This is the third in a mini-series of three blog entries. In the first blog entry, I described Gov 2.0 as a world of “permeable boundaries”, characterized by crowdsourcing and collaboration, and described the challenges that created for leadership. In the second blog entry I looked at some model organizations that are already working (and very effectively) in that sort of environment and what they might have to teach us. In this final instalment, I'll try and apply those lessons to government. This was the hardest one to write, as I've really just started thinking about it. I'm sure that these models provide lessons we can learn and apply to government to enable our leaders to lead effectively, despite the blurred boundaries and diffused responsibility. I'm far less sure of exactly what those lessons are. These are my first thoughts. I welcome your edits, corrections, additions, etc.

(As a side and obligatory note: these opinions are my own and not those of my employer. Although I wouldn't be offended if my employer starts to think along these lines.)

Internal collaboration
For internal collaboration, I find it easiest to draw a parallel by thinking of the staff of the department/branch/unit that is accountable for the finished product being collaborated on as being the equivalent of the "paid staff" in the model organizations and the participating staff from other departments/branches/units as the equivalent of the "volunteers".

There are two main challenges to internal collaboration: getting people from outside the department/branch/unit to devote their time to the collaborative project and getting management to be comfortable in sharing their intellectual property (the "draft" material "not ready for publication"). For both of these challenges we might be able to find some solutions from our model organizations.

For the first, part of the answer comes from a clear vision and direction statement from the leadership of the collaboration project. As the models have shown, if the vision is one that the volunteers can buy into, they are more likely to participate. The key would be to describe the goals of the project in broader terms than the departmental goals, using rather the goals of the government as a whole. These are goals shared across the organization. Rewards used by the model organizations can also be adopted to encourage participation (reputation, enhanced access, etc.).

For the latter, there are also several sides to the solution. One major concern with sharing materials within the organization that are "not ready for publication" is that they will be seen as representing the thoughts and opinions of the department/branch/unit when that isn't clear yet. Our model organizations have a number of approaches to addressing this particular concern. One is by clearly identifying material as to just how far along it is and distinguishing DRAFT from APPROVED. We see this with Mozilla in the many release versions, which are clearly marked as alpha, beta and full release and where the public releases are clearly identified as such. They are comfortable having people using their beta releases because they are clearly marked as such.

Another tactic for addressing this concern is clear attribution of authorship. If the work-in-progress is clearly attributed to the particular authors who work on it (or the changes attributed to changers) then the leaders won't be as worried about content being attributed to them that they haven't vetted. The various modules of Firefox all have clear individuals who are accountable for them. Another concern with sharing the material is about trust in the work that the volunteers will be doing. On the one hand, if the leaders are confident that the "volunteers" share their goals, they will likely be more trusting with their material. On the other hand, a clear review process of volunteer submitted material can also allay these concerns. The Mozilla Project has a strong review process to ensure the quality of volunteer contributions. While approvals are not necessary to take the code and creatively modify it, they are required before the resulting code is integrated into the Firefox product and associated with the Mozilla brand.

External engagement and crowdsourcing
For external engagement and crowdsourcing, government staff are the "paid staff" and citizenry and partner organizations (community groups, NGOs, businesses) are the "volunteers". Leadership needs to be comfortable with "co-creation" - including the community in the creative process. One technique that can be learned from model organizations is a focused call for participation. While people frequently  request that government simply open all data saying "make of it what you will" , government leaders may not be comfortable with this. Following our model organizations, government leaders can provide more direction and a vision.  They can provide a call to action. It is far better to make the data available saying "Use this to help us promote our province (or state or country)!", "Use this to help encourage investment and industry!", "Use this to help us improve our service delivery and to design innovative new services!" or "Use this to help us increase citizen engagement and improve our democracy!" This can be done through a competition or it can be simply how the material is marketed.

If the vision or goals are made clear and the initial responses are in line, it will be much easier for leadership to be confident that the community shares their vision and goals and is "on side" (fear of a "gotcha" response is a primary impediment to risk-taking). This technique was followed by the Obama campaign. It was very clear on what the vision was. All of its material was tied to the three themes: Hope. Change. Action. The message was so clear and consistent that it was effectively picked up and communicated by the vast community of volunteers in the development of their home-grown marketing efforts, graphics, posters, videos, etc.

This concept of providing the overall direction/vision and letting people make it happen in any way that works sounds a lot like "leadership" (as opposed to "management") as described in the leadership literature for a long time now. Our leaders (the politicians and senior executives) may be ready for this but most government organizations are not. They tend to be  bureaucracies and very process-oriented. They are control-driven, to ensure consistency and accountability. This can be seen internally and in relationships with partners, which is usually accompanied by Service Level Agreements or Memoranda of Understanding.

We need to trade some consistency for innovation; some accountability for opportunity. We need to keep some consistency (quality) and definitely accountability with the paid staff while opening up to the loss of consistency and accountability in the volunteers. We need to embrace that which moves the vision forward; while letting that which doesn't die on the vine.

These aren't the be all and end all of my thoughts on the matter. This is the result of a week or two's musing in off moments. I'm following my own advice and sharing the draft, "not ready for distribution", half-baked ideas and looking for contributions and creative re-mixing from the community. What do you think?

This is the second of mini-series of three blog entries. In the first blog entry, I described Gov 2.0 as a world of "permeable boundaries", characterized by crowdsourcing and collaboration, and described the challenges that created for leadership. In this blog entry I'll look at some model organizations that are already working (and very effectively) in that sort of environment and what they might have to teach us. In the final instalment, I'll try to apply those lessons to government.

(As a side and obligatory note: these opinions are my own and not those of my employer. Although I wouldn't be offended if my employer starts to think along these lines.)

Before we go into specific examples of effective leadership in a crowdsourcing/collaborative environment, I'd like to consider what type of organization we should be looking at. We can look to organizations where:

• There are a small group of paid employees and a large group volunteers
• Employees and volunteers are working together toward a common goal set by the organization's leadership

We tend to find this situation in charities, non-profits and political campaigns. If we look at organizations in those categories that are performing exceptionally well, perhaps we can learn some lessons that will serve us as we move to Gov 2.0. Perhaps coincidentally, within the last week or so I attended talks on two such organizations.

The Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. The Mozilla project creates open source software. Their most famous product is the Firefox web browser. To give an idea of the success of Firefox, when Firefox 1.0 was launched, there were 10 million downloads in the first month. When Firefox 2.0 was launched, there were 10 million downloads within 10 days. With 60 million daily users, Firefox enjoys a market share of over 20%. And it accomplished this in ten years, while competing with the largest, wealthiest and most competitive software company in the world.

How did it do that? An effective mix of paid staff, contractors and volunteers. A lot of work is done by volunteers. Looking at the number of patches submitted over the first four months of this year, for example, 50-60% were submitted by volunteers (generally closer to 60%).  And it is not just in code development that Mozilla depends upon (or benefits from) volunteers. When Firefox launched, thousands of volunteers raised $200,000 to buy a two-page advertisement spread in the New York Times. Clearly the Mozilla leadership has found a way to effectively harness the efforts of a large group, external to the organization, toward a common goal. (You can view the talk I attended yourselves.)

The Obama Campaign
The Obama Presidential Campaign was also a model of how to leverage volunteers. Whatever your views of Obama's personal character or policies, he clearly led an effective campaign. The Obama campaign raised $639 million (as compared to the $360 million raised by the McCain campaign), much of it in the form of small donations. It dominated online: about five times the number of friends on social networking sites Facebook and MySpace, nine times as many views of the YouTube videos they uploaded and over 28 times as many Twitter followers, for example. But its success wasn't only online. There were 35,000 volunteer groups and 200,000 offline events. In the four days before the election volunteers made 3 million calls. In the weekend before the election volunteers knocked on 1 million doors in Pennsylvania alone!

