HighTouch

Social Media 101: Destination Website Fail

2009-06-30T14:40:00.007-05:00

Image by kimberlyfaye via Flickr

The ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article on people's lack of interest in the Obama Administration's open government initiative. It highlights the paltry participation numbers:

An Open Government Directive page for a drafting phase has now been extended until July 3. Although the OSTP blog states that "well over 100 drafts of open government recommendations" were submitted by users, contributors number just 201 users, and fewer than 1,000 ratings have been registered by the site.

For example, what should have been a hot topic (enabling citizens' participation in government using new media) on the wiki-like MixedInk site only had 18 contributors.

It then speculates as to some possible reasons for the failure:

Do you think the U.S. government did an adequate job of publicizing its Open Government efforts? Do you think political and technology bloggers with a critical mass of traffic should have done more to spread the word and encourage user participation, much in the way that music television channels consistently harass youngsters to "rock the vote"?
Do you think that trends of citizen apathy have finally peaked to a point that - even when tools for participation are free and available via a simple Internet connection - no one cares enough to weigh in?

Of course, the correct answer is none-of-the-above. All that has been proven, once again, is that it is extremely difficult to build destination Web sites. It doesn't matter who you are-- even the President of the United States with a community of 306 million. If you build it they won't come.

The failure says nothing about the people's penchant for open and participatory government, but everything about how the Internet is changing. If you want to engage with people you have to go to them. How many times must this failure be repeated before people get it?

Federal Government to Develop Free Online Courses

2009-06-29T08:27:00.005-05:00

Image by telethon via Flickr

An interesting bit of news: U.S. Push for Free Online Courses:

Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration.

Targeted at the community college system? Okay, I buy that. If your primary interest is in job skills for the largest number of people then this makes total sense. What doesn't make sense is the proposal's old economy emphasis on face-to-face learning to the tune of $18.5 billion while supporting online learning with a paltry $500 million ($50m a year x 10 years). The goal for this $50 million is to produce 20-25 "high quality" courses a year. Wow, $2 million per course? I wonder what little goodies are buried in this proposal that have little to do with learning?

Then there was this little gem about the Federal Government "owning" the courses:

The courses would be owned by the government and would be free for anyone to take.

That can't possibly be right? If it is, this would represent a major shift in policy. Things produced with the people's money go into the public domain. Period. That has been the law since forever. Surely the people behind this proposal are smart enough to know that? Any attempt to change the Federal Government's approach to intellectual property in such a draconian fashion must be resisted. I'd rather nothing be done than for it do be done so wrong.

Yes it's about speed but don't forget the process

2009-06-27T08:31:00.006-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

We all have those people in our lives, you know, the ones who say something and you know immediately that the opposite is true. Recently my certain someone proclaimed that Twitter had peaked and was soooooooooo dead. Hehe.

Personally, I think Twitter is irrelevant. Twitter is just an application. It is what people are doing with Twitter that matters, and that is anything but irrelevant. It's the future. Twitter is changing the world because it's changing the way we communicate. It's changing our expectations in regard to: timeliness, transparency, flatness, engagement, and even the way that knowledge is constructed. Hint: it's a social process.

This talk by Marc Benioff has been receiving a lot of attention: The future of computing looks like Twitter:

Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.

The Marketing Pilgrim picked up on this meme and elaborated, The Reality of Real Time Hits Real Hard :

What is more important is a real sea change that is occurring which shows that in business it’s real time or it’s no time. While it may not be practical or even possible to have true real time for everything, most companies should be tapped into some form of real time availability of information that occurs outside their four walls. If not, they stand a real chance of being left behind.

I'm in complete agreement that expectations around timeliness are accelerating. It's no longer acceptable to make them wait. Focusing on speed alone, however, misses the most important trend-- people expect to be an integral part of the process.

Bottling knowledge for later consumption is an industrial era model. Knowledge is not something that you package and put on the shelf. It's not something to be found at the end of a Google search string. Knowledge construction is a process. It's a conversation, thinking-out-loud, learning. It's a journey that people embark on together.

