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.