Dressing down

I had an argument today with a friend of friend about Sarah Millican’s dress.

Some background for you, in case you’ve missed the story.

Sarah Millican is a comedian who was nominated for a Bafta, had a wonderful evening and was eviscerated on Twitter for the temerity of having breasts. She was devastated but responded magnificently and very good for her. Millican was betrayed by her dress which she says looked lovely in the shop but which really didn’t look great in the photographs. This happens, the camera is a bastard at times. As she pointed out she’s a comedian not a model and has never learned to walk or pose in front of cameras.

What was egregious about the response to Millican’s dress was not that it was commented on, but that it was commented on in public.  There is a whole sub-specialty of fashion journalism dedicated to being bitchy about women on the red carpet. And then there is twitter. Oh lord.

I commented in a closed thread on Facebook about other choices Millican could have made and was roundly bollocked for doing so.  But I am English, and was brought up not to be rude to people to their face. Other people think we are a culture of hypocrites because we will comment discretely behind your back. The internet makes this hard, of course. Hence twitter storms.

However, I really felt for Millican. I have more or less the same figure and I never know where to put my tits in a photograph. I end up being so self-conscious when I know there’s a camera around that I always have the shifty look of someone who’s just wet themselves. The only photographs of myself that I like are ones where I didn’t know I was being photographed, or where I’ve given up responding to the camera at all.  So in this thread of doom I was reflecting on my own experience: I too face the difficulty Millican describes of finding clothes that I like and fit.

Two months ago I had my photograph taken for a national paper, one of the ones with a circulation in millions not tens of thousands, and it’s not an experience I enjoyed. I was more resigned than nervous; nervous is for situations where you have some agency. I settled for looking groomed rather than attractive and thought about what to wear for weeks beforehand. I had my hair and nails done,  I wore a highish necked dress and a waterfall cardigan that cut vertically across my boobs. The photographer hated the fact I wore black. If I had known, I’d have worn a different colour. I like to be helpful and he seemed to know his job. the piece has not yet been published, but I will probably ask someone else to read the comments thread for me. The ironic thing is that the story isn’t even about me.  Oh well.

I am so sad that Millican’s bubble was burst after the Baftas. She is a talented person, and deserves so much better.

#saveH2G2

I’m distracted this week by the campaign to #saveH2G2.

What is H2G2, and why should you care?

H2G2 is one of the community sites shivering under the BBC’s axe. It was bought by the BBC on the 25th January 2001 and a decade later less one day the BBC announced it will be “disposed of”. “Disposed of”, note, not “closed” because there is something here of great vitality.

H2G2 is an open access writing site, where you’ll get thoughtful and constructive feedback on what you write through a system of writing workshops and peer review and where you can make friends (and enemies) that you’ll value for life.

H2g2’S new front page – the new skin is a bit buggy – oh the irony

But whenever I try to say more I just end up saying what it isn’t:

• It’s not Wikipedia even though it predated it as an experiment in user-generated content and on-line communities being founded in 1999 by the late, tall, Douglas Adams as “the earth edition of the HitchHiker’sGuide to the Galaxy”.
• But it’s not a fan site.  It really isn’t.  “Hootizens” respect DNA, but  don’t revere him.
• It’s not a blog-and-comment site though users have their own “journals” and create “entries” with “conversations” hanging off them.
• It’s not a creative writing site though there is a lot of creative writing on it.
• It’s not even primarily a social network though it predates just about all of the ones still standing,  and it’s not  “a small town in cyberspace” though that is how I’ve described it for years. Well, a decade, I guess.

And after –  or because of – it’s indescribable past it now faces an uncertain future.  Nick Reynolds (Social Media Executive, BBC Online) and Jim Lynn (who developed the original platform) both express cryptic goodwill and commitment to the community.  But it’s hard to see who’d want to buy the site.

The future then and now

One of the great wistfulnesses about h2g2 is the difference between what it could have been and what it was.  Douglas Adams was an astonishing visionary about all things online…

49 minutes of uncanny prescience.
Where we are now predicted way back then
by Douglas Adams in 1990.

