Just a reminder that Greg Narain and I are kicking off a series of webcasts at 1pm ET today, called Podcastng on Windows (see here for details). The series is sponsored by GoToMeeting. Today, we start with an introduction to podcasting, and Greg will enlighten us all on his Beercasting project, which has been very successful so far.

(PS If you wrote down the codes to join the teleconference, please do not use the 'sub pin code' -- thanks!)

Over the past several months, I have written many times about "social architecture" (see here). I recently invited a group of thought leaders to join me in developing a one-day Corante symposium on the topic, and got a great response; but I also got one email (from Ross Mayfield) that said "Sure, sounds fun. What's Social Architecture?" For the sake of my co-conspirators on the event, and anyone else, I am writing this post to clarify what I think the term denotes, and set a loose collection of questions to start a dialogue about the event.

[Note: I should be formally announcing venue (Boston, provisionally) and date (early November, provisionally) in the next few days.]

Social Architecture Dynamics

The following diagram is an attempt to charcterize the interactions of three sorts of "social agents" in the blogosphere -- the human creators (or authors) of blog writings, the human readers of blog writing, and the social software applications (or "machines") that search and analyze the blogosphere based on the social "gestures" that human writers and readers leave behind. Note that human authors and readers are collapsed into one category -- they are almost identical from the viewpoint of social architecture, since they both are reading and then leaving a gestural history behind.

Authors and readers both leave social traces behind (or "gestures"), as a result of their activities. Authors point to other blogs in their posts - either by link or by name - and create ageless links like blogrolls: these represent an implicit social network relationship between the parties, not just a topical pointer, like a search engine provides. And the actions of readers (which includes all authors) create similar gestural information: explicit, shared evidence of reading like comments and bookmarks, and implicit value indications, like the frequency of return to a specific blog, or the number of comments left.

Authors and readers can make assertions about blog posts, based on various capabilities that are basic to the current Web, like HTML keywords, or relying on specific capabilities supported by various software implementations, like rating services, blogging tools (Movable Type categories, for example), or tags. Tags in particular are an area of intense interest, to a large measure as a result of the premise of a distributed, decentralized, and bottom-up approach to making sense of the exploding volume of the blogosphere. For example, we browse through the tagspace of our Deli.icio.us network of friends or all Del.isio.us users as a whole to discover web pages of possible interest: a social search mechanism.

Machines -- software applications, like Google or Technorati -- "read" the blogosphere, too, although not in the way that people do. These apps are plowing through the blogs, indexing the text, and, on the social side, algorithmically evaluating the value of various blogs or blog posts based on the social cues that readers and writers have left behind, as well as less social analysis, like keyword incidence.

The analysis that machines provide serves the general needs of readers, and specialized reader constituencies, like advertisers. We use the analysis of Google and other search tools to provide us the most relevant and most highly valued results based on our search terms. We use Technorati's tag-based analysis to help us find the most recent or most relevant and highly rated posts associated with given tags, or sets of tags. They provide, therefore, and very useful service necessary for us to make sense of the expanding blogosphere.

On The Road To Get There

In essense, what people are doing is an endless search for more stuff to read.

In a real sense, what we do on the Web can be reduced to the graph above: we are somewhere -- looking at some page, a search result, the New York Times -- and then we read what's there, we make comments, capture bookmarks, or write blog posts. These are all -- including the micro details of how we read the page -- gestures that represent, implicitly or explicitly a value judgment about the material we are looking at. Sooner or later we leave the page, perhaps following a local link: one embedded in the post, a blogroll link, or a tag. Alternatively, we might jump from the local context not using local, hard coded links, but just typing in specific terms or tags at Google or Technorati, that are related in some way to what we were reading.

Clicking on any link is a vote -- clicking on an embedded link leads to overall link counts for the target page, while clicking on a tag is an endorsement of the relevance of the tag, itself, given the context where it occurs. All these gestures are ways that we extend ourselves in the world, and thereby make it our own, and socializing it.

[Note: This is why graffitti is a creative act. What is considered defacement is in fact an innate socializing impulse -- to leave our mark on what we behold, and thereby denote our liaison with the greater world.]

