HighTouch

2013 Farm Bill's Threat to Open Access

2013-05-12T11:24:00.001-05:00

I was reading the Senate's version of the 2013 Farm Bill which is scheduled for markup this week. Where there is a lot not to like in the bill, it contained one particularly disturbing provision, the use of $100 million of taxpayer's money to create the non-profit Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. The purpose of the Foundation is to solicit private funding for agricultural research, and to match it with taxpayer dollars. The bill states very clearly that "The Foundation shall not be an agency or instrumentality of the United States Government."

On the surface this seems like a good thing. If industry is going to benefit financially from publicly supported research then it makes sense that they have some skin in the game. But here is what caught my attention and raised my ire:

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.—The Board shall adopt written standards to govern ownership of any intellectual property rights derived from the collaborative efforts of the Foundation.

In other words, the Board, which is not an entity of the U.S. government, will determine the intellectual property provisions for the research funded by U.S. taxpayers. This is incredibly disturbing, and a clear end-run to the public's demand for open-access to science research. Just when it appears that open-access will become the law of the land we have a proposal in the Farm Bill to circumvent that access.

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2013 will require Federal agencies with research expenditures over $100 million to create publicly available repositories of journal articles. It is basically an extension to all Federal agencies of the National Institute of Health's open-access provisions mandating that the public have access to the results of the research they funded.

If the people pay for the research, even part of the research, the results belong in the public domain. It's that simple. This language in the Farm Bill is just wrong. It needs to be changed to make sure that the public's intellectual property is not given away and locked-up forever. Write or call your Senators!

Crowd sourcing a future focused list of core competencies

2010-11-28T07:55:00.001-05:00

I'm leading a conversation for professional educators (academics) next week focused on the future of work. This is one of a series of Webcasts dealing with preparing the next generation of non-formal educators. My emphasis will be on optimizing workplace environments around ideation, creativity, and complex problem solving-- basically freeranging. I'm going to be focusing on workplace environments that are friendly to creatives, makers, and solvers.

In preparation for my session I watched the first sesssion which happened last week. The presenters described the results of a delphi study (and another study) that had just been conducted (accepted for publication but not yet in print) that discussed the core competencies of non-formal educators needed for the year 2015. Here is the list:

Communication Skills
Diversity
Interpersonal relationships
Professionalism
Resource management
Self direction
Teamwork and leadership
Thinking and problem solving
Teaching
Information technology
Technology adoption and application
Research
Program planning, development, and evaluation
Subject matter expertise
Volunteer management
Continuous learning
Customer service
Flexibility and change
Organizational knowledge
Understanding stakeholders and communities
Management and supervision
Marketing

It struck me that this list could have just as easily been generated 10 years ago, and that it's not all that future focused. I know that a delphi is going to bring you a pretty conservative result-- the very nature of the way panelists are selected and the process will eliminate edge perspectives, and the consensus process will result in more conservative and basically safe findings. I think the core elements are probably found in the list above, but they are needing more specificity.

My reaction was to start creating my own list of the core competencies that will be needed in five years for a learning intermediary. What are the needed competencies for a networked economy where social learning is exploding? I had a pretty good start on a list when I realized that this might make an interesting crowd sourcing activity. Let's see if we can put together a list that really has a future focus, and I promise to use it in the seminar next Thursday.

Have at it-- either comment here, or over on Google Buzz where this post will be fed. Thanks!!!!

The post can be found here on Google Buzz: Crowd sourcing a future focused list of core competencies

The history of copyright from 1831-1891

2010-11-26T09:42:00.002-05:00

A free book on the history of copyright in the United States from 1831-1891. I'm fascinated with almost everything from this period of time as I think it more closely represents how information currently moves in society as compared to the aberration that was the 20th century. I plan to start reading it today. You can get the book here: Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891

A taste:

In the republican model of authorship, an author’s purpose is to
contribute to the public good, to educate and inform, promote virtue,
and to fight tyranny. For an author to depend upon the largess of a
patron is seen as slavish. However, instead of proposing that the
author’s livelihood be based on a property right to their work, this
ideology concentrates upon lowering barriers to entry and extending
authorship to a broad swath of society. Taken to the extreme, in this
model there would be no professional authors – but every citizen
would have the education, opportunity, and civic duty to participate
in a populist public sphere by writing

Sounds like a perfect model where every citizen has access to a modern and ubiquitous printing press-- like we have today.

