Question 181 of 365: What is a vendor? #iste10

A company becomes a vendor when they have clients. Or when they provide services to a specific subset or field. It is when they believe they have a solution no one else posesses, yet somehow they can exist within a crowded trade show with many fellow vendors showing off similar wares.

I have purchased things from vendors, conversed with vendors, and demanded things of vendors. And yet, through the entire process, they stayed vendors. They didn’t become companies or individuals, they were just the vendors who were providing us the service, whether that was online curriculum, a content management system or simply a few books.

Being a vendor is easy for some and much harder for others. Losing your personhood and becoming simply an arm of the entity you work for can be debilitating. It can make you not feel as though you can be part of any conversation. It can also make others feel as though you have nothing of value to add. You are simply there to provide a service, not an idea.

In education and non-profits especially, distrust for vendors is high. There is the sense that the folks who work with kids and other valuable stakeholders know exactly what they need and the vendors are just trying to sell them things that are superfluous. And for the most part, looking out at the floor of major conferences, that distrust is well placed. The gadgets and curriculum that are pushed are not tranformational, but are sold as if they were. The space is set up so that you can learn more about the products of a given vendor, but the line between learning and propaganda is razor thin.

And yet, vendors are people too. They go after what they perceive the needs to be with something that they believe will help. And we cut them off from being a part of the conversation because we don’t want to be sold on anything. When they host cloud computing symposiums for mostly vendors to take part in, there isn’t any of the snakiness that you might find in a practitioner only summit. They are looking for solutions. They don’t hide their self-interest, and maybe that is the difference between those on the ground and those who are willing to brand their ideas and sell them to others.

In all of the social networking, self-publishing, and collaborating, we tend to obscure our self-interest. We tend to forget about the fact that we are helping ourselves to whatever results we are after. We also forget the worth of the connections we make. We obscure that many of the contacts we have may at some point have monitary value. This isn’t new. We self-promote up until the point that we could be consider selling our ideas, and no further. Unless of course, someone is buying. If someone is offering to come on board or to consult or to collaborate for a price, then we take on those roles. Yet, we still don’t want to be a vendor.

Vendors are unafraid to be called on their desire to make money. They have plans and contracts for that expressed purpose. We give away our content because we think that there is more value in the conversation than the transaction. But, the conversation is a transaction. We are exchanging information and ideas and building something new. And we should be able to quantify the value we create. If for no other reason than to say to the vendors in our lives that we are vendors too, and that we should be taken seriously.

Just like some vendors won’t listen to a teacher because they don’t hold influence. We don’t listen to vendors because they hold too much. There is something wrong with this equation, and here is what I would like to see to make it better (and not just in education, either):

For the record, the things that I have learned and created with others in the last few days are worth $1500. They weren’t revolutionary, but the evolution of certain connections and ideas was at least worth that much. And anyone who isn’t willing to put a price on their learning should affix some other value that others will be able to understand. I’m not sure there is any other value that will let all stakeholders come to the table and compare apples to apples, but I am open to suggestions.

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Question 126 of 365: Is multi-tasking noise?

People have been up in arms since the iPhone came out that it doesn’t allow multi-tasking. In fact, I was one of those people with arms outstretched. I couldn’t understand why any company as visionary as Apple would want to limit their devices to only doing one thing at a time. At any given moment, I have at least 20 programs running and another 20 tabs open in Chrome. This is the way that I work. It is how I communicate with other easily and how I push the flow of data along. Now though, I am beginning to question whether or not this multi-tasking mania is really good for my creative prospects.

I think I get why Apple has resisted multi-tasking so much on their devices. They wanted each one to provide an experience for their users that was unlike anything else they have seen. They wanted to make sure that each app downloaded would feel as though it were made just for them, and not as some distraction for other distractions from real work. As I have gotten used to working on the iPad, I have realized just how powerful it is that I don’t have twitter up while I am writing. I realize just how intriguing answering an e-mail becomes when I’m not distracted by downloads or multiple tabs that keep on redirecting my attention.

On the desktop, I set up tasks in separate programs. I start one and then jump to another while that one loads. I sometimes forget about the first one until I am closing out of things a few hours later. On the iPad, I don’t feel that rush. Everything is fast and the apps don’t work together at all. Ordinarily, I would be frustrated, but at the moment, I like the fact that I am drawing a vector illustration in one app, taking a screenshot, rotating it a second app, then sending it to my blog with a third. Each task becomes sacred. It becomes more time with the process of making something great. On a desktop, it is all done for you. You don’t feel as though you have accomplished something.

