Reading :: The Blind Side

The Blind Side
By Michael Lewis

The Blind Side has been selected as this year's First Year Forum book at the University of Texas at Austin: the book that all students enrolled in first year rhetoric and writing classes (RHE 306) will read. Like most FYF books, this is a popular title that (loosely) engages a bundle of controversies: in this case, issues of race, academics, and sports.

In a nutshell, the book has two alternating parts.

One part examines a strategic change in football: the introduction of the quarterback sack -- a defensive move that can only be pulled off by a very swift, strong player who can surprise the quarterback on his "blind side" -- required a strategic, systematic response. The NFL's strategic response was to elevate the position of left tackle as a counterbalance, and to find incredibly rare offensive players who are fast, strong, and massive enough to block a QB sack. This position is now the second most highly paid position on the field.

The other part examines the discovery and grooming of a left tackle: a homeless African-American boy from Memphis who ends up at a Christian private school in the Memphis suburbs, is taken in and adopted by a wealthy Anglo-American family, and helped to reach his potential in academics and athletics. At the end of the book, he is pulling a 3.75 average at the University of Mississippi, the alma mater of his adoptive parents -- and playing left tackle.

It's a well written and interesting story. Although sympathetic to the adoptive parents -- in the Afterword, Lewis mentions that he knew the adoptive father since kindergarten and he stumbled onto the story when visiting the family on a social call -- the book attempts to look at all angles of the story, including one accusation that the NCAA investigated: whether a wealthy white family adopted a black son in order to guide him to their alma mater's football program. Lewis concludes that this was not the case, but allows us to make up our own minds.

The future face of the Web

According to this Adaptive Path video, it will be cluttered and widgety. I like Adaptive Path a lot, but I was hoping the future web would look more like Quicksilver.

Editors' reviews of Network are up...

... and they are awfully kind. Amazon is accepting pre-orders with a 20% discount. Check it out.

I want to believe, but the Mars Phoenix won't let me

Yesterday, Slashdot ran a story claiming that the President had been briefed by NASA scientists about something, and speculated that it had something to do with the Phoenix lander finding organic materials in the Mars soil. This morning, the Mars Phoenix team announced on Twitter that these reports are "untrue and incorrect."

On the shores of Ontario Lacus

According to the Cassini spacecraft, Saturn's moon Titan has a complete hydrological cycle based on ethane rather than water (which cannot exist as a liquid at the moon's average temperature of -300 F). From the story:

The visual and mapping instrument observed a lake, Ontario Lacus, in Titan's south polar region during a close Cassini flyby in December 2007. The lake is roughly 20,000 square kilometers (7,800 square miles) in area, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario.

...

The ethane is in a liquid solution with methane, other hydrocarbons and nitrogen. At Titan's surface temperatures, approximately 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, these substances can exist as both liquid and gas. Titan shows overwhelming evidence of evaporation, rain, and fluid-carved channels draining into what, in this case, is a liquid hydrocarbon lake.

Earth has a hydrological cycle based on water and Titan has a cycle based on methane. Scientists ruled out the presence of water ice, ammonia, ammonia hydrate and carbon dioxide in Ontario Lacus. The observations also suggest the lake is evaporating. It is ringed by a dark beach, where the black lake merges with the bright shoreline. Cassini also observed a shelf and beach being exposed as the lake evaporates.

Sounds chilly, but beautiful.

Netroots crafting Democratic party platform with collaborative software

We've been hearing about the use of collaborative software for crafting platforms. The Republican Party unveiled a crowdsourcing tool for their platform recently (although it has been overwhelmed by Ron Paul followers agitating for a return to the gold standard). Now the Netroots are using a tool that sounds more finely crafted for this sort of work:

Stern, a former economic development consultant with a masters degree from the London School of Economics, described the project as "very much a synthesis between a wiki and Digg, or between a wiki and Soapblox," the popular community-building software platform. "It's exactly in the middle. It does things that neither allow on their own." Stern is based in Washington DC, and and works with New York City-based partners Vanessa Scanfeld and Dan Scanfeld.

In one of the platform's more intriguing features, when contributors start to edit a plank the software suggests similar prior contributions and suggests that you "Borrow This Sentence." That language is pulled and added to the new version, but the original author's name stays attached to that bit of contributed text, throughout the plank's remixes and permutations. The idea, says Stern, is to "give people credit for their words and ideas." The advantage over a wiki is that no one author's version is dominant -- at least until the project is closed, and only then by community agreement, not by virtue of who edited it last.

The goal? Consensus. And efficient consensus at that. Stern: "Our assumption is that no one person is going to have all the best words and ideas. The idea is to fuse them together, synthesizing ideas into a single, concise text." Each proposed plank is rated from one stars to ten, and the highest rated plank gets to the top. The site now has ten planks categories, from health care to media and communications to electoral reform, and about 75 contributed plank versions.

This sounds like a really interesting tool. I worry, however, that the sort of polarization we tend to see on existing left and right discussion sites will make its way into the platform with this sort of tool. My colleague Trish Roberts-Miller might call this "agonistic expressive discourse," the kind that normally marks a homogeneous enclave. The question, I think, is how well the tool would scale up to include minority-perspective input.

"Learning is not to be found on a printout."

Others have already piled onto the Sunday NYT article about the so-called literacy debate: whether reading online counts as reading. The vignette that starts this debate involves a high school student who spends six hours a day reading online. But does it count?

Peter Merholz sharply eviscerates this quote:

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

Merholz points out that

Learning is “acquired” (if that’s even the right word… it makes it sound like something you can get at the store) through doing. Through processing. Through acting.

True enough, I think. But I should also point out that McCullough is not spontaneously generating an argument against online reading. This is the same argument that has been leveled against all of the "low genres," i.e., all genres that are not great literature. We in rhet-comp are fairly familiar with this unsupportable argument, which is sometimes trotted out to oppose composition and professional writing programs. It doesn't get much play across campus, though: imagine how this great books argument would be received by engineering, physics, microbiology, or business administration -- let alone the College of Education, where actual empirical research suggests a viewpoint closer to Merholz'.

But I digress. I found it interesting that when McCullough tries to translate this argument into an attack on online texts, he mixes up genres with media. So he ends up making a really muddled argument: learning isn't acquired on a printout, but in the pages of a book. These days, of course, books are essentially printouts. And printed-out websites are themselves frozen, rendered inactive and inert -- booklike.

As people like McCullough try to command the waves, others are interested in how new media and new genres translate into new competencies. One study involved examining how high school students' online reading affected their grades.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”

Jackson doesn't say whether she thinks that students would be better served by reading Jane Eyre in their spare time, but the question seems moot: she indicates that they will read online, and they won't read books. Furthermore, the sort of reading they do online -- active reading, engaged with those low nonliterary genres, those interactive texts, those snippets of information that must be assembled into new arguments -- looks a lot more like the sort of reading and writing they will continue to do in their academic life, their postacademic careers, their leisure time as adults, and arguably their civic engagement.

Android to become a cyborg?

The latest rumor is that Android and Symbian will be combining, and that's why Google has been secretive and slow to release a new SDK. Hmm.

It's a coincidence

I've been thinking a lot about Mars lately, specifically steps to colonize Mars. Just wanted to state for the record that this has nothing to do with the fact that Google wants to make a Mars colony its next major project. Had no idea.

Anyway, I hope they don't approach a Mars colony the way they do their other projects, keeping it in beta indefintely. Probably would be hard to find early adopters that way.

Update: Link went bad, should work now.

