Measuring Mindshare

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend, Jerry Michalski, recently tweeted a question about collaboratively authoring documents using GitHub. I didn’t see his original tweet, but I saw a followup exchange between him and Howard Rheingold, and so I pointed both of them to Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki. I’ve seen some followup exchanges, and I’m happy that the pointer may have triggered something interesting.

I also realized that, despite admiring Ward’s project from afar for years now, I have never blogged or tweeted about it.  I’ve mentioned it to folks, but not to Ward directly, and I even wanted to incorporate it into a client project last year that I didn’t end up doing. I don’t know that Ward knows how interesting or important I think his explorations have been. Hopefully, he does now.

It got me thinking about how hard it is to measure mindshare, especially in this day and age. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in regard to my own work, recently. For the past few years, I haven’t spent much time thinking about who reads this blog or any of my other writings, but every once in a while, I’d get some signal that people are paying attention. Sometimes, it would be from people I knew, who would often allude to something I wrote face-to-face. Other times, it would be from completely random people.

I’m thinking more consciously about mindshare again, partially because I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do next, and I’m being a bit more transparent about it here than I’m probably comfortable. But I’m also doing it because I wonder how much of an impact my thinking and my writing is making in the world.

My numbers tell me that a tiny corner of the universe is paying attention. It’s smaller than when I first started the blog and when I last seriously paid attention to this sort of thing, but it’s still there. Still, it’s hard to really interpret what those numbers mean and what part of the story they’re not reflecting.

With Changemaker Bootcamp, I’ve gotten many more signals, and they’ve surprised, moved, and motivated me. When I started my first pilot five months ago, I posted a call of participants here, not expecting anyone to respond. Not only did a handful of people respond, they included some I hadn’t heard from in a long time, and two people I didn’t know at all, including Anna Castro, who became my first bootcamper.

My “official” launch a few weeks ago triggered more signals. I’ve heard directly from interesting folks I didn’t know before, and I’ve discovered a bunch of new folks from my newsletter signups.

Thinking back to my reflection about Ward, I’m now wondering what kind of mindshare I have beyond the signals I’ve received. I know that much of it is latent and invisible, but knowing that it’s out there is a source of encouragement.

One of the challenges with working online is our lack of literacy around feedback mechanisms. There are actually more feedback mechanisms online than there are face-to-face, but we don’t necessarily understand or pay attention to them. Regardless, it’s important to remember that those feedback mechanisms only tell part of the story, that mindshare is immeasurable, and that it’s important to keep sharing in ways that others can benefit.

It’s also a good reminder that we all have the ability to give feedback without requiring any special tools. It’s so simple, it’s easy to think it’s not important enough to do. That’s too bad. It can be very meaningful, and the world would be a better place if we all took the time to do it more often.

The Real Work: A Poem by Wendell Berry

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

A weekend gift from a chain of friends: Nancy White, who saw it from Jerry Michalski. This poem, “The Real Work,” is by Wendell Berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Power Relationships and Collaboration

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

At the Open Collaborative Services Initiative meeting three years ago, I met David Hartzband, who at the time was VP of collaboration technology at EMC. We had several fantastic conversations, including this thought-provoking claim: True collaboration cannot exist in a hierarchical relationship.    (LQK)

I disagreed with him then, and I disagree with this now, but I think I understand why he made this point. I was reminded of it again a few months ago, when Eugene Chan and I were having a conversation about the foundation world. He said that he wished fundees would be open with their program officers about the challenges they faced, but that the natural power relationship between funder and fundee discouraged it.    (LQL)

This, I think, was the essence of David’s argument. Would you approach someone with a problem if that person was in the position to punish you for being in that predicament in the first place? This scenario applies to both hierarchical relationships within an organization and relationships between competitors. It’s further complicated by the presence of money.    (LQM)

Even if your answer is yes, the fact remains that power relationships affect interpersonal dynamics. When you’re trying to improve collaboration, it’s better to be explicit about these relationships than to wish them away.    (LQN)

A great example of this phenomenon emerged from the CIA workshop last September. Upper management there both encourages internal blogging it and are some of the most active practitioners. However, as the workshop revealed, there is still a tremendous fear of blogging amongst the analysts. The roadblock? Several people blamed middle management, whom they claimed actively discouraged blogging, even while upper management said and did the opposite. Many also cited an incident where an analyst got punished for writing something. (Others insisted that this was an oversimplification of what actually happened.)    (LQO)

In response to these and other comments, Jerry Michalski (my hero when it comes to pithy wisdom) said, “Familiarity and fascination trump fear.” The fear in this case was a consequence of the power relationships. A more accurate (although less alliterative) word for “familiarity” is “trust.”    (LQP)

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reported the following stats from a recent Florida State University study:    (LQR)

  • 39 percent of employees surveyed said their supervisor failed to keep promises.    (LQS)
  • 37 percent said their supervisor failed to give credit when due.    (LQT)
  • 27 percent said their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers.    (LQU)
  • 23 percent said their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment.    (LQV)

The problem isn’t that power relationships are inherently bad for collaboration. The problem is that most organizations do not have enough trust. Building trust is hard and takes time. But it’s possible.    (LQQ)

Online Community Summit: Marc Smith

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma, California. Forum One, which organizes the event, brought together a fantastic group of folks — about 60 people, including corporate and grassroot community facilitators, foundations, venture capitalists, consultants, and researchers. Zack Rosen joked that he wanted to come to this gathering, because he always sees the same people at the other events he attends, and he didn’t recognize anybody at this one. I saw several familiar faces — Zack, Tony Christopher (who informed me of the event), Jerry Michalski, Jan Hauser, Paul King, Thomas Kriese, and others — and recognized the names of several other attendees, but most of the group were new to me.    (2E1)

