Archive for February, 2007
The following notes, are my personal notes from the excellent presentation Stowe gave during the course of LIFT two weeks ago, together with a following post about another excellent presentation by Tom Coates during BarCamp London, I’ll try to resume the basic ideas behind the so called Social Applications and the Social Web, formerly known as Web2.0.
Back in 99, Stowe wrote something along this lines his personal blog “/message”:
“A new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems (…) I call these systems social tools: software to shape culture”
Well, I couldn’t agree more, as he puts its, the internet is no longer a huge database and it’s users aren’t doing simple queries anymore, price based searching or common characteristics search are things of the past. People are in fact using the internet and the tools as a mean to extent their own social life. What takes part on the “third place”, those places where we tend to spend time, between Home and Work, the place were we actually go to meet people and further personal relationships. People this days are less affiliate to groups, political parties, bars or even sports clubs, people are overcoming that social need by other means, in this case and for the purpose of this subject, their using the internet as a mean to overcame that essential need: SOCIALIZE.
The question we must ask ourselves as a whole and in terms of general trend, is “Where are we spending time these days”, because, according to different sources, we are witnessing a major cultural shift, currently it seems, that for each hour spent watching TV, we’re spending more than four on the internet. I can personally subscribe to this thought, other than some occasional screening of special series, like Heroes, BSG or Dr. House, I rarely watch television at all, which could be making me less aware of my surroundings, but it seems these days is doing precisely the opposite, I much more involved on my local community, much more aware of national problems and at the same time, my personal network exploded thru the online communities I take part in.
Back to the social applications, and what makes them special is that contrary to their predecessors, these applications have in common the rule of having the individual needs at their core, individuals and their needs must come first than the group. Individual is the new group: my passions, my contacts, my markets, and my groups, in a sense: ME FIRST!. The discovery of the others comes as a second task, and that’s something very new and carries an immense power regarding to user loyalty and user growth when we talk about web applications.
The individuals needs are first than the group!: provide individuals with enough tools to present themselves, their interests, hobbies, quests and whatever serves the purpose of your service and you’re on the track for a successful social application. The concept of bottom up belonging, in a sense that our integration on a particular group of interest or people is made by the creation of my own “presentation of myself” online rather than a clear membership or invitation to take part on that community. The communities without an effective membership are sometimes also refer to as communities of practice, community that one transparently belong to without explicitly make something in that direction, other than express his opinion and experiences in a certain community of practitioners.
At the same time, and following the boom of social apps these days, it’s evermore important to actually categorize and determine some differences among them, namely, the semi- and asocial applications that we’ve seen appear on the net horizon, apps like iTunes, BestBuy, Pandora, eBay, NetFlix, Amazon and even Basecamp.
The Buddy lists are center of the new Universe: I am made greater by the sum of my connections and so are my connections. Being online these days evolves around connections! Who do we know? who shares my interests? who takes part on my second life? Who has and read the same books I did? Who hears the same musics? Everything, connects us somehow, implicitly creates communities of people with common characteristics. And better than the value or our own network, is that the Network as a whole also benefits from this ever enlarging number of groups, the more it fosters the bigger is the value of the network.
Profiles seem to be the a fundamental part of the social web, my online identity, kind of aggregates my flow, it’s not static, but an ever evolving presentation of myself, bridges me to the real, outside of the network world. The profile allows me to create and discover social affiliations, engage conversations, swarm intelligence and gather a reputation. The conversation flows within this networks, the media and systems hold the pieces but not the conversations, growing the notion that to follow the conversation one has to be inside the flow and not outside of it.
Tags matter in social networks, their the base of the grassroots classification therefore essential for the creation of these communities of practice.
Discovery is the new drive engine for people getting online, we’re using the grid to find people, find stuff, find groups, and in the end find ourselves and evolve as individuals, much of what we see as ourselfs is based on the groups we belong to. To take part of these groups however we have to accept certain facts, accept the asymmetry of the networks, some people matter more than others, side chats are normal, and they help build internal connections within the groups, groups that share everything are exceptions, not the rule!
Thru others we find ourselfs
One has to accept these facts, and know from the start that some people will have more power than others within the group, and within groups we see the rise of the weighted recommendations, where some of the members since have better “karma” inside the group see their opinion take more value than the opinion of members with less “karma”
Vox Popully, Vox Humana
The latest players to get to the market, always have clear advantage and benefit from others despair, services like Last.FM, Upcomming.org, FaceBook or ThisNext all seem to have in common a deep knowledge of the ground rules of a social application, but even clear winners like Last.FM can make mistakes, inside Last.FM you can’t search for groups, or why can’t tags help and be the source of group creations? Basecamp on the other hand, have problems, like not allowing people to the all the projects you have based on several different Basecamp accounts on one same, personal view! On Basecamp, we have multiple logins for the same individual. All of them however clearly know that the more I use them, as an application, or as a service, the more probable is that I’ll invite others, and in that sense the user interface and user interaction matters a lot, and correctly on their concerns and development timelines.
