For most of my life, whenever I went on a walk, I would feel a pang of regret about not being able to identify trees or plants. Today, I passed 400 species observed on iNaturalist, 402 to be exact. I find this miraculous given how nature-blind I was up until four years ago. The silver lining of the pandemic was that I ended up learning a lot about birds and native plants, and I am deeply grateful for that.
I knew that they were swallows from their flight pattern, but I had never seen a flock of swallows just chilling out in a tree before. I’m used to Tree and Cliff Swallows, both of which tend to flutter about constantly and frenetically. I used Merlin to identify the exact species, which iNaturalist later confirmed. Then I just stood there with my Dad, watching them in wonder, before finally walking into the marsh to continue congregating with some other feathered friends.
Many thanks to Travis Kriplean, who helped catalyze my deep dive into the world around me by sharing his own journey so generously and comprehensively. I started my iNaturalist account in the Fall of 2000 with Travis’s encouragement and also with great skepticism, as I didn’t quite understand how iNaturalist worked, and the interface felt… challenging. I was dipping my toes into a mushrooming curriculum that Travis had developed, and I thought I would use iNaturalist to document my findings. I didn’t realize the giant nature-related U-turn I was about to take thanks to a run-in with a big, beautiful, brown bird.
I also have to give a lot of credit to Dario Taraborelli, who unwittingly primed me for all of this. I met Dario 15 years ago through Wikimedia, but I had no idea how much of a birder he was until I started following him on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter. (He, like me, is now mostly on Instagram.) He often posted glorious photos of birds, a stark and welcome contrast to the rest of my feed back in the day. He also sang the praises of iNaturalist, so much so that I knew about them well before I attempted to use the app.
Strangely enough, I don’t think this deep dive into nature would have been possible without iNaturalist and social media in general (and Instagram in particular). It still boggles my mind that iNaturalist’s interface manages to facilitate any kind of community, but it’s how I met Marisol Villareal, whose encouragement and engagement on Instagram helped me feel like I was a card-carrying member of a state-wide fan club, even though I’m still largely clueless. It’s how my friends, Jon and Linzy, met Rudy Wallen, an unassuming and generous nature savant, who also happens to live on our side of town. For all of the terrible that social media has wrought onto all of us, this is a great example of what social media can do when it works.
I was one of the featured commentators on a two-part CBC radio program about Wikipedia. Each part is just shy of an hour. If you’re new to Wikipedia, start with part one. If you’re interested in a broader philosophical discussion about community, knowledge, intellectual property, and the Internet, go directly to part two (where I’m more heavily featured).
I had mixed feelings about the program. After part one came out, Sue Gardner (who is heavily featured) asked me what I thought about the piece. I said I didn’t like it very much. She laughed, and pointed out that I was not the audience for that piece.
She’s right of course. The first part featured the voices of many of my friends, people who are deeply embedded and knowledgeable about the community. Kat Walsh was particularly well-spoken, and it’s worth listening to part one just to hear her commentary.
However, I had difficulty enjoying the first part in particular. First, there were lots of mostly inconsequential, but annoying factual errors. I was horrified to hear myself repeatedly described as an “IT consultant,” something that I’ve never even resembled.
Second, I was bothered by who wasn’t included in the piece. In the first part, several of us pay homage to Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki and who is thoughtful and brilliant. Instead of having us speak for him, why didn’t the reporter just talk to him directly? I also felt like I and others were taking up space — especially in part one — that would have been better served by other members of the community. For example, Pete Forsyth (who has a cameo at the beginning of part two) is one of the most well-spoken leaders in the Wikipedia community. I would have loved to have heard much more from him, and I would have gladly sacrificed my voice to do so.
All that said, I think that the piece was solid overall, especially part two. If you listen to either part, I’d love to hear what you think.
