen the upper-corner lowercase “draft” label and it seems to be casually motioning to the horrific display of “tables as content.” This kind of drafting is someone’s way of sending out an idea that has been touched by no more than three people but is going to be made into binding language for hundreds or thousands. It is done because version control is too abstract and collaboration too difficult to muster. It is a way for the illusion of planning to really take root, but in reality, it is simply pursuing the easiest path to the finish line, never mind the consequences of backlash or loss of buy-in.

Holding lots of meetings (or holding none at all because you are too busy)- The two sides of the coin to this particular issue are equally terrible for trying to show people that planning and action is taking place. When people hold lots of meetings, many of which are scheduled at the last minute, it is incredibly rare for anything of importance to be said. It is much more likely, for someone to call the meeting convener on the fact that the meeting is ill-planned. More likely still, the originator of the meeting will lose all credibility with the participants because they feel as though their time is being wasted. The participants will most likely be back-channeling about how bad the meeting is being run, which will further deteriorate any support that the leader is trying to instill in a given project.

If no meetings are being held because the stakeholders are just too busy, this is also the illusion of planning for the future. By appearing busy but having no work products or communication to show for it, you look like you have been squandering valuable time. It also looks like you lack passion and a direction for all of the work that you have done. It looks like you are replaceable. Being busy means that you schedule things in advance and stick to those appointments. It means that ongoing meetings don’t work, but purposeful e-mail exchanges do. It means sending updates and new ideas out to people and letting them think about it while you work on something else. Planning and action are not the product of an empty schedule with nothing but “work time.”

Arbitrary Deadlines- I have seen a rash of deadlines that are tied to almost nothing. There is a hint of importance in creating a deadline, but only if that deadline has a real purpose. It only makes sense when there is something really driving that date to have meaning. The deadlines that make sense are ones that come from laying down a series of dominoes and nocking them over. The ones that don’t are a single event that could affect a future event, but only if the stars align correctly.

We all feel an impetus to get something done, but there must be consequences both good and bad for doing those things. The deadlines that are self-imposed seem to require more planning than a lot of the arbitrary ones that float around in times of “almost planning.”

And while there are many other examples of other things that look like planning, I don’t think that beleaguering the point will do any good. Suffice it to say that I am looking forward to the day when planning and getting things done are one in the same and when all stakeholders are consulted for the future. I also look forward to the day when collaboration makes sense for everyone and not just as a cherry on the top, and when transparency isn’t an excuse to do things half-cocked.

Planning should be a part of the art of creation instead of the art of obfuscation.

(This came off as more condescending than I had meant it to. I should state for the record that I have been guilty of all of these except putting “DRAFT” on things. I get why people do it, but I just can’t bring myself to put the word on a Google Doc.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Death By Powerpoint ! (slideshare.net)
• Values Can be Judgmental (westseattleherald.com)
• Creative Vision (slideshare.net)
• Setting realistic communications expectations (agentgenius.com)
• A Gentle Introduction to Version Control (profhacker.com)

Question 61 of 365: How do we make renewal more accessible?

Sometimes, making a single change to a long held practice will completely renew your interest and commitment to that practice. One of those times was this week.

I am renewed in my fascination and commitment to blog comments.

For years, I have thought that along with PDF’s (as Will Richardson puts it), they were where ideas went to die. They only lived as tiny little attachments on the end of a post, an asterisk on an idea. While they may spark a lot of debate or be the most interesting part of a blog, I could never help but feeling as though they were a waste because of how little they were incorporated into everything else I was doing. Sure, you have been able to subscribe in e-mail to comments on blogs, but it never felt like a cohesive conversation. Sure, people have had threaded comments for a couple years, but it always worked more like just an extension of the regular commenting structure than a real debate of ideas. The threads never really went anywhere besides what the original blog post had envisioned.

So, why this renewal?

The switch to Disqus comments has fueled my new outlook on comments. The simple ability to respond to a comment directly in e-mail and then see all of the threads as a conversation in gmail has made me think that there really could be a commenting renaissance in our future. Because each comment now has its own short link, I can send it out on Twitter or Buzz and continue the conversation.

I am now looking at my comments as ways of forming relationships and beginning/continuing conversations that were impossible to do previously. And, all from one simple switch to a different commenting system.

So, this has gotten me thinking about whether or not the entire process of renewal can be made more accessible to others. It makes me want to figure out which feature of a process could be changed in our every day lives that would cause us to buy-in anew and want to create something.