… but  the BBC never really took first mover’s advantage in any of the then-cool things that h2g2 was first to have.  And now the BBC are disposing of what has become a site that even those of us who love it have to admit is quaint.

Community action

And how have the h2g2 community responded?

By and large, pretty well.  As Nick Reynolds said:

H2G2 is the best behaved and most civilised community I’ve ever encountered. The way that you have reacted to the news is a great credit to you.

Members of the community have gathered in a Google Group called the h2g2 Continuity Consortium (h2g2c2 – geddit) and are trying to put the show on right here in the barn… er… server farm.

Some of the comment is skeptical,  but slightly to my surprise, I think we’ll succeed, partly because we are not trying to buy the site off the BBC. We want to ensure that the best possible group runs the site, but are rather reluctantly aware that group might end up being us.

We will succeed in the short term because the BBC is not pulling the plug immediately, because we’ve been overwhelmed by offers of server space, by advice from people who’ve done the same thing in other online communities, and by practical support from within the community.

And I think we will succeed in the long term because we are so old.  We know each other.   We’ve fought, flirted, argued and made up across timezones and forums for a long time.  We’ve danced at each others’ weddings, stood godparents to each others children, and grown from being school-children to adults, collecting relevant (and gloriously irrelevant) skills, experiences and qualifications in the process.

We know how the internet works, how online communities and social media and web servers and all the things that Douglas Adams predicted but the rest of us took ten years to find out.

And best of all, it turns out that we are not just a bunch of quirky names and flirty posts, but also a bunch of coders and project managers, change programme leaders, doctors and people claiming disability benefit or who are just plain on the dole.  We have skilz and we have time.  (A lot of the former and a bit of the latter).

In management speak, we’ve Stormed (ye gods how we’ve stormed) Formed and Normed (and abNormed, but that’s a different story).

Now we are ready to Perform.

The Facebook Privacy Row 2 – The Social Network

We went to see the film the Social Network last night, which is about how Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook, and the ensuing law suits with people who claimed he had misappropriated their ideas (in one case) and their money (in the other case).

What is shown on the screen must be pretty much law-suit proof.  We are talking about the bio-pic of a billionaire, after all.  There are other signs that the big spend was on lawyers.  It certainly wasn’t on special effects; the “outdoor” scenes at Henley Regatta were clearly filmed in a tank.  And it wasn’t on stars either; the only name star is Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker who co-founded Napster. (We are of course meant to love the knowing irony of that casting).

In the first five or ten minutes of the film, Zuckerberg’s girlfriend when he was 19, Erica Allbright says:

You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.

And that more or less positions Zuckerberg for the rest of the film.

Would you entrust your privacy to the Zuckerberg portrayed here?  Hell no.  But of course, film is a two-dimensional medium.  If you look for them, you can see the usual narrative compressions: two of the four people who co-founded Facebook are barely mentioned in the film, for instance, and neither is Zuckerberg’s current girlfriend who (according to Wikipedia (I know….)) who was with him throughout.  And that is an interesting omission, because he comes across as someone whose IQ is stratospheric but whose EQ (emotional intelligence) approaches zero.  Portraying him as maintaining a relationship all that time would undermine the idea that he’s a nerd and an asshole.

I was intrigued that Zuckerberg is portrayed not as someone who  has good ideas, but as someone who spots them.  In one scene a friend asks if a particular girl is dating someone and Zuckerberg realises that “relationship status” is the thing that will change Facebook from an app to a killer app. Likewise, he is portrayed as using the Winklevoss’s idea for a campus-wide social network in the first place, and borrowing Savarin’s algorithm to rank girls based on how hot they are, which is itself an idea he took from some one else.  So he’s portrayed as a harvester,  not a creator.  But if harvesting ideas was easy, everyone could do it. In the movie, Zuckerberg’s stance is summed up by his line:

If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.

And he has a point.

