All posts by Richard Gayle

Web 2.0

An online discussion

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Extending The Discussion:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

I love blogging. Your sweat and you write and you post — and every so often you get the chance to have a detailed conversation with someone you’d never ordinarily engage with.

Such is the case today — I came to work and found myself scrolling through a multi-page thoughtful comment from John Tropea.

Rather than responding with another multi-page comment, I decided to put the discussion in a post, and respond (hopefully) conversationally.

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This is a really nice discussion about top-down Communities of Practice, barriers to entry, how much ‘time’ to devote to oversight, duplicate commuities, etc. All things that any group investigating these technologies shoudl think about.

The key seems to be to find ways for the groups to grow organically with a lot of top-down overhead. But there does need to be some sort of light touch at the wheel, so to speak, for effective growth.

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Web 2.0

Change

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mac by Marcin Wichary
A Brief Guide for Mac Switchers/Try-ers (No Laments, Please!):
[Via Web 2.0 Expo]

Wow, CNET’s Rafe Needleman sure raised a ruckus with his Mac switcher’s lament article. If you are thinking about moving from a Windows PC to a Mac and want to avoid the feeling of lament, read on, I have some advice that might help you make the change.

This is a really helpful article for those making the switch. It covers all sorts of useful viewpoints that can be applied to anything creating a large-scale change.

Don’t make the shift cold turkey if you can. Talk with people who are experts. Talk with others in the same situation. Use communities to help. Take classes and read books.

These approaches work with almost any change. They are not really Mac-specific in their underlying usefulness. The use of human social networks is critical for the rapid implementation of any novel process.

These approaches use social tools to help make a personal change. It can be as simple as getting a new camera or buying a new car. Implementing an innovation works best when the social aspects of change are used.

These are use of subject matter experts, local mavens and community leaders. Moving the information of change around a group rapidly is the best way to guarantee rapid uptake of new technologies.

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Web 2.0

Tips for any web site

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bee by Noël Zia Lee
Using Social Media Efficiently: 52 Tips from Beth Kanter:
[Via TechSoup Blog blogs]

Wow. Beth Kanter has impressed the heck out of me again. She’s participating in Convio’s Now is the Time campaign of New Year’s resolutions for nonprofits and technology (along with our very own Robert Weiner who’s own resolution post is here.)

Beth’s New Year’s resolution is to use social media efficiently and she offers up 52 great tips on how to do so. And if you try one each week for the next year, maybe we can all be better communicators, have more effective and engaging campaigns, and mobilize our supporters for greater change. New Year’s resolutions always make me dreamy.

Some of my favorites from her list include:

Do an annual ROI for your blog (and other social media activities) using benchmarking and metrics.
Don’t set up a presence on every social network in the world all at once.
If you are not reading blogs and Web sites in an RSS Reader, make that your New Year’s resolution.

read more

These rules are not only for non-profits but are important for anyone who is using social media to connect people or move information around. Many of these can be adapted to either non-profit or for-profit situations.

The key is capturing the right metrics. Web 2.0 approaches create a treasure trove of data that can be effectively mined to learn just what is working and what is failing, leading to effective solutions. So do not only have a plan for getting Web 2.0 tools up and going but also have a plan for mining the data they produce.

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Web 2.0

Analyze your followers

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If you were stuck on a desert island, and could only follow 150 people on Twitter, who would you follow and why?:
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

If you’re thinking about how to streamline using Twitter, Vladis Krebs offers excellent advice in “So Many People, So Little Time.” He recommends using social network theory to design your Twitter following strategy. (Following = people whose Tweets you read.) It boils down to following the few to find the many!

Source
OrgNet, Vladis Krebs

It isn’t about following thousands and thousands of friends on Twitter. We don’t have the time or brain cells for that. Don’t just pick an arbitrary number and start pruning. It isn’t about finding a small number of people who have large networks either. It’s about finding people who are connected to different social circles and

following them. (Of course you have to be interested in what information or conversations they are sharing Twitter, too). Identifying these people or what Krebs calls “nodes” is core of social network analysis.

And you need to build some redundancy in your network so you have a few multiple paths to people and ideas of interest to you.

He explains why this approach is efficient:

And this is why I follow so few people on Twitter! For the time invested, I want maximum return. I use the redundancy of connections, between the many social circles I am interested in, to my advantage. I follow a select group of people that give me the same access as following someone in every group. Follow the few to reach the many!

