CFP: Writing Research Across Borders 2011

I'm excited to be involved with WRAB 2011 - it's a great conference with an international crowd discussing writing research. Here's the CFP:

Call for Proposals: Writing Research Across Borders II

George Mason University

February 17-20, 2011

Proposal Deadline May 3, 2010

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research Across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years.

Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research.

As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition’s previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims.

Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects.

The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to <writing@education.ucsb.edu>. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker’s individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter.

Conference information will be available at http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/wrconf11/

"Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky ..."

I'm guessing this press release was translated into English:

“Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky to introduce the most innovative robot mobile phone,” understood JK Shin, Executive associate President and supervisor of movable Communication department in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industriousness and our consistent stratagem to support all obtainable in service system, I believe with the intention of Samsung provides the better choices and remuneration to our consumers” he added.

The release also informs us that the phone will give us access to the "gorged" Google Apps.

"An unpopular position"

Jeff Rice weighs in on the controversy of adjuncts being valued less in humanities departments than tenure-line professors. He takes a pragmatic view of adjuncts' choices and concludes with a piece of advice: "Don't take these jobs." And furthermore, he says:

And before you get to the stage where economic realities force you to take a job you don’t want: Pay attention to market forces when you go to graduate school so that you are preparing for a career that exists.

If Jeff's stance is unpopular, I suppose I will be taking an unpopular position by agreeing with it. Adjuncts, he argues, are tasked primarily with teaching, while tenure-line professors also shoulder research and service responsibilities - especially research, which is a critical part of the mission of a research university and is just as much the university's "real work" as teaching. Jeff lays this out quite well, and I would only add that we who train the next generation of PhDs need to be really conscious about emphasizing the choices these grad students will have as they prepare for their careers. Those choices are far more varied than adjunct/tenure line.

Participants can respond. Uh-oh.

This article about Jared Diamond being sued for libel should serve as a warning for qualitative researchers:

Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit claiming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond wrote a New Yorker magazine article that falsely accused them of murder and other crimes.

Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp say in a single-page filing in Manhattan's state Supreme Court that Diamond's article published April 21, 2008, accused them "of serious criminal activity ... including murder."

The article was titled, "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"

This incident is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the scenario I described in my chapter "The Genie’s Out of the Bottle: Leveraging Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Qualitative Research," published this year in Amy Kimme Hea's collection. There, I argued that although institutional research boards have historically been conceived as a way to protect participants from researchers' representations, social media mean that the danger is now bidirectional - participants can represent the researcher in damaging ways as well, and those representations could easily circulate more broadly than the researcher's. The nightmare scenario I described in that chapter was one in which the participants could openly contest (and ridicule) the researcher's representation, publishing their own competing accounts and evidence.

The obvious implication is that researchers must think seriously about confidence-building measures such as member checks, and even about bringing participants into the analysis, not as a matter of noblesse oblige but as a matter of self-protection.

Based on the linked article, Jared Diamond's situation sounds a bit different. He essentially accuses an interviewee of murder, and he uses the interviewee's real name - clearly not something that would be sanctioned by an institutional review board, since it could cause damage to the participant (and to the institution). Yet in other ways, the case carries a huge warning even for qualitative researchers following institutional guidelines. Diamond apparently didn't expect the participant to respond. And now the participant is not only responding in court, he is garnering considerable attention online.

The implications for methodology:

• Institutional review boards are your friends. Human subjects protocols are a contract between you and your institution; stand by those protocols and the institution will stand behind you.
  
• Methodology should include confidence-building measures, not as a matter of politeness or nicety, but as a matter of self-protection. You don't have to give away the farm by trying to achieve consensus, but you should be able to provide feedback loops and demonstrate how you'll take that feedback into account. That's especially true if you'll be using real names - a practice that is frowned upon by IRBs, but occasionally necessary.
  

Near UT? Contact me about having your workplace communication evaluated this summer.

Do you want a thorough evaluation of how people work and communicate in your organization, and a list of recommendations for improving it?

This summer, I'm teaching a class in which students will work in teams to do just that: enter organizations, observe people at work, interview them, and analyze the results in order to make solid, data-driven recommendations. Deliverables will include an interim report, a recommendation report, and prototype solutions.

So I'm looking for organizations (in the loose sense) that are

• near the UT campus
• relatively coherent (someone at the site can authorize the study)
• amenable to having small teams visit, observe, and conduct interviews
  

If this sounds interesting, drop me an email and we can chat further.

"I, for one, would relish the opportunity to delete my Facebook account and go all-in with Google."