Today, I relicensed all of my photos on Flickr from CC BY-NC-SA to CC BY. In English, that means that you may reuse, redistribute, remix, and even resell any of my Flickr photos as long as you give me credit.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but hadn’t, mostly due to laziness. Flickr has a batch relicensing feature, but it failed on my 12,000 photos, so I had to do this mostly manually, which was a pain. I also plan on embedding the license in the pictures themselves from this point forward using Jeffrey Friedl’sCreative Commons Lightroom plugin. I had already done this for my Instagram photos using Philip Neustrom’s clever service, i-am-cc.org.
Why now? It was some combination of me working on my photography workflow today, thinking about licensing for Faster Than 20, and thinking about Aaron Swartz, who died one year ago.
Why do this at all? In general, I’m trying to make the world a better place. I believe that sharing my knowledge artifacts can help with that, but others need to be able to reuse that knowledge. The fewer barriers I create, the easier it is for others to do that. I also believe that doing this is better for me financially, that I am likely to make more money over time by giving away my knowledge than I would by trying to restrict it.
I’ve always been a strong advocate for open licensing, and I’ve always favored less restrictive licenses in theory. But when I first had to choose a license for my photos, I hedged, and I placed a “non-commercial, share-alike” restriction.
In practice, this has worked swimmingly for me. The only problem I’ve had is that non-commercial licenses are incompatible with Wikimedia. When I’ve wanted to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, or when someone has requested that I do, I’ve simply relicensed those particular pictures. That’s worked fine, but it hasn’t been ideal, and I’ve been wanting to get more active on Commons recently, which is a large part of why I’ve been wanting to relicense my content.
My reasons for relicensing, however, run much deeper than these minor roadblocks. It represents my ongoing journey of getting comfortable with giving up control, which speaks to where I am with Faster Than 20’s licensing.
I have long enjoyed the merits of open licensed content, and I’ve always been comfortable licensing my content that way. I’m not naive about the downsides. About a year after I published my first book (in 1996, predating Creative Commons by five years), I found a pirated version on the Internet. I would have been fine with that — it hadn’t sold well, and I wanted people to have access to the content — except that this person had replaced my name with his.
Even after I started open licensing everything, I’ve seen plenty of my content repurposed in ways that violate the already liberal licensing terms. I never feel great about it, but I the benefits have far outweighed the downsides, and it’s not like others have made millions off of my content.
Still, it takes a bit of faith to trust that the upsides will far outweigh the downsides. Over time, I’ve gotten more comfortable with this, and I’m wanting to be more liberal with my licenses.
My current thinking is to license all written content published on Faster Than 20 as CC0 — essentially public domain. In other words, I would be giving up all copyright and all associated rights for content written on Faster Than 20. I would accompany the license with a statement of how I’d like people to engage with the content, but I won’t require it.
I’ve been particularly persuaded by what Mike Linksvayer has been writing about CC0 and the whole suite of new CC licenses. At minimum, I’d like attribution, but who am I kidding? People attribute because they think it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re worried about me coming after them. I can be more explicit and more effective about what I want by inviting people rather than by relying on a license.
Why not release my photos under a CC0 license also? I could blame it on Flickr not offering that option (Flickr’s support for CC-licensed content is seriously lagging), but the reality is that I don’t want to. With pictures, I not only have a responsibility to myself, but also to my subjects. I’m not ready to give up all copyright and renouncing all control.
I spent this past Wednesday with some of my favorite colleagues talking about networks and social change. Garfield Foundation had brought us together to surface our collective mental models about networks and to see where they overlapped and where they diverged. The day was rife with wonderful twists on familiar topics, and I learned a tremendous amount exploring different nuances with the others.
One of the important themes that emerged was enrollment. The classic careless way to approach design is to say, “Let’s just get everybody into a room together and see what happens!” There’s an element of openness here that should be encouraged, but beyond that, this approach is likelier to create more problems than solve them. It’s critical to think through the following questions:
Whom do you want to engage in your process?
How do you enroll them?
At what stage do you enroll them?
How do you want them to engage with each other?
