Category Archives: Web 2.0

Open Access, Web 2.0

Data is useless without us

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62 153893226 C18E14A7A3 by NightRPStar
In science, data is nothing without purpose:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

In an article on TechFlash, a VC, talking about trends in 2010, had this to say while talking about increased IT needs in cleantech and biotech

Both areas are generating terabytes of data and it is no longer just about science — it is about digesting mountains of data.

For some reason that statement scared me. Digesting mountains of data is all about the science. If we forget that, we are in big trouble. Yes, from a pure technology perspective it is about digesting mountains of data, but (a) that has to be looked at in the context of science (sense-making?), and (b) the digesting is a necessary pre-requisite to getting to the science. You really don’t have much of a choice, but if you forget about the science, you will end up with noise, a whole lot of it.

My advice to all the VCs out there is simple. Yes, life science is increasingly data intensive, and to make any sense of that data, you need to look at computing as a core aspect, but never lose sight of the fact that collecting all that data has a purpose, understand our molecular machinery and figuring out how we work, and what makes us stop working properly. If we forget that, a lot of money is going to get wasted.

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Data just exists. Human interaction with data provides context, transforming the data into information.

Concentrating on the data does us no good at all. Finding better ways to store it might be useful but without putting a lot of work into being able to extract the data for human purposes, it is useless.

We need better ways for humans everywhere to interact with the data so that we can deal with the inherent information created.

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Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

Finding the innovators

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201001061223by Christiиa
10 Ways to Recognize the Innovators In Your Organization:
[Via BIF Speak]

Can you recognize an innovator when you meet one? In his latest Mass High Tech column, BIF founder Saul Kaplan offers the 10 behavioral characteristics he uses to recognize an innovator. “If the game is to identify and connect the innovators, how do you identify them and ensure that they have the resources and freedom to innovate?” After years of honing his targeting and selection process, here are Saul’s first five traits:

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The original article is very important to read. The 10 ways are a useful measure but it also says this:

I used to think we could convert everyone to be an innovator or create a culture in which everyone could innovate. I have changed my view after many years as a road-warrior consultant and innovation junkie. Proselytizing doesn’t work. People are either wired as innovators or they aren’t. The trick isn’t to create more innovators; it is to identify them, connect them together in purposeful ways, and give them the freedom to innovate. A leader’s job is to create an environment where innovators can thrive.

While there are times when almost anyone can innovate, but some people are just ‘wired’ to produce and spread new ideas. They just have to do that and an organization that can identify them and harness their ingenuity can adapt much more rapidly than a group that does not.

If their innovative talents are not harnesses, they often simply disrupt the ability of the majority of the company to actually do their jobs. Because, at its heart, innovation is disruptive.

Here is the list of 10 ways to identify innovators:

1) Innovators think there is a better way.
2) Innovators know that without passion there can be no innovation.
3) Innovators embrace change to a fault.
4) Innovators have a strong point of view but know that they are missing something.
5) Innovators know innovation is a team sport.
6) Innovators embrace constraints as opportunities.
7) Innovators celebrate their vulnerability.
8) Innovators openly share their ideas and passions, expecting to be challenged.
9) Innovators know that the best ideas are in the gray areas between silos.
10) Innovators know that a good story can change the world.

While these are traits are those found with innovators, they do not really help identify them when simply looking at a group of employees. Saul’s article provides a hint for separating the innovators from the rest of the group of employees.

It is not important or even possible to have everyone in an organization be innovative. In fact, most of the people in an organization should not be focused on innovation. Rather, they should be focused on delivering results within the current business model. These are the motivated and valued individuals committed to making quarterly numbers and annual business objectives. There is nothing wrong with that, and those individuals must be highly valued in any organization. They are people who get stuff done. They should not be made to feel like second-class citizens just because they are not innovators. Without them there would be no resources to invest in innovation.

In my discussion of the diffusion of innovation through a community, I mentioned the work of some researchers such as Everett Rogers. He splits an organization into 5 groups based on how rapidly each adopts innovations and change. These groups were innovators, early adopters, early middle, late middle and laggards. But I like to rename them.

The word ‘innovator’ has some very positive conotations. People don’t like being told they are not innovators and made to feel like ‘second-class citizens.’ I tend to view each group more by what they do and how the community views each group.

The majority of people, those in the middle, have several characteristics that are identifiable but the easiest to see is that they are Doers. As Saul mentions, ‘they get stuff done.’