Update 2: Did I mention the press release is dated April 1?

Reading :: The Network Society

The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy
Ed. Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso

Policy books are difficult for me to get through since they tend to be narrowly focused and defined and overwhelmingly analytical. Yet this work is necessary and vital work (work that I'm glad interests others). Overall, that's the sort of work that The Network Society does. The collection has a particular focus on Portugal, but discusses trends across the globe as well.

What sorts of trends? That's where Manuel Castells' excellent introduction comes in. As Castells explains it, the organizational form of networks has been with us a long time, but networks have not scaled up beyond a certain size and complexity because they have had difficulty in mastering and coordinating resources. Now, however, "digital networking technologies enable networks to overcome their historical limits. They can, at the same time, be flexible and adaptive thanks to their capacity to decentralize performance along a network of autonomous components, while still being able to coordinate all this decentralized activity on a shared purpose of decision making" (p.4). Castells rejects the litany of underexamined complaints about new technologies, as well as the counterpoint litany of underexamined praises (pp.6-7), to focus on what we actually know about how these technologies are affecting society. He notes an increasing trend toward economic activity performed by networks of networks built around specific business projects (p.9); the erosion of stable and predictable careers (p.9); the ability to work autonomously, also known as self-programmable labor "not necessarily to increase monetary gains but to enjoy greater freedom, flex-time, or more opportunity to create" (p.10); and the hypersociality (not hyposociality) of networked society (p.11).

Castells sees the rise of a new form of state: a network state. Such a state does not replace nation-states, he says, since no one wants a world government, but a global government is a functional need so we are now seeing networks of nation-states (such as the EU) as well as ad hoc groupings of nation-states. "Thus, the actual system of governance in our world is not centered around the nation-state, although nation-states are not disappearing by any means. Governance is operated in a network of political institutions that shares sovereignty in various degrees an[d] reconfigurates itself in a variable geopolitical geometry" (p.15).

Castells' introduction alone is worth the price of admission.

Reading :: Smart Mobs

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
By Howard Rheingold

I've been meaning to read Smart Mobs for a while. The last time I checked it out from the library, I left it at a bus stop. Fortunately, some good samaritan returned it to the library. So now I'm back at it.

Smart Mobs is a well known, widely cited book, and for good reason. Published in 2002, its predictions are generally dead on, making it surprisingly relevant even five years later (an immense time period in terms of mobile technologies).

Rheingold defines smart mobs in this way:

Smart mobs consist of people who act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. (p.xii).

He goes on to describe several possible applications of mobile technologies, applications that have been realized or are being realized at present (xii). But Rheingold is less interested in the specific applications of technologies than he is in how these transform the possibilities of cooperation and communication, in turn spurring shifts in culture, society, and work. For instance, he observed that mobile technologies in Japan were already dictating fashion changes (p.3; as an aside, I predict that a new wave of smartphones and internet devices will prolong the fad of cargo pants) and mobile phones in Norway were allowing users to remain accessible to their peer group while simultaneously participating in other events (p.6). He also observed early trends that predicted the shift of mobile phones away from communication devices and towards a "remote control" for interacting with the world (p.11).

I was a little startled to see that Rheingold interviewed, among others, "Jyri Engestrom, a sociology student in his early twenties" (p.17). Engestrom later worked for Nokia before cofounding Jaiku, a service that flourished briefly before being acquired by Google last year. Engestrom is quoted describing a public space in terms of consumption, production, and exchange, in a phrase that could have been taken from one of his father Yjro's articles (p.17).

In any case, the book is easy to read and surprisingly fresh; I would recommend it over more contemporary work such as Shirky's Here Comes Everybody for people who are interested in the impact of mobile technologies.

The only disappointment I found was that in the last chapter, Rheingold turns to Foucault to discuss the "panoptic" possibilities of mobile technologies. Specifically, he worries that too much information about our mobile dealings will result in self-censorship and other ways of conforming due to pervasive surveillance. True, in some contexts and societies this will be the case. But Smart Mobs is stuffed with counterexamples, and I wanted Rheingold to explore further why these counterexamples occur. One reason, I think, is that mobile technologies (at least as they are currently configured) foster peer-to-peer connections that actually encourage violations of conformance by surfacing counterconformance across the network -- or more accurately, surface different centers and activities, exacerbating the tensions and contradictions across established and nascent activities.

I'm just thinking out loud here, but: In Bentham's panopticon, prisoners (theoretically) conformed because they knew they might be observed by the guards, who had the ability to enforce conformance. The uncertainty of whether they were being watched or not resulted in incorporating state-friendly actions into their every movement. In the police state of the Soviet Union we saw something similar, although citizens also developed "double consciousness" in reaction to the contradiction between pervasive surveillance and private activities (see Wertsch). In 1984, the protagonist similarly finds himself called out by the televised exercise leader for not exercising strenuously enough, an event that nicely illustrates the ambiguity of surveillance that results in the weaving of state intent into citizens' unconscious action.

But we move across different groups with different expectations. You might behave quite differently at your bowling alley, your church, and your home, for instance. When peer-to-peer connections are enabled, you might find yourself interacting in multiple networks simultaneously, and state power (at least in a relatively hands-off state such as the US) contends with power in these other intersecting activities. So countervailing knots form, from hobby groups to cryptography clubs to sex clubs. And the power of social opprobrium is loosened in any given knot, since other knots have different criteria and one can live across these knots. So we're seeing much freer discussions and diverse identifications, as well as fracturing of political organizations (e.g., the Reagan coalition is fracturing into libertarian-leaning conservatives, South Park conservatives, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, small-government conservatives, and other groups that are beginning to form knots where they can more freely articulate viewpoints diverging from the Republican platform). Like the car, which encouraged the dissolution of stable communities and loosened stakes in neighborhoods, mobile technology is accellerating the shift toward such knots of interrelated activities with different expectations. Rheingold actually gives some examples of these, and I'd be interested in seeing a more fully theorized exploration of them.

Teaching controversies: Using Opposing Views as a simple support site

TechCrunch announces Opposing Views, a site on which certified experts debate established controversies such as peak oil and the supposed connection between thimerosal and autism. It aims to be a go-to site for getting up to speed quickly on a controversy, with links to further resources.

There are problems with the (lower case) opposing-views model, since it tends to bifurcate more complex discussions. But the site might be really useful in particular for rhetoric teachers using the so-called controversy model, as we do in our introductory rhetoric and writing courses at UT. I like that, compared to other sources such as Wikipedia, Opposing Views puts the controversy front and center. On the other hand, setting up two opposing sides tends to lend equal credence to both. OV doesn't debate whether the world is flat, but you can imagine how a "balanced" debate would give credence to the flat-earthers.

The McCain-doesn't-use-the-internet meme

I've seen this meme half a dozen places: John McCain doesn't use the Internet or computers, therefore he's unqualified to be President.

Well, I'm intensely interested in understanding digital technologies and how they are causing enormous shifts in work, education, and leisure -- but I think this argument is pretty thin. It's essentially the flip side of the "experience" argument that we hear trotted out in various ways, often from the McCain camp itself. Candidate X has never served in the military, so how can he be commander-in-chief? Candidate Y has no executive experience, so how can she function as chief executive? Candidate Z has little economic experience, so how can he run the largest economy in the world?

Yet we generally don't narrow the pool of candidates to governors with economics degrees and military backgrounds. Competent leaders hire teams to take care of the issues in which they are not expert. Or to put it another way: the pool of true polymaths who are also outstanding leaders is pretty small. And that's okay.