However, it is not enough to mobilize an army of volunteers like that. You have to keep them "on message" and aligned with the organization's goals and beliefs. Especially in a situation where volunteers are freely using your materials, and it is very difficult to distinguish volunteer activities from "official campaign" activities, it is critical to keep them aligned to avoid brand dilution and mixed messages. (You can view the talk I attended yourselves.)

Lessons we can learn
These two examples have a lot in common, in terms of how the organizations are/were run:

• Clear and consistent expression of a common vision that inspires and attracts a large community of participants. For Mozilla that vision is of a community-produced open source alternative. For Obama the vision is: Hope. Change. Action.
• Core team of paid staff to provide central coordination and take on tasks that volunteers are unable/unwilling to do.Both the Mozilla Foundation and the Obama Campaign employ paid staff to coordinate the efforts of volunteers. In both cases the paid staff is a small core mobilizing a large volunteer team.
• Volunteers are provided with direction and possibly training and tools. Mozilla provides extensive online documentation supporting developers, with a clear delineation of the various roles and responsibilities. They also provide a toolset (for example "Bugzilla, the tool the developed for tracking bugs). The Obama campaign also provided training to volunteers, with increasing training opportunities as their involvement grew. Sophisticated tools were provided through the MyBarackObama.com social networking site. Other innovative tools were also provided, such as the iPhone application, which acted like a portable campaign office.
• Volunteers are empowered to act creatively and to use the organization's intellectual property freely, as long as it is consistent with the overall vision. Mozilla makes its source code freely available to volunteers and invites them to work with it. On the marketing side, they encourage the participation of volunteers as well. For the Obama campaign, many of the most effective promotional materials: posters, viral videos, even carved pumpkins, were created by supporters who had no connection whatsoever with the campaign organization.

What do you think? Are these fair examples? Can you think of other examples ... or other lessons learned?

In this first blog entry I'll explore the main changes that Gov 2.0 will bring and the corresponding changes that will be needed in the style and culture of our leadership and organization. I'll argue that the primary change of Gov 2.0 is the creation of "permeable boundaries". With increasing engagement and collaboration, work and decision making will no longer be kept in one area and one organization.

In the second blog entry (coming Wednesday) I'll look at organizations where an inspiring leadership and a small staff effectively harness a large group of volunteers to create significant achievements as models of leadership in this type of environment. I'll look at some examples and discuss what what they have in common and their "lessons learned".

In the third blog entry (coming Friday) I'll attempt to apply those lessons to a government context. If that sounds interesting to you - read on!

(As a side and obligatory note: these opinions are my own and not those of my employer. Although I wouldn't be offended if my employer starts to think along these lines.)

Permeable Boundaries
When it comes right down to it, Web 2.0 (and Gov 2.0) is all about permeable boundaries. We are moving from a time of clear distinctions, with Government as the producer (of policies, services and
communications) and the community as the consumer to a time when the boundaries are much less clear. Emerging web technologies are enabling collaboration within the organization, breaking down silos, and enabling increased integration of government organizations with the surrounding community. Tapscott and Williams capture this shift in their book Wikinomics. It is most clearly captured in their "prosumer"
concept (a consumer who helps produce the products comsumed) but underlies their other concepts (peer production, ideagoras, etc.) as well.

The Gov 2.0 model is one where government is releasing its data for conversion into services by the community (e.g. the Apps for Democracy innovation contest sponsored by Washington D.C.); where analysis is outsourced to the community (e.g. the Peer to Patent community patent review ); and where the community is actively involved in writing, not just responding to, policy (e.g. the NZ Police Act Wiki). It's a world where the government is inviting people in (Web 2.0 consultations, community-sourcing traditional government activities) and, at the same time, increasingly going out into the community, delivering services and communicating, not just through government websites, but the places people regularly visit (Facebook groups, YouTube videos, Second Life islands). The boundaries between government and the community are becoming a lot more permeable.

Internal boundaries are also becoming much more permeable. Increasingly, as Web 2.0 technologies are applied within to improve collaboration they are breaking down the barriers between divisions and departments in traditionally siloed and hierarchical governments. One of the most famous examples is Intellipedia and the rest of the Intelink tools (blogs, social bookmarking, etc.) which are breaking down the barriers between the 16 US military and intelligence agencies, but there are plenty of other examples. These collaborative products are not produced by a single department but horizontally across the organization.

Resulting Concerns
These changes are provoking concerns. One concern we are hearing raised repeatedly is that leaders are concerned about the loss of effective control. This is true for both the outward-facing and internal implementations of "Gov 2.0".

The role of elected officials in setting the agenda, defining the policy direction of the government and representing the people is a cornerstone of representative democracy. Some have expressed a concern that direction setting directly by the "community" through Web 2.0 engagements bypasses the role of our elected leaders and undermines representative democracy. We need to find a way to connect the informal Web 2.0 engagements to the formal decision-making structures of the government. We need to find a way to enable the political leaders to stay true to their policy platform and the commitments they made during the electoral process while fully engaging citizens between elections.

A perceived loss of control is also a challenge to internal collaboration and wide-scale adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. Intellipedia competes with what seems to be a fairly wide scale implementation of Sharepoint, which is attractive to many because it allows users and administrators to establish boundaries and work within smaller groups without sharing across the broader government community. People continue to feel the need to work on material in private and take it through preliminary approvals before enabling wider distribution, even within the organization.

Separate, but perhaps related, is the need that some groups have for ownership of "their" content. This is also often associated with concerns about diffused accountability and difficulty of attribution when authorship is spread around the organization.

Effective leadership in a Gov 2.0 organization will need to acknowledge and address these concerns, not dismiss them.

What do you think? Have I effectively captured the essence of "Gov 2.0"?
What am I missing? Have I more or less hit the mark or am I way off target with the challenges I describe?

It's been a while.
I’m responding to a blog post that hasn’t been written yet. Yesterday an acquaintance tweeted “writing blog that info overload is not new. anyone read every book at their university library?” and that got me thinking. 

Certainly it’s been the case that there has been more knowledge available than a single person can learn for a very, very, very long time. We’ve dealt with that in a number of ways: increasing specialization, high level overviews, effective cataloguing and indexing. I might argue that the amount of information available is taking a quantum leap, exploding through the hugely increased publishing and distribution options now available through the Internet. But, by and large, these techniques for dealing with it continue to work and some are seeing definite improvements. 

It’s not the information sitting out there on the Internet (which I might be pressured to keep up with) that is causing my information overload. It’s the information coming in. Specifically, it’s the information coming in from or about personal contacts. It’s the emails, the blog entries (and comments), the status updates, the tweets and friendfeeds. 

There’s a reason that a lot of people are calling this “Web 2.0” stuff “social media”. And I think that this “social” information is a lot harder to leave on the shelves, unread until we need it, than the other stuff. It feels sort of anti-social (unsocial?) to do so. 

And there’s no question that there is more of it. One of the values that social media bring is the ability to effectively maintain “weak connections”. In the old days we had a few good friends, a somewhat larger number of acquaintances we saw regularly and a heck of a lot of people that we used to know but who had dropped off the map. Nowadays, with Facebook and Twitter and the other new tools, these people aren’t dropping off the map. We can still, with little effort per person, keep in touch and up to date with them. And, the networking gurus will say, it is these weak connections that provide great value. Because they don’t necessarily have all of the same interests as you, hang out with the same group of people, share the same perspective, they can answer your questions with information that you don’t already have. Studies have shown, for example, if you are looking for a job, you are much more likely to find the opportunity through a weak connection than a strong one. 

