Mon, Nov 27, 2006
Ggeh and Trust #
Trust is such a critical component of collaboration, it's easy to dismiss. Other than acknowledging its importance, I haven't thought too deeply about the role of trust in collaboration. That started to change a few weeks ago, as the concept kept rearing its lovely head in all sorts of places. (LKM)
One of them was ChangRaeLee's beautiful novel, Native Speaker, which I reread this past week. On the surface, the book is a spy novel, and a compelling one at that. Dig a bit deeper, and you'll find that the book is really about the many nuances of personal identity. (LKN)
Featured prominently throughout the book is the notion of a ggeh, a Korean money club, where a small group of people -- usually friends or members of the community -- pool their money and redistribute it to the others. Lee's protagonist, Henry Park, says: (LKO)
Small ggeh, like the one my father had, work because the members all know each other, trust one another not to run off or drop out after their turn comes up. Reputation is always worth more than money.... (LKP)
In our ggeh, if you give a few dollars you can expect to receive a few hundred. The more you give, the more you can ask for; everyone comes to learn what's a fair amount. You send a letter. Then you come at night and you make your request. You spoke with Eduardo, who in the beginning spoke to John. Now you will simply speak to me. Bring an interpreter or phrase book. Everything is in private, we deal like family, among ourselves, without chits or contracts. This is why I must see your face, hear your voice, make certain that you live how you say. It doesn't matter what your color is, whether your breath reeks of garlic or pork fat or chilis. Just bring your wife or your husband, bring your children. If you want a down payment on a store, bring the owner of the store you work in now. Bring your daughter who wants to attend Columbia, bring her transcripts and civics essay and have her bring her violin. Bring X rays of your mother who needs a new hip. I want to see the fleshed shape of the need, I want to know the blood you've lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you, the blood you desperately want back from the world. (LKQ)
Here, Park is describing a very large-scale ggeh, and he emphasizes the importance of seeing people face-to-face in order to establish the requisite trust. (LKR)
I asked my parents about ggeh, and their understanding of the concept was very different from Lee's. I think their opinions were strongly colored by their experiences with ggeh in Korea, whereas what Lee describes seems more pertinent to the immigrant experience. One thing I did learn from my parents was that ggeh were generally organized by women, which is remarkably reminiscent of how microfinance generally works. (LKS)
I did some searching on the Internet, and found some interesting links and references to ggeh, but details were relatively scarce. If some of my Korean peeps can shed more light on how they work, please let me know. (LKT)
/collaboration | Posted at 10:12pm
Catalytic Communities' Secret Sauce: Trust #
A few weeks ago, I drove down to TheTechMuseum in SanJose for the Tech Museum Awards exhibit. All 25 recipients were there showing off their projects, including TheresaWilliamson, who was an Equality Award Laureate for her organization, CatalyticCommunities. (LKF)
I'm a big fan of Theresa's. She is a wonderful person, and she's doing awesome work. CatalyticCommunities, besides having one of the best names in the business, is a knowledge-sharing network for community activists all over the world. It consists of an online database of community solutions and a community center in Rio de Janeiro known as the Casa. There are over 130 projects over nine countries documented on the site, and over a thousand local community leaders have met at the Casa to share stories. (LKG)
What's really interesting is that she's doing an outstanding job of leveraging technology to help catalyze her network, even though her tools and her organization's knowledge of tools is rudimentary at best. Theresa says that she first heard the term, "Wiki," from me at a talk I gave a few years ago. Well, her ignorance of the concept hasn't hurt her one bit, and it may have even helped. (LKH)
At the awards exhibit, I asked her what she thought her secret sauce was for catalyzing a vibrant network. "Trust," she responded without hesitation. I shook my head vigorously and protested, "No, that's too trite. What have you done to build that trust?" She thought for a moment, then cited the importance of Casa. She suggested that face-to-face interaction was even more critical for building trust in Brazil than it was in this country, where a culture of digital literacy is starting to emerge. (LKI)
