So the thought that occurred to me is… what if we’re not putting it in a proper context? Maybe Robert’s Rules are more about collaboration than we realize at first blush. More on this in a second. Bookmark this idea:

Goal: Conventions are needed in virtual collaborations.

Now this might or might not be very controversial, but I want to try and use a model that most people are familiar with (Robert’s Rules) and apply it to something that for most people is going to be very foreign: Google Wave.

So let me offer a rhetorical question…

If Google Wave is the next big thing in virtual collaboration, what do the collaborations look like?

If you’ve already received an invite and launched Google Wave, you probably went into it the first time a lot more excited than you walked away from it. Why? Because of one of a handful of reasons. My guess that some or all of these apply to you:

• You had no one to talk to
• You couldn’t find a public wave to jump into
• It was generally buggy or crashed a lot
• You found a Wave to participate in, but over time it’s nothing really new (except for some stuff like real-time typing). Even that is more of a distractor.
• You started a public Wave and it got so huge as to lose meaning, crash your browser, crash Wave, etc.
• The playback feature is buggy, or I’m still not following what’s going on.

Whatever the reason is, there’s a lot of people using Wave right now who are noticing that while there’s a lot of potential in the tool, we’re either a) not sure of what that potential really is; or b) it’s got a long way to go to be useful.

I’ve started a few public waves that picked up traffic. Two in particular (launch them as you will, beware that the Waves are big) include the LrnWave, which became more of a playground for #lrnchat people on Wave and their friends (and general public) and the DevLearn 2009 Public Wave, also public, and meant primarily for DevLearn attendees.

The LrnWave, becoming a playground, is perfectly understandable — I mean, everyone needs a place to play that’s safe so we can learn the tool. It’s not exactly spelled out for you on how to use it, much less get started.

The DevLearn Wave kinda started as a playground, also, but there are some useful things emerging. Example, we started listing our arrival times by airport and time, and that may hopefully allow people to figure out how to rideshare to the hotel (especially from San Francisco). That was a useful first collaboration experiment.

Also in the DevLearn Wave, there’s a couple of Yes/No/Maybe polls that demonstrate some utility of the widgets for Wave. In a synchronous exercise, I think it has a lot of use. It’s useful asynchronously too, but it loses a bit of the impact over the longer term.

Now, Google Wave is in an alpha state — an “early preview” and anyone using it is still getting used to it, so there’s a lot of caveats here. There’s not an established community, even if you think of #lrnchat folks rolling into a new tool — it’s a new thing and no one is an expert at it (which is saying something when no one is an “expert” Twitter user either). All that considered, at a second blush, my observation across several public waves is this: where there’s a structure for people to work within, the wave (or parts of a wave) has been pretty useful/productive (given how it’s been employed). Where there’s no identifiable structure or context, the wave is usually a fancier but buggy BBS.

Supporting Question: Why aren’t we collaborating on something bigger?

IMHO there’s a couple of reasons why we’re not all working on climate change, improving health care in the US, curing cancer, revamping our energy system, tackling rampant obesity and replacing ADDIE with a better workflow for Instructional Design (snark intended). Incomplete, my list of reasons why include:

1. These are big honking issues that no sub-group of us can just fix for the rest of us.
2. We mere mortals don’t communicate in ways that easily translate across languages, capabilities, geography, contexts, etc.
3. Our means of talking to (let alone *with*) each other don’t scale.

Google Wave is a step in the right direction. The tools is pretty much a blank slate when it comes to conventions. Most public waves I’ve seen have little to know organizational model; my guess is the participants aren’t thinking about it (so it’s like a chat to them or a BBS — anything but an actual “Wave”) OR they’re waiting for the organizational model to emerge organically from the users who continue to habit a particular Wave. All fine and good.

But if you want to use Wave right now… and by “use” I mean leverage the tool to accomplish something with a group… you need to have common expectations of how you’re going to work together, just like you’d have to have if you were working with people in a conference room, synchronously face-to-face. There are two waves that have been brought to my attention that seek to at least identify standards for moderation of Waves (from a facilitation perspective) and etiquette (what’s expected behavior).

I won’t repeat what’s on those waves. If you have an account you can go yourself. What I’d point out is that a very high level, if you moderate a group in the real world with rational, exptected behaviors and you’re working with any real community (maybe we’re talking about your colleagues at work, peers at a conference, #lrnchat folks, etc) where there are social mores and customs — there are conventions for how you behave in those communities, whether you readily acknowledge them or not.