At FastCompany, Chris Dannen thinks the improvement to Google Profiles might make it a Facebook killer. Possibly - but wasn't Jaiku supposed to be a Twitter killer?

"My advice to anyone who finds Blackberry or laptop use during meetings rude or distracting: have fewer meetings or get to the point faster."

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch reacts to a survey on whether people think that PDAs and laptops contribute to a decline of workplace etiquette. The last sentence in this quote nails it:

One thing Baby Boomers apparently really hate is when the rest of us are not paying attention during meetings and instead checking our e-mail or Twitter accounts on our mobile phones and laptops. A full 69 percent of Baby Boomers surveyed agree that “PDAs and mobile phones contribute to the decline of proper workplace etiquette,” while only 47 percent of Gen Y workers see what is the big deal. (By the way, who says “PDA” anymore? I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that it must have been a Baby Boomer who put together the survey).

Twitter+CRM, or how corporations engage with social media

ReadWriteWeb discusses how corporations are engaging social media through their customer service, using "social listening technology" (i.e., blog search + analytics) and CRM databases to detect and head off issues. Seems pretty tame to me, since most social media conversations are public and easily mineable and since corporations have a vested interest in keeping customers happy. But the author recoils:

It's kind of a modern day horror story, isn't it? Web 2.0's potential benefit for humanity tragically sold short by social media because it fell under a fog of marketing software. Would-be short-form conversationalists jumping in with CRM-tinted glasses secured to their faces. One of my co-workers says that within minutes of his wife Tweeting about her art studio last night, she was friended by scads of art companies and salespeople. Who wants to have a conversation in that context?

The author originally went farther by pointing out that such systems give a lot of information to the "emotionally twisted" people who go into sales; in the current version of the story, that phrase has been edited out.

Hackerspaces

David Ronfeldt was kind enough to point me to this recent article on hackerspaces, a phenomenon that I keep meaning to look up but haven't until now:

There are now 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United States, according to Hackerspaces.org. Another 27 U.S. spaces are in the planning or building stage.

Located in rented studios, lofts or semi-commercial spaces, hacker spaces tend to be loosely organized, governed by consensus, and infused with an almost utopian spirit of cooperation and sharing.

...

Since it was formed last November, Noisebridge has attracted 56 members, who each pay $80 per month (or $40 per month on the "starving hacker rate") to cover the space's rent and insurance. In return, they have a place to work on whatever they're interested in, from vests with embedded sonar proximity sensors to web-optimized database software.

...

Many [hackerspaces] are governed by consensus. Noisebridge and Vienna's Metalab have boards, but they are structured to keep board members accountable to the desires of the members. NYC Resistor is similarly democratic. Most of the space — and the tools — are shared by all members, with small spaces set aside for each member to store items and projects for their own use.

"The way hacker spaces are organized seems to be a reaction against American individualism — the idea that we all need to be in our separate single-family homes with a garage," says White. "Choosing to organize collectives where you're sharing a space and sharing tools with people who are not your family and not your co-workers — that feels different to me."

The setup looks at first glance like coworking for the DIY/Dorkbot/Maker Faire crowd. Organizationally, the similarities seem pretty strong. Both coworking spaces and hackerspaces are conceived as collaborative areas. Both types of spaces have adherents that trace their genesis to artists' collectives. Both imply "a reaction against American individualism." Both emphasize creating local community.

However, as coworking folks imply, the two are not quite the same. Let's throw together some hypotheses about the differences, and maybe I'll test these later. Off the top of my head, here are some differences between coworking (as described by the coworkers and coworking literature I know) and hackerspaces (as described in this article):

• Coworking tends to involve professionals who work for their clients in the company of others with loosely similar skills; hackerspaces are for enthusiasts working on their own projects for their own enjoyment.
• Coworking spaces, although they often have thin margins and are often loss leaders, are a business; hackerspaces - at least according to this article - are run as collectives.
• Coworking spaces provide common office equipment such as copiers, printers, and wifi (and coffee machines), but the central tools are actually the laptops and mobile phones that the coworkers bring from home; hackerspaces' tools are mainly shared.
• Coworking spaces mainly involve using software; hackerspaces mainly involve hacking hardware (and software). That is, in coworking, technology is a tool; in hackerspaces, technology is the object to be transformed.

That being said, I think hackerspaces are part of the general trend that has produced other forms of outworking. I'll try to monitor this phenomenon as I continue to get my arms around this larger trend.

