Ed Batista

Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts

Although it could have been much worse, Hurricane Katrina has passed through southern Louisiana leaving a trail of wreckage in its wake.  New Orleans is a very special place to me, and I'm encouraging people to visit Network for Good's page on Hurricane Relief Efforts, where you'll find numerous ways to help the people who are now putting the city back together.

I just donated $100 each to the American National Red Cross, Charity Hospital of Lousiana at New Orleans, and Second Harvest of Greater New Orleans.  I also gave $15 to Network for Good themselves, to help support their efforts to make online giving easier and more secure.

UPDATE: Although the storm itself didn't cause as much damage in New Orleans as was expected, the aftermath has been terrible and continues to get worse.  The levees have burst, pumps aren't working because there's no electricity, and the floodwaters are continuing to rise.  If you can help, click on the links above.

new orleans hurricane katrina

Rilo Kiley

I heard a snippet of a song from Rilo Kiley's The Execution of All Things a few months ago and it really grabbed me.  I must have put it on my wishlist, because lo and behold it recently turned up in a stack of birthday presents from my baby.  And it kicks ass.

Musically eclectic, lyrically intense, they're a hard band to pin down.  (Yes, "they."  No idea what the name means, but the woman with the beautiful, hard-edged voice is Jenny Lewis, not Rilo.)  Sometimes they remind me a bit of Stephen Malkmus' post-Pavement output, sometimes they're much more folk-y and jangly.  But just when you take them a little lightly, they hit you upside the head.  From the title cut:

Oh god come quickly, for the execution of all things.  Let's start with the bears and the air and then mountains, rivers and streams.  Then we'll murder what matters to you and move on to your neighbors and kids.  Crush all hopes of happiness and disease 'cause of what you did.

Phew.

rilo kiley

AttentionTrust

I've been talking with the folks at AttentionTrust for a few weeks, and I just agreed to help turn this concept into a reality by serving as Executive Director.  I'll still be working with the great people at Beaconfire, so my time management skills are going to be severely tested

So just what is AttentionTrust?  Let's start with some language from the AttentionTrust site that I helped to draft:

Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it's gathered, measured, and analyzed. Right now, you generally lack the ability to capture that data for yourself, so you can't benefit from it. But what if you could? And what if you could share your data with other people, who were also capturing their own data, or if you could exchange your data for something of value with companies and other institutions that were interested in learning more about the things that interested you? You'd be in control--you would decide who has access to what data, as well as what you'd accept in exchange for access to your data.

The mission of AttentionTrust is helping to give people control over their "attention data" to enable them to participate in the emerging "attention economy" on their own terms.  That mission starts with education--making people aware that attention data exists--and empowerment--encouraging people to assert their rights to own, transfer and exchange their attention data as they see fit.

The next step is helping people to actually capture and manage their data in a practical, user-friendly way, and we hope to have some news on that front shortly.

(It's also important to note what AttentionTrust is NOT.  We will not be a repository for users' attention data, and we will not be capturing or analyzing users' data.)

attentiontrust

Staying On Message...Or Not

Mark Frederickson commented on my recent post about Michael Stein's interview with Michael Gilbert:

I think I have to weigh in on the Gilbert side of this debate, and for one simple reason: message. Email allows for better control of what you are saying and to whom. I believe the thought of allowing anyone the opportunity to add, change or diffuse an organization's message is scary (to me at least).

I come from an electoral background, where message manipulation is the primary focus of the campaign. I've seen campaigns burned by allowing anyone to use their websites as a soap box. In a similar vein, remember MoveOn.org's "Bush = Hitler" ad fiasco?

(I apologize in advance for linking to a Washington Times article - I would have found something better but I'm in a hurry ;-).

With email, an organization does not need to worry any (even well meaning) person hijacking the message.

My $0.02

Thanks for the comment, Mark.  As I noted in my post, I agree with Gilbert's underlying philosophy, but I also think that the combined proliferation of (on the one hand) self-publishing tools and (on the other) spam are working to move dialogue out of the Inbox and onto more public online spaces.

And for related reasons, I disagree with the idea that nonprofits should be focused on delivering a honed message (and on preventing anyone from altering that message.)  I'm sure you didn't intend it to sound this way, but that idea strikes me as patronizing, suggesting that "we" (i.e. the organization) have the right answer, and our job is to deliver a compelling message that will convince "them" (i.e. activists, donors, etc.) that we're right and motivate them to act accordingly.

Instead, I think that nonprofits should be focused on engaging their constituents in an active dialogue that's about listening and learning as much as anything else.  The idea that the people at the center--the organizational professionals--have all the answers just isn't true.  No matter what issues you're involved with, there are vast networks of people out there with a great deal of expertise and plenty of creative ideas. 

