Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

The Sounds of (Disconnected) Silence

I had the great pleasure to attend this week's U.S. Open Championship golf tournament at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland.  All in all, it was a remarkable experience on many levels: 

• the immense skill displayed by the players (as of this writing, Rory McIlroy was running away with the tournament),
• the beauty and challenge of a U.S. Open-caliber course, and
• the sheer logistical effort associated with getting approximately 45,000 patrons to and from the event, around the premises etc.

But the most interesting thing to me, something I haven't seen in many years, was an almost total absence of mobile devices:  phones, cameras, PDAs, and the like.  The USGA bans mobile phones and cameras from the Open to prevent distracting sounds at inopportune times, and spectators were told that mobile phones and other devices were not permitted on the grounds or even the shuttle buses.  In fact, we were wanded at the entrance to the club to enforce this, and there were "disallowed items" tents where spectators were forced to check their devices.

The downside:

• People lacked access to information they were used to ("Did Havret win the British Open?" "What's Phil Mickelson's wife's name again?" "What time is it?  I don't wear a watch anymore.").
• Coordinating meetups was exponentially more difficult than it had been since, say, 1995.  Something as simple as "Meet me at the concession stand behind the 7th green" had to be planned out before arriving at Congressional.
• A profusion of what looked like spasms from people continually and reflexively patting their pockets or groping for an absent belt-holstered phone. 

The upside:

• People were more engaged with what was going on around them (one of the great events in golf), and with each other, actually looking one another in the eye and mostly listening when spoken to.
• Other than some "overserved" patrons, people were generally walking in a straight line, with purpose, toward their destination, rather than weaving, head down, oblivious to the flow of people around them.

Overall the effect of this grand social experiment was...refreshing.  I don't know when or where I'll see something similar, but it made me cherish the "unplugged" time even as I counted down the hours until I could tweet and blog about it.

[Note:  A great article in the Washington Post about this phenomenon today provided inspiration for this post.]

Mashing up Private and Public

(Flickr photo hello, neighbours! by D'Arcy Norman)

As someone who is:

• active in several social media communities, 
• committed to helping clients think about how information is shared and secured,
• interested in current events (like the newly enacted Mass Privacy statute and well-publicized data security breaches), and
• fortunate to have access to some really smart people on topics involving knowledge management, social computing, and information security,

I think a lot about private vs public communications.

For a while, I have considered on-line privacy in light of a construct I first saw courtesy of Doug Cornelius through one of his many presentations (perhaps at the Boston KM Forum).  I appreciated the concise summary of how people share information on the internet via the "Four Ps:  Personal, Professional, Public, and Private."

Last week, I felt the lines among those four quadrants blur more than a little as I read the speaker's crib notes from a keynote presentation given at the recent South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference by danah boyd.  ms boyd is a researcher whose focus includes studying how young people use the internet and social media, and she spends a lot of time listening to young internet users and thinking about how expectations and social mores are evolving around the concept of privacy.

In Dr. boyd's keynote speech, she highlights several instances where online systems are evolving in unexpected ways (e.g., well-publicized unseemly goings-on on chatroulette, mash-ups of location-based applications used as farcical "robbery helpers"), and instances where service providers have changed the rules unexpectedly by commission or omission, often hiding under the self-serving rubric of "Privacy is Dead." 

If you live a fair amount of your life on-line (yes, I'm talking to you, Facebookers), a quick look to take stock of what information you're broadcasting, whether intentionally or inadvertently, on the Internet might be in order:  the best data point from Dr. boyd's presentation might be that 65% of Facebook users have left their privacy settings at the lowest level (all open to the public).  This is severely at odds with the Pew Foundation's research that 85% of all adults want to control who has access to their personal information.  Have you checked your privacy settings lately?

So, in addition to creating a reminder to yourself to get your car's oil changed, to change the batteries in your home's smoke detectors, and to get your annual free credit report, perhaps you should consider a periodic "on-line reputation monitoring" exercise.  Search for yourself using the search engine or your on-line social community of choice every few months, and see what you've been broadcasting about yourself to the world.  You may be surprised at what you find.

If you develop or use on-line communities in your place of work, heed Dr. boyd's advice to consider whether you are providing a space that is clearly and unequivocally public, or one that provides a feeling of privacy.  If the latter, spend time considering your policies and norms, and listen to your users to understand their expectations.  The price of publicly exposing information thought to be private can be enormous, in both economic and real human terms.  As Dr. boyd's examples illustrate, there are lives in the balance.

The Enchantress of Numbers

Whether they are colleagues, clients, or associates from my business, I am blessed to work with many women in the field of technology. 

Today, on Ada Lovelace Day, let us take a moment to remember the woman who often thought of as the first computer programmer, having written programs for computers (Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine) before they even existed. She is credited with being the first person with the vision to see computers (even before they were know as such) to perform functions beyond mathematical calculations.

The lingua franca of the US Department of Defense, the computer programming language Ada, is named after her, and Britain awards a medal and holds a competition for women in computer science in her name,  but Charles Babbage summed up his feelings for her most beautifully:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

Blog Rally to Help the Boston Globe

[originally based on Paul Levy's idea -- I'm happy to contribute, and to be counted among the bloggers offered the chance to amplify this message]

We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe.  A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally.  We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance.  Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm:  Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money.  Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help.  Thank you.

As an inveterate reader, media junkie, blogger, thinker, and citizen, my visualizing Boston without the Globe is sad and scary.  I think of the role that the media plays as a check and balance to those in power (the famous line attributed to Jimmy Breslin about the media's role being "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" comes to mind), from government to church to corporations to higher education, and know that Boston needs a world-class daily newspaper.  So, how would YOU propose to save, improve, re-direct or otherwise enhance the Globe?

Inaugural Word Clouds: Bush vs Obama

Mike Volpe from HubSpot (thanks, Drew Smith [twitter:  @smith_drew] for the tip!), has a terrific blog if you're a marketer, or just interested in how people use language in marketing and interact with and consume social media.  He just posted a great blog article about comparing word clouds of the Bush 2000 inauguration speech and the Obama 2008 inauguration speech.  For those readers not familiar with the concept (i.e., if you missed this previous post, a word cloud or tag cloud is defined as:

"...a visualization of word frequencies. [A] tag cloud enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers.  The size of the word corresponds to the quantity associated with that word."
[source:  ManyEyes blog from IBM,  http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html]

The comparison of speeches like these is a use case I've heard for a qualitative, visual analysis tool, and I'm pleased to see it actually used in a timely and topical way.  I have no desire for a political discussion here, so take a look for yourself, and see how the speeches compare when held up against one another.