Stowe ended the workshop with a set of questions for the future:
- How high is up?
- When will we see the birth of a social iTunes?
- Why are calendars and calendar sharing so hard?
- When we’ll develop an effective social browsing?
and also left a wise advice for anyone thinking on launching any sort of social service or application: Don’t launch it, before you can get all the social features working, correctly!!
Notes: Stowe published his notes where he has the presentation available for download, and Stephanie also posted her excellent notes on Stowe’s workshop.
February 28th, 2007
Professor Sugata Mitra presented two weeks ago at LIFT an engaging presentation about remoteness and the quality of education. Remoteness not only in geographic sense, but also the remoteness from means, materials and education in general. Professor Sugata has suggested that in many countries (not only those typically associated with third world countries), the schools in remote areas suffer from what he quoted “not good enough”: not good enough teachers, nor not good enough educational technologies.
The first is mostly caused by problems like teacher’s retention, or how can we as society attract more teachers to those almost abandoned areas, and second, for reasons like the preference of affluent urban schools in detriment of the more remote schools for piloting technologies. How apparently in good schools with excellent (or at least rather motivated) teachers and students, the EI is many times perceived as over-hyped and under-performing in the educational values. In Professor’s Mitra opinion, and something I personally believe in, the particularities of the less fortunate and remote schools implies that they should be the ones actually, experimenting and be targeted by the pilots with educational technologies.
States should be actively searching and testing alternatives to primary education, whether schools don’t exist, or simply aren’t enough, schools where teachers aren’t available or aren’t the “best ones”. According to the experiments Professor Sugata conducted along the years, he not only discovered but also helped prove that children are particularly well adapted to self learning and organization.
The Kalkaji, Mandantusi and the “Hole in the Wall“ experiments all seem to enforce this precise idea. The concept of the experiments, were simple: embed a PC into a hole in some remote location; places where children didn’t have much or no contact with technologies. “Et voilá!” the results were not only surprising, but they ended up helped raising more questions than real answers. For instance, the language in which the computers were running didn’t seem important for the interaction, in some cases it even helped demonstrate in a matter of hours/days, how children can actually learn some vocabulary (approx. 200 different words), all of them extrapolated from the simple interaction with the machine.
In a matter of 7 hours of interaction with the PC on the Kalkaji Experiment, 17 youngsters were already browsing in Internet, proving that children and teenagers can actually be self educated. This is more or less common fact, but the truth is that we all keep forgetting how simple this can be and actually happen on a regular basis. According to his presentation, during the Mandantusi, where the PC wasn’t actually connected to the internet, but was only packed with a large collection of CD’s and DVD’s, and an experiment, were the target audience didn’t had any previous education in english, on the post experience interviews, most of the investigators were more or less surprised with requests like “a better processor and nicer mouse”"!! 
The Hole in the Wall project not only helped prove the fact that youngsters and teens can be self taught, but also helped understand a bit of more of the self-learning process. As an example of the results from this experiments, Mitra quoted that personal connections have a deep impact on the learning process: 6-13 yo seemed to learn better when integrated in groups, regardless of their education as a whole, the results were quite uniform in groups with different background. This project also documented the kind of stuff students were using the PC for: basic windows functions, browsing, gaming, chatting, email, music download, painting, learn from educational material and other computer based activities.
The fact remains, during the curse of his experiments, more than 300 children became computer literate in 3 months with just one Computer!!
Natural systems seem to be self organized, from Chaos seems to arise the order, we all now the paradigm, but what matters to this professor and should also matters for a a lot of people on the education structures is how can we seemly make the transition from the current educational model to the self-organizing model. So should we just be “letting happen” or should we look at self organizing, natural, systems and try to improve from there our current models? Well there’s no master plan yet, but Professor Sugata Mitra did leave some key ideas for the sake of the Primary Education 2.0:
- Remotness affects que quality of eductation;
- Remote locations should be taken care first;
- Values are adquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed;
- Learning is a self-organized process;
- to address remoteness, values and violence;
In his opinion the only form to actively solve the remoteness problems of education is thru Outdoctrination, or self-organization, which makes me wonder if this would actually workout in the Portuguese case, or if we could reproduce it on a larger level and maybe try to educate other generations of citizens thru a massive self-learning network and always on system?
