Collaborative Thinking

Participation Models: Observations On The Future Of Civic Engagement

Interesting study worth reading. Long-range "food for thought" as generational shifts change the nature of participation in the workplace as well. What engagement models transfer, etc.

Does the Internet make for more engaged citizens? For many youth, the answer is yes, according to a new study by civic learning scholars.

Posted February 23, 2011

IRVINE, Calif. –Youth who pursue their interests on the Internet are more likely to be engaged in civic and political issues, according to a new study of student Internet usage by a group of civic learning scholars. Youth who use the Internet are also more likely to be exposed to diverse political viewpoints, the study shows.

The study’s findings run counter to two commonly held assumptions: first, that the Internet makes exposure to divergent political viewpoints unlikely, the so-called “echo chamber” effect; and second, that the Internet promotes shallow activism among youth, so-called “slacktivism.”

The first-of-its-kind longitudinal study by civic learning scholars of high school students’ Internet use and civic engagement found that:

• For many youth, their interest in the Internet translates into engagement with civic and political issues.
• Contrary to popular belief, it is rare for individuals on the Internet to only be exposed to political perspectives with which they agree, but many youth are not exposed to political perspectives at all.
• Teaching new media literacies such as credibility assessment is essential for 21st century citizenship.

For More Details About the Study Findings and YPP Research Network:

“The Civic and Political Significance of Online Participatory Cultures and Youth Transitioning to Adulthood” (Working Paper)

“Youth Online Activity and Exposure to Diverse Perspectives” (Working Paper)

“Digital Media Literacy Education and Online Civic and Political Participation” (Working Paper)

Video of Professor Joseph Kahne discussing digital media, youth, and participatory politics

Youth and Participatory Politics website - www.ypp.dmlcentral.net

 

Adobe Catches The Real-Time Wave

Adobe Wave: Lets publishers “wave” hi to users directly from the desktop

Readers opt-in for the updates. For example, if you’re a reader of VentureBeat, and want VentureBeat article links to appear on your desktop as soon as they’re published, Adobe Wave lets you select that option. VentureBeat can then tailor how we send you those updates.

The notifications arrive on your desktop in the shape of a rectangular widget (see above for example of widgets featuring Evite and MySpace updates). Then they form a river, as new notifications come in (see below) You can click on them and they direct you to the publisher’s specified URL. All of this happens out of the browser. Publishers can customize with things like logo, background and foreground colors, and a thumbnail image.

Adobe Wave: Lets publishers “wave” hi to users directly from the desktop | VentureBeat

About Adobe Wave - Adobe Labs

Adobe® Wave™ is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications. It helps publishers stay connected to your customers and lets users avoid the email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update messages. Adobe Wave is a single web service call that lets publishers reach users directly on their desktop: there's no need to make them download a custom application or build it yourself. If you’re a user who wants to try it out, click here to send us an email. We’ll let you know when Adobe Wave is available for you to try!

Adobe Wave allows consumers to opt-in to receive desktop notifications from their favorite publishers. Each notification carries a call-to-action: clicking directs users to a publisher-specified URL, driving traffic back to your site. Notifications bring activity and events on your site to users even when they’re not in the browser and not thinking about you. Unlike e-mail, Adobe Wave has been architected to be a trusted communications channel and consequently minimizes spam and phishing concerns. Notifications can be customized with your logo, background and foreground colors, and a thumbnail image to ensure that your brand shines through to the user.

Adobe Wave - Adobe Labs

Waves of Wave Clones?

I wonder if we will see a series of vendors tilting existing or delivering new products that mimic Google Wavel... 

Shareflow shows the future of group communication — and it’s not email | VentureBeat

However, a rash of recent innovation is starting to challenge email as the predominant form of work-flow communication.