#lrnchat does it all the time in terms of etiquette. The rules shared at the beginning of every session include the litany:

1. Introduce yourself. (We do this again at the end). Location? Focus? Fave topics?
2. [try to] stay on the #lrnchat topic. A new question will be asked every 20 min or so. If you can, include Q# in related responses.
3. When writing, complete thoughts help followers outside chat learn from you.
4. on #lrnchat we aim to play nice. Sarcasm, welcome tho.
5. Periodically RT questions so others outside #lrnchat know what you’re talking about so they can chime in.
6. Remember to include the #lrnchat in all posts. http://tweetchat.com, http://tweetgrid.com & http://twubs.com/lrnchat work well.
7. 10 min before end, tell us if you need anything from the other #lrnchat participants. Time to reintroduce yourself, too. Links welcome.
8. Please RT important points and vital questions asked for clarification, so we don’t miss them amid the lively and fast-paced #lrnchat

The format of every #lrnchat follows a model, or pattern that is predictable, so the community can immediately conduct itself even in absence of some of the facilitators. The model for #lrnchat, as an example, is:

Introductions -> Deep Question -> Practical Question -> Out-of-the-box Question -> Reintroduce & Cleanup

Pretty much every #lrnchat follows this model. The simple, predictable structure is, I’m convinced, a major reason why it is gaining in strength instead of devolution. Even in an open medium like Twitter, to accomplish certain types of collaborative goals, there must be an adopted structure that the community accepts: an “order” if you will.

Hence the tie-in to Robert’s Rules of Order. They’re adopted by a community (be they legislators in government, executive boards, community groups, 4H, whatever) so that groups that convene regularly to accomplish something can get things done in ways that are acceptable and desireable by the community. From the history of Robert’s Rules itself…

“Henry Martyn Robert was an engineering officer in the regular Army. Without warning he was asked to preside over a public meeting being held in a church in his community and realized that he did not know how. He tried anyway and his embarrassment was supreme. This event, which may seem familiar to many readers, left him determined never to attend another meeting until he knew something of parliamentary law.”

Why would he need to preside over a meeting in his community? Anyone? My guess is that the group that was meeting didn’t know how to get anything done, and even with his own set of assumptions, he couldn’t get the group to adopt any framework to have a productive discussion without a model that everyone could understand. It’s my guess. If you actually geek out on this stuff and know more, please share in the comments below.

Anyway, if you can accept that shared adopted models for collaboration help (not necessarily agree or subscribe to that idea), here’s another

Supporting Question: What models might work for virtual collaborations to build/share learning?

Let’s take a look at the meta of this post. Because, in fact, I’ve been modeling a model for you already.

Up towards the top, there’s an H1 to define our Goal. This could be our theme, focus, idea, whatever — it’s the way in which we’re going to categorize our shared conversations and collaborations. It’s what we’re working toward; what we’re talking about.

Now to meet a Goal, we need to generate as much focused discussion as we can WITHOUT telling ourselves what to say. What we want to do is create channels for discussion. I’m using H2 Questions (only one here so far) to help define some context with plenty of room for discussion, debate, disagreement and hopefully new perspectives.

These bigger questions, however, are likely too big in and of themselves to draw meaningful, actionable takeaways in a group. That’s why we need H3 Supporting Questions. They might help draw out some granular points of discussion that might be actionable.

This model I’m using in this post is just an idea. I’m trying to organize a public Wave discussion that I’d facilitate using this model. I’m also planning on using it in my session at DevLearn so that people who join in virtually might be able to follow better in real-time and after the event. Rather than just one linear flow of information (like a presentation), I want to have a discussion and try and maintain it both in the physical space and time we’ll share at DevLearn AND virtual, synchronously and then structured for asynchronously post-game.

Anyway, I know this is a long post. I hope this engages you and I hope you’ll comment with your own goals and questions for us to continue this discussion.

Related posts:

1. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem
2. Star Wars MG: Stay On Target

If you’re connected to me in any way, already in Google Wave, have invitations you can share, please leave a reply for who you’re inviting, starting from the top of the list on down.  No need to double-invite anyone.

Thanks!

No related posts.

Before Twitter, I was a pretty successful learning technologist.  I used and evangelized Flash. In a time before you could make a career in ActionScript, my career was ActionScript.

I liked social media.  I thought a lot about the implications social media could have on a broader definition of E-Learning.  I blogged a lot.  I tried lots of betas.  If you asked any peers of mine to describe me, they would probably tell you that I was a talented content developer.  I never felt comfortable with the designation, but it made sense.  I developed content. Lots of content.  I was good at it: I had efficiency and preternatural talent for architecture of static and dynamic content.  I could focus my attention and teach myself new tools, languages, technologies at lighting pace.

What am I now, after Twitter? Am I still a developer? I don’t write code with any frequency, so much as manipulate code as a need arises.  I don’t coach best practices in authoring tools much, even though there’s much I could share.  All the things I’ve been known and notable for are not the things I do now.  I don’t manage people.  I don’t formally lead people.