And, I want to accomplish something. I want to take my time editing and producing and completely forget that there are other tasks that need to be done. For the moment, there is just one. I will follow it to its logical conclusion and then move on to the next.

It lets my mind be something it doesn’t ussually get the chance to be: organized.

It is like the one time that I cleaned my room for real.

I don’t think that I am alone in complaining about having to clean up my room. Also don’t think I am alone in doing a half-hearted job most of the time because I knew that it was going to get messy again quite soon. I am also willing to wager that I am not alone in having spent one full afternoon really cleaning my room so that I was proud of the result.

I set up action figures in fight scenes on the bookshelves. I put each of my baseball cards into their protective sleeves. I made my bed with special folds at the top that were far to intricate to be accidental. I sorted my books by genre and put the series books into their correct order.

In short, I cleaned that room like it was my job. And, I enjoyed it. I took time with those action figures to make sure that the scenes were believable. I found out new statistics about my favorite ball players. I thought about how many times I had slept in that bed while I folded the top sheet underneath the blanket. And I made mental notes of when I should read those same books again. Each event had its place and I wasn’t worried about getting all of it done because I knew that I would eventually create the finished product.

I feel like that is the power of not multi-tasking. That is the power of quiet.

While I need the noise sometimes to do a lot of things quickly, I know that I will never enjoy them as much as if I only were doing one task at a time. So, the iPad may get multi-tasking this fall, but I can tell you that I will never use it to create noise. I will never enable it just so I can devalue each step in the creative process. I will only use it to know more about the one task I am concentrating on right now. On this device, I will set up workflows only to create better work, never more output.

Because for me, output and work are two totally different things. The latter I love because it gives me more purpose. The former I despise because it gives me generic accomplishments and false understanding.

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Question 125 of 365: Who moved my privacy?

Virginia Woolf wasn’t kidding. Having a room of one’s own matters. That is why teachers who keep their materials on carts are the ones who we pity. It is the reason why we still have stigma around cubicles. It is the reason that we put our names on doors.

In a couple of weeks, I will lose my own room. For the past 9 months, I have been able to meet with people on my own terms. I have been able to put my children’s artwork on the walls. I have been able to avoid ridicule from everyone who ventures into our office for my manual typewriter sitting on my desk.

We are all moving to a historic school building, one of the first ones built in my district. And this is rocking our department to our very core. We spent at least an hour today meeting to just discuss the anxiety around the move (not the move itself, but dispelling the anxiety around it). There is a serious reorganization underfoot and it makes everyone nervous. The feeling in the air was that our family was splitting up. It was a divorce proceeding, or at least the aftermath of one.

“On this day, you can pack your stuff. The next day, you will no longer be able to visit your old home. The day after that, you will be surrounded by strangers.”

This isn’t what worries me, though. I could care less about the loss of being around a few key people. I usually talked with them through online collaborative means, anyway. The thing I am worried about is losing my own space, and losing my sanity along with it. There are very few places that I can really be alone in thought. My room was one of the last vestiges of a bygone era.

For years I lived in the basement. I did this on purpose. As soon as my parents would let me, I moved all of my solid-wood furniture down to the basement and set up camp. I put up christmas lights on the ceiling. I plastered the walls with posters from the local art movie house. I let the technology on my desk spill over onto my dresser and on my bed and on the bookshelf and on the floor. This was the space that other people only visited when I asked them.

I don’t want to return to those days, but I do wish that I could figure out how to preserve some of that privacy. For as open as I am about my work and my collaborative instincts, I feel the need to have a space to spin around in my chair if I need to and not be questioned about it. I am not in any way looking forward to going back to sharing the music I choose to listen to with others. The privacy that I crave is the kind that relaxes shoulders and puts feet on tables. The kind of privacy I desire lets me put up sticky notes and record videos of them.

I want to be able to go for a few hours at a time without having to put up a facade of work sarcasm. The small talk gets ridiculous after a point. And, that point is about after the first 15 minutes of the day for me.