What else did you have to do this weekend but learn about copyright? We've strayed too far from its original intent. Join me in reading. Its even free!

Open germplasms?

2010-11-25T11:02:00.001-05:00

Why not? Why not our public land-grant universities leading the way? A general public license for seeds?

So here is a counter-proposal. Following the example of what was done for free and open source software with a “General Public License” (GPL), Jack Kloppenburg is proposing to establish a GPLPG (General Public License for Plant Germplasm) license for seeds and plant varieties that allows free use of the plants by farmers and growers, but prevents any so licensed seeds or plants from being subsequently altered and made commercial.

The license imposes on subsequent users of the Plant Germplasm (the seeds or plants) that any new varieties developed on the basis of those plants be similarly licensed for free use.”

Mixing work and family time

2010-11-24T08:14:00.002-05:00

Many people would find the notion of mixing work and family time ludicrous. They'd find it unprofessional and rail against it. Yet, the separation of work and family is a rather recent change when taken in the context of human development. Sending the children off to their own version of a factory school while the adults go to their separate workplace is decidedly anti-freeranging. It's not natural, and until the last 200 years or so it was not the way we humans lived.

That's why I found this article Busting Down the Office Door about mixing family and work time so refreshing:

The gurus of productivity would say that by mixing work and family time I’m shortchanging my family and killing my efficiency. Which is true to a point, and I wouldn’t want to spend all of my time splitting my focus like this. But for me, the ability to work from within the living system of my family is one of the reasons I chose to work at home.

This is absolutely the kind of thinking you'll find at the heart of freeranging. I'm sure many organizational people would find this shocking. But, when most of us are now working as knowledge workers, creatives, and makers we need to be optimizing our work spaces for creativity and ideation. Family is an essential part of that equation.

Productivity is an obsolete concept unless we're talking about robots. People need to work more naturally in order to be creative in ways that only humans are capable. We have a long ways to go before this type of working environment is considered the norm, but it's exactly what is needed for where our world is headed. Let the change begin.

Enable hiding--inhibit learning

2010-11-23T19:28:00.000-05:00

Great post by Harold Jarche on Learning in Public:

Transparency is the first, and perhaps largest, hurdle in creating new management frameworks for a networked world. Learning in public makes our work transparent and can help us develop critical next practices in our increasingly complex workplaces. We all have to start thinking and working like rocket scientists.

If you bake-in hiding to your core IT infrastructure you'll kill your social learning. The old will destroy the new before you can even make it out of the gate.

For your message to spread...

2010-11-21T11:38:00.006-05:00

We are meme machines...

Memes == copying with variation and selection (Dr. Susan Blackmore).

For your ideas to spread your immediate network must have: 1) permission to copy, and 2) permission to modify and create variations. Otherwise, your message will never get beyond your immediate social network which we know is something less than 150 people. If you want your reach to be limited just lock your message down with restrictive copyrights.

If on the other hand your mission is to have a far greater impact you're going to need to set your message free:

It's really quite simple. Hold it tight and you limit your ability to have impact. Set it free, and with a lot of luck your message might replicate beyond your echo-chamber. This is why I say over and over and over-- social networking and by extension social media-- starts with getting the permissions right.

Wanting to dive deeper? I highly recommend watching this Susan Blackmore TED talk on Memes and "temes":

I met my SO on the Internet...

2010-10-28T18:21:00.002-05:00

We all are captivated by those stories of someone meeting their SO on the Internet. We find them of such interest, because we know that developing deep relationships online is still relatively rare. Related to this topic is this great TED talk: Ze Frank's web playroom, where he makes the point that meaningful relationships can and do happen online. He also makes the point, however, that they don't happen very easily. He has a slide in the video devoted to this concept:

TO FEEL AND BE FELT

REALLY CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE ISN'T EASY

In my last post I asked you to think about your social network, and to actually draw it out on paper. I've heard from a few who are attempting the assignment. This is good! I know the assignment will take some time to complete, and I don't want to rush you.

For now, I'd like to give you an interim assignment. I'd like you to think about the people you have met online-- how many of them have made it to your social network map? How many people on your social network have you never met face-to-face? How many started as online relationships, but eventually evolved into in-person relationships? Finally, and why not ask, how many of you met your significant others online? We'd love to hear your stories.

So you know I'm participating, my social network includes four relationships that started online. Two of the four I have subsequently met face-to-face. The others are still close friends, but we've never engaged in a conversation that wasn't technology mediated.