What Twitter has singularly enabled for me, that no other tool before it has done quite so well, is firstly to connect me to people — lots of people — very much like me in life experiences, professional drive, sense of purpose, sense of humor, etc.  That awareness changed me — because before when faced with a challenge, I’d have no recourse but to tackle some kinds of challenges by myself.  Once I had a network aligned by multiple shared affinities, I could crowdsource challenge analyis, collect insights and respond with multiple levels of next-actions rather than tackle everything head-on by myself.  I became a networked thinker.

Since Twitter, I hardly use Google Reader or any other RSS aggregator to find links worth knowing.  I now solely rely on my networks to supply me with the information that relevant, and since my networks are pretty tightly aligned to my collective interests, my information is filtered with an appropriate mix tailored to me: news, a lot of learning information, some general design discoveries and a dash here and there of irreverent humor, with suggestions for new music worth checking out.  I have a personalized web.

I’ve sat in now on probably 80 different conferences in the last year.  I physically attended less than ten.  The context generated by my network as they tweet their conference activities has accelerated my professional growth.  I don’t pretend to have a mastery of virtual world creation, user experience design, government transparency efforts or even Flash and Flex anymore — but I have a really good bead on what the buzz is, what the issues are, why things that are going on in these areas are relevant to my work and my life and who I can reach out to if I need more information — not just who I can email; who will reply back with the exact piece of information I need.  I can situate myself anywhere.

Twitter was a change for me.  As a result of having taken to the tool, I am now changed as a professional.  I am changed in how I think.  I am changed in how I work.  I am changed in how I seek, absorb and process many kinds of information.

There will be another new tool, probably sometime soon given how rapidly things change.  I wonder how I will change as a result.  I wonder about how people collaborating together, becoming aware of one another, witnessing each other’s changes can accerlate their alignment, share their goals and produce — even innovate — more richly; with more acceleration; with more impact.

That’s my musing for today…

Related posts:

1. A Knowledge Exchange Strategy for Enterprise
2. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem
3. Social Media and Military Security

At work, our team once had no skills or capability to produce media.  For less than $100, we were able to produce video and audio.  We’ve taken that train as far as it goes, and leaders grew discontent with the quality of the audio and video we could produce.  Still, we kept doing it.  Why? Because they didn’t care enough to want to pay for something better.

I’ve spent the better part of two days re-evaluating the tools we have and what capabilities they provide for our team, in terms of media production.  When we began building E-Learning content ourselves, there was no budget and no appreciation for media, so everything had to be guerilla-style.

What is guerilla-style multimedia? It’s multimedia production on the cheap. I selected a small, $40 FlexMic (from MacMice) that was a USB condenser microphone, which provides better audio quality than the unpowered microphones that plug into your Audio-In port on your computer.  We put a pop-screen together out of a coat hanger and panty hose (I read that one online a few years back). For video, I picked up a Flip Camera (which ended up getting adopted throughout the organization where people wanted to do video).

When we had no media capability and no business case to make, this gave us a set of tools which enabled only so much.  I’m now proud to say that our leadership is demanding better quality audio and better quality video, and that after two years we’re now easily making the business case it will take to significantly advance our ability to produce such multimedia in-house.

Sometimes to please people, you have to make them aware of the pain their own lack of investment causes.  You must withstand the countless retakes someone will make you do before a leader realizes that it’s the quality of the tools you’re using that prevents desired results. You must be ready with a plan to improve (and you must deliver on that plan).

Many organizations tend to value the diving catch; they should be valuing the people who prevent the need for diving catches but it’s largely not in our nature.  Designers, by definition of wanting to design the “right” experiences, tend to fight this head-on.  As a disruptive practice, I advise leveraging this cultural moray. Do the best job you can with the tools you have and continue to work on the plan to level up.  That way when the idea to improve becomes a leader’s idea, you have a solid plan to help that leader execute flawlessly.  You can make the diving catch.

Related posts:

1. What Makes Great Apps

The problem I run into more often than anything is that I don’t seem to have a lot of friends.  More to the point, despite how many hundreds of actual friends I have, we never seem to be online, playing the same game at the same time and aware of each other so we can play together.  The exchange of friend codes on the Wii is so ridiculously complicated, I imagine that it is so much better on XBox because of all the Microsoft integration, allowing you to port friends lists in and out of the platform.  I love the Wii for so many things, but the amount of work some of my friends put into manually managing their friends in each game, and scheduling times to play with each other online… it seems like a lot of work and I wonder how often it actually does work.

While there’s no consistent friend management on the iPhone, most online multiplayers I’ve installed hook up with Facebook Connect to put you in league with friends.