Note: Bruno and Stephanie also posted their notes (much, much sooner then I) about Professor Mitra presentation at LIFT, in case you’re interested just follow the links to their blogs! 
February 28th, 2007
UPDATE: Lee, just posted his own notes plus the presentation PDF file.
Lee Bryant’s actually presented on of the most interesting presentations I’ve watched during LIFT, his presentation was about how to effectively collect and empower knowledge inside companies. Lee is founder of HEADSHiFT.COM a social software consulting focussed on the development of social tools for the work environment.
Most of his premisses are based on a set of general thoughts: we should just be re-factoring the factory, but “we should also be using technology to feed our minds instead of the machines”! Tools should serve people’s actions, not the other way around. People are better and have greater power in activities like pattern matching. Most IT systems (definitely) don’t understand the way we work, the way our brain works! People have peripheral vision and intuition, abilities we’ve always used on our life’s, abilities that aren’t only hard to achieve but their also quite hard to emulate on the computer level. Based on this small set of thoughts we’re simply wasting way to much knowledge on the enterprise and large organizations today!
So the question Lee posed was what can technology do to stop the waste?
The now so called web 2.0, is actually giving place to a more accepted “social web” and with it, we’re witnessing the birth of a new set of tools: The Social Tools: tools like wikis, blogs, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, cms’s, and a whole bunch more tools and websites, what Social Tools have in particular is that they intrinsically harness the network effect to get better along the way, feeding themselves on what people do while using them, in particular with the information people produce by using them.
So what’s the definition of the new enterprise IT working environment, the “enterprise 2.0″?
The IT infrastructure for the next generation of enterprises, those companies that will effectively use employees power as competitive advantage, will certainly for sure master social tools, as a mean to harness knowledge and effectively share it across all their structure dimensions. These social tools will need to create an ecosystem of information, data and will depend on a connected infrastructure that facilitates the idea or notion of information everywhere or ever present information scenario. Participation is mandatory, not only with the purpose of sharing information, but also because internal staff reputation will probably be built upon those contributions.
Lee also mentioned one important feature, these so called social tools must effective have to ensure their success: subscription and aggregation. Together their the only way you can actually be acknowledged and get to know, what’s being made and updated on your enterprise universe.
In general today’s companies are searching for better internal understanding, more effective and better collaboration, better decisions. In general we’re talking about gathering and optimizing the Collective Intelligence. CI already exists in some defined communities today, like Wikipedia, Digg, Slashdot, etc. and it reflects their native cultures and norms, and in large companies, they’re just like most of those communities, they have the “man power” to scale and take advantage of these collective intelligence gathering tools. CI represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the IT departments within those companies. Too much time and knowledge is being wasted today’s, which reinforces the idea of possible massive savings in terms of productivity, effective work, increased peripheral vision, reduce duplication and extend the work relationships in a more closer and personal matter: people might contact themselves directly instead of depending on the rigid structures most companies have to get in touch with someone.
With all this information sharing inside and outside of the enterprise, another problem arises, how can we effectively sort out what to read, or even write?
Individuals, groups and divisions inside the companies work as funnels: on a typical day you might have 100 items suggested by your social network, from those, 10 might be sufficiently important for you to link or tag them, but in the end you’ll only write/blog about one entirely. So social reading and filtering drives relevance! Others can also share what you blog, link or tag, information is most probably finding you these days instead of the other way around if you already take part on such groups.
Lee’s presentation left some nice tips towards the CI in the enterprise: start by deploying some social tools, tools that allow you to have feeds everywhere for everything, so that people might subscribe what interests them and be notified as soon as new information is available. Create ways of adding value to your online library, tools like social news-readers, allowing people to recommend and share bookmarks and documentation between them. Allow people to create internal blogs, as a window to their functions and work inside the company. Tools that not only share collections and remixes of other documents, posts, etc, but also allow some sort of social search driven by attention data and link authority.
So, as you can see, software isn’t enough, to reach the second wave adopters, not you or me, but the remaining working force, we need to actually create localized or situated apps like Lee mentioned, applications that are designed not to change behavior, but to extend the already existing workspaces, in a sense that they facilitate and augment todays tasks, having always in mind the collective intelligence harness that their supposed to collect and redistribute.
In the end, it’s all about context and engagement.
February 18th, 2007
Seems todays is the first day of the Chinese New Year!
So let me wish you “Kung Hei Fat Choi” or as we say in Portuguese: “Feliz Ano Novo“!
February 17th, 2007
February 16th, 2007
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