Taj James shared a wonderful metaphor for how to think about enrollment: Picking people up at the train station. Do you want to pick people up at the first stop? The second stop? The third? What would happen if you had picked up the people from the third stop at the first stop instead? What if you want to pick up a group of people at the first stop, but they’re not ready to travel? Maybe they’re not packed yet, or maybe they don’t want to travel with people they don’t really know.
Here are three examples of how I dealt with issues of enrollment in previous projects:
Wikimedia Strategic Planning
The purpose of the Wikimedia Strategic Planning process (2009-2010) was to build a movement-wide set of priorities through a bottoms-up process. We had to navigate around two conceptual myths:
“We have to work in small, closed groups before we can open up the process. Otherwise, it will be too chaotic, and we’ll never get anything done.”
“Once we have something to show people, we’ll put it out there, and thousands of volunteers will magically start working on it.”
The first myth is a common one. It is easier to get things done and build relationships when working with small groups. But should the first stage of a process like this be about “getting things done”? Who gets to be part of that initial small group, and what will be the impact of the people you leave behind at that first station? Also, is “closed” truly a prerequisite for working in small groups?
When I came on board, the team had already drafted a plan that did not open up the process until three or four months into a 12-month process. I immediately changed that, and two weeks later, we were engaging with the community in an open, large-scale way. My reasoning was this:
The end goal was co-creation and broad-scale ownership of the strategy. If you don’t give people the opportunity to get on board early, then it won’t be co-creation.
Even if you gave people the opportunity to get on board, why would they? Wikipedians are overwhelmingly young (in their teens and 20s, many of them students). Most of them had never heard of strategic planning, much less participated in a planning process. Many of them didn’t even know what the Wikimedia Foundation was or that it even existed. They were there because they liked writing carefully crafted, thoughtfully researched articles about areas of interest. Why would they spend time participating in a strategy process?
We already had a small group of people who were committed to working on strategy, and we had some norms and relationships in place. Given that core, I was confident in my ability to open up participation while maintaining a high-level of productivity.
We engaged our core community immediately around questions that mattered to them, and we listened. The initial question we asked was, “If you had the opportunity to change anything, what would you change, and why?” The “why” question pushed people to start thinking strategically, because it forced them to connect tactics to purpose. It helped everybody — not just us — understand what people were seeing and thinking, and it also surfaced people who were already thoughtful and engaged whom we could more actively target in later stages of the project. Because it was many-to-many conversation as a opposed to something like a survey, people were building relationships with each other while they worked through these questions.
We also continued doing our preparation work, but we did it openly, inviting others to jump in and participate. The deluge of distracting volunteers that people feared never came. Instead, the people who did come helped shape and improve the work that we were doing, and many of them became critical leaders later in the process.
Delta Dialogues
With the Delta Dialogues (2012 and still continuing without me), we were dealing with the wickedest of problems: California water issues. One of the ongoing dynamics was the lack of inclusion in existing planning processes. People involved in planning feared disruption, and so they would either exclude stakeholders from early stages of the process, or they would try to control their participation through a set of discouraging ground rules. That simply reinforced the rampant mistrust that already existed in the region, especially when the resulting plans felt one-sided, which made those stakeholders even more disruptive. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We originally proposed a joint small-group / large-scale engagement process, but for a variety of reasons, we ended up focusing on a small, representative group of stakeholders. It was a network leadership play. Our goal was not to “get things done.” That approach wasn’t working, because people were not taking the time to listen and understand to each other. Our primary goal was shared understanding.
Once again, our biggest challenge was going to be enrollment. There was severe planning fatigue in the region, and the people we were targeting were extremely busy. The exact timing (beyond our control) was even more challenging, because it came in the heart of harvest season, when farmers in the region were literally working around the clock, seven days a week. How were we going to get people into the room? How could we keep them coming back?
We played a number of cards:
We focused on people, not just organizations. People didn’t really know much about our organizational client, the Delta Conservancy. But everybody knew, liked, and trusted its Executive Director, Campbell Ingram. People came the first few times because of their relationship to him. It was our responsibility at that point to keep them coming. If he had not already been such a trusted network weaver, we probably could not have gotten this process off the ground.
