Emergent complexity from social networks

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If I was an employee, I’d want to have someone like Ross Mayfield as my boss. He really understands the way that work is changing. I came across this good (but too short) ZD Net interview on Web 2.0 for the enterprise via Jay Cross.

In a panel interview, Ross Mayfield starts by saying that collaborative work tools must be simple to be effective. The real complexity comes out of the emergent social network, not in the software on which it’s based. Over-engineering for complex social (work) environments seems to be counterproductive. Ross also says that automating processes won’t give you any sustainable competitive advantages either, because others will be able to replicate these processes just as well. Where social tools, like wikis, have an impact is in changing the corporate culture. In a more transparent and collaborative work environment, powered by collaborative web-based tools, information hoarding is punished and sharing is rewarded. The workplace changes.

The most memorable line is when Ross shows the disconnect between the new world of work and the old world of education; “These are the people who did their homework on MySpace, and it was called cheating, and then they come to the enterprise and it’s called collaboration”.

The times they are a changin’

Here are Ross Mayfield’s own words, following up from the ZD Net “sound bite”:

Blogs and Wikis are inherently more transparent than email, where 90% of collaboration occurs.  Users are first gaining exposure to these tools as consumers, within consumer culture.  The default in that culture with these tools is transparency and sharing.  Corporate cultures vary. I can say that we see earlier adoption by corporations with healthy cultures and management practices such as 360 degree reviews, and adoption practices matter.  But it should be noted that consumer culture spills over to corporate culture.  And because this culture shift aids practice building, I’d assert that these tools will trend us towards transparency.

Intro to Blogs in Education

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I’ve been asked to conduct an in-service workshop for our local high school. The original request was for blogs, wikis and everything else Web 2.0 but I’ve managed to limit it to just blogs for starters. Participation is voluntary, so I’m assuming a motivated group of teachers.

I know that I could spend a day or two on the subject, but my challenge will be to motivate and hopefully instruct a bit within the one hour available. I’m asking for help from anyone who has done this before.

I’m considering starting with a short video to get attention. Something like The Machine is Us/ing Us, but I’d like any other recommendations. This could be followed by a discussion of the concerns that teachers may have about using blogs for their classes. Finally, I’ll show how to create a blog and set it up for class use. My first impulse is to use Eduspaces, even though it is more complicated to set up than WordPress.com or Blogger. The social networking aspects of Eduspaces resemble Facebook and the students might prefer this, even if the teachers may need more help with it.

I’ll also create a short list of web resources as a take-away. This list would include Will Richardson, Teachers Teaching Teachers, and Start Blogging. Any other excellent resources for beginners out there?

Training, for all that ails you

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“Canadian companies aren’t spending enough on training,” said the announcer on the radio this morning. My first thought was that we would never hear the news that we weren’t spending enough on bandages in our healthcare system. Once again, the mass media and the so-called experts get it wrong. It makes you wonder if there’s a training industry lobby out there.

According to the Conference Board of Canada:

“Canadian organizations are under increasing pressure, due to a tight labour market and competitive demands, to renew and upgrade workers’ skills. Building workers skills through training, learning and development is one way for organizations to compete. Yet, TLD spending in Canada is stagnant,” said Michael Bloom, Vice-President, Organizational Effectiveness and Learning.

Read in its entirety, this makes sense, as TLD is only one way to improve performance. There are many other ways and usually training is the most expensive method. I’ve noticed that many large organisations have a tendency to slap on the training bandaid once any problem has been labelled a human performance issue. It seems that the media and research institutes reinforce this behaviour. However, training that is not directly related to developing specific skills and knowledge wastes time, bores workers and costs money.

This is not the first, nor the second, but the third time that I have heard our national broadcaster report the unfounded notion that training can solve unrelated performance problems. This is the same as prescribing medication without a diagnosis. Of course I don’t really blame the CBC, because it is getting this misinformation from our training and learning “experts”. The snake oil salesmen have jumped on the Conference Board report and are demanding that companies spend more on training. That would be a costly mistake.

I also noticed from the Conference Board’s report that informal learning is actually being mentioned:

Informal learning, which is not well tracked or monitored, may be occurring more frequently. Respondents said 42 per cent of all learning occurs informally.

I get the sinking feeling that informal learning will soon be commoditized by the TLD industry and sold like training currently is – as a solution looking for a problem.

To read the complete report you would have to spend $975 to find out what many of us already know. Training is a means (one of several, not limited to learning & development), while performance is the real goal.

Do we need a public alternative to Facebook?

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As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming. As private systems proliferate, it’s time for our publicly-funded institutions to jump on the Web 2.0 cluetrain and offer an alternative.

