Abelard: A Tool for Slow Discourse

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I recently came across Jack Cheng’s essay, “The Slow Web” (via Alex Pang). Jack describes the Slow Web Movement as analogous to the Slow Food Movement. On the one hand, it’s a reaction to the “Fast Web,” this on-demand world of information overwhelm. The Slow Web, on the other hand, is about rhythm. It’s about doing things when they feel right to do, as opposed to whenever they come up.

I studied history of science in college, and I used to enjoy reading the correspondence between different scientists. It was this incredibly intimate experience to be listening in on these conversations, but what really struck me was the quality of discourse. They were respectful, thoughtful, and insightful. They were also slow. If you paid attention to the dates as you read, you’d start to feel a rhythm to the correspondence.

Respectful, thoughtful, insightful, slow. These are not words that describe most of the correspondence on the Internet today.

Ten years ago, I came up with an idea for a tool called Abelard. It was a tool for slow discourse, an attempt to integrate the best of the Web with the slow, wonderful art of letter-writing. The name of the tool was an homage to the medieval philosopher, Peter Abélard, who became famous for his romantic correspondence with his student, Héloïse d’Argenteuil.

I never had a chance to actually write the tool, but it seems fitting that — after 10 years, having had a chance to let the idea stew in the back of my mind for a very long time — I would share the idea for the tool in the hopes that somebody else might be inspired to build it.

The original concept had two key features. The first was a time limit. You would only be allowed to post once a day. The goal was to encourage rhythm and thoughtfulness.

  • Read people’s thoughts
  • Sleep
  • Write a response
  • Sleep
  • Read people’s responses
  • Sleep
  • Repeat

Simply slowing the conversation down would encourage higher levels of discourses (how many flame wars would be prevented if people were only allowed to post once a day?) and higher levels of participation.

Second, it would have tools to make it easy to respond to multiple ideas in a single post. Most of our current tools (especially email) encourage us to respond to individual ideas in separate posts, which leads to divergent conversations. The ability to combine multiple points (perhaps shared by different people) in a single post would encourage convergence.

My focus, at the time, was how to architecturally enable features like this. (This was building on the work that Chris Dent and I did around Purple Numbers and granular addressability and that Chris has continued developing with TiddlyWeb.) But the world of the web has evolved a lot since then. If I were to build something like this today, I would focus much more on the user experience. I’d also spend a lot of time on making it a delightful experience, in the same way writing on beautiful stationary with a great pen is delightful. Paperless Post is a great model for this.

I recently came across a group called the Letter Writers Alliance, which is trying to revive the art of letter writing. I would love to see a tool like Abelard that combined the same joy and benefits of letter writing with the magical world of the Web.

Technique, Practice, and Craft

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last week, Sports Illustrated published an article about Georgetown’s basketball program and its coach, John Thompson III. Georgetown has a long tradition of producing skilled big men, starting with Thompson’s father in the 1970s and 1980s. And while Thompson has continued that tradition, he’s gained a reputation for something different:

Much has been made about the Princeton-style offense that Georgetown runs under Thompson, about how difficult it is to defend and prepare for. But what is unique about Georgetown’s system has little to do with anything that is written in a playbook. Everything the Hoyas do offensively is based on reading the defense and reacting to those reads. Most systems involve a player being told something along the lines of: cut here, run off of that screen there, set a pick for him and roll to the basket, lather, rinse, repeat.

Georgetown’s theory is different.

Thompson doesn’t tell his team what to do on any given play. He doesn’t give them specific instructions, rather he teaches them, from the day they set foot on campus, how to make that decision for themselves based off of what they see on the floor in front of them. In his words, “the ability to just be a basketball player is something that we stress. Don’t be a position.”

And that is the most difficult point to get across.

“A lot of freshmen want to be told specifically what to do,” he said. “The difficult part becomes understanding that they have to make the read, because they’re so used to being told where to run in the play next.

“It’s new for most players to have to make reads and have to make decisions based on how they’re being played and how the defense is set. But once you grasp that way of thinking, I think it is very simple.”

I’ve loved basketball my whole life, but I’ve never played it competitively. So I’m intrigued by what this actually means in practice. I totally agree with it in theory. However, before you can learn how to make your own decisions, sometimes you have to learn things by rote.

I recently heard chef extraordinaire Jacques Pepin on the radio talking about cooking, and he gave a wonderful definition of technique:

For me, technique is very important. Technique is really a repetition, repetition, endless repetition of a certain movement, whether you use a knife or whatever, so it becomes so engrained, so part of yourself that you can afford to forget it, because it’s there forever.

You learn a certain movement, a certain reaction over and over and over again until, as Pepin said, “you can afford to forget it, because it’s there forever.” That, to me, is the essence of craft, whether it’s sports, cooking, or my own craft of collaboration. Learning certain things by rote ultimately gives you the freedom to express yourself.

After a recent playoff game, Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers had this to say about his point guard, Rajon Rondo:

“He’s got to be in attack,” Rivers said. “I thought the second quarter he was attacking and attacking. I thought he was reading a lot instead of playing on instincts. I think sometimes his IQ hurts him at times. He’s trying to read the defense, but you can’t read and play with speed at the same time.

“We go through it a lot — at least Rondo and I — about, ‘Rondo, just trust your instincts. Your speed has to be part of it. Your instincts will take over. You’ll make the right decision.'”

Doing any craft well is all about trusting your instincts. You get those instincts by doing your thinking in practice rather than in the moment.