Administering "paternity tests" in qualitative research: or, creating a rigorous account of lineage that would convince Maury Povich's audience

So I got into an online discussion a while back on the question of whether coworking can trace its lineage back to other forms of loosely organized work. It's an open question, though I am skeptical. The comments on that post became really interesting, surfacing differences in assumptions and proofs. And the discussion got me thinking about how qualitative researchers establish such lineages -- an important discussion in itself, especially for people who do the type of work I do, examining workplaces, workplace development, and workplace contradictions.

Unfortunately it looks like the last four comments in the thread were lost. Rather than trying to reconstruct the conversation, I want to take the opportunity to explore the question: how can qualitative researchers establish developmental lineages? Or: How do we test for paternity? And to focus the discussion, how might a paternity test look for coworking? (The last question is not just abstract, since I'm planning to study coworking this summer and fall.)

Let's put the abstract question this way:

Does phenomenon B descend from phenomenon A? That is, did A develop into B? Did A cause B? Are they genetically related, with a specific lineage?

Here are three examples:

• Coworking (see the blog post). Does modern coworking trace its "lineage" back to pre-industrial forms of work? Is it descended from those forms of work, now reemerging? Or is it actually a different, unrelated phenomenon developing from more current work forms?


• Interface elements (See Tracing Genres through Organizations). Did elements of a modern interface descend from previous, pre-automation genres?


• Objectives (See Network). Can we trace current understandings of "universal service" back to previous understandings? Can we relate these to changes in markets and regulations?

How can we answer these questions?

• One common-sense impulse is to look for resemblance. (A and B have these things in common.) But resemblance isn't enough. The obvious rejoinder is to point out dissimilarities. (A and B also have these enormous differences.) After all, resemblance is often coincidental - and often in the eye of the beholder. (That's the tack I began to follow in my first comment on the coworking post.)
• Another common-sense impulse is to look for chronology. (B came after A.) But by itself, this is post hoc reasoning. I was born after JFK, but that doesn't mean JFK was my father. Mayan writing developed after Phonecian writing, but that doesn't mean that Mayan writing originated in Phonecia. Coworking came chronologically after other work that occurs among independent workers sharing a space, but that doesn't mean it descended from that work.

So we get a sense of why these two approaches are shaky. How do we get to a less shaky, more verifiable argument for paternity? Here's an analogy.

Analogy: Who's the Father?

Suppose you're watching a daytime talk show, like Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. The theme -- a recurring theme -- is: "My baby's father won't admit he's the father!"

You may be familiar with how this episode goes, because they all go basically the same way. The couple argues:

• The baby does/does not resemble the accused father. ("Look, he has his father's eyes.")
• The baby's conception does/does not fit the chronology. ("We got together and nine months later the baby was born.")

Oh, and the couple leans heavily on ethos. ("I would never do that." "I swear on my life that that never happened." "Believe me, I know!")

But the audience isn't credulous. They listen to these arguments for entertainment, and they have their favorites, but they know the question will be settled at the end of the episode -- with a paternity test. Without it, these arguments don't settle anything.

Conducting Paternity Tests in Qualitative Research

So, by themselves, resemblance and chronology don't constitute a paternity test. What does? How do we get to a rigorous explanation of paternity?

The question is important because research is itself an argument. And as with any other argument, you have to play the believing-doubting game in order to make that argument solid: you spend some time believing your emergent argument, then you doubt it and push yourself to find evidence that can turn back those doubts. A worthwhile audience will be skeptical -- and speaking as someone who reviews a lot of journal manuscripts, I am always skeptical of the methodology, no matter how banal the conclusions -- so you must be skeptical first and deepen your argument as much as you can. That skepticism, applied methodically, produces rigor. As my colleagues and I put it in a recent article, "Healthy research and a healthy disciplinary matrix for research involve developing a coherent and densely textured argument as a symbiotic cluster; it involves creating rhetorical rigor" (Fleckenstein et al. 2008, p.411).

So let's go back to my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations. There, I was trying to establish the lineage of interface elements. So how did I test the paternity?

I went back to the basics: I triangulated different data sources in order to validate and deepen my analysis.

1. Artifacts. I started with the artifacts - the interface elements of GIS-ALAS (maps, menus, and dialog boxes), PC-ALAS (menus, dialog boxes), and Mainframe-ALAS (punchcards, printouts), as well as pre-automation forms and reports. I put these in chronological order and looked for similarities - but I went farther by rigorously examining dissimilarities. By doing this, I was able to
   
   • establish a set of unchanging and changing characteristics.
   • establish similarities with other preexisting artifacts (e.g., interface elements such as dialog boxes)
   • construct a reasonable story of how and why characteristics were mingled as new interfaces were developed (e.g., they had to break up this printed form's questions into two dialog boxes in order to make it work in a dialog box format)
   • establish not just a chronology or similarities, but a chain of custody in which characteristics were passed from one interface to the next.
   