So was anyone in the film actually a good guy?  Savarin, the friend who stumped up the original seed money for servers, is the nearest thing to a good guy.  But our sympathies lie with him because of where he sits in the narrative: he’s portrayed as being out-maneuvered when Facebook got cool and Sean Parker got involved and they all went to California.  He’s the loyal friend, shafted by the asshole.  Then there are the other litigants, the Winklevoss brothers. In one of those unnecessary strokes of narrative cuteness occasionally thrown up by real life, they are olympic rowers and twins.  As one of them says when they are discussing whether they want lawyers or the Sopranos:

I’m six-five, 220 pounds, and there are two of me.

Quite.

Privileged, ambitious, with a sense of entitlement which is annoyingly substantiated by actual physical achievements?Just another kind of asshole, really.

If no-one touches the sympathy button, was anyone here a victim? No, not really.  Not as portrayed in this film. It’s an enjoyable movie about how the prospects of billions makes not particularly attractive people do not particularly attractive things. Im irritated that we are presented with Zuckerberg as a tragic hero in the last five minutes of the film. Heroism isn’t really something you can tack on at the end.

I’m wary of assuming that this bio-pic is accurate simply because it wasn’t made by Oliver Stone even if there are no actual law-suits against it, and it seems I am right to be wary.  An excellent NYT article quotes the film’s writer as saying:

“I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling” … “I feel like, had I met Mark, I would have felt a certain obligation to make the character sound like Mark, walk like Mark, all of those things. And frankly, I probably would have had an affection for him that I wouldn’t have wanted to betray.”

So there are lies, damned lies, and movie scripts.

That said, it’s an entertaining movie if you like that sort of thing, which I do. On top of that, the script is sharply clever, and I like clever.

But I still keep my Facebook settings shut down tight.

The Facebook Privacy Row – 1

Facebook Privacy Settings

Isn’t the Facebook privacy row a fascinating piece of anthropology?

Mark Zuckerburg presents himself as a geeky regular dude who just created a really cool app for his friends. Here he is in the Washington Post:

Facebook has evolved from a simple dorm-room project…
Mark Zukerburg

However, many Facebook users think he’s made of cunning, harvesting our personal information for his personal gain and  saying  “aw shucks, my bad” when people object. There may be no contradiction here, given the gap between a person’s view of themselves and the effect they have on the world. Wired sees naiveté ascending into arrogance,  a third interpretation which may also be true.

But isn’t the normitivity of Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s approach intriguing? They say they want to change the world, but it seems they want to change us. They express surprise whenever users point out other assumptions are available. The problem, they hint, is our secretiveness and inability to use the privacy options. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we did like our moms told us, and shared nicely with others?

What they hint, Scobleizer states. He thinks we should get over ourselves and accept that privacy is dead. Indeed he thinks that a desire for privacy is downright suspect:

Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife?
Scobleizer

… which suggests either a blessed lack of complexity in his life, or a complacent sanctimoniousness.  He argues that Facebook is at its most useful when it is wide open, and opens his profile wide accordingly. But he is disingenuous, and has a more personal personal account.

Facebook shows a parochial lack of imagination for a service which is already global: there’s fluffy talk about peace and connection, but a lack of respect for diversity or acceptance that different folks want different strokes.

What I find interesting is the underlying assumption that openness is good, that  we are old-fashioned meanies who just “don’t get it” when we say “my data is mine, not yours Mr Zuckerberg, and no I don’t know you well enough to call you Mark”.

Here’s my real question:

Are Zuckerberg and Scobleizer culturally naive? They wouldn’t be the first Americans to think of the rest of the world as the 51st state. Or is the naiveté just PR for the punters as Facebook backs slowly and cynically away from a strategic position that’s increasingly unpopular and no longer compatible with a geeks-of-the-people, guys-with-integrity act?

Here, incidentally, are some more geeks-with-integrity who are developing an open-source alternative to Facebook, with privacy built in by default.

Colour me world-weary but it will be interesting to see if they are still as squeaky clean 3 or 5 years from now.

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PS – I’ve no idea if I’ll post on this subject again but it seems likely, so I thought I’d number it anyway.

Web 2.0 – if you don’t join in are you really missing out?