That still is a limiter, however.  Case in point? Scrabble, which has a pretty clean and obvious multiplayer component using Facebook.  You can play Scrabble on the web, through Facebook, or on the iPhone; both methods are portals to the same game which is what I’d expect to happen.  Compare this setup to Mafia Wars, which has a web-based portal outside of Facebook, a web-based portal in Facebook and the iPhone application — at least the iPhone and the Facebook portals have no means of playing the same game.  So my 147th level Mogul? Completely inaccessible to me on the iPhone, where I needed to start from scratch — which is why I uninstalled Mafia Wars not two seconds after figuring that out.

Unfortunately, even though I know a lot of Scrabble players, we’re never playing together at the same time.  Scrabble at least can hook me up with someone on Facebook that *is* playing when I’m playing (at the moment of starting a game), but that’s the only point of shared awareness.  If my opponent makes her move, I still need to either launch Scrabble to find out about it or launch Facebook to get the alert (or get the alert texted to my phone, etc). Unless there are several of us playing the same game on the same WiFi network, Scrabble can’t find anyone playing right nearby me, which is something I might prefer.

I deconstruct this part of the multiplayer experience in games to highlight one common gap that BAQON is intended to solve.  Gamers benefit from having location-aware and situation-aware services that connect them to their friends or potential friends nearby them, regardless of how they’re accessing the same (or similar) game.  It seems to me that if I’m limited only to playing with people on my wifi network OR people with Facebook accounts OR people playing on iPhones — that’s still not nearly as many candidates for meaningful connection or competition as ALL of those people, plus people who are playing the same game in the same place but through their cell service AND people who are playing the game who don’t belong to Facebook AND people playing the game on anything but an iPhone.

So, it’s not obvious for people who know me now as opposed to 9-10 years ago, but I used to build web-based games for kids 6-12.  I was producing them (writing up proposals, managing the project) and developing them (coding in ActionScript, programatic animations, architecture in Flash).  I worked with a team that produced the media and handled the server-side code and database layers.  This was my first job after teaching, and I loved it.  Making games was fun and I was very good at it.

There are many ways in which developing games is easier now.  For one thing developers now have frameworks to employ, like OpenFeint to handle high score boards, username, in-game purchases, unlockable items, etc.  On the other hand, games are so much more complicated now.  There’s more competition, your user base is savvier and likely more casual and definitely more interested in connecting with their friends and competition — all things you need to design and develop for.  You’re still largely responsible for maintaining or paying someone to maintain a backend to the game you want to build and that takes a huge chunk of resources to accomplish.  You’re nailed if you build a game no one wants to play, and you’re doubly nailed if you build a game that becomes so hot that you can’t handle the scale of adoption.

If you’re going to be building a game that touches the internet, I think you’re going to be interested in BAQON.  BAQON will provide your players with the ability to connect with each other based on location.  The intention is that BAQON will work with identity services like Facebook Connect or Google or MSN or… pick a service.  What we’re hoping you won’t need to do anymore is deal with is all the effort it takes to deal with your own backend for highscores and multiplayer awareness.  BAQON is not a socket server, but it should make it much easier to create interoperable real-time gaming experiences.  In that respect, I think it’s going to accelerate a lot of game development.

For one thing, if you’re a game developer and you don’t have to worry about maintaining a back-end system to mitigate your high scoreboards, even that by itself, probably saves you a huge boatload of time, money and resources.  This allows you, as a developer of a small game to focus on the actual game — not the servicing of things that aren’t the game.

If you’re a game developer with multiple titles, the ability to create an entry parlour where players can get line of sight into who’s playing what games of yours locally should help to expose new players to your other titles.  After all, as gamers are becoming more social, gamers will want more gaming experiences they can actually share with each other — almost impossible to do that right now, even with the emergence of location-aware gaming devices.  Now, people playing a game in one location may have line of sight into all the games being played in the same location.

By abstracting out persistent gaming information, you can enable multiple points of entry into shared game experiences.  This means you can potentially build games on multiple platforms and it’s all the same game.  When World of Warcraft launched, it was revolutionary because Macs and PCs could play with each other.  How many of the thousands of game titles around allow users to play with each other across platforms? It feels like it’s mainly the web-based titles, and as I use the iPhone I see that the stovepipes are still around. I believe we’ll help solve for it.

My question for you: if you’re building games and/or are gaming actively, what am I missing?

Related posts:

1. What BAQON Enables: Public Services Applications
2. What About BAQON?
3. Gah!!!!! the gPhone is not the gPhone!!!!

First, a little background.  When I was just the content specialist for ADL back in 2003-2006, Dennis worked for the same firm on completely different projects.  We got along, but it’s fair to say we weren’t close.  We had very little professional contact and I lacked some maturity, perspective and exposure that comes with experience.  Our families got together, but we didn’t bond much.

