Enormously moving speech on the way the Internet transforms lives – Boing Boing: “Enormously moving speech on the way the Internet transforms lives By Cory Doctorow at 9:47 am Tuesday, Jun 7

 

Watch live streaming video from pdf2011 at livestream.com

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum at NYU today, and the morning plenary has been a series of fascinating short talks. But one talk, by Jim Gilliam’s “The Internet is My Religion,” brought the house down. Jim worked in many early and influential Internet firms, went on to produce Robert Greenwald’s extraordinary films, and do many other notable things. Among them was surviving two bouts of cancer and a double-lung transplant. The story of how he went from a Jerry Falwell born-again to an Internet advocate and film producer ended with a standing ovation and not a dry eye in the house. Watch this, please, I’d consider it a favor.

Jim Gilliam- The Future of Sharing

Created by: Online Schools

 

Hans Rosling helps visualize economic development over the last 200 years

You can now find the entire video from the BBC by way of Rosling’s Gapminder website. I certainly wish both Rosling and this technology had been available when I was doing my undergraduate degree in statistics. I did have the benefit of excellent teachers, although none quite as gifted as Rosling. As for what the technology makes possible in terms of both extracting and explaining the stories hidden in the data, it is well and truly a brave new world.

This TED video from Jane McGonigal makes a persuasive case that I need to invest some more time looking at the world of online gaming for insight. Watch the video  and see if you don’t come to a similar conclusion.

I’d also recommend his blog, Schneier on Security.

Thanks to Richard Dale, Dave Grady "from the annual Citizens Bank Employee Talent Show." Have you been on this call?

"The conference call"
Jessica Lipnack
Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:00:48 GMT

Saying the Dell or P&G has a social technology strategy is a common shorthand that obscures a more important truth. There are real people in specific roles who take on the responsibility for developing and deploying the collection of initiatives and programs that get labeled as an organization’s social technology strategy. The specific people and the particular functions involved greatly influence the success or failure of these initiatives

Some manager in marketing experiments with Twitter or a fan page on Facebook. A lawyer in the general counsel’s office raises a concern about whether an employee comment on Twitter creates a liability for the corporation. A divisional general who still has his assistant print out his email traffic creates a task force to develop a corporate social media policy proposal. While there may be no right answer for how an organization handles social media, these choices matter. The hypothesis that we are considering is this:

The CIO represents an excellent choice for who should coordinate an organization’s approach to social media/social networking.

Why we think this is a reasonable hypothesis

From an IT manager’s perspective, the technologies of social media/social networking appear quite simple. They are either web services hosted outside the firewall or they are very simple new capabilities hosted on internal servers. Compared with the complexities of a global ERP system, a distributed point-of-sale system, or a terabyte-scale data warehouse, social media/social networking capabilities are technologically trivial. Why then are they a problem relevant to the IT function? Why not simply let ownership and management of these capabilities reside in the business?

First, much of the value in social media/social networking lies in the masses of data they generate. Whether in the content of employees at Microsoft blogging internally or publicly about their work or in the network linkage data embedded in the interactions among customers and customer service staff using @ComcastCares on Twitter, there are masses of data to be managed and manipulated. IT knows and understands the issues that arise when dealing with data on this scale. Moreover, they understand how to filter through and extract insight from this data.

Second, there is huge potential value in connecting activity in social networking venues to specific business process steps embedded in the current enterprise support environment. This too constitutes an area where IT’s existing perspectives add value as social media/networking activity moves from experiment to operating at scale.

Third, many of the issues with social media/social networking cross functional boundaries in the organization. IT as a group routinely handles cross-functional issues in designing and deploying other technology around the organization. They will have established relationships with the right people around the organization and they will be sensitive to the kinds of organizational issues that arise in cross-functional undertakings.

The general point is that experiments with these technologies will occur naturally in multiple spots throughout the organization. As these experiments grow in scale and scope the particular management challenges that will appear fall squarely in the sweet spot of the IT function.

What we’re doing next

Organizational work is messy and complex. Social technologies are messy and complex. Put the two together and you have mess squared.

What that means is that there aren’t any maps and there aren’t any checklists. There is no cookbook or operating manual to follow. Not yet, at any rate.