   That gives us a decent story, but the story needs to be tested.


2. Documents. I then went to any documents I could find that could shed light on the transitions between interfaces. These included software manuals for the three computer programs, but also newsletter accounts, written records of the development, and in the case of GIS-ALAS, the thesis and the drafted dissertation of the developer. Doing this allowed me to
   
   • validate my reasonable story of the transitions (and in some cases, correct and deepen it)
   • gain insight into the specific decisions that led to adopting characteristics
   • validate the chain of custody of characteristics
   
   Okay, but I like to verify my verifications. So I took the obvious next step: I asked.


3. Interviews. Finally, I talked to people who had been involved in the activity and, when possible, the development of the different systems. Doing this allowed me to
   • gather more documents (see step 2), allowing me to further validate the record
   • gather unwritten history - although recollections are variable and always have to be triangulated, they can shed new light on how pieces of the documented history fit together
   • validate my reasonable story of the transitions (and in some cases, correct and deepen it)
   • gain insight into the specific decisions that led to adopting characteristics
   • validate the chain of custody of characteristics

At the end of the process, I had a verifiable story. Each part of the story, each transition - that is, each assertion I made about the lineage - was supported by at least two and usually three types of data, triangulated so that I could really pin down what happened. And the parts that I couldn't verify, I either left out or hedged so that readers knew where the weak parts of the chronology were. Based on that study, I was able to establish that some of the interface elements were actually hybrid genres, i.e., text types that could trace their lineage back to two or more separate texts originating in two or more separate activities.

In other words, I had a paternity test -- and more than that, I was able to establish the entire family tree.

Lineages and Rhizomes

Now, paternity tests and lineages are fairly restricted ways of thinking about these issues. Sometimes people enact work or organize themselves or use tools based on experiences that they idiosyncratically transfer from one focal point to an entirely unrelated one. Imagine, for instance, someone using a disused software manual as first base in an impromptu softball game -- or someone being unable to interpret a GIS-ALAS map properly because they think of the dots on the map as separate pushpins.

Issues like these are what pushed me toward looking at rhizomes in Network. Rhizomes are "anti-genealogies," as Deleuze and Guattari put it: they constitute associations, sometimes entirely idiosyncratic ones and sometimes ones that form interferences with each other. These interact with the "paternity tests" in definite and observable ways - they are often implicated in discoordinations and breakdowns, for instance - but they don't constitute lineages in themselves. (How can they? They're "anti-genealogies"). John Law does a great job of discussing rhizomes and the problems they pose for research in his book After Method, a book that has become very familiar to my grad students.

Rhizomes seem to completely destabilize lineages, and therefore "paternity tests." Think in terms of Ulmer's "chora," or resonations among entirely different meanings for the same word. Or in terms of "genre ecologies" in Tracing Genres through Organizations, in which a given text can represent a hybrid of two or more different genres, each with its own logic, assumptions, and associations. Or in terms of "splicing" in Network, in which whole activities are sutured together to form new, destabilized and dynamic ones. But in all these cases, unless they're completely tacit and idiosyncratic, these associations can be isolated and traced through some careful interview work and the right analytical technique -- grounded theory, for instance, excels at building a picture of a loose, slippery concept. That doesn't mean that everything can be simply reduced to a line of development, especially since qualities emerge from the interplay/hybridization/splicing among different lines of development. But it does mean that the careful researcher can still tease out these lines of development and build a case for each, separating the historical-developmental characteristics from the emergent/dynamic ones.

Giving Coworking a Paternity Test

So let's apply this approach to the case at hand. Can we give coworking a paternity test?

Sure. We can determine possible lines of development by looking at similarity and chronology, and we can verify those lines through our paternity test, careful triangulated research.

One obvious way would be to interview the coworkers. For instance, in I'm Outta Here, the authors interview people who were involved in the early coworking movement, turning up a number of precedents. These precedents don't stretch back to trades and guilds, but they do make definite connections to mid-20th century experiments in artist collectives. Interviews like these might at least establish some perceived lineage. Of course, you have to be careful to avoid feeding answers to your informants, who might be eager to see connections to older forms of work and who may express affinities or ideas rather than actual lines of development. "We're like a clan of nomads" is very different from "coworking can trace its lineage directly to nomadic clans."