Following the recent mass murder at Virginia Tech, over 200 Facebook communities were created as “a gathering place for those affected by this event, both for people who lived through it and those moved to express their condolances”. At Library 2.0, [dead link] Laura Cohen also noted that there was no equivalent social networking system (SNS) provided by Virginia Tech, so people, mostly students, had to use a commercial platform.

When I advise clients on Web 2.0 applications I discuss the pros and cons of free systems. These are excellent “use as is” systems, as long as you don’t intend to move your data or think you will need it in the event of new rules or a system shut-down. Some platforms, like social bookmarks, let you export your data in an open format which can be used by other systems. However, you cannot do this with most SNS, nor can you export your posts from the ubiquitous Blogger. That is a critical distinction between “free” and “open source”. With the latter, you can access the source code, export your data and move to another host. The more data you create, the more important it will be to control it.

Our public institutions may be missing the boat on SNS. Currently there are over 15 million Facebook users and the growth curve is steep. Universities could easily adopt open source SNS, like Elgg,[dead link] to provide a similar free service. The advantage would be ownership by a publicly-funded institution or perhaps even the alumni association. Laura Cohen [dead link]sees the loss of this information as a cultural issue:

I’m concerned about this because many academic libraries are charged with preserving the cultural memory of their institutions. In the age of Web 2.0, a great deal of this culture is being played out in networked communities unaffiliated with these institutions. If campus constituencies are gathering in external spaces, how will their activities be preserved? The third party gathering places – Facebook and many others – may or may not survive over the years. In fact, they surely won’t outlive most of the institutions with which their members are affiliated. When these services fold, their content will fold with them. Issues of privacy aside – and these are major issues – a great opportunity for preservation will be lost.

I noticed that our local university is highlighting student bloggers [dead link]. Unfortunately, all of these blogs are hosted on Google’s Blogger. Why not provide a Mount Allison University blog for life to all students? Hosting it on an open source platform would also give students the ability to export their data if they so wish. Furthermore, a free blog and/or SNS would be an excellent way to stay in touch with alumni. An easy first step for educational institutions would be to test out Elgg’s Eduspaces [dead link]. It’s free AND open source.

Open data protocols and open source systems have become more important for me as I realize that I have almost one thousand posts on this website and many more comments. This is an important professional archive for me now, but this was not an issue initially. You don’t realize the importance of the open source model until after you’ve passed the point of no return.

Update: You may want to watch this video overview [dead link]of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I haven’t researched it to verify that it’s accurate.

Blog Comment Tracking

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When I discuss the basics of personal knowledge management on the Web I usually suggest starting with a Feed Aggregator (like Bloglines) and a Social Bookmark service (like Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us). Using these two tools, you can manage the streams of information that flow by and mark items of note for future reference and sharing.

One of the more difficult aspects of reading blogs has been tracking the comments. Now there are several services available to help you with that. Basically, they act like a feed reader for specific posts and tell you if anyone has added another comment since you last looked. I started with coComment last year, but found it had a few glitches when I used the Firefox plug-in, so I abandoned it. It probably works fine now, as I get frequent visits to my site via coComment.

How do I know that I get visits from coComment? I use Blogflux’s MapStats which is a service only for blogs that shows you who has visited your site, where they come from, what search terms they’ve used, etc. Blogflux has recently introduced Commentful, which is similar to coComment and lets you track any conversation with a right mouse-click. So far I’ve found it simple and easy to track blogs where I’ve left comments.

One other comment tracking service that I’ve come across is co.mments, which appears to be simple and easy, but I haven’t tried it out.

Once you’re comfortable with an RSS feed aggregator, the next addition to your learning 2.0 toolbox should be a comment tracker.

Our Crooked Broker Society

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Dave Pollard shows how dysfunctional relationships in a “crooked broker society” create systems that are not fit for meaningful human life.

In each industry, an Exploiter oppresses a Desperate Supplier. This unbalanced relationship is reinforced by a Procurer who in turn gouges an Addicted Buyer. Dave’s graphic shows several examples:

brokersociety.jpg
Image: Dave Pollard

So what about public education?

Are teachers the desperate suppliers, exploited by the school system which has a virtual monopoly on education jobs?

Are publishers, testing companies and universities the procurers who gouge the addicted parents, looking for any advantage in a shrinking middle class?

To show how vested interests control public education and stifle reform, Roger Shank describes the roles of these groups, in Rich Folks Misunderstand Educational Reform:

1. Teachers – Teachers would have to teach differently and no one really wants to change what they do on a day to day basis. True, teachers’ lives have been made so miserable by previous politicians’ attempts at reform that they are more open to change than ever, but still, they really don’t want to have to go to school to learn new methodologies.