But we are always moving from Somewhere to Elsewhere, and everything we do on the way is potentially a gesture that could, if it were captured, lead to a richer understanding of the relevance and value of the pages -- and by extension, the authors -- involved.

Toward an Ecology of Social Architecture

The elements of social architecture are appearing at a bewildering rate, and there are a number of very complex societal and economic issues emerging along with the explosion of social artifacts:

1/ Ethics and Economics of Social Gestures -- Who owns the traces of social architecture? If authors create public tags -- for example -- can companies accumulate them, and sell the resulting information gleaned without consideration for the authors? Do we need to tag all tags with creative commons-like agreements? The same considerations arise relative to other public gesture spaces -- comments, links, and so on.

2/ Open Architecture -- How open is enough? How should various sorts of gestures be implemented: for example, there has been a lot of discussion recently about making tags more open (see here). If a few major companies (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, for example) come out with competitive, closed Technorati-like solutions, we could rapidly find ourselves in a fragmented world, with three non-interoperating, partially overlapping tagspaces. It is clearly not in the public interest to go down this path, like what has happened in the instant messaging world.

3/ Privacy and Identity -- What measures for privacy should be contemplated? Is there some way to make gestures only sharable with known others? What does anonymity mean in a socialized Web? Is it possible at all? Are we defined as the sum of our gestures? Will we be declaring our willingness to be advertised to by a tag-based profile? What is the aggregate complement of the history of our meandering around the Web, writing, comments, and tagging?

4/ Better Social Elements -- Blogrolls and other explicit links are very coarse-grained mechanisms to represent social relationships between people, but explicit mechanisms to denote degrees or depth of relationships have not emerged. Is there a solution here, buried in the countless gestures we make in the world, including closed spaces like your email and instant messaging, or explicit social networks?

5/ The Personal and Global 100 -- The recent spate of criticism about the various top 100 lists suggests that new ways of analyzing social architecture are needed so that the oft-quoted notion -- "everyone can have their own top 100" -- might be more than just an handwave. How do can we manage our own lists, really? Explicit blogrolls (embodied in blog readers, on on our blogs) is not at all the same as determining who are the most relevant top 100 writers on a topic of interest, based on personal preferences and inclinations.

Close

The continued growth of the Blogosphere will make its social architecture even more of an global asset that it has already proven to be. We will continue to witness enormous technological innovation, with dozens of new Flickrs, Technoratis, and De.licio.uses appearing in the next year. As more writing (and other media, like audio, video, and photographs) is generated on an ever widening range of topics, more and more machine-generated analysis of human social gestures, and the gestures themselves, will play an increasinglt important role in making sense of the Web. Without these techniques, the explosion of the Blogosphere will overwhelm our traditional information-based approaches.

The criticality of these activities will cause friction on technological, societal, and economic levels, and as so those of us who are most interested and involved in these discussions may have a significant impact on the future direction of the socialized Web. The planned Symposium is intended to bring together thought leaders, practitioners, and entrepreneurs in the arena and to explore the various threads making up the discussion about social architecture.

Gnomedex has come and gone. It was, hands down, an amazing conference (or un-conference, as it turns out). It was basically a room full of thought-leaders coming together to share ideas and look at where we are going. The energy and the vibe were exhilarating. Chris and Ponzi did an amazing job of not only organizing the event, but coordinating all the speakers and topics and making sure everyone got the most out of it.

I met a ton of new people, went all out blogging the whole thing on Blogaholics (23 posts in all!), and came home with a bag full of swag.

Anyway, rather than inundate everyone with all of my posts, I'll just go over some of the highlights:

Dave Winer notes that anyone can lead the future of the web now. It's not about being the leader or controlling the technology anymore. He advises us to think of the web based on how everything interconnects. To think of it as a repository of knowledge. When you do, you'll think of it based on how things fit together. Technology is secondary to this and should be used to highlight these interconnections.

We saw the release of IE 7 and previewed Longhorn, which will feature RSS integration as its main selling point. Many of the RSS features, including the new Simple List Extension, will be available under Creative Commons.