Now over the past year or so, Dennis has popped up on my radar through LinkedIn and Twitter.  Specifically through Twitter’s lens, we’ve noticed something interesting in what each other is into.  Through the relationships forged over the past couple of years with usability honchos like Brian Dusablon (@briandusablon) and anthropologists like Mark Oehlert (@moehlert), my appreciation for all the pieces of the puzzle I haven’t worked with myself has opened up.  As my understanding of what I don’t know grows, I appreciate Dennis’ gifts for user experience and intepretation more.

But still… it’s not like we hang out much.  So Dennis, being in-town, meets me for dinner.  It could be a cordial affair among acquaintances, but that’s not how it goes down.  He starts out the conversation with a simple enough question: “what are you up to?” and I start to describe BAQON — which he instantly gets.  He’s clued in by some professional experiences in similar circles that help him bridge the gaps in my flow of tweets.  Sprinkle that with some in-person delivery of information, giving him additional context and voila. He gets what I’m doing.

But more importantly, after about an hour of riffing ideas off each other in a frenzied rush of cerebral adrenaline, we finish our appetizers and drinks and he asks me, “So how did we get here?” What he continues to ask me is how did we establish this level of very close, very personal exchange of ideas?  Because we’re going deep, readers.  He’s got me thinking about ontologies and you know from reading this blog that’s not a road I go down on my own normally.  But yet we’re in a very concentrated state of some serious idea flow.  And let me just say, for the record, that if you’re going to ideate with Dennis, you need to have your A-game, because he’s a master.

So I respond to Dennis and simply state that I can connect with him at this level because I know he’s been paying attention to what I’m doing.  I know he’s doing some pretty interesting things in other places I don’t know much about, but aren’t completely unrelated.  I haven’t had time to follow his blog, but because he’s tweeting about his blog I have some idea about what he’s blogging about and as I can, I catch up.  I haven’t had time this week to catch up with everything, but I’ve been following his thread about bodystorming, because I can see its potential in helping me to express my ideas in ways that others might understand more fully.

He jumped at the chance to debrief me from the Innovations in E-Learning conference.  He’s been witness to my change, even from a distance; even at 140 characters at a time.

And that’s when it visibly hit Dennis: Twitter is a “Trust Ladder.”  To follow a blog takes time to read, time to absorb — but a tweet? That’s a very easy morsel to digest, and you can digest a lot of them.  So even though he probably doesn’t read every blog post of mine (and I, his) we have a way of knowing through the preponderance of messages what each other are doing — because we elect to pay attention to each other’s tweets.  And that… that is what builds the trust.

That must be what Chris Brogan talks about in “Trust Agents.”

So the lesson for leaders of organizations is this: stop fearing social networks.  Embrace them.  The people in your company networks who share openly — I mean, those are the people you want on every project, on every team.  They are the people who are connecting your organizational silos together.  They’re the conduit that keeps the current of information and knowledge circulating in the body of your organization.  You want all the flow you can get if you care about revenue, profit, reducing expenses, innovation, agility, etc.  You don’t turn on the social networking pipes for the entire organization to share information — awesome if they’ll do it, but they won’t.  Most people are afraid of change: multiply that fear by technology and you get… well, Dennis and I couldn’t come up with that answer of what you get, but I think you get laggards on Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations curve.

You don’t turn on the social networking pipes for everyone: you do it for the 1% of the organization that is connecting all your disparate pieces together, and potentially the 10% of the organization that is paying attention to what that 1% is doing.

If you want to break down walls that divide people, individually or as groups, just let people talk to each other, and engineer it in a way so that you have influencers talking with other influencers who have slightly different experiences — the gaps they’ll fill in will lead to the change and growth.  When the parties can identify the gap in their understanding of a shared concept, that’s the opportunity for both to create a new alignment.  That’s not something you can mandate top-down, and it’s far more powerful than anything you’d try to push that way.

So the bottom line is this: I came home with my head spinning with incredibly rich ideas that expand my knowledge in new ways.  Could a total stranger have the same conversation with me? No.  Could a best friend have that effect on me? Maybe, but people who fit the “best friend” camp are probably so aligned with you anyway that there’s little sunlight between your divergent ideas.  No… if you want to think new thoughts, you need to find people you can trust to bring out the best in your thinking who you know don’t look at things the way you do.

I find those people on Twitter — even, sometimes, if I already knew them.

P.S.: What’s with Dennis and Mark both from Baltimore? Is that some anthropologist hideout?

P.P.S: I’m sure I swiped a blogging idea from Dennis, but no doubt he can riff off this one and beat it silly with something much more awesome. That’s not a challenge to call him out. I’m citing he’s got some really good mental tools to write with.

