Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Secure what people do, because information doesn't do

JP Rangaswami, in a delightful read, muses on Drucker's quote "people make shoes, not money" and how information has no value until it informs a decision.  Our institutions value sharing, cooperation and trust -- but create cultures of hoarding for advantage and control out of fear.  Perhaps this is because we haven't learned to manage when information wants to be free.  JP notes that "Information is changing. And it is becoming more valuable to us all by becoming less valuable to any one of us." 

But this except sparked a thought:

Take a completely different perspective on all this. Privacy. Why does someone worry about who has access to his medical records? Not because the records themselves have value. But because someone can misuse them. Because, for example, someone can refuse to insure, or raise premiums for, some hitherto undeclared medical condition. Or even worse, for some future projected medical condition, projected as a result of discovered habits.

It’s not about the information, it’s about what you do with it.

Privacy and security paradigms focus on controlling the flow of information.  I wonder not only if this is possible.  But if its the right focus.  Information precedes action.  Now I'm no Bruce Schneier, but perhaps the security industry should be focused more on controlling action than information.

I recall a panel on Data at Large at PC Forum, way back in 2003.  Jeff Jonas from SRD shared how they were at the frontier of using social network analysis for security in casinos.  In hallway conversation, Gilman Louie, then with In-Q-Tel, clarified an interesting tension around homeland security and civil liberties.  In a top-down manner you could data mine communications for patterns and profiles to discover threats.  Or, from the bottom-up, you could work with a lead to reveal a graph of conspiracy.  The latter is much closer to traditional intelligence or the practice of private investors, just with new tools.  And with less risk of infringing upon civil liberties.

I recall when we introduced wikis into a bank in London where JP was the CIO.  The compliance officer's initial reaction was to demand that he approve every edit before it was posted.  Of course we could have developed that feature, and the attempt to control would prevent any collaboration whatsoever.  But we showed him the audit trail inherent in a wiki, revision history where you can see who did what at what time.  We gave him some smart search feeds for basic monitoring.  If someone did something inappropriate, he could prosecute the lead and potentially fire them.

Perhaps the need to know basis has less of a basis than we believe.  Perhaps there is an opportunity for security systems to be more effective as a whole system when it focuses on what people do with information instead of controlling its flow.

Change Congress Call for Tags

Larry Lessig's Change-Congress.org seeks to reform the influence of money on politics by enabling emergent pluralism.  It calls for citizens and candidates to take a pledge.  Click on the badge to see mine.  The principles behind the pledges are:

1. No money from lobbyists or PACs

2. Vote to end earmarks

3. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency

4. Support publicly-financed campaigns

Lessig put out a call to action yesterday:

I'm asking you today to go to the site and first tag the candidates in your own district. When that's done, then please work on as many other districts as you can. You'll get points as you do this (we're not sure what those points will get you beyond whuffie among reformers). And please spread this please of mine around to as many others as you can. Blog it, spam with it, talk about it at parties: We need to complete this map as quickly as possible and it will only get done with your help. Here's the link to get started:

http://change-congress.org/tag/

Quick Question

Would you prefer I take my del.icio.us Linkorama out of my RSS feed?

Slideshare slammed with DDOS from China

Yesterday I ran into Slideshare co-founder and CTO Jonathan Boutelle in the Blogtropolus lounge.  He told me about the Denial of Service attacks from China that Techcrunch covered this morning.  It aimed to bring down political content through removal and password reset requests by fake users, and then a botnet attack last Thursday and Friday.  CNN had a similar attack. 

It continues now, perhaps after blog coverage, but that shouldn't stop people from raising awareness.  Think of it as recruiting a friendly botnet, on a political level.

Fireball and Location, Location, Location at Web 2.0 Expo

In semi-private beta at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, Fireball is ghost of Dodgeball
revived across Twitter, Upcoming.org and location webservice Fire Eagle.  I'm looking forward to enabling my location and querying find my friends amidst the unwashed web masses at this mega event.

Plazes also just launched FireEagle support, letting my location on the network automatically update Fireball.

My guess is this if enough people get access to the beta, this could be the app of inflection for Fire Eagle, what SXSW did for Twitter.

