Scott Adams

Architecture of participation?

Architecture of Participation

In a recent NYTimes.com article titled "Here's an Idea:  Let Everyone Have Ideas," Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media, the computer book publisher and an evangelist for open source technologies, is quoted as stating that creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling "architecture of participation."

That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products.

I was really struck by the phrase "architecture of participation" and began to think about how do we design and build a structures that make it easy for more people to be involved with the process of creating new value.

The article focuses on internal markets as an engaging process of getting people to express their honest opinions.  One example of expanded participation came from Rite-Solutions which focuses primarily on high-tech applications for the military market.  A member of the administrative staff with no technical expertise thought there might be a way to use the company technology to help students learn math or history in an entertaining way.  This concept led to the co-development with Hasbro and the launch of a new educational multimedia system called VuGo.

This seems like a great question for feedback.  How is your organization making it "easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?"  Please add your thoughts in the comments section below.

In a recent NYTimes.com article titled "Here's an Idea:  Let Everyone Have Ideas," Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media, the computer book publisher and an evangelist for open source technologies, is quoted as stating that creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling "architecture of participation."

That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products.

I was really struck by the phrase "architecture of participation" and began to think about how do we design and build a structures that make it easy for more people to be involved with the process of creating new value.

The article focuses on internal markets as an engaging process of getting people to express their honest opinions.  One example of expanded participation came from Rite-Solutions which focuses primarily on high-tech applications for the military market.  A member of the administrative staff with no technical expertise thought there might be a way to use the company technology to help students learn math or history in an entertaining way.  This concept led to the co-development with Hasbro and the launch of a new educational multimedia system called VuGo.

This seems like a great question for feedback.  How is your organization making it "easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?"  Please add your thoughts in the comments section below.

Leadership Lessons from General Colin Powell

Leadership Lessons from General Colin Powell

All the lessons below were taken taken from a presentation by General Colin Powell. I like them all, and will publish them here over the coming days.

Lesson 1

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."

Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It's inevitable, if you're honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you'll avoid the tough decisions, you'll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you'll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.

Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally "nicely" regardless of their contributions, you'll simply ensure that the only people you'll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.

Lesson 2

"The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."

If this were a litmus test, the majority of CEOs would fail. One, they build so many barriers to upward communication that the very idea of someone lower in the hierarchy looking up to the leader for help is ludicrous. Two, the corporate culture they foster often defines asking for help as weakness or failure, so people cover up their gaps, and the organization suffers accordingly. Real leaders make themselves accessible and available. They show concern for the efforts and challenges faced by underlings, even as they demand high standards. Accordingly, they are more likely to create an environment where problem analysis replaces blame.

Lesson 3

"Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world."

Small companies and start-ups don't have the time for analytically detached experts. They don't have the money to subsidize lofty elites, either. The president answers the phone and drives the truck when necessary; everyone on the payroll visibly produces and contributes to bottom-line results or they're history. But as companies get bigger, they often forget who "brought them to the dance": things like all-hands involvement, egalitarianism, informality, market intimacy, daring, risk, speed, agility. Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues. Real leaders are vigilant, and combative, in the face of these trends.

Thomas A. Edison "Hell, there

Thomas A. Edison

"Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something."

Blogging to win friends and influencing people

Blog to Win Friends and Influence People

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Dale Carnegie classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In the book, Carnegie outlines a timeless approach to building people skills. It's a throwback to an era when civility ruled.

Over the weekend someone took a cheap shot at me, scored a lot of links and generated a lot of traffic to her blog on her very first post. Robert French summarizes the whole event here. The blog, which rhymes with Smurfette, is clearly going to dish out salty gossip and innuendo about the PR business, starting with me. The entire episode, which honestly I didn't pay a lot of attention to, inspired me to revisit Carnegie's classic. Carnegie's tenets provide a solid reminder or two about how to take the high road in the blogosphere, which at time is a rough and tumble environment in a world filled with vile and meanness.

What follows is a summary of his ideas. My comments are in italics. Model these and you will go far in the blog world. I haven't always followed this road, but it's always been my intent to do so. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all did?

Fundamental Techniques for Handling People:

* Don't criticize, condemn or complain. Advance or build on the dialogue, even if you disagree

* Give people a feeling of importance; praise the good parts of them. Link to the posts you disagree with, but point out the parts you agree with too.