But perhaps computer use seems more like a basic life skill. Like pumping gas or buying groceries -- two activities that we don't honestly expect our President to do either. I'm much more interested in what the candidate thinks about technology and education, technology and public policy, technology and the economy, than whether s/he can blog. I am not convinced that the experience of using a consumer electronic device will impart significant experiential knowledge that can't be substituted by a good board of advisors. Obama has a 300-person foreign policy advisory board to shore up his perceived weakness, and that seems perfectly reasonable as long as he can coordinate them; surely McCain can similarly draw on an advisory board to shore up his lack of experience in Googling.

(I should make clear here that I'm not in the tank for either McCain or Obama. I just want people to base their decisions on arguments that are reasonable and significant.)

iPhone total cost of ownership

One source ran the numbers, which are pretty remarkable.

Telegraph Media Group moves from MS Office to Google Apps

Jeff Jarvis excerpts the story of how the publisher of the Daily Telegraph migrated to Google Apps. Which is impressive. It also makes a weird sort of sense that the dying newspaper industry is turning to Google to optimize itself.

"If enough people asking the same question creates a viable market place, then we've reached the end-game of a knowledge society."

Jan Chipchase looks at the practice of renting rooms in China during the Olympics.

Google Docs now has templates

They're not fantastic, but they're decent. See what you think.

Sabotage

Confused of Calcutta unearths an OSS field manual on sabotage and discovers some familiar-sounding practices.

Project Lore - Better than This Old House

I could see myself spending a lot of time watching this show about how to level up in World of Warcraft. Maybe I'll fire up the Wii and watch it on the TV through the browser. I mean, I don't play WOW, but I don't design clothes either and I still catch Project Runway sometimes.

The street finds its own uses for things, even Windows Server 2008

Slashdot has an article about converting Windows Server 2008 into "the lean, efficient, reliable 'power user' OS that Windows should be," rather than trying to run Vista.

Community managers for startups

ReadWriteWeb asks: Do startup companies need community managers? Short answer: Yes.

Facilitating and managing communities has already become an important job and I believe it will increase in importance. As far as I know, no field or discipline has specifically targeted this sort of job. Technical communication and rhetoric are well suited to do so, but we'll need to get out of the starting gate quickly.

The free software, anti-DRM case against the iPhone

Gina Trapani, who has an iPhone, argues that you shouldn't get one.

Soon GMail and GCal will have offline access

Google Gears is coming to both.

A few thoughts on Google's strategy

As most frequent readers of this blog know, I'm very interested in what Google is doing. That's partially because Google has a big influence on other players in the sector, partly because I use their products extensively, but mostly because while other players have focused on enterprise or consumer sectors, Google has been exploring ways to tap latent markets of small businesses and federations.

One example is Google Docs. As I've argued elsewhere, comparing GDocs with MS Office misses the point: Although MS Office is usable by broad swathes of the public, it is crafted with large companies and enterprises in mind, and that has influenced its features and positioning. Microsoft knows that enterprises have a lot of value locked inside them, like oil fields, and so Microsoft goes to the most promising oil fields to drill. Microsoft doesn't drill eveywhere; that would not be cost effective. In fact, small businesses, sole proprietorships, and casual groups are a bit of a drag on Microsoft: They tend to pirate software like Office, or skirt agreements in other ways (ex: students graduate but still use their student version of Office).

On the other hand, Google has crafted GDocs in a way that does not necessarily work that well in enterprise settings, but that works wonderfully for small businesses, sole proprietorships, and casual groups. And especially in emergent federations of contractors and subcontractors, in coworking, and in similarly dispersed, loose affiliations of workers. That's a latent market, one that Microsoft can't tap and hasn't been eager to recognize up to this point. Metaphorically speaking, whereas Microsoft is looking for oil fields, Google is deploying solar panels to recover low amounts of energy everywhere. And this works mainly because Google has the infrastructure to do that deploying.

All right. Keep that in mind as we turn to Android, the Google-initiated and backed OS for mobile devices. I know I've been talking about Android a lot, and partially that's because since it hasn't been released yet, I'm free to project my hopes and wishes onto it. But there's enough information that we can also do some speculating about strategy.

Analysts have been speculating lately about what market Android is trying to crack. Is it going after the corporate market, competing with RIM and MS Windows Mobile? Or is it going after the consumer market, including Apple's iPhone?

I suggest that, just as with Google Docs, the niche is neither. Google is going to use Android to facilitate latent connections among emergent organizations and organizational forms, such as federations and coworking. It's not focusing on a tightly controlled consumer experience, like the iPhone, or a tightly controlled corporate infrastructure, like the Blackberry or WinMobile devices. It's going to focus on the many small businesses that have to do B2B collaboration, the professionals who have to be increasingly mobile while facilitating face-to-face meetings, the loose collaboration that is increasingly characterizing knowledge work.

A linchpin in this strategy, I think, is going to be Jaiku. For those of you who may not remember, Jaiku is a Finnish startup that emerged as a Twitter competitor before Google bought in fall 2007. Since then it's been closed to new registrations as Google works to scale it. Jaiku is mobile phone centric and includes short messages (like Twitter), feed aggregation (like FriendFeed), and location awareness (like BrightKite). It's being moved onto Google Apps Engine. And we keep hearing about how that move will "soon" be complete. I strongly suspect that the move includes integrating Jaiku and GMail's address list (continuing Google's de facto social network of contacts), Jaiku and OpenSocial, Jaiku and SocialStream, Jaiku and Google Maps.

Like Twitter, FriendFeed, and BrightKite, Jaiku would be good at serving the latent market for loose recombinant organizations, but it will do this in a much more coherent and focused way. And it might or might not launch in October, but it almost certainly will be hyped to coincide with the first release of Android phones from T-Mobile in October. Look for a Jaiku icon on every Android desktop out of the box.

Reading :: Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
By Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody has been discussed widely on tech-oriented sites such as BoingBoing, and for good reason. To be honest, if you read BoingBoing, BuzzMachine, and similar sites, you won't find much new here. But Shirky manages to clearly and elegantly summarize the sorts of shifts that are currently occurring in mass organization and organization as social software and hardware bring down the transaction costs of communication.

The book makes a good summary for those who have already been reading these issues; a good reference for those who want to illustrate it; a manifesto of sorts for those who are thinking through these changes; and a tract for those who want to communicate these changes in organization to others. Shirky discusses networked organizational structures, power law, the fail-faster approach, and similar concepts clearly and simply; he reviews tools and projects such as Twitter, Dodgeball, MeetUp, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia as illustrations of his points, not just as neat services; and he levels precise, common-sense criticisms towards successful-on-paper, failures-in-reality efforts such as MoveOn campaigns to email Congresspeople. I'd recommend this book if you're trying to understand social media yourself or if you want to explain it to someone else.

"People [are] starting to put the dreaded @ signs from Twitter in emails!"

That's a reader's report to Gawker:

Has anyone else noticed this trend (or is it a one-person trend piece?) From a reader: "People [are] starting to put the dreaded @ signs from Twitter in emails! Such as @Tricia, how did making that Excel spreadsheet go? and other horrible things of that nature." Has this infected your office as well?

It hasn't yet, but I think it's a brilliant convention to export for the same reason that it makes sense on Twitter: it allows you to set up automated scripts to identify direct addressees within the body of text. It also makes it easier for humans to scan text for direct address.

iPhone is the new PC

ReadWriteWeb discovers that a sufficiently powerful and app-friendly phone has potential to be a true personal computer. Yes, that is why Microsoft, Google, and Apple are flooding the space. Expect iPhone 3.0 to link up to Apple's Bluetooth keyboards and perhaps displays.