However, while the new technologies make it easier to keep up with weak connections, there is still a time commitment. There is still information coming in. And it can get overwhelming. Of course, you can just stop following people or “de-friend” them, but that can be socially awkward (and you lose all the kinds of value that the connection can bring). Also, once you have started following people, it can create an expectation. I stopped using Twitter for a while, but it was a bit awkward when friends and colleagues were referring to things in conversation, obviously expecting me to be familiar with them from Twitter. 

This is also why people find email inboxes such a big challenge. Unlike a library, there isn’t the expectation that you can just leave it there, calling upon it when you need it. It is a social communication (in the sense of “person to person”, not in the sense of “not work related”) and we are expected to at least read it in a timely fashion. 

I think people are feeling information overload. And part of the reason is that we haven’t developed the tools and techniques for dealing with the abundance of social media that we have for the abundance of traditional media. 

What do ytou think?

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. It really stems from two things:

1. Reading Jonathan Zittrain's book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
2. Various blog posts like Jason Kottke's "Facebook is the new AOL"

Jonathan Zittrain holds the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford as well as co-founder and professor at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard University. He likes the Internet. He just doesn't like where he believes it's heading.

Zittrain contrasts PC and Internet architecture, which he calls "generative" with earlier closed systems (information appliances like the early word processors or proprietary networks like AOL, Compuserve, etc.). Generative systems have the "capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences". Anyone can write programs for the PC, which can be shared with anyone who has a PC. Anyone can put content or tools on the Internet which can be accessed by anyone with Internet access. There's no filtering on the contributions and no predicting where they will lead us. Often, it's the unintended and unforeseen contributions and uses which are most trasforming and rewarding.

There are ups and downs to generativity. It creates a heck of a lot of value. Most of the uses of computers today were not imagined by the folks at IBM when they were building the first computers and were very unlikely to have been imagined, much less pursued. The same goes for the oringinal DARPA Internet. It's is generativity that brings us the rich tools we have today.

On the other hand, generativity, the openness of our computers to running other peoples software and of networks to carrying it, leaves us open to spam, viruses, etc. The percentage of PCs today that are parts of botnets, awaiting orders, is staggering. Zittrain fears that this downside is leading us away from generativity, to walled gardens and tethered appliances. He fears that something in the future is likely to send us from the down slide we are on now (with tethered appliances like Playstations and iPhones) and into free fall.*

Right after reading Zittrain's book, which talks about how the generativity of the Internet won out over the walled garden that was AOL, I read Kottke's blog post which said "you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?" The initial post was about the launch of the Facebook platform. The facebook platform poses problems in two ways:

1. As Kottke points out, it's not scalable. What is a developer to do when all of the major social networking sites (in the broader sence, including MySpace and Flickr, YouTube and MetaFilter) all come out with their own proprietary platforms. What is a poord developer to do? We already have a platform - the Internet.
2. The Facebook platform is not generative. It is proprietary and subject to filtering by Facebook. In a later post, Kottke further points out that "Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN." The concern is that, unlike with Flickr and YouTube or even MySpace, most of the content on Facebook is not available from outside.

I've been thinking about this in the context of government collaboration spaces where I think it has a lot of relevance.

There's a lot of pressure we in government are facing for the walled garden approach. Don't use public social networks. Let's create an internal social network just for our own organization, behind the firewall. In some cases this is justified and even necessary. I totally understand it in the case of the Intelink suite of collaboration tools (Intellipedia, Tag/Connect and the rest). I can certainly see why using del.icio.us is not an option and they'd want their own social bookmarking tool. Never mind the Top Secret items that people would want to bookmark, whose very existence shouldn't be public knowledge. I expect bookmarking public documents would be dangerous, as the very topics people are researching may be sensitive information.

That's not the only reason to take a walled garden approach. There may be security concerns (our security people are apparently very concerned about social networks as a vector for viruses). There may be concern with ownership or control of government information passing to third parties. (Here there is especial concern about this when it is American third parties subject to the USA PATRIOT Act.) There may be a concern with sharing things that are being collaborated on within that are still in development, unapproved and not the "government position". There is also definitely the opinion that with internal tools it will be easier to keep them "business only".

Of course, as Zittrain points out, there is a downside to the walled garden approach. You have to build (or buy) and maintain the product yourself. You get what you ask for and can't reap the benefits of unanticipated features that a generative system brings. While it is true that the proprietary solutions can incorporate the innovations that generative systems provide, it can take a while for it to happen and then even longer for them to be rolled out across a large organization. Let's just say that most of the people in my office are still running Windows 2000. Finally, with a walled garden approach, you're just talking to each other.

I think the last is really the telling argument and the real value to the open field approach. As Tapscott points out in Wikinomics, the real nature of Web 2.0 is the crowdsourcing, the peer production, the expanding the organization beyond its boundaries to include the world. That's open field not walled garden.

For example, in the Ontario government we have a shared del.icio.us account for our web community. It's set up so that anyone in our community can bookmark and share items and anyone in the world can see them. You can see it yourself at http://del.icio.us/opswebframework. That allows the value we create to be leveraged all over, multiplying. Of course, wit the tools that del.icio.us provides, others can share their bookmarks with us. And while we are on del.icio.us adding or viewing our bookmarks, it is easy to go beyond and see what others have tagged on topics that interest us. While we certainly could have done so had we been using our own tool, that's not where we'd be spending our time and it would be much less likely to happen.

Another example is the Library of Congress Flickr photostream. The Library of Congress could have set up their own photo library on their own site. By putting them on Flickr, they can make them available to the Web community where they hang out looking for photos and draw upon that community to tag them, adding value. Now other institutions both American (e.g. the Smithsonian) and elsewhere (e.g. the  Bibliothèque de Toulouse) have joined them in the Flickr Commons.

I'm not saying the open field approach is good for everything. There is certain validity to some of those reasons for the walled garden approach.  And there is room in between the walled garden and complete openness. Spaces can be set up as an extranet, open to some for a broader perspective and different contributions but not to all. We've done that with our web community collaboration space and the 16 US agencies have done that with Intelink-U, first opening up to the broad range of American civil servants and now even to us Canadian civil servants. The ideal solution will vary from organization to organization and from tool to tool. It's something I think will need careful consideration by all organizations to determine what is right for them.

* Zittrain's proposed solution is to use generative tools to support community governance and problem-solving, as Wikipedia does.

Last weekend we went strawberry picking.

I love Ontario strawberries. I always look forward to when they are in season again. In between times, we make do with Florida and California strawberries, 'cause Tara has to have her strawberries. But it's not the same. Every year I look forward to the arrival of Ontario strawberries in the local supermarkets (the ones that carry them). And I seek them out and buy lots. And I think that's sufficient. Until I taste the really fresh ones.

The week before last, a co-worker brought a basket into a meeting with the last strawberries that were left from when she and/or a friend had gone strawberry picking. When I tasted them I remembered. This is what strawberries are supposed to taste like! I came home and told Tara that the family was going strawberry picking on the weekend. Supermarket strawberries, even local ones, aren't even in the same league.

So we went strawberry picking. I looked up local (and sort of local) "pick your own" farms and selected one. It turned out is was about 45 minutes away, which is farther than the one we used to go to (20 minutes away) but the extra drive was worth it. The closer one used to be really good but they've gotten a lot more commercial and expensive (for example, charging an admission fee to the playground). Rather than feeling good going there, I've started feeling resentful and exploited. So I was looking further afield.

The place we ended up was really nice. The fields had three different varieties of strawberries and we were encouraged to taste freely to determine which we wanted to pick (we ended up picking all three). There was a huge play area for the kids filled with a huge variety of structures and games. A good time was had by all and we came back loaded down with strawberries. Enough to fill the fridge and more than we could possibly eat.

