Question 318 of 365: What is the difference between support and sales?

You will support your ideas any way that you can. You will defend them. You will decry alternatives. You will link to items that reiterate your claims. You will pursue those who want to debate you, and you will wrestle with the intellectuals that try to pick your words apart. You believe in something and no one is going to turn that belief into doubt.

But there is a difference between doing that as a member of a community and doing it is someone that is trying to sell the idea to the community from the outside. A community member has credibility. A community member is welcome in off-topic conversations as well as brainstorming sessions for solutions. A salesperson is welcome no where that isn’t a hosted space, no where that doesn’t directly involve a transaction. As a salesmen, you have no real friends. You have contacts and leads.

Support is what members of a community do. Annoyance is what salespeople do.

Injecting yourself into a conversation just to plug your idea is regarded as spamming the community. We chuck spam out with every other processed ideastuff. And that is all you have to offer. You aren’t creating anything new. You have an ideastuff that manages to look slick, but under the microscope of everyday use and asking good questions it fails miserably. Support backs off, thinks thoughtfully about the needs of those around and shifts focus with the conversation.

Support tracks usage. Sales brags about it.

Support forges relationships. Sales is always closing.

Support listens. Sales talks.

So, how can I support those that are interested in what I have to say? I can connect those that are interested with one another and create a space for all of us to collaborate. I can let everyone know that I love telling stories, especially others’ stories of success. I can wrestle with the hard questions and admit when what I am doing is wrong. I can push the development of my ideas until they work for those in my community. I can take breaks and let others do the supporting. I can promote others and not just myself.

My successes are measured in conversations and not units. The better the collaboration, the more fulfilling my work is. The larger and more engaged the community, the more change is enacted. The more I support, the less I have to sell.

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 270 of 365: How do we define success?

I believe in serendipity. It is one of my strongest held beliefs, actually. It is the way in which I find much of the passion that I have for technology, education, and business. I make contacts on Twitter and at Coffee Shops that have very little chance to pay off with real relationships, but on occasion have yielded some of the most enduring friendships of my life. I take serendipity as a given. I proclaim that given enough time and enough creative output, I will meet the people that I am supposed to and traffic in enough new relationships to be fulfilled.

One recent encounter has shaken that hard-fought foundation.

A few weeks ago, I was meeting with a colleague and we decided to grab some coffee. After our meeting was over and I was finishing up some e-mail, a woman (who was clearly stood up by her business contact because of the awkward phone conversation I overheard which contained quite a few apologies on both sides from the sound of it) introduced herself to me. She asked what I did for a living and she wondered about the type of meeting I was having in the middle of the day. As I often do when in interesting conversation introduces itself, I gave her my card. I didn’t think anything of it. It seemed serendipitous, but probably not all that useful in the long-term.

And yet, that weekend I received a phone call from this woman. I returned her call on the following Monday and we had a short conversation about her new business and potential dovetailing of interest. She told me that she had a e-commerce website like Amazon.com and was looking for other people to help with it. I am always interested in seeing what else is out there (although I struggle to find any reason for someone to start up an e-commerce website that is “like Amazon.com” having a close relationship with that retailer already). So, we set up a day and time to meet to talk over what continued to seem like the logical extension of serendipity.

Then we met and she brought out her computer. We talked a bit about things that were going on as she connected to the free Wifi. I told her about doing some professional development with online school teachers and she reacted with an overly complementary response, which I thought nothing of because she seemed very interested in each one of our short conversations so far. Then she pulled up a rather obscure URL and turned the laptop toward me.I immediately recognized the site for what it was: a specifically designed presentation for a “business opportunity.”

Not wanting to get too judgmental (the meeting was serendipitous and all), I let her talk about her business as if we had always known that this was where we were headed. She went into details about her “e-commerce” site that she purchases all of her household items from. She showed me logos of every major player in online household and consumable products. We talked about my goals for the future and what I wanted to see happen in the next three years economically. I did my best to play along as much as I could.