Because I have chosen them carefully, I want to actually read the tweets of the people I follow. A small part of my “following network” is always in churn, but the number of people I follow on Twitter never exceeds 100 [currently I follow about 70]. Those who follow thousands of people readily admit that they can not read the fire hose of tweets they get every day.

Strategically I am building a small, yet efficient, group that reaches out into the many diverse information pools I am interested in. I know I am finding good people to follow on Twitter by the number of great exchanges that emerge on many topics. Think before you follow, use your time and ties wisely!

This is a shift from earlier debates about the optimal number of people to follow on Twitter and social conventions. There was considerable discussion about the following to friends ratio (the number of people whose tweets you read compared to the number of people who read your tweets) and whether you should follow everyone who follows you. This can create a lot of noise as Louis Gray points out.

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Twitter, more than any other social networking application, lends itself to network analysis. Krebs has had some very important things to say about this before. Using these tools to connect to a few major connectors in each group more efficiently moves information around in less time.

The key is actually determining who those people are but current tools go a long way towards helping accomplish this. Social network analysis can help Twitter become even more of a useful, daily tool than it is.

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Web 2.0

Social media – must have

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backup by Tony Austin
When Your Corporate Social Platform Becomes Mission Critical:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

Life is full of learning experiences, and we had one yesterday.

A minor patch to our environment exposed underlying database corruption, which resulted in our internal social platform being unavailable for almost a full business day.

The backups? They were corrupt as well.

Thanks to the exceptional effort of everyone involved, nothing significant was really lost.

Sure, there are lessons to be learned on proper support practices for important applications (and our social platform is now one of those), but there are other lessons to be learned as well.

Things happen. While these tools are becoming as mature as email, they still rely on databases that can become corrupted. Chuck details some of the lessons learned. And this is from a company where mission-critical is a well known term. For these tools, it should become used by almost everyone.

#1 — The Impact Was Stunning

Len wrote a great post on “The Air That I Breathe“, and I think that’s a great analogy.

All day long, it was hard for many of us to get business done, simply because the platform wasn’t available. It was pretty much in the same league as “email unavailable”.

So, at what point did this social platform go from “nice to have” to “need to have”? There wasn’t a defined point that I can see, it just kind of snuck up on us.

People were resilient, and adapted — that’s what we all do anyway. But it was a huge impact to a lot of people’s workday, and didn’t do anything to help with establishing confidence around the platform.

When tools become a part of a person’s workflow, removing them has huge effects on productivity. It’s like running out of toilet paper.No one really notices until it hapnes. They can get by with alternatives but no one is very happy.

#2 — At Some Point, Declare Your Social Platform As Mission Critical

We didn’t do that.

As a result, we didn’t get the same operational procedures that EMC’s top-tier applications get. I’m *not* blaming the IT guys — they have a schema as to how they categorize things, and our application wasn’t in the appropriate tier.

Why does that matter? More scrutiny and extra effort is applied to make sure that the application is always available — and usually at significant additional cost.

Some of the investments that top-tier applications get include:

advanced test, dev and staging environment to allow quick roll-back if there’s a problem
snapping off disk copies of your database and running consistency checks before it goes to tape or other backup device
HA failover of servers, storage — or even physical locations!
Maintenance at off-hours, rather than prime time

Well, now we have a case to do elevate the category, so to speak.

And probably a willingness to spend more $$$ to keep this from happening again.

It is sometimes hard to convince the powers that be to put the money and resources into new areas such as this. But it should not be necessary for a meltdown to see the need. There should be a process in place, one that is well-defined, to determine what has moved from “nice to have” to “can’t live without it.”

#3 — Vendors In This Space Will Need To Revisit Their Processes

EMC sells mission-critical hardware and software for a living. We know what top-tier customer support looks like — it’s an integral part of our business.

You never can get good enough at this stuff, trust me.

Now, we’re not blaming anyone here, but I think it’s safe to say that we were exercising our software vendor’s support processes in a very unique and unexpected manner. We had 10,000+ users down, and things were pretty bleak there for a while.

Everyone pitched in and helped once an emergency was declared, but it was pretty clear that it was an immature process, relatively speaking.

If you’re a vendor in this space, and you’re convincing customers that your product is essential to their business, and your customer does what you told them to do and now has their entire company running on your stuff, you’re going to have to start thinking like a mission-critical vendor, and invest appropriately.

Everything breaks now and then — it’s what technology does.

What can’t break are the service and support processes: problem escalation, expert triage, advanced notice of potential problem areas, proactive preventative fixes … the whole ball of wax.