I think the jury is still out as to whether or not face-to-face is inherently better for building trust than other mediums. Nevertheless, there is unquestionably something special about face-to-face interactions, yet many organizations don't do a very good job of leveraging this. (LKJ)
Looking back, I was too quick to dismiss Theresa's initial response: Trust. This past year, several groups asked me to comment on online tools they were building to help catalyze knowledge sharing and collaboration within their networks. The majority of the efforts were completely over-engineered. The problem was that the designers got too excited about Web 2.0 bells and whistles, and didn't think deeply about how those features addressed their underlying challenges, challenges such as how to build trust within a network. (LKK)
When I originally founded BlueOxenAssociates, my main goals were to identify and name patterns of high performance collaboration and to understand the forces (like trust) these patterns facilitated. While I haven't completely strayed from these goals, I've certainly done my share of meandering. My conversations with Theresa and others these past few months have helped me refocus, and I hope I'll have interesting things to report over the next year. (LKL)
/collaboration | Posted at 9:49pm
Tue, Nov 21, 2006
Implications of the Kintera Data Sharing Announcement #
AndyDale reported earlier this month that La Leche League will be using Kintera's software for member and donor management. More importantly, the two organizations will use open "standards" to share data between their respective systems. Andy's company, ooTao, is implementing the data sharing using technology known as XDI. (LK3)
The data sharing problem is well-known in every large organization, and it boils down to this: You have common data across multiple systems and databases, and none of it is linked. Because it's not linked, it's difficult to update information, it's difficult to maintain a high-level accuracy, and it's difficult to do any serious reporting. Every time you add a new system, it gets exponentially harder to do all of the above. (LK4)
Does Kintera's announcement mean that the data sharing problem has been solved? No. But it's still an important announcement. To understand why, it's important to delve a bit deeper into what makes the data sharing problem hard in the first place. (LK5)
First, standards are inherently hard. (LK6)
Second, getting an established market of vendors to agree on a set of standards is even harder. The problem is that every vendor thinks that lock-in is good for their business. The bigger problem is that they're absolutely right, as long as lock-in is the status quo. Open data sharing is not viable until a critical mass of tools support it, and there's no short-term return on being first to market (other than marketing value, which I would argue is underappreciated). (LK7)
Third, those who have been trying to address the problem have been going about it the wrong way. In particular, they've made the social problem bigger when it should be smaller, and they've made the technical problem smaller when it should be bigger. (LK8)
The most common mistake that people make when trying to agree on a standard is to try to get everyone on board up-front. That is the path to certain failure. The best approach is to get two people on board up-front, build something that works and is open, and then approach others about joining the effort. Getting small groups of people to collaborate is hard enough. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. (LK9)
On the technical front, people seem to have oversimplified the problem. It's not just about coming up with the right set of APIs and XML schemas. You have to also think about identity -- on many levels, as it turns out. The data needs to be addressable, which means you have to think deeply about identifiers. Also, the most common type of common data is people information -- in other words, digital identities. The requirements around DigitalIdentity -- especially UserCentricIdentity -- are more complex. The good news is that engineers are well-equipped to handle this kind of complexity; you just need to make sure it's part of the problem statement. (LKA)
Back to the Kintera announcement. They're doing the right thing by building something that works between two organizations, rather than declaring a standard up-front and trying to convince everyone to jump on board willy nilly. (LKB)