Then we came to the org charts and one very small detail that was intentionally missing from the previous 20 slides.

At the bottom of the org chart, almost obscured by the arrows in the chart pointing to “me” was the Amway-Global brand. As she begins to reassure me about this company’s presence in the presentation she says this: “I’m sure you have heard of this company.” She pointed to it. She didn’t say the name. She just pointed and allowed me to process. She explained her progression of coming to terms with working for Amway. It was a real soul searchers story.

She said that she had wanted to run straight out the door when the person sitting in her seat now had introduced it to her. She said that her uninformed opinion was, well, uninformed at that time. She received some sage advice from her uncle to give it a chance. She is so glad that she did because she is doing quite well for herself now. I, on the other hand, just wanted to see how long she was going to go on about how it wasn’t a Pyramid scheme. I wanted to see how many different ways she was going to obfuscate the referral process. I wanted to know how she was ever going to get around to how she convinced other people to purchase all of their household items in bulk from a website that seemingly provided no benefit to anyone except for the person who owned the website (other than perhaps having a lot of off-brand discount products).

By the time she got to the point of asking for feedback after this revelation about what we were really talking about, she was pointing to a $117,000 annual salary. This was supposed to elicit a reaction of rabid interest from me, but I just felt dirty. I was being asked to consider “owning my own business” as nothing more than growing someone else’s model. I was being asked to believe that money was the measure of success that mattered most.

The problem with her pitch wasn’t that this seemed too good to be true. I am fairly confident that many people who get into Amway and work hard at it make a good amount of money. I am also pretty sure that given the right situation, this type of work would seem awfully attractive. The problem with her pitch was that I already consider myself a success. I don’t require that kind of salary to validate it. Furthermore, the purpose and passion I feel for everything I do has always provided me with enough money to feed my family and purchase all of my needs and many of my wants.

I believe in education and good ideas. I believe in creating a life for ones’ self. I do not believe in manufacturing it out of consumable goods. While you may be able to sell a lot of them, they will never last. That is the metaphor for why I felt so betrayed by serendipity. I create things based upon the reciprocal nature of shared ownership. She took that ownership of our communication and bent it toward her will. She tried to reengineer it until I became the perfect client, the next in a long line of “business owners” that she had converted. Well, that is not serendipity. That is manipulation. That is false advertising and bait and switch networking.

No thank you.

So while I still believe in serendipity, I will be on the look out for those who try to trade on it and are unwilling to give creativity back. I will still give out my card, but I will ask for their’s next time as well.

Question 267 of 365: How much are we willing to share?

My first email address that wasn’t tied to a major online provider like AOL was pacer@cyberdrive.net. It came from this local ISP in my home town. It was this cute all you could download on a 14.4 modem affair for about $25.00 a month. The reason that this ISP was surviving was that they were one of the first to offer the unlimited model, rather than the hourly rate for logging in. I thought that this was the best of all possibilities because I had been mowing the lawn for years just for the chance to log in a few more hours. This plan, however, came with one major drawback: the email address had to be shared. Everyone in the family had access. They might not have checked the address all that often, but they had access to it. Most importantly, my father had access to it.

Upon the occasion of my posting to a newsgroup with less than desirable users, I received an absolute torrent of email. Per our arrangement with Cyberdrive, my father received those emails too. After quite a long discussion about cyber safety (which didn’t really have a term at the time, so I’m pretty sure we just called it safety), he decided to shut down the account and I decided that sharing an e-mail address with my father was just about the worst idea ever.

I didn’t want him to know everything that I was up to, and I’m sure he didn’t really want to know either. We both realized that there was a level of trust and privacy that had to be built into our relationship. We had to figure out a way for the model of not sharing an account to work. I’m not sure we ever talked it through, but a few weeks after that incident (I had been grounded for a bit during that time), we both stopped checking that account and we moved on to our separate ones. It made sense to do so, but we knew that something had been lost. We used to be able to view the state of things from our family email account. I would get my updates from my newsletters and my father would get his. Sharing the email account made it easier to appreciate the things that we were both a part of. Now we didn’t have that.