Years ago there was a television programme on the BBC called Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead? (I always took the hint, so I have no idea if it was any good). But the same is often said of the Internet.  For years I thought that the web was the coolest thing ever and would happily spend entire evenings schlepping around online, while non-internetty people said ‘you have too much time on your hands’ and ‘get a life’.  I took the view that there was loads of really interesting stuff you could only online and besides, I met a whole swathe of clever and talented people via the creative writing sites I hung out on.

Recently I’ve been considering the space between those views – is Web 2.0 life-transforming, or a zero sum game, or (whisper who dares) would we be better just switching off our PCs so we can do something less boring instead?  If you don’t join in, do you actually miss out?

Zero sum

Socially, I am no longer convinced we gain that much from social media. Here’s why.

Making friends

I’ve made a lot of  real flesh-and-blood, go-to-the-pub, dance-at-their-wedding friends on line (gain) but some of my previous friendships have lagged a bit because so much of my social life is brokered electronically (loss) so I don’t necessarily have more friends or better friends, just different friends.

Zero sum, for me anyway.

A window on the world

The web gives us access to places and people which is not limited by cost or mediated by the media:

I get a first hand global account of life in other parts of the world. It is unlikely that I will travel to small town America for instance. I get to hear the sort of trivial day to day stuff that I find fascinating.

Similarly:

Blogs tell me what it is like to be a bookish woman living in Idaho, or to live on a dairy farm in the mid-west, or to be raising a child in south London, or to be a mormon battling crippling burns, or to be a sex-worker.

While this is clearly a rewarding use of time, is it more rewarding than spending the same time reading books or being with friends?

Probably not.

Zero sum. People-watchers only.

Net Gains for niches

It clearly is possible to get real benefits from social media, but most of these are for people in niche circumstances.  For example:

Dealing with illness and taboos

Access to others in similar circumstances is a clear gain: no matter how obscure your illness or unusual your fetish you can find information and fellow travellers which you couldn’t get in any other way.

Could the time and effort spent on the internet give you equivalent benefits off-line? – Almost certainly not.

Net gain, if you are in a relatively rare situation.

Dealing with physical isolation

If you are housebound or physically isolated the internet’s a sanity-saver. And there are other forms of isolation:

For me, it’s communicating in English, amongst other things. This is something I can’t do where I live.

Could you use the time spent hanging around on-line communities to break down these sorts of isolation in any other way? Clearly not.

Net gain, depending on circumstances.

Being creative

Almost everyone likes to have their voice heard, and the internet gives everyone a platform.

It’s a curious bran tub full of frustrated artists, musicians, agit-prop bloggers and the like but it does seem that a lot of talent is being elevated by 2.0 into spheres they’d never have a chance with outside of it.

Could the time spent being creative on-line produce the same satisfaction if it was spent any other way? Well, you can join an writers’ club or do a creative writing course, but only You Tube is You Tube. So that’s a qualified no.

Net gain. Mainly for narcissists and hobbyists.

Feeding a news habit

The web gives you access to foreign, specialist and alternative news media:

People I know who rely on the MSM [Mainstream Media] and don’t use web 2.0 have a very different view of the world than I do. It’s scary, because I don’t think people realise how specific the MSM is in what it presents and how.

Can you keep as well informed with mainstream media? Well, maybe: I had a friend who did so using Teletext and TV news and the very occasional newspaper, but it is clearly quicker and easier online.

Before the internet I had to go to the library and borrow ‘alternative’ magazines, or read counter culture publications and newsletters to get a broader view of news. Or go to meetings and gatherings and talk to people directly more.

And of course now there is Twitter.

Net gain. News-junkies only.

Net gains in the mainstream

There are some situations where social media does make a difference in the mainstream.  But these are not life-transforming differences:

Keeping in touch

My guess is that more people in their 40s have dragged themselves online to keep an eye on what their kids are doing on Facebook than for any other single reason.  And it works the other way round:

I resisted Facebook for a long time, but joined as my family want to keep an eye on me and now I have a window into lots of other families’ lives, the stuff you couldn’t discover from tourist holidays.

This is the contentious one. Is socialising on Facebook better or worse or just different?  I suspect the answer is ‘all three’.

