Question 167 of 365: When does the game change?

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 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.

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Question 95 of 365: What do teams solve?

Groups seem to be the holy grail of social networks. From Linked-in groups to the new Facebook communities to the millions of people self-organizing in Ning networks, groups have become the default setting for communication and collaboration. When you are in doubt about the effectiveness of your web application, throw groups in, and you will have a winner. When there is nothing left to hang your hat on, set up a team that will send out e-mails to everyone multiple times a day.

And it makes sense. People want to organize around an idea. They want to set themselves up to answer the problems that a single set of people have. Where it all goes wrong is that people start to believe that by simply setting up a team, they have solved something significant. They work so hard to organize themselves that the energy for action just isn’t there. Even in the ease of grouping within a hashtag, very little seems to be done that isn’t in the effort of maintaining the grouping rather than moving it forward.

Teams are meant to change, to be modified, to evolve. And yet, we are creating teams and groups online that have no ability to become something different than what they once were. Once you are a “fan”, the group doesn’t change. Once you are a member of a Linked-in group, the members are mostly stagnant. And that is sad.

I want teams with iterations. I want the ability to change the purpose for any given group that I am within. Restating our hypothesis continually is the only way that I know to create rather than persist. And that is why Friendster is dead. That is why Ning networks grow and die. It is why people can leave behind entire bodies of work online when they are no longer interested in having those same old conversations.

So, why not let groups evolve. Why not allow ideas to branch naturally, one from another until you are working with only the people that are as invested as you are in solving the problem at hand. Why does the process of self-selection have to be the last democratic act that you can contribute to a group?

Here is what I am proposing:

• Self-select into a group.
• State your bias and interest in associating with the group.
• Establish a great schism within the group because of either disagreements, reevaluation of needs, or interest in solving different problems.
• Split groups, rename both, and reestablish bias and interest for the new groups.

With this in mind, teams never become bloated. Lurkers don’t outweigh participants. People aren’t cc’d because they exist, they are informed for consent in decisions. People have ownership in their group, because they are continually in the process of remaking it. They need it, because it needs them to thrive.

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Question 39 of 365: What data points are we missing?

All of the data points matter. The ones that fit neatly inside of your daily life are just as important as the ones that lay way outside of it. The information that causes us to go forward unabated is no less valuable than the stuff that makes us cautious. The problem is, sometimes you do not have all of the data.

Specifically, in terms of the people that I know, there are huge gaps in skill set and experience. While I have access to a great many people through my professional social networks, there is much more that ties them together than separates them. Each of them has more than a passing interest in technology. Many, if not most, have some interest in teaching and learning. And, nearly everyone I associate myself with is working on creating, writing, coding, connecting, presenting or some other productive pursuit. These things that join them all together as “my network” also mean that I am missing out on huge amounts of information and people that do not fit these roles. While I can go out of my way to collect voices that go against my own ideas, even those people will be passionate creators of content, have an interest in learning, and probably care about technology. Those voices are not new data points; they just provide a new outlook on the same data.

I ran into an amazing tool for visualizing all of the data points in my network, and it really brought home just how homogeneous my network is. The tool is called Gist and once you give it access to gmail, twitter, linkedin, and facebook, it will analyze all of your contacts and conversations to see the patterns of how your network acts and reacts. It literally shows you just how important each contact is to your working and waking life. You can adjust this importance if you like, but the default data is pretty telling for me.

The most important people in my network according to Gist are all involved in Online Teaching and Learning, more specifically, the online school in my district. While this is not surprising, it means that on any given day, the data points that I get to consider are all working on the same things that I am working on. They are working toward the same goals, bringing only the small differences in their experiences to the table.

So, now that I know exactly just how insular my network is. Here are the following things I would like to add in order to gain a much richer perspective on my own existence:

• A fortune 500 CEO
• Some kids who make up games for fun in the middle of a large metropolitan city
• Professionals who do not speak english (Google has a pretty good translation feature now)
• A cohort of happily retired individuals
• Someone like LeVar Burton (Actor, eloquent speaker, fan of reading)
• People who struggle to understand technology
• Baseball players who toil in the minor leagues for 10 years or more
• People recently divorced (I literally can count on one hand the number of people in my close network that have gotten divorced. While that may be an anomaly, perhaps it has something to do with the number of people in my close network that are children of divorced parents)
• Functionally illiterate people with good paying jobs

And there are lots of other data points that I think would add value to my outlook for technology, learning, and entrepreneurship. While I love that Gist can show me all of the holes in my network, I have not yet been able to figure out how to fill them. That kind of a service would be one that I would be very interested in.