Innovators, who usually make up 3-5% of a community, love new things and are always advocating change. They are necessary to any organization the deals in innovations but they are generally very disruptive to the doers.

Innovators keep coming up with things that changes a Doers’ workflow. Often they love new things simply because they are new, not necessarily useful. It is harder to get things done when someone keeps suggesting changes.

Doers do and innovators disrupt. This is partly the reason why the community rarely views innovators as people to listen to. Disruption, while often necessary, often makes a Doers’ life harder.

For innovations to move from the Disruptors to the Doers, there needs to be thought leaders, the early adopters, who act a really good mediators between the innovations of Disruptors and the work of Doers. In fact, the ability of innovative communities to function well, there have to be enough of these mediators. Without them, the Disruptors and Doers have a very dysfunctional relations.

These Mediators are also viewed as the thought leaders of the community, the ones whose opinions are listened to, often because they are so good at filtering disruptive innovations.

So, it can be somewhat easy to find the innovators (Disruptors) by simply asking the majority (Doers) who disrupts their work the most with ideas. Then using the 10 ways that Saul delineates will be very helpful in separating the truly innovative from those who are merely time-wasters.

These Disruptors, however, need to work through the Mediators in order for the community to more rapidly take up change. The Disruptors, by themselves, will generally not be listened to.

So, while finding the people who innovate is important, finding those who can mediate these changes is also important.

In my experience, many communities have enough disruptive innovators and a large majority of doers. What they lack are enough early adopting mediators to permit rapid adoption of change.

Later, I’ll discuss how to identify these mediators by both top-down and bottom-up approaches. These are the key people in the process. I’ll also have some suggestions for overcoming the lack of Mediators in many organizations.

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Non-Profits, Web 2.0

Information into action

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Online Activism: The Movie – Ten Tactics for Info Activism
[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Activists around the world are using social media tools to make change. A new 50- minute documentary film called “10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action” is a guide to how best to use take advantage of the power of these tools and avoid hidden dangers. The site and film include inspiring info-activism stories from around the world, a set of cards with tool tips and advice. The project comes from Tactical Technology, inspired their info-activism camp in India.

The film is being shown in 35 countries, showcasing the experiences of 25 human rights advocates from around the globe who have masterfully incorporated tools like Twitter and Facebook to take on governments and corporations.   The film also covers the security and privacy issues faced by human rights activists.

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In today’s world, the huge amount of information makes it impossible for one or a few people to quickly examine a complex situation and begin to formulate a successful response. It requires a knowledge of social interactions as well as an appreciation for systems thinking.

These ten tactics fit right in the sweet spot of systems approaches and social interactions. There ned to be good facts and information. There need to be great stories and an understanding of policy. Here are the ten (there are more but ten is such a great number):

The Ten Tactics

1. Mobilise People

2. Witness and Record

3. Visualise Your Message

4. Amplify Personal Stories

5. Just Add Humour

6. Investigate and Expose

7. How to Use Complex Data

8. Use Collective Intelligence

9. Let People Ask the Questions

10. Manage Your Contacts

These tactics can be incorporated into several strategies for systems thinking to produce some powerful solutions to complex problems.

My model is the bacterium. It does not know where a food source is, yet moves quite rapidly towards it. Bacteria, such as E. coil, have no eyes or nose. How does it find the sugar, or other nutrient it needs? It is called chemotaxis and is actually a very simple solution to a complex problem.

E. coli has a few flagella to propel itself. When they all rotate counter-clockwise, they work together and move the bacterium forward. This is called swimming. When they rotate clockwise, the bundle of flagella breaks apart and the bacterium rotates in a random fashion called tumbling. Here is an example:

The combination of these two behaviors allows the bacterium to move towards a food source. As long as the concentration of the attractant is increasing the bacterium swims. If it gets off track, and the concentration begins declining, it tumbles, eventually picking a new, random direction to swim. No attractant, more tumbling. More attractant, swimming.

This actually results in a very efficient method to move to, or away, from things.

When the bacterium fails to successfully follow the correct path, it makes corrections to see if a better path arises. If these corrections fail, more tumbling until it succeeds. It has a process for dealing with failure that inevitably leads to success.

Same with systems approaches. Intermediate evaluations, rapid failure, path to success. Incorporate the ten tactics into these strategies and you are well on your way.


Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

More than a change in latitude. A change in afftitude

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margaritaville by Ed Bierman
We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

By David Gurteen

Whenever I run my Knowledge Cafe Masterclasses, a few people always have a serious problem with the fact that when run in its “pure form” there are no tangible outcomes of a Knowledge Cafe.