In my next post we'll discuss what you've learned from mapping your network, and do the outreach math. That probably post it until early next week so you still have a few days to get yours done. I'll look forward to hearing from you.

Determining your outreach?

2010-10-26T05:39:00.003-05:00

In our last post we discussed that you reside in a social network that might extend to somewhere around 150 people with whom you have a stable social relationship. These are relationships where you know each individual and how they relate to every other person.

For the sake of discussion I'll ask you to make a list. The easiest way to do this is to get a big piece of paper and put yourself in the middle. Then start by listing your eight closest people-- your strong ties. These will be your spouse, children, parents, siblings, and perhaps a few work colleagues. Then work out from there to your weak ties. When you're finished you should have a pretty complete list of your stable social relationships. We're not after total accuracy here-- we're just wanting to get a rough idea.

How many names did you come-up with? Excepting your closest family, how many of the people on your list are external to your work environment? How many would you consider professional colleagues? Would you like to share your results with us? What percentage of your social network is external-- e.g. they would be a customer, client, acquaintance... I'm looking for two things: 1) How large is your social network; and 2) What percentage of them are external to your own organization.

I'd love to hear from you with your results...

You can only know so many people well

2010-10-25T21:11:00.003-05:00

Following on my last post on the difficulty of being a node or a connector in a social network, let's discuss your second big hurdle. You can only know so many people. That number is generally believed to be somewhere around 150. This is Dunbar's Number:

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

That's it. One hundred and fifty people. If you don't like that number please find me another based on any sort of scientific determination. These 150 people are organized into some sort of social relationship-- a network or community if you will. (See: Social Network Analysis)

Christopher Allen in his research on online guilds found:

This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups -- as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages -- hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50.

You belong to some sort of social network. We all do. We don't engineer these networks. We don't network hop . Our networks are volatile and dynamic, but they aren't all that maleable. They reorganize a few nodes (people) at a time. We exercise little conscious control over these networks. What is is.

If mass is dead and social is the future-- then what is the sphere of your influence? In the next post we'll do the math.

Being a Node Isn't Easy

2010-10-24T19:57:00.003-05:00

"You must be a node, a connector!" That's the way the story goes, if you can be a connector in
the networked economy your future will be set. So, how do you make that happen? Let's start with your first hurdle.

I'll begin with a story. Last weekend I took a long bike ride to Virginia. It was a bit of a death-march as our route was mapped via Google, and somewhere in there Google lacked some of the necessary details to get us there safely, i.e. you can't ride skinny tired bikes on gravel roads. So, we had a few ride-arounds that added a number of miles to our journey. We don't really know how far we rode as not a single one of us had a functioning odometer (which is another story). We estimated that our little ride was somewhere around 120 miles. Could have been 150 for all we know or maybe even 200. Did I mention it was a death march?

Somewhere around mile ninty we stopped at a country store to replenish our fluids and take on some calories. One of my colleagues, who was bonking badly, purchased a lot of stuff at the store. One of the items she acquired was something called Goody's Powder. I was starting to get a cold last Sunday, and at that moment of the ride I was not feeling very chipper. When she asked, "You want some?" I attempted to answer in the affirmative without appearing too desperate. She proceeded to hand me this folded up piece of wax paper that contained the aforementioned mystery powder. This is where I blew it. I asked, "What am I supposed to do with this?" She demonstrated for me the most macho of the consumption techniques, The Tough Guy:

This is how The King does it. Very simple. Open it, fold, dump on your tongue and swallow. Then, very casually continue whatever you were doing.

Down the hatch it went, but I guess I didn't do so well on the "casually continue..." part as the next words out of her mouth were, "You're not from around here are you?" Outed!

And there-in lies your first challenge in transitioning to a networked mode of working. Online networks aren't any different than non-online-networks. Network members can spot an interloper in a heartbeat. If you want to be a node in a network then you've got to get to know the network's culture, you must contribute, you must live it. You have to be the ball... You have to care enough to know the difference between The Tough Guy, and The Dump and Chase. That kind of deep understanding takes a great deal of time, and you don't scale. Your capacity to understand multiple networks is limited-- actually it's impossible. That will be the subject of my next post.

Thank you but no thank you Starbucks.

2010-10-19T21:56:00.003-05:00

Starbucks is going to provide us a curated digital experience when we access the network when visiting their stores.

