What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

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

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

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

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

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)

Robin Lakoff: The Linguistics of Food

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

First, a confession. I don’t always read my email carefully. A few weeks ago, I received an announcement for last week’s PARC Forum, a periodic lecture series that I often attend. I skimmed the announcement, and two words immediately jumped out at me: “Lakoff” and “identity.” That was enough for me to put it in my calendar.    (14E)

I had read the announcement carefully enough to see that it was Robin Lakoff, not George Lakoff, who was speaking. This was fine; she is also a Berkeley linguist, and I was curious to hear her thoughts. I also assumed that Robin is George’s wife, which as it turns out, is not the case. A little bit of Internet searching suggested that she might be his ex-wife, but I have yet to confirm this. As for “identity,” I thought that Lakoff might offer some insights that would be relevant to digital identities.    (14F)

Unbelievably, I missed a very important word in the talk’s description: “food.” The talk was entitled, “Identity a la Carte; or, You Are What You Eat,” and the theme was how we construct minor identities of ourselves around food. I walked into the talk a bit late, but was delighted when I started listening and realized what the talk was actually about. Lakoff was a charming speaker with a dry sense of humor, and the talk was entertaining and informative.    (14G)

Lakoff’s thesis was that how we talk about and interact with food says a lot about ourselves. She gave an outstanding overview of the history of food in our culture, explaining that the recent interest in food stood in sharp contrast to the 1950s, where it wasn’t considered very masculine or even very American. One metric for demonstrating the rise of interest in food is the proliferation of cookbooks. The other are the new words that have recently entered our vocabulary, such as “foodie.”    (14H)

Lakoff then explained that the rise in interest in food over the past 50 years paralleled a similar rise from colonial times to the mid-19th century in America. Initially, servants were largely responsible for cooking, which they learned from their mothers. With the rise of the middle class, the responsibility shifted to people themselves. A similar phenomenon was responsible for the emergence of restaurants in France. Because the aristocracy was overthrown in the French Revolution, the cooks needed to find something else to do, so they started up restaurants.    (14I)

The evolution in people’s interest in and roles regarding food are evident in the recipes themselves. Recipes in the colonial period were concise and fairly ambiguous. They were general guidelines for experienced cooks. This began to change in the 19th century, culminating in Fannie Farmer’s cookbooks in the 1890s, which perfected the measurements and specifications still used in cookbooks today.    (14J)

Curiously, in the past 50 years, there has been a rise in interest in food, but the reverse phenomenon has occurred with recipes. Lakoff compared a scalloped potatoes recipe from the Joy of Cooking, Julia Childs’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Vegetables. The first was no-nonsense, with the traditional listing of ingredients followed by fairly detailed instructions. Childs followed the same basic formula, except the measurements were less precise and the terminology more advanced. Waters did not list measurements at all. She clearly spoke to the reader as a peer, suggesting amounts “to taste” and offering suggestions for variations on a theme as opposed to a rigorous formula for a single dish.    (14K)

I think there’s an important lesson in knowledge management here. If the purpose of knowledge management systems it to make humans smarter, then we must design systems with humans in mind. The Semantic Web suggests that we need to express knowledge precisely. The lesson here is that we need to express knowledge as precisely as our users demand, which may not be very much. We have to take into account the tacit knowledge already in the heads of our users.    (14L)

During questions-and-answers, one audience member noted wryly that the fall of the Roman Empire was preceded by Romans erecting statues of their favorite chefs, and hoped that history would not repeat itself given our current obsession with food.    (14M)

Emergent Learning Forum Gathering on Social Networks

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve been following Alex Gault‘s blog for several months now. It is an outstanding source of articles and information on collaboration and Knowledge Management. Earlier this past week, I learned that Alex had organized the program for last Tuesday’s Emergent Learning Forum meeting, “Social Networking, Relationship Capital and Expertise Management.” Both the speaker list (Spoke Software‘s Andy Halliday, Intel’s Anita Lo, and Tacit Knowledge Systems‘ David Gilmour) and the opportunity to meet yet another blogger in person were too much for me to resist.    (140)

Alex kicked off the meeting with an excellent introduction to Social Networks, providing some background material (see Social Networks) and a concise overview of the current marketplace.    (141)

Andy Halliday followed by talking a bit about Spoke Software, although the scope of his talk was much more general. Spoke’s tool identifies social networks within the company (including people’s contacts outside of the company) by analyzing outbound email, and then acts as a referral broker. Andy emphasized individuals’ abilities to control their profile and protect their data. Afterwards, I asked Andy whether they had identified a threshold for how large an organization usually is before it can benefit from such a tool. He answered 1,000 people, but added that Spoke’s extended search capabilities (for contacts outside of the company) increased the tool’s utility for smaller companies.    (142)

Spoke is marketing the tool to salespeople, but it is clearly cognizant of the wider opportunities. Andy cited a few, including search results based on your social network (essentially Brian Lincoln‘s Collab:GrassRootsPeerReview idea) and a tool for sorting your inbox (including spam filtering). Spoke hosts a free online version of its tool called the Spoke Network.    (143)

Anita Lo, Intel’s Productivity Program Manager, gave a remote presentation on Intel’s recently deployed expert locator service. There were some technical difficulties and the talk was cut short before Anita could talk in-depth about the system, but a few points caught my ear. Intel conducted an internal survey to identify its most salient knowledge management need, and expert location was the top priority. The result was a system called People Yellow Pages, based on a tool that they purchased but that Anita did not identify. The system seemed to depend on people keeping their profiles updated as well as an overall taxonomy for categorization, which was managed by a librarian and validated periodically via surveys. This approach is in stark contrast with Spoke Software‘s and Tacit Knowledge Systems‘s, so it would have been nice to discuss how well it worked and whether Intel had evaluated any tools that automatically built and maintained people’s profiles.    (144)

(Seb Paquet posted some comments on Anita’s talk as well. Interestingly, Seb watched the talk remotely from his perch in Canada, and he may have been able to follow the talk more clearly than those in attendance!)    (145)

David Gilmour closed out the morning’s talks. I wrote about David’s excellent Harvard Business Review article before. His talk mirrored that article in some ways — an impassioned belief in the knowledge brokering model, coordinating collaboration rather than trying to force people to work together — but he provided much more detail in several areas. In particular, he spent much time discussing his company’s emphasis on individual privacy (as had Andy earlier) and noted that Tacit Knowledge Systems had several patents on ways to protect privacy, one indication of the value the company places on it.    (146)

David observed that individuals liked to use the tool to see their own profiles, which are automatically constructed based on their behavior (email, documents, Web, etc.). On the business end, he noted that pharmaceutical companies (which make up many of his clients) needed no persuasion regarding the ROI of his approach; the only question was whether or not the tool worked as advertised.    (147)

Jay Cross, the CEO of Emergent Learning Forum, posted some notes on the day’s talks as well. He also mentioned Alex’s other blog, the Collaboration Cafe, which I have added to my aggregator as well.    (148)