Playing with Dragon

One of the brainwaves i had for producing a blog a day with a minimum of effort was to rely on labour saving technology. I have been waiting for the release the dragon dictation iphone app, available several weeks ago in the US and as i learned last night at a wedding reception/iphone party just released in Canada.

I downloaded the free app and these are the results of the third attempt reciting the first 2 sentences of this blog ( it seems that the results are improving with each try) I think it has real potential:

One of the brainless I have for producing a blog again with the minimum effort must rely on labor city sending technology I have been waiting for the release of dragon dictation on phone available several weeks ago in the US and as I learned last night at a wedding reception/iPhone party just released in Canada.

Cheat blog #1

So far I have written 6 blog posts in 8 days.  This is actually pretty good for someone who is a born procrastinator.  If my calculations are correct it also means that at this rate I am going to be publishing 90+ posts on december 31 2010 if i am going to meet my blog-a-day commitment.  No worries that’s in the future.

So not having anything else ready to post i thought i would cheat by talking about the experience of writing a blog so far.  This may seem egoistic and a little bit desperate but i am a philosopher by training and there is a time honoured tradition of sitting around and self reflecting on all kinds of topics, psychology for example, or metaphysics, or if you were Descartes thinking about thinking. ( I am sure at some point Descartes had to be thinking about if he really existed when he wasn’t thinking.)

Blog Post Digression

Descartes at a Party: A one act play

(Descartes is standing in a crowded ballroom, stage left with a cup of mead and a canape thinking about if he really existed when he wasn’t thinking, he shrugs his shoulders and spills drink on french royal personage)

French Royal Personage: Merde! you fop,  you’ve spilled a drink on us!

Descarte: Sorry I wasn’t thinking (Descartes disappears in a flash of light as he resumes not thinking)

The end

So 10 bucks or if youre in ottawa a pitcher of beer to anyone whose read this far and can tell me the conceptual/metaphysical error with my first play.

Blog observations

Writing a ‘daily’ blog under these time constraints has meant reading more and then rapidly assembling what has been read into a few paragraphs.  One of the things about google, wikis and blogs is that i can within the space of half an hour research a topic and come off sounding informed.  But can my 30 minute scan of several sources on Nietzche’s typewriter yield useful observations that are grounded in reliable information?  Maybe it wouldn’t matter at all if this was a personal diary but my blog is accessible to the world via google.

By writing my 6 blog posts I have added to a world knowledge base my own points of view bad or good,  interesting or boring, insightful or off the mark and these blog posts will be read by a few people over time,  and, it could be a very long time.  I am not sure what will be done with blogspot or wordpress or any other tools as time passes but i cant help but think that these will be preserved as an essential history of the internet.

Maybe a thousand years from now some “world brain” archivist or  archeologist of knowledge will read my post and find some useful historical insight or be completely misdirected by it.  If that is the case then “hey there” and or “oops sorry”.

The world brain

I was browsing through wikipedia today looking for something about shared knowledge bases and came across an this wiki article on the “world brain”, an idea described by HG Wells in the late 30s as an encyclopedia of encyclopedias, accessible to all human kind.  Here is an excerpt from the wikipage:

The world brain is “…a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.” Wells felt that technological advances such as microfilm could be used towards this end so that “any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica.” A similar view of an automated system for making all of humanity’s knowledge available to all had been proposed a few years earlier by Paul Otlet, one of the founders of information science.

Aside from drawing the obvious conclusion that HG Wells was describing if not predicting something like Wikipedia it is also intriguing to note that the excerpt also refers to Paul Otlet one of the founders of information science who posited a similar idea.  Two noted individuals from the early part of the 20th century,  one a science fiction writer and futurist and the other a “librarian” both articulating this idea of universal knowledge.  I don’t wonder what they would think of Google.

The 140 character attention span

Are social media changing the way we think and write?  Oh yes they are.  Is it a good or bad thing?  According to commentators concerned with their impact we are losing our capacity to reflect and to think deeply.  Growing volumes and velocity of information are forcing us to adapt from reading to scanning,  from thinking through complex issues to assembling bits of information on the fly  and from diving deeply into ideas to skittering along their surface.  I am sure at their darker moments critics imagine our children evolving in to a society with ADD, poor memories and a fascination with pop culture (or to carry this way too far, saucer sized eyes, distorted thumbs and large bottoms)

There is probably truth in this…all of it. I certainly see tell tales signs in me…some of it.   At the same time this critique completely ignores one of the most powerful and compelling aspects of social media.  They are social.  Users of these tools are contributing to and drawing from an open and shared social network and social memory. While we may individually provide superficial and bite sized bits of knowledge the sum of all our contributions more than compensates for any one person’s lack of deep analysis.  To take a metaphor from my tech friends we have gone from stand alone computers to massive parallel processing systems where large complex problems are broken down into smaller ones and solved.  Crowdsourcing might be another word for it.