In the future (which is now) if you're going to survive, the artificial walls you've constructed around your organization are going to have to fall. The sooner you realize this and start tearing them down the better your long term prospects for survival.

Balls and strikes or strikes and balls

2009-06-16T21:05:00.010-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop this morning (The Royal Bean in Raleigh) fooling with my iPhone, and I overheard the most interesting conversation. It was between a woman and her SO, and it was obvious she was not happy. The conversation went something like this:

HER: I have my (inaudible) fundraiser this Thursday.

HIM: I'm doing a game that night.

HER: What time does it start?

HIM: Six o'clock.

HER: The fundraiser starts at eight.

HIM: I'd be hard pressed to be there before 8:30, but I am behind the plate.

HER: What difference does that make?

HIM: I can make a bigger strike zone, and speed up the game considerably.

HER: That's terrible!!!

HIM: Nah, they love it when you make them hit.

The moral of the story? Got me. Anyone?

The Heisenberg principle and education

2009-06-13T06:20:00.012-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

This is one of the best blog posts I have read in a long time: Competing With Competition? It is about competition and how it destroys cooperation in organizations. It describes the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.

Then it applies this principle to organizations:

So what happens when we compete with each other? What are the consequences when we decimate each other? What happens when one departments competes with another department in the same company? What happens when one person competes with another for a salary and bonuses? What happens when society competes with Wall Street for their 401K? What happens when the competition is already lost – do we continue competing or do we then cooperate?

Which is exactly why adding extrinsic incentives totally borks the conditions which make peer-production systems work. People who don't understand how these principles work, well meaning people, try to incent what can't be incented, and they totally break it in the process.

It's the same thing with education. Want to improve education tomorrow? Then stop this competition madness immediately. Throw-out that which destroys learning: competition. Recognize that most learning is socially constructed, and do everything in your power to promote those social elements.

I saw a wonderful one-person play this week about the life of George Washington Carver, Listening to the Still Small Voice played by Paxton Williams. He had a take-away line that would be a perfect mantra for education, Lift as you climb. You can't lift when you're devoting your energy to finishing on top.

U.S. News and World Report: University rankings and gaming the system

2009-06-04T21:38:00.003-05:00

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The Charlotte Observer reports on Clemson's gaming of the U.S. News and World Report university ranking system: Staffer: Clemson manipulated rankings

A rogue Clemson University staffer has accused the South Carolina school of manipulating its U.S. News & World Report ranking – reviving a debate over what critics call the pernicious influence of the magazine's annual college ratings.

That someone would game this ranking system totally rocks! Of course, it is completely to be expected. The already high respect I had for Clemson University just went up ten-fold. These rankings are nothing short of evil. They are worse than meaningless, and that parents and students buy this crap is really sad.

The best way to deal with trying to measure things that have no business being measured is to totally destroy their credibility. My hope is that every school games these ratings to no-end, and that it drives a stake through the heart of the whole sordid mess.

Facebook begins support for OpenID

2009-05-18T19:23:00.006-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

I've been critical of Facebook's lack of openness in the past so I need to give them a massive shoutout now: Facebook’s OpenID Goes Live

Later today Facebook will officially become an OpenID relying party. What does that mean? It that if you wish to register for Facebook using another OpenID provider, you can. Initially the service will not be completely open though. As Facebook will post later today, “To start, new users can now register for Facebook with their Gmail accounts, and existing users can link their Facebook accounts with any OpenID provider to connect with friends and eliminate the need for multiple sign-ins.

This is really big news. I'd pretty much backed completely out of Facebook over their closed nature. This move brings me back. The hiatus is over.

That Facebook was the first of the really big players to accept OpenID from third parties is huge. May the remaining dominoes begin to fall. Thank you Facebook!

UPDATE: It was there just like them promised. I set it up, and it works totally sweet. This is most excellent!!!