So, I internalize this privacy and I put all of the christmas lights into my head. I use headphones and I step out to make phone calls. I drop out of the space that is supposed to be so colegial. I find reasons to be away from co-habitation. And that is exactly what it is. It is an environment in which we are all a part, but no one has the space to create something new. Everything just seems to take on the sanitized undertones of being civil to one another all of the time.

And this is the grand irony. In all of my calls for collaboration, I still want it to be a choice. I want to be able to go in and out of collaborative spaces at will. I want to be able to begin from a place of personality rather than homogeneity. And for me, this isn’t negotiable.

My privacy isn’t up for debate. Whether or not my official space is found within cubicle or an office, I will always seek out a room of my own. I will plan on finding the spaces that will let me set up shop and let my stuff spill out onto the floor. I will intentially create works that require collaborative spaces that others CHOSE to come into rather than are set as a default.

While I do not bemoan change in my life, I believe in marking its passing. Others can be nervous about shifts to job description or responsibilities, but the only thing I will be looking for are places to ask real questions and get beyond the political fight awaiting all unchosen spaces.

If I had a glass in my hand I would raise it to this:

To finding the next room of my own, wherever that may be.

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Question 124 of 365: Are there clowns hanging up on our walls?

The Cleveland Clinic was my childhood hospital. I visited my pediatrician there with my two brothers more times than I care to remember. I didn’t recognize it as the world-premier institution that it is, though. I just knew it as the place with the clown posters on the wall.

Within this enormous waiting area with a few children’s toys and books, there were these rather intimidating clown posters that had french words written on them. The clowns weren’t sad or particularly happy. They were just there, staring down at you as you waited to get your next shot.

The clowns were such a part of my childhood that I lamented their loss when the Cleveland Clinic decided to venture out into satellite buildings closer to our house. As I was old enough to drive and needed blood work instead of height and weight checks, I still wanted to wait in that room. There was something about having clowns look down at you that made everything seem absurd, and by that measure, made everything relatively okay.

The question I really want to ask is if I have ever replaced the beautiful smeared lipstick of the clown with anything else that is worth noting. I want to know if there has been anything that I have hung up around me that has given me the same level of consistency and understanding for things, even in all of their chaos and unbelievability. And more than that, can we all hang our own clowns up in the waiting rooms that we frequent so that nothing seems as real as it is and we can float away from the pain that forthcoming into a place of fantasy and interest?

The waiting rooms in our lives are not in hospitals for the most part. They are in our cars, in our homes, and wherever else we can’t have the instant gratification we crave. They are even in our email as we wait for responses. They are in our physical objects that don’t update as fast as our digital ones.

And as we wait for lights to change or someone to hit the reply all button, there really is very little in the way of clown ambiance. But, I think that there could be more of it, if we tried hard enough. We could make the background of waiting just slightly more comforting if we worked to create reminders of the hilarity of it all.

Here is what I am proposing:

1. E-mails should have an escape hatch. Within every reply there should be a link that you could click to get away from the experience entirely. There should be a link in signatures to an inspiring photograph of an absurd situation. There should be a labyrinthian puzzle to traverse before you can get back to your e-mail. It should be hard and worthwhile, but it should be more difficult to do your e-mail without being reminded of how ridiculous it is that we are tied to a machine for multiple hours of the day.

2. Traffic lights should be hackable. Instead of just having a green orb to tell us to go, we should have the ability to upload our own (filtered, perhaps) image to the green light so that when it changes we are looking at what it could possibly be. The only people who might be able to see this change are the ones that just missed the light the time before, and thus the folks with the most time on their hands. By ensuring that others can tap into what the traffic light is all about, it is ensuring that the absurdity of humanity is represented in one of the craziest practices we do every day (letting a color tell us when to go and stop).

3. The physical objects around us should make fun of us on a regular basis. Or, maybe we should just get in on the joke. After all, books know more than we do about their particular subjects or stories. Chairs do a better job than us at supporting a person’s weight. The plastics that we use everyday will likely outlive us. Perhaps all of this should be made known to us more consistently. Subtle hints could be dropped in the form of notes or casual taunts. Our objects could be the clowns of consistency that stare at us every day if we let them.

While I’m not sure that the Cleveland Clinic was trying to promote this idea or not, here is what I learned from sitting in that room for endless hours in my youth:

The whole world is a circus. The sooner you recognize that and start laughing about it, the better the world will become.

