Shared Minds

In the last airplane trip (love plane rides for reading), I read Shared Minds by Michael Shrage. The 1990 book, borrowed from Chris Allen, is delightfully prescient in a number of ways.
Going on fifteen years ago, when tools to collaborate electronically were just emerging: gestating in the the research lab, Lotus Notes was just coming to market, and Tim Berners Lee was inventing the web, Shrage described some of the very familiar uses of social software:
* holding a meeting with a digital whiteboard to capture and shape ideas in a meeting, complete with backchannel
* collaborative writing, as we do now with SubEthaEdit and Wiki
* the citation and deep collaboration culture of scientific research
* the metaphor of “shared space” to describe digital tools supporting collaboration
The book also articulates an important distinction between communication and collaboration. Shrage critiques the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and advocates of business communication for focusing on one-way transmission of thoughts and feelings. Somehow, if the speaker can only “communicate” clearly and powerfully enough, the message will get through, and the recipient will follow.
Instead, Shrage describes collaboration as a shared and deeply interactive process of discovering and creating meaning together. Individualistic modern western culture wants to see discovery and achievement as the product of a lone hero, but innovation in science, art and business is a collaborative process.
Perhaps this is what Sunir means by blogging is sadness: the impression that bloggers are each in their own little world, making speeches at each other. (Although this perspective misses the distributed conversation of the blog communities.
Shrage captures the joy of collaboration — elaborating an idea, creating something new, getting something done — when the contributions of the participants are intertwingled.
Given the state of the art at the time, Shrage’s perception of tools was skewed toward the sharing of personal artifacts (shared access to documents), and elaborate research prototypes (wall systems with voice and video). Today, we have the ubiquitous net, and a wide range of tools, build for shared use, to knit together in a situated manner.
It’s really fun to work on bringing more of these ideas into common use, in a culture based on the values that Shrage describes.

Texas halts closed meetings for now

Last week, ACLU-Texas and Jon Lebkowsky sued the Texas Secretary of State’s office, demanding that the SOS comply with the Open Meetings Act, and hold meetings to review voting systems for certification in public.
On Friday, the Secretary of State’s office backed down, postponing the upcoming meeting til further notice. We hope this means that they are evaluating how best to hold these meetings in public.
We especially hope that the public scrutiny will encourage the Secretary to insist on a reliable, secure, and transparent voting process.

Internal Corporate Weblogs

Ross Mayfield draws a useful distinction, responding to Fredrik Wack’s taxonomy of enterprise weblogs

Instead of the next six types Fredrik offers, I’d suggest the simple categorization of if the blog has a single or multiple authors. Inside the enterprise group blogs are more common and oriented towards collaboration. The topic or objective of a blog can change over time, as most things do, and most individual blogs defy categorization.

Building on these points: knowledge and collaboration aren’t different kinds of blogs — they are different stages in the lifecycle of the same post.
For example, at Socialtext, we use a team weblog to collaborate on the release process, logging process steps, and keeping the team up to date. Once the release is done, the posts serve as an archive. Because Socialtext uses a wiki repository, blog posts can be linked to by name, and updated later.
A post starts as live collaboration, and turns into a knowledge base over time.
Also, today’s technology is blurring the distinction between individual and group blogs in a corporate and community settings. Aggregators, portals, and metablogs pull together individual blogs into combined views of the conversation in the community.

I have issues with “issues”

There’s a dialect of business diplomacy where it is considered rude to identify a problem.
Instead of “we have a problem, the dam has been breached”, we say “there is an issue with the dam”, or “I have a concern with the dam”.
Now, it is true that simply pointing out problems is annoying and often counterproductive in a business environment. Problem statements are best accompanied by suggestions for improvement. Particularly in a startup environment, you fix it, or help fix it, or help prioritize fixing it, or log it and go do something else useful.
Sometimes, there are situations where you’re trying to figure out whether a problem exists “There’s an issue with the flibbertygibbet setting — is this correct.” “I have a concern about the EastCo account. Haven’t heard from them in a while, are they happy?”
But when the water is pouring from the dam, you have a problem, and nobody’s doing anybody favors by using euphemisms.

Women Don’t Ask

Men graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Masters’ degree earned $4000 more in their first job out of the program than women did, according to a 2002 study.
It turned out that only 7% of the women had negotiated their starting salary, but 57% of the men had asked for more money. Those who negotiated raised their salaries by an average of $4000.
The striking difference in salary was explained by the willingness to negotiate.
Currently Women Don’t Ask, about women’s reluctance to negotiate.

Congressman Boucher engages copyfighters on Lessig’s blog

There’s a lively, thoughtful, substantive discussion going on over on the Lessig Blog, where Congressman Rick Boucher is engaged in conversation with the “free culture” crowd, while Lessig is on vacation. The congressman is reading comments throughout the day, and writing thoughtful, informed, reasonable responses, with insights about the political process. Participants are asking good questions and bringing up relevant angles to the discussion of copyright policy and the INDUCE act.
This is the real deal. Congressperson takes a leadership role on an issue, and uses a blog as a way to meet with constituents who are active advocates in the issue area. The blog community of activists is catalyzed by a thought leader.
No “messages”, no flames. Cluetrain live.