I know other families that still do this. Everyone logs into one gmail account. It is something that prevents anyone going too far off the deep end of perversion or illegal activity. It focuses our attention on the family itself rather than the individual conversations. The privacy loss, though, is hard to swallow. When anyone makes a mistake or signs up for a ridiculous list-serve, we all pay the price.  We want to send out a united message from a single source, but we don’t want to be pigeonholed into a single identity or be unable to develop our own interests.

I wonder if there is a compromise that exists. I wonder if Facebook and other social networks might help us to maintain that level of inclusion without the headache of solely a family identity. They have shifted our expectation of what should be our own. They have let us connect to family members but not be swallowed by this association. Already, these services are stating the default sharing to be public rather than private. This allows me to group my family’s responses on walls and in twitter lists. I can see the communication and I can watch it grow. Somehow, this simple act of making more things public has allowed my family to share the things that they might not think to do, but keep hidden the things that are none of my business.

Social networks are just better at communicating what is yours, mine, and ours. Email just dumps everything into one pot and forces us to sort it out. This may be inciting in order to completely control what we are all getting into, but it spells disaster for the relationships we are trying to build. We need autonomy. We need trust and respect. In short, we may need Facebook.

Question 245 of 365: What is our social media policy?

An institution will be known by its use of social media. They will be seen through the lens of every contributor in their ranks. They will either be well represented or incredibly absent, nothing in between. The identities of every Facebook and Twitter user will build into an army of advocates for the institution, so long as the institution doesn’t squash that reality.

Social media policies govern what can and cannot be posted, connected, and learned from the networks that drive many of our work and personal decisions and plans. And mostly, they do it rather badly. These policies tend to confuse guidance with enforcement. Here are my biggest infringements with social networking policies that have been floating around for the past few years:

• They are overly long. There is no reason to have a 4 page social networking policy. Either people will follow the guidelines or they won’t. There is no reason to have a stipulation for blog posts that is different from Facebook updates.
• They try to regulate privacy settings for employees. By asking people to hide certain parts of information about themselves, you are asking them to not represent themselves completely online. You are asking for less real interactions than if they had the option to reveal more.
• They try to separate professional and personal life. While this may have been easy to do in the past, it is nearly impossible to sanction when “working hours” happen for many positions. I wake up at 3:00 am some days (because my daughter felt it was a good time to get up, mostly) and get started on answering emails and working on the things that require most attention. These kinds of policies would mean that I couldn’t tweet out about anything else but work during those times. It also means that connections that are made based upon work can never become more than those connections. Some of my best friends are a part of my twitter network as well. They aren’t one or the other. They are real people that live and work really hard. Let’s not regulate that out of them.
• They dictate (or try to) what company ownership of ideas is. Many communications and legal departments see anything that is done on company time as being a part of the company’s assets. Their understanding is that there is very little co-ownership of reflections, annotations, or conversations about the work that is going on. In essence, they claim everything. And at least according to my understanding of copyright law, unless they have signed something to that affect (which most places, unless there are strict non-disclosure agreements) this is not the case. The one thing that claiming everything does to employees is that they decide to save their best ideas for themselves. They don’t post things that could help the company, but rather they separate out what it is that is beneficial and they take it elsewhere. This drains value from the organization and takes away a big incentive for staff to want to contribute in a collaborative way to the projects that are in front of them.
• They impose disclaimers for all social media that do not have any basis in what social media is or can be. By putting a disclaimer on everything that says you can in no way speak for your organization is incredibly disempowering. The whole point of social media is that you are speaking for a unique perspective that others will want to listen to. By adding this disclaimer, you are essentially saying that you don’t want any of the value that others are creating to reflect back upon the employer that helped him/her to grow. These disclaimers are superfluous in a day when everyone has a profile and the profiles most certainly are not official. It is clear that when John McCain is tweeting, he is not speaking for the entirety of Arizona or for the whole senate. He is bringing his unique perspective to bear on the events of the day. This is what social media does; it gives a voice to everyone. Those voices are ones that we should celebrate and reward, not cut off at the knees in the hope of getting disavowing the disgruntled employee.

