Question 293 of 365: Where does documentation get us?

I take notes.

I can’t help but listen to others and write down what it is that they have said. I can’t help but summarize and ask questions. I think that margins are for drawings and diagrams. I think that everything requires context, and I am the one to provide it. I share these notes, freely and openly with anyone who cares to take part. I do not believe in a single pad of paper that stays in my possession. I believe in the screenshot and the annotation. I work with front and back channels, streaming information back and forth to provide both with my own perspective on what is possible. I take these notes without thought. I give attribution and I put quotes around what needs them. I do not put words in anyone’s mouth nor do I exclude voices from my notes.

I document with time stamps and version histories. I link and revise. I do not save as. Everything is live. Always. It stays in the cloud as I change it. I do not pull it down and then reset expectations of where it should live. I embed and I publish. I disseminate and never retract. I build upon rather than starting from scratch. The blank piece of paper is never really blank to me. It always has a preface, a foreword that I can look back at. Everything is prologue for something else.

And this documentation lets me stand on something real. It isn’t a vanity exercise. It isn’t something that I use to lord over others, to make them think about what it is that they have done. I live an annotated life, and I know from where all of those annotations came. I can reconstruct what is missing from the spaces that I frequent. I can support when someone leaves. I can cushion the blow of new information. The things I use talk to one another. There are no silos of information or unconnected dots. I do not wait for the planets to align to start working. I project when that will happen and work toward having everything ready for that reality.

My notes set me free.

They make me bulletproof. They make action items tangible. They turn being uninformed into being ignorant. Not availing yourself of their collected knowledge is tantamount to hearing half of the story and asking for the same meeting every day. Moving forward is a function of seeing the velocity of notes. Being able to project into the future is a function of being able to see all of the data. My notes are the data points that I live by. They are the story. They are the conversation.

My documentation never leaves me. It is always at my fingertips. Let me search for you. Let me know what it is you want to know. I will find it out. I will see where it took place and what everyone was saying at the time. And if I can’t find it then it probably didn’t happen. Our memories are faulty. We need notes to build a case. We need notes to know where we stand. We need notes to help us with collecting the artifacts of our life. We need to outsource our brain so that we don’t have to rely on our brains to make judgements without supporting evidence. Our brains aren’t very good at that.

Question 292 of 365: When can we speak freely?

US Military protocol is almost entirely unappealing to me. The hierarchical structure and the chain of command really don’t adhere to my ideals of hyperlinked networks and free communication. The idea of classified documents or need to know information is counterintuitive in an era of Open ID and Web Search. And yet, there is one thing that continues to intrigue me: The simple custom and protocol of asking to speak freely when in the presence of superior.

This is such a valuable tool and it has almost no corollary in civilian life. Perhaps it is because we lack the rigid chain of command or code of conduct, but our expectation is that we can speak freely. In fact, we regularly go on about our opinions for most of the meetings and conversations we have with one another. We don’t hold our tongues or seek the guidance of others before we speak.

And it is this fact that we lack a line in the sand beyond which we cannot speak that we are perhaps even more bound in our speech. Because we do not know our place and time to contribute, we end up subconsciously filtering what we say along to coincide with all of the platforms and expectations already in place within our institutions. For example, if I am being overtly collaborative and sharing a Google document with others, I have to consider each domain and email address I am inputting. Even if I am sharing it as a link, others see where I created it from and what the context for that creation was.

We are tied to our context in a way that both does not require us to ask permission to take part and does not grant us permission to say the things we would if we weren’t an extension of our company or school district. We are the outstretched hands of our entities and we can’t escape that. Our meetings would be more collegial if we could ask one another for permission to step out of our own roles and speak as individuals.

Even if we are relaxed and social, even if we don’t have to worry about insubordination, and even if we aren’t working on the types of sensitive information that military officials claim, we need a system for asking one another to be unaffiliated, to be human with one another. Opinions are not all equal unless we can ask for them without bias and agenda.

Perhaps we just need a signal, a sign on the door or a label in digital spaces: “Free Speaking going on in here. Be people, first and foremost and last of all.”

Or, perhaps we need to designate a specific time and space for free speech, where everyone agrees to the rules of abandoning hierarchy and institutional pretense.

I have great respect for the leveling that happens in Twitter and on Blogs, but I still think that we are tied to and weighed down by our public identities in those places. We need a way to say “Permission to speak freely ” with one another and have that mean something. We need to be able to define the lines that we assume aren’t there because we are on the civilian side and then we need to give them up sometimes. We need to identify the limitations of our personas and put them aside when they get in the way. Only in that space and time will we truly be able to share everything and collaborate on what matters most: changing things for the better, no matter where you are starting from or who you supervise.