Unlike some friends and relatives, we're not the canning types. Some baking was done. Tara made a beautiful trifle for Canada Day. (Perhaps it's worth mentioning that trifle with fresh berries, despite its sad lack of chocolate, remains my favourite dessert.) I made Strawberye.

I don't think I've mentioned in this blog my interest in medieval culinary research. I collect medieval cookbooks. The original cookbooks (not the manuscripts - I wish - but editions of them) and "modern versions. My focus is on Western Europe 1300-1500, but I'll go a bit later or further afield (e.g. medieval Arabic recipes) when opportunity presents itself.

I used to do a lot more medieval cooking. As Tara has taken over more of the cooking and time has gotten shorter, I do less. But I remembered a nice medieval recipe that used strawberries and looked it up.

Cxxiij. Strawberye. (Harleian MS 279 1420 A.D.) [Thorns represented as "th", yoghs as "y"]
Take Strawberys, & wayshhe hem in tyme of yere in gode red wyne; than strayne thorwe a clothe, & do hem in a potte with gode Almaunde mylke, a-lay it with Amyndoun other with the flowre of Rys, & make it chargeaunt and lat it boyle, and do ther-in Roysonys of coraunce, Safroun, Pepir, Sugre gret plente, pouder Gyngere, Canel, Galyngale; poynte it with Vynegre, & a lytil whyte grece put ther-to; colour it with Alkenade, & droppe it in a-bowte, plante it with graynys of Pome-garnad, & than serue it forth.

Basically: Take strawberries and wash them in wine. Push them through a strainer (to turn them into strawberry puree) and put them in a pot with almond milk (made from ground almonds and water). Thicken it with wheat starch (amidon) or rice flour and boil it until it thickens and is stiff. Add currants, saffron, pepper, lots of sugar, ginger, cinnamon, galingale, vinegar and a little white fat. Colour it with alkenade and garnish it with pomegranate seeds.

Since it's been so long since I did some medieval cooking, I cheated. rather than adapting it myself I went to Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks by Constance B. Kieatt and Sharon Butler (University of Toronto Press, 1976). They have an adaptation of the recipe which calls for:

• -a pint of fresh strawberries
• wine to rinse them in
• 1/4 cup of ground almonds
• 2 Tbsp. rice flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 10 oz. water
• pinch each pepper, salt, ginger, cinnamon
• 2 Tbsp. dried currants
• 1 Tbsp. butter or lard (I used butter)
• 2 tsp. wine vinegar

I doubled the recipe. I more or less used it as it was. If I were to do it again, I'd add in some galinagale since the original calls for it and I really like that spice. It'd be nice to use the pomegranate garnish, but I don;t think they are in season (they never are when I want to use them). I'd also significantly reduce the added water. The recipe came out the consistency of applesauce (or a smidgen thinner). I think it should really be more like a strawberry mousse.

But it really tasted good. We had some with the family (alongside the trifle) on Canada Day and then I brought it in to work on Tuesday. I offered tastes to all and sundry and it was quite well received. Some suggested it would do well frozen into popsicles.

It all disappeared at work, which was a great disappointment to Toby, who preferred it to the trifle. I promised him I'd make it again. We're talking about going strawberry picking again next week with some friends who'll be visiting from out of town. That'll give me another opportunity.

Since reading "Why the old-fashioned TV is the best social media channel known to mankind" by Alexander van Elsas, I've been thinking about it. His point seems to be that TV (a one to many broadcast medium often seen in contrast to the new interactive social media) is the social medium par excellence because it gives us "a reason to get together and socialize". There are two sides to this:

1. "getting together" - while we certainly can watch TV alone, it also lends itself well to social gatherings (more on this below)
2. "socializing" - once we are brought together, we interact. We respond to the TV and each other. During an exciting sports match we "scream, cheer, curse, cry, hug, and probably show every emotion possible" (more on this below, too).

This certainly corresponds to how I remember things. People got together to watch TV in the evenings, then people got together the next day to discuss what they had seen. Since my parents didn't keep a TV around when I was growing up, this left me conversationally deprived. I have distinct memories of feeling out when everyone was discussing "Welcome Back Kotter", the hot new show, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Later, when I went off to university and had better TV access, I have vivid memories of a ton of us gathering in the common room for the Thursday night NBC line-up of "must see TV": Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, Hill Street Blues. It was definitely a social occasion. Sometimes, a bunch of people gathering together in a living room isn't enough for the social draw of TV. I also remember that for the final episode of M*A*S*H people got together in the SkyDome and watched it on the Jumbo-tron. It needed a place that big to hold them.

Broadcast media has always been that way and continues to be that way. Before my time, people got together to watch shows like "The Ed Sullivan Show" and before them they gathered around the family radio. And now, I see people gathering in bars to watch sports and my colleagues tell me of weekly "Lost-watching" parties that bring together 30 or more people in someone's living room.

So how do the new social media compare. On the one hand, they bring a lot more of us together (the occasional SkyDome experience notwithstanding). On the other hand, they tend to do it separately. (One of my co-workers says he and his buddies get together to watch You Tube on the TV. I think this is the exception rather than the rule. And I think it is notable that they are gathering around the TV again, rather than the computer.) While social media may be a shared experience, it tends to be a shared experience separated by space and time. I think that diminishes the sharing.

It's one thing to be in the room with people. You can physically hear their reaction. You can hear their tone of voice and volume. You can see their expressions and read their body language. You can feed off of each other's excitement. Next best is to partake of an experience knowing that at the same time all around the world, others are doing the same thing. You can still feel that sense of solidarity. Maybe, through online channels you can communicate your reactions (watch Twitter light up during the Apple presentations!). Mostly, how we experience the major Internet memes, though, is asynchronously. We visit the link that thousands have dugg or bookmarked on del.icio.us or seen on Slashdot or Boing Boing. But we don't do so at the same time as they did. Ho does this affect the quality of the experience?

And what are these shared experiences? The Star Wars Kid, LOLCats, goa...I won't go there. What will be the shared Internet experiences to compare to the shared experience of watching the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show or Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon? I don't know. I do have some suspicions, though.

I think it will be shared experiences where we get together online and do something. Not just watch but participate, and participate in something meaningful. It could be something we do with our shared computer power. The SETI@home project is probably the most famous of the distributed computing projects (wouldn't it be cool if that paid off!). There are plenty of other worthwhile projects, though. If one of them paid off, and especially if people could see the end coming and be online for the pay-off, that would be a memorable shared online moment.

Another option is that people get together and do something themselves that makes a difference. Social media a great tools for organizing people towards action (as Senator Obama has discovered). There are lots of causes that people could unite online and do something about. For example, climate change comes to mind. Not necessarily organize a protest (as older folks tend to think of). Organize something more productive and really make a difference... together... in a shared moment.
In a way, it parallels the broadcast media. Although the broadcast media are not themselves interactive, they bring people together who are interact. Similarly, although social media don't themselves bring people together in time and space, they can lead to meetups, shared activities and real-offline interaction and achievement.

Or do you think our shared Internet experiences will be "we all got the tweet together when people first visited Mars"? "We all watched together on YouTube when they first uploaded that video that forever changed our lives"? Will that be enough. Will it make the impact that sharing the experience in person made on our predecessors?

What do you think?

Let me begin with the obligatory disclaimer. I'm not a marketer. I'm not a PR professional. I work with them, and I am interested in what they do and how they do it, but I am not one of them. I'm a public servant and a web guy with a focus on connecting people to the information and services they need (by training, a librarian). Now that I look at that focus I guess that's fairly close, but I do it from a different part of the organization from where the marketing people hang out. So anything I have to say about marketing, and how to go about it should probably be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Anyway, I do follow the literature, especially with regard to social media and web 2.0. So my attention was caught by a blog entry "Social Media Marketing: More than Blogger Relations" by Geoff Livingston. It has a lot of good advice: Don't spam, press releases don't work, pay attention to the community you are in, provide value, etc. The main point of the article seemed to be "There's more to social media marketing than cultivating influential bloggers."

