Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

How Does the Internet See You?

The title of this post is the key question posed by the "Metropath(ologies)" exhibit at the MIT Museum, one of Boston's best-kept secrets.  I had the chance to try out an on-line component of this exhibit called "Personas," an installation that comments beautifully on both the power and fallibility of data-mining.

When you enter your name into Personas, a computational process kicks off that assembles a "seemingly authoritative personal profile," beautifully presented as follows:

It's not meant to be useful or accurate, but to spur thoughts about reliability of algorithms being created inside "black boxes" that can have significant impact on our lives:  showing up on the first page of search engine results, having misinformation about us "out there" for credit reviewers or hiring managers because of past indiscretions, sharing a name with someone else, or something as simple as a misapplied tag to a photo on a social networking site, etc.

Although it took me a while to discern what is meant by "illegal" in my results (it's not as bad as I had thought, but it did indeed make me think!), I enjoyed not only the visualization of my "on-line identity", but also the thought that the artist  put into the project.

On-Line Social Stratification: Different = Bad

I recently had the opportunity to hear danah boyd of Microsoft Research speak at a Mass Technology Leadership Council (MTLC) event about social media.  Although the principal themes of the event were supposed to be about ROI on Social Media, Ms boyd's remarks were the highlight of the day for me.  Her topic of study (through her work for Microsoft, Harvard University, Cal-Berkeley, and others) is the intersection of technology and society, mostly in the form of how young people use social media, and her remarks provided useful insights into how tomorrow's information worker regards social media technologies.

Several weeks after the MTLC event, I happened upon a transcript (actually, her crib notes) of Ms boyd's remarks from a later presentation to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.  It captured and built on some of the themes we heard at the earlier event, and provided some timely updates to social media use cases (#iranelection, Michael Jackson's death).

The single most resonant point in Ms boyd's remarks was one that not only applies to Internet-based social media sites, but also much more broadly:

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics."

She uses this point to underscore social stratification in on-line communities along lines of age (teens don't Tweet), socio-economic status (Facebook vs MySpace), race, sexual preference, etc., but it also applies to smaller communities.  It's critical for us, as those who help information workers effectively implement and use these technologies, to keep this in mind as we look to social media and on-line communities as ways to bring people together within an enterprise.  We heard plenty of "Mom and apple pie" sentiments of this type at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e.g., "It's about culture, not tools," "It's 90% sociology, 10% technology," etc., but seeing this point borne out in the larger Internet environment and supported by broad, rigorous research really brings it home.

A good rule of thumb in practice seems to be:  if your people won't pick up the phone to call one another to ask for or offer help, a well-engineered implementation of SharePoint, Lotus Notes, SocialText, Jive, etc. although useful for many things, is not the solution to your collaboration problem.

Crowd-Sourced SharePoint Governance via DebateGraph Visual Wikis

I read with interest a recent post by one of my favorite bloggers, Paul Culmsee that I want to share.  I especially like Paul's blog because:

1. He and I care about some of the same things:  Project Management, Governance, SharePoint, and pop culture (although I prefer Eric B & Rakim to Opeth, and I haven't yet had cause to integrate Tom Cruise into my blog's content, thematically)
2. We're unlikely to compete with each other for business, given the distance from Perth to Boston, MA (11,635 miles).
3. He's generous with his knowledge and his opinions, and has welcomed correspondence and feedback on these topics.
4. He writes in a breezy style, accessible yet insightful.

OK, now that the honorifics are dispensed with, I'll get to the point:  Paul blogged this week on an innovative approach to SharePoint governance:  a product called DebateGraph, which serves as sort of a visual wiki that shows graphically how ideas relate to one another.  An example follows (sorry for the static image -- can't fit the interactive version into this format):

Seven Sigma has created downloadable DebateGraph SharePoint web parts to allow users to visually show the debate of any issue within a SharePoint wrapper, but to me the most interesting application is the one where "n" is the biggest:  Seven Sigma's public, Internet-facing debate about SharePoint governance, shown in the example shown above.

So, if you have strong opinions about SharePoint governance (I know you're out there -- you haven't been shy about expressing your opinions with me), please take a look, vote, and make your voice heard about what works and what doesn't in SharePoint governance.  Join the debate today!

On-Line Identity Management 2.0: DandyID

Our firm focuses a great deal on collaboration as a way to solve business problems, and we view social media tools as a great addition/complement to the Microsoft Information Worker technologies we use and advise our clients about every day.  Accordingly, several of us have accounts with such services as:

• Typepad (blogging)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Delicious (social bookmarking)
• Twitter (microblogging).

One of the most difficult things about using all of these "best of breed" services is maintaining a centralized record of account credentials for each of these services.  I recently learned of a tool that I've been looking for for quite a long time: DandyID, an on-line tool for managing, in one place, all of my on-line identities.

I tried out DandyID this week, completed my profile, associated my DandyID with my various on-line profiles (out of the hundreds they offer), and used DandyID to verify my credentials with the services that offer this option.  I also was able to see where I rank among the digiterati, as far as the number and quality of my on-line presences.

I then took a link to my DandyID profile and dropped it into my e-mail signature so that people can follow me on-line using the services and accounts I've chosen to share with them.  (NOTE:  This is not managed on a user-by-user level via DandyID -- content is shown or hidden based on security/privacy settings in each of the individual services.)

  

I've used the free version to do everything I've described here, but DandyID also has a premium offering for $4.99 a month that includes social stats and analytics about how and where people interact with you on the Web.  I've also yet to explore the "Contacts" functionality in DandyID -- looking for a good use case to test this.

Now, if I could only find a centralized service to manage all my passwords across those accounts...

NOTE:  Shout-out to @DougCornelius and @jackvinson for the Tweets that led me to this tool.