They're also doing the right thing by hiring ooTao to implement this piece, because ooTao understands the identity problem, and it has credibility in the grassroots identity community. While calling XDI a "standard" is a stretch -- there's not even a published spec yet -- it will most certainly be open, and a number of organizations and individuals have already contributed to it. More importantly, all of this stuff will work with OpenID and i-names, two technologies that can be accurately called open standards. (LKC)
Will XDI "win"? It doesn't matter. The architectural and practical lessons learned in implementing and deploying something real will move us one significant step closer to solving the data sharing problem, regardless of the role that XDI plays in the the long-term solution. (LKD)
Should you avoid XDI because of the uncertainty over whether it will "win"? Absolutely not. The architectural changes you will need to make to support XDI will be largely spec-independent. Should you need to migrate to a different spec at a later point, the work required will be relatively minor. (LKE)
/collaboration/idcommons | Posted at 7:59am
Tue, Nov 14, 2006
Excellent Talks this Week #
Three excellent talks are scheduled for the Peninsula this week. The first is tonight at BayCHI: FredTurner will talk about his new book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: How the Whole Earth Catalog Brought Us Virtual Community. His talk is at PARC tonight at 7:30pm. (LJQ)
Tomorrow, AllisonFine will talk about her new book, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. It's required reading for folks in foundations or nonprofits. The talk will be at Margaret Jacks Hall at Stanford tomorrow at 7pm. (LJR)
On Thursday at 4pm, JimSpohrer will speak at PARC on his ServiceScience initiative at IBM. If you haven't heard him give this talk yet, you need to go. His vision and approach are extraordinary. (LJS)
Unfortunately, I won't be able to make Fred's talk tonight, but I am planning to be at Allison's, and I'm hoping to make Jim's. (LJT)
/events | Posted at 10:35am
Sun, Nov 12, 2006
Learning and Collaboration #
On a warm summer evening in Virginia last July, I sat on MarciaConner's porch and wondered aloud whether we were in the same business. Marcia cares about collaboration, but she's nuts about learning. If she doesn't hear the word "learning" in the context of projects she's involved with, alarm bells go off in her head. (LJ7)
I'm equally passionate about collaboration and learning, but I can talk about my work without ever mentioning the latter. My reasoning, as I explained that night, was that good collaboration encompasses learning, and the best way to learn is to collaborate. You can't talk about "collaboration" without also thinking about "learning." (LJ8)
DougEngelbart often says that high-performance communities are experts at CoDIAK -- collectively developing, integrating, and applying knowledge. I hate the acronym, because I think it's unnecessarily esoteric. What CoDIAK boils down to is: (LJ9)
There's that "learn" word again. (LJD)
I still believe that collaboration encompasses learning, but I've changed my mind about whether it's important to explicitly mention learning in the context of my work. Marcia, of course, is to blame. We were chatting in the attic of a colleague's home last Friday, with her two year old son, Clarke, playing on the floor as we talked, and our conversation again drifted towards learning. I was talking about a project I'm involved with, and I explained that while it still felt important, I wasn't learning any more. (LJE)
As soon as I said it, I laughed to myself, because it sounded like something that Marcia would have complained about. Yesterday, as I was reading AllisonFine's Momentum, a book that Marcia gave me, I was again struck by how important learning is to my work. I believe very strongly in defining projects concretely and getting things done, but I refuse to take on a client who doesn't care about learning. I expect to learn from my work, and I expect my clients to want to learn as part of our collaboration. This is not a requirement to be in this business. There are plenty of projects where clients don't give a damn about learning. They just want you to get the work done. I've been offered these kinds of projects in the past, and the work itself is often intellectual, enjoyable, and well-paying. I still turn it down. My mission is to help people learn about collaboration, and I won't work on projects where that's not happening. (LJF)
I've already made it a practice to describe BlueOxenAssociates' long-term goal as building and facilitating a LearningCommunity centered around collaboration. I could just as easily have chosen Engelbart's term, ImprovementCommunity, or EtienneWenger's term, CommunityOfPractice, but I chose PeterSenge's instead, and the fact that "learning" is there was a major reason why. I'm currently in the process of revamping our web site, and I plan on making "learning" a more explicit part of our message. (LJG)