Mostly, the world of social media is so new that many places do not understand how to embrace a different paradigm of communication. The communications department can not control the message simply by putting out an reactionary policy. By assuming the worst of people, they are creating an environment of distrust and miscommunication. They are taking all of the bad things of social media out of context and convincing those with power that social media is bad for business. It isn’t. It is one of the things that will save your working life. It is engaging and invigorating because it brings all of our personality into a one space. We can be real people in social networks, and that is what we should want for our employees.

One of the best social networking policies I ever saw was this, from the blog Gruntled Employees. It is an entire policy put into a single tweet:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

It is simple and authentic. It is exactly what we need for our organizations. Let’s do that and nothing else.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Creating an Enterprise Employee Social Media Policy (itexpertvoice.com)
• The Social Media Policy – not just for the big players (mindjumpers.com)
• Does Your Agency Have A Social Media Policy? (worob.com)

All Educational Twitter Chats in One Calendar

Update [05.20.2011]: Sarah Kaiser made one of these too, and it may be more up to date than the one below.

I few weeks back I recognized a need for all of the hashtags and twitter chats to have a single calendar that could be added to my own Google Calendar. I looked around for such a thing, but all I found was a really nice list of every chat with dates and times. I have compiled this list into a Google Calendar that I would like to share.

Here is what I would love to happen:

1. Other folks would comment on this blog post and ask for me to share the calendar with them directly so that they can add their own educational chats and information (including links and documents that might be important) about the chats in the description section of each chat.
2. Anyone who wants to, can add this calendar to their Google Calendars so that they can stay up on when these great educational events are happening each week.
3. We share this calendar (with all of its contributions) to any new teacher, administrator, parent or student that gets interested in the educational conversations happening on twitter.

If all of those things happened, I believe the communities we are all trying to create will have a much better understanding of what the entire community is up to. We will be able to pay attention when it is time to do so, and learn from one another much more easily.

Without further ado, here is how you can access the calendar:

Embed:

Here is the code for you in case you want to embed it too:

<iframe src=”https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?title=Educational%20Twitter%20Chats&mode=WEEK&height=500&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=9k50j34spec6pailr59uo2becg%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23060D5E&ctz=America%2FDenver” style=” border-width:0 ” width=”600″ height=”500″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”>

HTML Page:
Use this if you want to see only the calendar without adding it to your own Google Calendars.

Calendar ID:
Copy and Paste this into your Google Calendar to add the whole calendar: 9k50j34spec6pailr59uo2becg@group.calendar.google.com

iCal Address:
Use this one if you want to add the calendar to another program besides Google Calendar (iCal, Outlook, etc.)

Please let me know if I can provide this calendar in any other format. I’m looking forward to the conversation about the conversation.

Question 236 of 365: Who wins when others fail?

I don’t want to hear about other people not doing their jobs right.

It isn’t interesting, novel, or beneficial. It may make for cleverly underhanded conversation or ambitious posturing, but it doesn’t really do much good. I can complain about others not pulling their weight or not working the way I would, but I just end up feeling petty and unoriginal.

I don’t believe in basing my worth in an organization based upon the worth that I see in others. Everyone is judged on his or her own merits, and I am not responsible for the final word on quality. Even if you are evaluating work done by someone else, talking about it as an absolute failure is negating any contribution you may have made to the work. If you see yourself as so separate from the community of work that we are all engaged in, I don’t see how you have any ground to stand and judge what others have done. If, on the other hand, you are subject to the same environment, then you are responsible for making sure that mediocre work is not valued in the community. It is your responsible to set standards for yourself and others, but not to impose a sense of superiority about whether or not others have made the cut.

