OpenSource

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@DaveGray – “trainers must know the thing they are training. Most knowledge today flows too fast to learn, then teach. Simultaneity is faster”

Queensland Police on Facebook: “There was no master plan” by @RossDawson

One of the key lessons was that it was critical to have built their social media presence before it was needed. They understood its role and how to use it before the disaster hit and it became the best possible way to communicate with the public.

Hopefully other organizations can learn the lesson of engaging before you need it, particularly in being able to respond effectively to online conversations.

There was no master plan. They were just using the tools they had to address the issues of the moment. Policies, as required, were created on the fly. If they got something wrong, they simply apologized and people generally accepted that.

Are you prepared for the Internet of Things? – by @michelemmartin

The Internet of Things is going to automate a ton of jobs that have never been automated before, reducing the numbers of workers needed for many occupations or eliminating jobs altogether. At the the same time it will create new jobs in areas we can’t even predict.  It will also change the nature of many jobs–the skills and knowledge, the processes, etc–in ways we can only imagine.

Paying attention to how technology and other trends may be shaping the new world of work is incredibly important. It allows us to see where old careers may be dead or dying and where new opportunities may await us. It can show us how our current jobs may change and what we need to do to take advantage of change, rather than letting it happen to us.

Rupert Murdoch’s ‘cognitive disconnect’ by @CharlesHGreen

The problem is that the press wields enormous power, even in allegedly educated and refined countries.  So do the police.  And when Scotland Yard’s leadership, and even Downing Street appear compromised by an evil corporate culture like News Corp.’s, there are serious implications for society’s ability to trust anyone.

Open Work: Using Social Software To Make Our Work Visible Again – Too few social business Enterprise 2.0, social media efforts know of  open work – by @dhinchcliffe

Open work, like open source, open standards, or even the more prosaic scholastic open house for that matter, has at its core the ethic that hiding the work process in shadows is generally counterproductive. Collaboration and teamwork work best when there is abundant communication, transparency, and therefore most important of all, trust in the process. Open work is the most likely and most direct route to enabling this.

 

Here are some of the things I found via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

@stangarfield – “Influence knowledge sharing behavior by modeling it – lead by example, practice what you preach, show how it is done: get followers”

@nilofer – “Being genuinely creative means not knowing where you are going. Accept uncertainty.”

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The Bitcoin Epoch: It is Akin to the Printing Press Revolution – via @petervan

Hang on, you may think, how can a currency be created out of thin air? The answer is central banks do this all the time. Remember most money in existence is not in a physical form. Central banks create ‘base money‘ to keep their currencies flowing. Its a bit of an esoteric process as if they create too much then deflation follows yet too little and the liquidity of the economy suffers. Bitcoin uses the ‘mining’ of its peers to create the ‘base money’, so the balance of getting its level of generation right is created not by top-down be-suited men in offices, but by the natural ebb and flow dictated by the number of peers in the system.

The dark side of being human – via @JoanVinallCox [related post on organizational architecture]

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?

Kai Nagata: Why I quit my job – via @JoanVinallCox

So I didn’t quit my job because I felt frustrated or that my career was peaking. I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means.

Sharing For Art and Profit: Creative Commons Celebrates ‘The Power of Open’

Creative Commons not only empowers creators and remixers, it can also be a driver of viral success. When Nina Paley, director of the animated feature “Sita Sings the Blues”, was unable to release her film due to music licensing issues, she decided to release it for free online with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. The film was acclaimed by critics such as Roger Ebert, and after an outpouring of donations and revenue from related merchandise, Paley was able to secure distribution. In the book, she explains, “When an artist is broke, you start thinking that it has to do with the value of their work, which it doesn’t. I have also seen artists who refused to create unless they got paid … I’ve never had more money coming at me than when I started using Creative Commons BY-SA. I have a higher profile. I don’t spend anything on promotion. My fans are doing it for me and buying merchandise. Sharing put me on the map.”

Here’s what I learned on Twitter this past week:

@literacyadviser “The only truly effective web filter is an educated mind.” via @ jonhusband

@dweinberger “The only way I know to solve big problems anymore is to do it in public.”

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“Training for future use of a skill is pretty much pointless.” by @JaneBozarth

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Why you need to understand political policy by @cognitivepolicy via@drmcewan

In other words, we are more like defense lawyers than philosophers.  We are compelled by our judgments to feel a moral view is appropriate and correct, then defend it if pressed to do so.  We don’t start with a set of assumptions and reason our way to conclusions.  And this process occurs largely outside conscious awareness so it takes practice to recognize when it is happening.

This relates to a common psychological phenomenon called “confirmation bias” which refers to the tendency to be overly critical of information that challenges what one believes to be true (or the tendency to uncritically accept information that supports one’s belief).  We see this all the time in politics.  People are predisposed to consider their values, views and positions as inherently good and right.  At the same time, we tend to be suspicious of anyone who holds a view different from our own.

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Industrial vs Networked approaches to work: Fire the indispensable? OR nurture a linchpin culture? via @minutrition

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@courosa “Ning Exposed – Tech Company Scams its Clients” [2008]

Is Ning a scam?
There’s a theory that Ning’s actions are part of a carefully planned scam to make the company the next MySpace or Facebook. Instead of spending millions of dollars advertising and gathering enough members to compete with MySpace or Facebook, why not create a social network platform and rely on the ambition of thousands of other network creators to up build membership. When the time is right, simply take all of those members and combine them into one super-site, Ning.com

[Read the comments on the above link to get a better idea of the issues]

This reminds me how important it is to own your data, and the following show two open source options to Ning’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform:

@elggdotcom “there is a hosted version of Elgg coming in May”

@romiranck “A hosted version of Drupal, Drupalgardens, is in beta now. Testing it out.”

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You may have noticed that I’ve changed the tagline of this website to life in perpetual Beta. I find it an accurate description of my life and work. It’s been a subject of conversation here since 2006.