Zenbe, a New York City-based startup, is the latest example. The company today has released something called Shareflow. Shareflow is essentially a web-based dashboard that lets you see the flow of communication around a given topic (see image below). In many ways, Shareflow is like Google’s Wave product, released in late May. In each case, the page becomes a stream of things posted about the topic, with the most recent item posted at the top, and the previous posts moving down the page. However, Shareflow takes a step further than Wave by letting you incorporate your regular email into the flow. More on that in a sec.  

Basically, both Shareflow and Google Wave are different from email in that they let you post text comments, but also other attachments, such as charts or files. A flow can have as many participants as you want. It can include two people, or the entire company, and include people external to your company too. But each flow remains focused on a particular topic.

Shareflow shows the future of group communication — and it’s not email | VentureBeat

YouTube Video Clip Of Shareflow by Zenbe

For Those Caught In The Wave...

There is a great deal of "irrational exuberance" about Google Wave in the news right now given its current state (pre-beta). While prognostications on how it will derail existing solutions make for good press coverage, such statements should be viewed as part of the natural enthusiasm when something creative and innovative comes along.  This is a ways off... 

My skepticism concerns Google’s ability to execute over time (e.g., building in security and management capabilities) if they are serious about Wave being an enterprise solution. However, it is clearly a disruptive approach to current market players and one that entrenched vendors with large revenue streams to protect would never have undertaken.

Google info:

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?

Google Wave Federation Protocol

Google Wave API

Google Wave Videos

Other related articles:

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Exclusive: Video Interview With The Google Wave Founders

Live With The Google Wave Creators

Google Wave: A Complete Guide

Sergey Brin: Google Wave Will Set A New Benchmark For Interactivity

Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email

Information Overload And The New Luddism

You should definitely make time to read the entire two-part article. Clay covers a variety of topics such as literacy, media, generational shifts and the future of news/journalism. Some excerpts relevant to an enterprise environment below:

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I:

RJ: What’s your response to people who say that all this information that’s out there, all this knowledge that we’re producing is great, and there’s all this access that we didn’t have before. But we also risk information overload alongside, and we don’t—

CS: Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate because they, I mean, almost all of the people arguing that this is the Dark Ages are narcissists, because they’re essentially trying to preserve a particular piece of it. But the information overload people are the most narcissistic because information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

.....

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

RJ: So, is this just a generational thing? That younger people have come up using these filters and these technologies and they love it and the older generation is just kind of scared?

CS: Yeah, that’s certainly part of it. I mean, the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I : CJR:

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II:

Russ Juskalian: Well, this kind of brings me to something. We’ve heard all the consequences of what will happen because of information overload or attention spans. But, when you were talking about the last couple of things, I started wondering. Can you think of any of the consequences that would come about as a result of trying to stem the so-called information overload, or trying to slow down all of these things as they come?

Clay Shirky: So, there’s two different possibilities here. Stemming the information overload is this ridiculous Luddite fantasy of somehow, you know, making all those bloggers shut up so that there’s not so much stuff to read. You know, going back to the day when one could have said that you had read or watched the news, as if there was exactly one hour of news per day. I mean it’s just, you know… even, as an experiment, if you said “I’m going to only read the RSS feeds of news sources that existed prior to 1990,” you would still be drowning in it, because you can get to every English language newspaper in the world. So even if you just dealt with the fact that all this production is now global—forget any new entrants, forget amateurs at all—access to professional information is now so far in excess of what it was in 1990 that you still have that problem. So I don’t think that there are any rollbacks.