What caught my eye in the article, though, was the sentence "Instead of pitching skills, PR and blogger relations pros need networking skills." It's really about social networks. And to effectively leverage them, you need networking skills.

Just over a week ago, I attended an excellent symposium for young professionals with a communications theme and one of the sessions was on "How to Network". I wonder if a number of the points that they made might also operate in the social media marketing arena. According to the presenters, networking:

• Is about quantity over quality. The idea is not just to connect with a few selected people who can provide value to you. It's about connecting with everyone: the taxi driver, the person next to you in the airplane, the person in line with you at the grocery store, whomever.
• Is about being interested in others. Everyone has a passion, something that interests and energizes them. If you approach the conversation with an open frame of mind and lead them to that, their interest will be infectious and the conversation will be interesting and educational.
• Is about providing value over receiving value. The question a successful networker is always asking himself (or herself) is not "What can you do for me?" but rather "What can I do for you?". It may not be much but it should always be on your mind. Even if it is just connecting the new acquaintance with another one of your myriad acquaintances.

How do those three principles play out in the social marketing/Web 2.0 world?

Just as we're seeing a shift from broadcasting to participation, we're seeing a shift from individual content creation to aggregate, crowd-sourced content creation. From  the early days of Google, which harnessed the millions of link decisions to the current crop of Web 2.0 apps like Digg or del.icio.us which raise things up as they are bookmarked by more and more people, we are seeing that all of the little people can speak together with a loud voice. (Also, as the "six degrees of separation" are shrinking, you never know when one of the "little people" you connect with will speak on your behalf to one of the big influencers. And, by virtue of having no personal space, will speak with more influence. The take-away: Get involved with the whole community, not just a few influential bloggers. 

In order to successfully get involved with an online community, you need to approach it with the openness and respect referred to in the second point above. You have to join the community, stick around and find what makes them tick. How do they operate? What are they interested in? Once you know that you can participate, on an ongoing basis, as a part of the community. The take-away: This isn't a drive-by blitz. it isn't about one campaign. It's a sustained relationship. 

Once you are part of that community and know what they are interested in, it will be much easier to see accurately how you can provide value. Part of that is you, personally providing value, through your participation in the community. Another part may be how your product can provide value. And, with an understanding of how the community operates, it will be easier to see how you can communicate that value effectively and appropriately. It may also lead to improvements in the product, as with a better understanding of/relationship with the audience you see opportunities for improvement. The take-away: They should feel you are doing them a favour and meeting their needs, rather than the other way around. 

It seems to me that in the new social media environment, marketing has a lot in common with networking. I guess that goes with the label "social networking". 

What do you think?

I've recently come across a number of articles and postings suggesting that our attentions spans are getting shorter. The first of these was probably an Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. Carr has noticed a shortening of his attention span. It has got to the point where he can't immerse himself in a book any more. After a few pages, his mind starts to drift and he has difficulty sustaining the necessary attention. As he says, "The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." His thesis is that the Internet has physically re-wired his brain. And not just his, those of his friends, too.

There is a lot of evidence to support both the change in our reading habits and the ability of different activities to "re-wire" the brain. To take the latter first, Carr cites research: "Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. ... We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works." In addition, at the very conference I'm at, a Gov 2.0 conference, they are reporting on research that the brains of the "Net-generation" are wired differently from their predecessors, presumably due to Internet usage.

On the reading habits side, I posted recently about emerging forms of online content, microblogging and commenting, both of which are significantly shorter than traditional web content. And it is not just the Web. We see the emergence of new "commuter papers", small papers with extra short articles for quick reading. The no. 2 paper in Toronto is just such a paper. And its not just reading. I've noticed that I am eschewing TV in favour of YouTube, which comes in significantly shorter segments.

In a recent article on a similar subject, "Attention, Multitasking, Learning", Howard Rheingold quotes from Josh Waitzkin's "The Multitasking Virus and the End of Learning?". According to Rheingold, the emerging problem with focus is not only our inability to sustain it for any length of time. It's also an emerging inability to stay "single track". The up and coming generation just has to multi-task. This is especially evident in WiFi-enabled classrooms, where Waitzkin "watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia." And it wasn't because the lecture was boring.

Once again, we see evidence of this growing division of focus everywhere. It started on specialty news channels and displays, with split screens to show news, weather, sports scores, etc. all at the same time. Now we are seeing it extend into regular TV with the increasing proliferation of ticker stripes. We see it at work where people will check emails during meetings and multi-task in a variety of other ways.

People will say this multi-tasking is an asset not a liability. It's more efficient and allows them to accomplish more. Waitzkin counters with evidence that we aren't truly multi-tasking. He notes that "Brain activation for listening is cut in half if the person is trying to process visual input at the same time. A recent study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another
creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points."

All of this together seems to indicate an emerging significant decrease in our ability for sustained, deep, focused thought. The kind needed to solve difficult complex problems and come to grips with profound philosophy or works of art. But is that really the case?

In the interest of fairness I could point out some contrary evidence. For example, a colleagues recently told me that the Globe and Mail is putting longer articles online than in the paper! (They are not restricted by page size and page count) and that they find that the longer articles have a greater likelihood of being read to the end. In a number of other formats, we are seeing new technologies enabling us to increase content length, and the audience preferring that. Whether it be the "extended" length movies on DVD or the "complete season" (or "complete series"!) TV DVD collections, people are looking for a longer story. (In fact, we are much more frequently seeing TV series with extended storylines running the length of the season or the series than we ever did when I was a child and everything reset when the episode was over. Similarly, in comics, where we see a shift from the shorter comic books to the longer graphic novels.

In terms of the multi-tasking, I wonder how different it is from the doodling that was fairly present when I was a student. In my experience (from long before I used a computer, aged man that I am) sometimes having something to keep my hands and the lower levels of my brain busy, can free the rest of my brain to pay even better attention. Or was I just fooling myself.

I'm not sure what I think about all of this. I definitely find my attention span shorter when reading online. And I do have a tendency to multitask with my blackberry. But unlike Carr, I haven't noticed any impairment at all of my ability to read books, nor have I heard it reported from my acquaintances. I don't know. What do you think?

Reading Friendfeed this morning, I was directed to a Mashable post, "FriendFeed and the Web Itself as a Blogging Platform", written by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins. Mark mentions that when he was re-doing his personal blog, he took a good look at his content output. In his own words:  "I wanted something that emphasized the content I naturally create during the course of my daily routine, as opposed to something that would be creating extra work for myself". What he found that most of that content is now in micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) and comments on Friendfeed. So he used the Friendfeed API to put that content front and centre into his personal blog, with the full blog posts there and from Mashables off to the side. And what he found afterwards was that the traffic to this microcontent was equal to the traffic to the full blog articles.

This makes a certain amount of sense. As more and more of us spend more of our time on Twitter, Friendfeed and the other social networking apps, that's where we'll do most of our contributing. And where, in the past, one of the things people were using blogs for was to alert people to the great stuff they found (see, for example, the mega-popular Boing Boing), now folks are more likely to ckick the "Share on Facebook" or "Share on Friendfeed" bookmarklet or to tweet about it.

Similarly, people would blog their opinions on something that struck them during the day. Now, it is just as likely that what struck them is someone else's post or comment, and the easiest thing (and most appropriate) is to comment on it. The pendulum seems to be swinging back from trackbacks to comments again.

