On the day before the instant, no less 

from Doc Searles

Things I hadn't thought about IM. I have used existing IM tools in a variety of project management settings and found them a useful supplement. It's also an additional way to stay up to date with a dispersed network of friends and colleagues. The analogy to the early days of CompuServe and The Source feels particularly apt.

One aspect of the proliferation of new communications choices is that we now need to become mindful of those choices and how they connect to what we want to accomplish. The spectrum of communication options is getting very rich (FTF, phone, conference call, video conference, IM, email, weblog, web, print publication, bully pulpit, etc).  All of us now have to think through choices about audience, message, tone, etc that only the "professional" communicators did. Perhaps that's one of the reasons this fells threatening to the professionals. We're pulling back the curtain and revealing that Oz isn't all he's cracked up to be. (The Media Equation : How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places is one fascinating book about the interaction between people and all these new media choices.)

4:06:18 PM •  • comment  

Hey, Ernie the Attorney has a blog! That makes two cool lawyers if you count my brother, too (which I do, even though he doesn't have a blog). In addition to a funny-in-a-sad-kind-of-way story about someone who is most definitely not shifted, Ernie ruminates on change and admits that law is basically information and that "lawyers are generally not comfortable with technology."

Go Ernie, go Ernie, go Ernie....

10:53:55 AM •  • comment  

Funniest thing I've seen today: "No Mental Theft Act" Needed, Congress Told: Law would mandate mind-erasing drugs for every movie-goer

" 'Our undercover investigators have finally discovered why ticket sales to most newly released movies drop so dramatically in the first week or so', said Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

'Hundreds of millions of movie-goers pay a mere $7.50 each, but they leave with mental copies of images and sounds of movies that cost us billions of dollars to make. This is blatant theft of our valuable intellectual property!'

Because of this rampant mental piracy, Valenti said, 'few ever return to a theater to see a movie even for a second time. This deprives our industry of billions of dollars in lost revenue, and it forces us to spend billions every year just to make new movies in a never-ending battle to stay ahead of the pirates.'

Valenti was especially critical of a few brazen individuals who regularly use television and newspapers to disseminate mentally pirated movies, often before they're even open to the public. As a result of this piracy -- a gaping loophole in present copyright law -- many millions of people do not see most movies even once." [Phil Karn]

10:51:22 AM •  • comment  

Are we ready to take the next step, continued

My environment currently consists of a large group (say, 50 people) made of several interdependent teams (sub-projects). Some people belong to more than one team.

A lot of communication takes place via email that reaches a few people from this team and a few people from that team, in order to accomplish some task. So these are little sub-teams that spring up around a task and then disband.

A significant problem is getting the right people to know about new issues that the sub-teams form around. Those people may want to be a part of the sub-team, or simply track their progress.

With a tool like Radio, those sub-teams may be able to form around an issue, and communicate with each other, out of their own self-interest, just as with email. (Or enough like email that the members do not feel an extra burden just to reach people who may or may not be interested in their issue.)

Others can "listen in" on the conversation via Radio in ways that are simply not enabled by email. Almost everyone in the larger group would soon benefit from this ability to see into the day-to-day conversations of sub-teams they otherwise would not be aware of until much later, sometimes too late, or wastefully late.

I thin this transparency offered by Radio can help avoid the sub-teams from losing focus and thinking too much about people outside their focus. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]

Absolutely. And you're spot on when you say "enough like email that the members do not feel an extra burden." This was the opportunity I thought I saw, way back when, when I noticed that:

- email was ubiquitous

- email clients were closely coupled to news clients

- news was a groupthink medium

Once I set up the private news server that unlocked the latent power of the already-universally-deployed news client, which shared the same message composer as the mail client that was in constant heavy use, I thought I was all set. There was essentially no new software to deploy, or to learn.

Why didn't a lot more people catch on to this? Why, even in my own environment which was, like yours, made of overlapping subgroups, didn't it have the effect I thought it should have?

I say again: it wasn't primarily about the software. It was about the willingness of people to work transparently, for their own benefit and for the common good. And about the ability of people to think in terms of messages addressed to spaces, rather than messages addressed to people. This is a deep anthropological issue. As a species, we are now being invited to communicate in ways more abstract and indirect than tens of thousands of years of cultural history have conditioned us for. I know we can adapt, and will. The $64,000 question for me is: how soon?

[Jon's Radio]

More deep thinking from Jon

10:40:34 AM •  • comment  

Are we ready to take the next step?

Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps? [WriteTheWeb]

From the story itself, an email interview with John Robb:

John Robb: Within a corporate context, K-Logs make it possible for any employee to add knowledge to an Intranet. It's easy enough to use (start-up in less than five minutes) that it overcomes resistance. Further, K-Logs provide people that use them two immediate benefits: 1) it is a highly visible way to enhance personal brand and 2) it is a great organizing tool that you can share with co-workers (it organizes your most important information over time). There is no other better way to get employee knowledge off the desktop and out of their heads and onto an Intranet where it can be archived, browsed, and searched.

I know. I've been there, done that. When I turned in the first draft of my book, my editor -- Tim O'Reilly -- said, "This is great, but I worry that you expect too much from people." It was true. We technologists like to think that if we can just come up with the right tool, all those wonderful k-logging benefits -- which are quite real, I can say from my own experiences -- will simply flow. But even then, I knew it wasn't just about the tools:

The cultural problem is far more difficult. The methods I'll present in the next few chapters presume that groups really want to collaborate - that is, share documents, move communication from interpersonal to group spaces, pool knowledge. "Our people are our only real asset," corporate executives like to say, and they mean it. They understand that their success depends mainly on what their people know, not just individually but collectively. A Lotus executive once claimed that there is an infinite return on an investment in Lotus Notes. Infinite! That sounds like brash computer-industry hyperbole. In fact it's arguably true when Notes captures organizational knowledge as it was designed to do, and is capable of doing. But mostly that doesn't happen, for lots of reasons. People tend to focus only their own tasks, and associate only within their own workgroups. People don't want to document everything they do. People don't want to think carefully about how they communicate, with whom, for what purposes, with what results. People don't want to share what they know, if they believe that doing so will threaten their own security. [Practical Internet Groupware]

So why am I suddenly deep into blogspace, hoping once again to achieve what Notes never could, and what my own brand of Internet groupware never could? Because culture evolves. What's more, as Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore argue, culture is evolution. Fifteen years ago, most people weren't ready for the kind of collective mind-meld that makes k-logging work. Five years ago, most people still weren't. Today...well, the jury's still out, but the mainstream interest in blogging tells me that maybe, just maybe, we're close to having a critical mass of people who are ready to live transparently, to narrate their experiences in order to better understand them, and to be informed by the narrations of others.

I hope it's going to happen this time around. But whether it does or not, let's be clear about one thing. Although the software needs to have a certain set of properties, software's not the gating factor. People are. There's really no mystery as to why the Web didn't go two-way from the start. If most people wanted it to, it would have. Maybe now they do. I hope so.

[Jon's Radio]

I'm certainly hoping that Jon is right and that we're reaching critical mass around this notion. Buried inside this line of thinking is something deeper. It's related, in part, to what the Cluetrain authors (Doc Searles, Dave Weinberger, Chris Locke) were picking up on; that getting through this transition to a knowledge economy (whatever that may turn out to mean) demands a level of personal responsibility from all of us. You can't try to pass off responsibility to somebody in charge. What's curious about this transition is that the troops are figuring it out and accepting it before the generals.

10:18:18 AM •  • comment