I enjoyed meeting and talking with Marc Smith, whose work I’ve blogged on multiple occasions, and who kicked off the day by giving a fantastic overview of the work he’s doing at Microsoft. Marc is doing very, very good stuff, and I’m not just saying that because it overlaps with some of our own work and thinking.    (2E2)

NetScan performs a variety of data analysis on USENET newsgroups based entirely on postings, and presents those metrics in useful ways. A lot of the innovation is in the visualization (see his slides for examples), and the visualization software is freely available. Some key points:    (2E3)

  • About two percent of the 13 million USENET users post three or more days a year. That doesn’t sound like much, but it works out to a quarter of a million people.    (2E4)
  • Support communities need about 40 active posters to be sustainable.    (2E5)
  • The metrics you expect depend on the type of newsgroup. The alt.binaries.* newsgroups have lots of posts, lots of posters, and very short threads. Metrics describe the interaction, but to place a value judgement on these metrics, you need to combine them with qualitative analysis.    (2E6)
  • Marc posed a bunch of metrics to look for in a healthy community: retention of leaders, interaction, size and growth, topical focus, speed, and host participation.    (2E7)

I am amazed that more people have not done this kind of research. The opportunity for evolving our applications in useful ways is tremendous. As Marc sardonically stated, “There’s a little room for conversation in our UIs.” Marc showed a few possible directions in which to evolve UIs, but whether or not these features will show up in future applications remains to be seen. There’s a tremendous opportunity for Open Source developers to study this research and implement its findings in their own applications.    (2E8)

Marc also described Project A U R A, which I blogged about a year ago.    (2E9)

ChiliPLoP, Day 3

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last Thursday, my workshop met for a second day. Having agreed on a working definition for collaboration (see Collab:Collaboration), we started working on the Pattern Language. As was the case the previous day, I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish, and I made that clear when we got started. What differed this day, however, was that Linda Rising, Ofra Homsky, and Joe Yoder — our three experienced Pattern Language authors — led the way in terms of process.    (1CT)

We began by laying out the index cards we had collected the previous day onto a table. The goal was to see what patterns we had and what seemed to be missing. The definition that we had collectively agreed on the day before helped us tremendously with this process. For example, because collaboration — as we defined it — required bounded goals, that meant there were patterns related to the start and end of the collaborative process. There were also patterns related to interaction (meetings for example) and knowledge exchange (Shared Display).    (1CU)

Mapping out our cards also helped us identify gateways to other Pattern Languages, such as Linda and Mary Lynn Manns‘s patterns for introducing new ideas into organizations, Ofra’s patterns for leadership, Jim Coplien and Neil Harrison‘s organizational patterns, and GivingSpace‘s patterns of uplift.    (1CV)

Lots of brainstorming and storytelling happened throughout. My favorite was a story that Joe Yoder told about a factory where he had previously worked, which literally left its financial books open on the factory floor. Anyone who worked at the company could examine the books and suggest improvements. The open books were a form of Think Out Loud that showed that the company treated its operations as a collaborative process involving all of its employees, regardless of position. Tremendously empowering stuff.    (1CW)

Linda, Ofra, and Joe constantly stressed the importance of iteration and cautioned Josh Rai and me about getting too caught up with formality too early in the process. Ever fearful of being berated by Ralph Johnson or Jim Coplien, I would periodically complain, “That name isn’t a noun phrase!” Fortunately, the rest of the group kept me on track. We had plenty of time to weed out and refine our patterns after the brainstorming process.    (1CX)

We ended our brainstorming at lunch, at which point we had 36 cards. After lunch, we picked two patterns — Collab:StoneSoup and Collab:KickOff — and Linda led us through a group pattern writing exercise. (I’ll say more about these two patterns when I describe Day 4.) She gave us a letter-sized piece of paper for each component of the Coplien Form (name, problem, context, forces, solution, rationale, resulting context, known uses, and related patterns). Each of us took one piece of paper, wrote down our ideas, then exchanged it with someone else for another piece of paper. The cycle continued until we all had our say to our satisfaction. Afterwards, we discussed what we had written.    (1CY)

This was the first time Linda had tried this particular exercise, and I think it worked very well. It was particularly good at helping us reach Shared Understanding. We all had slightly different views of both patterns. Actually going through the group writing process helped make these differences explicit, at which point we were able to talk through our differences.    (1CZ)

Because Josh and I were the pattern-writing newbies in the group, we each collected the sheets for one of the patterns and promised to combine, edit, and rewrite them into a readable draft. I chose Collab:StoneSoup; Josh took Collab:KickOff. The plan for Day 4 (which was only a half day) was to workshop our results.    (1D0)

I ended the day with a brief overview of how blogs and Wikis integrated with Backlinks could be used to tie stories with corresponding patterns.    (1D1)

Chili Beer    (1D2)

Since that night was our last in Carefree, I decided to organize a margarita BOF. Earlier, somebody had told us about the Satisfied Frog, a legendary Mexican restaurant and bar that had “a thousand different kinds of margaritas.” This was the obvious place to hold our BOF, so Josh, Jerry Michalski, Gerry Gleason, and I trekked on over.    (1D3)

As with most legends, the facts had been slightly exaggerated. The Satisfied Frog only served one kind of margarita, although in fairness, it did give us the option of frozen versus on-the-rocks and with or without salt.    (1D4)

The restaurant did, however, brew its own special beer — chili beer — which was bottled with a serrano chili pepper. It had a nice kick to it, but it wasn’t overpowering. I recommend it to those with a a penchant for adventure and a bit of a heat tolerance.    (1D5)