Dave Sifry notes that the web is a stream of state changes, not documents or pages. It's people talking.

The Hive was launched. For Windows fanatical leaders. Enough said.

Matt Westervelt, Asa Dotzler, Scott Collins and Matt Mullenweg had a great session on Open Source; all about the benefits of word of mouth, about community building, and the challenges of choosing what is your core product and what you leave to others in the form of extensions. It's hard to transcribe. My posts are here and here.

Julie Leung gave the best presentation at Gnomedex. Everyone just sat in awe. Julie gave a presentation on blogging as a social tool and the challenges in deciding what to blog, what to keep private, and what your online self really is. It was inspiring to hear her struggle to find the balance as well as her rich description of the benefits you get from sharing your life online with others.

"This is a personal media revolution" - JD Lasica (ourmedia)

Terry Heaton (Donata Communications) told us how WKRN-TV was using blogging to build audience. They started with one blogger but now they are moving to having the reporters all blog as a part of the company-endorsed strategy.

Adam Curry keynoted the end of Gnomedex by sharing with us Daily Source Code #200 with the following highlights:

• "We want to take back the media. Not to put it into our hands, but our hearts"
• Blogging is a communication medium. A marketing medium. It will always be both. Let's embrace it.
• Podcasting will be the revolution for music promotion
• We're taking back our media to its roots in the hearts and minds of people through the power of subscription.

I had the opportunity to hear James Surowiecki's keynote this morning. See my comments here, in a post I called "We Are Not Ants"

[Update: Kevin Werbach points out that the dinnner that Suw attended was not a Supernova session: "we invited Supernova attendees and friends to attend as our pre-conference dinner." I also want to note that Kevin did in fact invite me back to speak at Supernova, despite the hue-and-cry that followed my 'email blows' session. I think that shows that Kevin understands the value of dissent, and as a result is interested in a diverse range of viewpoints. Thank you, Kevin.]

Suw Charman attended the Supernova kick-off dinner, and she suggests that folks attending are missing the point about the collision between social media and the mainstream:

[...] the crowd there (and half the panel) didn't really seem to grasp the issues, and there was quite a bit of hostility and opinionated voices without much in the way of displays of deeper understanding. Maybe I felt that way because I have been thinking about and talking about blogging and its impact on the media for a while, so such a shallow and unfocused discussion is always going to leave me wondering why I bothered.

As the social media meme begins to diffuse, all sorts of odd things happen. One that I have seen a lot in the past year -- in over 10 conferences I have attended -- where the dreaded panel session format (see Death To All Panel Sessions) throws up all sorts of characters onto the podium. Especially those that attempt to occupy some sort of surreal middleground, stating that blogs are "just another medium" that can be used "to push messages" and so on, but that the same old techniques have to be applied to get maximum return on whatever buzzword. Gah.

I guess I have had some reservations about the Supernova show, too, but it's moot since I will only be here a few hours. I am doing a True Voice seminar this morning, and then heading east to NYC for the CTC 2005 conference. I look forward to hearing Suw's take on the conference. I was almost lynched here last year for saying that "email blows" when I was heading a session on the future of email. I wonder what the tenor of the conference will be this year, now that Wharton is involved. Last year, I definitely felt that the neck-to-necktie ratio had moved in the wrong direction: not enough fringe lunatics, and too many folks in $400 shoes.

I would like to organize a conference, and following the general meme of an open business plan (that I have pursued recently), I am opening the discussion to whoever is interested.

The theme I am interested in is Social Architecture: Tools and Technologies for a New Wave of Social Media. The social architecture term I am shamelessly lifting from the recent interaction with John Hagel (see here), one of the authors of Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Maybe I can coerce John into participating?

I will also be sending out emails, inviting various tech firms, thought leaders, and researchers to jump in. I guess I still don't trust blogging to be the sole mechanism of getting things rolling on an activity like this.