I succumbed to joining Facebook a couple of days ago BECAUSE my not-into-computers friends were using it to display all the photos / video of their newborn baby son. As they don’t use check or use email regularly I was feeling ostracised!

There’s also the alluring prospect that Facebook and Twitter’s frequent updates will make the Christmas Round Robin superfluous.

Net gain, but not necessarily a big one. Mainstream.

Summary

So there you have it.  I really should turn off my PC and do something more interesting instead.

Er…

Fancy going to the pub, then?

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Thanks due to B’elana, Bright Blue Shorts, Christopher, coelacanth, Kea, lanzababy, and Mrs Zen for the quotations.

How will the corporation subvert Web 2.0?

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

It’s an exciting idea, the way that Web 2.0 will transform the world of work, making collaboration the norm by providing wikis, bosses opening up dialogues by posting blogs that are open for comments, replacing meetings with discussion boards.

But before we get to that nirvana, we will have to live with the worrying answers to the question ‘how will the corporation subvert Web 2.0’

In the long term the Luddites always lose. In the long term the organisations which embrace Web 2.o will over-take those which resist it, just as Amazon has flooded out the bookshops and iTunes and Spotify have all but destroyed the the record companies.

What worries me, is the nature of that embrace.

Web 2.0, briefly, comprises the tools and attitudes that enable me to blog and enable you to rate my post and comment on it.  It’s FaceBook and Twitter and citizen journalism and mash-ups and crowd-sourcing and ‘Here comes everybody’.  It’s MySpace instead of A&R  It’s Wikipedia instead of the Brittanica. It’s Twitter instead of… well… instead of no Twitter. Web 2.0, so we all thought, is a force for democracy and good.  It cuts out the parasitical middle-person, it empowers individuals and enables them to form groups and enables those groups to face down corporations and governments.  It puts artists directly in touch with their audience. It enables me to publish this and you to read it with no more cost than our time. It turns base metal into gold and chocolate into a slimming aid.

There are, it seems, two current views of what happens when Web 2.0 meets the Enterprise.  In the first view, Web 2.0 brings about innovative, hierarchically flat organisations where knowledge is freely shared, where anyone who comes up with a bright idea can get it aired and taken up, where discussion boards pwn meetings and where gatekeepers and barriers to innovation are no more.  Google is reported to be just such a place.  The other view is that Web 2.0 and the enterprise are oil and water:  executives and managers will resist Web 2.0 either because they don’t get it, because they think it is a distraction, or because they are just plain running scared.

But I am not convinced by either.  Web 2.0, combined with an internal search engine, are powerful surveillance tools.  Any well-governed Wiki will tell you exactly who made which changes when, and far more neatly than you can track the changes in Word.   You can capture Instant Messenger logs and run searches on them in a way which you cannot tape and search conversations by the water cooler.  Nobody minutes meetings any more, but a discussion forum can be there for as long and the server farm lasts and longer.

Web 2.0 facilitates networks and interactions, but it also makes them more visible, and therefore easier to track.  We already know that the web is destroying privacy.  These days it takes diligence, vigilance and consistency to hide in cyberspace.  It is hard not have your name published by other people when school mates tag you on photos in FaceBook.

So it is surprising that hierarchical organisations don’t espouse Web 2.0 tools more actively, and this supports the theory that this is because execs and managers just don’t get it.

As something of a Web 2.0 evangelist, that places me on the horns of a dilemma.  A trilemma, actually. Do I:

1. promote Web 2.o tools because they empower people and democratise knowledge
2. stop promoting Web 2.0 tools because they expose people by turning situations which they are used to considering private into permanent searchable records or
3. use the argument that they can improve audit and accountability in order to get them into an organisation because they are just so flippin’ COOOL?

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For some of the thinking that led me to this impasse see:
Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom – Matthew Fraser & Soumitra Dutta

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Selling collaboration services within an organisation

Selling collaboration services and development services within an organization? – Art Gelwicks recently posted this as a question in the SharePoint Users Group on LinkedIn, and I found myself writing more than would fit in a discussion forum. So here it is.