This is one of the worries about the cloud. An organization’s capability is determined by another organizations view of mission critical processes. If a company says it is prepared, it had better be because expectations will not be happy with ‘an accident that could not be foreseen.’

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Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Web 2.0

Collaborate to survive

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Collaborative Paper: What to do in the nonprofit sector to offset the economic crash.:
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Source: Foundation Center Focus on the Financial Crisis

The map image above is an interactive map that displays the distribution of the most recent support by U.S. foundations to aid those affected by the downturn. Drill down to see the details. It’s part of the Foundation Center’s aggregated page of articles, podcasts, data, and resources that Focus on the Financial Crisis. You can updates through RSS. Excellent example of aggregation strategy and really clear and good information design.

This is a nice example of an organization using Web 2.0 tools to help the community in ways that would have been difficult before. And not only can you access the data to study it, but you can get updates via a newsfeed so new information is brought to you.

Marty Kearns has set up a collaborative paper and discussion on a wiki. The paper is called Cascading Failure. Marty is convinced that the answer on how the nonprofit can understand and survive this meltdown is out there in network and has set up a space for us to kick it around.

At this stage, it is clear that nonprofit and advocacy groups are headed for extraordinarily difficult financial times. The cash crunch for the advocacy movement will be as bad as we can imagine and far worse than we can easily manage. We need a plan for how to remain effective. We should all begin to operate with new assumptions.

You can find the paper along with some draft prescriptions for organizations. One the recommendations is:

Invest in Social Capital. It will be the only growing market in 2009. Look at it as part of your organization: There have always been good reasons to build your social network, but now it is a matter of strategy and applying the techniques of network weaving. You need social capital to help in difficult times. I set up a page to brainstorm some practical tips, strategies, and resources.

There are also some draft recommendations for individuals working within advocacy movements.

So. not only is a draft paper available to all, but individuals and organizations can add their own value to these ideas with online discussions. Thus, novel ideas and innovations are able to rapidly traverse the networks that are created. The increase in the rate of diffusion of creative solutions may just be critical in finding a way out of this mess.

Science, Web 2.0

Pools for drugs

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pool by seanmcgrath
Goldman’s pool for drug research:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

And while we are on the subject of blog posts by Derek Lowe, here’s one where he points to news about Goldman Sachs funding a large pharma company and using a “new” business model

(The model involves) a different approach, creating a “research pool” into which pharma companies would place a range of experimental drugs in a single therapeutic area in early-stage phase 1 and 2 trials, where their specialists would work alongside external experts including scientists, chemists and clinical research organizations.

By the time an experimental drug is in Phase I or II trials, little ‘research’ is really being done. It is mostly development, at least with regard to dosing and such, as well as production methods. The failure rate of drugs at this late stage is much lower than during the pre-development stage, which really is what most people would call research.

But the large costs for drug development comes at the clinical trial stages. So it makes sense for Big Pharma to pool resources here to save some money.

That’s a model that I am sure I’ve heard being mentioned somewhere else, although I can’t remember. The concept is one that does appeal to me in general, but is phase 1 or 2 the correct time? A lot of the attrition occurs in pre-clinical work. Isn’t that the best time to share some risk and make some bets? I still like the idea of a company whose task it is to find interesting drug candidates and connect that candidate to pharma, biotech, academic researchers and funding, or a model where there would be a marketplace that early stage candidates could be placed into and companies could form collaborations or bid for the ability to take the drug forward. This isn’t that far removed for those ideas. I think the distribution fosters innovation, but having someone orchestrating the network is also critical otherwise you won’t get anywhere.

Anyhows, will be following this story and see if we can find out more. A quick google search really didn’t shed any additional light.

Pre-development, on the other hand, is something Big Pharma has not been as innovative at. That can be seen in the areas of research seen in many non-profit research institutions and small biotech companies.

In many cases, technology moves out of basic research facilities at universities and research institutions too early, with a very risky economic future. The pressures of raising money often hampers effective investigation of novel approaches, especially today when almost every small company wants to demonstrate a ‘proof of concept’ so it can sell out to a larger company.

Either the technology should be held longer and investigated by non-profit research institutions (and we see this with some of these organizations moving all the way to production methods) or for a similar basic research pool for companies to fund interesting technologies. Luke Timmerman wrote about one such possibility in Boston earlier this year, Enlight.