Related posts:

1. Twitter Friends
2. Reflections on #IeL09, Part 1
3. Reflections on #IeL09, Part 4

Thesis:

• Identity is vital for people to participate in social activities.  For good or bad, people tend to participate within a discourse when they will be identified for their contribution (or lack thereof).
• The participation within a discourse breeds trust, and within a discourse of trust, people tend to share “personal” information to elevate context.
• Sharing sensitive information honestly across discourses as an anonymous agent is different from disclosing such information within a discourse.  Within discourse, trust in others is key.  Inter-discourse sharing requires something else.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve dabbled here and there with experiments in social activity and community building online.  The Star Wars Management Guide was the most recent experiment, but I’ve tried it before with the notion of authoring a SCORM book, group blogs, group podcasts, family blogs… I’ll freely admit I’m not the best guy to lead such community efforts because I just don’t have the time and resources to do the heavy lifting all by myself.  With each fizzled out idea, I’m learning a bit more about how people behave in groups, and how its different when that behavior is exposeable.

When my first daughter was born, I attempted to start up a family-wide blog as a means to collectively capture narratives from around the whole family.  Once a week I’d send out a question to the family and ask my parents and my wife’s parents to respond.  We were geographically dispersed and Wordpress required far less maintenance on my part than assembling together a word document.  At the time, there was no Google Docs (this was in 2004-2005).

Eventually, this kinda hit a wall.  Some members of the family just didn’t participate past a first post.  We’re not a huge family, so there was very little readership, and almost no commenting — which meant no visible feedback.  Then there was the fact that it was a blog — so family posting personal anecdotes about growing up was a layer of personal identification that everyone ultimately felt uncomfortable with.  In hindsight, blogging was the wrong tool for this exercise — but there’s something like a contradiction here that we can learn from and it’s evidenced by the misapplication of technical means and what it affords.

Radio Gen1us is hands-down my most successful social effort to-date.  Even though almost no one from the outside comments, we know that there are over 500 downloads a week.  That’s feedback enough.  To participate in Radio Gen1us, you need to record a podcast of yourself dj’ing a mixtape you put together.  You need to upload it to a webserver. You need to post the entry.  It’s a high barrier to entry, and that’s why we’ve only had six people including myself ever DJ, three with any consistency.  But it’s been in existence since June 2007.  Participants are identifiable, but the sensitivity of what they’re sharing (by and large) is pretty low (music preferences are not as risky to share as, say, political leanings). That said, some members who’ve hosted shows repeatedly share more and more, as identity manifests itself through repeated contribution (the Whuffie factor).

Juxtapose that with the Star Wars Management Guide.  I had the idea to put it in a wiki, because I wanted to open up the authoring to “anyone.”  Even though there seemed to be considerable interest in participation — it hasn’t gone anywhere.  As I stated even at the initial post, I’m not making this my life’s work, and that has considerable effect on the success of the project.  Look at what happened as the chapter ideas came in.  First, people wanted to claim chapters to write.  This pre-supposes the idea that authors would “own” the chapters, but the means to author them get in the way.  To author a work in a wiki means that while there’s a history of what you’ve contributed to any one page, someone else may add to that work, edit that work — diminish your writing.  The wiki sits out there right now.  Anyone can go in and write, but they’re not.  I’m not admonishing the lack of participation. I’m hoping we’re learning from that fact.

To participate in a social activity as an individual participant, there’s got to be something in it for you as a participant; generally referred to as the What’s In It For Me (WIIFM).  For me, as a participant, to engage with YOU, as another participant, I need some trust that you are who you appear to be, and that you’re going to respect our shared ground rules of participation (Whuffie).  Without both WIIFM and Whuffie, a social effort tends to falter at the start.  But there’s one more abstraction we need to deal with, and that’s what our interaction looks like from the outside.

There are exchanges that happen within one discourse, like #lrnchat which happens on Twitter every Thursday evening, and because the participants exchange within a certain discourse, and with regularity there’s a high degree of Whuffie factor there among the participants.  Because the chats are enjoyable, reliable and generally thought provoking, there’s also a high factor of WIIFM for each participant.  Twitter, as a means for communication, is widely open — that’s the intent, so participants have no illusions that what they contribute may be seen from outside their discourse.  I should posit that participants “should have” no illusions about this.  I don’t know for certain that they consider that #lrnchat is collected weekly and posted to the #lrnchat blog, which allows the contents of the exchange to be aggregated far beyond Twitter and the blog’s site itself.  For all we know, the #lrnchat gang is being cited in someone’s doctoral thesis across the world (yay) or being co-opted in someone’s for-profit book on E-Learning Best Practices (boo).  In either case, if anyone had the gumption to track down who I am (and judging by blog traffic recently from Twitter, that’s happening), it’s pretty easy to figure out who any of the participants are.  In the case of #lrnchat, on Twitter, everyone’s sharing the kind of information they wish to be known for, so the sharing of information outside of the discourse is something people are hoping for.