What I do think is potentially quite interesting is all of the work on filtering that says a big part of the value of information is actually downstream from its production. I would like to be reading or talking about what my friends are reading or talking about, or my colleagues are reading or talking about, or my competitors are reading or talking about. And this rise of social filtering—there’s an interesting phenomenon in the university world, where the number of papers jointly published by two or more researchers working in different institutions is on the rise. And it’s on the rise because it’s very… sitting at your desk, it’s almost easier to figure out, “Who else [in the world] is working on what I’m working on?” than to figure out, “What are my colleagues down the hall working on that isn’t like what I’m working on?” And that idea of information weakening the walls of the institution seems to me to be really beneficial for cross-disciplinary work. I mean, I think the fact that many of the people doing behavioral economics are psychologists is indicative of the kind of cross-disciplinary work we can potentially hope for in the future. So, I think that one of the ways to get around this filter failure problem is—you know, I refuse to use the term ‘information overload’ for obvious reasons—is to start deploying these social filters that assume that at least part of why I want to read or look at something is to be able to have valuable thoughts or conversations in tandem with other people.

And I think that when we start to see those kinds of conversational groups form in the kind of salon culture, particularly in university communities, we will see a potential transformation not of just whole academic institutions but also individual disciplines, where the econo-physics people, the behavioral economics people, and the neo-classical economics people are all now having a conversation that cannot be resolved with reference to only one of those three disciplines. And that potential for saying, “You know what, we’re going to give up on any idea that one can have read the ‘relevant literature’ now,” because a lot of that was just artificial barriers around the filter. And, instead, we’re going to say, “I’m reading the literature that’s keeping the conversation I’m having kind of the most interesting it can be.” That seems to me a potential way out of the current filter failure problem.

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II : CJR:

What If Web 2.0-Style 'Life-Streaming' Isn't For Everyone?

Interesting catch-phrase: "broadcast yourself". It's an intriguing spin perhaps on how communication technologies are evolving (slowly)- rather than transmit information in a point-to-point manner to known addresses (e-mail sender to e-mail recipient), we post or stream communication to a space where 1-N people can receive it in multiple ways. As senders lose control of the tool used to interact with the message, those receiving such messages gain control by interacting with information using preferred tools. We can begin to think of "channel switching" as a key communication design point. For instance, a Twitter SMS post ("tweet") can be sent from a range of client tools but does not dictate the manner in which other users will interact with the message. Some users might receive it via SMS while others might see it on the Twitter web site or via IM or even displayed that user's Facebook page (via a Twitter plug-in). Messages can even be subscribed to (example: a tweet can be delivered to your favorite XML feed reader).

The article goes on to discuss Quickeo but the idea of communicating into a space (rather than locking a dialog into a specific toolset), and designing up-front for channel switching (which enables more flexible "1-N" conversation paths), jumped to mind.

A lot of non-techy people, when they hear the words wiki, upload, widgets, layout, blogging, user-generated content and so on, simply tune out; what's available now works for techies, but uploading personal content to a public Web site is a huge barrier for others. Such is the contention anyway of a new San Francisco-based startup, Quickeo, which offers a service for those "who don't want to go public with their private lives."

According to Quickeo, while YouTube tells you to "broadcast yourself," and Flickr says it can help anyone show off their best pictures to the whole world in a bid for Web celebrity, those messages just don't resonate with those who want to share pictures and videos with family and friends but not the whole world. The Quickeo alternative allows you to send any kind of data (e.g. video, photo, audio) in an email format called a Quickeomail.

What If Web 2.0-Style 'Life-Streaming' Isn't For Everyone? (SocialComputingMagazine.com)

Need To Know vs. Right To Know

One of my active research areas right now involves event stream processing and its implications to communication, collaboration and social networking. Specifically, I'm looking at how attention data and "post" activities act as informal, loosely-coupled signaling methods that, when streamed in a public manner, can be combined with sensor/filter/relay mechanisms to intelligently pull messages and information to other people or situate the information to the right place (e.g., a "my space" created as a honey pot of sorts to house interesting/relevant items). A goal of such an environment would be to create opportunities for subsequent connection and interaction (at a person-to-person, group, team, or community level). Examples of attention data and post events would include blog entries, tags, social bookmarks, and changes to presence indicators - even Twitter messages are a continuous stream of post events. The collection and streaming aspects could be accomplished through a combination of pinging, aggregation and XML syndication services. The sensor/filter/relay mechanisms could be instantiated through various clients and agent/watchers. This type of environment would likely not be a single system (overly complex and monolithic) but instead would be some set of inter-connected / net-centric systems of interoperating nodes, without hierarchy, and include some level of trust zones (for security/identity reasons).