Question 244 of 365: Why do users revolt?

Over the past week, something strange has been happening on Digg. Ever since they changed over to a new format for the website and a different submission process, an absolute torrent of users have decided that this site no longer has their best interests in mind. Whether it is the removal of the bury button (the ability to demote stories that are not relevant or interesting) or in the total site redesign, users have given more than an earful to the makers of Digg, including spamming the site with articles from competing news aggregators. They want it to go back to the way it was before, or at least to fix the glaring errors that are starring them in the face every time they use the site.

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. A single web portal changed its platform and a few users (mostly hipster geeks) aren’t happy about it. It isn’t a tragedy or a massive privacy breach. It isn’t a power grab or a diabolical plan for torture. The website changed. That’s it. It is a blip on the timeline of the web, but it may be a symptom of a much larger problem. User revolts are becoming more common and more pronounced.

Facebook‘s privacy changes prompted congressional letters, a number of different startups to be created, and huge numbers of users to up and quit. Google‘s inclusion of Buzz into gmail without any notice prompted huge shifts in our understanding of what a company can do with a product that we have all come to rely on for our daily workflow. Even something like Microsoft‘s use of the .docx standard for all current generation word programs has been a slow burning user revolt that has many saving files in open formats or uploading them to Google Docs for fear of not being able to open them on other’s computers.

This may just be the fear of change that is the same in every generation, but I feel as though there is something different going on here. Users are revolting based upon the idea that their requirements for a service are no longer being met. This type of change is akin to an employees benefits being changed via a form letter, with no recourse whatsoever. One day, a switch gets thrown and the services we have come to expect have changed because the company responsible has other motives.

Users revolt because their trust has been compromised. They revolt over not knowing what the future holds and believing that the direction and progress is all wrong. Fear of change is warranted when the process for change is secret. Companies have every right to introduce new features and to try and advance into new markets, but their interests should still be to collaborate with users (all users) to find out what their needs are. Too many companies are advocating for fictional needs rather than focusing on the core pain that their software or service actually eases.

Facebook made up the need that people have for publishing all demographic information in a public (or easily monitized) way. Google made up the need that people have for having a social network in their e-mail (while I like this idea very much… it isn’t one that I hear a lot of people clamoring for). Microsoft made up the need that people have for proprietary document formats. All three of them did this because they saw a future opportunity based upon those fictional needs. Facebook could target better ads, Google could get more of the social graph information, and Microsoft could hold on to formatting standards. These are real opportunities, but they don’t necessarily lead to happier users. Because each of these needs are fictionalized, the cost benefit analysis that these companies are doing is severely flawed. The cost of the change is much higher for each user and the benefits are much lower for the company because the users revolt.

I understand that the vast majority of the services where users revolt are free. This may lead companies to believe that they can change anything they want to without repercussions from users. In essence, we should all just be glad to have the service at all. I would make the case that we have a social contract with Google and Facebook even if we don’t have a signature and a payment plan in place. This social contract includes the idea that major changes made to the service should be vetted. It includes working with users to establish needs rather than making them up. It also includes transparency. The process of creating something new should be an open one, and that is how revolts are stopped before they start. By making everyone a part of the new version, you will create buy-in and ownership and you may even find the elusive needs that are both beneficial to users and lucrative for the company.

Otherwise, we will continue to see more user revolts, more splintering of user groups, and more distrust of really great pieces of technology. I also like the idea of an undo button somewhere in the top left corner of everything, just in case.

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Question 216 of 365: What are the right triggers?

I’ve been thinking a lot about if-then statements. Those little representations of causality that seem to crop up everywhere. If one thing happens then another will transpire. It is the easiest relationship to understand, far easier to get than the complex political or emotional relationships that populate the rest of our lives.

I first learned about them when I was learning how to program in high school. To me, they seemed like the most inelegant but simplest way of solving problems. When we were asked to develop a tic tac toe game that could play against the code of my peers, I wrote my code as a series of if-then statements, trying to figure out every possible situation and prepare what its reaction should be. As it turns out, I didn’t prepare for every situation because my code broke. I lost because other people didn’t write if-then statements, but rather elegant algorithms for strategy.

What I learned: if-then statements only work if you know all of the ifs.

