Million Dollar Dialog

I was at a party this past weekend, and a group of us started discussing the following question: If you had a million dollars to spend on saving the world, what would you do with it?    (196)

Not surprisingly, there was quick consensus on investing that money into improving education for kids. Then we got into the details. Where do you invest that money? How do you maximize the effectiveness of that investment? How do you measure effectiveness?    (197)

I’ve played this game several times before, and although it’s never boring, I’m rarely surprised by what I hear. What surprised me this time was how much my own answers have changed from the last time I’ve played. It’s indicative of how much The Blue Oxen Way has infiltrated my thinking.    (198)

How would I spend that million dollars? I would use it to start a nationwide dialog on improving education. I would involve parents, teachers, administrators, and especially the students. It seems like students are often left out of these dialogs, when in fact their insights are as profound and as important as those of adults.    (199)

The dialog would consist of facilitated face-to-face townhall meetings with an emphasis on capturing stories. I would use collaborative online tools to augment the dialog, allowing participants to continue their conversations and making those conversations accessible to a wider audience.    (19A)

Most of the topics would center around education-specific topics, but a portion of them would be about sustaining the dialog and facilitating emergent collaboration. In other words, the participants — not I — would be actively shaping the movement.    (19B)

What would this accomplish? First, it would help build Shared Understanding between stakeholders. Education is a collaborative process. There is a tremendous amount of mistrust among the different parties involved with education, but I find that there is often a strong commonality as well. People care about the kids. If people were to focus on this commonality, a lot of the mistrust would disappear.    (19C)

Second, it would build self-awareness among community members. I know a lot of people who are doing wonderful things in education, be they local teachers or concerned parents. Many of them are doing them on a very small scale and are mostly unaware of similar efforts. Simply knowing that others share your goals and ideas can be tremendously self-assuring. On a more pragmatic level, self-awareness creates the opportunity for the sharing of best practices.    (19D)

Third, it would augment all projects involving education, be they evangelizing parental participation, purchasing textbooks, or lobbying for better laws. There are so many ways we can improve education. Who can place a value judgement on which of these efforts are more worthwhile? If we want to maximize effectiveness, it’s best to invest in areas that will help all of these efforts, not just one of them.    (19E)

Fourth, it would be a sustainable movement. The sustainability comes from involving the participants in the shaping of the movement itself.    (19F)

Fen Labalme on SharedID

Fen Labalme posted some comments on SharedID, an authentication service for sharing personal information across different web sites:    (16M)

While this sounds promising, unfortunately SharedID is exactly the wrong thing. First off, it’s centralized (ug) – all authentications go through the SharedID site (another hideout for Big Brother?). Further, and this is a problem with FOAF in general, profile sharing is at FOAF-file granularity, which means all my info, friends, etc. in my FOAF file will get shared once the cantralized authentication happens. I’ve heard some of the FOAFsters talking about how one might have several FOAF files, but then you’ve got data replication problems.    (16N)

Fen is the primary architect of the Identity Commons protocols. Identity Commons is a chaordic organization founded by Owen Davis that is designing and building an infrastructure — both technical and legal — for federated digital identities and profile sharing. How is this different from Microsoft Passport or Liberty Alliance? Identity Commons is designing its protocols so that individuals retain control over their personal information.    (16O)

I think Identity Commons is a wonderful project and Fen is the perfect technical lead. He’s been working on privacy issues for 25 years and is the founder of the OpenPrivacy initiative. Blue Oxen Associates is a member of Identity Commons and plans on being one of the first sites to use the protocols.    (16P)

What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

There were two good posts on careers in the blogosphere recently. Ross Mayfield advises future entrepreneurs in a piece entitled “Budding Entrepreneurship.” I liked all of his points, but my favorites were:    (15C)

  • Change your major.    (15D)
  • Take responsibility beyond your years.    (15E)
  • Have fun with failure.    (15F)
  • Do different.    (15G)
  • Be a businessperson.    (15H)

Alex Pang offers a much different, much more personal take in his essay, “Journeyman: Getting Into and Out of Academe.” Alex’s post resonated strongly with me, but before I talk about his essay, I first have to commemorate this moment. We haven’t actually crossed paths physically before (as far as I know; we both happen to be frequent patrons of Cafe Borrone, so it may have happened), but we’ve crossed paths spiritually in many ways, and this will mark the first time we cross paths online.    (15I)

I studied History of Science in college and have continued to pursue my interests in that field in small ways. One of those was an extension school class at Stanford I took in 1998. The class was on postmodernism, but Tim Lenoir, who taught the class, soon learned of my other interests and showed me a project he was involved with. It was called the MouseSite, and it was an online oral history of the mouse (the device, not the rodent). Alex was also involved with that project, and his name stuck with me because his middle name is Korean.    (15J)