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Question 117 of 365: When should you jump ship?

Other people affect us in the strangest ways. Retirement parties are one such example. The rash of these awkward moments in my life have really been getting to me. When people decide to cash in their chips, it really makes me eye the stack I have in front of me. It makes me wonder what they know that I don’t (which, if they are retiring after 30 or 40 years of work, is probably a lot). At these parties there is cake, but it isn’t about the cake. There are gifts, but no one cares about the gifts. There is small talk, but no one remembers what was said. The entire event is centered around the vacuum that will be left in the absence of the person leaving. While we pay attention and say nice things about all of the service that was one in the retiree’s tenure, the real issue on everyone’s mind is all of the things that won’t be done in the future because of this retirement. We all play out in our heads the stories of what will never be completed or worse yet, what projects will never be started.

And the same goes for people leaving to work elsewhere (although, they usually don’t get a grand party). We all know that they will be replaced either by someone new or someone shifting into that position from within. Yet, we cannot put ourselves into that place of knowing what it is that will happen during or after the vacancy. It is entirely the fear of the unknown that creeps in on us and makes us want to run to leave too. It isn’t the peer pressure of other people leaving that makes us question our loyalty. It is the fact that we have no idea who is coming in to replace them and what the organization will look like afterwards.

The best organizations can weather any large-scale changeover. There have been many shifts in priorities and populations in large school districts and Fortune 500 companies, and with each shift comes a new identity. And yet, fitting re-assimilating that identity is hard work, and not all of us have enough energy left for it. So, how can you take control of that oncoming identity shift? You make that change first. If you leave and start work elsewhere, you get to control what you want to be a part of. You get to choose your partners and your co-workers, instead of having them chosen for you as the organization morphs into something that is unrecognizable to you.

And yet, there is a powerful force within us that makes us want to wait it out and see if it will get any better. There is always this loyal streak that seems to engage our fight or flight instinct and it gets us to recognize just how hard the flight might be. We look around us, at the economic realities of the day, and we decide that it is good just to have a job. We make do with what we have. We take on additional responsibilities. Every day, we keep our head down just a little bit lower in the hopes that everything will start to shake out and we won’t have to move too far from where we are to maintain a similar status.

And then more changes come, more uncertainty. More people keep leaving, challenging our resolve. Stay the course or head out in a new direction? All of this head-down standing still doesn’t work so well when the ground underneath us is moving.

So, without putting too fine a point on it, I would like to enumerate the things that I look for in deciding whether or not to jump ship on any given day:

• I must be able to see myself in my leadership. This doesn’t have to be all leadership, however. It can be a single leader that I can look to and see that his or her values align with mine. I need to feel as though I am not working against the entire system at any given moment, and I need to know that someone will have my back if I take a risk.
• Reorganization doesn’t take people for granted. In any reorganization effort, I need to be able to see that the people who are working the hardest to create and innovate within the system are not passed over for people who either want to obstinately keep the status quo or folks who would rather forget everything that has been done before. I don’t want anyone else (or myself for that matter) to feel like someone’s pawn or bargaining chip in the Org Chart.
• Cost savings isn’t getting in the way of progress. You cannot put an entire organization on pause. Cutting can lead to better reflective practice, but it can also lead to better blinders. I opt for continuing what was promised and then delivering more.
• Sitting down and pounding things out becomes the default option instead of waiting things out. I will only stay on board so long as people are willing to sit down and write out what they want. I will not hesitate to jump if I start seeing people wait on the sidelines for too long, hoping that someone will come and solve their problems for them. Hardship is the time when collaboration matters most. It isn’t that you need to communicate more, you need to listen and be in the same space with other people as much as possible. You need to rewrite the organization and ratify it with everyone who is capable of putting their name to paper, even if we know that it will change again. Not knowing, believing, or creating the next generation of an institution is unconscionable.

Because I know that each of these issues is of value to me, I don’t have to live out one my favorite Clash songs on a daily basis. I am loyal and hard-working, but there I also know what is worth fighting for.

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Question 115 of 365: When should we build things just to knock them down?