Whipping up a batch of effective communications

Randall Stross in the NYTimes writes about how prominent bloggers get overwhelmed by email and how its nothing new.  Of course, journalists empathize with this condition, so its perhaps over emphasized at large.  But implicit in a lot of conversations I've had lately, we've turned up the noise in our communications and there is a lot of room for innovation in extracting signal and enhancing effectiveness. 

Randall notes how  human proxies in the form of assistants may not be effective.  Yes, you can offshore outsource such services at nominal cost these days, but if anything such an assistant should be closer to you than anyone to be effective.  And the article does not explore using the social network as a filter, going beyond the single assistant.  The article does highlight the practices of H.L. Menchken, known for his effective and illustrious correspondence, who died 50 years ago.

Whether the post brought 10 or 80 letters, Mencken read and answered them all the same day. He said, “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”

YET at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent as to interrupt his work.

Batch processing was easier when everyone was on the same clocks for sending and receiving.  Today most people have a bell curve for their communications, with peak hours generally being when they are awake.  And everyone has a different bell curve not to mention different time zones.

This batch processing approach is inherently more efficient, but to make it effective you have to establish protocols with whom you communicate.  Productivity guru Tim Ferriss notes:

...In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail. The fastest method I’ve found for controlling the e-mail impulse is to set up an autoresponder that indicates you will be checking e-mail twice per day or less. This is an example of “batching” tasks (performing like tasks at set times, between which you let them accumulate), and your success with batching will depend on two factors:

1.  Your ability to train others to respect these intervals
and, much more difficult,
2.  Your ability to discipline yourself to follow your own rules

I think you can work out these protocols with people you regularly communicate.  But such people also adapt to you, perhaps your lack of responsiveness and how you react in escalating.  But establishing these protocols, across modalities, are the most difficult with the same strangers who could provide the most valuable new information to you.  Look Tantek's approach of putting and adapting his protocols on a wiki page.  Look at Robert Scoble's difficulty in how he follows everyone who follows him, but then can't get people to respect a protocol of not sending him direct messages in twitter, especially the text messages are expensive when on the road in Israel.  Valuing and responding new correspondents, what Menchen called courtesy and we might call quaint, rises in complexity as modalities fragment communication.

Ms. Rodgers said that Mencken was acutely disturbed by interruptions that broke his concentration. The sound of a ringing telephone was associated in his mind, he once wrote, with “wishing heartily that Alexander Graham Bell had been run over by an ice wagon at the age of 4.”

Some people might wish the same for Jack, Ev and Biz, although an ice wagon is tough to come by these days.

As we are splintering out of email and into other modalities, they tend to share some common traits:

• Pull models of attention management instead of push
• Less formal
• More public and discoverable
• With RSS and APIs, messages can be used in other modalities
• Filtered by people

These modalities, such a blogs and Twitter, and not to mention more specialized forms such as social bookmarking, feed sharing, Flickr or obnoxious Facebook apps -- all trend towards batch processing.  They can almost all flow into an RSS newsreader for a power user.  And conversations flow across them and often threads and comments are hard to follow.  But that's okay because of informality and discovering what you missed while in the flow is far easier. 

One key to effectiveness is looking for opportunities for more public conversation to prompt easy group forming and gaining agreement from the group on a more effective set of protocols.

Batch processing private correspondence needs more than tools, but practices.  We've known for a while now that creating private spaces for collaboration can aid productivity by taking some email out of the inbox.  And more recently with wikis and the right practices, groups can agree on protocols to be more effective and adapt them rapidly.  To Tim Ferriss' point, this needs discipline, but for the whole group.

Something I'm seeing with what we recently launched at Socialtext is an important distinction:

1. You can follow people and their more public communications.  They will be less formal, often curating information for you while in the flow of their own activity.  By pulling their flow at a time convenient for you and publishing not just for them, you gain greater social discovery.
2. As you form more private groups in workspaces, and if you take the time to gain agreement on communication protocols, you can batch process effectively.
3. If either (1) which requires no protocol, or (2) which does, fails to be effective for sender or receiver -- by all means escalate, even at risk of being run over by an ice wagon.

Putting People in the Wiki

Today Socialtext launched Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard, significant enhancements that make people a first class object in the wiki platform and give them greater control over their internal and external information.  We also launched Four Solution areas that I've mentioned before, that turn features that demo well into strategic implementations, but they need greater explanation.