There are plenty of intangible ones, such as a better understanding of the issue, a better understanding of ones own views, a better understanding of others perspectives, improved relationships and genuine engagement and motivation to pursue the subject but no outcomes in the form of a decision or a consensus or a to-do list.

I and many others don’t have a problem with this — the intangibles are worthy outcomes. And then I recently came across this quote from Peter Block in an online booklet of his entited Civic Engagement and theRestoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation

My belief is that the way we create conversations that overcome the fragmented nature of our communities is what creates an alternative future.

This can be a difficult stance to take for we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.

We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list.

We want measurable outcomes and we want them now.

What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.

We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

This is not an argument against problem solving; it is an intention to shift the context and language within which problem solving takes place.

Authentic transformation is about a shift in context and a shift in language and conversation. It is about changing our idea of what constitutes action.

So another intangible I should add to my list: “a shift in context and in language and conversation that changes our idea of what constitutes action.”

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I do not usually include an entire post but this one has so many important points. There are intangible benefits when these changes are made that may eventually lead to tangible benefits. But, most likely, those benefits will be a series of actions that would be wildly different than expected.

This is the paradox of a paradigm shift. People on either side live in completely different contextual worlds and are completely unable to explain their worldview to the other. One example – mimeograph machines. This used to be the only inexpensive way that multiple copies of a test could be produced for schools. There was an entire process developed for creating the stencils for the test, etc. It resulted in a ‘wax’ copy of the test that was used to print off the copies. With the appearance of copiers, the mimeograph disappeared from regular use. Now most young people have no idea of what a mimeograph is.

Thus when they watch National Lampoon’s Animal House, they just do not understand the whole scene with the two characters rifling through the trash bin to find the stencil. They have no personal knowledge of what a stencil is or why having one would be useful for cheating on a test.

Transformation presents a similar division between what was and what is. But those organizations that can effectively learn how to move information around more effectively, who can harness human social networks in order to solve complex problems, will be more successful.

They may just have a hard time explaining it to those organizations still on the other side.


Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Make it a pub

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[Crossposted at A Man with a PhD]

pub by gailf548
Participation Value and Shelf-Life for Journal Articles:
[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

Discussion forums built around academic journal articles haven’t seen much usage from readers. Lessons learned from the behavior of sports fans may provide some insight into the reasons why.

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The scientific discussions that many researchers have found the most productive are often those sitting around a table in a informal setting, like a pub. These discussions are often wide-ranging and very open. They often produce really innovative ideas, which get replicated on cocktail napkins.

Some of the best ideas in scientific history can be found on such paper napkins. Simply allowing comments on a paper does not in any way replicate this sort of social interaction. But there already online approaches that do. We call them blogs.

Check out the scientific discussions at RealClimate, ResearchBlogging or even Pharyngula. Often the scientific discussions replicate what is seen in real life, with lots of open discussion about relevant scientific information.

If journals want to create participatory regions in their sites, they might do well to mimic these sorts of approaches. David Croty at Cold Spring Harbor has such a site. Although it has not reached the popularity of RealClimate, it is a nice beginning.

I would think that research associations, with an already large audience of members, would have an easier time creating such a blog, one that starts by discussing specific papers but is open to a wide ranging, semi-directed conversation.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Staying up to date with twitter services

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Part 1: What are Twitter Lists?:
[Via Pistachio Consulting Inc.]

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series cross-posted from adelemcalear.com

lists-header

WHAT IS IT?

Back on September 30th, Twitter announced on their blog that they would be launching their new Lists feature to a small group of users to beta test. Lists allow Twitter users to organize the people they follow into groups. By segmenting your following list into groups, you can then filter tweets from your main stream and just view the tweets originating from a selected list. You can also subscribe to other people’s lists.

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Twitter is a social medium that has varying uses for different people. But it is obvious that it has some use for almost everyone.

When they introduce a new service, like lists, it is useful then to get up to speed quickly. This nice little series discusses the new Lists feature of Twitter. It helps prov ide some important insights into the potentials of lists and their drawbacks.

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Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Updated: Short answers to simple questions

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fail by Nima Badiey

NIH Funds a Social Network for Scientists — Is It Likely to Succeed?

[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

The NIH spends $12.2 million funding a social network for scientists. Is this any more likely to succeed than all the other recent failures?

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Fuller discussion:

In order to find an approach that works, researchers often have to fail a lot. That is a good thing. The faster we fail, the faster we find what works. So I am glad the NIH is funding this. While it may have little to be excited about right now, it may get us to a tool that will be useful.