More recently, I see if-then statements every day with my children. If they eat their dinner, then they can have dessert (if it’s a dessert night that is). If they hit one another, they go to time out. It isn’t as if I am trying to program them for every situation, but I am trying to ingrain the causal relationship of their actions into them. I know, though, that this relationship is made up. It is one that I am enforcing because I want them to understand the consequences of making bad choices. Those choices, however, are not really tied to the result. Healthy food does not lead to dessert for everyone. Some people don’t go to timeout for hitting; some people are rewarded for it ( like boxing or self-preservation).

What I am learning: If-then statements work best when you can control the then.

Today, I started writing some if-then statements of my own. I created a workflow that allowed me to email my computer at work and have that computer take a screenshot and email it back. All I needed were a couple of well thought out if-then statements and some really good triggers. You see, I needed that workflow to initiate all of the if-thens only once I triggered that I wanted it to happen. I needed to figure out what the first domino should be that would set off the reaction. The causal relationship only goes so far; the trigger is what makes it all happen. I needed to find a great trigger that I could do remotely and would allow me to validate that it was me supplying the request. Email was the only thing that met all of the requirements.

I will continue to learn: A good trigger is worth a hundred great if-then statements.

The greatest triggers are those that allow us to focus our attention on a single spot. They are so exacting that whole new sets of possibilities open up. They must be simple. They must be accessible. They must be choices that a child could make or a seasoned veteran of business. They must be like email or SMS, that do not require definition before implementation.

(This is why Google Wave failed. The trigger to take part was never there. There were lots of wonderful if-then statements in the middle filled with collaborative back and forth and use cases that was pretty engaging. The trigger, though, to go and spend time there was nonexistent. Without the simple push into and reason for starting a Wave, it was doomed to fail.)

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Question 186 of 365: How should we submit our work?

I think a lot about the submit button. The process of taking something that you own and uploading it to someone else is an act of trust. I am trusting that everything that I submit to Flickr will be there when I look for it, without some crazy provisions or copyright license on it. I am trusting that the presentations I upload to Slideshare will be embeddable wherever I want them to be. Whenever I submit an assignment in an online course, I am trusting that it will be valued by the person on the other end and not just put into a virtual file cabinet to make one more check on a class checklist.

This trust isn’t something that we should take lightly or that we should let rest as it is. There is inherently a problem with turning over your work to something else via a button. The transaction method of turning things in is all wrong. When we have to turn over all authority of the things we have authored, we are no longer able to take responsibility for where they end up. And we should be able to do that. We should be always able to make decisions about our content, continuing to extend its existence wi every link and collaboration.

I want to start making Dropbox the standard for submitting. The very idea of dropping your content into a folder on your desktop and having that sync into a space that other people and services have access to is he future of sharing. Removing content or revising it updates the files everywhere that they are referenced, preserving your control and your ability to revise and continue to come back to where you have already been without recreating or storing every ne version on every different service that comes into existence.

I want to turn in assignments by dropping files onto my desktop and revise my answers with a simple save. I want to share them with everyone else who is in my class and have the facilitator see that sharing as well. I want to have photo sharing sites get access to my collection through a sync from my computer. I want to always maintain the copies but know that they exist and are accessible easily.

The possibilities for creating are simple and elegant when you remove the pressure of the submit button. When you no longer have to wait until something is good enough to start syncing it our to the world, collaboration has the ability to take hold of everything that you do. When you don’t have to be connected to the web in order to check in on what other people have contributed, we aren’t tethered to any device or service. Sharing ownership of our work and also being able to continue to expand its use is the next journey that we must attempt.

This is the workflow I see:

Any file that is on your device is on the cloud is also shared with others and is found on other’s hard drives. The redundancy allows for backup after backup of our work. All of these drives and versions are networked and allow us to see as a work progresses because a visualization of all edits across the world will be a part of the metadata of the file itself. Each file will be editable on all devices either by a local program or a cloud based service. The file will not care which. Microsoft word and Google Docs will simply be the way we revise the much more powerful part of this process: the sharing. Each file will become linked and embeddable. And because of the way all of these hard drives are networked, the file will not be embedded just from the cloud service, but it will also be embedded from the original source (your device). This will mean that we will always be able to track where content has come from and where it goes to. The single source of truth will be the person that created it, and if they delete it, all that will be left will be the remixes and revisions that work under fair use.