For now, let me link elsewhere:

• TechCrunch: SocialText Putting A Little Social Into…Enterprise Wikis
• Mashable: Socialtext Makes Wikis Social; Announces People and Dashboard
• Webware: Socialtext enterprise wiki getting social network features
• Scott Schnaars: Socialtext is Made of People
• Social Web Strategies: New Socialtext innovations
• Alan Lepofsky: Socialtext Expands with People and Dashboards
• CIO Mag: Socialtext Adds Features to its Enterprise Wiki
• Tom Raftery: Enterprise wikis reviewed update
• Dennis Howlett: Socialtext moves the collaboration goal posts
• Pete Kaminski: Socialtext 3.0!
• Press Release

 

Networks don't have people. People have networks.

"Networks don't have people.  People have networks." - Demian Entrekin

Christopher Carfi shared this quote, which really resonates with me, not just 'cause its made of people.  He goes on to make this point:

The right point of integration is around the individual.  Each of us is the center of our own universe.

Here's some related Soylent Green.

The Edge of the Organization in Turbulent Times

  flap your wings 
  Originally uploaded by hanssolo

Yesterday I was talking about the US recession with my boss, Eugene Lee.  Our best customers are looking at the downturn as an opportunity.  A chance to optimize, innovate, adapt and seize new opportunities.  But this isn't the case for most of corporate America.  Eugene shared an interesting insight about the role of the edge of and organization and how its at risk in turbulent times.

The edge of the organization is the source of innovation and growth.  Its also where an organization can sense and respond to change.  Ironically, during a downturn, organizations often shave the edge of vital people and resources.  And the strains to do more with less hampers communication between the edge and the center, just when the center is making its most vital decisions.

JSB and John Hagel noted the edge is the only source of sustainable innovation, and the edge is becoming the core. On the same day I came across a post by JP Rangaswami, sparked by an article in BusinessWeek that crossed his social news feed.  Here's a big excerpt:

They make a number of points really well, points that I have written about before, but without the crispness and coherence they bring to the table:

• Innovation happens at edges
• Youth shouldn’t be discounted, their demographic group has edges as well, edges where innovation takes place
• We need to build platforms that sustain many open edges in order to foster innovation
• When building the platforms, we need to ensure that the time/money costs of edge innovation are kept low

The “lessons” piece at the end, while succinct, is really worthwhile. Don’t dismiss it lightly just because you may have come across variants before:

• Create more edges
• Provide better ways to connect at the edge
• Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation
• Experiment and iterate rapidly
• Social, technologic[al] and economic are inextricably intertwined

And, of course, the paragraph at the end.

“Social interaction often precedes economic activity.”

Otherwise known as cluetrain. Markets are conversations. Relationship before conversation before transaction.

Just as new solutions are emerging to enable effectiveness for the edge, it may be more critical than ever.

Fear Sells 2.0

Steve Lohr posts Enterprise 2.0: A Security Nightmare on the NY Times Bits blog.  Its the kind of fear sells story that is inevitable.  There are apps happenging outside your firewall.  P2P, unauthorized-by-the-enterprise proxies, YouTube and Google Apps.  Underwritten by a firewall 2.0 vendor, they slap the broadest popular monkier on it, Enterprise 2.0, and lo, profit.

Now, Palo Alto Networks may have some good fine grained capabilities, and their PR firm is to be congratulated.  But there are some very basic issues that concern me:

• Every Enterprise 2.0 firm worth their salt has on-site deployment options.  Some like Socialtext have appliances, which give you behind the firewall benefits of SaaS.
• Not everything attributed as a threat in this piece is Enterprise 2.0.  It lumps everything on the web in one bag.  And the more enterprises shun the outside in turbulent times, the less they will adapt to survive it.
• While meeting security requirements is a reasonable part of doing business in this sector, illusions of control do little but erect barriers to collaboration.
• Last time the economy was in a downturn, further muddied by fog of real war, it was a Fear Economy, with vendors only highlighting risk with claims to manage it.  I think we are there again now in popular consciousness, but it is not the case that threat levels have escalated beyond our usual advancing of good policy and practice.