The fact is: you didn’t do the work. You could have, but you didn’t. And anyone can stand and tell you that they could have done a better job, but their lack of experience is disengenuine. You look at others work as a representation of the person who created it, and criticism of that work as criticizing the person. While I believe in being a critical friend sometimes, I cannot stomach the glossing over of hours of work in the hopes of summing up contributions into a soundbite.

You are either building capacity or you are burning bridges. There is hardly anything in-between. If things don’t look like the way you want, build relationships with those people who aren’t “doing it right.” If there needs to be a change in personnel, so be it. Don’t talk about it as if it were nothing. Don’t talk about work as not being worthy of your own prerequisites.  There is no line in the sand, across which is your sweet approval.

For our ears only is a hollow sentiment. Stating that something is not good enough to everyone but the person who could make it better is dishonest at best, and downright evil at worst. Nothing good comes from tearing down our future before we can even get there.

No one wins when the people around us fail. We are not better than those we work with, and we do not know better either. We just know different, and if our different is indeed better, then others will see that too. If our different is truly a success, there will be no denying it. Pointing out failures without providing a viable alternative is not winning. There is nothing learned from it because we haven’t done any of the work and we don’t know what lessons can be gathered from the failure itself.

I don’t need to hear it. It is one of the things that is holding us back from creating real change.

Question 226 of 365: What speaks to us?

I have a web alert set up for “social media” in my local area. Anything, whether it is a job or blog post or simply a quiet mention on the local news sends me an e-mail calling my attention to it. Usually, it turns up things that I am already aware of like a school’s new twitter account or a new business working their way through their newest iteration of “viral marketing.” I don’t often feel as though the things that I am interested in are really interested in me. Much of the time, the social media that is happening around me is much more concerned with broadcasting information rather than engaging in a conversation. Yesterday, though, was different. I felt as though someone was reaching through the screen and tugging at my shirt, employing me to come and act on what was going on. This is what it said (formatting is mine):

You are a natural communicator and a master of the written and spoken word.

You know how to convey complex topics in ways that both novices and experts will understand.

The power of your words influences people and shapes their opinions.

You can write case studies, white papers, press releases and other marketing collateral in your sleep.

Importantly, though, you are not old-school.

You embrace social media and its viral power.

You had a blog before most people knew what they were; you were on Facebook and Twitter before they were cool.

You spend your waking hours blogging and tweeting.

You understand and use a variety of social media platforms and outlets, and a lot of people follow you to hear your insights.

While I might never boast about myself in such terms, upon reading those words I couldn’t look away. I was drawn to the potency of being so direct. It was as if someone was taking the journey that I am on in these 365 days and splaying out on a table. While these words could be used to describe others, their urgency is arresting. All at once I wanted to be the one that these words were describing, to feel validated and unencumbered by these talents that seemingly so few people see as talents.

Each one of these statements struck a different chord within me and I wanted to explore exactly why that was.

When I think back to when writing was hard, I had to set aside a specific time and space to find an elusive muse. Now, I pull out a cell phone, iPad or laptop and the words just come. I don’t lack for stories to tell, pedagogy to analyze, or technology to dissect. I pull construct ideas, turning them over in my mind until I can figure them out. I find images and links and all kinds of media that speak to my experience, and nothing is out of bounds. Most importantly, I question. I question what is possible and I question what is good. I lend value to the words and seek out the truth in identity. I think about all that has come before and I know that I am not alone in a quest for expression or commentary. I know that the network of creation around me is supporting my efforts, one word at a time.