If the interviews suggest a lineage, we could then try to establish a line of cultural development for that lineage. For instance, if a participant claims that he sees coworking as developing from artist colonies and collectives (I'm Outta Here p.20), how did that development work? Can we establish that an art collective turned into a coworking site, or its members migrated to that site, or its principles migrated to a professional organization to which workers belonged before they started their own coworking site? If a participant claims that coworking is the descendant of guild work, can we establish that guilds' tools, principles, or ideas survived in (say) workers' unions and were revived when union members became coworkers? Do these ideas, tools, or organizational structures have a traceable chain of custody? Or are they just similar, but developmentally separate, solutions to similar problems?

Finally, we could look at documents. Was the business plan of a coworking site influenced by a manifesto written by an art collective? Was the site's layout explicitly patterned on older studios?

If we can establish and triangulate evidence that allows you to clearly delineate these lines of development, their resonances and interferences, then we've successfully administered the paternity test.

Parting Thoughts

I'm really pushing here for an understanding of research as an argument, a rigorous argument that should emerge from the data and that should be hedged appropriately. That approach sometimes seems unnatural to us, especially for graduate students who are first beginning research: they know that research is unfamiliar to them, they're still working on mastering it, and they expect a lot of charity from their readers. That charity should be lent -- but only in the early stages, only by instructors who can mentor the beginning researchers and guide them into asking the proper questions. When research becomes "real," taken seriously, it also needs to be a solid enough argument to fly. And sometimes that means scaling back the scope of the research and its claims.

Certainly that doesn't mean cutting off speculation. But speculation should be clearly marked, heavily bracketed, and usually should appear in the Implications section, where the researcher can suggest it as a new research question.

But when you can, turn speculation into verification. Don't restrict yourself to saying "Don't you see his eyes? He looks just like his father!" Because you can expect your readers to be at least as smart and critical as Maury Povich's audience.

MIT Press' new digital distribution portal: CISnet

My first book is at MIT Press, and they've made the first chapter available for free online ever since launching the book. (Not coincidentally, when people cite Tracing Genres through Organizations, they usually seem to cite Chapter 1.) But MIT Press has now made that book and many others available through CISnet. This is from the email they sent me:

As part of the MIT Press’s ongoing exploration of digital publishing opportunities, we are launching CISnet, a new electronic collection of MIT Press titles in computer and information science. I write to let you know that one or more of your books is included in the collection. CISnet, the MIT Press Computer and Information Science Library, can be found at http://cisnet.mit.edu. It is the Press’s second library of e-books in a single subject area and follows the model of CogNet, our popular online collection in the cognitive sciences. CISnet currently contains about 170 titles hosted in PDF by technology partner Tizra, Inc. It offers the ability to read these books from any Web-enabled computer and to search within them as well as across the collection.

I've cruised through my book online, and it looks pretty good. They're shooting for institutional subscriptions, but you can buy individual ones too. Check it out.

Reading :: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition)
By Joseph M. Williams

A short review. I still have the third edition of this book, which I used in a technical editing class (I think) in my MA program. It had a big impact on my writing style. The seventh edition is similarly illuminating, and it's also genuinely pleasurable to read.

On the other hand, Williams' own style is a bit talky for me. I lean toward much more spare prose, and I take a harder line against expletives. That hard line probably stems from my tech comm training and orientation.

In any case, a great book. I'm about to take a look at the short version, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition).

Reading :: The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive
By Peter F. Drucker

I've linked to the latest version of The Effective Executive on Amazon.com, but I reviewed the 1967 version. That's right, this version was written the same year Cream released Disraeli Gears and the same year Star Trek aired its most respected episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." I bring that up because, like those two examples, this version of The Effective Executive is firmly situated in its time, yet surprisingly relevant.

On one hand, The Effective Executive occupies a world in which the executive is always male and usually assisted by female secretaries as he steers the course of large manufacturing corporations. This world seems increasingly irrelevant in 2009. On the other hand, the executive is a prototype knowledge worker, someone who contributes to analyzing information and developing ideas - someone whose contributions cannot be easily monitored or counted in the sense that scientific management had enabled managers to monitor and count manufacturing output. Now that world is very relevant in 2009, and its problems are fresh and largely unsolved. The two world collide continually, as in this sentence early in the book: "The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness." (p.4).

When you read this book, then, think of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, in which a spacegoing society uses what appear to us to be relatively backward computer and communications technology while managing casual space travel and faster-than-light jumps. Ignore the 1967-era language and examples, and you'll see a lot of contemporary, even forward-looking concepts. In fact, you may find that The Effective Executive is the Big Bang of popular management books. Here's Drucker's list of the five practices of the effective executive - along with more recent books that pick up and extend each practice.