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Science

Xconomy’s event

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On Thursday, Xconomy held an event in Seattle where a panel discussed Vaccines 2.0. It was very interesting and I will wrote up more later. In the meantime, here are some photos:

vaccines
Well, I spent too much time talking out front and did not get a great seat.
vaccines 2.0
There was a full room here, with some standing room only in the back.

vaccines
The networking session afterwards lasted well over an hour with people still talking after 9 PM. This was a really nice first event with a potential to bring together quite a wide range of people.

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Science, Web 2.0

Innovation life cycle

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mushroom by Vik Nanda
Soon it will be time to start over, again:
[Via Scripting News]

Here’s how the tech industry cycle goes.

A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn’t cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new systems become popular with “power users” — people who yearn to overcome the limits of the previous generation. It’s exhilirating!

Some of those power users are venture capitalists, they’re hanging around looking for things to invest in, and they pick a few things that look like winners. When I was fresh and dewy, part of the new crop of techies, these people were Mike Markkula who funded Apple, and Ben Rosen who funded Compaq and Lotus. In later generations they were different people, of course.

So the new folks, freshly funded, hire lots of people, young’uns like themselves who are doing it The New Way. They ship some products, and while the users are happy and excited about all the cool new things they can do with the new generation, now that they’re freed of the limits of the previous one, they still want all the features they had come to expect in the old days. No problem! The new companies hire more people and they add all the features of the old generation. Feature wars follow, and the users get bored, and a new generation of techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch.

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Dave has been around for quite a while and he is absolutely right about this sort of innovation cycle. Read the entire post. Complexity is what we fight. But the simplifying solutions are usually inherent in the complexities we have created.

Cultures of innovation are capable of traversing this cycle with success. Apple is a good example. They constantly make the complex simple – such as the iPhone. Creating and sustaining a culture of innovation is the best way to survive the coming transitions.

The key is to have management that can adapt. This is where transformational leadership excels. It channels the creative spirit in the individual, who is free to find the solution that works. The difficulty with transactional leadership is that the individual only finds the solution they are told to find.

If the leader is an innovative genius, great. But if not, the entire organization will have difficulties coming up with innovative solutions, especially if the solutions are ones that the leader is not comfortable acknowledging.

It will be interesting to see what the next cycle will bring. Innovation is always exciting but never more so than when the world is in turmoil.

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Non-Profits, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

The science commons

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Supporting the Commons: Jesse Dylan and Richard Bookman:
[Via Science Commons]

Today, we are proud to announce the release of Science Commons’ first informational video. The video was directed by renowned director Jesse Dylan, the director of the Emmy- award winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video with musical artist will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. The video can also be seen on the front of sciencecommons.org.

“I believe Science Commons represents the true aspiration of the web, and I wanted to tell their story,” Dylan said. “They’ve changed the way we think about exploration and discovery; the important and innovative ideas need to be shared. I believe it’s vital to revolutionizing science in the future. I hope this is just the beginning of our collaboration.”

This video is launched in conjunction with a letter of support from Richard Bookman, the Vice Provost for Research and Executive Dean for Research and Research Training at the University of Miami. Bookman joins a group of esteemed Commons supporters featured in this year’s “Commoner Letter” series, including this year: Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia University, Renata Avila – CC Guatemala Project Lead, and singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton. More information and an archive of past letters can be found at http://support.creativecommons.org/letters.

In his letter, Bookman writes:

“We need to find ways to make sharing research results and tools easy, trackable, and useable by scientists on a day-to-day basis. Science Commons is working on these problems in a way that few other projects contemplate: they don’t write papers, they release “running code” like contracts for sharing biological materials and open contracts for biological tools like stem cells and genetically modified mice. […]

I support SC/CC because I think it’s the right approach at the right time. It’s vital that we as a community support the organization – the interstitial nature of what gets done at CC makes it harder than many might think to raise money, which can leave the most important work dying for lack of funds.

I hope everyone in the community can dig deep and support CC during this campaign. When you support CC, whether because of the cultural work, or the education work, or the science work, you’re supporting an organization that is much more than contracts and websites and videos. You’re supporting an umbrella organization working around the world that lives and breathes the “some rights reserved” philosophy.”

Our thanks to Jesse Dylan, Professor Bookman, and the broader CC community for their ongoing support. For more information about the campaign, or to show your support, visit http://support.creativecommons.org. Every little bit counts. Help support the Commons.

Science Commons has a very strong role to play in getting scientists to actively develop the web in ways that can benefit everyone, including themselves. In particular, Health Commons is a project that may provide a place for biologists to ‘remix’ their data in profound ways. If we can only get them to think about the Commons in the pursuit of their work.

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