I would like to imagine a world in which I can say that I have all of the data points required in order to speak and act in my own best interest. While I can say that I do that right now, I believe that without hearing the stories and understanding the background of lives outside of my daily existence, I can’t really know what will lead me to greater understanding of education, the economy, politics, or humanity. I feel like those things are worth knowing, too.

Perhaps social networks are structured all wrong for this type of pursuit, though. If I want to find people who are nothing like me; how would I go about doing that? Facebook is set up to connect me with the people that I already know, LinkedIn connects me to people that I work with, and Twitter is a wildcard but it has a specific userbase that mostly fits with my worldview. Maybe it is time for a social network to be created that puts together all of the stakeholders on any given subject, especially the ones that are not traditionally listened to. Perhaps there is room for a network to grow around getting everyone to the table, not just those with an inclination to show up. I want a social network to exist for the simple function of telling the most complete version of a story possible. That is a story I would read.

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Question 26 of 365: Is treading water dangerous?

As far as metaphors go, there are no greater cliches than using treading water to represent staying in one given place in your personal or professional life. However, every once in a while, the metaphor is warranted, so I hope you will not begrudge me using it. I use it now not to describe whether or not treading water is lame or counterproductive. I think that it is fairly obvious that not having a direction or reaching for something is a universally panned activity. At the very least, we pay lip service to trying to find your passion, and swimming against the current as if they were they were virtuous in their own right.

My invocation of this metaphor is much more centered on the idea that treading water is quite probably dangerous in addition to generally being a bad tactic for achieving what you want in your life.

Imagine for a moment that there are two people in an office. This office has a number of IT professionals, trainers/teachers, management, and support staff. It is generally a high functioning office in that people show up to meetings on time, everyone seems to like each other enough to be civil, and people get paid on time. The first person in this office does not blog, tweet, podcast, post status updates on facebook or connect with anyone on LinkedIn in a professional capacity. The second person does have this kind of connected online presence. Both get a decent amount of work done within their teams and they have been reviewed well in the past few years. Up until this point, there is very little difference between the two of them.

I would like to make the case that the person who does not have an online presence is treading water. While he may be advancing his career, there is no record outside of the office that this is the case. His general direction is measured based upon exactly what the company’s general direction is. So, while the company may be moving forward (perhaps even as a result of his efforts), he is still really in the exact same spot within the company. The ocean waves are moving, not him.

I would also like to make the case that the second person has a direction. Through her daily tweets and weekly blog posts, she is reflecting on what has transpired within her job. She is asking questions and finding answers for what is going on within her profession. Her forward momentum always outpaces that of the company. Even when the company has a major setback, her network keeps her legs churning and her arms moving through the water with intense energy.

So, why is the first person dangerous for treading water?

This first person is dangerous because you can’t tread water forever. Eventually you have to reach solid ground or you will drown. This person is even more dangerous because he will drown others while he is trying to stay afloat.

If you have no external voice through a modern network, you are easily outsourced. If your company doesn’t know that losing you will have the effect of losing all of the experts that go along with you, you are sunk. If your work stays within the confines of the company, credit is easily obfuscated.

Treading water isn’t a strategy for the future, it is simply a method of keeping your head above water. The danger of not posting or preparing a presence online is that you cannot represent yourself or your company to the people that need to see it. You cannot be an advocate for the things that your school district needs in order to to keep on working. In essence, if you are not sharing what it is that is important to you and your office, you are going to bring it down. If you have other competitors (and you are kidding yourself if you think you don’t), they will win. If you can’t place yourself into the great evaluative system that is the web, there is little chance for people to see that you have any value.

While this metaphor may be wearing quite thin at this point, I think it bears repeating. If you are treading water in your job or in your life, you are a danger to yourself and others.