Domino Rally required a lot of patience. Setting up the huge amount of dominos in a row without knocking them over required a steady hand and an iron will to get to the very end of your plan instead of settling for knocking it down half-way through. I played it almost constantly whenever a friend had a set. I liked to watch them topple, sure, but I also liked seeing just how far apart I could put them to stretch out the configuration or how high I could get them to climb over books. I’m not sure that my friends always shared the same enthusiasm. They could go for doing it once or twice, but the time it took to build so far outweighed the toppling time that it hardly seemed worth it to them.

It was, however, worth it to me. The time that I spent setting those dominos right and keeping them that way over carpet, hardwood and tile was what made the whole experience what it was. I was creating destroyable art and it held my imagination like little else. Unbeknownst to me, there is an entire subculture of people who weren’t constrained to the pre-made sets of a Domino Rally toy. They were creating art, telling stories and paying perfect homages to pop culture. They have been creating domino falls and constructing elaborate runs of kinetic energy long before I understood what the domino effect even was. And even though I was never as proficient or patient as the folks creating these masterpieces, I understood that there was something majestic about not worrying about destroying your own creation before anyone else has the chance to.

I could put sand sculpture and sidewalk painting into a similar category, but those pursuits let others demolish the beauty of the original work. It is the temporary nature of all of this that I find fascinating. Whether you do the destructive act or not, there is something incredibly satisfying about knowing that you are giving your work a specific time limit for greatness. This timed perfection is something that could be more widely applied if we accept that all great works of creation are held in a particular time and space and that any attempt at recreating or extending those two things will fall terribly off the mark.

I put it to you that institutions should be like a great domino fall. They should take strategy, inspiration, and an incredible amount of diligence to create. Everyone that participates in the build learns something new and they develop the relationships of that only attempting something hard with others can foster. The people that build it know where the weak points are, the problem areas that could cause everything to devolve. They see the whole thing in their mind’s eye, recognizing the beauty and potential of what is to come. They are the ones who set off the chain reaction too. Everyone cheers as a well orchestrated ballet of movement commences. There is a held moment of existence for everyone who witnesses a great build and fall. We are all better for having witnessed it.

And then, the builders pack up their equipment and proceed to their next adventure. They take everything that they have learned and make the next creation even more ambitious and awe-inspiring. They do not try and pick up the pieces of the last build and try and set it off again. There is nothing new for them there. They would simply be doing the same exercise and hoping for the same result. That doesn’t make sense, not for the world of dominos or the world of business, education, or other creative work.

We are all builders and learners. We are all starters of chain reactions. We know, too, just how hard it is to pry ourselves away from having done something flawlessly and trying to do it again somewhere else. But we must. We must not allow our successes trip us up and make us unable to move forward.

The biggest part of this question is really trying to figure out just what it is that I am building, and what I am learning from it, and how I am going to let it go once I accomplish at least some of the things I have set out to do. Just how easy will it be for me to walk away from the systems I have set up? How quickly will I be able to set up a new series of ideas elsewhere? And who will come with me when I do?

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Question 105 of 365: Are we still allowed to be embarrassed?

You never know if you can fit underneath a metal folding chair until you try.

I used to sing really loud just about any time I got the chance. Ask my childhood neighbors about my lawn mowing falsetto or headphone isolation. I really didn’t have a concept that this wasn’t what other people were doing. I just knew that it made me happy to “project” and feel the conviction of the words as much as I could.

Ultimately though, singing loudly in unison is where it is at. That is why choirs are wonderful. You can surround yourself with a bunch of folks who like to sing for all they are worth. It is also why knowing the rhythm, the words, and the repetitions matters. There is nothing worse than singing loudly while standing next to a whole bunch of other people who like to sing loudly and being entirely out of sync with them.

I think I was 7 when I first noticed this phenomenon. During a particularly passionate religious gathering (another time when it is okay to be around loud singers), a particular song was being sung by a large congregation. This song happened to have a series of “Hey” refrains within it that were to be sung after the right phrases. I was incredibly good at screaming out at those parts and thus adding my own little flavor to the experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t truly understand the nature of the song, because just as it became soft once more, I shouted out the loudest “Hey” I could.

I knew that I had screwed up immediately because everyone (or seemingly so to my 7 year old brain) turned and looked directly at me. It was then that I decided to try and fit underneath my chair. I hid there just long enough for my father to see and come rushing down from his place in the mini-choir up front to try and coax me out. This was not a proud day for my wish to sing out loudly at any chance I got. I was embarrassed to be that off the mark.