Which aspect of collaboration can I change to incite renewal for others?

Which part of meetings can I shift in order to renew interest in talking with one another?

What can I change in the writing process to allow people to see it as a renewing force in their life?

And there is the crux. In order to make renewal available to everyone, there is a level of investment required. All of these things do require someone to DO something. So, by focusing on things that people are already doing, we may be able to shift them one or two degrees in order to bring about real change.

In essence, what I need to figure out is not so much what are the changes I can make for others, but to really figure out what people are doing and go from there. Unless I have a good understanding of exactly how people are using a given tool, protocol, or idea; I will have no chance of making a lasting change that brings about renewal. I need to hear more stories about how people are meeting and collaborating, about how they are asking questions and about how they are leveraging the people that they know in order to find answers.

Until I listen, I can’t renew or reinvent anything.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 8 Reasons You Might Not Be Getting Many Comments (problogger.net)
• Disqus Comment System Beta 2.2 (toddrjordan.com)
• Comments Have More Value Than Tweets… Networking Arbitrage (socialmediatoday.com)

Question 60 of 365: Who should be our partners?

Not all collaboration is equal.

There are the types of collaboration that require that I do a first draft and then everyone hangs ideas off of it like a christmas tree. Generally, these are things that I have a lot of experience in, but many others have opinions about. Google Docs is the perfect platform for getting things like this done because it is basically begging for someone to start an idea before sharing it out.

There are the types of collaboration that require divvying up the work in a big way so that each person. I think about every time that I have started a wiki or managed a project. There are just some things that we gravitate toward because we actually have time to tackle them. Each page is owned by someone else and while there may be commenting back and forth, the pages really feel like one person’s work.

There are collaborations that call for extremely distributed contributions. We are talking here about the ones that use hashtags, forms or drop boxes. These kinds of collaborations do not feel especially well organized because their point is to gather data rather than propose an idea. The real result is that someone must use the data wisely and produce a first draft type of collaboration.

All three of these types of collaboration are fine, but they aren’t partnerships.

To me, partnerships are all about shared resources and shared responsibility. They are all about taking a risk in the hopes of finding a reward. They are about joining forces so closely that it doesn’t matter who is doing the action, both entities feel “on the hook” for making sure it is a good one.

These kinds are partnerships are few and far between. And yet, they are the ones that I am looking for. I am actively engaged in finding groups of people (whether those are companies, organizations, or just self-organizing conglomerations) that are interested in giving up a piece of what they have in order to find something greater.

I am looking for groups willing to invest time and resources in building an idea, and not necessarily their idea. Rather, I want groups who are willing to share an idea.

And yet, how do you get a group that is already established to buy into something that isn’t “theirs” in the strictest sense of the word?

It is my belief that in order to partner with someone, your value must be so glaringly apparent as to make it inconceivable for the partner to want to do anything else. Too often we settle for less than ideal partners because we either do not believe that we have this kind of value or we believe that it does not exist outside of us, and therefore, is impossible to find.

The people we partner with should be able to help us achieve one of our goals better, stronger, or faster. If not, we should take a pass. And if they do not see us in the same light, they should move along as well.

Partnerships should be made based upon creating something new. If it is just consolidation or dovetailing of interests, a partnership is unnecessary. People will collaborate just fine without formalizing a relationship. But, creating something new, requires new people to step forward. It requires a leadership that cannot be slapped together. Creating something new, at least something lasting, is impossible without sharing a thought process and following through on that process.

A partnership also must be perfected over time. The relationships are very much like any good marriage: they require a lot of communication and work. I believe in the power of working hard to communicate between two entities and in fulfilling the requests that one another have. “Trouble Tickets” should be able to go both ways. The process of fixing something broken is both systemic and swift, iterative and intuitive.

In short, I want to partner with those who want to partner with me. Any takers?

Question 54 of 365: Why are we digital amnesiacs?

I was going to say that we may be digital goldfish, but then I did a little bit of research and it looks like goldfish have a lot longer memory than we have ever given them credit for (about 3 months for colors and other things). My point actually is that we seem to keep on having the same conversations in new contexts and think that we are making real progress every time. It is like we believe that everything that has come before this particular moment in time doesn’t matter. The problems that we run into and unique, and our solutions are novel.

