The web and the silo of the self

Our digital tools of connection and discovery - the web and its reliants - are not here to make our lives faster.

Whenever it feels that is what they are delivering this is more a result of the sometimes over-stimulating abundance of choices they uncover - and our fear of missing out on something.

That abundance has always been here. People who face the same issues as you existed before the web enabled us to discover each other rapidly and effectively. Sources of information we could refer each other did too.

The existence of the abundance is not the cause of our occasional feeling of being swamped by opportunity - or information overload, as the less-connected world would have it. (image courtesty eggman)

Enabling the discovery of all our available, relevant connections is also not the cause of the 'drowning' sensation.

Some of the solution is effective filtering.

But the greater key is attitude towards our personal responsibility for knowledge acquisition and retention.

In the silo'd world of one-to-many channels (broadcast/mass production) we felt the pressure to acquire and hold the knowledge we needed in the silo of ourselves.

In the many-to-many networks of the web we are allowed a more distributed view of knowledge.

Humans who share lives each hold composite pieces of a shared memory - which can be readily assembled into a greater and agreed whole.

Mark Earl's book Herd describes this. You will recognise it in the experience of swopping stories at a family get-together. Each member of the group recalling a different detail of the same story - completing the jigsaw for all to see.

The web offers a similar opportunity for knowledge - with each node retaining for recall important pieces of a billion jigsaws; nodes being people, documents and things.

For an individual to know everything at once is an impossible godlike dream.

To know that everything known is knowable by us all is a reality of the web.

Those feeling swamped should stop setting themselves impossible personal targets and start accepting their part in our collective knowledge bank.

What you know and are willing to share is more important to all of us than what you don't.

• See also: The internet simple shows us the way the world actually is.

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• Silos & sinecures (cognitive-edge.com)

Why the next web matters. Asserting who we are

Stowe Boyd has made his NextWeb presentation available on his blog. Worth your time.

Stowe's thinking about flow and the value of connections resonates with me and lives in my own thinking. You'll often hear me quote his: "I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections."

At NextWeb he said: "As the edge grows, the center dissolves. Mainstream journalists begin to act like bloggers, editors begin to drop the veneer of objectivism, and immediate, first person voice becomes the standard not some radical minority."

He also has a much more elegant way of describing the importance of sharing our metadata in less and less silo'd ways that I detail in my white paper: Communities of Purpose Are The Business Units of the 21st Century. In that paper I share the understanding that exposing our metadata is the key to allowing us to rapidly form and reform adhoc communities of purpose.

Nutshell: The reason we go online is to connect with other humans. The reason we share our metadata is to make that process easier. Our metadata asserts who we are. The more widely it is shared the more we can connect with others who share our immediate purpose.

Stowe says: "We are seeing the next web start to appear today, away from the heavily annotated and mashed web of pages that is the primary reality today.

"The first glints of that new web is starting to emerge from the lineage of instant messaging and RSS feeds: the development of tools and technologies on top of ubiquitous connectivity that allow the artifacts of conversation between us to flnd us instead of us having to dig through the archives of the web of pages.

"I call this the web of flow.We are seeing an explosion in flow applications -- the Facebook minifeed, RSS streams, Friendfeed, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and my own Workstreamer project (coming soon)"

I agree. And it's just the beginning. The future is outside of the silos, where we become the mediator and the medium.

Twitter vs FriendFeed: Conversation vs Convenience?

Twitter has been suffering growing pains in recent days and weeks. Outages aplenty.

I noticed they are trying to control things by switching off some functionality from time to time. And what they choose to switch off indicates what they see of least value.

When times are hard, it is the archive, of previous posts, and direct messaging which get booted out.

Turning off the archive shows that they recognise the primary importance of synchronous communication. You might be interested in what someone said in the past, or what they were asking about in the past, but you can respond less effectively now than you could at the time the request or share was made. Twitter gets that; being prepared to drop anything to assist with a community of purpose is high on the list of useful value creating stuff.
Dropping IM's indicates they also understand that closed communications have less value than open.

This thinking pervades twitter and drips from its architecture.
They are all about the current, right now conversation and connecting people.

Blogs were described by Doc Searls as the best example of the sovereign self. Twitter (distributed microblogging), imho is the best example of our communal selves.

