Know Your Audience

A recent Harris interactive poll indicates that most people don't like that the ads on the websites they see are customized to their browsing/networking/purchasing and other habits.

What the hell?

Do these responders realize that the alternative is random advertisement? I love the idea that the browsing experience is customized/personalized to the user. Imagine a Google where the returns you get aren't just the regular algorithmic results that represent the oft gamed priority selection of, well, everybody? I know that Wikipedia mastermind Jimbo Wales is thinking of this exactly, which you can read all about in a great if somewhat dated article from Fast Company here.

It's not just for search. Personalization and customization are coming, and it's a good thing. A team of us have been working on building a presentation strategies workshop (not presentation skills; you can learn posture and projection somewhere else), and among the core considerations is to know your audience. How can you communicate effectively to a person or group that you don't know?

Who wants generic? Having no boundaries on what info you're exposed to sounds appealing, but the current delivery and consumption on most of these things is a masses-created intelligent design. As long as they're not over-policed, these systems work.

The supposed reasoning here for people not liking the customized browsing is that there's a "creepy factor" (that's right: creepy factor) surrounding the notion that Big Brother is out there minding your patterns and actions and distributing and reacting to that information. Read more in the Globe's article here. This kind of irrational fear is what will get things over-policed.

Emergent Media and Emerging Minds

The Emergent Media Center at Burlington Vermont's Champlain College is one of the more innovative programs at one of the most entrepreneurial schools I have ever seen.

Champlain is a relatively small school in a relatively small town. I had the great pleasure of visiting there last December with some colleagues and experts in education to have a meeting devoted to expanding the appeal and effectiveness of the National History Club using emergent media. Before joining President Dave Finney and some faculty for dinner, I was given a tour of the campus.

The classrooms were designed to meet the specifications of professors. The school seeks out entrepreneurial students, and they even have a BYOB (bring your own business) program that only accepts proven entrepreneurs. There is a real community feeling throughout, as well. That's what amazes me most about the place. Of all the gadgetry and forward thinkery; the people there are focused on people, and explore gaming and other technologies as a part of a much bigger purpose...

At John Abele's Game Change Summit at The Kingbridge Centre last year, several of the faculty and students from Champlain joined us, and ran demos and offered presentations. I had the chance to speak with one of the students (Tony!) who was demonstrating World of Warcraft. It was incredible to learn how this game that so many stigmatize as antisocial actually empowered this bright guy to become a better communicator and collaborator. In this safe environment, he developed his skills as a leader by rallying others to accomplish missions. More on MMORPG's later - the point is that Champlain knows what emergent media can do, and they're advancing the field and advancing the people who will advance it further than we can imagine.

I strongly endorse the EMC blog authored by friend, colleague, altogether great person and leading researcher in the field; Ann DeMarle.

Restructuring

I have been speaking with and working with several organizations lately that are looking at restructuring their organizations or departments. A sensitive issue at best, and an impossible task at worst.

Following the mantra (or is it a cliche?) of "if you want me on board for the landing, you'd better have me on board for the takeoff", we've been experimenting with visually co-creating the future structure of a group with all of the stakeholders. Almost like a Value Networks NetMap exercise. Here's a few of the lessons we've learned:

• Prepare the group for some difficult discussion. Lay out the rules of engagement and encourage people to resist defending their position.
• Avoid using names and identities. Refer to roles.
• Using a tool or method that enables anonymous and candid collection of suggestions for altering current structure can be a good way of breaching the tough issues. Accepting inputs as questions is a good way to avoid threatening. Decision support technology can be a good option.
• Having a visual to follow is critical for some people to process and contribute effectively. The tactility of populating or organizing the visual is also a necessity for some. I hope I don't have to include that this visual is not an org-chart. How people deliver value and interact with other roles is not a matter of who they report to.

There are those that would say that attempts like this at restructuring and reorganizing are futile. People self organize and they way they arrange themselves in roles cannot be engineered, as it is an organic process.

I don't absolutely dispute this, but maintain that this is a collaborative and "facilitated organic" catalytic process.

Here Comes Everybody's Failures

In his new book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky explores a lot of the same kinds of web 2.0 phenomena that we've seen in Wikinomics and countless other books and sources. Wikinomics is a classic, but Shirky's works has a bit of a different spin that may be of interest.

Shirky looks at the social implications of groups of people coming together with the support of technology. An interesting notion (one of many) that he explores is the impact of user generated inititiatives on the perception of failure.