As David mentions, the people quoted in the article seem to have an unusual idea of how researchers find collaborators.

A careful review of the literature to find a collaborator who has a history of publishing quality results in a field is “haphazard”, whereas placing a want-ad, or collaborating with one’s online chat buddies, is systematic? Yikes.

We have PubMed, which allows us to rapidly identify others working on research areas important to us. In many cases, we can go to RePORT to find out what government grants they are receiving.

The NIH site, as described, also fails to recognize that researchers will only do this if it helps their workflow or provides them a tool that they have no other way to use. Facebook is really a place for people to make online connections with others, people one would have no other way to actually find.

But we can already find many of the people we would need to connect to. What will a scientific Facebook have that would make it worthwhile?

Most social networking tools initially provide something of great usefulness to the individual. Bookmarking services, like CiteULike, allow you to access/sync your references from any computer. Once someone begins using it for this purpose, the added uses from social networking (such as finding other sites using the bookmarks of others) becomes apparent.

For researchers to use such an online resource, it has to provide them new tools. Approaches, like the ones being used by Mendeley or Connotea, make managing references and papers easier. Dealing with papers and references can be a little tricky, making a good reference manager very useful.

Now, I use a specific application to accomplish this, which allows me to also insert references into papers, as well as keep track of new papers that are published. Having something similar online, allowing me access from any computer, might be useful, especially if it allowed access from anywhere, such as my iPhone while at a conference.

If enough people were using such an online application then there could be added Web 2.0 approaches that could then be used to enhance the tools. Perhaps this would supercharge the careful reviews that David mentions, allowing us to find things or people that we could not do otherwise.

There are still a lot of caveats in there, because I am not really convinced yet that having all my references online really helps me. So the Web 2.0 aspects do not really matter much.

People may have altruistic urges, the need to help the group. But researchers do not take up these tools because they want to help the scientific community. They take them up because they help the researcher get work done.

Nothing mentioned about the NIH site indicates that it has anything that I currently lack.

Show me how an online social networking tool will get my work done faster/better, in ways that I can not accomplish now. Those will be the sites that succeed.


[UPDATE: Here is post with more detail on the possibilities.]

Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

A very big challenge for biopharma

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Loose coupling and biopharma:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

A few days ago, via the typical following of links that is typical of a good search and browse section on the interwebs, I chanced upon a discussion about a presentation given by Justin Gehtland at RailsConf. The talk was entitled Small Things, Loosely Joined, Written Fast and that title has been stuck in my head ever since. Funnily enough, what was in my head was not software, and web architectures, cause today, I consider that particular approach almost essential to building good applications and scalable infrastructures, and most people in the community seem to understand that (not sure about scientific programmers though). What I started thinking about was if that particular philosophy could be extended to the biopharma industry.

Without making direct analogies, but without suspending too much disbelief, one can imagine a world where drug development is not done in today’s model, but via a system consisting of a number of loosely coupled components that come together to combine cutting edge research and products (drugs) in a model that scales better and does a better, more efficient job of building and sustaining those products. One of the tenets of the loose coupling approach to scalable software and hardware is minimizing the risk of failure that is often a problem with more tightly coupled systems and in many ways the current blockbuster model is very much one where risk is not minimized and one failure along the path can result in the loss of millions of dollars. I have said in the past that by placing multiple smart bets, distributed collaborations and novel mechanisms (like a knowledge and technology exchange), we can reboot the biopharma industry, reducing costs and developer better drugs more efficiently. I don’t want to trivialize the challenge, the numerous ways in which the process can go wrong, and the vagaries of biology, but resiliency is a key design goal of high scale systems, and is one we need to build into the drug development process, one where the system chooses new paths when the original ones are blocked.

How could we build such a network model? I know folks like Stephen Friend have their ideas. Mine are ill formed, but data commons, distributed collaborations, and IP exchanges are a key component especially in an age where developing a drug is going to be a complex mix of disciplines, complex data sets and continuous pharmacavigilance. I can’t help but point to Matt Wood’s Into the Wonderful which does point to some of those concepts albeit from a computational perspective

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Designing great and awesome tools for researchers to use will be critical for successful drug development. But there also has to be a cultural change in the researchers themselves and the organizations they inhabit.

One is that the tools have to work the way scientists need them to, not what works well for developers. This is actually pretty easy now and many tools are really starting to reflect the world views of researchers in biotech, who, more times that expected, are somewhat technophobic.