Always up and the cloud

2009-05-17T08:36:00.009-05:00

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I find this discussion of 100% uptime quite interesting: Google Outage Shows the Cloud May Not Be Enterprise-Ready

Google and other cloud-based services have been experiencing outages of several hours' duration throughout 2009. While that may be fine for members of the general public, who can live with e-mail occasionally being down for an hour, it is of potential concern for businesses of all sizes, including larger enterprise companies, where constant uptime equals revenue and even survival. Are services such as Google Apps and Microsoft Azure ready to meet that need?

I remember a saying back in the day, and it revolved around emergency services like 9-1-1, that when it absolutely had to run you chose Unix. Of course, Unix-based systems didn't run 100% of the time. You can create redundant systems all you want, but they still are not going to run 100% of the time. Nothing runs 100% of the time.

I'm reminded of when I moved to Iowa from California to attend graduate school. This was back in the 80s. One of my first tasks as part of my instructorship was to help in organizing a big conference. I worked on it for months. When the day of the conference finally arrived, we had this massive snow storm and the event was canceled. Canceled just like that. No one gave it a second thought. I'd never experienced a blizzard before. I was distraught. All that work. All that money. Poof!

The people I worked with on the other hand, were totally unconcerned. Of course, they were way smarter than me. They'd learned to accept that snow happens. I still had to learn that lesson, but eventually I came to look at snow events as opportunities. An opportunity to slow down. An opportunity to do something different. Snow helped to put things in proper perspective. The sky wasn't going to fall.

That's how I feel about cloud computing as well. If you can't get to the servers, who cares, the world isn't going to come to an end. If you live in Iowa you come to accept snow as a sometimes inconvenient aspect of life. Same thing with the cloud. If you live in the cloud you realize that sometimes those clouds might be cumulus, and at other times they might be funnels. You'll be far healthier and happier if you just think of a cloud failure as something akin to a naturally occurring phenomenon.

I think there is a freeranging lesson here.

Wolfram|Alpha Error Message

2009-05-15T21:42:00.003-05:00

I was fooling around with a link to Wolfram|Alpha that actually works, and after several test entries it spit out this error message:

I'm prepared to declare that this will be a huge hit based on the coolness factor of that error message. From Wikipedia: Wolfram Research

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, as it does not look up answers to queries on an index of web pages or documents. Queries and computations are similarly posed to it via a text field, but it computes answers and relevant visualizations on the fly from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

In 2009 it's hard to beat humans.

HighTouch Book Club: The next read

2009-05-10T08:15:00.005-05:00

I'm almost finished reading What Would Google Do?. I have 31 pages to go. It'll take me a bit longer to get my notes up on FriendFeed: Hightouch Book Club, but I think it's safe to say we're within a week of starting the next read.

It's time to pick the next book. Rule #1 in the book club is:

I pick a book. (I'm open to suggestions, however.)

The next book will be The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt. I wanted to announce the book early just in case you're interested in reading along.

If you would like to influence the choice for the read following Whuffie speak now...

When I visited B&N to pick up Whuffie I also purchased, The Philosophy of John Dewey which includes two volumes: The Structure of Experience, and The Lived Experience. I'm thinking this book won't fit the primary criteria of the book club, "the intersection of technology and culture (loosely defined)." If I get into it and decide it might work I'll add it to the list.

I want Google Analytics everywhere

2009-05-09T06:18:00.005-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

I was kicking the tires on a new site this morning, posterous.com. Their tagline, "the dead simple place to post everything." Getting started is as easy as sending an email to post@posterous.com. You account and domain will be automically created. It couldn't be easier.

If you want, however, to customize your site a bit it can be done. I was customizing my posterous page when I got a huge surprise: Setting up Google Analytics. Are you kidding me? This is something I asked for almost two years ago: Privacy - yearning for yesteryear:

In a transparent world I should have the ability to see who is looking at my information. I want my Google Analytics capabilities extended to every location where I post content. If you're looking at photos of my children on Flickr I should be able to see that. If you're hanging on my every Twitter post -- I should know that too. Transparency needs to be a two-way street. We need our social networking sites to open-up and allow us to embed tracking scripts on our personal pages.

