continuous partial attention

Organizational learning and Leadership

As mentioned previously, I  attended the Young Democrats of Georgia Convention by the Sea this past weekend and gave a talk on social media, touching on ideas such as the future of participatory democracy,  and how internal communications can be retailored in the age of information abundance.

One of the observations I made throughout the weekend was that the de facto social network of choice amongst the Young Democrats of Georgia is Facebook.  Moreso then that was the fact that the way in which the younger democrats in University approached Facebook seems to differ from the older young democrats.  A point I made throughout the weekend was that everyone using Facebook is at the forefront of exploring the future of participatory democracy.  I think it was an ah-ha moment for a few people.  For college level democrats it was a wide-eyed "omg, hellz yes!!" ah-ha moment, and fromsome of the elder young democrats I noticed a more puzzled "that's interesting but a bit theorhetical" ah-ha.

I learned a valuable lesson this weekend about why it's so difficult for organizations to adopt social media.  Going into an organization, regardless of what the goal is regarding social media, the bottom line is that the project is an internal communications effort first and foremost.  That is to say that the proper organizational learning structures need to be put in place before social media can be adopted and utilized by an organization to more effectively do whatever it is they want to do.  My realization this past weekend is that what's most often needed in order for this to occur is leadership imperative and knowledge of already existing organizational learning structures.

One of the things I keep hearing from many Young Democrats is that the YDG is pretty much rebuilding from scratch at this point in it's history.  Communications between the many local branches has been either strained or non-existant, and they are now beginning to work towards building a robust communications network.  At this moment there pretty much isn't a learning structure in place for the YDG to adopt social media into their every day practices. 

This may be a net positive. Elections for new leadership were held this past weekend, so the opportunity exists now more then ever for putting these learning structures into place and making social media the cornerstone of their internal and external communications efforts.

This is a stark contrast to organizations with established leadership and established learning networks that are taylored towards indoctrinating it's members into the already existing communications practices of the organization.  This is self-perpetuating and makes it difficult for such organizations to adapt to the new  reality that networked culture and information abundance portends.

Twitter groups already exist!

I've heard people suggest that Twitter is in need of groups functionality.  I thought that would detract from Twitter's simplicity however, and I began thinking of simple ways to focus Twitter messages to specific groups of people.  Say I'm at a conference and only want other people I know at that conference to receive my messages, how would it be done?  I was thinking about applying a tagging tool to categorize your friend network, but using the tags would be too unwieldy on the ground.  Scratch that idea...

As it turns out, this problem has already been solved! Although I don't think most people have realized it yet.  Too Obvious perhaps? (Pardon the pun, I couldn't help myself. I'm getting help.)

The answer lies in using the @username syntax that's emerged from the user base.  This past week I noticed that I wasn't getting any noisy @username messages from anyone on my friends list to anyone else not on my friends list.  Cool, I thought. Everyone in my network spontaneously decided that was annoying behavior!

As it turns out, no one's behavior changed, I only stopped receiving these messages.  Everyone else was still using them!  But what does this mean?

In addition to direct messages (which are private) which take on the syntax of "d username message" we also now have public directed messages (with the syntax of "@username message") which will only be received by friends that the sender and the recipient have in common.

Which means, if I were to create a Twitter account called "Atlanta" (which is already taken btw) and every single Twitterer in Atlanta were to join it, we'd be able to use that account as a filter to direct messages solely to our friends in Atlanta.  So next time I'm at a bar and want to let all my local friends know (while sparing all my friends in New York and elsewhere the annoyance of random and irrelevant messages they can't act on) all I have to do is text "@Atlanta I'm at Manuel's tavern, beers on me for anyone who shows!"

To put this simply, "@username message" let's me message all the friends that the person I'm messaging and I have in common.