This leads to the second area- researchers often need active facilitation in order to take up these sorts of tools. They need someone they trust to actually help convince them why they should change their workflows. Most will not just try something new unless they can see clear benefits.

Finally, the last thing is better training for collaborative projects. Most of our higher education efforts for training researchers makes them less collaborative. They are taught to get publications for themselves in order to gain tenure. Plus, with the competition seen in science, letting others know about your work before publication can often be harmful Large labs with many people often can quickly catch up to a smaller lab and its work.

Like in the business world, being first to accomplish something can be overtaken by a larger organization. So, many researchers are trained to keep things close to the vest until they have drained as much reputation as possible form the work.

But many of the difficult problems today can not be solved by even a large lab. It can require a huge effort by multiple collaborators. Thus, there is a movement towards figuring out how to deal with this and assign credit.

Nature just published a paper by the Polymath Project, an open science approach to the discovery of an important math problem. They addressed the problem of authorship and reputation:

The process raises questions about authorship: it is difficult to set a hard-and-fast bar for authorship without causing contention or discouraging participation. What credit should be given to contributors with just a single insightful contribution, or to a contributor who is prolific but not insightful? As a provisional solution, the project is signing papers with a group pseudonym, ‘DHJ Polymath’, and a link to the full working record. One advantage of Polymath-style collaborations is that because all contributions are out in the open, it is transparent what any given person contributed. If it is necessary to assess the achievements of a Polymath contributor, then this may be done primarily through letters of recommendation, as is done already in particle physics, where papers can have hundreds of authors.

We need to come up with better ways to design useful metrics for those that contribute to such large projects. Researchers need to know they will get credit for their work. As we do this, we need to also help train them for better collaborative work, because that is probably what most of them will be doing.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Changing social rules

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10 Golden Rules of Social Media:
[Via Nonprofit Online News]

Yes, the title is linkbait, but I like it anyway. Aliza Sherman has been doing this almost as long as I have and her digestion of 20 plus years of experience into 10 Golden Rules of Social Media are utterly simple and powerful. They could easily be a checklist for any social media project or campaign: (1) Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net. (2) Listen. (3) Add Value. (4) Respond. (5) Do Good Things. (6) Share the Wealth. (7) Give Kudos. (8) Don’t Spam. (9) Be Real. (10) Collaborate.

In fact, it makes me think that I ought to see if I could build some research around this list. Unfortunately, the most important one (indeed the one that leads to all the other nine, as far as I’m concerned) is a challenging one to test. “Respect the spirit of the Net.” I have a solid idea of what that means and oddly, I think it’s a large part of what people pay me for. But could I build an instrument for it? I’m not so sure.

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One thing the Internet is doing is requiring us to change and adapt social interactions, to create rules that work in the new environment. Society does this in order to control behavior so that the interactions are the most productive.

We see this in many of our day-to-day interactions. It is found in how line cheats are frowned upon, how we decide who goes first through a door, how we move to the right when going up some stairs. There are many social rules that we use to function smoothly.

Now not everyone follows all the rules but the rest of us sure notice when they are broken. I would guess that much of the road range seen is due to the apparent breaking of social rules that may not actually be appropriate when in the car.

The Internet is also a new social environment and we are creating social rules just like anywhere else. These 10 rules of social media are a good start. They all help enhance what makes the web so powerful. As we gain more experience with this new social setting, we will do w better job of training each other how to behave.

Not that trolls and spam will disappear but, just as we do with someone who to break some of our current social rules, we will do a better job of isolating and ignoring their behavior so it does not do as much damage.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Mashing up

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200910202344.jpg by foodistablog

One of the great things about openness and transparency is the ability for people to mash together various things to suit themselves. So, look at this:

Listening to: Death of an Interior Decorator from the album “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab For Cutie.

I added that with a single click in ecto, the blog editing software I use to create and publish posts. Ecto has a nice add-on that grabs the info from the song I am listening to and puts it in the post. I can set up templates with formatting so it has the links, etc. But the original template created Google search links. I simply remade the template so it links to iTunes.

I’m doing the same thing with Twitterfeed. This has allowed me to push blog posts from my different blogs (Spreading Science, Path to Sustainable and A Man with a PhD). Now I’m seeing if I can push posts to my Facebook account.

So, a simple posting can also copy the post to both Twitter ad Facebook. It looks like I do a lot but it all comes from simply clicking one button. That is what open APIs and other aspects of the web allow us to do.

It all makes it easier for the right people to get the right information at the right time.