Just as web 2.0 is bringing us distributed authorship and distributed content production, it is distributing that content across the network.

This "spreading to the four winds" of a person's creative output makes it hard to bring together what you have to say into a body of work (like the blog used to). Mark's solution, mentioned above, it to use FriendFeed for this purpose. I've seen another solution (at least for the commenting) appearing on the horizon. I'm starting to see more and more use of separate, full featured commenting systems like Disqus and Intense Debate. These provide commenting to multiple sites. They are very attractive, both to site owners (they provide a really full-featured commenting solution) and to commenters (allowing them to aggregate their comments across sites - so long as the sites use the same solution). They are really tempting, especially if you are dealing with a high volume of comments (which we all wish for).

Positioned where I am professionally, I can see one major concern which I expect will seriously hamper their use within large organizations, business or government (especially for collaborative intranet spaces). The problem is "All your comments are belong to us." This lack of control over the content will be a significant concern.

My prediction, similar commenting systems either being incorporated into the major enterprise social networking/collaboration offerings or being offered as plug-ins that can be hosted locally within an organization.

Several news sources are reporting today that Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable will be either completely shutting down or severely restricting access to Usenet. The instigating cause appears to be that some 88 newsgroups (out of well over 100,000) are being used to deliver child pornography. I suspect other newsgroups used to deliver adult pornography, pirated entertainment and software didn't help matter. Nevertheless, the vast majority of groups are for discussion of completely legal and upstanding matters. From figure skating (rec.sport.skating.ice.figure) to entertainment (rec.music.beatles) to science (sci.math or sci.space.policy) to philosophy (alt.philosophy.taoism) to computer administration (comp.os.linux.admin), Usenet has been carrying conversations for a long, long time (not quite as old as the Internet, but dating back to 1979, well before the Web). And, although this news won't have any real impact on me, it's worth a blog entry.

I actually came to Usenet before I came to the Internet. It was the latter part of the 80s and I had no computer background at all. I was a literature and linguistics major. But I heard that members of an international society I was part of were meeting and conversing on something called Usenet and I wanted to check it out. So I asked some friends in the society who were likely to know about this sort of computer thing (engineers) and they pointed me in the right direction. "Just get an account on the University of Toronto computer system," they told me, "type in 'nn' and away you go." This was also my first introduction to Unix.

Well, it was quite the experience. The "nn" newsreader wasn't too hard to use as I recall. Either it was dead simple or my friends had also told me about "man nn". I could read usenet fine. It was just posting that would send me into a tizzy.

Any time I would try and post, I dropped into a black hole. My keyboard essentially stopped working no matter what I did until it started again. I had no idea what was going on! I would hit the keys at random. Eventually letters would start appearing on the screen, but then I didn't know how to end my post and save it. It was as if the computer was possessed.

What actually happened was that when the time came to write a post, the unix system dropped me into the default text editor "vi". vi has two modes, a command mode and a writing mode. You start in the command mode and a few keys (e.g. "i" for "input") will put you in the writing mode. There are other keys to take you back to command mode and keys in command mode to save and exit. When all of the sudden letters started appearing on the screen, I had randomly put myself into writing mode, which I didn't know how to exit. Eventually, I got it figured out and was able to participate more fully.

In the beginning of the 90s, when I was in grad school (Library Science) and getting into the Internet, I got into Usenet much more. This was before the Web took off*. The Internet action was on gopher and FTP sites. But community and conversation, shared creation of value, a lot of the things we now see as "Web 2.0" were found primarily in mailing lists and on Usenet. And Usenet was much better at handling high volumes of traffic and discovering a wide range of discussion topics.

In many ways Usenet was the prototypical "Web 2.0" app. It was used for social networking (finding and keeping in touch with friends and people who had similar interests). It was peer-produced and crowdsourced (the value was produced by the coordinated efforts of I-don't-know-how-may-thousands of individuals. It was a platform for participation. There were open processes by which anyone could start a newsgroup for discussion.

Eventually, the Web took over as the place where people went to read and write on their favourite topics and meet like-minded folk and my usage gradually dwindled. I remember feeling significantly peeved and protesting when Rogers (my broadband ISP) stopped providing Usenet feeds. But it wasn't enough to make me switch. I could still participate, when I felt the need, through Google Groups. That need has been less and less frequent. I think I now go for a year or more between checking a newsgroup.

People have been saying for a long time now that "It's the death of Usenet" and it's still here. It survived when AOL dropped it. I expect it will survive this. But this is another indication of how marginalized Usenet is becoming, what was once a major pillar of online communications. And it provides an opportunity to reminisce about a formative stage in my online involvement.

* As a side note, when the web was starting to gain more traction, a lot of tech help was found in Usenet newsgroups. And I created and edited many of the first websites I worked on using the "vi" editor, which you could always count on finding on any Unix system.

Should mention that the first page of the new short story is up: http://galaxioncomics.com/

I've been doing a lot more experimentation with social media recently, as I may have indicated. I'm tweeting and digging and blogging and commenting. I'm still refining my methodology for bringing it all together and managing the increasing mounds of information. I'm bringing as much as possible through Flock, Google Reader and FriendFeed, but I still find myself checking the individual sites in some cases as well. I know that this isn't best practice. It's well known that a new tool/technology/process doesn't save time until it replaces the existing one, rather than adding to it. The aggregator won't save time if I'm doing it in addition to the individual sites rather than instead of them. But they're not quite there yet.

Flock is a great social media browser. It'll alert me to updates from Facebook/Twitter/etc. But it really integrates with them rather than replacing them. The "People" sidebar shows the most recent updates from my "friends", but I need to visit the site to see a more complete timeline, Facebook messages, pokes, friends, events, etc. Of course, the browser facilitates that. Similarly, like many browsers these days, Flock has it's own RSS feed reader. You can configure it to subscribe to Google Reader instead of locally. But feed monitoring and displaying is strictly local. It doesn't show when Google reader has articles waiting (the way it does for Gmail). So It's a great tool, but it won't replace the individual sites.

Google Reader is also great. I've got all of my (external) feeds going there. I'm using it to keep up with most of the blogs I follow, as well as the news sites. (As an aside, I should point out that for the really high volume sites, I'm using AideRSS. It uses its own "PostRank (TM)" system to score posts for relevance and reaction to filter out the noise for you. You can choose how selective you want to be.) I also use Google reader to follow my Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati Alerts. I share on Google Reader and plug that share feed into Facebook. However, If I want to see the comments with the article, I need to go to the blog itself. So for those blogs where I am interested in the community, it's no substitute for going to the site. Similarly, when I want to see the comments on a news story to get the broader context, I've got to go to the source.

FriendFeed is also cool, aggregating 35 different feeds (Twitter, digg, RSS, del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Google Reader, Google Talk, Picasa, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, etc.). You can comment on what shows up in your feed (and see the comment's of others). You can indicate that you "like" it. One interesting thing I've noticed is that it is really not just a "friends" feed, but a "friend of a friends" feed. This may be because it is not just including what my "friends" post, but what they comment on or like. As you can imagine, it is very information dense. To help deal with this you can use the "best of" view (best of day, week or month) which filters for interestingness. What makes this unsatisfactory as a replacement to twitter, etc., instead of just an adjunct, is that you can only easily follow friends who are already using the service. So you have to go to the other sites for the rest. (To be fair, you can add them as imaginary friends, feeding in their usernames and the sites they use. But you have to do this one at a time. If you have a network of any size, it's just too unwieldy. What they need is an import function.)

The one aggregator I've seen that looks really useful, isn't for reading from the various sites. It's for posting. Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap. Update from anywhere using AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone, SMS and E-mail. It seems to update, in one fell swoop, all of the sites I use and (potentially) a lot more), Unfortunately, it is still in beta, by invitation only, and I don't have an invitation.