Why look into this? Years ago I became fascinated by what DISA and DoD were doing around net-centric collaboration. The DoD felt that it was imperative to move from Task, Process, Exploit, Disseminate (TPED) to Task, Post, Process, Use (TPPU). The design emphasis is on posting, processing and using data and information in parallel. A key aspect was enabling processing to happen in parallel to information access with people having access to information refinement along the way. The thinking (I believe) is that getting information out to those that have a "right to know" through an intelligent pull model is more effective than pushing information through a process first (introducing latency) that makes assumptions about who "needs to know" (often driven by a desire for risk avoidance).

A TPPU model is about managing risk while providing near-instantaneous communication and information access. It avoids scenarios where people are not alerted and failed to become knowledgeable about situations that impact them. It is almost impossible to know who might have a time-sensitive or other relevant interest in the raw data and its refinement as the process cycle continues. It was felt that a TPPU approach would reduce communication latency and improve information transparency. The result of such an environment would be improved shared situational awareness and self-synchronization through net-centric collaboration. This would have obvious operational and battlefield benefits and have a transformational impact on future warfare strategies.

Adopting and applying these concepts more broadly is intriguing. Almost all organizations could benefit from a TPPU-like model in terms of improved enterprise agility, resiliency, and performance - and would positively influence innovation and knowledge management efforts). This, in a round-about way, gets back to "the need to know" vs. "the right to know". It does not necessarily mean an end to push-centric systems, they continue along in parallel to intelligent pull models. Clarifying my thinking around the balance between the two models was triggered by a comment from Urban Mermaid below. It's a fair point and highlighted some incomplete "thinking out loud" on my part in an earlier blog entry.

In any case, this post provides a glimpse into some current research activities. Feel free to comment ... this is not fully-baked in my mind, I'm bouncing ideas off of various clients and vendors and found this post by Jeff Jonas especially helpful.

Comment from Urban Mermaid

interesting that you mention people wading through the stream of information and extracting what they want. however, what i've found in my job of providing research & analysis is that i still have to actively push information to people.

it's like the advertising mandate to break through the clutter.

sure, there's definitely people willing to wade through it and that's a cultural value that's beginning to embed itself, but i also feel there's still a need to have some information that gets fed to people.

A cure for e-mail attention disorder? | CNET News.com

Applying models and practices from gaming environments as a means to improve how organizations communicate has some intriguing possibilities. This article examines the use of currency and some tenets from the field of economics (scarce resources) as a means to encourage better behavior and attention management. 

A cure for e-mail attention disorder?

Silicon Valley start-up develops system to help manage e-mail overload that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies.
Images: Handling e-mail overload

By Daniel Terdiman
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: February 28, 2007, 4:00 AM PST

TalkBack E-mail Print del.icio.us Digg this

Corporate managers concerned about the amount of time employees spend sifting though mountains of unwanted e-mail may soon have World of Warcraft to thank for providing a solution.

That's because a Silicon Valley start-up called Seriosity has come up with a system to help manage e-mail overload that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in WoW and other large-scale online games.

Known as Attent, Seriosity's system is essentially a new currency--called the Serio--that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message's importance: the more important they think the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.

Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they think it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn't valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.

But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so users get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.

And while the system, strictly speaking, is enterprise software, it was directly inspired by the virtual economies of online games like WoW. There, players accumulate gold or platinum pieces or some other form of currency and can spend them on weapons, armor, dwellings and the like that themselves have real monetary value as demonstrated by what people will pay for them on auction and third-party Web sites.