This leaves a question in my head: are there examples of social activity we want to share within a discourse but don’t want to share across discourses?  Let me posit a hypothetical.  Imagine you worked for a pharmaceutical company as a sales representative but you have some very strong beliefs in support of holistic medicine.  Chances are if you’re networking with anyone in a professional (”day job”) sense, you’re not talking about your interest or experience with energy healing.  With the risk of discovery by your employer, you either don’t network at all online with other healers, or you do so as anonymously as you can.  I mention this because I know people who are into holistic medicine as practitioners (not just subscribers).  Some of them work at pharmaceutical companies and of the twelve people I’m talking about, none of them participate in a community of practice or even network around holistic medicine.  Why?  It might be that the field itself just doesn’t draw a crowd that thinks about networking.  But it might also be because there’s a contradiction at play that makes it impossible to network and learn from each other.

Clay Shirky talks about, in Here Comes Everybody, that the transaction costs for all sorts of groups to network and collaborate together has become exceedingly low — to the point that anyone can network about anything — but it pre-supposes that you don’t care who knows who you are.  Certainly, people doing nefarious things don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing, but there are a host of reasons why you might wish to network and not be identifiable outside of the group you’re networking with.  I don’t know that I have a solution for that, but it’s something we should be talking about as learning professionals.

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As I wrote last week, the first way in which we want to help organize experiences is around fixed physical locations: things in physical space that don’t move (much).

Let me start with a potential application for public service.

We know going back the last several years that there’s a huge need in the US for infrastructure improvement.  This means fixing bridges, filling potholes, greening our tall buildings, expanding pedways to be more accessible.  Local, State and even Federal municipalities are responsible for this, in partnership with private citizens, small and large companies – but the resources to apply to the myriad of problems are scarce (like lots of resources these days).  One way we all could save money, accelerate improvements and help allocate proper resources scaled to critical needs is by opening up the information gathering and helping organize user-identified issues through aggregation means we already know how to employ.  Then, municipalities could apply experts in architecture, civil engineering and/or environmental science to determine a course of action instead of expend resources in just finding out where the problems are to begin with.

Ideally, mobile phone users could take pictures or video encoded with geo-location metadata of visible issues on their streets, bridges, buildings, etc into a shared repository on the Internet.  That repository could be made publicly available for a number of different purposes:

• Mapping services (like Google Maps, Yahoo, etc) could use the information to provide some visual information on where clusters of issues might be.
• Color-coding and shading to identify types and severity of issues, which might help identify related concerns.
• An application could export tagged structures and descriptive data related to them into a variety of formats (RSS, MS Project, ???) to aggregate that information into something else.
• Watchdog groups could use the same data set that Local, State and Federal resources use cross-agency to monitor the status of improvement efforts, promoting transparency and reducing wasteful redundancies that come from multiple data stores.
• Mashups with other available datastores (perhaps a visual mashup to highlight to what extent identified infrastructure needs may correlate with degrees of air quality, water quality, etc)

What the services on the back-end would help with would be in terms of:

• Organizing the information in terms of proximal location and granular details within a fixed location (what building, which floor of a building, what room, where in a room, etc).
• Make the data available and interoperable.
• Support the need to aggregate and filter all that user-generated metadata.
• Enable multiple points of entry to the data pool.

That last point is really important – not necessarily more important than the others, but pretty huge.  In my mind, we don’t want one application for mobile or web-enabled users to enter such information – we want to cast a wider net to empower more end-users to easily support and accelerate data collection and, thusly, infrastructure improvement.  Building a straight-up tagging application is one use, but what if someone wanted to create a scavenger hunt game to flesh out details about infrastructure improvement?  What if yet another game was a massively multiplayer game where discovery of infrastructure defects acted as multipliers or Mana in-game?

By abstracting the data collection aspect from the application, but making that data set widely available across applications, you enable more than one type of user activity while solving a larger problem.

In the case of collecting information for infrastructure improvements, it’s not that there aren’t people trying to do this already, or that there aren’t pockets of applications to help make this easier for our municipalities – it’s that many of the data stores aren’t well known, widely available and more critically shared.  By opening up the collection, filtering and aggregation of the data, we hopefully save time and money to accelerate solving a very big issue.

This is one way in which BAQON can be used.  In the coming weeks, I’ll highlight many more.

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• Influence comes from sharing ideas or modeling behaviors, but the person influencing others does so without a vested interest in the change of the influenced. That’s not to say influencers don’t care or are amoral; it’s simply an objective fact.  Influencers may not even need to know who they’re influencing.
• Coaching involves some kind of social contract where the coach has a vested interest in a change or growth within a limited scope.  This could be a skill or a behavior; it might be a set of skills or a set of behaviors.  Coaches are often role models, so they may have a wide degree of influence, but a coach’s primary investment in the coached is through the lens of the skill(s) and/or behavior(s) they signed on with.
• Mentorship involves a deeper social contract.  A mentor has a vested interest in the mentee’s change or growth as a person, which infers there’s really no limit to the behaviors or skills involved.  A mentor may coach to certain things, but they are invested in the person he/she is mentoring; not the skill for which they can coach.