These people are your audience, and they want to get involved.  But they don't want to be told what to think.  They want to tell you what they think.  They're willing to listen, to be educated, and to be recruited to your cause as well, but treating them like passive recipients of your message is a sure way to turn them off and drive them away.

In recent years there's been a steady progression toward greater interactivity and responsiveness on the part of all institutions (except where they exercise monopoly control).  Nonprofits, schools, political campaigns, and businesses in every industry are increasingly engaged in conversations with their markets (see Cluetrain).

Email is great for broadcasting messages, broadcasting will continue to be important for most institutions, and email isn't going away any anytime soon.  But blogs and other public, visible, searchable and archivable web tools provide a much better platform for ongoing dialogues between an institution and its constituents.  Continuing to prioritize email over these other tools is a mistake and a missed opportunity for any institution.

cluetrain

The Personal is Professional

When a blogger you read for professional purposes shares personal information on his or her site, do you find that appealing or does it make you uncomfortable?

I think there are some boundaries we should respect (which is why I maintain a separate site for posts to friends and family), but I also think its important to allow our personal and professional selves to overlap (which is why I link to that site from this one.)

Amy Gahran is running a 10-question survey on this very topic, and it takes just a few minutes.  No matter how you feel about this, I encourage you to share your thoughts with her--she'll be publishing the results soon.

Hat tip to Tris Hussey at Business Blog Consulting.

Michael Stein and Michael Gilbert

Michael Stein posted an interview with Michael Gilbert at GetActive's Word of Net yesterday, and the results were as interesting as you'd expect, given their extensive involvement in the nonprofit technology field.  Gilbert made a particularly good point on the question of whether ample resources (i.e. staff time, money, and management support) are preconditions for successful nonprofit technology initiatives:

I am not convinced of the generalization that more resources devoted to Internet strategies are the key to success. Rather, I think success is the key to more resources. In other words, I think that careful change management, with an eye toward the right first steps, can be far more powerful than asking people to pour resources in and wait for results down the road.

So it's the culture, stupid?  But although I agree with Gilbert's emphasis on the importance of organizational culture and change management, I'm not convinced by his continued prioritization of email over websites:

The Internet has not changed in any way that fundamentally undermines those rules. [i.e. (1) Resources spent on email strategies are more valuable than the same resources spent on web strategies, (2) A website built around an email strategy is more valuable than a website that is built around itself, and (3) Email-oriented thinking will yield better strategic thinking overall.] You still get a higher return on investment on money invested in email. You still get better websites when you design them around your email strategies. And the better you are at thinking about email, the better you become at thinking about relationship management strategies in general.

At the root of Gilbert's philosophy is an absolutely correct emphasis on relationship management and attention to ROI.  Listen to your constituents and don't waste money on useless bells and whistles--and that advice will hold true forever.  And email isn't going away anytime soon--nonprofits must continue to think seriously about their email strategies.

But the Inbox isn't the only place to meet your constituents anymore--try their aggregators--and websites aren't static, glossy brochures--they're lively public spaces, with comments, guest bloggers, and wikis creating opportunities for direct participation.  And although these tools are still in their infancy, usage is exploding and they're dirt-cheap and easy to implement.  The Internet may not have changed, but the tools we use to access it certainly have, and nonprofits should be taking full advantage of them.

nptech

Clay Shirky and Jon Lebkowsky on Tagging

Adam Weinroth recently posted an outstanding email interview with Clay Shirky and Jon Lebkowsky on tagging.  I particularly liked Shirky's take on how tags are helping us navigate the transition from information scarcity to information abundance:

We have come from a land of information scarcity, and the assumptions from that world break in this one. In a world of information scarcity, the assumption is that after a user has some piece of information, it's problem solved. Once the library has given the patron the book, they should have no trouble keeping track of it.

In a world of information abundance, though, it's merely problem transferred, because now the user has so much information that they have become an accidental archivist, and everyone has the same two, bad strategies: get rigid about a categorization scheme for local files, and use some combination of bookmarks and common search strategies. (How often have you had to re-find something by recreating a particular Google search?)

Tags put post-industrial strength tools in the hands of ordinary users, allowing them to manage the increasingly large corpus of things they've already found once, allowing them to re-find them easily.

Hat tip to Marshall.

Must-Reading

From Hillary Johnson on Why I Read Business Blogs in Inc.:

When I tell people that I read blogs, they usually say something vaguely condescending to the effect that "it must be nice to have so much free time."...

The truth is that I recently quit my day job to start a company of my own and have absolutely no free time. The business blogs I read aren't written by, or for, fools. Reading them is something I consider part--granted, an entertaining part--of my "job."