Ultimately, the point of Serios is to help large enterprises manage their employees' attention.

Source: A cure for e-mail attention disorder? | CNET News.com

Apple Innovates Again: iPhone

Cingular is the partner, impressive form factor and features.

Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye (comments, Cisco?).

Source: Engadget

Technology Deployment versus Technology Adoption

IT organizations have historically focused on a variety of aspects related to the deployment of information technology (e.g., architecture, applications, integration, networking, infrastructure, security, and operations) with little resources spent on technology adoption. This situation can be overly simplified by saying that IT pretty much concentrates on the plan-build-run phases of the technology lifecycle. Some organizations might append "retire" for the sunsetting aspect of legacy systems (plan-build-run-retire). But few organizations would insert "adopt" into that sequence. I think it's a fair comment to say that organizations equate "run" to "run away" when it comes issues related to the technology literacy and adoption challenges faced by users. People equate adoption to training and training is often one of the first areas cut in terms of budget and resources. But adoption is more than training on the tool, it's about change management and working more effectively. Adoption is about literacy, understanding technology in the context of work and becoming fluent in its use so that the technology becomes part of a user's work style (and potentially their lifestyle as well).

This is not the fault of IT groups. It's the fault of the organization at-large. In many cases, I find that business decision-makers do not have a governance framework that can value technology adoption. So it is rare that I hear about anyone, including IT groups, having a strategic role, budget and resources to participate in the organizational development aspects of applying technology effectively. The norm is to essentially throw it over the wall to training groups or let end users fend for themselves. Some experts feel that such problems will be solved simply by deploying social software (under the banner of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and such) or that younger workers will come into the workplace with such literacy embedded within their DNA (e.g., "digital natives") having grown up in a world where they communicate via a new collection of tools (e.g., blogs, instant messaging, etc.).

I'm not so sure we should accept the notion that technology literacy exists simply because someone has social software is supposed to be easier to use. And I'm not so sure that younger workers, although familiar with these tools, have the know-how to use the tools effectively in a business context.

My sense is that organizations need to prioritize technology literacy and adoption issues over the next couple of years and closely involve IT organizations in such efforts. 2007 and 2008 will see a wave of new applications and infrastructure platforms coming out from major vendors and the emergence of more socially-oriented tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, and social networking). These new platforms do indeed offer powerful new metaphors for people to work differently than previous generations of technology.

But the tipping point, in terms of delivering value back to the enterprise, is shifting from deployment (simply making the technology available) to adoption (making sure that users change behaviors). This is more than simply training on the tools, it's about making sure that users are aware of the capabilities of these tools (i.e., literacy) and are willing to work differently (take risk, explore new ways of thinking, new ways of doing and new ways of interacting).

Adoption helps ensure that users are engaged enough to apply these tools in a productive manner that leads to improved business performance and innovation. That's why I believe technology adoption will become a enterprise-wide mandate for the next two years.

The following articles triggered this train of thought:   

Cal State will soon demand technological literacy

The California State University, in conjunction with Educational Testing Service, is putting the final stages on a technological literacy test that gauges students' tech competency. Students would have to pass that test in order to move on to higher-level courses.

Source: Cal State will soon demand technological literacy

Testing for Technology Literacy

Professors, librarians, and other college officials are increasingly coming to grips with the somewhat confounding reality that despite students’ affinity for IPods and their complete comfort with Google, many of them lack the technological literacy they need to navigate today’s information landscape. But recognizing the problem is not the same as knowing how to measure or fix it — tasks that many colleges are puzzling over.

Source: Testing for Technology Literacy

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Are College Students Techno Idiots?

Susan Metros, a professor of design technology at Ohio State University, says that reading, writing and arithmetic are simply not enough for today’s students. What is important for learners is information: how to find it, how to focus it, and how to filter out nonsense. But for many students, their main source for information is Google, which Metros finds troubling.

Source: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Are College Students Techno Idiots?