Groupaya Brown Bag: The Secret Life of Groups

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve been knee deep in Groupaya work since launching a few months ago. It’s exhilarating to be creating something new with such great people. However, if you’re not careful, you can actually go too fast.

One of the things that often goes by the wayside when you’re in startup mode is learning. Sure, you’re learning by doing, but you’re not necessarily giving yourself the time you need for proper reflection.

We were wary of this happening to us, and the counter we came up with was to hold weekly brown bags. They’re for us to learn from each other and from our friends, and because we strongly value openness and community, we open up the brown bags to anyone who wants to come.

I’m particularly excited about this Thursday’s brown bag (December 15, 2011). Kristin Cobble will be sharing her secret sauce in working with groups in a session entitled, “The Secret Life of Groups.” She’ll explain how to apply David Kantor’s family therapy work to groups of all types, shapes, and sizes — project teams, leadership teams, a group of friends, you name it.

Please join us this Thursday at noon at Fiore Caffe in San Francisco. If you’re planning on joining, please RSVP in the comments of the blog post. Hope to see you there!

My Ideal Project

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I had coffee with a colleague last week, and she asked me to describe my ideal project. I didn’t even have to think about my answer. My response:

  • Socially impactful
  • Collaborative
  • Very, very hard

I love projects that make you stop and think, “How the heck are we going to do this?”

I love projects where stuff gets done, not just talked about.

I love projects that require you to gather as many smart, passionate, caring people as possible and to get them aligned and activated in order to even have a chance at succeeding.

I love projects where everyone is working their butts off, learning, and having the time of their lives.

I love projects that are meaningful.

Not all of my projects are hard, but they’re all meaningful, and I feel very fortunate about that. Still, I’m constantly craving bigger, more impactful challenges.

Recently, I’ve been turning down a lot of speaking opportunities. I love to give talks, and I want to give more of them. They’re great excuses for me to reflect and synthesize and tell stories. But sometimes, I get the feeling that people are asking me to speak as a proxy for actually doing something.

The more my reputation grows, the more people give weight to what I say. It’s a nice feeling. It’s gratifying, it’s safe, and it makes me uncomfortable. I hate safe.

In theory, I know that all of this translates to more opportunities to work on the kinds of challenges I crave. Still, I would much rather have someone say to me, “I don’t want to hear what you have to say. I want you to show me.”

And when my reaction is, “Wow, that sounds super hard and super scary, and if we pull it off, a lot of people will be better off,” then I know that I’ve found the right project.

Help Wikimedia Win the Management 2.0 Contest!

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

One of my past projects is a finalist for the Harvard Business Review / McKinsey Management 2.0 Challenge. I am recruiting Wikimedians and everybody who cares about open collaboration in general and the Wikimedia movement in particular to help us win.

From 2009-2010, I had the pleasure of designing and leading the Wikimedia strategic planning process. Not only was it the first strategic planning process of its kind for Wikimedia, it was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. It was a completely open, movement-wide process, where anyone in the world could help co-create a five year plan for the movement as a whole. It was risky, it was scary, it was stressful, and it was exhilarating.

And it worked. Here’s what happened:

  • More than 1,000 people from all over the world contributed to the project
  • These volunteers created over 1,500 pages of high-quality, new content in over 50 languages
  • The year-long process resulted in five clear movement-wide priorities that has resulted in a movement-wide shift over the past year

If you’re a Wikimedian, you’ve seen and felt the renewed focus. If you’ve followed Wikimedia, you’ve read about initiatives that have emerged from the plan: closing the gender gap among contributors, a shifting emphasis on the Global South, and a slew of innovative features focused on strengthening community health. All of this came out of the planning process.

Why did it work?

It worked because we had an organization (the Wikimedia Foundation) that was committed to the cause and the process, even though it was an enormous risk for them. It worked because we had a great team. But the main reason it worked is that Wikimedia consists of an amazing, engaged, passionate community. We created a space, we invited people to come, and passionate, devoted, really smart people came and took care of the rest.

I’ve been wanting to tell the story of the process for a long time, but the usual thing happened: I got busy with cool new projects. Along the way, friends and colleagues have convinced me to get bits and pieces of the story out. Diana Scearce of the Monitor Institute has been a huge evangelist of the work, constantly putting me in front of philanthropic audiences to tell the story. The Leadership Learning Community (on whose board I serve) asked me to do a webinar on the topic last March, which garnered a great response.

Chris Grams has probably been our biggest advocate, and he’s the reason I’m writing this blog post today. Chris heard about our work through a mutual colleague, and he asked me to lead a webinar on the project for opensource.com. Something about our story stuck with him, and he kept finding ways to talk about us.

Several months ago, Chris told Philippe Beaudette (the facilitator of the project) and me about the Management 2.0 Challenge. As usual, I was too busy to contribute, but Chris pushed us. He wrote the initial story, and he kept kicking our butts until we fleshed it out. And so we did.

Today, they announced the top-20 finalists, and we’re one of them. The other 19 stories are really great, and it’s an honor to be nominated. But you know what, our story is the best of the bunch. We’re talking about Wikimedia, the greatest, free, volunteer-created repository of human knowledge that exists on the planet. We ought to win.

You can help us do that. The final judgement will be based on the feedback the story get, and how the story evolves as a result. So for starters, we need feedback. Please read the story. Rate it, comment on it, and ask as many people as possible to do the same.

Thanks for helping!

Photo by Ralf Roletschek. Cropped by Deniz Gultekin. Licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0.