Are you selling ‘bottom up’ by putting SharePoint out there and letting people use it spontaneously, or are you selling ‘top down’ by finding a sponsor with a requirement and using SharePoint to fulfil it?

There are pros and cons to both. The keys to working out these pros and cons for your organisation are

• culture
• use cases and
• champions

Culture

How your organisation takes to SharePoint depends in part on the culture. Some cultures are enthusiastic about collaboration tools like Instant Messaging, Live Meeting and SharePoint, and others see these sorts of tools as time-wasters. Here’s how to work out which one yours is.

Goffee and Jones do a great 2×2 for the culture of an organisation. They say that the glue that enables a team (department, company) to work together is either sociability or solidarity; organisations with high sociability scores are ‘networked’ and organisations with high solidarity scores are ‘mercenary’. There’s more to it than that, their book is very readable and includes diagnostic tools.

I have seen people in departments where the glue has been sociability take well to the collaborative features of SharePoint like discussion forums, alerts, review workflows and MySites. I’ve not tested this, but if your organisation is networked (and read Goffee and Jones to decide if it is) then a bottom up approach would probably work well. Look out to see whether the people are already comfortable with tools like Instant Messaging and LiveMeeting, whether they are active on Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook, and whether Monday mornings start with a chat about the weekend. This isn’t about people who are early adopters of technology, it’s about people who like technology because it is a social and work enabler.

By contrast I have seen people in ‘mercenary’ organisations who are so busily focussed on deliver-deliver-deliver that they don’t have time to ‘waste’ learning how to use a new tool like SharePoint. In an organisation that’s mercenary (again read Goffee and Jones – they mean it in a particular way) you need a sponsor and a project. Work out what your sponsor’s driver is and fulfil it. They may want to cut down storage costs, or improve a specific set of working practices, or control the published versions of training material.

Find a sponsor with a specific need and fulfil that need.

Rinse and repeat.

This brings us on to:

Use Cases

One of the problems with SharePoint is that it’s a swiss army knife of a tool – useful for such a large number of things that it’s hard to stay focused on just one or two. In a ‘mercenary’ organisation the problem is handled for you – your sponsor has a specific task and you focus on that. The challenge is in the ‘networked’ organisations where everyone who comes across SharePoint wants to play with it all, now, as soon as possible, shiny, shiny, new, cool.

Rolling out the whole of SharePoint across the whole of the organisation is a distraction for them and a management nightmare for you. You need to identify a single use-case, but it is much harder because there isn’t a single obvious business requirement and there may not be a single sponsor. Worse, you may have a sponsor who has a vague vision like ‘collaboration’ or an unrealistic one like ‘getting everyone to use their My Site like an internal FaceBook profile’.

If you are going bottom-up you need to roll out solutions to one or a maximum of two use-cases at a time. To find out which one, put together a survey and ask what stops people collaborating well right now. Word it terms of how they work, not in terms of the SharePoint features so:

• full mail-boxes – not – emailing urls
• ‘shared’ drives you can’t share – not –local control of permissions
• documents you don’t know are out of date – not – control over the full document life-cycle
• keeping track of document sign-offs – not – workflows

Pick one of the popular ones, create a simple solution, and run with it.

Let’s read that again.

Pick one. Not a couple because they’re similar. Not three or four because Internal Communications want them (that’s your sponsor-and-project scenario and a very nice place it is to be too). Not two or three variants to cover all the bases. Just one.

Create a simple solution. Yes, there are half a dozen different ways to build and display a discussion forum in SharePoint. If you can’t tell which one works best, then put together one that works well and stick to it.

Then run with it. Get it out there. Get it used. Get comments and feedback. Improve it.

Only then move on to the next one. Bite size chunks. Could be as close to a month apart, but bite size chunks for you and your users.

The subtext here is simplicity. Turn off the ability to make subsites, remove most of the templates, switch off the themes. Lock it down. Shut it down. SharePoint is a casket of magical delights. You can always open a lid you’ve kept shut, but it is much harder to shut down a lid on something you’ve left open. SharePoint baffles new users and new organisations with choice. Lead them step by step through those choices.