There is a lot more to be said.  There are a lot of quotes about fear and how a person or society deals with it by far wiser men than me.  Recall them, because they are unforgettable.

RecentChangesCamp May 9-11th in Palo Alto

RecentChangesCamp, the Barcamp for the wiki way, is May 9-11th in Palo Alto:

RecentChangesCamp was born from the intersection of wiki and OpenSpace - a very wiki-like way of organizing gatherings. A lot of cool people into wiki, community and collaboration will be there - what do you want to talk with them about? Every participant is invited to lead their own sessions; the guideline is to take responsibility for what you love. In addition to general and technical conversations about - and actual coding on - wikis and other software, session topics from past RCCs have covered subjects from art to social organizing to philanthropy, playing a creative conversation game, and individual & group coding practices. See the past conference wikis for more complete lists and session notes.

Anyone and everyone is invited to attend. You will especially enjoy Recent Changes Camp, if you happen to be any of the the following:

    *      Member of any open wiki community or someone who uses wikis at work, school or in any other context
    * Interested in community, action, collaboration, creativity or any other activity in which the self-organizing power of wiki might be helpful
    *      Interested in the OpenCulture and/or OpenTechnology movements
    *      Interested in knowledge creation and sharing knowledge
    *      A generally curious and inquisitive person

Signup on the wiki, Upcoming or Facebook.

SHDH 24.5

Next Saturday at 3pm till bust is SuperHappyDevHouse 24.5 at the Socialtext Coworking space.

StartupHappyDevHouse is not a full on DevHouse, so we'll be providing snacks and drinks, but no dinner. We'll also be skipping the Lightning Talks, which leaves 100% of the time for hacking! Bring your laptop, your project, your startup and leave your shoes at the door (or not). As usual, admission is free and open to everyone.

RSVP @ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10749954249

RSVP @ Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/472612

Why The Marketing World Can't Turn

This was originally posted in a private space for the SAP marketing community.

Marketing professionals don't have difficulty "getting" Social Media. They are apt to play on Facebook, network on LinkedIn, read and possibly write on personal blogs and Wikipedia. If someone wants to engross themselves with the tools, they can as consumers. And there is far too much blogged about what it means for their business than most have time for. But when it comes time for a Director of Product Marketing to pitch for budget on a Social Media, things may grind to a halt.

The reason is we are still developing the language, let alone the numbers, around Social Media as a marketing investment. David Meerman Scott  notes correctly that Viral Marketing is not about sales leads.  Same for Social Media.

The hardest part of adapting your marketing thinking is that the predominant pattern in Web 2.0 is sharing control to create value. You see it in communities like Wikipedia or YouTube. You see it in business models like Open Source. You see it when the conversations around your brand happen without you. But there is no buy vs. build equation for deciding to share control. The decision to put intellectual property into the commons does not yet have tools to forecast return.

We think we have marketing down to a science. And we use the language of war -- campaigns that divide targets for capture. Lead generation often comes with guarantees. The ROI of a campaign is supposedly known in advance.

But I'll wager that the campaigns that have the best known returns are the ones your audience is most sensitized against. If not simply viewed as spam. And those campaigns are done at the greatest distance from the customer, if not increasing it.

The Edleman Trust Barometer tells us that in six out of ten countries surveyed, individuals trust their peers to inform decisions more than institutions. And half believe the word of a rank and file employee over a CEO. (yes, I've quoted this twice on this blog) We've been erroding trust, not just in the private sector. And with the NetGens entering their second year into the workforce, they bring even stronger attitudes about social influence.

They say you can't manage what you can't measure. I'd suggest you can measure social marketing, but with less leading indicators. Stop thinking about the number of impressions, but who you impress and more importantly who they impress. Referrals and references are a mainstay of enterprise software, but you need to find new ways to engage and attribute them to return. How can influence a decision maker without witholding information from them and a wider market? What processes can you redesign by making them more transparent and participatory? How can you foster deeper relationships on mutual trust that lead to others?

Adaptive Path looks for CEO 2.0

Our good friends at Adaptive Path are looking for a new CEO, openly.  As you may know, searching openly for CEO 2.0 can have great results.

This is a fantastic opportunity for someone.  Help spread the word.