That Posterous is allowing me to embed my Analytics script is very cool. I can't believe that someone hasn't done this sooner. (Does anyone know of other sites that provide this capability?) As said previously, Google Analytics will become the neighborhood watch of the Internet. This kind of stuff is going to be huge. I want these sort of capabilities everywhere a piece of me lives on the Internet.

Your Web site strategy: What's plan B?

2009-05-03T22:57:00.005-05:00

We've been saying this for a long time. Treat every page as a standalone site. Quit wasting your time and energy trying to control your Web site visitors. They are in charge, they have the back button. It's a good read: The End of the Destination Web Era

In March the average American visited a mere 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What's worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention.

If your strategy is to build a destination Web site and bottle content, what's your back-up plan?

Putting people in boxes

2009-04-29T05:28:00.008-05:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I know I'll be dating myself, but back in the day I used to be very sensitive to someone wanting to label someone as a techie. I considered it then, and still consider it to be a derogatory term. It was an attempt to define you by a single dimension, and to limit your input to a particular element of the discourse. It was mostly used by people who wanted to tell you what to do, and who rarely wanted your input on why, what they were wanting to do, was unlikely to work. So whenever I heard the word it caught my attention as the idea that followed was often quite clueless.

I've worked pretty actively with technology since 1978. Back in those days you became a techie mostly through self-learning. I guess there were computer clubs to be found, but certainly not in the area of California where I lived. So what I learned, I learned almost entirely on my own. I had a diverse background. I had expertise in several areas, but technology was not really one of them. Granted, I knew a lot more about it than most people, but in reality I was (and still am) a neophyte. So I was most definitely not a techie, and I found people's attempts to define me as such insulting. (And I still do.)

So it was with great interest yesterday when an email crossed my screen describing a soon-to-be very important and influential person as a technocrat. My radar went up immediately. First, as I read the person's bio I didn't see any technology in their background at all. This was, by anyone's estimation an extremely accomplished person. It was a bio that quite seriously would blow you away, and yet the person was still quite young. So to describe this person as a technocrat to me seemed quite odd. It's one step worse than describing them as a techie.

To me, it spoke volumes about the author while telling me little about the subject. It was not used as a term-of-endearment. It was a very public display of a lack of respect. (Did someone forget to mention to the author that emails are public today?) What makes this particular example more interesting is that the subject is soon to be in a position of tremendous influence.

We're going to see many more of these clashes of culture as the next generation ascends to leadership. Starting-off by name calling doesn't bode well. I feel for those who think it's appropriate to begin a relationship by using derogatory terms to describe their new colleague. Having to start by mending fences is never good.

The looming clash of cultures

2009-04-26T05:56:00.017-05:00

Yesterday afternoon the family went to see State of Play. It was an entertaining movie with an engaging and plausible storyline. I was, however, taken by the subplot which paired a veteran Washington Reporter played by Russell Crowe with a younger blogger played by Rachel McAdams who worked in the papers "online" division. It was a very subtle subplot but it worked. He had a visible disrespect for the online division, she thought he was mostly clueless, he considered her somewhat inexperienced and naive. In the end it was journalism that brought them together, and the development of just enough mutual respect that allowed them to focus on what was most important, getting the story.

The movie handled it really well. As I mentioned, it was subtle, and allowed the subplot to develop without detracting from the main plot. It also didn't take sides, or denigrate the position of either character. It was a happy ending. I'm not so sure that in real life that many of our organizations who will live through the looming cultural change will fair so well. If only life were like the movies.

