Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Thoughts of War

The fact that we are at war always creeps up on me. I certainly don't devote active thought to it/ Passive processing is heavily occupied these days.

Some of the most valuable ambient mainstream information gets in from NPR while driving to a meeting or the tombstones at the end of telecasts. My Junior Optimists Club (like the Rotary Club on collective Prozac) leader taught me to read the front page last. Go straight to the funnies.

But it is in my subconscious. Gnawing at me. So busy being a prophet on the burning shore. So I write this, perhaps just to myself, to remind me that we are still at war despite declared victory. That just because it is over there or over there doesn't mean it doesn't matter here. Just doing my job isn't doing my part. That's being a cog at a different scale in a bad plan. When I realize I am thinking about war, which isn't easy to do amidst all this probable peace, I need to go with the thought. Consider it.

I'm wondering how other people think of war when they least expect it. Probably shouldn't blog this...

The Language of Collaboration

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM and new to blogging, on the essence of open source, which isn't so technical:

Now, when you collaborate with your colleagues, they have to be able to read and understand what you say, whether you use a natural language like English, or mathematical notation, or tables of numbers. Likewise, if the collaboration involves software, then you would expect to be able to read, modify and generally share the source code of the software on which you are jointly working. Thus, in my opinion, open source software is just a by-product of, or rather a necessary precondition for, collaborative innovation involving software. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, let's say you want to increase the level of participation. You do so by lowering language barriers. Such as collaboration at scale with Wikipedia. Yet another way of saying that simple is hard, as is fulfilling Ward Cunningham's vision for wiki as a collaboration platform for experts and novices alike.

Weak Signals to Strong Movements

Dina Mehta shares the tsunamihelp story for the Global Knowledge Review.

Today, I believe that no crisis on this scale or magnitude will ever be handled again without sms, blogs, and wikis. That social tools will become a natural extension of rapid adaptation to chaotic conditions. I'm still trying to figure out how it all happened. What was it that put my colleagues and me on the global stage answering news requests? It was all viral and we were on a completely "out of control" ride and yet somehow it all worked.

These are my reflections...

Do read on. The story is more than weak signals channeled through social tools in ways mainstream media cannot. People, driven by the heart, had already established practice to apply from other experiences. This latent network activated to become a strong movement in a startlingly short amount of time.

While all the participants deserve praise, I'd like to commend the volunteer effort Constantin Basturea put into wiki for tsunamihelp.

A Democracy of Tags

Peeter Marvet made a 10 minute screencast in English that provides a tour of Estonian e-government sites, explains where tagging to provide feedback to elected officials could fit in and asks you to provide feedback on the concept.

Watch this and you will wish your country had today's level of interaction with government officials. One of the great things about a small country is the ability to make swift change and test new approaches to government. How would you improve the system? For example, one e-government site requires you affiliate yourself with a group in order to provide feedback -- how could group forming be supported?

In related news, President Rüütel issued a statement yesterday against the internet voting act passed by the Parliament, which wire services are interpreting as a veto, even though he has no such power. His principle concern is Identity (60% of the population has electronic ID cards already). The devil is certainly in the details of this system, but again, here is an opportunity for Identity experts to weigh in from afar.

Fear and Greed

Enterprises are adopting social software out of both fear and greed.  Fear is the primary driver for corporate blogging, while greed is driving adoption of social software within the enterprise.  I have used this metaphor to explain what I see in the market lately, so here it is in one place.

Continue reading at Many-to-Many...

Slashdotted...

Group Rethink

Great article in Technology Review by Michael Fitzgerald on how social software helps groups make better decisions:

Creating a communications infrastructure that fosters a healthy democracy has been a concern of the United States since its founding. Newspaperman and intellectual Walter Lippmann once noted that the real trouble with both the press and representative democracy is "the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge." That machinery may finally have arrived.

[via eastwikkers]

Vote by Tag

The Estonian Parliment approved internet voting, which led Peeter Marvet to prototype this example of using tags to collect a richer form of public opinion for decision makers.  This may remind you of Vote Links, but it is really a simpler way to coordinate feedback with practices.

Tags and Simple Rules

Paolo Valdemarin, who has been thinking about tagging as long as anyone, is still not a "believer." Upon Technorati's 1 millionth tag, he points to the need for more sharing and gardening tools, but also practices:

But look at Wikipedia: it's a totally bottom-up project which has some very simple but strict policies and guidelines about how it should be developing. Writers are respecting these rules, finding new ways to enforce them and the whole system is blooming beautifully.

Tagging has already grown into a rich and barely comprehensible ecology. There is a role for rules where groups want to coordinate. But these can be implemented through either tools or practices, and tools tend to hard code against emergence.

Qualified Bloggers

The issue of blogging as journalism is being attacked on all sides this morning.

First, a Pew/BuzzMetrics study says blogs aren't that influential. Mitch Ratcliffe subsequently points out the flaw in the study itself, paying attention to word count instead of influence. Via Steve Rubel, George Simpson says regardless this is a case of bloggers not really being journalists:

"When bloggers start schlepping down to check the police blotter at 3 a.m. just to make sure the victim's name is spelled correctly, then they can pull up a chair to the adult table."

When I was a college newspaper editor, I put newbies on the blotter beat. The definition of a writer isn't just changing, readers are savvy beyond discrimination, they have become engaged. And if you buy that assumption, schlepping becomes a lower form of journalism. Not that there are really higher level forms, which is the point.

Second, John Battelle calls Steve Jobs on suing bloggers and contradicting himself in the way he deals with publishers. John makes to core point: Forcing journalism into some kind of a "qualified" box is a very bad idea. With iTunes support of Podcasting, an architecture of participation, I wonder how long it takes for Apple to sue a participant.

How to fire your team and make them happy

Today I fired the entire Socialtext team. Then I fired myself. We are all pretty happy about it.

We were subsequently hired by Administaff, the largest Professional Employer Organization (PEO). They are much better at employing people than we are.

With a back-to-back agreement with the company, we essentially outsourced HR and enabled our employees to gain benefits only Fortune 500 companies get. By pooling risk and purchasing power, they negotiate better rates and provide better services (with employee choice) than is possible for a small company. I did this before with Trinet and there are other PEOs out there.

Some of our goals included making Socialtext a supportive place to work, while letting people work where they work best. Without this partnership it would be an administrative nightmare, as our team is spread across the states. We also want to make Socialtext family friendly, so we elected for a significant portion of dependent co-pay. Now everyone has great PPO or HMO medical, dental, vision and life insurance, a 401k and a bevy of options.

I blog this administrata because not all small companies know that you can achieve economies of scale and scope for such a large line item. In the bootstrapping phase we even had to go uninsured (stupid) for a brief period. Needless to say, my wife is pretty stoked. I am because the payroll service means my hand doesn't hurt signing checks twice a month, but that is a good pain to remember.