* Get the other person to want to do what you want them to by arousing their desires. Put another way, make dreams come true.

Six Ways to Make People Like You:

* Be genuinely interested in other people. Read lots of blogs for different perspectives.

* Smile. Put your picture on your blog.

* Remember and use people's names. Remember where you read things and credit the bloggers who wrote them.

* Encourage others to talk about themselves and listen to them. In other words, welcome comments.

* Discuss what the other person is interested in. Add value to your readers.

* Make the other person feel important. Take all your feedback seriously and adapt if needed.

Government of the Future: 7 Predictions

[library of congress] Bev Godwin of FirstGov

Bev Godwin, Dir, FirstGov.gov talks about "Government of the Future: 7 Predictions."(She's speaking for herself, not FirstGov.) [Note: As always, I'm paraphrasing. I am sure to get some of what she says wrong.]

Her assumptions: By 2015 [the year the conference is about] people will never not be on the Internet, and access will be provided by the government.

In 2000, there were at least 24,000 federal web sites. There are now at least 40M documents. There are way too many sites. Many are out of date. Her mantra to her group: "Let's manage the content we have." If you type "mold" into the FirstGov site, you get 127,322 hits. (There are 3,541 active top level.gov domains. 1,476 are federal. 1,811 are state, county or city. 81 are sovereign nations.)

Prediction #1: There will be dramatically fewer government Web sites and pages.

Prediction #2: The design debate will be over. They'll all be arranged basically the way newspaper front pages are: Title at the top, color image to direct the eye to the lead story, etc.

Prediction #3: US gov't sites will have a common look and feel. She points to .gov sites that are wildly different in their format. She believes they all should look basically the same, using usability-tested layout. [Usable but boring.] They can vary in details but have the same navigation bar in the same place, the country logo in the same spot, etc.

Prediction #4: No gov't Web site will be launched without usability testing.

Prediction #5: "The .gov naming convention will actually make sense to the public." There will be a taxonomy that's rational.

Prediction #6: "The public will be able to perform the tasks they want on gov't websites." Gov't should think of it as a retailer of services, not a wholesaler.

Prediction #7: Content will be aggregated to serve the public. It will be intelligent about your interests and needs: It's time to renew your driver's license, here's the contact info about your elected officials, here's your tax refund status, how long until you can collect social security, etc. [Tags: firstgov bev_godwin ]

The future according to kids

[ia summit] Andrew Hinton: The future according to kids

Andrew Hinton asks what we can learn about the future by looking at what the kids are doing. [I came in a few minutes late.]

71% of all teens are playing games online, he says. [I missed the scope — US teens?] . He goes through the impressive financial stats: We're spending lots of money on these games. Wells Fargo built an island in Second Life.

Designing a game overlaps heavily with designing information spaces, Andrew says, and thus there is much IAs can learn from game design. E.g., game sites assume multitasking and are ok with complex interfaces. Games assume you will learn by doing.

We need to give people not just maps but navigational tools because the environment is constantly changing. He points to Microsoft's Wallop.

"Kids are going to be kings of all media," he says. "Broadcasting is dying; it's not going away but it'll be a specialized thing...It's a peer-to-peer world. And, please only give me authentic voices." And community is important, he says, pointing to Warcraft as an example. Why doesn't Photoshop's help system send us to the communities of Photoshop experts, he asks.

MySpace takes all the stuff about high school — how many friends you have, for example — and makes it explicit.

Being able to make multiple selves — e.g., multiple profiles at Yahoo — is relationship diversification.

The virtual environment is spilling out into the real world. He talks about TATUS, a simulated virtual ubiquitous computing environment. "This is freaky. This is Postmodern to the nth degree. we're studying virtual reality to study reality." He also refers to the "I love Bees" marketing campaign to launch Halo 2 that engrossed the user community.

Andrew calls "the game layer" the merging of the physical and digital realities. "This is going to make our real lives more like game lives, because we're going to be immersed in data."

[Great talk. I haven't done justice to it or its playfulness.] [Tags: iasummit andrew_hinton games]

Field trips, tech & project based learning

Why Field Trips, Technology and Project Based Learning?