We bet that participants would buy into the goal of shared understanding versus something like planning.
We invested a considerable amount of time creating a space that was safe, inviting, and transparent. Instead of hosting the conversations in a “neutral space,” we rotated locations among the stakeholders. That deepened empathy and relationships, because people were not only talking to each other, they were immersed in each other’s worlds. It was also far more inviting to spend a day on a farm or in a nature preserve than it was to be stuck in an office building.
We thought explicitly about people we wanted to bring on board at future stations, and we tried to set the stage for that. We produced artifacts that people could easily share outside of meetings, all centrally located at a public website that anyone could point to. We assigned each other buddies, and we encouraged people to talk to their buddies between meetings. We also had a leadership development component to encourage people to have these same kinds of conversations outside of our process. (This part of our process wasn’t working, and we quickly scrapped it. We were trying to do too much.)
Our ongoing challenge was making sure people kept coming back. And, at each meeting, people would consistently say that they had felt swamped and had considered skipping, but that they were glad they came and that this was their favorite time of the week.
Organizational Change Initiatives
I don’t really differentiate an “organizational approach” from a “network approach” in my mind, because an organization is simply a type of network, and the same principles apply. I’ve been in a few large-scale organizational change efforts, and enrollment was always a huge, sometimes overlooked challenge. People don’t necessarily think this is the case, because if you’re working with C-level leadership, they can essentially “force” people to “participate.” The power dynamic here is similar to what many foundations experience. They can easily get people into a room. However, getting people into a room is not the same as enrollment.
Many organizational consultants make two mistakes in their processes. First, they spend all of their time with leadership, which simply reinforces both a narrow perspective as well as a power dynamic that gets in the way of broad participation. Second, they focus entirely on the meetings. Again, you can leverage power dynamics to get people to a meeting, but your success depends on what people do outside of those meetings.
I always apply the same principles of participatory processes to my organizational work, and I invest just as much time building relationships with people at all levels of the organization. Those leaders are critical in getting other people on board at future stops.
And, I was disappointed to see that Kat Walsh, the longest running community member on the board and current board chair, was not re-elected. In the grand scheme of things, that’s probably for the best. I’m a firm believer in term limits for nonprofit board members, and if the Wikimedia Foundation had had them, Kat would have been termed out at some point anyway. I also think that this will be a wonderful opportunity for her to take a break from the drama that Wikimedia board members have to deal with on an ongoing basis.
I don’t know anyone in the Wikimedia community who doesn’t love and respect Kat, and she’ll continue to be a community leader, board seat or not. I want to tell a personal story about Kat that says a lot about what it means to be a leader, especially in a network and in a community.
I’ve been part of the larger wiki community since 2000 (pre-dating Wikipedia). I was friends with Wikipedia contributors in its earliest days, but I only edited sporadically and anonymously. Because of my role in the larger wiki community, I was invited to participate at the first Wikimania in August 2005, where I met many Wikipedians for the first time. I created my user account shortly thereafter, but I didn’t make my first non-anonymous edit until November 2006, and only then at the urging of my friend, Erik Möller.
What does it mean to be a Wikipedian? Obviously, if you edit Wikipedia frequently, you are a Wikipedian, but how frequently? The Wikimedia Foundation currently defines “active contributors” as anyone who edits five or more times a month, but not all edits are created equal. There are the edits that I specialize in — mostly typos and occasional citations — and there are the edits that make Wikipedia sing, the ones that require painstaking research and eloquent craftsmanship. Does one type of edit make you more of a community member than another?
And do you have to be an editor to be a Wikipedian? What about the Wikipedia enthusiast, the people who evangelize Wikipedia to all of their friends and colleagues, despite never having clicked the edit button? What about the people who consistently donate money? My dad has nary a clue of my involvement with Wikimedia over the years, but he has enthusiastically given money every year completely on his own accord, and he waxes poetic about the project. He almost certainly evangelizes it more than I do. Is my dad a Wikipedian?