I was recently pretty much stunned to run into a similar "Why do you read blogs?" attitude among some pretty tech-savvy folks.  Not to beat a dead horse, but this reminds me of one of the reasons why I tried to declare the term "blog" obsolete in the first place--because I say "blogs," and some people still hear "teen diaries," or "black helicopter rants," or "cat pictures," instead of  "simple, discoverable, linkable, archivable web publishing that allows incredibly smart and creative people who share personal and/or professional interests to find each other and exchange ideas."

Blogs are now my most important means of professional education and networking.  I can't imagine how I could have learned so much and met so many intriguing, far-flung people who share my interests over the last seven months without the blogosphere.  (Yeah, I hate that word too, but find me a better one.)

And it's not just the breadth and scope of these interactions that I find compelling--it's the depth.  I think of my fellow bloggers as such richly interesting people because the medium encourages a blending of the professional and personal, and allows us to share so much of ourselves.  (Yes, there are plenty of people who could use a few lessons in boundaries, but we're still working the kinks out.)  Hillary Johnson again:

The blogosphere is a vast, anonymous, and surprisingly intimate place inhabited by all manner of exotic creatures--or is it just that blogging brings out the exotic in people? From [David] Hornik's official bio I know that he has a degree in computer music from Stanford and another in criminology from Cambridge, and earned his J.D. from Harvard, magna cum laude. But from his blog posts I know that he has a thing for sumo wrestling, and that his 9-year-old dressed up as Danny Zuko from Grease for Halloween.

In an age when everyone is talking about information overload, this may seem like more than one wants or needs to know about any total stranger, but I find quite the opposite: This is exactly the kind of information that helps me decide whom I really want to listen to...

And as I've noted before, plenty of us aren't just intermingling the personal and the professional, we're writing extensively on many different aspects of our lives, allowing friends, family, colleagues and strangers to get acquainted with our varied interests and areas of expertise.  That helps to deepen existing relationships, forge new ties, suggest creative possibilities, and it just makes the working day a hell of a lot more interesting and fun.  And if that don't grab your attention, then it's back to the cubicle for you!

TalkDigger

TalkDigger = metasearch for blogs.  From their How it Works? page:

TalkDigger is a meta-search engine. It asks major search engines: "Who links that URL?" The results will then be processed and displayed on Talk Digger. This is a free web service developed by Frederick Giasson.

Couldn't be easier to use, and I love Frederick's honesty on his About page:

I developed an addiction for my blog statistics and for people talking about my writings. I was always checking the link-backs to my domain name on the major search engines...

Then some weeks ago I asked myself that question: why don't you build an application to query all these search engines for you, displaying the results and some statistics of these queries... Then Talk Digger was born.

Hat tip to Anonymous ;-)

It's the Culture, Stupid

That's my reading of R. Todd Stephens recent post on the (in)effective implementation of collaborative applications such as corporate blogs:

Failure [of these collaborative applications] will be related to the infrastructure. More specifically, the capacity and performance of the application will dictate the failure. Assuming the system selected has the basic business functions required, failure will occur when the system destroys the trust by not excelling in the operations and infrastructure areas. However, successful applications built over a solid infrastructure does not guarantee success. In fact, a solid infrastructure is only important when the need is not fulfilled.

Success is much more related to the client support and the business community acceptance of the technology. Therefore success in collaboration is related to the training, engagement processes, branding, best practices, user manuals, communities of practice, communications, and providing customer service.

So where does the vast majority of funding in this area go toward? You guessed it, the software, hardware, vendor relationships, capacity, etc. More importantly try to find a best practice document, vendor user guide, or a research firm review of the implementation of collaborative applications, you will find a rather large vacuum. Our community is obviously more concerned with collaborative failure than collaborative success.

I see two overlapping failures that contribute to this massive vacuum Todd so rightly recognizes.  First, there's a general bias in favor of the tangible and the visible over the abstract.  People will devote much more time and energy weighing the pros and cons of various software packages than they will considering the organizational culture that will ultimately determine whether said software succeeds or fails.  Considering that an organization's culture is the full expression of its history, its leadership, and every dollar spent on personnel, and that even the most expensive technology is a trifling toy in comparison, this failure says a lot about our shortsightedness.

Second, speaking specifically about blogging tools, these applications are so easy to implement and use that it's hard not to take a "Shoot first, ask questions later" approach.  The temptation to just get a blog up and running is understandable--everybody else is doing it, and management is breathing down our neck wondering why we're not, so let's just get going.  As a result, our understanding of these tools and their impact on an organization's culture lags far behind their actual use.  Todd's looking for a set of engagement processes, best practices, user manuals and communities of practice related to these tools.  I see some great resources growing organically, and I see some absolute garbage being hyped by get-rich-quick blogging "experts," but I don't really see what Todd's looking for, because I don't think it exists yet.  Now that gives me some ideas...

organizational culture