Beginning Wednesday, Starbucks customers who use the free Wi-Fi at more than 6,800 U.S. company-operated stores will be greeted with the Starbucks Digital Network (SDN) — an exclusive content network curated by the company and designed to enhance the customer’s in-store experience.

No thank you. The difference between wifi and 3G is just not that great for me to have to suffer through intermediation of my network connection. I know what I want, and it knows how to find me.

Your next big challenge: Scaling Time

2010-10-15T07:45:00.004-05:00

Great article on real-time services: Real-time + Face Time = the New Primetime

One of the realities of the modern era and the age of continuous information streams is that consumers now expect, rather than simply demand, that their needs be addressed in real time.

Some of my own research uncovered this phenomenon. If you asked people their expectations on speed of service they told us one thing. BUT, when you graphed their satisfaction across the speed of response, it dropped off a cliff the longer you took to meet their needs.

If you're in a business working with the public the new gold standard is, "I want it now." How are you hiring and reorganizing to meet this new expectation of performance? Seems to me that one solution is to embrace freeranging. Office hours are the first thing needing to be abandoned. You have to organize to have people in the flow 24x7.

Workplace access to social media

2010-09-18T08:46:00.000-05:00

Jane Hart asks the question: Is access to public social media sites seen as a workplace luxury?

...the reluctance to allow this (social media access) in some organisations is to a large extent due to a lack of trust in employees. So I do get the impression that where access to sites like Facebook, Twitter etc is not controlled or banned, this is also a good indicator of the fact that the organization is building an employee-based culture.

If your business is public engagement then workplace access to social media is a necessity not a luxury. Imagine a business that locked its doors so its employees could not waste time interacting with customers? What about shutting off the phones so they can't waste time talking to people. How is cutting off access to social media any more ludicrous than these two examples? What's the difference?

The threat to the open internet

2010-09-06T10:07:00.001-05:00

The Economist has a great read on the threat to the open internet: A virtual counter-revolution

“The real question is how high the walls between these walled gardens will be.”

Exactly why government, and other citizen funded efforts should not succumb to the proprietary interests of companies (and others) wanting to own the flow of information.

There is only one neutral platform. It's called the Web. If this privatization movement succeeds we can say goodbye to the free and open exchange of information we have come to love.

Now, would you still like to tell me about your idea for an iPhone app? Over my dead body...

Being Wikipedia

2010-09-04T07:55:00.003-05:00

Image via Wikipedia"Some were worried that it would be like Wikipedia."

Seriously, someone actually said this, in front of other human beings, in a setting where others could hear it, and the words could be recorded with a name attached? Oh my!

My question: What part of being like Wikipedia has you so worried?

Being so popular has you concerned? The sixth most popular web site in the world? The number one search destination? Perhaps it was last year's 360 million unique visitors, or maybe the 13 billion page views? Those are big damned numbers. That is a lot of people learning a lot of things... I can see why that might keep you awake nights.

Maybe it's the depth and richness of Wikipedia's content? Those 3.4 million articles written in English? I bet you're concerned about the 35 million edits made by people from all walks of life? It's that engagement thing? That people are actively involved in creating knowledge can be a little scary. I feel your pain. All that collective learning and conversation is a bit disconcerting. What, you say you've never really looked at a Wikipedia discussion page? Ahhh! Go read a few right now and come back. I'll be waiting... Learn anything?

I know, I bet it's the accuracy of the content that's keeping you awake at night? I can see you being concerned about that "many eyes" method of peer-review. It's showing itself to be a lot more accurate than pretty much any other system ever devised. Some have even given this whole movement some new fangled name called distributed cognition. It's already wreaked havoc with the media. I can see where that sort of disruption in academia could be a major cause for concern. Perhaps it's something more personal, did you find something inaccurate in Wikipedia? (Maybe you could leave us a comment about that inaccuracy and all the difficulty you experienced trying to get it fixed?)

Yep, I can see why you'd be worried about being like Wikipedia. I'm sure there is nothing to be learned from the world's largest and most accurate source of knowledge. Obscurity is a much safer space to play.

New sites and Chrome extensions of interest

2010-07-25T06:45:00.000-05:00

I continue to be amazed at the amount of innovation still happening on the Web. I make a real effort to kick-the-tires on new sites, but like all people I get busy and comfortable and distracted and miss things. This weekend I've found three new sites that I have found interesting, and wanted to share them.