I hope to explore dozens of themes at the symposium, but all circling around social media, and the social architecture that arises from our interactions through these technologies and tools. I am eager to create an opportunity for a wide range of researchers, analysts, entrepreneurs and users to interact. And I want to explore Marc Cantor's contention (see here) that this has to be more than just a brief real world event: it needs to be an ongoing community, with continuing virtual activity after the symposium is over, and leading up to the event itself. Marc's already said he's interested. Now, all I have to do is convince some weak-minded people to do all the hard work involved (wink).

Does IT Matter? This is the discussion I recently had with Larry Cannel, who has been an integrated part of the Collaborative Applications Group at Ford Motor Company since 1998. As a leader in the IT side of driving collaborative technology strategies, he has some great insight to the actual deployment and adoption of collaborative tools. Part of leading change is understanding new technologies and how they can solve enterprise knowledge and collaborative needs. Larry will be speaking at the Collaborative Technologies Conference, which starts in just a week now, on Collaborative Strategy and how IT can drive these strategies. In essence, Larry argues that IT does indeed matter.

Can IT lead collaborative strategies? Or should it be left to each vertical function to find their own means? Larry strongly asserts that, in most cases, IT are the only ones in the position to do so. However, it really does depend on the individual or team leading the process. One crucial component is perspective. Is IT the owner of the collaboration tool or are they the operator of it? Most of the time IT is simply the operator of technology - you throw out a tool like audioconferencing then just walk away. However, with collaborative tools, they must step up to be the owners. Here is the distinction in perspective: as an operator, the focus is on saving cost and avoiding risk; as an owner, the focus is on creating value and seeking opportunities to create value - on making it easier for people to meet and collaborate. To do so, they must drive the change. So, changing perspective is the first step, and it's one obviously on the shoulders of individuals. The role of IT has changed, and people must change with it.

How can IT ensure that collaboration tools are used to create value? Part of this comes in how its adopted. IT has a role to show people why something creates value - to show them how to post files in a wiki, for example, rather than dumping them to email. Reinforcing value creates a pull effect. IT can even go so far as to start using the tools themselves - to become the best practice community for others to watch and learn. Just like I discussed with Ross Mayfield on the topic of wikis, there should be a balance of bottom-up/grassrots adoption along with driving the change top-down. However, Larry and Ross differ in opinion on ownership. Ross argues for shared ownership, whereas Larry argues for IT ownership. I can see the validity in both arguments, and I'm sure it's a long-standing debate that I'm just grazing now.

Go read more of the ownership discussion on the CTC blog.

Marc Canter agrees that conferences need an overhaul, or are totally broken. "I had an opportunity of helping one of the new conferences push the envelope. I suggested that perhps the notion of a conference - which only existing for a few days a year - was passe. Conferences of the future will be on-line, and 24/7/365. A brand. An IRC channel, a Wiki and a marketplace. It's a new paradigm of conferences." Hey, Marc, let's plan a new conference trying some of these ideas. [tags: Marc Canter, Death To All Panel Sessions]

Lisa Kimball and I talked a bit about virtual teams and what can accost them to make them go off track. Lisa founded Group Jazz in 2000 - her focus has been on how to create effective teams and communities online and offline. Lisa will be heading up two very interesting groups at the Collaborative Techhnologies Conference. One session will be a tutorial on effective virtual teams, the other will be a shorter speech on the same topic.

What is a virtual team? Simply, it just means people who are in different locations or companies that must work together. Lisa made the point to clarify that virtual teams really are just teams - same challenges, problems, needs, and dynamics. The only difference is that these teams, versus co-located teams, perhaps suffer from more, and earlier, team dysfunction than do non-virtual teams. Virtual teams are not just distributed across time and space, they are also often made up of people from different functions, departments or organizations. Toss in the fact that people may be on more than one team, that your team expands and contracts at irregular points and that your boss may not be everyone's boss. Sounds complex, doesn't it?