Discouraging signs for Brightkite

Brightkite is a relatively new service, still in private beta, that combines Twitter-like microblogging with location-awareness. Up to this point, it's taken that location via user input: you type your address into Brightkite or alternately have it search for the location based on a business name. This is a clunky way to indicate location, which is why I rarely use it. Obviously, getting coordinates directly from a GPS-enabled phone would make the service much more useful.

Unfortunately, Brightkite's iPhone 3G app does not take GPS input. This is a big issue, and I am not sure how Brightkite will recover unless it can pair a GPS-enabled client with another major launch such as the upcoming Android or RIM touchscreen launches.

Reading :: Groundswell

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
By Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

Just a short review tonight. Groundswell is another social media book focused on how corporations, particularly marketers, can stop worrying and love social media. It's not a bad book, and I particularly liked the fact that much of it was based on research performed by the authors and their employer, Forrester, Inc. I also appreciated that the book tried to make sense of social media by deducing and presenting a strategic approach to using it within one's own business.

On the other hand, the book does not have a lot of new insights to offer. If you've read The Cluetrain Manifesto or Wikinomics, or for that matter Scoble's or Jarvis' blogs, there's not a lot of news here beyond some finer-grained work on strategy. And that grain is not that much finer: the book still speaks in very general terms. The book also relies heavily on stories and anecdotes, many of which have the shelf life of lettuce.

If you're interested in what this whole social technologies thing is about, Groundswell is not a bad place to start. But you may get more from reading a broad cross-section of tech blogs.

Are the British really worried about Google Street View?

It's condemned as a "gross invasion of privacy." This is from the country with more surveillance cameras per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Strategy in the Obama Campaign

Although the end of this analysis piece is negative (it's written by Karl Rove, after all), most of it is highly interesting. A master political strategist looks at the Obama campaign's ground game and sees several parallels to the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

Avatars teleport from SecondLife to OpenSim

IBM and Linden Labs have for the first time managed to teleport SL avatars to another virtual world, OpenSim. The thing that interested me was that both worlds appear identical -- they both look like Santa Barbara, CA. Why not make OpenSim look like someplace more interesting, like Mars or Austin?

Want to reproduce Twitter? Here's a crazy idea.

Just blue-skying here. Here's a crazy idea for replacing Twitter:

Use Google Calendar. Make your calendar public. "Tweet" by adding an event; if you simply text it to GCal, it's put in the calendar at the point you sent it in.

Have your friends do the same thing and share their GCals with you. Show all their calendars in your default view. You'll see your "tweets" and theirs in an ordered time stream. They'll also be auto color-coded, although you'll soon run out of colors.

Advantages:

• Massive, distributed infrastructure.
• SMS integration (upstream).
• Many clients exist for desktop and mobile.
• Can export to other services and perhaps import from other services.

Disadvantages:

• Calendars (streams) will not be easy to scale.
• No practical SMS integration downstream at present.
• This is really, really not what GCal is designed to be used for.
  

Information overload!!!

There's yet another article on information overload, this time in the WSJ online. This one starts out with this sober warning:

Warning: On average, knowledge workers change activities every three minutes, usually because they're distracted by email or a phone call. It then takes almost half an hour to get back to the task once attention is lost. So if you're trying to read this column at the office or within range of your mobile device, what should be a few minutes can take much longer. Consider the rest of this article an 800-word test of your ability to maintain attention.

Okay, I'm having trouble parsing this. The casual reader might think that this means that once you get distracted, it takes 30 minutes to focus again. But if you're changing activities every three minutes, that means that in that 30-minute span you're cycling through ten activities. Right? So what is this business about "the task"? How are tasks defined? Does this string of ten activities represent several steps in a larger activity (like the Communication Event Models that Bill Hart-Davidson creates from studying knowledge workers)? Does it represent touching several different genres in a genre ecology, which collectively coordinate and mediate a larger work activity? Unfortunately we don't get any answers in the loose string of personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this article.

Android comes to Sprint

Sort of -- enthusiasts have gotten it working on the Touch.

Voicemail is dead?

That's what Michael Arrington says. He suggests that if you want to contact him, you should email him instead. Of course, elsewhere he has talked about periodically declaring "email bankruptcy," deleting all unopened emails in his inbox, so maybe that's not a great strategy either. Maybe if you want to contact Arrington you should just visit his house.

For me, voicemail is just fine. No, I will not give you my number.

identi.ca

identi.ca is the latest Twitter-like service. It's open source and uses OpenID. It's also slow right now -- but if you like it, you can download and install the underlying software on your own server. Not sure at this point whether doing that will wall you off from other installs on different servers, but if it does, it seems to be going in the wrong direction. More as it stabilizes.

The iPhone wants me to buy it after all

Corporate iPhones are rumored to be getting a slide-out keyboard. Golf clap for Apple.

Point of No Return

The world (of Warcraft) is flat.

Network book cover is up

A total surprise for me. Cambridge still hasn't updated the book title on the page, but the proper book title is on the cover. I'm just delighted to see it coming out, and incidentally I like that the typeface and bars make it look a little similar to my other book's cover.

Here they are together, my two books, just hanging out.

Microsoft to buy Powerset, or Yahoo Search, or something

People are all excited about the rumor that Microsoft will buy Powerset to beef up MS Live Search. Of course, this succeeds the rumor that MS is back in talks with Yahoo to buy it or its search business. My sense is that the Powerset deal is a possibility, but MS is floating it now to keep Yahoo's stock from rising on speculation.

I remember this pulp cover for 1984

Cory Doctorow just reposted an excited blog post about a pulp fiction-style cover for George Orwell's 1984.(Click through to see the lurid cover.) The blog's author enthuses: "Significant is the artwork and over-the-top copy on the back, which is quite different from almost every other edition of this novel that I've seen."

The funny thing is that this is the version of 1984 we had when I was growing up. I think I read this thing when I was ten, and I remember feeling a little let down that the material was less exciting than the cover.

Big glossy love letter to Android in Wired

Google\'s Open Source Android Phone Will Free the Wireless Web

Reading :: Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management: How to Succeed in the Face of Changing Project Requirements
By Gary Chin

I've reviewed several project management books lately, and so far this is the best-of-breed in terms of defining agile project management, describing its need, and setting out a list of concepts for understanding it. The book isn't a set of heuristics and principles, nor is it a methodology, but it provides a solid basis for those other sorts of books.

Starting in the Preface, Chin argues that highly innovative businesses, especially those that push the limits of current technology, face challenges in discovery and planning that have not been encountered before. Such projects have inherent uncertainty, and face multiple paths, decision points, and iterations. Classic project management, he argues, is simply not set up for that sort of problem (p.vii). He ties this issue to the advent of the knowledge-based economy and acknowledges that although project management could be a key advantage for smaller businesses in this economy, classic PM is not well suited for helping them (p.ix).

It's not that classic PM is broken, he argues in Chapter 1, but it's been overextended. Agile project management is seen not as yet another extension, but a new foundational element (pp.2-3). The focus of agile PM moves from planning to execution -- a necessary move because

Agile PM Environment = [Uncertainty + Unique Expertise] + Speed (p.3)

or, in other words, the agile PM environment involves specialized problem solving that has not been done before, at the edge of experience, with rapid development. It's for startups in particular. Think in terms of software development, but also other lightweight tech-heavy development such as search engine optimization, social networking, and social media marketing. Organizations functioning in this space have "gurus" rather than interchangeable resources, working on problems that change from day to day, opportunistically incorporating new technologies to accommodate a rapidly shifting environment with both internal and external uncertainties. In contrast, classic project management assumes familiar problems, interchangeable expertise, unchanging objectives, and minimized internal and external uncertainty -- all signs of more mature industries such as construction.