Miio

You say what you like. I say what I like. And Miio makes it easy for us to find, share and chat with each other about the stuff that interests us. That's it. That's Miio.

You may think this sounds like a lot of sites you're already using, and at its most basic level that is true. What is different is the way they handle filtering. It is filtering on steroids. This is an example of the kind of tool coming to help us deal with information overload. It's definitely worth watching.

Mendeley

Mendeley Web lets you access your research paper library from anywhere, share documents in closed groups, and collaborate on research projects online. It connects you to like-minded academics and puts the latest research trend statistics at your fingertips.

Most of what Mendeley does will be of no interest to you if you are not a researcher. So why am I mentioning it? It does one thing you have to see: research collections. This is an aggregation by discipline of research papers that other scientists find of interest. This is basically a trend-spotter. Ignore everything else at Mendely, but checkout the collections-- fascinating.

FeedSquares

FeedSquares provides a cool, entertaining way to read your favorite feeds.

As most of you know I'm a big fan of Feedly as an alternative interface to Google Reader. FeedSquares works in this same space and provides yet another alternative to the bland Reader native interface. You use it by installing a browser extension. I've been using FeedSquares a fair bit, and can definitely recommend it. I know many of you have told me that you just don't get Feedly. FeedSquares provides a slightly less filtered view of your feeds, and it just might feel a tad bit more comfortable. I'm not sure I'll completely make the switch to FeedSquares just yet, but it does have a Chrome app (Feedly does not) and that may be enough to make it my feed reader of choice.

How about you? Seen anything new and interesting of late you'd like to share?

Machinimas and copyright

2010-07-01T10:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday during my web session on copyright someone asked a question about machinimas, avatars, and permissions. The first thing I thought of were the various skins worn by avatars, and the artists who created them. These skins are created in a fixed and tangible medium, and to me would absolutely be protected by copyright.

This got me to looking around to see what others have said on this topic. I found this: Second Life Terms Of Service Changes:

Prior to TOS 2.0, many Machinimatographers felt that they were completely within their rights to film content they had purchased from creators. Things such as Animations, clothing, buildings or sets, props, hair, skin or attachments. In Linden Lab's new TOS 2.0, they explicitly state that it's okay to use their own content, but if you incorporate content from other users, you must obtain licensing or permissions from the creator before including said content in your production.

That the machinimatographers would assume they had permission strikes me as particularly naive. I'd think that not only would you need the written permission of the avatars, but also the artists who created each avatar's skin, the programmers who created the gestures, and on and on... Sounds impossible to manage.

To my thinking, the copyright laws render this entire new art form as illegal, or at best totally impractical to pursue. We could fix this ourselves if everyone would license their "stuff" using completely compatible open licenses; e.g. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution (with no other restrictions). That's not going to happen.

It makes me very sad.

You know you're going to fail...

2010-06-19T07:13:00.005-05:00

I was at a conference this week where the speaker was touting the organization's shiny new web site that would be rolled-out very soon. Of course, it was going to solve all of the problems the organization was having with people not working together. At the conference I was at the week-before-last I heard someone saying the same thing, "We're are totally revamping our Web site so that people will work together better." If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that some new tool was going to solve their collaboration problems, I could treat you all to a round of drinks.

I came across a great blog post this morning at Inkling Markets where Nate makes a great point-- Enterprise 2.0 - Tiger Woods would kick your ass with 3 golf clubs:

Tiger Woods could walk into Kmart, grab 3 clubs from the cheapest, shittiest bag of golf clubs in the store and still kick your ass on the course.

Why?

Because it's not about the tools.

If you're having trouble getting people to work together no tool is going to fix that. People who are truly motivated to work together will find a way to get it done no matter the tool. If your groups are not working together now they're never going to work together unless you solve your people problems first. Before you spend a ton of time and money on technology-- invest a lot of time in conversation.

Who will win the College World Series?

2010-06-18T18:20:00.000-05:00

Please jump into the prediction market:

Open Education: University of Michigan shows how it is done

2010-06-11T07:08:00.002-05:00

What a great initiative coming from the University of Michigan: open.michigan

Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students, staff and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.

That this effort isn't being initiated by Michigan's land-grant university is sad. When the history is written, that the nation's land-grant universities were so slow to get on the right side of the open education movement is going to be seen as a blunder of epic proportion. The open education movement should have been an idea birthed and totally embraced by the land-grants. Instead we've seen it resisted. It's very very sad to see such an opportunity to have gone totally missed.