Without face-to-face interaction, problems tend to show up earlier and corrections are much more difficult to make on the fly. Before you know it, you may have taken a wrong turn in your project or your team dynamic and it will be harder to turn back the longer you leave it unchecked. With virtual teams, you cannot read people in the same way - body language, tone of voice and all of these important things are lost. Assumptions we don't know we make are suddenly taken out of the equation. The problems that can occur more frequently and/or earlier with virtual teams range from breaking the ice to trust to sustaining forward momentum and shared vision. We need to solve these team issues with more than technology. We need to processes to help manage these complicated social networks, to help foster communication, and make sure the team creates value as a whole.

What are the top three reasons virtual teams fail? According to Lisa, these are:

1. People lose the sense of the whole. They only see what they are doing and have no way to "look across the room" to see what others are doing. Lack of context kills.
2. Assumptions are not explicitly stated.
3. People don't enjoy it - they don't have fun. Without the laughs to go along with the work, it feels less "human" and the lack of personal interaction is dispiriting.

So, one of the key ways to make your virtual team happy is to make your team happy. Period. So, let's look at what makes a good team in general. Throwing people together does not a team make; a team is measured by its interconnectedness and the understanding of its goals and roles. One important step to achieving this is to create a team charter that outlines the purpose of the team, its norms, everyones roles, and how success will be measured. You don't need to write this down or talk about it in an overly formal way, but you do need to address this early on. And regularly.

Read more on how to create a better team on the CTC blog.

I had the chance to speak with James Surowiecki last week, who will be one of several keynote speakers for the CTC 2005 conference. James is a writer at the New Yorker, but perhaps best known for his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, that explores the ways in which groups can -- at times -- be smarter than the individuals that make them up.

We spoke about the ways that collaborative technologies can help -- and possibly hinder -- intelligent decision making within groups, especially organizations like the modern enterprise. James started the conversation by expressing his optimism about the upside potential for collaborative technologies, which are "immense, in the sense that we can learn from each other, and pass critical information to each other." At the same time, there is a downside: "the more we interact, the more we will be influenced by each other, and therefore, the independence of thought that we know is critical to good collective decision-making can begin to fade away. So, finding a balance between the two is important, especially when you consider technologies like the Internet."

Click here to read the rest of the piece at the CTC 2005 blog.

I had a brief but compelling chat with Eugene Kim a couple of days back. Eugene is cofounder of Blue Oxen Associates, a think tank that works on improving collaboration. He personally works a good deal on open source and interoperability and has cocreated PurpleWiki, an open source collaborative tool. Eugene will be speaking at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference on 'How to Collaborate Without Really Trying' and will be moderating two other very interesting panels. His speech will definitely bring to light the problems that often come with complex and expensive collaboration tools. He'll be going over some lightweight and open source tools that can offer simple ways to streamline collaboration efforts.

From my conversation with him, I can tell that Eugene is a huge proponent of simplicity. If you only need a piece of paper, then just go ahead and use that piece of paper rather than buying a complex and cumbersome tool. In fact, when I asked Eugene what his favourite collaborative tool was, he unhesitatingly said "a piece of paper." It really can be that simple. Sketch, jot down, pass around. Easy.

I like how Larry defined the issue in his last post on CTC: "Collaboration is how we work together. Collaborative technologies present opportunities to work together more effectively." Though the opportunity may be present to optimize workflow, at the same time it can also hinder it. Sometimes, as Eugene noted, a piece of paper can still be a powerful collaborative tool.

Aside from paper, Eugene strongly believes in the power of wikis. They are a very simple tool to use, manage and learn. I think online collaboration, personally, is more powerful for one simple reason: links. Files and ideas can be linked together in ways that you cannot always do otherwise. I was surprised to hear that Eugene thinks that we could actually be seeing some good lightweight tools from Microsoft. I've had some bad Microsoft collaboration experiences just due to the amount of work it took to manage. So, we'll have to see. Other cool tools: TWiki, del.icio.us, Jotspot, Socialtext, and RSS feeds. For those of you wondering, we did have our conversation via Skype - how's that for collaboration.

So, if there are easy tools out there, how does collaboration go so wrong so often? Well, you've got pressure from IT and finance, constrained thinking office-wide about what constitutes a collaborative/social tool, and then you have the whole stigma around collaborative technologies that are actually inexpensive: people just don't take them seriously simple because they are affordable. Go figure.