FriendFeed, surely makes that conversation even more communal, with its aggregation and friend-of-a-friend/fuzzy-edged groups form of sharing and distribution?

No wonder some tout it as the next-gen twitter. But I wonder if it is more about convenience than conversation?

Some have described FriendFeed (and I'll add links when I have more time - sorry) as distributed conversation.
I'm not clear that's delivered. At least it isn't delivered in the right-now and in one place synchronous way that twitter values so highly.

What FriendFeed does deliver is the convenience of compiling and redistributing huge amounts of an individual's metadata.

Not only do you get to see what I'm 'doing' on twitter, you also see the feeds I'm reading on googlereader, or videos I post on youtube, or images on flickr etc etc.

So now there's even more reasons for conversations to start.
More metadata on show to each other means more opportunities for us to find we share a right-now purpose and act on it. (Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21s century).

All good. But there's a risk in distributing the conversation. Where ever you follow the flag to, that's where the conversation risks being taken - and silo'd.

Twitter's value is in keeping the conversation open, visible, synchronous and consistent.

Friendfeed is a useful broadcast of our metadata - and potentially a step towards us becoming the url. The key will be connecting the conversations in a coherent human-focused way.

Right now the conversation is at risk of being disrupted more than distributed.

So I'll happily broadcast my metadata through FriendFeed, and have others broadcast their metadata at me, but when the conversation flags are raised where will the conversation be hosted which creates most value for all parties.

For this post, I'm hoping it'll be right here. If FriendFeed were to offer me that control...

More questions than answers I'm afraid.

Disaggregated Government, here we come

I saw Alex Butler speak yesterday; the Director of Transformational Strategy at the UK Government's Cabinet Office (cool title, btw)

She's facing an uphill battle - as anyone who is attempting to tackle the silo'd mentality of any organisation will attest. Her gig is to try to put the 'citizen' (read consumer for the rest of us) first - not the producers of the information (familiar difficulties in media, too).

Her problem is that each Government department wants to dissemminate its 'information' from its centre, out to the edge that is the citizenry. The result is something like (and it appears very hard to audit) 1500 government web sites.

And famously you may need to contact something like 40 government offices if you suffer a sudden bereavement. Not really putting the citizen first.

So the Directgov.co.uk site is an attempt to address this.

Alex says she understands the need for two-way flows of conversation, says government is learning from the success of e-petitions (that people actually want to take part in the legislative process) and is even considering the thorny issue of letting go of control - by offering government stuff as widgets and sources for mash-ups. Alex referred to NetMums (not a government site), revealing an understanding that local mums know best about services locally. Edge is best.

And at the end of this process you might conclude there will be no need for directgov.co.uk.
For example, if you want to go abroad; sure you need to know about passports and visas and whether or not your dog can come with you etc etc etc - all those government agency things... but you also need to know where you can book flights, hotels, car hire etc.

That government information is best deployed where it is of most use - eg when we're going through the 'consumer journey' of booking our travel.

So allowing government 'information' to be set free to be re-used by other relevant widgets/sites will mean the distribution is no longer controlled by the centre. And in citing NetMums Alex seems to understand that even the control of content is not always best performed from the centre.

Heartening. Makes me wonder what changes will be wrought to the machinery of government as a result. Disaggregated government here we come.

First OpenSocial, now Android - Bring Out Your Dead!

Worthy of note today (read the whole thing here):

"A broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies today joined forces to announce the development of Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. Google Inc., T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola and others have collaborated on the development of Android through the Open Handset Alliance, a multinational alliance of technology and mobile industry leaders.

"This alliance shares a common goal of fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today's mobile platforms. By providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers."

When I think of those still insisting on locking down, closing out and burrowing into their silos, I can't help thinking of that scene from The Holy Grail: Bring out your dead!






BTW: For a reality check on whose open this is, read mobhappy.

How Fuzzy R U?

Just came across the following (from David Armano's blog Logic + Emotion, see links, left) which speaks just fine for itself.

It's about breaking down internal and external silos and being prepared to change. Find more of David's writing (and often brilliant illustrations) here.