Fast forward five years. I accidentally discovered his blog several months ago via GeoURL, and I’ve been enjoying his entries ever since. (I’ve bookmarked at least two of his past entries with the intention of blogging about them, but never got around to doing so.)    (15K)

I didn’t follow the same career path Alex did, but I did some of the same soul-searching that he describes in his essay. I have always loved scholarship, and to this day, I long for the days I used to spend lost in the stacks at the library, taking pleasure in all of the things I didn’t know. As brilliant and as diverse and as intellectual as the Bay Area is, it still does not come close to the experience I had in college of being immersed in scholarship and surrounded by scholars.    (15L)

The flip-side of this is that I’ve also always been interested in entrepreneurship and social change, neither of which are commonly associated with academia. Resolving this schizophrenia has not been easy. Pang suggests that the institutional language (at least in academia) is so narrow, we don’t even know how to think or talk about careers that deviate at all from the “path.”    (15M)

I chose to work in the “real world” and pursue my scholarly interests on the side. This was possible from the beginning because Jon Erickson — the editor-in-chief at Dr. Dobb’s Journal, my first employer, and a good friend — strongly encouraged this. As a curious side note, one of my responsibilities at DDJ was putting together its special issues on software careers, which included writing editorials. Of the five that I wrote, four were about the importance of spreading your wings and extending your learning outside of your given field. My favorite was a piece entitled, “Reading, ‘Riting, and R-Trees.”    (15N)

I loved my work and the people at DDJ, but I eventually left because it only took me 80 percent of where I wanted to go. The boom made it a great time to explore, which I did as an independent consultant for four years. Then the boom became the bust, and I had to start thinking seriously again about what I wanted to do.    (15O)

I did two things simultaneously: I applied to a few Ph.D. programs in History of Science and I started Blue Oxen Associates. I did the latter with the belief that my (and other academically-oriented people’s) skills and interests were valuable in convergent ways and that there was an opportunity to create something that took advantage of this. I was directly inspired by organizations like Institute for the Future (which currently employs Alex).    (15P)

Last spring, a few weeks before we threw our launch party in San Francisco, I received an acceptance letter from one of the programs to which I applied. I decided not to go back to school, a decision that was more gut-wrenching than most people probably realize. Blue Oxen was progressing the way I had hoped it would progress, and a lot of people at that point had begun to jump on the bandwagon. I couldn’t give up on the vision at that point, and more importantly, I couldn’t give up on the people who supported me and were counting on me.    (15Q)

We’re still progressing, but we’re also still several years away from my larger vision for the company. I probably shouldn’t admit this here, given how I rant about being action-oriented and changing the world, but part of that vision has me sitting happily in a corner of the library, following some obscure and fascinating train of thought, and then joining fellow researchers afterwards for coffee and speculation about the life, the universe, and everything.    (15R)

Chaordic Commons Revisited

Tom Munnecke (a member of our Collaboration Collaboratory) posted some thoughts on Chaordic Commons. Tom, who’s currently working on a project called GivingSpace, worked with Dee Hock on a health care venture a while back and has some interesting insights into Dee and the Chaordic Commons.    (14T)

I want to take issue with something he said about Doug Engelbart, however:    (14U)

As a student of visionaries, I am interested in how far-sighted individuals succeed or fail in getting their ideas across. One of the patterns I see is the degree to which the visionaries are able to dissociate their own identity from the ideas they are promoting. Sir Tim Berners-Lee did not name it “Tim’s Web” – but rather gave it away to be “the World Wide Web.” However, “Ted Nelson’s Xanadu” and “Doug Engelbart’s Augment” and “Dee Hock’s Chaordic thinking” got tangled up in the charisma of the visionary. The really successful visions, I think, embed the charisma in the vision, not the visionary. “Success has many parents, but failures are an orphan.    (14V)

This may be true of Dee’s work, but it doesn’t apply to Doug. How many people have heard of Doug? Not enough. How many people know what a mouse is? Quite a few.    (14W)

Anyone who attended Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution symposium at Stanford in 1998 knows how many important thinkers Doug has influenced over the years. More telling is that Doug insisted that his name be removed from the followup colloquium held at Stanford in 2000. His reasoning? It’s not his unfinished revolution; it’s ours.    (14X)

Dried Squid Leads to Loudspeaker Innovation

Gregory Aharonian reported in the February 27 issue of his PATNEWS newsletter an interesting article in the Feedback section of the February 28 issue of New Scientist. It describes how JVC’s engineers decided to soak birch wood in sake “to make it pliant enough to use as a loudspeaker cone.” According to its inventor, Satoshi Imamura:    (14N)

One night I left the laboratory after another day of failed attempts to mould the wood and went to a restaurant. We were eating dried squid and I wondered why something dry was so chewy. The waiter told me that some kinds of dried squid are soaked in sake. So I went back to the lab and put some of the cone wood in sake. When I came back next day I knew I had found the answer.    (14O)

Low-focus thought at its best.    (14P)