Continue reading my article over on the Collaborative Technologies Conference Blog.

I was following the thread of various folks' responses to a recent piece on Continuous Partial Attention (see here), and came across this piece, which suggests that various institutions -- in this case the Wall Street Journal's D3 conference organizers, including tech pundit Walter Mossberg -- are declaring war on CPA. Apparently, Jason Pontin (Technology Review's editor in chief) was asked to stop blogging by a staffer, although it turns out later that wasn't the real issue. The conference organizers sought to shield the conference from wireless so that attendees would not blog, email, IM, or backchannel -- wanting to keep everyone's attention completely in the forechannel, completely focussed on the presentations, etc. Mossberg's response:

[from comment at Pontin's blog post]

It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else. We merely declined to provide wi-fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences -- near universal checking of email and surfing of the web during the program. The policy wasn't aimed at blogging, and any staffer who said that was just plain wrong. We are fine with blogging. We deliberately invited bloggers. And we provided a bank of PCs right outside the conference room hard-wired to the net.

Yikes. Another culture war, where the institution -- here the WSJ -- deems some new style of communication and social interaction the ruination of the prior Golden Age. But this is just another attack on continuous partial attention, which is, at its core, an allegiance to broadcast, mediated, unsocialized communications. In this case, the WSJ -- although you can replace it with any institution, such as a corporation laying down rules for behavior in meetings, for example -- wants full attention on the official speakers, and no side channel discussions. But in a many-to-many world, where individuals want to participate in unmediated discussions, and who believe that their social connectedness is more important and strategic than the task at hand, as a general rule, The WSJ's iron-fisted approach to stamping out back channel IMing will anger the most connected and ruin the conference for us.

Personally, I suggest a boycott of stupid, singlethread, chowderhead conferences that prohibit wireless on this basis. I am all for asking people to turn off cell phones -- the ringing and talking is annoying. But demanding that we fold our hands and pay full attention to the talking heads on the podium is nonsense.

You want to hold our attention? Get better speakers! Throw out the panel sessions and the powerpoints! Use video, and music! Practice what you are going to say, instead of hemming and hawing up there! Speak more quickly, say less and make it worth more!

Others have chimed in:

Wade Roush

[from Continuous Computing Blog: Disconnected at D3]

From this perspective, preventing Wi-Fi connectivity at a conference means depriving attendees, at least for a few hours, of their situational awareness and their connections to their productive groups. This may be justifiable, especially if audiences go into an event knowing that they'll have to disconnect. But the benefits to the speakers and organizers should be weighed against the fact that audiences will be less productive and will be cut off from the intelligence of their groups (which may even include fellow audience members, in the case of an IRC backchannel, for example).

I'm not going to argue that we deserve to drag our electronic umbilical cords everywhere. Concert halls should probably be off-limits. (And perhaps bedrooms: A startling number of people admit that if their cell phone rings during sex, they answer it.) But I believe that those who want to reach large audiences--whether at a conference or through a broadcast or a publication--will eventually have to recognize that the audience's partial attention is the best they can hope for, and the most they have a right to ask for.

More than ever, we are connected beings. Now we have to figure out, as a society, when it's proper to ask someone to disconnect--and in effect, to cut off a part of themselves.

I got the pointer to Wade here, Crumb Trail, who adds a misleading analogy between CPA and multithreaded programming of computers:

Throughput on compute intensive tasks is degraded and total throughput is degraded except in cases where there were many wait states. Time slicing and task switching allows that otherwise idle time to be used. Not all of it can be used since it takes time to switch tasks, but when the length of the wait state exceeds twice the task switch time there is an increase in throughput.

When such machines were configured wrong they ended up spending too much time in task switching - they thrashed, squandering their power on the overhead costs of task management and getting little real work done. This is more than just wasteful since it has ripple effects. It wastes the time of everyone who depends on the computer, like sitting and waiting for a web page to be served by a thrashing server or flooded network.

This is the real cost of CPA. Not only is the thrashing individual's performance lowered, so is that of everyone who engages with them. Charm school classes and time management seminars will teach methods to avoid CPA and increase fun and profit.