Of course, the problem with trying to keep up with the new social media sites (even with the help of aggregators, such as they are) is that it is impossible. This is a new frontier and everyone is setting up a homestead. No sooner had I joined Twitter than someone set up Plurk. They're growing faster than anyone can manage.

That growth also impacts the individual services. As they take off, it can place demands on the system that are hard for a fledgeling service to accommodate. It's pretty wild out here on the frontier and not all of the services have been tamed to work as one would wish (or expect) every time. That's why you have services like Twiddict, which let's you post to Twitter even when it is down (which has been a fair amount of late).

I guess that shows best what life's like here on the frontier. It's a frenzy of activity. There are a lot of sites and services p[opping up every day that add real value to people's lives. So much value that people get "addicted". However there is still a lot of work to be done. That work is being done by people working on/for the services directly. It's also done by the community, building add-ons, connections, workarounds and new services that augment the existing ones.

What are you sing? How is it working for you?

Sameer Vasta issued a challenge: Your resume in 140 characters. That's a challenge I find it hard to resist. My response (exactly 140 characters):

I am a leader of innovation in the public service with a background in new media. I effectively bridge the gap between business and techies.

or, if I need to put my name in it (also exactly 140 characters):

David Tallan: I am an innovative leader in the public service with a background in new media, bridging the gap between business and techies.

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools has alerted me to the cool LibriVox service. Essentially, LibriVox provides free public-domain audio-books. They are available through the website itself as mp3 files or through iTunes (as podcasts, with a separate podcast per chapter). However, they don't only offer the audio-books, they organize the creation soliciting readers, providing information on how to read and prepare the files and links to free recording software. It's really wonderful for me on a number of levels.

On the one hand, it's a cool "Web 2.0" site. It's a good example of crowdsourcing (and you know I've been thinking about that). It also uses podcasting and rss feeds to distribute the works (and notify of updates) and wikis and blogs to bring the community of readers together. It's a great example of people self-organizing on the Internet and using some of that "cognitive surplus" to create real public value.

On another hand, it really appeals to the parent in me. As Kevin Kelly points out, there is excellent stuff in here to keep the kids occupied on long road trips (which we occasionally take). Even at home, we could put them on the stereo and have our kids read to while we do other things. In the "Children's" genre 326 books are currently listed. That should keep us busy for a while. (The site as a whole has 1523 works.)

On the gripping hand, it also connects to the family comics business. How does it do that, you ask? When Tara inks, she likes to listen to audio-books. (She can't when she pencils. That requires more thinking.) Here's a great source of books for her to listen to while inking.

Now if only I had the time to listen to them myself.

Not a lot to talk about today, and it's kind of late. So I'll just link to a few of the items that caught my interest recently.

Cory linked to geeky balloon art on Boing Boing. This is just the sort of thing my kids would love - especially the Mario. There are some nice balloon artists at the CNE every year, but the geek factor is really nice.

Also on Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder linked to the Maker's Notebook. Don't we all know someone who would love one of those?

Just to show I don't only read Boing Boing, Nicholas Carr asks "Was eBay a Fad?" on Rough Type. He points out the decreasing percentage of e-Bay sales that come from auctions and problems with the reputation engine. Personally, I think I side with the commenter who sees e-Bay as more of an online garage sale than a major auction house. As such, I don't think it is going anywhere soon.

Finally, Michael Arrington on TechCrunch posted yesterday that Facebook had announced officially that they were releasing their application platform as open source. This is clearly to compete with the Google/MySpace/Yahoo/AOL OpenSocial. It'll be interesting to see who comes out on top: VHS or Beta? Blue-ray or HD-DVD?

Oh, one more. I've been seeing a lot of retro stuff lately. Well, what could be more delightfully retro than goosh? I guarantee if you are an Internet early adopter it will bring a smile to your face.

Plunged as I am into "Web 2.0" these days, I'm starting to pay attention to the various trends that fall under that rubric. One of those is "crowdsourcing" - drawing upon the intellectual output of the vast horde of Internet users to help create your product. To me, this is one of the key elements of a "Web 2.0" application.

One of the first sites to use it was Google. If memory serves (admittedly, after kids, it's not as reliable as it used to be) I was using it when it was still practically beta. It's chief competitor at the time was Alta Vista. Alta Vista claimed an index of millions of pages, more than anyone else. At it had tried and tested algorithms for determining relevance based on metadata and full text keywords, etc. I switched to Google right away.

What Google was relying on was something very different. Rather than the data provided by one person (the page author), Google was relying on data provided by many more, and people who were presumably less biased than the author. They were using the links. They were using the decisions of the millions of people making the Internet as to what was relevant and what wasn't. In effect, the PageRank system crowdsourced their relevance decisions. It was brilliant. It worked. And it is why I tend to think of Google as the first "Web 2.0" site.

Others have followed that have followed a similar model. Any site that depends upon "tagging" to find things (e.g. del.icio.us, Flickr) or the big wiki projects (Wikipedia, of course) are a couple of other examples of crowdsourcing used to add value.

Recently I've started seeing examples of crowdsourcing used to create intellectual property. The most common topic is "Web 2.0" itself. I've seen books written this way sold in bookstores. There was an episode of CBC Radio's Spark written with the audience using a wiki. The list goes on.

Crowdsourcing is branching into other topics. of course it's been there for a while (see above). But what I'm seeing more ond more is the "help me gather the material and when i have enough I'll compile it into a book". In a recent example, Boing Boing's David Pescovitz alerts us to the For Those Who Tried To Rock project. Their goal is "to capture data about every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America." For now, the material they collect will end up on the Web site, preserved for posterity. Eventually, they hope to compile it into a book.

The latest I've seen is collaboratively produced fiction. One example is "Ficlets". These are tiny stories of up to 1,024 characters. Anyone can write a prequel or sequel so the overall narrative structure is contributed by the group. Another example is "Wovels", an audience-plotted novel that Cory Doctorow points out
The newest thing is crowdsourcing fiction writing.

Something abou crowdsourced fiction rubs me the wrong way a bit. I certainly recognize that art can be created by groups. Theatre, movies, even symphonies are examples. But it seems to me that even in these there is some sort of singular creative vision (be it the director's or conductor's)

Can you really get art by committee?

(On the other hand, there are some great examples of collaborative songwriting!)

What do you think?

No blog post yesterday as we were out 'til midnight (and then I was up until 1 a.m. getting the Galaxion Birthday Retrospective ready to post on the new Galaxion website.

We were out 'til midnight at a contra extravaganza. Contra is our dance passion. I've tried several different styles of dance and contra is a clear favourite. What is contra? I tend to think of it as half-way between square dancing and english country dancing. It tends to be danced in long lines of couples with the lady on the gentleman's right. However, the couples usually alternate between couples facing down the hall and couples facing up the hall, so that it isn't a long row of gents facing ladies but alternates. The long line of couples becomes a long line of foursomes - two couples facing each other. These two couples do a little dance with each other. The dance is made up of figures: e.g. swings (not the arms hooked swing of hoedowns in film but a waltz hold), do-si-dos, stars (the four hold hands in the middle and walk around a circle), heys (a weaving pattern the four make) and so on. There are no fancy steps. It's generally done at a walking pace. It involves a lot of social interaction with the others in the foursome. After each mini-dance (about 30 seconds) the couples progress. That means the couples facing down the hall move down to the next couple and the couples facing up the hall move up the hall to the next couple. When you get to the end, you sit out a bit, turn around and head back down the next time the mini-dance starts.