Each of the above generally (but not always) involves increasing time and effort commitments.  I throw myself under the bus as an example.  I blog and tweet.  Sometimes, people take an idea I float out on the internets and they run with it as their own.  This pleases me a great deal, and I’m very interested to see how he/she takes it to another level — but I do this without regard for any one person or group’s particular change in thinking or behavior.  Many times, it’s completely opaque as to what, if any influence I have on others — but certainly people are influenced by what I blog and tweet.

As a side note, we can even talk about the technicalities of measuring influence virtually, because we have things like retweets and pingbacks and comments, etc.  But that’s not where I’m going…

In my day job, I was brought into the organization a few years ago to help consult on a specific set of problems: namely, getting the learning function to design, develop and manage E-leanring “better.”  This involved me coaching a large but pretty well defined set of skills to a set of Instructional Designers, and it involved me coaching a set of skills to project managers within the organization.  I also needed to coach people managers and IT engineers with some skills, too.  Now, I obviously care about people, so I became interested in the lives of those I work with — but as a coach, I was not interested (nor would I be welcomed) in coaching aspects of their job (or life) that had nothing to do with E-Learning.  In addition to the work agreement that brought me in the door, there was a social contract that was established.

Now over time, working with people, I’ve helped develop long-term relationships with individuals that I’ve signed on as a mentor.  I’m not a great mentor, but I do try to be better at it with every exchange.  I currently have one person whom I’m invested in her success; there’s no tangible reward in it for me other than the satisfaction I get from marveling in her achievements.  Kelly (no last names) is a brilliant multimedia producer who took an opportunity to pursue a Master’s abroad, and is coming back to the States.  Now she’s ready to consult on information design.  Even writing about her growth brings a smile to my face, because I remember meeting her two-months after she graduated college where she was a multimedia producer at an E-learning company, and I was hired in to be her boss — but I could tell she didn’t need someone to manage her work or time; she needed someone to remove obstacles for her.  I bore witness to her growth on the job, and even when I left that gig, I remained invested in her growth.

Side note: I say I’m not a great mentor, and that’s because I’m not as available as I’d like to be as a mentor.

Back to the first question, at first during #lrnchat I had a very difficult time identifying my mentors.  But clearly I’ve had mentors in the past.

Scouting (Boy Scouts of America, at least back in my day) is probably where my models of mentoring come from.  My dad mentored me.  I can say that up until high school (yes, I was still in Scouting in high school) my scouting leaders were all very vested in my growth as a person, in addition to coaching specific skills.

My first master teacher in student teaching was very vested in my development.  It wasn’t just coaching — she provided the constructive feedback I needed to thrive in education, beyond the classroom.

I’ve been blessed to have a lot of coaches who have had a lot of influence on me as a professional.  There may be mentors emerging for me even now, but the whole Jedi Master/Padawan thing is still too informal (for me).  As a mentor, with Kelly, she knows that I’m invested in her growth.  All she owes me in return is that she grows

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What we’re looking to do is to accelerate development of a new generation of applications for collaboration, communication, information exchange, learning and gaming where experiences can be persistent, interoperable and still contextualized (// vision). Our plan is to enable such development through a well documented and open (// free) set of web services or APIs that can be replicated on any server (// mision).

Making this functionality available as a set of web services enables the kinds of “combinatorial” innovations that can only happen when you mash things up.  Take for example the LETSI Run-Time Web Services. From a learning perspective, the ability to create an AR app that also can be tracked in an academic or corporate LMS?  I think that’d be pretty sweet, as well as the converse: making performance support content available through Augmented or VW space.

Our total scope is very bold, but we’re starting with a practical set of services that will support location-based experiences.  The goal for our initial set of services is to accelerate development of a variety of Augmented Reality (AR) applications, collaboration tools, learning transfer mechanisms, games, and the like. When the community organizes to help us improve and extend it, we’ll do it together as the source will be shared and open.

There’s probably some questions of timetables, so let me try and address that now. We’ve locked down our initial requirements set and begin development of the web services this weekend. The plan is to have a stable public release of the web services in December (if it’s clicking along, we’ll release it sooner).

BAQON in its first incarnation

As the idea guy and the evangelist for BAQON, I’m getting ready to architect out the website (baqon.org). I need your help. What do you want to know? What would help you prepare to build a web or native mobile or desktop applications (heck, even embedded applications)? How can I connect you to the people or resources you’d need to make your application idea happen?

Please use the comments below, but obviously feel free to contact me or hit me on Twitter (@mrch0mp3rs).

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