When I speak, it isn’t to obfuscate the world that I am co-creating. I seek to educate and to let simmer the ideas I find engaging until there is only flavor and further inquiry left. I do not dumb down, either. But I understand how to frame conversations and I do so until the only thing within that outline has a rich context, no matter who the viewer is. I do not stick to a single form of expression or arena of influence because I do not see value in arbitrary barriers to learning. The tools for presentation are all at my fingertips and I mix and match at will. I find audio resonant with audience, video triggers value, and words awaken the mind. Nothing less is worth our time.

When people link to me or retweet my work, they lend credence to a version of history that shifts with everything I consume and learn. I focus attention on what matters to me, and it never ceases to amaze how many others feel the same. I know this because I am a part of a conversation and a community. We are engaged in the act of rebellion, always. It is rebellious to influence others. It is rebellious to write and persuade. It is rebellious to have an opinion and to support it with everything you author. It is my responsibility to rebel in such a way. I’m not sure I know anything else at this point.

And I research. It is never the world according to Ben Wilkoff, but rather hyperlinked vignettes that aim to reinvent the world. There is polish in a PDF, in a slide deck, in action research. Collaboration is drafting, and publishing is posting. The process is an act of courage for finding an authority all my own. And in moments I feel that authority. In moments, I feel like final drafts are for people who have stopped exposing and promoting what is ongoing. So, I iterate. I never stand on a case study or white paper for very long. They are stale from the first time they get’s saved to a hard drive. Links are substantial. They allow you to rewrite history and focus attention on the next day’s rather than yesterday’s news. Knowing what is still relevant is my work every day.

And sometimes I use a typewriter. Sometimes, I know the tools of connection so well that it makes sense to bring a solitary notion back into the equation. I do not engage in echo chambers. I write because that is what is new. New media isn’t merely about comments, aggregation and syndication. It is about having a new perspective and articulating it through those means. The new school is about assimilating who we are and were into who we will become, and anticipating what we will need when we get there. It is a blend of tactile and transformational. It is creation wherever people are. It is more about those people and their connection to others. We are the links. We are the words.

When I watch the traffic of a single tweet as it bounces around among friends, I see action within each bounce. One annotates and one embellishes. One retweets and one reminisces. There is no single path that a meme can take, but each shows the value in tracing influence and challenging convention. Social media’s goal is to subvert convention and hierarchy. It is to go use the spaces that already exist to proliferate and saturate those that are already savvy and those who have yet to get on board. Social media makes those who do not engage feel as though they are missing something. That is virality. When the old networks of email and phone calls get mixed up in the madness of sharing what is new and bold. When grandmothers are suggesting video to their grandchildren, we know that we have changed the order of things. And that is what we must do. We must continue to use leverage legacy systems and inject them with the networked values of the blogosphere. The power of social media is in being social with media, not the media itself. It is in creating the context for the things that we have always done. It isn’t optional, and no one will do it for us.

Everyone has a journey and here is mine:

• I joined my first social network in 2003… along with 3 million other people.
• I first blogged in the winter of 2004… at least 4 million other people beat me to it.
• I sent my first tweet in 2007… by then 8 million others had sent theirs.

Being first doesn’t matter. Having a presence does.

I don’t sleep until I have posted my questions and ideas of the day. I don’t read or watch without thinking about sharing, commenting or annotating. This is the way my mind works. Anything that I can’t rate, clip, or link to has little value to me as a learning tool. Technological silos aren’t of interest to me because they have taken themselves out of the absolute value equation. They have already lost in the game of competition and reflection. My identity is wrapped up in what I can write and think about. If I lose the pulse of what is going on, I feel as though my own pulse is lost. While Virginia Woolf believed in a room of one’s own, I can only advocate for a blog. It is the one space that sanity and understanding of self can happen in public. That can be a person or a company, the blog is the public face that we wish we could have had with us all of our lives, crafting it and changing it to suit everything we have tried on or tried to make work. We are public institutions, and it is time we all start taking control of it.