We state that we are reinventing something, but we frame it in terms of the old thing.

Take cloud computing: We are putting huge amounts of information online for access anywhere. We are accessing web platforms and programs in the cloud that used be housed on our hard drives. We are putting so much together onto the servers belonging to great companies, and we are paying for the right to access it.

We are amnesiacs if we can’t recognize that we are now reliving the days of mainframe computers. We are storing everything on a server in a room somewhere, and we are accessing it via a terminal. Essentially, we are time-sharing (great documentary at MIT labs in 1963)  our files and processing power, and sometimes (see The Fail Whale) not even for as much reliability.

Take “collaborative tools”: We have been talking about participatory culture and the read/write web for a few years now, and in many ways completely oblivious to the fact that collaboration is not something new. We claim that it is a 21st century skill, but people have collaborated beautifully without the need for such a label.

Whiteboards work. Post-it notes work. And the best collaborative tool is a really good conversation. We conveniently forget these are options when we design spaces online.

Take Social Search: This latest version of search is masquerading as something new. We are ready to crown it as the next big thing in vetted information and resources. By simply applying a social process to videos, links, and question asking in general, Social Search is aiming to become the officially sanctioned “Google-killer”.

And yet, people have always been the best vetting mechanism. A person who has the experience to pull resources from everywhere and know which ones will matter most to an individual is always going to do a better job than an algorithm or leveraging a crowd that has no personal investment in the individual seeking knowledge. Truly, the librarian is the original Social Search.

We conveniently forget just how much has already been done and thought. We don’t realize the other iterations of an idea, and we don’t seek them out either. We are happy with our Digital Amnesia because it helps us to consider ourselves as original, even innovative. However, when we are blind to the analog and only care about the digital, we will only be able to make small gains in our organizations and companies. If we can’t truly learn from the past and stand on the shoulders of giants, of what use are we?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Launches Social Search (seroundtable.com)

Question 41 of 365: When is vigilante infrastructure justified?

Being a vigilante in any organization creates a reputation. You are known for being on the cutting edge but also for being a lone wolf. You are known for pushing the envelope but also for pushing an agenda. Mostly, you are known for doing things that no one else has the will to do, and that sword cuts both ways. If you are right, everyone will see you as a visionary, and if you are wrong, everyone will see you as a lunatic.

While it is possible to be a vigilante in any aspect, I propose that the most dangerous type of vigilante is the one that sets up infrastructure for other vigilantism. The type of vigilante I am referring to does screencasts of how to set up Google Apps for your Domain for every part of your organization without involving the IT department. The infrastructure vigilante will set up twitter accounts and hash tags for organizations that they do not control. They will request backchannels for every PD session. They will take notes collaboratively with everyone attending the meeting without asking the head of the meeting’s permission.

In short, an infrastructure vigilante is someone who doesn’t believe that she needs an invitation to collaborate, create, or add value. She is actively looking for ways in which her own workflow can be leveraged for the good of everyone she deals with on a daily basis. She is a walking hyperlink, subverting hierarchy everywhere she goes.

And yet, she isn’t able to work in groups the ways in which they are fashioned. She doesn’t work well with others when she can’t actually use her network and her collaborative tools. When she is bound to the piece of paper in front of her and the rigid agenda, she retreats. When her values of co-creation are not valued, she has a hard time relating to the process.

There are even some people who hate her kind of vigilantism. There are people who seek to get her in trouble because she won’t use the applications that “everyone else is using”. These people are looking for any reason to catch her in living too close to the edge. They bring up privacy concerns and IP infringement arguments. They talk about her being the one who makes everyone else feel like they have to catch up. They want her to know her place and stop trying to “help” everyone.

So, when is her vigilantism justified? Whenever there are people who want to help kids to learn and need a path to do so. Whenever coworkers want to learn from one another. Whenever a a group has an artificial hierarchy. Whenever teaching someone to fish actually causes them to teach others to fish. That is when infrastructure vigilantism is justified. That is when it makes sense to ignore the protocols and pursue a different course.

So, set up systems. Pursue workflow. Buzz. Tweet. Link.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Web 2.0 Arrow to an Educator’s Quiver (slideshare.net)
• Google Buzz Released (Think Friendfeed In Gmail) (blogoscoped.com)
• 3 Reasons Why Students Should Be Using Dropbox (makeuseof.com)

SpeedGeek Learning Version .1