So is the impact of social media a good or a bad thing.  Its just reality, and we are adapting to it.  But if there is anything about the new social media that is obvious and fundamental its that we are not alone, we share collectively in a deepening ocean of knowledge and we are all becoming sailors, some a little more seasick than others.

Thus clack clackity scheisse! clacked Zarathustra

Towards the end of his life Frederick Nietzsche’s bought a typewriter. The philosopher’s vision was failing and he needed a tool to help him continue his work. According to academics, Nietzsche’s use of the typewriter had a profound effect on his writing and his philosophy. His early works were long form prose, his later works “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” (twitter style?). Nietzsche himself felt that the “apparatus” played a part in the forming of his thoughts and some of his most influencial works: Thus Spake Zarathustra and the Will to Power were written during this period. (@AJKeen remix)

This is a compelling and fascinating argument that i really want to believe but after more ‘research’ (a google search two blog posts and a wikipedia page) i found out that Neitzche unknowingly bought a damaged typewriter and when he took it to a craftsman to improve it, the machine was damaged further. He eventually abandoned this new technology out of frustration.

So while i want to, and do believe that the technology we use influences our writing and our consciousness and that we can draw all kinds of parallels with social media one of the most significant i can draw from this story is that Neitzche had lousy tech support and an angry frustrated philosopher can change the world.

Cop out #1

So i basically slacked off on the second day of my ambitious, some almost everyone would say over ambitious, attempt to write a blog post a day.  i would have conveniently forgotten about posting today and just made it up later except a guy from the Rock is on my case over it.  Thats social media for you, no matter where you are in the world you can still get called on not living up to your commitments.  So now i really need to do something.

I think Nick Charney had mentioned a while ago Dragon naturally speaking software which translates voice into text and boasts a high accuracy rate.  According to the lit the average person can speak at 120 words a minute but only type at 40.  I am not sure how much the average public servant speaks but its gotta be in the 180 range and probably types around 5 per hour if you average in vetting and approvals.  So this might be a great option for me.  There is even an iphone app (currently only available in the US) this could be a major cheat on my part.     So there you have it adaptation in action.

And just so you think this is just going to be superficial i am definitely going to tackle the whole issue the death of writing…but i have to wait for dragon to do it.

cheers

Blog Post #1

I cant believe that i am trying to live up to my new years resolution of writing a blog post a day.  its 27 days in to 2010 and ive only written one, internal,  mini half hearted blog.  I  have never actually kept a new years resolution before except to drink more water and even then i had to widen the definition of water to include anything with liquid in it.   I guess i am just intrigued with the challenge.  Is it physically and psychically possible to do this?  Can i think of something to say every day that anyone would find interesting or useful or informative?   Mostly i am wondering how am I ever going to adapt.  Shorter blog posts might help (can anything more than 140 characters be a blog post?), stream of consciousness writing too, or,  lets face it,  cheating is always an option as long as its open and transparent cheating.  So there ive done it blog #1 only 361 to go.

By the way if anyone has any suggestions on how to write blogs fast please help me out.

Helping out in guatemala

I was discusssing with a friend a project she and her charitable group has undertaken to help a guatemalan village build a school in early next year.

She wanted to know what should be looked at to set up a computer room and link to the Internet in this small remote vilage I told her what little I knew but suggested that we could ask the Twitter community for help. So help out if you know something or someone. Pls post here or tweet us. Thanks and I hope this works.

Here is a note provided by Joanne

Subject: Guatemala 2010

Hey Peter,

It was good talking to you today.

Click here to access our Amitié Gaitneau-Monde Website

http://web.mac.com/nbcom/agmonde/Accueil.html

Here’s a short description of the computer room to set up…

A classroom with 35 computers is going to be set up at Hogar Shalom’s school. The «clase informatica» will be used for teaching but also to allow peasants from the neighbouring shantytown to develop their computer skills. Teaching of commonly used office tools and access to the internet are planned for this classroom.

The school intends to use desktops that will be networked. Each will have its own power supply. The room will not have wireless access (isn’t that contrary to have them networked?). That’s all I know for now.

My question is…how do we go about it?

J

Happy birthday NRCan Wiki!