I've been thinking about this a lot of late. How we're living in these two parallel worlds: pre and post the Big Change. Most know that change is necessary, but are uncertain of the path forward. I've written about this many times in the past. People aren't just sitting back and watching the change happen-- they are actively resisting. (See: The Empty Quarter November 2006)

I was thinking about this a bunch yesterday while watching the movie. I'd just read three excellent articles on this very topic. The first was from Dave Snowden on how the old-school IT departments are resisting 2.0: Beware the blanket octopodes

...it was to my mind a perfect description of how too many an IT department treats social computing. Creating net-like membranes that disproportionately exaggerate their role was a good start. However the perfect piece was ripping off the tentacles of the poor old Portuguese man of war and using them for defensive purposes. I've seen this too often of recent years, reluctantly dragged into the world of social computing which they only partially understand, the first reaction is to dismember it into something familiar and controllable, then use it as a weapon to fend off reform.

Then there was this piece from ReadWriteWeb on some new reasearch from LexisNexis: The Technology Generation Gap at Work is Oh So Wide

Yikes! Phones and PDAs are distracting and inefficient tools? Blogging is unacceptable? Who are these people? Unfortunately, they're the people who still have a lot of power when it comes to the decisions being made at the workplace. Baby boomers are the executives, the CEOs, the bosses, etc. while Gen Y is just now getting their foot in the door. But it's clear that these two generations strongly disagree on how technology is to be used.

Finally there was this piece by Xerox researcher Venkatesh Rao: Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War

The uber-cause of this war is that Knowledge Management was conceived as a top-down Boomer (born 1946 - 62) management effort, created by this generation just as it was moving into leadership positions. Social Media, on the other hand, is a Millenial/Gen Y (born 1980 -) movement. This overall generational cultural divide has shaped the ongoing corporate cultural war. This leads to vast, and I mean truly VAST, differences in how the two movements approach enterprise social engineering...

I don't know how you can read these three articles and come away with any other conclusion than, we have a serious problem here! Unless you've been living in a cave the last five years, I think it's clear to everyone that organizations have to make the transition to newer more democratic, flatter, open, and transparent ways of working. You either make the change or die. It's that simple. Social computing technologies are how we're going to get there: wikis, blogs, microblogs, social networks, blah blah, blah... AND YET, the current generation of leadership (see: The looming leadership paradox) is supposed to take us there? Tell me how this is supposed to happen?

Which brings us to the clash of strategies. There are basically two approaches being advocated-- the long-slow-one, where it happens through evolution. We know how this story ends, the current leadership eventually retires and the mantle of leadership is left to the next generation. Most people, including myself, don't think enterprises have this kind of time. The second approach, you create safe-havens for this newer and more modern style of working to emerge. Skunkworks if you will. This is exactly the approach that Venkatesh Rao advocates in this Stowe Boyd interview at the Enterprise 2.0 blog: Open Enterprise 2009: Venkatesh Rao, Xerox

Venkatesh argues that ‘culture change is hard’ may be an excuse for not pushing hard to get adoption to happen. “It’s part of people playing the Impossible Problem Game.” If you set up something as culture change, then everyone frames it as impossible, like boiling the ocean. You should look for a more ‘Darwinian survival of the fittest’ model, where various alternatives are envisioned as competing with each other.

Agreed! Forget cultural change, forget transformation, forget teaching old-dogs new tricks. Find those pockets of emerging culture within your organization, protect them, shield them, feed and nurture them, and let them set up competing models for getting the job done. You want tons of safe-fail experiments. Survival of the fittest at its best. Let them duke-it-out, and may the best model win.

The delusional news media-- newspaper version

2009-04-19T11:07:00.003-05:00

Image by Ol.v!er [H2vPk] via Flickr

An interesting, but not reality-based read from the SF Gate: Web firms must pay for newspapers' work:

In France, newspapers are in trouble, just as they are here in the United States. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, wants to give 18-year-olds a free subscription to the paper of their choice.

What does he think this will accomplish? I stopped taking my local paper when I realized it'd been six months since I'd even taken it out of its plastic sleeve. Then it took me another year to get them to stop delivery. So it was essentially free, but I never read it.