I think that it all comes down to understanding.

I use social media because it is essential. I pick the voice and the vehicle, and I push it out to those who are most ready to hear what I have to say. The idea that others find value in what I do is powerful. The audience is what makes it authentic as is the greater purpose for creating change within what I see around me. And that is why these words spoke to me so much. I feel as though they were authentically crafted and offer up a reality that resonates with my own experience. The fact that it happened to be a part of a job posting is all the more engaging. It means that the change I seek is making its way into exactly the right places. It means, we are on the right track.

Questions 222 of 365: How gullible are we?

Gullibility is an ironic joke to those who are young. We tell each other that the word isn’t in the dictionary or that it is written on the ceiling. We prove ourselves gullible nearly every chance we get because we get so excited about the things that we know can’t possibly be true but that we wish were anyway. We believe in what our older siblings and parents tell us about bunnies who give away chocolate and monsters in closets. We continue to believe out of fear or pride.

As adults, though, we shun gullibility as a vice. We proclaim our abilities to rise above gullibility and rely upon the logic that we have honed over the years. And yet, we get sucked in anyway.

No fewer than four times today I received direct messages employing me to come and sign up for my chance to beta test iPads. These direct messages were from real people I know and follow. Each one of them were sucked into a slick looking webpage enough to give away their Twitter credentials and have their accounts hacked. They were drawn in by the promise of a free iPad. They were lulled into a false sense of security by a beautiful website theme. In short, they were gullible.

I don’t blame them, though. A few weeks ago, I was duped into entering my credentials to visit a mobile movie site. I realized my mistake, but it was awfully hard to tell on my phone that I wasn’t someplace like Netflix. But I think the broader point was that I wanted it to be that easy. I wanted to be able to watch full length movies on my phone so badly that I was willing to take the risk and pass out my account to anyone with enough gumption to promise it to me. I wanted to be gullible, and they knew that. They took what I held as the next logical step in the hope of technology and they ran with it. Because it wasn’t a giant leap, I was okay to be duped. I think that is exactly what happened to others today.

Because the iPad is something that likely each one of those people who out in their information were looking purchasing in the future, they saw this as the means to take that next step into iPad ownership. It wasn’t something that would just be nice to have down the road. These people had put enough time and thought into it to know that if there was some way of attaining one, they were going to do it. And rather than money, they were willing to shell out privacy in order to take that next step.

And, it is that next step that is going to kill us.

Well, maybe not kill, but surely get us into some pretty serious trouble. Because we are so eager for quick fixes and easy ways out, there is no limit to what others can propose to us. So long as it is not too outlandish or too far off what we can see directly in front of us, we are willing to accept some sacrifice to see where this path leads. We are willing to take the next steps with those that we are unfamiliar, but we would never do the same thing if they promised an entire journey.

This is the reason that most people don’t accept the “free cruise” flyer as legitimate, but they do accept the penny auction sites or sketchy Facebook targeted facebook ads (the ones that know your age and the fact that you are a father… just creepy). We accept what we can theorize into being. Whatever bit of magic there is in the offer (free, unlimited, etc.), there is always a basis in something real. There is always a reason that something is so cheap, and if we can see that reason as legitimate then the offer itself has been legitimized.

We are so gullible that we are willing to give away our universal passwords (most people use the same password for everything) for just the hope of attaining what we don’t have right now. It makes me worry about just how much we are being sold that is one step removed from reality. Was the promise of Google Wave’s revolutionary collaboration tool just a bit too magical? Is the promise of 3d video one step beyond what it is that we actually need? Are the ultra low prices at the local discount store or online retailer simply too much? Are we just being gullible?

The answer, probably, is yes.

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Question 214 of 365: What changes everything?

I don’t often make proclamations that I believe to be true for everyone. I don’t do this because I know that there is a high likelihood of me being wrong. So high, in fact, that I feel as though it would undermine my credibility as an expert on much of anything. However, for this I will make an exception.