NRCan’s collaborative culture project is two years old today!  This is a time to reflect on how much have we accomplished, and the impact we have had on our internal community. The metrics we have gathered indicate that the NRCan Resource Wiki continues to be a living and breathing collaborative environment: topic pages generated two years ago continue to evolve and change as new authors discover the Wiki and add their contributions.  In a demonstration of our cultural acceptance, some core uses for the Wiki are emerging, including self registration for conferences and training, reference materials for projects, event promotion and task tracking. Also, the transition of content from Intranets to the Wiki is underway, and dashboards for sharing natural resource and other indicators across the department has been effective.   And it’s not just the contributors who are benefitting. We are sharing information faster and more effectively than ever before, as metrics on page views jumped from 1 million in the Wiki’s first year to close to 9 million by the end of the second.

One of the most important contributions of the Wiki has been that it has opened the door for a broad and ongoing discussion about collaboration and collaborative tools. It has made it culturally easier for employees to adopt other tools, such as the use of blogs as communications channels for updates on key activities. With the advent of our internal video sharing site, we are now using video to capture knowledge and training, and NRCan employees are increasingly making use of external tools to reach out and better understand our clients.

But there are two sides to every coin. The Wiki still has lots of room to grow, as it has not yet been adopted as a platform for briefings or for drafting complex documents.  Usually part of a more structured work process, these documents are often perceived as being too risky or too unwieldy to author in a open environment. The Wiki also has a lot of junk lying around. It continues to be a little bit messy, with fragments of dead-end pages never completed. Scientists in the department who tend to work with outside communities cannot yet make optimal use of the internally focussed Wiki, and those who work through peer review processes cannot often work in open environments. 

The lesson we have learned is that even the wonderful Wiki cannot do it all.  This is why it must be part of a broader integrated tool set that includes both social media and other more traditional document authoring tools. With the integration of tools across the board, it is important – now more than ever – to understand how things connect, and when to use which tool.

A senior policy committee recently described the Wiki as surprisingly rich in content. This speaks both to the accomplishments of the Wiki, and to the fact that we still has much to attain. Culture change is a slow burn but we continue to be optimistic, and we are continually surprised at the inventive and interesting uses of NRCan’s collaborative tools. While some are moving faster than others, it is clear that we are moving down the road to innovation together.

IM planning for web20 – the cathedral and the garden

A colleague once told me that our old way of planning IT projects was like building a cathedral.  Planning and more planning,  construction according to solid architectural principles,  years and years of building and at the end of it all you find that no-one goes to church anymore…. or at least not in the same way.  

I have seen projects that have followed this model and  taken so long to implement that by the time theyre done the world has moved on.    I dont mean to completely reject this approach it is still fundamentally important for large projects where there are huge risks to control and dollars at stake,  but this is not web20.

Web20 is about small simple viral solutions (with no licensing costs) that can be deployed by pretty well anyone.  Rather than taking years, they can be rolled out  in hours or accessed online in minutes.  You could spend more time writing up a proposal to write a business case than you could installing and running a wiki or a blog tool.

Gartner calls them disruptive technologies,  not because they have more functions and features but because they are simpler technologies that  rely on social relationships.  In other words all the complexity and all the value comes out of the social interactions that emerge around these technologies and not out of the planning matrix.   You cannot plan for how a culture will emerge around these tools or where the community will take them.  All i can say from implementing web20 for the past two years is that I never could have anticipated how colleagues would use them,  it was their innovation,  their genius and not the plan that has moved these things forward. 

So lets look at another model.  Web20 planning is like gardening.   You prepare the ground,   you plant the seed, you put in place supports and you watch and weed and adjust as things  grow.   You might have to uproot and move and occasionally some things just wont work –  in which case they make it on to the compost heap to be reused.   But, every once in a while there is the ‘volunteer’ something completely unanticipated and rare that shows up out of  nowhere (am i going to far with the metaphor?).

Web20 needs to have planning but not the heavy handed traditional planning that is so basic to IT and IM thinking.  Regardless of whether you like the gardening metaphor web20 needs a planning model that recognizes its organic, ephemeral and fundamentally social nature.  

Gardening tips- making the metaphor practical

1. Prepare the ground – identify those groups that are likely to be open to these new tools and work with them;   put in place broad guidelines and supports that keep things growing in the right direction, but,
2. Plant quickly the season is short – the faster they are in the ground the faster they grow in optimal conditions
3. Let them grow – stand back and let the culture emerge around the tools,  support where you can through training and barnraisings,  encourage social classification dont impose controlled vocab. 
4. Weed and prune where necessary – have a small team of web 20 gardeners looking to consolidate duplicate content,  promote proper naming conventions encourage social classification. 
5. Make sure the garden fits within the overall landscape.   recognize the information and knowledge created in web20 is valuable and needs to be integrated with traditional sources like document management systems, databases etc.  See Olivia dehavilland   and note google results include traditional docs but also wikis,  blogs video accessible through one interface.

That reminds me i have to go rake leaves off the flower beds