The only thing that giving 18-year-olds free subscriptions is going to accomplish is to kill more trees. Guess that's good for the newsprint industry, perhaps: World's biggest newsprint co. files for bankruptcy.

The all new HighTouch book club

2009-04-11T06:25:00.005-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

Back in December we tried an experiment with starting a book club using the technology found at BookSprouts:

I've created the Hightouch book club, the place for us to read and discuss books that touch on the intersection of technology and culture (loosely defined). I've nominated a couple of books for reading, but it's a social site, and y'all can suggest books for the club to read. The site has a database of pretty much every book ever written so adding new suggestions is super easy. I set the initial ramp-up period on the longish side--10 days.Please join, suggest books, and be ready to cast your vote for our first read.

I've pretty much declared the first book club a failure. We had a good group of people subscribe to the club, we voted on a book to read, we gave everyone some time to purchase the book and start reading, we started the discussion, and we made it slightly halfway through the book with some good discussion. At least I thought it was a good discussion. Then the conversation died.

We could debrief the failure, but I'm not going to. It'd be easy to blame it on the technology, but that is rarely the reason these things fail. I'm just going to proclaim it a failure and move on. I'm ready to announce the new HighTouch Book Club. It is quite simply a FriendFeed feed. You can subscribe to the feed here: HighTouch Book Club.

Here's how it works:

I pick a book. (I'm open to suggestions, however.)
I post notes about what I'm reading to the feed.
Anyone can read along and post their thoughts as well.
Whether you're reading the book or not everyone is welcome to post their comments.

That's it. Pretty simple. I read. You read. We comment. When we're done we move on to the next.

The club's first book is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Please join us.

Peer review inhibiting science?

2009-04-09T13:17:00.004-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

This study from Canada helps to make the point concerning wasted dollars in the whole research cycle that might be better spent on actual science: Cost of peer review exceeds the cost of giving every researcher a grant

Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant).

The article goes on to make the point that perhaps we should be spreading the funding around with the hopes of seeing more diversity and innovation in discovery.

It's just another example of the massive overhead and waste in the current system, and how some disintermediation of the control points just might lead to better science. We need some new models that better reflect what the new technologies have enabled.

Openness and higher education-- how do we get there?

2009-04-05T06:41:00.010-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

In a great Slideshare presentation, Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education, David Wiley asks: How might we open things up? Higher education needs to figure this out.

I started giving this some thought and decided to make a list:

Video cameras in every classroom-- Streamed and archived video of everything. The world is invited into every activity of the academy. This is a first step. Eventually we have to lose the whole concept of a classroom and even a campus. Learning is not place-bound.
Intellectual property-- Close the university intellectual property offices. All formerly copyrightable materials are released into the commons: Creative Commons 3.0. Patentable discoveries are released into the public domain. It's that easy.
Open textbooks-- No commercial textbooks allowed. Faculty are strongly encouraged to contribute to and participate in open-textbook projects. Every faculty member is evaluated today on a public service component. A simple question could be added to all faculty evaluations: What are you doing to support the commons?
Open-courseware-- All course materials are released to the commons. No exceptions.
Credit hours-- Anything based on a measurement of time is meaningless. Time-based learning is a throwback to the industrial age. Some things we learn fast, some things take longer. One thing is certain, none of us learn at the same pace. Openness requires freeing learning from these types of artificial constraints.
Embrace open-learning-- Being learner centered requires the use of the tools used by the learner. So embrace blogs, Facebook , and other forms of social networking. Go to where the students are, and stop expecting them to come to us. Higher education needs to embrace the concept of Personal Learning Environments and ditch the whole Course Management System thing. Stop spending millions on Blackboard and Moodle too. There is nothing social constructionist about Moodle-- so stop the lie. The only people who should be managing learning are the learners themselves.
Tuition--If credit hours are absurd then so is a system of paying for an education based on that artificial unit. Students are paying for a lot of things when they decide to attend a university. That the payment is bundled into the unit of instruction is nothing short of odd. Openness mandates that the payment for education be done entirely different.
Peer assessment-- Faculty who teach no longer assess. Assessment needs to be separated from learning. In a world where most learning is socially constructed the competitive model of assessment is a severe impediment.
Departments/disciplines-- Eliminate them entirely. Move to self organizing communities of learners and scholars that are not discipline-based. Silos are so last century.
Open research-- Open data, open notebooks, open labs... Complete transparency from start to finish.
Tenure-- Employment for life? Yeah right. Openness requires a much more porous movement of intellectual talent both in and out of the academy. In addition, the costs for managing the whole process are obscene. These cognitive cycles should be focused on something more important.
...