Modeling Emergent Democracy

Over the weekend, I’ve been reading the draft of a once and future book on emergent democracy. The thesis is that many-to-many network communication is transforming human political and social organization. Theorists of emergent democracy draw on metaphors of self-organizing in networks, termites, flocks of birds.
The argument has truth and explanatory power. All changes in communication affect the nature and organization of human society. Networked communication facilitates network behavior patterns that can be described with network math.
There is also something profoundly unsatisfying about network determinism, where current forms of government are inevitably replaced by ad hoc swarms of citizens. There are two items that are missing in the ant metaphor — the nature of the nodes, and the nature of the ecosystem. In a human population, the nodes of the network are intelligent; the pheremones are ideas. The human self-organization takes place within a cultural ecosystem, with resources and constraints like money and laws, unlike termite colonies or flocks of birds, whose forms are shaped by food and weather.
Intelligence in the political network can be described along two related dimensions:
* coordinating action — in networked environment, the ability to draw groups in alignment, rather than in continual brownian bickering
* coordinating ideas — framing discourse to enable shared understanding
This frame makes the affect of the network easier to see: the network makes it easier to co-ordinate groups to take action, and makes it easier to spread ideas among groups.
By taking the environmental metaphor too literally, theorists of emergent democracy refrain from drawing models of the networked polity. After all, if the change is emergent and self-organizing, prediction misses the point. But the human environment is a built environment. Therefore, a theory of the evolution of a networked polity should take into account the constraints of the environment, and the adaptive paths from here to there.
Today, the elements of politics are election campaigns (mass marketing, fund-raising), and inter-election policy making, influenced by activist campaigns and donor money. Emergent democracy enables peer to peer get-out-the-vote activity and decentralized fundraising at election time; and enables groups of citizens to self-organize around issues in the creation and administration of policy.
Blogs, discussion groups, and “peer media” countact the centralizing tendency of mass media, and help provide greater visibility in local politics and particular issues. One chronic mistake made by the prophets of blogging as a political force is to see the conversation, opinion, and journalism in blogs as directly connected to political change.
Conversation, debate and deliberation is important in a democracy, but citizen conversation alone doesn’t make policy. There are two missing steps. First, citizens need to relearn to organize. The conversation needs to translate into action – effective advocacy for specific policy, or campaigning for specific candidates. Second, government officials need to learn how to listen. Today, politicians check polls to see what voters think. Tools like Technorati will give politicians a richer view of the opinion of particularly active citizens.
Yes, say advocates of emergence, but legislation and administration are passe in a networked age. Social decisions will just “emerge” as the sum of a million conversations. There is clearly room for greater decentralization and experimentation. However, as Stewart Brand observed in “As Buildings Learn”, buildings (and the civic infrastructure) consist of layers, with different lifespans.
One failure mode in underdeveloped states is the lack of a reliable legal system. Businesses need a stable foundation for contracts and dispute resolution, in order to conduct the shifting and fast-changing process of entrepreneurship and innovation. Roads, bridges, water and sewage systems are amortized over many decades. (Privatized decentralization is not a complete solution — if water and sewer systems are allocated to those with the ability to pay, epidemics will kill poor people and threaten the rich.) There will continue to be some stable organizational structure to create slow-changing rules, and and to choose, pay for and maintain longlasting assets.
There are other areas currently supported by government — education, health care — where there is some social agreement to spend common resources, but many opinions about how to do this, with competition between centralized and decentralized approaches.
The current geographical basis of governance — local, state/province, national, international — is shaped by geographic concentration of interests, and communication costs. As communication costs decrease, and it’s easier for citizens with common interests to band together across geography, jurisdictions will probably change.
It is useful to think about which aspects of social policy should continue to be set, funded, and managed by slow deliberative government process, which functions should remain but shift jurisdiction, and which functions should be handled by other social structures.
In sum, ideas of emergent democracy provide valuable tools for thinking about the networked polity. But a strong model of emergent democracy includes a picture of how people organize and deliberate, and how government functions in a networked world. Because the nodes of the network are intelligent, and the environment is built by people, it is not at all pointless to discuss a model of governance in a networked polity, and the answers are far from deterministic.
This essay can be found in live wiki form, here

frog-boiling

Washington DC closes streets, puts up security checkpoints.
In the words of a taxi-driver interviewd by the Washington Post: “During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, you didn’t see this kind of thing,” the 49-year-old Nigerian immigrant said. “Fear shouldn’t grip the nation like this. It’s demoralizing that a few people could cause a wall of change that affects the city’s character and image of this country.”

Hiring open source developers

Socialtext loves to hire developers with open source experience and reputation. We know people are good developers. We know they have initiative and have gotten things done. We know they have creative ideas, because thos ideas are public. People who’ve been active in open source have a public community reputation.
And I’m beginning to think that it is a great way to do the R part of R&D. One of the big problems with classic corporate R&D is that innovations don’t see the light of day. The typical corporate reaction is to put researchers on a short leash, and tell them their blue-sky research needs to turn into a commercial product in a finite amount of time.
An alternative approach is to do open source experimentation. If the experiment is interesting and valuable, it will attract other developers. So you’re building an ecosystem from the start rather than stifling it. If it works and seems valuable, you can package and develop and commercialize it — or leave it to an independent noncommercial life.
It increases one risk, because new ideas aren’t secret. It decreases the risk of developing products in the lab that don’t ever work or get done or find users.