And finally:

Champions

People like SharePoint. They really like SharePoint. Not everyone, but enough.

These people who like SharePoint are your friends. They are natural evangelists, experimenters and testers. They’ll pester you for the features that you’ve turned off, and they’ll come up with workarounds that’ll have you blessing and cursing them by turns. But they’ll promote it and provide free consultancy to their co-workers and come up with solutions to problems you didn’t know existed.

Really work your champions. Create a user forum and refuse to answer questions unless they are posted there. You’ll feel very prissy, but your Champions will gravitate there and get to know each other and do half your support work for you. Invite them to do in-house webinars on cool things in SharePoint, (20 minutes demo, 10 minutes Q&A). Create a SharePoint community of pratice with these people at its core. Take their advice on how to move your service forward.

So, how to sell collaboration services?

They key is asking the right question; in this case not ‘how do you roll-out SharePoint’ but ‘what does your organisation want to use SharePoint for?’

Oh, and bite size chunks.

Always bite size chunks.

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I guess you gotta be here

It’s pretty easy to understand Web 2.0 intellectually, but to really get it, you’ve gotta be there.  Here.  All sorts of things get missed when decisions are based on assumptions that are intellectual constructs, not built out of practice and experience. We know this already: there is a strong difference between hospitals directed by clinicians even when their administrators are professional managers, and those  hospitals directed by administrators or – even worse – by management consultants who are neither managers nor consultants.

Years ago I had a smug boyfriend who said to me

To know and not to act is not to know

It is apparently a Chinese proverb.

In the years since then I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve dealt with who understand the words used to discuss Web 2.0, but whose lives have not been affected by it.  No harm in that – I understand the words used to describe meditation, but I don’t meditate.  Each to our own, and all that.

The harm comes when these people make decisions about the use of Web 2.0. An example that is a few years old now, is the story of La Petite Anglaise, who was an Englishwoman working for the Pasis office of a boring and stuffy accountancy firm. Her employers fired her for bringing them into disrepute (hard, since her blog was anonymous), and that really DID bring them into disrepute.  They understood it, but they didn’t get it because they didn’t use it.

But blogging is so 2005, darlink.  The two more recent examples both come from the Twitterverse: the first is the story of Trafigura, and is summed up superbly by Colm, where the attempts to gag the Guardian turned out not to be a case of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, so much as opening the  stable door and shooing a  self-replicating herd of wild mustangs out of the stable-yard and then announcing you’ve done so in great flashing neon lights which spooks the mustangs even more.  And the second is the 25,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission as a result of Jan Moir’s venomously homophobic article about Stephen Gately.  (Hetronormativity  – the acceptable face of homophobia).  In both cases people who should certainly have heard of Twitter fell foul of something they don’t understand because they don’t use it.

The place where this matters is where people are taking decisions about technology that they don’t use.  You can go to as many conferences you like and talk about people tweeting their comments from their mobiles, but unless you use it, you won’t get it.  You’ve gotta be in it to win it.

In fairness, while there’s a lot I do get about Web 2.0, there is stuff that I don’t get. I took a deliberate decision not to get involved in Second Life and I’m ambivalent about whether or not I regret it.  I also don’t yet get Twitter.  I use it, but I don’t yet get it.  Other than Colm’s excellent commentary about Twitter the other day, the most informative thing I’ve come across was in a Word Podcast.  (I like the Word Podcast – it’s conversational dad-dancing, conducted with a complacent lack of self-awareness which always brightens my day).

The “what will you give me for a box of flood-damaged Roogalator albums?” podcast

At minute 38 (if you care to listen) they start talking about Twitter, and at minute 44 or thereabouts they discuss the way in which Twitter is now the first place to go for news.  News: the new Olds .  Or possibly Google: the new Print Media.

What’s the take-away from this piece?  Just that in the words of Bob Dylan, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand”.   And because you can’t beat a bit of Bob, here’s a clip,  and because it’s 2009 it’s from The Watchmen.