These are called dances to live music. So it is really a partnership between the dancers, the caller and the musicians. The caller will discuss with the musicians what might be the best kind of music for a particular dance ("sinuous and sexy", "sprightly and energetic" or what have you) and then teach the dance a couple of times to the dancers. Then, while they are dancing the caller will continue prompting them for the next move until it is clear that they have it. At that point he or she will fade away, leaving the dancers to dance to the music. However, if they seem to be losing it, the caller will step back in, bringing everyone back to the dance and clearing up confusion.

Contra dances are very welcoming to newcomers. As there are no dane "steps", there is no muscle memory you have to train and practice with before starting dancing. Before the dance proper begins, there is a beginners' session for a half an hour teaching all of the common moves. Any other moves are taught before the dance where they are used. And if you miss the beginners' session, your fellow dancers will be happy to explain any confusing moves. It is also welcoming in that you don't have to have a partner to come. Normal contra etiquette (at least around here) is to switch partners after every dance and, unless you are sitting down at the side (indicating you're sitting this one out) or already have a partner, the idea is to say "yes" when you are asked to dance. The dances start simple and progress slowly to the more complex, allowing beginners to build confidence.

What does it all mean in action? Well, It might be easier to see with a couple of videos taken at local dances: April 28, 2007 with Tom Calwell calling and Contranella playing, February 9, 2008 with Tom Calwell calling and Sheesham and Lotus playing (you can see Tara clearly in this one and the band and caller), Another one from the same dance (this time you can see me), April 11, 2008 with Tom Calwell calling and Fiddling Jay and The Squirrel Hunters playing (again with me), and finally April 12, 2008 with Tom Calwell calling and Changeling playing (this time you can see Tara clearly again). I don't know why these all have Tom Callwell calling. We have danced to plenty of other callers.

So what was up with yesterday? In addition to the regular evening dance there was a special afternoon session for "advanced dancers" This doesn't mean dancers who have been dancing for ten years. Tara and I have only been dancing for a year and a half, and some of the people there had been dancing for a lot less. It was a dance for people who already knew all of the basic moves and had had some experience. This means that the caller doesn't have to teach the moves, just how they are put together for the dance (if that - for the first medley of dances, she didn't teach them at all in advance, just started calling and we had to listen and do what she said - those are my favourite dances!). It also meant that you could count a bit more on your fellow dancers to be where they are supposed to be and give weight while dancing (a god thing). These dances are a lot of fun. We do them a few times a year. But I wouldn't want them all to be ike that. it's too much fun dancing with new people and watching them discover something new and enjoyable.

After the dancing we went to Demitri's across the road for ice cream. We'd earned it with al that activity!

If you ever want to give contra a try, I'd recommend it highly (obviously). It's really an all ages experience (the youngest dancer was 9, the oldest well into the senior years). We dance at St Barnabas at Chester and the Danforth, every 2nd, 4th and 5th Saturday evening from September until June. There is also a dance weekend in April and an Island Dance in July. You can find the details at the Toronto Country Dancers website. The next dance is June 21 (I know it is te 3rd Saturday, not the 2nd. I think the church is having some sort of centennial celebration on the 2nd Saturday) and is the last regular dance of the season. Ron Buchanon is coming up from the States to call and Tunescape is playing. It should be a blast!

I've noticed recently that Toby has his own reality.

This is not surprising. Many kids do. Imaginative play is to be expected, and we encourage it. And we can't expect the kids to have worked out the rules of how things work that took us decades to figure out. But this is above and beyond the call of duty. And I thought that Toby had more of a grasp of scientific realities, having been lulled by a journal entry he brought home from school last year or the year before (Sr. kindergarten or Grade 1) in which he explained the red shift and how we can use it to determine that the universe is expanding. I kid you not.

However, it appears when he is frustrated, the laws of the universe can take a flying leap. I give you two examples.

1. Toby has started playing Magic: the Gathering, a collectible card game (the grand-daddy of collectible card games - the one that started the phenomenon around here). He was complaining to me that everyone in his school had a collectible card game except him. Mostly Pokemon and the new game that has supplanted Pokemon when Pokemon got banned. It wasn't so much that he wanted a particular game to play with his friends. He wanted one so that he wasn't the only kid without one.

Well, we have a ton of Magic cards buried in the basement from the 90s when Tara and I used to collect and play them. So I dug them out and let Toby construct a deck from the cards we had plenty of. And then I constructed a deck and we would play occasionally. Tara would also play him. Toby's deck did pretty well and he was getting pretty confident. I then took him to a friend's place where folks get together on a Monday night to play bridge. While we were waiting for the bridge game to start he asked if I would play him a game of Magic. I acquiesced. I won. He insisted I cheated. But what gets me is how he insisted I cheated.

He insisted that I paid careful attention to how his cards came out. Then I travelled back in time to stack my deck. But not just stack my deck but stack it in such a way that after four or five proper shuffles, followed by numerous complex cuts by Toby, it would produce the exact cards needed to defeat his deck. Like I said, his own reality. I find it interesting that in his appreciation for my abilities he is quite willing to credit me with super human abilities of time travel, dexterity and observation, but not to credit me with decent card playing skills.

2. This is a shorter story from this morning. Toby likes to take a lot of books, magazines, toy catalogues, etc. up into his top bunk to read at night before falling asleep. In the middle of the night last nigh they fell down, making an untidy pile on the floor. This morning when I came into his room, I pointed out the mess on the floor. He got quite upset, saying it wasn't his fault but gravity's. This culminated in his insistence that he absolutely would not leave his bed until gravity had departed.

I wonder what's next.

Cabinet Office Communications has a new Manager, Strategic New Media Office - Zeena (I won't give her last name because she likes to keep a low Internet profile). When I first met Zeena she was an intern in the e-Government branch, having started there around the same time I joined, I believe. I hired her into her first permanent position in the Government of Ontario. Then, while I was away on parental leave Karl Cunningham stole her out from under me with a promotional opportunity. I got her back when he moved up to the Head of e-Government position. She was a valued member of the team for a while before Creative Services and New Media in Cabinet Office stole her away. And now she's a manager.

This got me thinking of the number of talented and high potential individuals I've had on my team. I've been in a team lead/manager position for about ten years now and there are some things I've done well and some things I know I can improve. One of the things I'm most proud of is spotting talent and giving it the opportunity to flourish. This is great for the team and allows us to produce some really great results and pull things off when many people doubted we could. On the other hand, ensuring people grow and develop also ensures that they'll grow beyond your team and move on. I can think of at least four people who have risen to be more or less peers who are people that I hired. And those are only the ones I still work with and have maintained contact with. Of the management team I'm on, half of the other managers are people that I hired.

When you've got these high potential people working for you, succession planning becomes extra important. I've always taken it seriously. I like to have my team "bus proofed" (what would you do if person X got run over by a bus) with everyone backed up by a colleague who can step in if necessary. It makes it much easier when people go on vacation, on training, etc. It also allows you to flexibility in distributing the work when one part of the unit gets extra busy. This attention to succession planning has allowed me to still meet my commitments when the team was down to half-strength due to the number of folk who were on developmental assignment elsewhere. When you have high potential people on your team (especially if they are ambitious high potential people as they often are) it becomes an absolute necessity. I've had enough difficulty with other managers who won't release staff for developmental opportunities. (At one point, we had lost our Ontario.ca web editor. I had a list of over ten candidates who could fill the spot. Every manager I approached looking to offer their person an secondment refused to let them go.) I don't want to be that kind of manager.

Succession planning isn't just important for my team. One of my mottoes has always been "Irreplaceable is unpromotable." I'm always looking to have someone ready to step in to my spot should an opportunity present itself.

And I have to admit, as more and more of my team grow and develop and rise up to join me at my current level, I'm starting to think about my own growth and development and look a bit harder and think about what developmental opportunities are available to me and where I can add additional value to the organization.