Ed Batista

More on Recovery 2.0

As noted below, I was lucky enough to sit in on a session at Web 2.0 last night organized by Jeff Jarvis and Greg Burton on Recovery 2.0, i.e. working to prevent future Katrinas through better disaster planning, preparedness and response.  One of the primary exercises we went through was coming up with a list of characteristics disaster systems should have--and which were often seen to be lacking on the Gulf Coast.

I think it's important to keep in mind, as Jeff noted, that there's no one single IT here--we're not talking about building an uber-system, some sort of Ultimate Defense Against Bad Things Happening.  We know that's not realistic--or even desirable, thinking about what fun the laws of unintended consequences would have with such a venture.

What we're talking about is 1) building a network of loosely joined people and initiatives who care and who want to take action (and a great place to start is the Recovery 2.0 wiki), and 2) working to insure that all the systems involved in helping people prepare, survive and recover from disasters benefit from the lessons that Katrina taught us (in short, insuring that Katrina's victims did not die or suffer in vain.)

So here's my copy of the list we brainstormed.  As someone pointed out, it's contradictory.  (Do we contradict ourselves?  Very well then, we contradict ourselves.)  And without last evening's discussion as context, it's somewhat cryptic, but I still think it's interesting:

Recovery 2.0

The highlight of Web 2.0 today was actually a very low-key, low-tech session on "Recovery 2.0," i.e. working to prevent future Katrinas through better disaster planning, preparedness and response.  Jeff Jarvis led the session, having raised the call to arms in a recent post and arranged for the space with the Web 2.0 organizers, and we had a great turnout, given the competition (free booze at any of a number of sponsored events) and the timeslot (6pm after a long day of conferencing).  Even some bigshots like Michael Powell and Craig Newmark showed up.

We introduced ourselves (a very valuable community-building experience, even if it does entice some people who really should know better into talking at great length about their Special Story),  brainstormed a list of characteristics that any Recovery 2.0 initiatives should have, and agreed to keep working together at the Recovery 2.0 wiki.  A good meeting--focused but inclusive, open-minded but with a tangible outcome, and it ended on time!  Kudos to Jeff and Greg Burton for pulling it together--I'm excited about the next steps.

recovery2

A Lawyer Walks Into Second Life...

I had two thoughts today about contexts where attention data could be useful--one serious, the other fanciful.

My wife is a reference librarian and legal research instructor at a law school. Her students and faculty members are constantly devouring huge amounts of legal reference and research materials. Much of this information is unavailable online (or at the very least extremely difficult to access)--but it's all highly organized, with extensive cataloging metadata. What if the students and faculty could capture and share the attention data that's being generated by their research activities? Everything from Lexis search results to checkout histories of old scholarly texts could be compiled to generate a legal research profile for everyone, which could then be cross-referenced to help people focus in on the resources that are likely to be interesting and useful to them. It would be an incredible timesaver.

I've also been thinking about a comment Paul Montgomery left on a post by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch:

...[M]any people like having different personae, and don’t want to be defined as one single entity. The persona they project to a single parent support group will be different to the persona they project at a computer games forum, and different again to the one they present at a P2P porn-sharing message board. If ATX can accomodate different personae for a single person, that might help drag more people in.

This leapt to mind during today's Web 2.0 session on gaming. One of the panelists predicted that the future of role-playing virtual environment games lay in allowing gamers in for free, but conducting actual micro-transactions with their avatars. Well, a gamer's avatar is just another persona, and it's going to be generating all sorts of attention data--where it goes, what it consumes, what other avatars it meets. Why not capture your avatar's attention data in order to share it with other gamers, or with other games? Just a thought.

attention attentiontrust

AttentionTrust at Web 2.0

The AttentionTrust gang will be convening at Web 2.0 tomorrow.  Seth and Steve will be hosting a session at 1:30pm, during which we'll be unveiling the alpha version of the AttentionTrust Extension, a Firefox extension that will allow users to begin to record aspects of their "attention data."  This is a small but significant step toward our goal of empowering users to exert greater control over their attention data so that they can make effective use of it.  And no disrespect to AT's original web designers, but we'll also be unveiling long-overdue new look for the AT website.  Long overdue.

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

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.

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