There are two things (and two things only) that are required to create radical positive change:

1. Knowing that you are not the only expert in the room.
2. Never submitting or asking for the submittal of a piece of paper.

I didn’t realize that I held those core beliefs until yesterday. In a convsation I was having, I tried to summarize the main things that I try to get across whenever I speak in public and those are the two things that came out of my mouth. I didn’t realize how true they were until they were both out. I didn’t realize that I had been working toward them for years until they fell at my feet.

The reason I am writing this is to proclaim that I am not the only expert. I write this to be a part of what has come before, and to build upon it. I am on Twitter because I know that there are others that will give me great context and ideas and whole labors of love that they are contributing to the world. I work so that I can learn, and I play and publish so that I never forget what it is like to be a part of something bigger and more engaging than the endless monologue going on in my head.

And if in any meeting, classroom, or board room the participants will simply grant to the other people in the room and those following along via digital means that they are not the only ones with value and substance, there is no limit to what can be accomplished.

I am not talking about the wisdom of crowds. The revolutionary aspect of believing that you are not the only expert in the room comes in simply being humble enough to listen to others. You do not have to accept or believe in what they say. You may even find yourself rejecting their premises, but to simply listen for a moment to the other experts changes the ways in which decisions are made. It isn’t by consensus or by committee, decisions are made with the best expertise available, no matter what the source. If it is a 12 year old or a seasoned professional, knowing that there are other experts in the room and giving them a voice is the only way to move forward.

The other belief is counterintuitive. If we are listening to all experts and being humble in our approach, surely we should accept paper submissions. Surely we should allow those who still use paper as their means of transmitting information to take part in creating value. To this I say: No.

The act of removing paper from the equation as a submission format is not meant to save trees, although it might do that. It is not meant to focus everyone on technology, although it may do that as well. Disolving the transmission of paper is responsible solely for disrupting expectations, and exploding what is possible.

Paper isn’t about ease of use, it is about making concrete and singular the things that would rather be abstract and collaborative. Anything that is written down is held in one place and one time. This is special, and we should treasure it. But it is one thing, and it can only be that. By submitting that piece of paper, you are dictating all that it can be. By asking for someone to submit a piece of paper, you are limiting what you can receive.

And some will say that we need to limit submissions. We need ot have signatures that can only be that. But submission of a signature that is not tied to the one piece of paper means that we can find that signature elsewhere. We can string together all of the documents with that scrawling across the bottom, and we can start to tell a story through tagged contracts.

This is a shallow look at revolution. But take a look at the alternative:

Those that disagree with the two above statements as the catalyst for change could be defined as Paper Experts. They are experts that are only backed up by the paper that defines them (diplomas and letters of recommendation). In every submission of paper to others, they are proclaiming their value (every report, handout, and printed email). In every request for paper they are trying to hold on to power (jumping through legal and beurecratic hoops for signatures and documents requests). Their paper expertise is static. They do not hqve the power to expand their knowledge into a network of experts because networks are not made out of paper. And, they are certainly not made out of people who proclaim their value above all others in the room.

So, if we want to move beyond being Paper Experts, we must acknowledge publicly every time we speak that we are not the only voices in the room worth listening to. We must honor this in our actions as well by leaving time to listen and protocols to support that effort. We must also stop giving people the option to submit pieces of paper as proof of their knowledge and expertise. We must stop asking for drafts to be marked up. We must stop making copies so that we can further devalue the precious comodity of original creqtive thought. If something is worth sharing, it is worth sharing in open communication. If something is worth submitting, it is worth publishing to those who need the information. If something is worth making, it is worth exposing to the light of day.

I do not take these words lightly. I understand the gauntlet I have laid out for myself. I just know that it is something I started a long time ago by learning from students and allowing them to turn in their essays on a blog. I guess they are still teaching me.