I've discussed emergent organizational structures such as networks, federations and coworking on this blog. Chin doesn't quite get there -- he is still envisioning single organizations, multiple organizations, and single companies within multiple organizations (pp.17-20). Yet he edges closer to a federation understanding in Chapter 3, when he argues that in smaller companies, projects are the business (p.22) -- that is, a single project might be the central activity of the startup. In such an environment, classic PM, with its emphasis on project boxes that cut across silos, is not wholly applicable (p.25). Naturally, a project-driven organization is better suited to agile project environments (p.33).

In agile spaces, Chin argues, teams need to be boundary-crossers in order to solve new, multidimensional problems (p.43). Agile decision-making must be decentralized as well, pushed down to the level of the local team when possible (p.46); it is rarely handled through formal authority, most frequently through personal credibility established during the project (p.69). "The agile project operates in an atmosphere of high interactivity, boundary crossing, and multiple simultaneous pathways," he adds (p.79), which is to say (in my terms) that agile PM is a result of splicing dissimilar activities. It's not surprising (to me) that he points to telecommuters as good candidates for agile projects (p.94).

Chin goes on to offer some heuristics and practical approaches to implementing agile PM. But the real value in this book is Chin's sharp eye for the connections between classic and agile PM, grounded in the differences among organizations, industries, uncertainty, speed, and expertise. It's a great book for getting an overview of agile PM rationale.

Reading :: Managing Agile Projects

Managing Agile Projects
By Sanjiv Augustine

In my ongoing quest to read about project management and its permutations, I picked up Augustine's Managing Agile Projects. This book is focused on software development projects, as much of the agile literature is, but provides principles that could be more broadly abstracted. Like other books along these lines, this one takes pains to separate its brand of project management from more traditional, PMBOK-based project management.

The author draws heavily from agile programming and its variants (eXtreme Programming, Scrum, FD). But he also draws from a broad set of other concepts and frameworks, and the result is sometimes a grab bag of theories and concepts: complexity theory, memes (as cultural DNA), game theory, mental models, and communities of practice all make a showing without much to tie them together. But this book really isn't a theory book -- it's more about a set of organizing principles put forth as a compact or a constitution for governing team interactions. Augustine introduces this notion from the beginning with a clarifying "fable" based on an actual shift from traditional to agile project management (Ch.1).

Essentially, agile project management as it is described here consists of the following principles:

• foster alignment and cooperation
• encourage emergence and self-organization
• institute learning and adaptation (p.25).

Complementing these are the following practices:

• organic teams (small, flexible, composed of generalizing specialists)
• guiding vision (keeping the team aligned with the same "mental model" or "commander's intent")
• simple rules (generative process rules that can result in emergent organized behavior)
• open information (vs. information kept in silos)
• light touch (fostering emergent control rather than heavy-handed rules)
• adaptive leadership (continuously monitoring, learning, and adapting) (pp.26-29)

The author lists certain core values for agile project managers:

• trust
• collaboration
• learning
• courage (pp.38-39)

The rest of the book elaborates these principles, practices, and values and supplies heuristics for implementing them. Overall, these are well done, with clear guidelines and relationships. But, I hasten to add, the approach really does assume strong management backing to push through this compact, even though the end result is to get everyone else on board. Also, the approach is meant for larger organizations working on large software projects, and may not be appropriate for other industries -- too variable for longer-term manufacturing projects, too heavy-handed for smaller, lighter organizations with short engagements.

Plurk has third-party updating available via HelloTxt

... along with several other services. Have not tried it yet, but this was one big obstacle to using Plurk. Perhaps I will set up an account and double-update for a bit.

HelloTxt - Help SMS Gateway

How are people reaching this blog?

The answer, according to Google Analytics, is surprising to me. The top referring site is Google Images, probably because I have a couple of images such as one of John Paul Jones playing a many-necked mandolin. But the next few referring sites are:

2. twitter.com
3. apps.facebook.com
4. google.com
5. friendfeed.com
6. locus.cwrl.utexas.edu (my homepage)
7. stc-austin.org (The Austin chapter of the Society for Technical Communication)

5-7 are tied. 2, 3, and 5 are different aspects of my lifestream; people are seeing the same information refracted through different services.

Reading :: The Rise of the Project Workforce

The Rise of the Project Workforce
By Rudolf Melik

I've begun trying to push past traditional project management literature to look at what is typically called "agile project management": project management for less hierarchical, flatter, typically smaller structures. In particular, I want to see what's out there for networked organizations that are distributed geospatially and temporally as well as organized in networks rather than silos or hierarchies.

Rudolf Melik's The Rise of the Project Workforce is in some ways a good place to start. Although the book is a bit too focused on a particular methodology for my purposes, its opening chapters frame the issue well and provide some good concepts and thoughts on the distinction.

Malik is deeply influenced by Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (which I haven't read). Based on Friedman's description of a hierarchically "flat world," Melik says, "Today's business systems are simply not designed to plan, schedule, manage, audit, and optimize work that gets done in a flat world. ... More modern versions of business optimization tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and project management software want to impose a certain rigidity within business processes, and fail to address the dynamic interplay and constantly shifting relationship between projects and people, which occurs naturally in the flat world that characterizes today's businesses" (p.5). Malik's book attempts to move toward a project management footing that addresses these characteristics.

This footing is called "project workforce management," a solution that combines human capital management, project management, business process management, and cost/revenue accounting (p.9). Such a system aims to integrate components such as time and expense tracking, cost and revenue accounting, workforce planning, project planning, project process management, and analytics (p.13). The idea is to produce a system that provides "a common vantage point for all decision makers"; "real-time views of projects, resource groups, actual progress, and issues"; and "more accurate decision-making" (p.14).

The rest of the book describes such a system in nuts-and-bolts terms. Melik has obviously given these parts a lot of thought, and I don't have the expertise to evaluate them, but the described system is fairly intricate and appears to be aimed at larger organizations with cross-functional projects. That is, Melik appears to be supporting project management for global enterprises which are going through "flattening"; I'm more interested in smaller, more agile organizations.

Nevertheless, the book was helpful for me to conceptualize some of the issues I've been investigating, and should provide a good blueprint for those working in larger organizations.

No cameras, no big deal

House Rep. John Culberson (R, Tx) has been Twittering from the House floor in the name of transparency. It's pretty interesting, but this post really caught my eye:

"@maslowbeer We (Rs) had TV cameras in the Rules Comm hearing room - Pelosi took all the cameras out - I will start Qikking these meetings"

Qik is a service that allows you to stream video from your mobile phone in real time. It's been used extensively by tech industry folks such as Robert Scoble. But seeing it mentioned in this context is arresting because it highlights the ability for someone with a pocket-sized device to easily replace much larger chunks of infrastructure such as larger cameras plus multiperson camera crews.

I don't take a position on whether transparency is a good thing in this particular case. As a general principle, I think transparency is a good thing, but in practice it may make people reluctant to do the sort of sausage-grinding necessary to generate compromises. My sense is that the House will need to establish firm protocol to deal with acceptable mobile device use, and soon.

Twitter / johnculberson: @maslowbeer We (Rs) had TV ...