The problem here is -- again -- measuring the efficiency of the individual "machine", ahem, individual, as opposed to the network of connected machines as a whole. If all the nodes in a network ignore interrupts from others until they reach a wait state, individual productivity of the node may go up, breifly. That is until the node requests information from another, and is blocked: the other node is not at a wait state, and won't respond. As a result, the productitivity of the network decreases. And, on the social level -- leaving mechanistic productivity concerns aside -- opportunities to touch base, exchange social context, or build trust and obligation -- these are all lost when we put task work deadlines ahead of social purpose. If we are going to have charm schools helping people out in this regard, let's not have them forcefeed Taylorist dogma while calling it time management.

The war on Continuous Partial Attention is on: they will maintain that it is good for us, we need to be less distracted, more focused, more productive, and ultimately, happier. But those who have shifted to a social work ethic resist. Our time is truly not our own, and in a good way. We are supported by a network of partners who will pause, give advice, offer suggestions, and then return to work. Who will take a productivity hit so that we can make headway. And who fully expect us to give back, the same way.

We know the benefits of participating in a backchannel IRC during a conference panel session with various marketing weenies one-upping each other at our expense, or of replying to an IM from a client during a meeting so that hours can be saved on a critical project turnaround. And, yes, we know that old school types -- bred in the days when people worked on a single task at a time, on a single project at a time, and were responsible only for moving stuff from their inbox to their outbox (and I don't mean email) -- they are going to have a difficult time moving to a time-shifted world. But it's here, and the rest of us are living in it.

[Note: I find it strange that both Crumb Trail and Wade quote my earlier piece on CPA, but don't link to the piece. Odd.]

I spent some time talking to Wes Kussmaul, CEO of The Village Group, about intellectual property and identity management. It's an area of business that is becoming increasingly important, and thus there is a lot of talk as to how best to secure and monitor access to collaboration systems.

We talked around a really interesting dilemma when it comes to securing intellectual property. How do you decide who is allowed inside the clubhouse? You not only have to decide which friends you're going to trust, but also which of their friends are allowed to tag along. Not easy, is it? When your clubhouse is your "circle of trust," it's more serious than just letting friends in. You have more at stake.

So, the key to controlling the flow of information (intellectual property) and to managing who gets access to what is enrollment. Your screening process must be controlled. You wouldn't give the keys to your office to just anyone, and the same goes with whom you choose to hire and to work with. These days, you don't just have employees. You have suppliers, contractors, advisors and more. Each of these people you work with need to be screened in the same way you do your employees. You don't want to invite your competitor into your clubhouse by mistake. Remember that not everyone who says they are "Fred from banking" will be telling the truth. You need to know, with some certainty, if Fred is being honest.

Wes points to three key ways to design an enrollment process that will reliably help me establish Fred's identity. The first two, auditing the enrollment systems of everyone in the circle of trust, and second channel verification (such as a phone call), are basic barriers from low-level threats. The third, however, poses much more potential - with much more debate. Universal ID.

Universal ID is a system that would establish Fred's ID, no matter where he was in the world. One such example of this is a PKI - Public Key Infrastructure. With the PKI, you can be assured that Fred is who he says he is. And, when it comes to managing intellectual property, you can see who has control over information. Whatever Fred had control of will be watermarked with a digital time/date-stamped signature. So, unless you have an enrollment issue of hiring people who are seriously out to steal your information, you can be reasonable assured that the PKI can manage the flow of information and restrict its access within your bounded space.

Continue reading "Managing identity and intellectual property"

I am all conferenced out. I left the Syndicate conference half way through the first day, after Doc Searls and I wrote a few posts (see here amd here) about the endless "monetizing eyeballs" comments, but the real cause of my distress is how bad conferences are in general, not Syndicate specifically. I went for a long ramble, clearing my head and smoking a cigar, and thought about conferences.

David Weinberger and I once used the Late Show format to good effect at a conference (KM Forum in Camden Maine), where guests had a few minutes to do their schtick, and then we grilled them on the couch, and opened questions to the audience. It was fun.