Why Field Trips and technology and project based learning? They build schema and experience many of our students don’t have.

School mission statements have revolved around developing students that know how to learn or teach themselves for many years.

“Students will develop the skills required to become lifelong learners,” has become almost a mantra in education. Then we go about this by doing what we have been doing forever – just more focused, organized and, “research based.” NCLB added “the stick” because obviously what was missing was strict accountability.

Language and math “literacy” have become the focus because the thinking is that underachieving students will never make it without the “3R’s.” OK, fair enough – and some of those programs have made a difference - especially in primary grade reading and math test scores. However, as soon as students get to 3rd or 4th grade those scores drop and continue to drop more each grade level thereafter.

Why? Partly because the programs being mandated are so time consuming that there is no time for anything else (field trips, real science, real social studies, art, technology, PE, etc.) where students might experience at least some of the vocabulary and background knowledge required to make sense of what they read - and make it interesting. When students hit upper elementary, reading and math questions stress more and more analytical skills and vocabulary and students often just don’t have the schema in those areas to be successful. Reading then is too often meaningless and boring.
Technology has become a new tool of literacy – like it or not. Just like long ago:

At a teacher’s conference in 1703, it was reported that
students could no longer prepare bark to calculate problems. They depended instead on expensive slates. What would students do when the slate was dropped and broken?

According to the Rural American Teacher in 1928,
students depended too much on store bought ink. They did not
know how to make their own. What would happen when they
ran out? They wouldn’t be able to write until their next trip to
the settlement.

We are not doing our students justice by not giving them experience with the new tools of literacy because we don’t feel they know the old ones well enough. Technology is a gateway to learning that without the knowledge of its use students will be at a disadvantage compared to those that do.
Don’t believe that yet? We will continue to convince you.

Hints for ESC

Conference 2.0 — Ten Tips for Extending your Education Conference

I have worked at several conferences over the past couple of months, that have attempted to extend their services into the blogosphere and other planes of Read/Write web activity. I know of several others who will be attempting to implement web 2.0 features in the near future.

So here are some of the things that I’ve seen, that seemed to work — and a couple of ideas that I’ve thought up by myself. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll refer to the Our State Technology in Education Conference, or OSTEC:

1. Communication: The conference should have a web page linked from the front page of the site. It might be called something like OSTEC Extended. This page could link to online handouts and other standard resources, but also include information about Web 2.0 features such as suggested tags, links to and information about the conference blog, links to conference wikis, and an aggregation of conference related blogs and pictures. You might also include a search box that will search conference blogs for key words.
   

   Also, consider sending out e-mail and snail-mail notices of your Web 2.0 features — especially to presenters. A conference blog is an excellent place for speakers to promote their sessions.

   
   
2. Tagging: Suggesting a tag for conference bloggers and photographers makes it easy to aggregate the discussion into a single page and into attendees (and lurker’s) aggregatores. There are three essential rules for establishing a conference tag. It should be simple, simple, and simple. The simplest tag is ostec (or fetc or whatever). Many conferences, though, are adding the year, asking bloggers and photographers to tag their material with ostec2006. It is probably wise to aggregate both tags.
   
3. Conference blog: Several conferences I have worked in the past couple of weeks have offered a conference blog. This is easy to do with Blogger. Post the e-mail address of the owner of the conference blog, usually the communications officer of the association. People who want to blog, send the e-mail request, and the blog owner:
   
   
   
   
   1. logs into blogger,
      
   2. clicks the “Settings” tab, and
      
   3. then “Members”.
      
   4. Then paste in the return address of the person requesting to blog, and click “Save Settings”.
   
   

   An e-mail goes to the person with a link that will click them in as a user. If they are not already a member of Blogger, they will have to establish an account.

   
   
4. Photos: Include, in the conference extension page, instructions for tagging photos uploaded to flickr with the conference tag. Also include instructions for creating a flickr e-mail address, for people with mobile phones that can e-mail pictures. Designate someone with a mobile phone to take regular pictures at the conference for e-mailing to flickr.
   
5. Wiki Notes (advanced): Establish a conference wiki and set up a page for each presentation. Then set up a way that attendees can add their notes to the wiki for their presentation. I have done this with my presentations, with varying degrees of success. When it works, it is a great service.
   