1. "Effective executives know where their time goes." (p.23 and Chapter 2) - See David Allen's Getting Things Done


2. "Effective executives focus on outward contribution." (p.24 and Chapter 3) - Again, see David Allen's Getting Things Done


3. "Effective executives build on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do." (p.24 and Chapter 4). See Marcus Buckingham's Go Put Your Strengths to Work


4. "Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results." (p.24 and Chapter 5) - See Jim Collins' Good to Great.


5. "Effective executives ... know that [making effective decisions] is, above all, a matter of system - of the right steps in the right sequence" (p.24 and Chapter 6) - See any text on project management, especially Scott Berkun's The Art of Project Management.

In many ways, these other books have simply taken and developed the principles that The Effective Executive listed in 1967. Since knowledge work has spread much more widely, the book still seems fresh in parts in 2009, and maybe even more relevant. In particular, Drucker points out that "in a knowledge areas there are no superiors or subordinates ... yet organization requires a hierarchy," and in this contradiction, "the knowledge worker ... is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair" (p.173). And therefore "the position, function and fulfillment of the knowledge worker is the social question of the twentieth century" (p.173). Knowledge workers need not just economic rewards, but also achievement, fulfillment, and values (p.174). Still true, perhaps more so. Also true - more true than ever - is Drucker's assessment that education and effectiveness are the only competitive advantages that the United States possesses over other nations (p.5).

On the other hand, I don't think that Drucker in 1967 anticipated the effects of widespread knowledge work coupled with loose networked organizations. His focus is on the executive who can shape the organization around himself [sic] and who can strategically plan over decades of engagement. So in the end, The Effective Executive can only point us to further development and evaluation of its principles for the light networked organizations we are starting to see. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it.

Newspapers as nonprofits?

Don't hold your breath. The third paragraph is the important one:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs.

Sekai Camera is coming to Android

Tonchidot unveiled Sekai Camera for iPhone last year, a social tagging application that uses the iPhone's camera to view the world with tags overlaid over the camera's image so that you can see how others have tagged your environment. It was a big hit. But it was only for the iPhone, and the iPhone doesn't have a way to detect where the camera's pointing, so the tags can't be associated with a specific orientation. You go to the tagged spot, then flick your finger to hunt through the tags associated with that spot.

Soon afterwards, T-Mobile's G1 was unveiled, and one of the first applications we could download was Wikitude, a sightseeing application that grabs your location (from GPS) and orientation (from the compass), then overlays the camera image with information about points of interest. For instance, if you're in my front lawn and you point your G1 south-southwest, the screen overlays the live image with points indicating the University of Texas and the Elisabet Ney Museum - and tells you how far away they are. Great for sightseeing and orienting oneself, but too large a scale for doing what Sekai Camera is trying to do. But notice that the orientation problem is solved due to the G1's internal camera.

This week MobileCrunch reports that Sekai Camera is releasing a version for Android - and it takes advantage of the internal compass. That's great. But - if the majority of tagging is done through the iPhone, I don't think that those tags will be captured with an orientation.

2009: Coworking's year of explosive growth?

Noting signals that coworking is gathering steam, Todd Sundsted predicts that coworking spaces will grow from 70 in 2008 to over 200 by the end of 2009. The reasons are two sides to the same coin: real estate is suddenly easier to negotiate and big companies are laying off.

"Ditch the Valley, Run for the Hills"

... was a South by Southwest Interactive panel in which panelists discussed startups in Silicon Valley vs. Austin, Shanghai, and elsewhere. Austin Startup has a nice summary.

Coworking in Austin: Launchpad Coworking + Cafe

After the Future of Work Salon, Michael Funk of Launchpad Coworking + Cafe took some of us on a tour. Launchpad Coworking has been in the works for a while, but the current credit crunch has made it very difficult for this space to get finished out. It's about 90% done; most of the remaining work will involve finishing out the space - flooring, furniture, etc.

The three coworking spaces in Austin are aimed at very different demographics. Launchpad Coworking is aimed at a high-margin demographic: corporate accounts, for instance. And the environs reflect that. Launchpad is on the ground floor of 800 Brazos, with condos upstairs, and they expect that they will attract people who live downtown and work at Launchpad Coworking. They also expect to pick up some foot traffic: during open hours, an enormous door slides open to reveal a coffee bar with wifi - and beer and wine will be available.

At the coworking space, a concierge will watch over 30 desk spaces. Peripherals such as mice, monitors, and chargers will be available for checkout. The space will also include a server room, printer, fax, copier, whiteboard, and corkboard.