Opera Mobile usage report is out

Who's browsing the mobile web? Mostly males 18-27. I'm among the mere 4.4% of users 38-47 years old. Some interesting variation by country too.

Mobile Browsing Report

GDocs torpedoes Yep

Well, that's one possible implication. Yep is OSX software billed by some as "iTunes for your PDFs." It scans your hard drive, finds PDFs, and puts them in one searchable, tagged interface. I used it for a while, but was unimpressed with the tagging and search functions, so I just use Quicksilver now.

But today GDocs announced PDF support. As in, you can upload PDFs. I just tried it and it works very well. You can't edit the PDFs -- yet. But you can upload and search them, another differentiator with MS Office.

Google Docs Get PDF Support

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Reading :: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge
by William R. Duncan

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, also known as the PMBOK Guide, is the frequently cited guide developed by the Project Management Institute Standards Committee. This edition was published in 1996 and supersedes PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK); the third edition, which I believe is the most current one, was published in 2004.

The PMBOK guide aims to set out the principles of project management so that this young field can establish standards. To that purpose, it is divided into the following sections:

I. The Project Management Framework
II. The Project Management Knowledge Areas
III. Appendices (which contain information on processes, additional sources, and a summary among other things)
IV. Glossary and Index

In other words, the PMBOK guide is definitely on the reference side, giving an overview of the basics of project management, an overview that should be supplemented with other texts as well as specialization in one's own content area and organizational structure. It's a 50,000 foot view. And as such, it's quite valuable for anyone who wants that overview. But it also introduces challenges for anyone who needs a closer view.

So, for instance, the PMBOK guide is especially valuable when defining project management as "the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a project" (p.6), and when explaining basic concepts such as the difference between projects and operations (p.4). It also diagrams the knowledge areas and processes of project management (p.7) and explains what stakeholders might be involved in the project (p.15).

In one really valuable part of the PMBOK guide, the different types of organizational structures are described:

• Functional: hierarchies in which staff are organized by specialty and have distinct superiors (p.18).
• Projectized: focused almost entirely on projects, with relatively independent project managers drawing on resources across the organization rather than siloed into functional areas (p.20).
• Matrix: a blend of the functional and projectized organizational structures (p.20).

The PMBOK guide is geared toward supporting projects across the two extremes of functional and projectized organizational structures. However, as I've discussed elsewhere, the projectized organizational structure is not an extreme: we are starting to see much looser and more distributed organizational structures such as federations and coworking as well as (arguably) agile organizations. The PMBOK guide, with its emphasis on processes and structures, is not well positioned to be extended to these looser organizations. More thoughts on this point as I continue to read the project management literature.

T-Mobile Plans to Release Android Phones in July? - Google Android Mobile Phone

Thanks to the good people at Filtrbox, I've been keeping up with interesting Google Android news. Today's unconfirmed rumor is that T-Mobile will bring an Android phone to market as soon as next month.

T-Mobile Plans to Release Android Phones in July? - Google Android Mobile Phone

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LiquidPlanner - fuzzy project manager

Like other project management systems such as Basecamp, but built to deal with uncertainty and contingencies.  

LiquidPlanner: Project Management That Deals With Uncertainty

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Microsoft Develops Workstreaming

Although that's not the term they use:

The system is said to resemble Facebook, but with a slightly less entertaining intention. Its goal is to let employees stay up-to-date with industry news as well as their own colleagues’ work and progress. It even has a feature that can let you see when someone has created or updated a document — something that may give bosses an added way to monitor progress.

But also a way for loose teams to collaboratively check status, something that is currently done using IM, Twitter, project blogs, RescueTime, and various other services in different work contexts.
Microsoft Develops Corporate Social Networking Tool

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iPhone 3G: The view from Singapore

Unimpressed.

iPhone is Next-Gen? You got to be kidding me! at Weikiat.NET

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The Austin Coworking Scene, Part 2: Conjunctured

As mentioned in a previous post, I have been thinking in terms of attenuated work organization for a while, ever since reading Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy. That book led me to read a lot on the information economy as well as related subjects. Some of them obviously related, such as new economy rhetoric, management theory, and communication technologies. Others were not so obviously related, such as asymmetric warfare, education theory, and lots of postmodernist and amodernist theory.

What I've been reading has led me to believe that the information economy is pushing work organization away from hierarchies and toward recombinant networks in which individuals reach across trade, field, discipline, and organizational boundaries to accomplish specific projects. This change is abetted by newly ubiquitous information technologies and is happening even in established organizations, as I've discussed in the upcoming book Network and in my recent TCQ special issue on distributed work. But it's happening even more quickly in smaller, lighter sectors such as small business-to-business services: think graphic design, web design, advertising campaigns, and consulting. In these sectors, since engagements are quite limited in time and in focus, it's possible for Zuboff and Maxmin's "federations" of contractors and subcontractors to coalesce, accomplish a project, and disperse at the end of the project. Such an organizational structure is quite networked, involving attenuated ties and constant boundary-crossing across fields, trades, disciplines and organizations. The falling costs of portable computers, broadband, and mobile telecommunications have meant that such federations can operate on very low overhead.

Some of the more interesting developments in communication-oriented software have come from these emerging federations. For instance, Basecamp was developed to help 37Signals manage their projects in consultation with clients. Google Docs, as I have argued elsewhere, is ideally suited for this sort of collaboration as well.

So it's not terribly surprising for me to see these federations coalescing and dispersing. What did surprise me when I ran across it a few months ago, and again as I revisited it recently, was Conjunctured. The company didn't appear to be a federation -- too stable -- but it certainly wasn't a hierarchical organization either. Was it something entirely new? A hybrid?

After a while, I did the most obvious thing. I asked. That is, I met separately with two members of Conjunctured to informally talk about the organization.

A caveat here: These meetings were not research, were not conducted via a research methodology, were not passed by a human subjects committee, and should be regarded as citizen journalism rather than research.

May 28: Cesar Torres
Cesar Torres was gracious enough to meet me at the coffee shop for an interview. An energetic 24-year-old, Cesar explained that he had recently graduated from UT with a marketing degree, although he was let in as a computer science major. Throughout college, he freelanced (over Craigslist) as well as interning at Apple. When he graduated, he faced the prospect of working at Apple or at a conventional advertising firm.

But he preferred creative control. He had interned at advertising agencies, and he thinks of them as a "big government" model: lots of overhead, layers between creative worker and customer. But technology replaces a lot of the overhead and infrastructure of the agency model: all the creative needs is a laptop and a mobile phone. So he decided to "flip the model."

Flipping a model as established as the agency model is hard. Conjunctured, he explained, is a moving target. The description on the website right now is a February statement, already a bit out of date. Currently, Conjunctured has two sides:

Agency. Conjunctured started in August 2007 with three others. They had begun working together in Jelly meetings and at Social Media Club. Together, they worked on a model of individual work + collaboration on projects that leverage their unique skills. And whereas a conventional agency takes too big a cut due to infrastructure, Conjunctured allows them to get freelancer wages.

Not only do they supply their own infrastructure (laptops, mobile phones) at low cost, they use free tools. Cesar describes this approach as learning to intertwine, learning to be efficient early adopters. The agency is an exercise in figuring out the value in social media and social connections.

Coworking space. Cesar went to SXSWi to talk to people about this model. Their advice was to get space. In fact, he met Julie Gomoll of LaunchpadCoworking.com, who is starting a coworking cafe with conference rooms. Gomoll's enterprise is high-end, catering to telecommuters at large companies. Space there goes for $15/hr.