But why do conferences have to be so boring?

This piece caught my eye today (free day pass requires watching an ad; pointer courtesy of the folks at SpotMe) about Brendan Barns, who is trying to shake up the staid world of pricey business conferences:

[from Economist.com | Business conferences]

Almost all such conferences conform to a tired formula in which there is no conferring. There are lots of PowerPoint presentations, chocolate biscuits and nodding heads, some in silent assent, some in sleep. Delegates turn up to these dreary affairs because they get out of the office for a while, and their employer pays. When asked what's the point, many mumble about "networking". They go home with a fistful of business cards which they delude themselves will open up countless new opportunities.

Barnes managed to get Tom Peters and Richard Scase to square off in a boxing ring for a debate, complete with boxing gear.

Corante is planning to push into events in a larger way over the next year. With our great contributors, and focus on some of the most important issues in high tech and science, we have a great foundation for important events. But we can't approach it using the old, tired formulas. No more blah blah blah panels sessions, please.

The emerging modern model for events is a strange stratigraphy: the old bedrock of 19th century professional conferences supporting a thin layer of the 21st century internet culture. The skeletal system of the conference is unchanged, with far too many sessions, with far too many speakers, with far too little unstructured meandering in the halls. The industrial ethic at work: must cram in the maximum dronage! And then, like a light frosting on a heavy cake, we have conference blogging and IRC back channels projected on the wall behind the speakers' heads. A handwave at interactivity and community in a format that is overwhelmingly broadcast-oriented.

Other models are used, often with good effect, breaking into smaller working groups where attendees become more involved, and less passive, for example.

But the basic problem is the panel session. Unless the session moderator is an expert interlocutor, lamentably rare, we have a rambling, uneven, and unsatisfying walk through "what's my metaphor?" or other even less edifying conference games.

I strongly favor one-on-one interviews, which is a format that has sadly fallen out of use. As just one recent example, Sam Whitmore did a masterful job at the recent BDI "Blogging Goes Mainstream" conference, interviewing Robert Scoble, and managing the task of keeping him on topic, adriotly, without seeming to be controlling, and at the same time allowing Robert to be Robert.

I also believe that sessions are way, way too long. Like today's mass food emporiums, we have sacrificed quality for quantity, as if they are interconvertible. Fifteen minutes of David Weinberger noodling about the emergent properties of Internet connectedness, Clay Shirky demystifing the tagosphere, or Evelyn Rodriguez reanimating our sense of wonder, is far, far better than 45 minutes of ax-grinding polemicists fighting for the microphone.

We have sacrificed too much for the sake of turning the conference experience into a product. At least the very best events should be orchestrated as artistic endeavors, a form of performance, a sublime experience where we are challenged, enlarged, and made wiser. Where the chance interactions with like-minded others are not stolen moments over poor coffee. Where attendees will look back on them as turning points in their thinking, their careers, their lives.

So, a short post about Brendan Barnes has turned into a manifesto of sorts, but, you can start to see the vision we are pursuing for Corante Events, as we move forward. More to follow.

JD Lasica points out that newspapers are staying away from blogging, because they are afraid to lose control. The NYTimes won't let writers even have personal blogs. Tim Bray relates that the day Sun decided to start blogging, they had to throw the company's communication policy out the window (and create a new one, that covers the new world order) because the company needed to get out of the way and let individuals talk with the world outside.

But this conference is brimming with fear -- not these panelists, Udell, Lasica, and Bray -- but the folks off the stage. The mainstream media folks filling the hall are hoping to make the most superficial, most minimal changes possible -- add some RSS feeds, let a few writers blog -- but otherwise, business as usual.

But I don't buy it. Wholesale change is necessary. But only a small proportion of these companies are going to make those changes, and as a result we can anticipate a pileup coming in this industry.

[tags: Syndicate, IDG Syndicate, Jon Udell, JD Lasica, Tim Bray]

Doc Searls credits the MSM folks at Syndicate with at least getting to the Pleistocene: past the dinosaur stage. I'm reserving judgment.