Launchpad Coworking will also include seven meeting rooms: a "treetop" or boutique meeting room accessible via a spiral staircase; three small meeting rooms; three large ones. Each meeting room has own fridge and "green" bottled water in addition to tables, chairs, and large flat-panel monitors. One meeting room is soundproofed; they envision supporting video and audio podcasting as well as voice-over work (easier than flying to LA).

Michael explained that community is not where you are, but who you're with. "You don't force community," he said. So how to facilitate a coworking community at a new space? Launchpad Coworking's approach is to create the right space, leading to an unforced community. They've been working for two years to develop the right space.

Despite the dismal credit environment, once they obtain funding, Launchpad Coworking estimates two months from funding to opening. I hope the funding comes through soon: Launchpad Coworking looks like a fantastic place to work, and it serves a very different segment from the other two coworking spaces in Austin.

For more on Launchpad Coworking, including their own pictures, see Launchpad Coworking's blog.

To see my own (poor) pictures of the space, see my photostream. And to see Launchpad Coworking on the map, see my map of alternative work spaces.

The Future of Work Salon: An account and some thoughts

The Shift101 Future of Work Salon was held March 6. Shift101 is a consultancy based in Australia, focusing on outworking solutions (teleworking, coworking, alt-work communications applications, etc.). Drew Jones and Todd Sundsted of NotAnMBA.com have recently joined Shift101 and are conducting salons in Austin, New York, and Sydney.

Drew Jones invited me to serve on the respondent's panel, which also included Bruce Eric Anderson of Dell (who runs the Digital Nomads blog) and John Erik Metcalfe of Conjunctured. Todd Sundsted presented on behalf of Shift101.

We had a light crowd, but a good one: Representatives from Launchpad, Conjunctured, The Creative Space, and Dell - and the University of Texas, I suppose, since I was there.

The presentation
Drew opened the session by discussing trends they had seen. He sees shifts in performance management, security, flexibility, and work-life balance due to demographic changes: the rise of Gen Y and the approaching retirement of the Baby Boomers. Those shifts point to the increasing popularity of "outworking" as people move from the corporate environment to other spaces.

This trend is not exactly making the office obsolete. But a generational transition is the elephant in the room. As Drew pointed out, we have 70 million Gen Ys. Ten thousand Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day. The two trends constitute what Drew calls a "demographic transfusion." And Gen Y brings in different values: they want individual, meaningful work.

Todd followed up by starting the presentation, entitled "Bold Moves." The 2008-2009 recession, he said, can be the great business school of the modern era.

Todd noted several "forces" that characterize the current moment and the near future:

• Increasing unemployment
• Corporation natural selection wiping out companies
• Workforce will get both older and younger - deferred retirement - but then much younger.
• Huge chunk of Gen Y
• Laptops, wifi, secure networks -> mobility

These have consequences:

• Executive: compensation more tightly coupled to performance, especially long-term
• Results: focused environment -> advantages of full-time employee under scrutiny
• Companies must justify growth of staff size, addition of full-time employees. Must justify $ of desk, office for each employee. Real estate utilization is about 40% in an office.

In 10 years, Todd added, 50% of the workforce will be Gen Y.

Todd thinks we're facing a fundamental shift on the scale of the last century's shift toward scientific management. He expects 5-10 years of innovation in the next round of work. In particular, outworking will become not just tolerated but necessary, due to the costs of commuting coupled with costs associated with maintaining underutilized buildings.

At this point, John Erik added: His generation is used to measurement in terms of video games and grades. Now they want that feeling back. (I understand this to mean that he wants clear measures of achievement coupled with autonomy in maintaining that achievement.)

Todd added that new work will involve new management skills:

• Managing remote teams becomes a necessary skill.
• Managing multiple generations, perhaps up to 4 generations - never before.

So he predicts Bold Moves:

• Companies must get by with fewer, more productive employees
• Companies will exit lease obligations, reduce real estate expenses
• Companies will develop robust methodologies for managing employees and contingent workers
• More teams will be allowed and encouraged in outworking
• Performance-based management will replace subjective measures (e.g., face time)
• Effective corporate leaders must become masters at framing, defining distribution. Innovation -> growth.
• Companies must pay more attention to workspace design as a factor in recruitment, retention, and productivity

John Erik adds here that Conjunctured (the coworking space) is a "loss leader" for Conjunctured (the design firm). Conjunctured functions as a brand - a company with many possible employees working in the space - and John Erik functions as an account manager. Drew adds that such distributed organizations rely on trust and nimbleness, and speculates that peer-to-peer banking will be the next necessary step. Privately, I wonder: are such organizations necessarily business-to-business?