2. Publishers – Big corporations have a real stake in education staying the way it has been. They don’t want to throw out all their textbooks and start over. They would spend a lot of money making sure this doesn’t happen.

3. Testing companies – Politicians have helped create an enormous industry that prepares and grades tests. They won’t give up their business without a fight. No real reform will take place if teachers are still teaching to the test and if we continue to teach stuff that is easy to test rather than giving kids open ended issues to think about and real workplace skills.

4. Universities – Any real school reform means changing how universities conduct admissions and convincing them to teach in college the subjects they have foisted upon the high schools (like algebra). This will never happen since it would also mean that colleges would need to interview students instead of relying upon grades and test scores for admission.

5. Parents – Parents tend to think school is a competition and they reinforce all the testing and grading in the hopes that their kid will win. In addition they believe that whatever they learned in school is what should be taught despite the fact that they have since forgotten all that they learned in school.

I think that local control of public education could fragment this system and weaken the position of the middlemen so that the Exploiters and Procurers would lose their centralized power and influence. “Small pieces, loosely joined” may be the right strategy for educational reform.

World Intellectual Property Day :-(

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World Intellectual Property Day has become little more than a lobbyist day with creators, users, and the facts once again getting lost in the process.

Read the rest of Michael Geist’s commentary on WIP Day in Canada.

On the bright side, there is Creative Commons as a counterbalance to vested corporate interests:

In sum, the Creative Commons toolset encourages and enables participation in creativity by everyone, not only those with access to copyright lawyers. This is as it should be in modern democracies, where the tools for expression and creativity are available to everyone as everyday consumer goods.

How our structures shape us

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If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.

This quote from Geary Rummler and Alan Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses or prisons.

I believe that the great work to be done at the beginning of this century is to create new organisational models that reflect our humanity. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and in many cases have become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

What happens when we don’t question authority? Let me re-quote this article on ABC’s recent re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phony. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discusses the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

In A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan (1967), John Culkin wrote that, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than to help keep a flawed one going.

Atlantic Standard Tribe

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The Future of Work has an article on distributed work zones — Zevillage in Normandy and Hidden Tech in Massachusetts. These zones offer a sense of local community to freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs. Zevillage is unique in France in that it is the only rural area with high speed Internet access, something that is available in most parts of Canada.

The basic premise of these zones seems to be that many workers have the ability to tele-commute and don’t need to live in an urban area. Avoiding a costly commute seems to be a motivator as are lower housing costs. The zones fill a need by connecting local, mostly home-based, workers who can meet face-to-face to made professional life a bit less lonely.

Work Commons seem to be similar or complementary to these kinds of zones. What I noticed about these two examples is that both are fairly close to major urban centres. For instance, Zevillage is 2 hour train ride to Paris. Out here in Atlantic Canada we don’t have that easy of a commute to a large city. Montreal is an overnight train trip and Boston is a full day’s drive.

Still, I’m wondering if an Atlantic distributed worker zone would be of interest? It would be kind of like a virtual Commons, linking all of us who work in our time zone. Perhaps we could call it the Atlantic Standard Tribe (inspired by Cory Doctorow – another Canadian).

Here is what Hidden Tech is focused on:

In general, HIDDEN-TECH members fall into the following broad market categories: PR/Marketing/Newsletters; Content; E-commerce services/Retailers; Hardware/Software Developers; Web Design/Hosting, and Management Consulting/IT Training. Everyone from jewerly designers to photographers, software developers to marketing specialists attend meetings. Their connection is that they are small, usually not incorporated and use technology to drive their business.

Is this worth following up? I’m willing to do the ground work if there is some level of interest, so contact me or add a comment.

Management is the problem

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Richard Florida writes that Toyota has now surpassed GM as North America’s largest automobile manufacturer, and says that it was due to better systems and better management:

The problem has long had one source: management. Oh, they have had their excuses. High wages, recalcitrant unions, pensions and healthcare. Nonsense. Toyota, Honda and other Japanese companies showed how workers were not real problem. They used American workers – sometimes the very same workers in the very same factories – to make quality cars American want to buy. The real problem was management. Given the right management and production systems, American workers did just fine.

I would say that most of our problems in our industrial economy can be attributed to bad management models, whether it be ineffective public education, short-sighted politicians, bloated bureaucracies or arrogant telecommunications companies. Toyota used the same conditions, changed the rules of the game and came out on top.  Who’s coming under the radar to defeat the  flawed operating models in your industry?