Conjunctured decided to take this model and apply it to a more downscale market:

• Walk-in: $15/day
• Part-time: 3-4 days/wk $150-200
• Full-time: 24/7 access, $250-400

So the space theoretically will pay for itself. This aspect of Conjunctured is not-for-profit. At the time of the interview, Conjunctured had made an offer for space 5 blocks east of I-35. They envisioned the coworking space as functioning as

• incubator
• recurring revenue
• but 80%: network, be in environment with other creatives

Ideally, the space functions as an incubator. Cesar envisions a recurring 7-minute period in which everyone focuses on one project to improve it. Once a company outgrows the incubator, they buy a space next door. And the property is strategically placed near light rail. The space is a house, with the mentality being that of a family rather than a corporation.

Currently the agency model is on the back burner. They had a chicken and egg problem:

• How do you run an agency without space?
• How do you obtain space without revenue?

So the coworking space is the main focus right now; once it's nailed down, the agency model can take hold.

How do you handle long-term planning, I asked. He feels it will work itself out. Designers and developers naturally go into the coworking model, But he believes that it will also draw project managers. Meanwhile, Conjunctured's founders will work on that level too.

How does Conjunctured bill work, since it is not a company in the traditional sense? Currently, when one of Conjunctured's members is hired, it's as an individual. That individual hires others as consultants and sends them 1099s. That is, they hire each other as subcontractors and they can write each other off as a business expense. Which is to say that in this sense, Conjunctured closely resembles a federation, but more stable in that the relationships are tighter and meant to outlast the projects.

Conjunctured currently has a DBA and is in talks with a lawyer about becoming a LLC. They are not incorporating in near future.

Cesar was also nice enough to give me pointers to the Austin coworking scene, which is more extensive than I had realized.

About a week later, another Conjunctured member, John Erik Metcalfe, sent me a direct message on Twitter, suggesting we meet as well.

June 6: John Erik Metcalfe
It was raining on the morning of June 6, and as I rode the bus toward my appointment with John (in the same coffee shop), he direct-messaged me on Twitter, letting me know he would be a little late -- he had to go back and get his umbrella. That was fine with me, since I was engrossed in a project management text. I settled in the coffee shop, and soon John appeared.

He explained that he saw the Conjunctured model as white blood cells in the bloodstream. When a hostile organism appeared, white blood cells swarm it. Similarly, Conjunctured's coworkers swarm a project. (This, of course, reminds me of the swarming concept applied in asymmetric warfare.)

John's particular focus is the Startup District, the anticipated cluster of companies that will grow from the Conjunctured incubator. And networking -- not on a money level, he explained, but on the level of human engagement.

Conjunctured's processes, he explained, are based on scrum/agile programming. They're incremental. Dusty Reagan (also of Conjunctured and a software developer) brought this orientation to projects.

John was excited because Conjunctured was signing on space that day. The four founders would sign. And although individual people would be working in the coworking space, Conjunctured as a brand/agency would bring in work.

So here's how that works. Coworking people can work on Conjunctured projects up to 20 hours per week. John used the same metaphor that Cesar had used: Conjunctured is "small government," with low overhead and freelance wages that meant workers would be "making what they should." The rest of their time would be spent on their own projects.

The part of an agency that many contractors find uninteresting, he explained, "is client service." Conjunctured handles that part by obtaining clients, chunking out projects, and distributing the chunks to a flat structure of people.

Here's the project management process John described, based on scrum.

1) Conjunctured talks to the client and asks, "What is the project?" They get an explanation, then promise to "put it into our system." Each project is an opt-in project.

2) Conjunctured creates a Google Doc with the project description. It's shared with everyone. Coworkers opt into the project by adding text on the GDoc. If not enough people opt in, Conjunctured declines the project. (It's all about opt-in.) But if there are enough yesses, the project is a go.

(John envisions a Digg-style list for projects: The most popular float to the top. This system would serve to aggregate interest and priority.)

3) Conjunctured then meets with the client, along with appropriate coworkers. They ask questions to create large chunks of the project. For instance, a branding project might be chunked into an identity system, website, etc.

4) Conjunctured then goes back to the group and presents the chunks: "Here's what needs to be done. Check in to do them." Members use the GDocs spreadsheet for tasks and time estimates. One column, "Dusty's gut," is used for developer Dusty Reagan's time estimate; others comment on the estimates to refine them and produce a firmer estimate. (Notice that this functions as a market-type system with free bidding inside the organization.)

5) Based on the breakout, the project lead calculates total length (which is to say, reads the total at the bottom of the spreadsheet). A line for client service is added, automatically estimated as a ratio of the project total.

6) If the client agrees with the estimate, Conjunctured asks the opt-in members to break their chunks into detailed tasks with time estimates. These tasks can be parceled out and managed recursively: the task's owner can manage the individual tasks and get more opt-ins, meaning that someone could work on as little as two hours of the project. Doing this means that parts of the project can be subcontracted and managed at a very low level of granularity; think of it as a federation with subfederations.

It's an intriguing process. However, John pointed out that Conjunctured has done few projects so far with this method. He expects that it will continue to evolve and refine.

What if someone doesn't meet their commitment? John points to the Conjunctured Manifesto, which states that "The community should call out members who aren’t pulling their weight"; members can call someone out at any time and judge them openly within Conjunctured. He also envisions a reputation system. They have implemented an initial version of this reputation system which allows them to give stars to coworkers; eventually, he envisions a thumbs-up or thumbs-down ranking on any project.

This process has some resemblance to project management, but also many differences. John says that Conjunctured expects to work out project management eventually, via a software solution that lets members look at

• the availability and reputation of available coworkers (a la eBay)
• the popularity of given projects (a la Digg)

He points to actionitem.com -- being developed by a fellow Austinite -- as one possible way to go.

What does it all mean?
It would be easy to characterize this young, rapidly developing model as a case of idealism overdose. Certainly it faces some key challenges in terms of project management, scaling, stability, and sustainability. However, I see some really interesting things going on here that resonate with the sorts of trends Beniger and Malone have talked about, among others. In certain project- and campaign-oriented, limited-engagement sectors, such as graphic design, advertising, and web development, freelancing and sole proprietorships have thrived; people have gotten used to flexible hours, to working on projects that interest them, to choosing people with whom they would like to collaborate, and to supplying or foraging infrastructure. At the same time, social software has begun to support opt-in collaboration on a broader scale. Federation-like structures such as Conjunctured are an attempt to scale up the freelancing model to preserve these desirable characteristics while providing enough stability and planning structure to support longer engagements.

The details are still being worked out, and I expect the model to evolve considerably over the next year or so as Conjunctured continues to coalesce as an organization. In particular, the freelancing/sole proprietorship model tends to focus on the tactical, reactive level, and Conjunctured will have to focus more on the strategic level as it evolves, in order to maintain a steady stream of clients and a stable identity. One way to handle that would be to shed the ideals and become a traditional agency, but another harder way would be to continue to evolve tools and practices in line with the Manifesto.

In any case, the emerging organization is really interesting, and I expect to keep in contact with them to see how things develop.

One more time: Security by obscurity doesn't work

A federal judge who was recently on the short list for Supreme Court nominations recently discovered this:

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The music files were copyrighted. The photos included porn.