The dialogue
And at this point, I lost track. I presented some of my own work here on federations - if you went to ATTW or CCTE, or if you're going to IA09, I covered the same ground as here - and we talked about the differences and similarities between my Gen X participants and Gen Y participants. We also had some great discussion with Cody Marx Bailey and Roby Fitzhenry of The Creative Space, a College Station-based coworking space, about their different perspective on outworking. The most important takeaway was that Cody and Roby didn't worry at all about facework the way that my Gen X participants did: they said they were entirely transparent about their lives and work, and didn't want to work with clients who didn't respect that.

Bruce Eric Anderson at Dell then talked about Dell's efforts in this space. Dell is concerned with recruitment and retention of Gen Y, but also lost work time during the commute, carbon footprint, and similar factors. They believe that "digital nomads" will become more prevalent, particularly in some highly desirable knowledge leadership positions, and they want to make sure they can support such work and evolve with it. Bruce also brought a prerelease netbook that Dell will soon release. Nice machine.

My thoughts
I left the salon thinking that Shift101 and the respondents have done some good thinking. But many questions remain about the future of work. I see the following additional trends:

• Mobile work accelerates.For instance, I strongly suspect that in knowledge work sectors, the mobile phone, home broadband, and smaller prosumer computing will continue to enable and accelerate the trend of mobile work. (The three technological trends are collapsing, and I expect smartphones+peripherals to take over basic email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations in the next couple of years.)


• New standards develop for distributing work. As work becomes more mobile and distributed, I also expect to see much more outsourcing and attempts at modularization in the corporate sector. But that's a very complicated and messy proposition, and to make it work, we'll probably see a lot of sub rosa workarounds and growing pains. Trust and accountability must be distributed too, and those mechanisms will be hard to lay out and enforce across an increasing number of subcontractors. So we'll see a proliferation of answers to that problem, probably including (a) rebounds: bringing subcontracted services back in house; (b) trade standards: articulation and voluntary policing of trade guidelines; (c) APIs for making work transparent across elements of emerging federations; (d) redundant subcontracting, leaning toward spec work. It will take a while for these innovations to settle down.


• Social media become essential communication services. I further expect that the use of social media for b2b contacts will continue and increase. I won't be surprised to see not just b2b versions of popular services (e.g., the corporate services that mimic Twitter, currently cropping up) but also b2b features of existing services (e.g., b2b features built into Twitter or layered over the Twitter API). OpenSocial and others in this space will become increasingly important. So will web-based collaboration services, which will increasingly depend on corporate accounts for revenue.


• Your social graph becomes your resume. Social media and collaboration services will return value for these corporate accounts by suggesting subcontractors, a really critical aspect of distributed work. They will increasingly include reputation systems, which have mostly been applied to products and sellers, but will increasingly be applied to service providers and independent contractors. Reputation systems of some kind will have to perform the same service that merit reviews do within organizations.


• Strategic planning becomes very difficult, then very easy. Transitioning to radically distributed organizations means a period in which getting a strategic overview becomes very difficult. This, by the way, is something that has bothered me about Zuboff and Maxmin's envisioning of federations: since federations are essentially project-based, with the federation dispersing at the end of the project, time horizons are very short and the federation is essentially tactical and reactive. I don't know that the business community currently has the tools to perform strategic planning in such an environment. But as subcontractors begin generating relatively stable social graphs, I expect a new equilibrium to be developed, meaning that strategic planning will become much easier - particularly as gobs of data become more available and aggregated.

If these trends are on the money, short-term winners include Google and Facebook (who are pushing APIs to connect different social networks); broadband providers; and nimble organizations. Long-term, the more stable and rich social networks become more valuable. I envision the day when people's social graphs are traded in portfolios - though I don't endorse that move.

Anyway, the FoW panel was great. I don't think Shift101 has plans for another one in Austin soon, but if they do, I will encourage everyone I know to go!

A map of Austin alternative working spaces

So I've been visiting coworking spaces in Austin. At this point, I've visited Soma Vida, Conjunctured, and Launchpad Coworking. (For writeups, just check out the "coworking" label to the right.) I'll be visiting other places this spring and summer, including Jelly meetings at Cafe Caffeine and Cupprimo.

And as I do, I'll be updating this map of Austin alternative working spaces. Take a look - the differences among these spaces are fascinating. I've included links to the sites' URLs and to my own photos of the spaces.

And if you can think of other spaces - coworking spaces and Jelly spaces in particular - drop me a line at clay.spinuzzi@gmail.com.