As web 2.0 applications hit the web and user-base running, much of the filtering and fine-tuning happens after they are in the public eye. Incomplete, sometimes bare products are introduced into the marketplace, and willing nerds (I make no apologies for the term, as I myself am a nerd and therefor have free license to label thusly) join the beta cause and experiment. Given their feedback and even their charitable coding and other efforts to refine their own experience, the product evolves to match the user's desirable outcome.

This has become the standard process, so the many failed intermediate applications that lead to a successful 2.0 application are accepted by the masses as necessary steps. We need those failures to achieve something we want.

Hopefully this mentality is a pervasive one and expands beyond the 2.0 space. Although that is a great place for it, it would be ideal if in meetings, work, and learning environments we were able to tolerate and even appreciate failures as a necessary function of progress.

It's been argued by cognitive science experts that humans are better able to learn from failures than from successes, which is where a lot of business authors focus their attention. What is the greatest learning you've mobilized from a personal success, and what's the greatest you've taken from a personal failure?

The Origin of The Origin of Species

The Royal Ontario Museum is currently featuring an exhibit on the great Charles Darwin called "Darwin: The Evolution Revolution". There was a lot of interesting information there, but all in the form of words (essentially you are there to read a novel that has been blown up and placed on walls instead of the regularly consumed book form). The artifacts were mostly things like facsimiles of letters that had been written to or from Darwin.

I'm not sure that museums really do it for me. There's nothing that could be more interesting than Darwin's contributions, but as I'd remarked following the experience... I don't feel any closer to Darwin than I did before the exhibit. Most of what I read I had read before, but that's fine. I expected to experience the evolution revolution. Likely an expectations problem rather than a delivery problem, but a reality of meetings and all experiences, regardless.

To draw a parallel between the theory of evolution and meetings, I would start with the selection process that finds individuals invited to meetings or not. It's a flawed process that can't isn't worth finch dung compared to natures example. It's usually the usual suspects that garner invitation (those that are closest to the issue) and the squeakiest wheels (those that bitch the most if their not invited). Nature shows that an ecosystem relies on diversity for success. We need to always consider diversity when strategically selecting meeting participants.

To draw what I consider to be an interesting parallel between the world's reaction to the theory and meetings, I would start with the defense. Darwin did little to refute the challenges from religous, scientific, and other factions. It was strong supporting voices from others in the scientific community that rallied to defend the Origin of Species. Likewise, the most successful and accepted notions presented in meetings are often the ones that are advocated by people besides the proposing party. Unfortunately, the real master politickers have mastered this phenomenon, and plant seeds for other people to carry out their bidding before the meeting begins.

A monkey riding on a donkey. That was worth the admission.

Elderly Spanish Fellow

Paleontologists in Spain have unearthed evidence of human ancestory in Spain from 1.3 million years ago. The remains indicate that humans occupied Europe about 500,000 years earlier than what has been accepted until now. As discoveries like this mount, we will get a clearer picture of how our species evolved, and sustained.

Part of what sustained the sapient hominid was their (is our?) tribal orientation. Whether it be eradicating competing homo-erectus subsets, slaughtering a wooly mammoth, or more generatively; developing methods to grow food instead of gathering it, hominids functioned in tribes to accomplish feats necessary to their survival.

Communication advances like the advent of language would have seen a punctuated spike in the gradual evolution of our ability to collaborate effectively. I wonder how the internet and would compare on that timeline? It's important that we look at what biological and physiological traits have helped us to get where we are in terms of collaboration, as well as looking at creating and leveraging technologies to supplement collaboration. This Spanish guy might show us the path to some answers.

More on evolution real soon...

Commuter's Collaboration

There's a new GPS device out there called "Dash". CNN had a spot on it, that you can watch here. The idea is that the GPS communicates with other GPS's from other cars in the network. The Dash tracks traffic by tracking all of the Dash's that are out and about. Moreover, it can alert drivers to their relative proximity to things you may be looking for, like products. You get a little notice if you are in the region where something you've keyed in is available.

Of course, this network depends on many subscribers to the network to be successful. If only 1% of cars have the Dash, then there's probably too few signals to get an accurate picture of the traffic situation. This gets me thinking a lot about critical mass issues with social networks, wikis, and other collaborative places, but that's for another post. For today, we'll look at a more literal parallel in a conferencing environment.

There are all kinds of gizmos like nTAG that house participant profiles, and beep or do other obnoxious things to let their possessor's know when there's somebody approaching that shares an interest or offers expertise in an area of need. This is all well and good, but it seems that this function could be done by cell phones in the near enough future, and probably is already although I'm unaware of it. It would be nice if phones could be more easily used as polling devices as a replacement for Audience Response keypads.

Any cool devices you'd like to share? Better still, what's the best collaborative use you've seen for a mundane technology, like a cell phone?