This was done off the top of my head. What'd I miss? What doesn't belong on the list? What can't possibly work? The floor is yours...

Waste in administering science: Buildings

2009-03-15T13:47:00.005-05:00

Michael Roseblum, at RoseblumTV has an interesting post contrasting the old ways of doing business with the new: A Visit to The Facebook Building

Outside my livingroom window is 30 Rock, the headquarters for NBC. It’s a very big building and they pay a very big rent to be there.

It’s remnant from another era.

Have you ever seen The Facebook Building?

Have you ever been inside it?

Have you ever even seen a picture of it?

Where is Facebook?

It is nowhere, and it is everywhere.

Where is the Craigslist Building? Craigslist, the website that destroyed the newspaper business in the US.

You don’t need the building to gather, curate, edit and distribute information.

You don’t need the overhead.

The New York Times building on 8th Avenue and 40th Street is a stunning tombstone to $800 million that could have been spent on content, instead of steel and glass.

I've talked about this before: Keeping your offices and losing your people. Now ask yourself the same questions about big science. How may more scientists could we fund if we administered it differently? That NSF building: really necessary? Aren't they just gathering, curating, editing, and distributing information? What about those huge overhead charges imposed by our universities?

Will big science implode?

2009-03-15T12:02:00.006-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

I'm going to be blogging more about science-- not the actual research, but the bloated bureaucracies that surround it.

The current system is broken. Seriously broken. There is massive waste, and the various entities all taking their cuts means less dollars available for actual research.

It's getting worse. When everything is becoming more open, big science is becoming more closed. Less accessible to the public which pays for it. We do have a few bright spots, the Public Library of Science, and the new NIH Open-Access mandate to name a couple, but there is a lot more that needs fixing. Especially the funding.

We don't have a shortage of scientists. We produce a massive number of new scientists each year. The problem is that only a small number of them ever work for entities where they can actively practice the science for which they were trained. We're wasting a ton of talented cognitive cycles by maintaining the current closed system. It needs to be opened-up. Completely redesigned.

This post at Science in the open: Fantasy Science Funding: How do we get peer review of grant proposals to scale? raises many of the issues.

For grant review, the problems that are already evident in scholarly publishing, fundamentally the increasing volume, are exacerbated by the fact that success rates for grans (sic) are falling and that successful grants are increasingly in the hands of a smaller number of people in a smaller number of places.

The problems with big science won't be fixed by rearranging the deck chairs. There are too many people, getting too fat, for a systemic change to occur. Entrained systems don't tend to fix themselves--they usually implode.

Spreading nasty bugs in virtual worlds

2009-03-14T18:34:00.004-05:00

We had a meeting in Second Life this afternoon. Yes, we meet on Saturdays. When you freerange you meet anytime, and in lots of different places. When you have a group of people comfortable with the Second Life interface there is no place better to meet than Second Life. It totally shines over the other virtual environments.

That said, during the meeting today I had to sneeze, and before I could click on the mute button I let it rip. Everyone said, GBY and I apologized for not being quick enough with the mouse. Then someone said, "At least in here we don't have to worry about you spreading your germs to the rest of us."

Great point! Just one more reason why meeting in virtual space makes so much sense: less travel cost, always available, no spreading of nasty office bugs...