Alex Kozinski, 9th Circuit chief judge, posted sexually explicit matter on his website - Los Angeles Times

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Houston Congressman twitters from House floor

Just amazing. I wonder how many direct messages he'll get as the result of this post?  

techPresident – CrackBerry Addicts vs Twittering Sunlighters on the Floor of Congress

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Why not to buy an iPhone 3G

Tomi Ahonen has a long post asking: what's the big deal with the new iPhone? And points out that with the low (subsidized) price, the iPhone has switched market segments -- and Apple is not ready for the switch.

Now Apple abandons that strategy of premium pricing. It jumps into the fray of the mid-field. Partly the iPhone exclusivity will be lost when everybody has it (or can afford it). Partly the cool factor disappears when iPhones are on every table. Partly the very fickle nature of the customer tastes in the industry will bite back at Apple. They cannot wait 12 months for a new model (from year to year into the future) if they intend to take on mid-market Nokia, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson model ranges - who release models every month, Nokia releases new models almost every week. I've said before, that it advanced markets the replacement cycle among young employed adults is 6 months - two new phones every year - such as in Japan, South Korea, and here in Hong Kong for example - so if the iPhone does not evolve and improve - it will soon suffer as a mid-field phone model. At the top luxury end, you can wait, but not in this crowded mid-field.

He reminds us that the US is the "backwater" of the mobile industry and that the iPhone is missing some of the basic features of European and Japanese phones. He also doesn't think RIM has anything to worry about.
Communities Dominate Brands: Apple iPhone 3G, what gives - great price but still..

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NCTE discovers RSS

NCTE Inbox Blog: RSS: Bringing What’s New to You

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Obama is a Mac, McCain is a PC?

Patrick Ruffini's latest thoughts on new media and the current campaign.

Obama, the Halo Effect, and What's Changed | The Next Right

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Monkeyfishing

My Way News - Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish

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Austin 3.0

Kristine and Joey from UT's ACTLab run down Austin's tech-creative scene, including coworking. They're a lot more plugged into it than I am (for now).

Austin 3.0 » Blog Archive » Austin’s Geek Summer “stuff maker” scene

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Two more approaches to mobile geolocation tracking

One is Citysense by Sense Networks. It anonymously tracks phones' geolocations and displays them on heat maps on your own phone:

Citysense is built on top of the company’s main technology platform, Macrosense. The company ingests billions of data points about people’s location from cell phones, GPS devices, WiFi, and even taxis. The company also collects geo-location data from everyone who downloads Citysense, or any future app (although, the company considers the data to be yours, and you can delete it from the database at any time).

The other is Buzzd, an app that was automatically bookmarked in the new Opera Mobile download. This one is opt-in and focuses on "buzz" around specific events, particularly music events. It's also location-specific, but it's opt-in and therefore not anonymous. Accessible via SMS and mobile browser.

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The phone is the new identity locus

A USA Today story about the new iPhone has this throwaway line:

The software add-ons have the potential to turn the iPhone into the pocket computer of the future, as essential, Apple hopes, as the keys in your pocket or purse.

The reason we put things on our key fobs is that keys have, until recently, been the locus of our identity. We use keys to get into our own private spaces (home, office) and shared areas. So we keep them on us all the time.

The phone is the new locus of our identity. I don't know about you, but my phone is on or near me all but 1.5 hours per day (they don't allow them in the gym). I stow my keys in my luggage when I travel, but my phone is on me all the time. Keys represent access, but the phone represents communication and self-mediation, connecting me to all of my contexts and contacts. I suspect that's already true for many people, so the line from the USA Today piece seems a few years late.

It's presto, change-o as new iPhone is unveiled - USATODAY.com

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The Austin coworking scene

Longtime readers may remember that I reviewed Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy four years ago, and despite some of the book's problems, I found it to be very useful in thinking through some of the phenomena I had been seeing in a study I was analyzing. (That study is the basis of my second book, Network, out this fall.) In particular, it helped me to better theorize and analyze blurred organizational boundaries, horizontal learning, and recombinant relationships among employees of the same and different companies.

One of Zuboff and Maxmin's more interesting statements was that we would begin to see more federations, or organizations that come into being to achieve a specific project before dispersing again. One good example is that of a graphic designer who owns a sole proprietorship: when she is contracted, she subcontracts other specialists to do parts of the work, then provides the "face" for that federation until the project is over. At that point the subcontractors disperse. Some of them might be employed in her next project -- and she might in turn be subcontracted by one of these others in their next project. I'm currently conducting a research project on small graphic design shops, and we're seeing this quite a bit. And although the contractor/subcontractor relationship has been around for a while, technological developments are making it really take off: mobile phones, laptops, and high-speed internet connections in particular.

Certain trades, such as graphic design, web design, and marketing, are particularly amenable to this sort of work organization. These trades' work is largely comprised of one-off engagements and mediated largely through digital technologies. So we're seeing a lot of people who work when they like, where they like, especially as contractors or freelancers. In fact, they tend to get better wages that way, since they don't have to pay the company for overhead. (The tradeoff is that they have to supply their own benefits and find their own work.)

But it's lonely working in your home office. So we're increasingly seeing a phenomenon called coworking. Put simply, these contractors and freelancers arrange to meet with other contractors and freelancers -- say, at a coffee shop with free wifi -- and work in the same physical space on their different projects. If you're an activity theorist, you might think of these meeting spaces as the intersecting penumbras of the individuals' work activities. They're working on different projects, but in the presence of others in the same or affiliated trades.

But, importantly, these can also be collaborative spaces and networking spaces. Someone who works close to you on a different project today might become your subcontractor -- or subcontract you -- tomorrow. And even if that never happens, you might end up being their sounding board, critique partner, technical support, or drinking buddy. I think this trend bears watching.

One flavor of coworking is called "jelly"; it's informal and irregular. It got its name because its founders (inventors?) were eating jelly beans when they conceived the idea. (But it reminds me of the "gels" that Sheller discusses: "whereas a network implies clean nodes and ties, then, a gel is suggestive of the softer, more blurred boundaries of social interaction" (p.47).

As you might expect, Austin is one of the few places where Jelly has taken off in a big way. JellyInAustin is a website for coordinating (or "forecasting") Jelly meetups, and acts as a community site.

Affiliated is the Austin Social Media Club, which hosts leading thinkers on social media and proponents of coworking (there's a lot of overlap). SMC describes itself as "part think tank, part curiosity, all new media."

Since coffee shops are not necessarily the best place to cowork -- and certainly not the best place to meet clients -- at least two efforts are being made to create coworking spaces in Austin. Julie Gomoll's Launch Pad Coworking launches in September 2008; and Conjunctured is partnering with StartupDistrict.com to open up another coworking space this summer that is meant to anchor a de facto tech incubator. In Conjunctured's case, the idea is to provide independent contractors with stable collaboration spaces, but also stable relationships with other entrepreneurs. Coworkers could freely subcontract each other for jobs as short as two hours, could form more stable teams, and could share expertise and participate in mutual critique. If stable teams decided to develop their own companies, they would be encouraged to lease property nearby, creating a de facto startup district.

Coworking is a really interesting trend, going beyond project-oriented organizations, beyond federations, and further toward entirely networked organizations. At the same time, it faces significant challenges in terms of accountability, reputation, trust, stability, and project management and planning. Those challenges are already being addressed with some emergent systems, practices, and expectations, but I expect significant further development. I'm going to be watching these developments closely over the next several months and will blog about them here when possible.

Soon I'll also be blogging about recent conversations with two members of Conjunctured. They're fascinating, and should provide further insights into the challenges above. In my view, we have to keep close watch on these challenges, not least because some of our students will be facing them soon.

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