A Walk with Howard Rheingold: Collaboration as Craft

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I had the great pleasure of walking and talking with Howard Rheingold last Thursday. Howard lives in Mill Valley, a few blocks away from some of the many trailheads leading up to Mount Tamalpais. We had exchanged emails a few times and had met briefly after his talk at Stanford in October. I had invited him to coffee, and he suggested a brief hike instead, which I gladly accepted.    (MG)

Winter is one of the best times to go hiking in the Bay Area. We started walking around 4pm as the sun was beginning to set. The sky was a deep blue with a solitary streak of clouds overhead, and the air was cool and crisp. We walked about a mile to the top of a hill, where a rock formation seemed to form a natural bench around the crest. Looking north, we could see the peak of Mt. Tam. To our west were neighboring hills and the Pacific Ocean. To our east was a beautiful view of Mill Valley, where the city lights were beginning to come on. All of this served as a vivid reminder that I had, as usual, forgotten to bring my camera.    (MH)

Nevertheless, I was there to talk, and talk we did. One topic that came up — and a key reason for wanting to talk to Howard in the first place — was my desire to see the emergence of collaboration and community-building as a discipline, a widely acknowledged craft.    (MI)

People sometimes ask me what I know about collaboration that other people don’t. My response: Nothing. The reality is the reverse. There are many, many people in the world today who know significantly more than I or anyone else associated with Blue Oxen Associates about collaboration.    (MJ)

The problem is that this knowledge is scattered around the globe in isolated pockets. These folks all speak different languages — not just English versus French versus Korean, but also geekspeak versus Wall Street versus academia. Even when they know about each other, they can’t always talk to each other.    (MK)

Even worse, there is no group memory. Narrow the field to online communities. A lot of folks in the field have heard of Howard. How many people know what he’s accomplished beyond his excellent books? How many people have heard of the WELL? How many people know who founded the WELL? Going further back, how many people have heard of PLATO? Most importantly, how many people can cite lessons learned from the WELL or PLATO? Online communities have been around for decades. How many people can trace the lessons learned from these different communities over time?    (ML)

Howard told me that one fellow — perhaps one of the most knowledgable people in the field of online communities, with the credentials to match, and someone whom I’ve admired from afar — is working in retail right now to make ends meet. There’s no shame in working in retail, especially when times are tough like they are right now. Nevertheless, this strikes me as the worst kind of cosmic joke. Venture capitalists are spending millions of dollars on fast-talking entrepreneurs selling Social Software, trying to figure out how to make this stuff work (and profitable). There’s someone out there with decades of experience to share, someone who can undoubtedly help make these efforts successful. And yet, he’s currently working in a strip mall, addressing the needs of last-minute Christmas shoppers.    (MM)

Who’s at fault? You can say that this person — for all his skills — is poor at marketing himself. You can say that companies are short-sighted, and that they don’t understand what they need or how this person can help. There’s probably some truth to both of these statements. But, it’s still a travesty. This guy should be a hero to everyone claiming to be in the business of collaboration.    (MN)

That’s the crux of the matter. This is a field that is in desperate need of self-awareness. If we in the business truly want to improve, we need to be aware of our history and our heroes.    (MO)

Culture Clash, Shared Language, and Story Telling

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Speaking of names, a recent Newsday article on Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn in the Lord of the Ring trilogy, notes that Danish people find his name:    (KK)

“Corny?” he says. “Yeah, I know. It would be like being called Oscar. Or Otto. It’s an old name. A really, really old name. And a little bit corny. Like Oswald or something …”    (KL)

Elmer?    (KM)

“Yeah! Elmer. Yeah,” Mortensen says. “I think there’s a comic strip in Denmark, a Dennis the Menace character, and his name is Viggo. He’s all over the place.”    (KN)

Names are a great example of how our different cultural backgrounds can make Shared Language challenging. There are many great examples of brand names gone wrong because they mean something obscene in other languages.    (KO)

When we first started discussing patterns of collaboration at Blue Oxen Associates, I identified casual social interaction as an important pattern, and I called it Water Cooler. Shinya Yamada, a collaboratory member based in Japan, had no idea why I chose that name. Shinya had worked in the U.S. before, so he understood my explanation. He also noted that he had never seen a water cooler in a Japanese office before, and that — unlike in the States — casual social interaction with strangers in the office was unusual.    (KP)

Another great example of the challenges of Shared Language cropped up at the GivingSpace workshop in San Francisco last Thursday. Six of us were discussing small, concrete steps that lead to transformation, and Heather Newbold described how Matt Gonzalez for Mayor campaign buttons had galvanized the progressive community in San Francisco. Four of us knew exactly what Heather was describing, because we lived in the Bay Area and followed local politics. All she had to do was mention the buttons, and we understood what she meant. The other two people at our table, however, had no idea what we were talking about. One was from San Diego, and the other simply didn’t follow politics.    (KQ)

Language itself is not enough. Telling stories is what makes language shared.    (KR)

Why I Have Three Names

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

One thing that the articles cited in my two previous entries is that they both mispelled or misarranged my name. This is actually a relatively common phenomenon.    (K9)

For the first dozen years of my life, I went by my middle name, “Eric.” Using one’s middle name is also a relatively common phenomenon. What’s more unusual is that, upon changing schools in the seventh grade, I decided to go back to my first name, “Eugene.”    (KA)

It’s been long enough now that most people know me as, “Eugene.” Notable exceptions include my family, all of whom still call me, “Eric,” and the few people who remember me from way back when. I think my brother-in-law, Isaac, is still thoroughly confused as to what to call me, although he seems to be settling on “Eric.”    (KB)

In my bylines, I use my full name, Eugene Eric Kim. This is partially an acknowledgement of my dual identity, and also a feeble attempt at uniqueness in a world with way too many Eugene Kims.    (KC)

A surprising number of people get confused by the three names and call me “Eric,” even though I introduce myself and sign my e-mails as “Eugene.” This phenomenon has always fascinated me. Do I seem more like an “Eric” than a “Eugene” to some people, or do some people naturally gravitate to the shorter name?    (KD)

These folks often apologize to me when they catch themselves doing this. No need to apologize. I don’t mind at all. You do it at your own risk, however, because on the occasions that you need to refer to me in the third person, your brain will have to context-switch. Freshman year in college, my roommate — who was not yet up to speed on my name situation — complained, “Some nut keeps calling us asking for Eric, and I keep telling her she has the wrong number.” That nut, of course, was my mother.    (KE)

WikiWhiteboard

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Many moons ago, Danny Ayers reported the successful prototype of WikiWhiteboard, a simple tool for creating editable SVG images on Wikis. Motivated by the simplicity of the design and a little subtle prodding by Danny, I ported it to PurpleWiki. (See PurpleWiki:WikiWhiteboard.) Danny’s writeup on WikiWhiteboard, “Creating an SVG Wiki”, appeared last month at XML.com.    (K4)

The WikiWhiteboard code will be released in the next version of PurpleWiki, although I will be happy to release code early to anyone interested.    (K5)