Is GChat crushing the IM competition?

2009-03-11T06:42:00.004-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

What's up with GMail?: Visits to Gmail surpass YouTube

For the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube. Previously, YouTube consistently ranked 10th among all websites by market share of visits until the week ending Jan. 10, 2009, where Gmail moved up one rank to reach #10. The websites have been swapping positions regularly ever since.

So why is this? You don't have to go to GMail to get your mail. Is this being driven by GChat? I've mentioned before that many people were abandoning AIM for GChat. Is Google on the brink of owning the instant messaging space? Is that where you do your chatting now?

The We the People Wiki: that ain't working that's the way you do it

2009-03-10T06:34:00.005-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

This is a perfect example of using MediaWiki to engage citizens: We the People Wiki

We the People began with the live data feeds provided by the D.C. Government and its Office of the Chief Technology Officer. But We the People will grow based on contributions and collaboration by everyone who cares about Washington, D.C. Together, we can make We the People a living reference and a new form of citizen participation in D.C. democracy.

We've entered an era where distributed cognition, and socially constructed knowledge rule the day. This is exactly the sort of participatory use of technology that people are demanding. If you're in the knowledge business you really have no choice but to invite the people to the table.

Google Knol: It's way too early to be calling for its shuttering

2009-03-08T07:10:00.007-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

There has been a lot of discussion about the poor quality of Google Knol articles. Even though the service has only existed for a little over six months that hasn't stopped people from calling for Google to pull the plug:

Why Has Knol Survived Google's Orphan-Project Killing Spree?

We admire Google's willingness to experiment with new ways to build cool (and potentially profitable) features onto their existing service. And we admire Google's willingness to realize when their experiments have failed and shut them down. So why still back Knol?

I visited Google in Washington, D.C. last week and one of the topics was Knol. I signed an NDA so I can't discuss what I learned, but I can tell you that it was very interesting. When I got home I was motivated, so I spent a good deal of time kicking-the-tires on Knol once again.

I read a bunch of Knol articles, and I have to admit that I was taken back by all the crap. Where I didn't come across the tons of spam that people talk about, I did experience some very poorly written stuff. I couldn't miss the obvious bias (non-NPOV) in many of the articles, and the lack of consistency in the style of writing. As I moved from article to article it became very distracting.

I also came across a lot of high quality articles written by people with impeccable credentials who I would trust. The articles were well written, informative, and enjoyable to read. When I was reading I had to remind myself that was I was doing, browsing Knol, was an abboration. People don't browse Knol anymore than they browse Wikipedia. Not happening! They'll come to a Knol article the same way they come to all content today-- from search. Every article stands alone. (See: Searchable wads of content: Pulling the plug on the Web site)

That Knol articles don't rank high in search is more a reflection of the age of Knol than their quality. It will take time for the good Knol articles to start ranking higher. They won't be returned high in search results until people start linking to them. That's how it works. The crap articles will fall by the wayside and no one will ever see them. They'll be relegated to the Knol dead-pool, and the fact that they exist at all is irrelevant. If a tree falls in the forest.... The high quality articles, however, will eventually rise to the top.

Anyone who understands the most basic principles of Search Engine Optimization knows that it takes time for an article to rank high in search. To be calling for Knol's shuttering half a year into its existence is absurd. Knol solves some very significant issues for people who have expertise, and want to share it with others. Given more time (5 years?) I have no doubt that Knol is going to be a force to be reckoned with.

Our New CIO-- YAY!!!!!!!

2009-03-07T16:53:00.005-05:00

Interesting interview with the new (and first) CIO for the United States: Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words

VK: I think you look at open source, as a technology, whether it's mediawiki, for example... with Wikipedia what we did in the District of Columbia was that we had a wikipedia solution that allowed every single employee to collaborate and have access to information.

snark-on MediaWiki? Horror of horrors! Everyone knows it's way too hard for government workers much less scientists. snark-off

It's a new day.