None of this will happen if we keep on with the submit button as the only way to share (this button takes many forms, but it is the function that I think is going to hold us back). We need to move toward sharing responsibility for our files and our ideas. We need to submit by moving things around on our devices and not just on the services that seem to come and go every few weeks. We need share via a link that will always exist, instead of break with every whim of a few shareholders. The infrastructure isn’t what needs a tweak. It is us. We need to push what our own devices can do and what we are willing to pay for as well. We need to become our own data centers and wharehouses. We need to become our own cloud, all with the idea that Google or someone else will also have backups of our stuff too. Because you know they will.

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

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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Question 119 of 365: How can you have everything?

I stood where Bill Gates is standing right now.

I’m not sure why that matters, but knowing that I was previously in the same space as one of the most influential people in the world is downright unnerving. It is as if the universe has now made the comparison between us. Not a connection, but a comparison. Of all of the people that have existed in that space, he is the one that has done the most good for the world health crisis. He is the one who has funded the most schools. He is the one that has made the most money and changed the world with his computing vision.

Today, in the cafeteria of the Science Leadership Academy, Bill Gates took question from high school students that I have met and have had conversations with. He looked through the same windows that I have and walked through the same doors. Now, watching him do these things on a live video feed is nothing compared to the experience of actually being there with him. But, perhaps it is better this way. I don’t have to be embarrassed at my relative lack of accomplishment. I will never have to stand up to him and justify my own work against his.

And I know he doesn’t care, but I don’t need him to. I don’t look up to him as if he were a god among men and I don’t need his approval to make my own small contributions to society. I do, however, want to listen to him. I want to know his story, both of his successes and failures. I want to see that the cosmic comparison continues to weigh everything and come up with an answer at the end of it all, not in terms of who matters more but rather a comparison of two ideas. Because at the end of the day, there is an idea of Bill Gates and there is an idea of Ben Wilkoff. Our ideas intersect and separate at different points. They both have a narrative, an arch, and many plot devices. I don’t think that just sharing the same space is the only part of our “ideas” that cross paths either.

In telling his own story, he said that it you can have everything. He said that all of the world’s knowledge can be found in libraries and online. He said that the basis of getting what you want out of life was a good education. He said these things because they mesh with his story, with the idea of Bill Gates.

They also match my story. I have everything. Everything that I need for information, for connection, and for creation. I had a wonderful education, and I figured out just what it means to learn (although, mostly outside of a formalized setting). I read books and blogs and tweets. I see the world’s information and I incorporate it into the idea of me.

That is why we should listen to people. Whether they are Bill Gates or someone in the supermarket. That is why we have to constantly compare notes on what kinds of stories we are telling to one another. We need to be aware that whenever two people have shared the same space and time, there is a comparison that must be shared. When we see differences, we should recognize them. We should celebrate the fact that our stories aren’t the same. We should also look for those places that our ideas match up. When we find those places, we should feel connected to an understanding that we indeed are experiencing the same reality as one another. We should feel incredibly happy that neither of our ideas are entirely flawed because we have shared something special. When the ideas of ourselves resonate with one another, it doesn’t matter if one knows it and the other doesn’t. So long as someone is making note that there was a singularity of vision for a brief moment, that is enough. It is enough to know that Bill Gates and myself, for the moment that the story was being told and heard, are allowed to let our ideas meld.

I was in Target the other day with my two children and an elderly man stopped me after I paid for our groceries. He told me that he had four children and that for a few years he had to leave them alone with his wife while he was in the War. He said that his entire family had a food budget of $15 per week, and they were able to stretch it and make it work. I had just paid for $150 of groceries that may not even last us the week. That is a factor of 10. He said that the number almost made him fall out of his bench seat as he waited for his wife to get out of the bathroom. In that moment, he noticed that our stories were drastically different from one another. He was both making a note of that fact and allowing me to do the same.

At some point in the future, I may understand exactly what he was talking about. For right now, I can just be thankful for the story. At some point, I may be able to hold the same understanding as he did of leaving his children and wife behind to work toward a cause greater than himself, but for right now I can just listen. Perhaps, that is all that any of us can do.

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Question 89 of 365: What’s on the table?

In discussions about change, the expectation is that some things are negotiable and others are not. There is a kind of understood language for those things that are sacred, and therefore off the table. We give them a preferred nomenclature, using words like standards or givens. These assumptions within any given change are ones that single-handedly deny compromise. They are responsible for strikes, mass-firings, and even riots given the right set of circumstances. They are what is universally known to be off the table.