/collaboration | Posted at 9:59am
Curriculum on Thinking and Learning #
I've done a lot of volunteer teaching, and back in 1998, I had become fed up with the classes that I was helping with. In particular, I had spent six horrible weeks volunteering at a class to teach kids computers, which turned out to be a glorified typing class. (LJ2)
Afterwards, I asked the volunteer coordinator if I could come up with my own curriculum, and she agreed. Most of my exercises did not require any interaction with an actual computer. The first exercise was to have kids write down instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which I then followed literally. Another exercise converted the kids into a computer and demonstrated how complex problems could be solved by breaking them down into simple operations. The tour de force was when I had the kids rip apart musical greeting cards to show that computers came in other forms besides desktop and laptop machines. (LJ3)
That experience was far more rewarding, but also made me realize that I didn't really want to teach kids about computers. I wanted to help them become better thinkers. So on August 24, 1998, I wrote down three principles that represented my philosophy for what a proper curriculum should achieve. On April 8, 2002, I added a fourth principle. Looking back, that fourth principle reveals how much my mindset had shifted towards the importance of collaboration. Not coincidentally, I happened to be knee deep in the planning stages of BlueOxenAssociates at that point. (LJ4)
I just put the curriculum up on my Wiki at LearningCurriculum. In the spirit of MarkOehlert's recent challenge, here is the curriculum boiled down into six words: (LJ5)
Reward questions, stories, lateral thinking, collaboration. (LJ6)
/collaboration | Posted at 9:43am
Tue, Nov 07, 2006
Quilting Patterns from Gee's Bend #
Last month, I went to see "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" exhibition at the de Young Museum with my friend BettyToole. To be honest, I found most of the quilts disappointing. The story is very compelling, even if most of the quilts are mediocre. I wish the quality of the collection wasn't as hyped as it was, as it took away from the overall experience. (LHY)
There were a few beautiful quilts, however. My favorite was a red quilt in an "H" pattern by NettieYoung, and the story accompanying it is a wonderful commentary on the danger of patterns. (LHZ)
Young said: (LI1)
I always loved sewing. Didn't need a pattern. If I sew a dress or a quilt or something I liked, I can make it. I just draw it out the way I want it. In the quilting bee time, I started using patterns, but I shouldn't have did it. It broke the ideas I had in my head. I should have stayed with my own ideas. I kept making quilts all the way up to last year (1999). I still got the feeling now and then to sew, but I just don't have the mind to do it now. My hands are good, but I don't quite got the spirit. Not like before when I was always ready day and night. Age got me. (LI2)
/collaboration/patterns | Posted at 11:54pm
Don Nielson on Societal Innovation #
The HyperScope crew attended SRI's 60th Anniversary celebration at the Computer History Museum last night. The main event was a panel discussion moderated by PaulSaffo. Participating were SRI luminaries DougEngelbart, PhilGreen, DonNielson, and PaulCook. (LHD)
Saffo closed the discussion with the question, "If you had a large sum of money to change the world, what would you do with it?" DonNielson had a wonderful response. He said that he firmly believed that it was impossible to do top-down social innovation. Societal change occurs when good people do lots of interesting things, and some of those things just happen to meet certain societal needs. (LHE)
JeffShults and I made this same question the central exercise of our "Tools for Catalyzing Collaboration" workshop last April. Curiously enough, all four teams came up with proposals that were about catalyzing bottoms-up innovation. Several of our participants came from foundations. (LHF)
It's good to see this philosophy starting to spread, but it's much easier said than done. By definition, creating an emergent space implies uncertain outcomes. People have a very hard time grappling with that uncertainty. (LHG)