And yet, I was allowed to be embarrassed. I was even expected to make that kind of a mistake a 7 year old. I was comforted in my mistake by the fact that other people had done the same thing, even recently. I am afraid now that we are not allowed to be this embarrassed of the decisions we have made. I worry that no one is diving underneath their chairs because of their missteps.

I keep on seeing justifications for wrong doing rather than simple contrite embarrassment. For example, when Google unveiled Buzz within gmail and didn’t fully consider all of the implications of their wide open privacy policies and sharing setup, they encountered huge backlash. All eyes were on them to fix it, which they mostly did. However, instead of simply admitting that they had not fully considered just how important people’s contact privacy is to them, they passed it off as inevitable part of being a “beta” product or of working with customers to find an ideal solution. These kinds of embarrassments are covered over for PR reasons, and yet, I believe that if Google were to have felt the sting more clearly and attempted to crawl underneath their decision to really reconsider their approach it would have garnered a lot of respect. If they would have simply taken the service down for a few hours, talked with some users in an open and honest way (perhaps much in the way that my father took me aside and consoled me for making an awkward decision) and then relaunched with their seal of approval, they would have a viable group of early adopters. As of right now, it seems as though that group is dwindling more by the day for such a service.

Embarrassments should be felt and remembered. It is enough that I remember this event as clear as day as it continues to inform my decisions on trying to do the same things as those others around me. While some people would say that I am advocating for learning from failure, but I see it is as something greater. Failure is a part of every day life. It is common, it a part of the action and reaction of doing your job or being a part of a community. Embarrassment is the feeling of being totally alone and isolated from anyone who is making you to feel embarrassed. While it is an awful experience while it is happening, it is the stuff that character is built directly upon. It is the stuff of origin stories and roads to success. Embarrassment is worth feeling because it allows us to share a common bond of disjointed being. It allows us to have the out of body experience necessary for reflection and change. But this only happens if we let ourselves be embarrassed.

You cannot justify your way out of singing when everyone else is silent. It is best to show your understanding of just how much you were out of sync. So, get down on your hands and knees and start crawling.

Question 59 of 365: When is Judgement better than Feedback?

I speak a lot about the value of perpetual beta or the need to emphasize process over product, so this maybe an entirely hypocritical thing to say. But… Judgement is better than feedback sometimes. Knowing in an absolute sense that someone hates your idea can be preferable to having any number of people try and help you make it better. Sometimes getting an objective kick in the pants or pat on the back can galvanize passion in a way that the incremental process of working toward a goal never can.

And, very soon I will be looking for judgement. Not, from my network, but from the outside, from people I have never met (online or otherwise). Very soon, I will be demonstrating an idea in the hopes that people will tell me that it sucks, unequivocally. I want them to be rabid about it too. I want them to be so mad that it doesn’t work the way that they want it to that they will challenge me to think about it differently.

I also want other people to make the judgement call that it is worthy of their time. I want them to believe so much in my ideas that they will be willing to back it up with funding, connections, and full throated support in everyday conversation. I want their judgement to be absolute, not dependent upon the next version forthcoming.

And when the judgements come, they will be swift. It will be a moment of consideration and then a decision. People will pronounce fate, and do it based upon evidence I have provided. They have the control, and yet, I am the one putting myself up for such a judgement. I am submitting myself to being graded for the first time in a long time.

And that is why I think it is special, and it should stay special. Grading and this kind of judgement on what you have done, should be something that only comes along once in a great while. It should hinge upon you being ready to stand up to criticism and believe that you have put the best possible version of what you believe forward for review.

That is why I believe in defending dissertations. It is why I believe in writing grants. It is why I believe in applying to schools. It is why I believe in the interview process.

And for the same reason, it is why I do not believe in standardized testing. It is also why I do not believe in many versions of performance review (the kind that is based on progress, not a culmination or an application for something new).

I believe that moments of judgement should be based on individual achievement, not measured against a standard. A test cannot measure what an application can. A review based upon Smart Goals will never be as good as a review that requires a person to rewrite their job description and apply for that new job. A judgement means that you have done something worthy of esteem. A feedback loop means that you can never take a step back and pronounce something as good.

So, as I head on into my next judgement. I hope people like what I am doing enough to tell me, and I hope people hate it enough to do the same. Either way, Judge me.

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Question 51 of 365: What do we model in our networks?

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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