BTW, I have written Michigan State University twice now asking for an explanation for the copyright statement attached to their OpenCourseWare site. Compare Michigan State's all-rights-reserved licensing to the Creative Commons statement found at the University of Michigan. Shameful!

Opting-out of Google Analytics

2010-05-30T22:20:00.005-05:00

Google has released a new browser extension that will stop your browsing information from being sent to Google Analytics. I hope this takes off, and gets Web site owners to stop thinking about meaningless metrics like pageviews.

You can get the extension here: Google Analytics opt-out extension

Good stuff Google!

HighTouch Book Club: Update

2010-05-30T09:27:00.006-05:00

I've finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. I will work on getting my book notes put up in the next couple of days. If you haven't read this book I highly recommend it.

I have no other new book club reads in the queue at the moment. Your suggestions are most welcome.

I am stepping back in the interim to enjoy a couple of older books sent to me by @ethnobot (Thank you so much!) These are: The Pursuit of Wow! by Tom Peters, and Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Richardo Semler.

Regular book club reads will continue when I have finished these two books.

A great movie and example of flow experience

2010-05-29T21:13:00.009-05:00

We watched The Hurt Locker last night on PPV. What a great movie! I'm so glad we saw it yesterday, because if we'd waited just one more day, I'm pretty sure this news would have seen me exercising a personal boycott of the film: Creators Must Move Beyond Suing the Audience

The file-sharing public faces yet another wave of predatory litigation, this time from the so-called US Copyright Group ("USCG"), which is suing BitTorrent users on behalf of various independent filmmakers. The Hollywood Reporter reports that more than 20,000 individuals have been sued, with more suits to come, and the producers of the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker have also signed up with the USCG to go after BitTorrent users.

That said, the character played by Jeremy Renner in the movie was simply incredible. I've been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. You couldn't ask for a better example of living in the flow than Sergeant First Class William James. This character had all the elements: immersion, mastery, a distortion of time, a suspension of self-consciousness, clear goals-- you make a mistake you die, and a desire to continuously push the boundaries of performance. It's worth seeing The Hurt Locker for no other reason than to study this character.

You can achieve flow states in all walks of life and in every type of job. You don't have to go looking for highly dangerous situations, e.g. bombs to defuse. You just have to push your personal everyday boundaries in ways heretofore unimagined.

Can you Trojan Horse cultural change?

2010-05-28T04:33:00.000-05:00

We all know the tale of the Trojan Horse. I was thinking of it again this week while listening to Byron Reeves (Total Engagement, Harvard Business Press, 2009) speak at a conference about the potential for gaming technologies to transform the work environment. Byron talked about the values baked-in to games that support the larger organizational trends toward greater transparency, openness, collaboration, and flatter more democratic work environments.

When I read Byran's book, and again this week while listening to his talk, I couldn't help but think of the Wizard of Oz. That behind every enterprise gaming curtain will be some little man micro-managing the worker's every move. I've talked about this before when discussing the dangers of workstreaming:

Workstreaming is one of those things that causes me a great deal of angst. It worries me so much that I have been reluctant to write this post. Its potential to be misused by micro-managers and control-freaks is huge. The logs track a worker's every action, through syndication feeds that data is exposed, through aggregation it is combined, and through filtering it is synthesized. Used improperly, it has the potential to lead to work-group hell. You could very easily create a workplace that no one would want to work. Think time-cards, dot-boards, seat-time, and otherwise irrelevant metrics on steroids. Giving these tools to old-school managers would be something akin to Sheriff Taylor letting Deputy Fife put real bullets in his service revolver.

I'm totally in the camp that says these technologies, when deployed in the right organizational setting, will be incredibly powerful and transformative. I'm left wondering, however, what happens when you introduce these tools into situations where they are at strong odds with an organization's predominant culture? Do the trojan-horsed values have the power to change the culture? Or, are organizational cultures so strongly entrenched that they will eventually displace the values embedded in this new breed of software?

We're headed for a classic battle once people begin to realize what's hidden inside that big wooden horse called code. I don't have a crystal ball, and I have no idea how it will play out. My gut tells me that most organizations will attempt to drive the embedded values out of the code. In the end, I suspect their attempts will fail, but it's going to be a long battle. Changing organizational cultures is a tricky business.