6. Session blogs: Ask presenters to establish tags for their sessions, encouraging attendees to blog about the session, including their insights.
   
7. Infrastructure: Hands-down, this is a necessity. Have wireless Internet in every session room. It should be robust and dependable. If there is a password required, it should be posted on the wall in every room.
   
8. Blog Reporters. Establish conference blog-o-reporters. Also establish a team of podcasters, who go around recording interviews with attendees and with selected presenters. Reporters and podcasters might be pre-service education students.
   
9. Podcasts & Webcasts: Podcast (or Webcast) selected sessions. Be careful about seeking permission to podcast sessions, especially from people who make a living by delivering presentations. They may be reluctant to grant permission, or they may be eager to.
   
10. Training: Consider offering a pre-conference (day-before or early morning) session on Web 2.0 and the conference, helping participants to establish a blog, set up an aggregator, or other applications that will enable a more productive conference and to help them to contribute more ideas to the conference.

These are just 10 tips. Please add by commenting on this blog entry.

Blog only???

Ad agency scraps website, goes blog-only

In a sure sign of things to come, Boston's Hill/Holliday has dumped their website and is gonna go at it with just a blog from now on. Adrants posted about it yesterday, and as I mentioned on Jordan's blog, this is the way we are headed. When you try to sell a company on adding a blog, one of the strongest selling points (to the company), is that the viral nature of blog traffic means that a

Things to remember for AECT ESC

Remember the mental gatekeepers as well

John has run into a problem that many of us, as proponents of blogs, can relate to:

The other day, I mentioned to a new client that we needed to add a blog to the marketing mix and they immediately told me that they didn't want anything to do with that online journaling for people who just want to rant on about nothing.

I really can't take it anymore! So, from this point forward I'm no longer going to fight the misperception. I'm not going to even use the "B" word blog.

No matter what John said, as soon as he mentioned the 'b word', the customer likely made the mental connection that blogs are nothing more than teenagers on MySpace, and decided that adding a blog would be a waste of time for him.

Recall my idea to give away a newly-released CD to 1,000 bloggers. No one yet has given me a viable reason why this wouldn't work. In fact, the first label that does this will likely have a huge success on their hands simply from the windfall of positive WOM it will generate for the label. But the bottom line is, if you pitch this idea to a record label, as soon as they hear the words 'give away the music', the mental 'giving away the music means losing sales, you idiot!' gate is activated, and they shut out everything you say from that point on.

Remember, your truth might not be their truth.

So you put 'your truth' in terms that more closely coincide with 'their truth'. John says instead of mentioning the 'b word', he mentions the benefits of a blog:

* Will bring you a substantial increase in search engine traffic

* Will greatly enhance your ability to communicate with your market

* Will increase your odds of being interviewed by the media

* Will allow you (or someone you designate) to instantly post news updates to your web site

* Willl guarantee that your web site has fresh reasons for people to come back

* Will allow you to be seen as a thought leader in your industry and

* Will give you a tool to help cement strategic partner relationships

Both times he said the same thing, but the second time, he put his marketing idea into terms that the customer valued and understood.

Take the '1,000 CDs to 1,000 bloggers' idea from earlier.(Jane made a great point in the comments that you could even make it 1,000 free downloads, but for simplicity sake I'll leave it at CDs) Do you present this idea to a label as 'Let's give away 1,000 CDs to bloggers', or that it would be 'an internet-based viral marketing campaign aimed at promoting Jewel's new CD to 1,000 fan sites, giving us exposure to the site operators, as well as the traffic for every site that mentions the campaign. The potential exposure for this campaign could easily reach the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people!'.

If the label 'gets it' when it comes to blogs, then just mentioning giving away the CDs to 1,000 bloggers would be a great idea to them. Because when you say 'give away 1,000 CDs to bloggers', what they hear is, '1,000 bloggers are going to be exposed to our music, and in return they will blog about the promotion, and our label and music will then be exposed to every visitor that reads their blog! The potential total exposure for our artist and label could be huge!'.

If the label doesn't 'get' blogs, then you have to explain the promotion to them in terms that the other label already understands.

The bottom line is, we have to remember that our truth might not be their truth. The effective marketer is able to communicate their ideas, in terms that the customer understands and values.