But, the table is big enough to hold everything. We just seem to like cutting it short and using only part of it to hold meetings. It is like we huddle together at the head of a big board room and ignore all of the space that we could have if we acknowledged it existed.

In writing about radical use, I advocated for taking the everyday objects and ideas and figuring out ways to reorganize and utilize them to greater and more interesting effect. I would like to make the case now for putting everything on the table once more.

We should not remove things because they are too hard to discuss or they would disrupt all other negotiations. We should not remove things because they would take to long to sort out or too many people are invested in them the way that they currently exist. Everything should be laid out and explored. Everything should be debated. Now, we may come up with similar conclusions, but the only way to be truly sure that you have made the right decision is to continue to affirm it.

So, what’s on the table?

• Childhood
• Relationship
• Hierarchy
• Memory
• Privacy
• Ownership
• Health
• Religion

There should be no givens on these topics. No free passes to any groups that find themselves at odds over the particulars. I want free and open questions to be raised as to the validity of a particular viewpoint. I want to put it all out on the table and manipulate just how important and prevalent each element is. I want to question the value of starting and stopping childhood at a certain age. I want to consider outsourcing our memory to objects and metadata on a machine. I want to discuss just how private each of us needs to be if we could trust that everyone else shares the same privacy.

I want data to support what stays on the table and what comes off. I want a Microsoft Pivot-like interface on the table so that we could measure the effects of each proposal.

And why is this so important?

Because our assumptions have led us down the wrong path too many times. Believing that things were off the table have led us to compromise just how much we can get done. If we know that change is only available for the few things that we comfortably admit are broken, then change is nothing more than an illusion.

And I want it to be real. I want to touch it and see it and talk about it. I want to notice that things are getting better all of the time because we have had the tough conversations and made the difficult concessions. If we had an interface for putting everything on the table, I think that more people would inevitably no longer fear what they have committed to. They could look at their own truth, and iterate into what makes sense for who they are right now and what place they inhabit.

What’s on the table? Everything.

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Question 38 of 365: How does color influence our actions online?

I am not a graphic designer. I am not a marketing guru. I am not a color snob. However, I did run across a really interesting reverse image search that made me think about how colors are associated with everything we do on the web. From the Twitter bright blue or Facebook‘s dark blue to the Microsoft Red, Green, Yellow and Blue, to Google‘s slightly different Red, Green, Yellow and Blue; we associate every click with a color. We even understand what can be linked together by having the underlined navy color present on a page. There are rules about such things. The ways in which colors are used on the web influence the ways in which we act.

So, my question becomes, how is color training us to be active participants on the web? How is it asking us to collaborate? How is it pacifying us? How does it cause us to consume more or work less?

As someone who is in no way qualified to answer some of these questions, I feel like I should start with something specific. Let’s take the examples of color that I mentioned: Twitter blue and the four colors of Google.

The following are companies who all use some form of the Four Colors of Google for their brand:

• Zoho
• The Olympics (with black added in, but I think it still counts)
• Kestrelflyer
• Joomla
• eBay

What do these companies and organizations have in common, and why would they all choose to go with a four color logo that seems to have been designed with the same aim in mind? My feeling is that these four colors represent a standard of quality. These four colors represent something that people will want to put their trust in. They say to anyone who wants to look that the company in question takes all kinds and then strives to be the best at one thing (at least one thing, that is). These colors have been embedded into the fabric of the web as the face of leadership (or at least the hope of leadership, in the case of Joomla and Kestrelflyer). I find myself gravitating toward these services precisely for this reason, even if subconsciously.

Now, Twitter blue represents something else entirely. Here is a smattering of companies who want to be associated with that color:

• Skype (it was a darker blue a few years ago, though)
• Portal (for xBox)
• Vimeo
• Miami.com
• Today’s Parent Magazine

Each one of these companies wants to be thought of as something new, something fresh. Each one is looking to make a name for itself in a different space. They may not share a lot in common in terms of the technologies they employ, but each one is looking to be recognized, to stand out from a crowded field. The Twitter blue has come to mean all of these things as it continues to expand just what is possible with “the new.”

While we may not be able to derive any definitive conclusions about the way that color affects our overall habits on the web, I believe that we are being trained by the use of color to feel certain emotions and to react in a certain way based upon the colors that are chosen for a brand. This may not be anything new to a graphic designer or marketing guru, but it is certainly a revelation for me in thinking about my own habits online.

While content is important, as is service and quality; in an increasingly visual world, we must take into account all of the types of persuasion being pushed at us. Color included.

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