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Book Review – Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom

This very readable book has impeccable academic credentials:  Fraser and Dutta are on the faculty at INSEAD but they wear their scholarship lightly. They consider the effects of Web 2.0 on business and society, and their case studies include FaceBook’s patchy relationship with its users and their employers, the destruction of the music business by the internet, and the 2008 US presidential election. It’s comprehensive and accessible and has a superb bibliography, what more can you want?

Occasionally I disagreed with Fraser and Dutta’s arguments.  They use examples from medieval France and the Knights Templar to illustrate the fracturing of hierarchical power structures.  Now colour me cynical, but would they have done that if it weren’t for Dan Brown?

More seriously, they are naive about the height of the barriers of entry to online fame and pin a lot of the first section of the book on the unsupportable assumption that online fame is open to all. They talk breathlessly (well, breathlessly for academics) about Joe Nobody from Nowhere obtaining online fame. But that doesn’t mean it’s replicable: the fact that they cannot see how it happened doesn’t mean that there weren’t reasons for it happening.  I mean, haven’t they read Outliers?  Online fame doesn’t come for wishing as Sandi Thom’s publicists discovered.  Exactly the same astonishment was expressed about the working class rock heros of the 60s, but for every Lennon and McCartney there were …. well there weren’t any other Lennons and McCartneys.  Which is my point.

They are balanced in their reporting of Web 2.0 evangelists and Web 2.0 apostates. This makes a refreshing change.  In fact, they aren’t just balanced on the subject, they delve deeply into why and how corporate and governmental organisations resist Web 2.0.  This is the nub of the book, and no-one else is saying just these things in quite this way.  But even so, they are reluctant to admit that there are some serious Orwellian implications for all our futures.

So I am not sure why I’m not raving about it.  Perhaps because I like books that give me epiphanies.  This one was rich and informative but didn’t shift any of my paradigms. They close their arguments down in a rather authoritarian way, which doesn’t set the brain fizzing with ideas. It may just be that their usual ‘voice’ is  the de-personalised style of academia.  Don’t be dis-heartened by my faint praise: it is much better than I make it sound.

Definitely a must-read, though possibly in paperback, for anyone considering the role of Web 2.0 in any kind of organisation, or who has an interest in the recent history of the internet or in how technology affects individuals and society.   Worth it for the case studies and the bibliography alone – everything else is a bonus.

PS – I thought I’d reviewed Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell – turns out I hadn’t. That’s easily remedied.

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So farewell then, Geocities

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be online was very heaven.

Three emails arrived today reminding me that the plug will be pulled on Geocities on the 26th October.

Longbridge, Bristol Road, Birmingham. As was.

This is shocking if you have any sense of history, like razing the New England colonial towns. Geocities was one of the seminal online communities – not as hip as The Well, not as well branded as CompuServe or AOL, but important nonetheless.

It was founded in 1995. It’s hard to remember what the web was like in 1995. Internet Explorer was launched in August and Amazon, MSN, Yahoo and Craigs List were clunking clumsy startups. Geocities was one of the first consumer hosting services. It was a combination of ISP, chat forums and bulletin boards. It was folksy and homely and friendly: users were exhorted to ‘have fun and be nice to each other’. The Wayback Machine has captured some of the early sites. Take a look: they are vigorous and naive like children’s drawings pinned to refrigerators by loving Moms.

Geocities - October 1996

According to Wikipedia by June 1997, GeoCities was the fifth most popular site on the Web. Yahoo bought in January 1999 and idealistic Homesteaders (‘Homesteaders’!) resented Yahoo’s clumsy attempts to moneterise the service. It is Yahoo, now, who have emailed me saying:

We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built. However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.

Put like that, it sounds almost like a good thing.

Web communities are real and vibrant things, and the older ones like Geocities can have more duration and closer ties than many real neighbourhoods. How many places have you lived in since 1996? Members of these early on-line communities were aware that they were right at the start of something cool and planet-changing, and we’ve already outstripped all but their wildest dreams. Those early communities felt special at the time and are special now, not just for reasons of online-archaeology and social anthropology, but because many of them now host decade-long ties and friendships

So although it isn’t my own online neighbourhood I am unsettled that the plug will finally be pulled on the servers on October 26th.

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