Twitter groups already exist, and it's the network! (as usual)

So, here some suggestions for Obvious to implement into Twitter to make this functionality a bit better:

• When I visit someone's Twitter page, on the right hand side, show me friends that that person and I share in common.  That way I'll know who else will see the message when I "@username" them.
• A simple command to only receive messages from people who are also friends with one other person.
• Create a special class of user accounts that don't have a microblog component and automatically accept friend requests.  These become formalized filters that anyone can join to target sections of their network. It would be great to see user accounts show up for citys, conferences, etc. This would be the group feature that many people are requesting. This would also create new public timelines.
• Bonus points for fixing the namespace problem: Perhaps starting these groups off with something like "!" as the first character so we can send messages like this: "!atlanta message" The fact that these accounts can't be used to post anything deincentivizes people from hogging the namespace.  There would be nothing to control!

When SXSW rolls around next year, everyone there will be Twittering "@sxsw I'm at the virtual worlds panel!" or "!sxsw podcasting in ze hallways!!!!1" and I won't get any of it!

Unless of course I want to, in which case I'll add SXSW to my friends list. :D

Upcoming speaking gigs

Shelby Highsmith, Benson Manica and I will be giving a talk/workshop to the Young Democrats of Georgia (YDG) at their yearly convention this weekend.  Here are the blurbs for the Saturday and Sunday sessions:

Online Organizing and Communications I: Strategic View
Maintaining an effective online presence is about more than creating and uploading content -- it's about building relationships.  In this first session we'll help you clarify what your overall goals should be in approaching social media tools such as blogs and streaming video, as well as social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube.  We will also discuss how these tools tie into not only generating real-world publicity, but real-world community.

Online Organizing and Communications II: Nuts & Bolts
So you've had a night to sleep on your grand vision for creating an engaged online community; now you need to know the tools and best practices to get it done. This session will highlight software and websites you can use to build your presence, share tips and tricks for effective content generation and distribution, and even run through a couple quick step-by-step demos of exactly how to create and share content ( e.g., videos, podcasts).

Wahoo!  This is my first speaking gig of the year, and the first of five I'll be giving in near rapid succession for the next month and a half. So far I've learned that having a number of new talks with very different content and themes within a short period of time is, well, CRAZY!!  How different can they possibly be?  Well, I'm flying to Maryland next weekend to give a presentation on trends and emerging legal theory around social software and virtual worlds.  Yeah.  I haven't even started working on that powerpoint yet, and that's always annoying as heck when it's brand new material.  At least this one will have high reuse value!  A few days following, Flickr will be the topic of conversation. :P

Oh, did I mention that the YDG talk will be largely off the cuff?! We have some ideas for what we're going to cover, but we're going to be passing out a survey on the social media habits of our audience to determine if this will be a MySpace or a Facebook crowd, and whether or not anyone reads local political blogs anyways.  Very important stuff to keep in mind if you're going to give a(n ideally practical) talk on putting participatory democracy into practice via social software.

putting things in narrative context: stuff I'm doing right now

One of the problems I have with blogging is that I grew up thinking about writing as narrative format.  Whenever I write anything, I wonder if what I'm writing makes any narrative sense.  Blogging complicates things first of all because readers can jump in at any point and start reading without any knowledge of what came before.  Secondly, if I haven't written on a topic before, I have a tendency to go into summary mode to put my writing into the narrative context I see in my head for how it fits into my life.  Frankly, I think this is my biggest obsticle to blogging right now.  I have a number of things I haven't blogged about yet for the sole reason that putting the narrative structure in place acts as a demotivator.
One solution to this problem is to just stop myself from feeling like I have to summarize everything for my readers (or for myself.)  This will take time. 
Another potential solution to get things moving is to make a list of things I'm doing, working on, and thinking about that puts things into some kinda context.  So without further ado, here are some things I'm working on, and potentially blogging about in the near future:

• Organizing an Atlanta NetSquared group!  Blogged about it here and here.  Our first -official- meeting will be on April 24th.  Join the group here and let your friends know!
• Learning to balance academic work with other information work.  Taking Calculus and an online Environmental Science course.  Related to this post on climate change.
• I'm starting my own brand.  (Surprise!)  I don't know why I've kept this offline.  I should be blogging about this.  There's no excuse!
• Giving a number of talks in the coming months on social media, online civic participation, and Second Life.  Uber excited about all of these.  Talking points as I generate them.
• Atlanta's quickly beginning to focus on social media.  Lots of events happening and being organized.  I predict local network density in the blogosphere by years end!