Most importantly, who decides who gets to be a Wikipedian? What is it that makes a Wikipedian feel like he or she is a Wikipedian?
Back in the day, I never felt like I was a Wikipedian, and I was perfectly fine with that. Whenever I participated in Wikimedia things, people were always very friendly, and I never felt excluded. I just didn’t feel like I was enough of a contributor to consider myself a Wikipedian.
That all changed on November 10, 2007, the day I first met Kat. Phoebe had organized a San Francisco meetup, and Kat was visiting from Washington, D.C. Even though I knew folks there, I was sitting quietly in a corner somewhere, when Kat approached me and introduced herself.
Barnstars are the virtual currency of the wiki community. Anyone can award a barnstar to anyone else for their contributions to the community. Kat made it a point to carry around real-life barnstars, which are beautiful and heavy, and give them out to people at meetups. She did this entirely on her own accord and at her own expense.
I knew who Kat was, and I knew what barnstars were. As I said, I had never felt excluded from the community before — I was at a Wikipedia meetup, after all — but when Kat handed me that barnstar, that was the first time I felt welcomed. It was the first time I felt like I was a Wikipedian.
As networks mature, they sometimes start spending an inordinate amount of time on issues like governance, where defining things like community membership suddenly becomes more important. (This is especially endemic to networks with a strong top-down element, such as funder-initiated networks, but it’s true across the board.) This is where the organizational mindset tends to kick in, and people are easily sucked into complex and difficult questions around criteria. At some level, it’s unavoidable. However, I think that people spend way more time on these issues than are merited (and often earlier than necessary).
Worse, it often comes at the expense of what really matters. Human things, like welcoming people. It may sound basic and perhaps too squishy for some tastes, but it’s incredibly important, and in my experience, groups neglect these basic human patterns to their detriment.
When Groupaya designed the Delta Dialogues last year, we incorporated some sophisticated tools, because we were dealing with a wicked problem and a toxic culture. While we were incredibly skilled at using those tools, that’s not what differentiated our process from the countless other processes that had been tried in that region.
Our secret sauce wasn’t our tools. It was our attention to our participants’ humanity. It was our instinct to open the Dialogues by having every participant describe their favorite place in the Delta. It was our instinct to rotate the locations of those meetings, to have different stakeholders host them, so that other stakeholders could break bread in each other’s homes and get a better sense of who they were as people. It was how we incorporated both head and heart into our process. None of this was brain surgery, and yet, no one else was doing it.
Back in 2007, Kat was already a long-time contributor and board member. All of that was simply status. You can have those things and not be exercising any leadership. Going out on her own and finding simple, human ways to make others feel welcome — that’s leadership, and you don’t need any kind of official status to practice it.
The Wikimedia projects have seen an ongoing decline in active contributors since 2007. The reasons why are complex, and there are no simple solutions to turning that around. At the risk of sounding simplistic, I’m going to offer a solution anyway. Find ways to be more human.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy. There are systemic ways to encourage this, such as making the tool easier to use, revamping the language in the templates, and starting community initiatives like the wonderful Wikipedia Teahouse. All of this stuff is already happening.
Then there are the individual things that everyone can do. Things like reaching out to someone and welcoming them, or expressing gratitude to someone whom you value. Those things matter a lot more than we think, regardless who is doing them, and we don’t do them often enough.
Here’s my advice to everyone who participates in any Wikimedia project in any way — contributor, reader, donor, enthusiast. Make it a point to reach out to one other person. Maybe it’s someone who’s just getting started. Maybe it’s someone whom you’ve appreciated for a long time. Take the time to drop them a note, to welcome them or express your gratitude to them.
If we all did this, I promise you, something magical would start to happen. That’s true of Wikimedia, and it’s true of the world.
Consider this my small little expression of gratitude. Kat, thank you for making me feel welcome!