The Fuzzy Tail

From: darmano, 3 months ago

| View | Upload your own

The Fuzzy Tail is a play on Chris Anderson's Long Tail—but that's where the similarities end. Being "fuzzy" means unlearning the way we've always done things and moving away from rigidity toward adaptability. The first draft of this presentation will be presented to employees of Critical Mass, a digital experience consultancy based out of Calgary, Canada.

SlideShare Link

I'll be adding this to the resources section you'll find low down the left column of this blog.

If there's one thing that illustrates how screwed up most companies are...

It seems to be an accepted fact of business life that when a new CEO gets appointed, heads always roll.
If there is one proof of how silo'd hierarchical companies create painfully counter-productive internal competition, perhaps that is it.
After all, if heads start rolling, it's usually an indication of either the new CEO seeing his exceptionally bright co-workers as threats or obstacles, or that the structure he's inheriting is fundamentally flawed.
In the first case - surely that's kind of dumb? In the second... should it really need a new CEO to sort?
And before anyone asks, no, I have no idea who/when/if a new emap CEO will be appointed. This thought was prompted by 'the outside'.
My walls are permeable!

The tendency to deficit thinking.

I've been giving a bit of thought to thought recently. Most recently of all I've had a nudge around the idea of deficit thinking - the way we will in some circumstances look for the negative.
It's generally a defence mechanism - it protects us against risks and dangers.
The phrase"Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" springs to mind.
This way of thought becomes a little too automatic - and becomes endemic in the average corporation.
Examples include the way you'll always find plenty of people on the team to tell you what's wrong with your organisation - but few who will tell you how to make it right.
Cynical, critical, looking on the bad side, glass half empty - no matter how pejoratively we describe it, we get so comfortable using it we find it hard to stop.
One real life example of why we should make the effort came across my radar recently (and no, we're not talking about the company I work for...).
One organisation measured its absence-through-sickness and found the average days off per person a year ran at (let's say) 4 days. The national UK average is closer to 9.
It didn't seem to occur that there might be some lessons about what they are doing RIGHT to be be learned - some carrots to be considered.
No, they went straight for the stick. If you're off work for x amount of time you have to be interviewed by your boss. The idea (actually expressed as such internally) is to scare staff away from swinging the lead. And the best way to make things 'better' is to make sure managers are doing those interviews.

It doesn't exactly communicate trust.

Of course, you probably need a bit of both. But to have a bit of both, you have to think a little less negatively - with a little less emphasis on the deficit - a little more on the trust.

The Ideas Marketplace

In this post 'Content sucks - if that's all you sell' I discussed the lessons we might learn from the collapse of content vendors in the music business.
In considering their dilemma (and the media industry's) I thought about how digital communities have better replicated the marketplace experience than bricks and mortar stores have chosen to.
And that made me question how ideas are 'exchanged' in corporations, in particular.
The mass industrialised mindset of Corporations tends towards hierarchy and the silo effect.
And that emerges (in corporate idea-exchange models) in the propensity towards broadcast of information: Centralised, one-to-many flows. eg "I'm here today to tell you about my great idea" echoing around an aircraft hangar...
I believe ideas are improved by more intimate two-way flows - conversations and challenges.
As Alan Moore likes to say "People embrace what they create". Confucius has effectively been saying something similar for 2500 years: “Tell Me and I Will Forget; Show Me and I May Remember; Involve Me, I Will Understand.” (Confucius, 450 BC).
So I'd like to see how ideas might evolve and new ones emerge by applying the model of the marketplace, rather than that of broadcast.
A traditional marketplace does three things:
1. Allows people to buy (AND sell)
2. Allows the exchange of information
3. Entertains
How might we take those elements to create an ideas marketplace within a corporation?
I have some vague ideas about literally allowing people to set up their marketstalls in a selected venue, putting on some related entertainment, and inviting everyone to just wander in and wander around, having conversations (ie not being broadcast at) with people with ideas/information to 'sell'.
It could be how someone wants to change how your IT department works, or loves a book they've read they want to market to their peers, or has a plan for a fantastic new digital play but no one in his/her silo has wanted to know...
But this is a first draft - an early iteration.
I'm bringing the idea to the digital version of the marketplace. Let's talk?

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