The appropriate research strategy now is to capture and start to understand the messy stories of what is actually going on. It is too soon to strip the story down to its essentials, because we can’t yet differentiate critical step from colorful detail.

We are looking to develop case studies of what organizations are actually doing. At this point, it is premature to be distilling these stories into a coherent and over simplified narrative. For now, it is enough to get multiple stories of successful, failed, and too soon to tell efforts. Comparing and contrasting those stories will begin to reveal the patterns of what matters. if you’re interested, drop one of us a line or leave us a comment.

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com collected the data for this handsome infographic designed by Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo. It shows your odds of becoming an airborne victim of terrorism. Maybe the new TSA rules will decrease the odds of being a terrorism victim from 1 in 10,408,947 to 1 in 10,408,948. Let’s hope so!

The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart

Odds of being a terrorism victim on a flight
Mark Frauenfelder
Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:09:37 GMT

At just about the same time, on the right coast, danah boyd of Microsoft was delivering a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City that didn’t go as well. Her experience and the subsequent conversation around it represent the latest installment in the evolving relationship between audience and presenter. It also contains comparable lessons for the successful adoption of social media within the enterprise.

If you ever expect to stand and deliver in front of a group, these are issues you need to think about beforehand. That can be as adrenaline inducing as boyd’s keynote or as seemingly innocuous as running a status meeting while the team focuses on their laptops, Blackberrys, and iphones.

I’ve been gathering and organizing links to some of the more useful and informative material I’ve found on this topic. For starters, here are some key pointers specific to boyd’s experience, including her own reflections and assessment:

• apophenia: Web2.0 Expo Talk: Streams of Content, Limited Attention
  danah boyd’s initial reflections on her experience as a keynote presenter in the sights of a backchannel with enough trolls present to derail the experience
• apophenia: spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective
  danah boyd’s reflections on her recent experience with a Twitter backchannel and a keynote speech that fell short of her standards. A very insightful reflection. You should also take the time to read through the comments which are equally thoughtful.
• Just because it’s a crowd doesn’t make it wise .
  One of several accounts of another collision between a keynote speaker and a visible backchannel. It’s an entry point to several more reflective posts on this particular case example.
• When Social Technologies Become AntiSocial – Opposable Planets
  Some additional insight and commentary on danah boyd’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote experience

danah body isn’t the only one dealing with this new relationship between audience and speaker. Here are some other accounts and overviews of other less than successful encounters, both recent and not-so-recent:

• The Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009 | .eduGuru
  An analysis of the interaction between a keynote presentation that missed the mark for its intended audience and provoked a hostile audience response in the back channel
• Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education
  Another overview article on an educational keynote speech that went off the rails and was chronicled in real time via a twitter back channel
• confessions of a backchannel queen – mamamusings
  The recent uptick in backchannel heckling via twitter doesn’t represent a new phenomenon. The same thing was happening several years ago on the conference circuit with the use of IRC channels. It was a bit harder to do given the technology but the emergent behaviors were quite similar

Fortunately, we’re also starting to see some good advice emerging on how to cope:

• How to present with Twitter and other backchannels : Speaking about Presenting
  Good advice and a pretty comprehensive ebook (PDF) on dealing with the backchannel when you present. How to avoid the pitfalls and how to derive some useful advantage.
• The Art of the Backchannel at Conferences: Tips, Reflections, and Resources – Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media
  An excellent collection of tips and resources for how to deal with the inevitable reality that your future presentations WILL have a backchannel

These examples are highly visible. They also take place in settings where you have the additional problems of a degree of anonymity that seems to encourage a level of boorishness more reminiscent of middle school than anything else. At the same time, they are also leading indicators of a default working environment that will be more public and transparent than we are accustomed to or comfortable with. Paying attention here and thinking through what lessons are available and how they translate into other settings is time well spent. Some of the questions on my mind include:

• Where and when can you influence the tenor of the backchannel? As a presenter? As a conference organizer? As a member of the audience?
• What can you do before the fact to set useful expectations or standards of interaction?
• What can you do in the moment?
• What can you do after the fact?
• What’s likely to differ in more private venues? What will differ for the better? For worse?