The Technology Doesn't Matter

As Clay Shirky recently remarked on the Colbert Report, so it must be true, "social tools aren't interesting until the technology becomes boring." And more to the point "the social effects are more important than how the technology works." This might be disconcerting to people in the technology business an hopefully they come realize they aren't in the technology business. But we are still in the early stages of social software. Case in point is how we still using the rudimentary language of features. Like "wiki" or "blog" or "social networking." Techcrunch posts and Facebook apps are a constant stream of feature porn.

Perhaps this is good at establishing a baseline literacy for tools. But effective implementation can't be found in the feature matrix. In fact, the more features you introduce, the more barriers are created between users and the more fragmented your community can become. Eric Von Hippel notes that technology has no value unless you again agreement from users on how to use it. This goes for ERP, but doubly for social software which is largely unstructured, powered by people whose roles and interests vary and requires different adoption strategies.

In my next four posts, I'd like to introduce four core Solution Areas for Business Social Software. My goal is not just to share what we've found as common social patterns, but how to extract value from them:

 

• Collaborative Intelligence for sales & marketing
• Participatory Knowledgebase for service & support
• Flexible Client Collaboration for professional services
• Business Social Networks for partners & customers

And if you can't wait, you will find a sample in my recent interview with CIO Magazine.

Twhirling Seemic's Underweb

What I like about the Seesmic's acquisition of Twhirl isn't that I'm using it as my default client for Twitter.   Or that I happen to use Seesmic and look forward to some chocolate and peanut butter goodness.

I thought last year was the year of offline apps.  And it was, of platforms.  The rise of AIM was a case in point, but it still needed a kller app.  It might still, and when Eugene Lee first mentioned Twhirl to me I didn't take too much note of it beyond  richer clone of Twitterific.  Later adopted it and you learn about social tools by playing with them.

The thing is we will see more special purpose browser clients that leverage the opaque flows of APIs.  We've all expected it, but now we see them enriching the desktop.  Look at PicLens.  Just look and look and look how it augments, for now, the browser experience.  Expect that Tim Berners Lee expected an editor, not a browser.  And then with varying media and microcontent, the possibilities are even more diverse than what you expect now.

In the enterprise, of course, this has to get past the standard desktop model that is administered.  Individual choice will still thrive within he standard browser.  But experimentation of a richer, more persistent and connected web will happen.  As we reverberate between centralization and decentralization, with darlings like FriendFeed feeding upon a small ebb of fragmentation, the timing is right for things that bring our disparate activity together for us in new ways (not that Lifetreaming is new, its the pattern and time in which solutions are brought to bear for them).

The Seesmic thing makes sense on a number of levels beyond the trend line.  It starts with how a flash vdeo client plays well with AIM.  And the need to hook into the command line of an emerging web (and for twitter and others it becomes interesting if clients that subsume attention subsume more).  Just follow the attention and gestures that mean something (Steve Gilmore, where art thou?).

None of this is ready for mainstream (consumer, already made the other point).  But, I, for one, welcome our new atomized client underlords.  The underweb, today, fits those who do more than browse in their pajamas.  And if you think more than that -- too much information.

Why Wiki's Aren't Your Daddy's IT

Michael Idinopulos blogs  Why wiki's aren't like other IT:

First, wikis are not a scale play. A single business unit, a single team, even a single person can derive business value from using a wiki. Of course the network effects are exponentially greater at larger scale, but there's a lot of benefit even without the scale.

Second, wikis are not a standardization play. Traditional IT systems are all about trying to limit variation and get everyone to do things the same way (often for good reason). Wikis area all about morphing, molding, and adapting to the way people and groups want to work. So the grassroots appeal is not surprising.

Finally it's difficult to force someone to use a wiki. It's relatively easy to force compliance around a Purchasing, HR, or Finance system: simply mandate usage and take away the alternatives. But the alternative to wikis is email, and who's going to take that away? People will use wikis only if they want to, so the adoption has to come from front-line workers freely choosing the wiki over other alternatives equally available to them.

He goes on to note the economics of SaaS and Appliance models provide further differentiation.  I'd note that his second and third points get at the difference for collaboration something you can't mandate from the top down.  Andrew McAfee would chime in here pointing out the freeform difference of Enterprise 2.0, where the structure emerges as a byproduct of using the tool, rather than being defined in advance.  Often and unfortunately by IT.