Tomorrow, I fly to Baltimore, then Raleigh for two projects that are very much about emergence. One of them is Imergence (formerly 1Society), which I still haven't talked much about yet. Trust me, I'm not hiding anything, I've just been really busy, but I hope to write more about it soon. It's been a very satisfying experience so far, not just because of the great people involved, but because of the opportunity to shape the proposal with ideas that I've been formulating and refining since founding BlueOxenAssociates almost four years ago. (LHH)
/collaboration | Posted at 11:15pm
Sun, Nov 05, 2006
Why the French Hate Wikis #
At WikiSym last August, WardCunningham showed some regional trends comparing Google searches for "wiki" and "blog." Overall, searches for "blog" (in red) steadily outpace searches for "wiki" (in blue), although the rate of growth is about the same for both. (LH4)
Ward pointed out that the phenomenon is reversed in Germany: (LH6)
The same is true in Japan, except the difference is even more pronounced: (LH8)
At WikiWednesday this past week, PeterThoeny said that he had shown similar trends for a recent Wiki talk, and that he also showed the trends in France: (LHA)
Whoa, Nellie! Apparently, the French don't care much for Wikis. It was a shock for me to see this, as I know several stellar French members of the Wiki community and even more French-speaking members. Any thoughts as to why this might be the case? (LHC)
/tech/wiki | Posted at 1:15pm
Kirsten Jones on Perlcast #
SocialText's KirstenJones talks about Socialtext Open and its REST API on this week's Perlcast. It's a good interview, and the last question reminded me of a funny exchange at WikiWednesday this past week: (LH0)
Kirsten: PHP is for girls. (LH1)
EvanProdromou: Hey, Michele would object to that! (LH2)
Kirsten: That's because she's a woman. PHP is for girls, Perl is for women. (LH3)
/tech/wiki | Posted at 12:59pm
Wed, Nov 01, 2006
Wikipedia Virgin No More #
Yesterday, ErikMoeller asked me to look at the Wikipedia entry on Intellipedia. Curious as to the timing of the request, I checked my feeds, and sure enough, a few articles on Intellipedia had cropped up. (LGQ)
I figured the best people to review the accuracy of the article were those involved, so I passed Erik's request along to them. However, in reviewing the article myself, I noticed that somebody had linked to my picture of the Intellipedia shovel, along with a short description. The description was slightly off, so I decided to fix it. In doing so, I lost my Wikipedia virginity. (LGR)
If you want to be technical about it, I wasn't a real Wikipedia virgin. I've vandalized the site anonymously on more than one occasion. That's right, vandalized. It was a cool trick I picked up from RossMayfield as a way to demonstrate in front of a live audience that yes, anyone really can edit Wikipedia, and more importantly, that Wikipedia is self-healing. I don't do it anymore, because the bots have gotten smarter, thus eliminating one of the main points of the demonstration. (LGS)
The first time I told this story to Wikipedians was when I was introducing myself at the Hacking Days Wiki developers summit at WikiMania 2005. I said, "I've never edited Wikipedia, but I have vandalized it on more than one occasions." I thought it was pretty funny, but no one laughed. It could have been that people had a hard time picking up on the irony in English, but I think people just didn't think it was funny. So for all of you Wikipedians hearing this story for the first time, blame Ross. (LGT)
I nearly edited Wikipedia for real in 2004, when I was finishing up my research on OpenSource adoption in Brazil. In my original draft, I told some great stories about the rise of grassroot communities in Brazil, and to my horror, the editors cut them out. I decided to insert them into Wikipedia, but I never got around to it. Maybe I'll revisit this, especially now that Lula is back in the news. (LGU)
I've spoken at both WikiManias, and I've talked to many folks about Wikipedia, so I've always felt a little guilty about not having actually edited it. Then at this year's WikiMania, I learned that WardCunningham hasn't edited it yet either. (It's captured on this recording.) That helped, but now the guilt is gone for good. (LGV)
How does it feel to have finally edited it? To be honest, it's no different than editing any other Wiki. Personally, I find that really cool. It's further confirmation that as big as Wikipedia has become, at its core, it's still just a Wiki. It reminds of the original exchange between JimboWales and WardCunningham on Ward's Wiki about Wikipedia: (LGW)
My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales (LGX)
Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham (LGY)
Of course, my assessment isn't quite fair, either. I haven't experienced a Wikipedia edit war first-hand or a negotiation over NeutralPointOfView?. More things to look forward to! (LGZ)
/tech/wiki | Posted at 10:40am
