Deborah Schultz

Catalysts = Tummlers

This is most definitely a new favorite quote.  I have added Theodore Zeldin to a growing list of sociologists and historians I need to read.  This one seems particularly apt for our time and my work on Tummeling:

"To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction."    - Theodore Zeldin

 

Forging a New Social Contract - the preso

Here is a new concept I have been noodling around with over the past year.  I packaged it into a talk at SXSW with the title: Dear Miss Manners: WTF the Social Web.  In essence, we are living through major shifts in business, culture and politics - this shifting landscape has resulted in a the need to forge new expectations on how we live together as a global community - aka a new social contract.

Forging a New Social Contract - SXSW 2011

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Forging a New Social Contract

A lot has been said recently about the utopian vs. distopian aspects of the Social Web. You can't watch a media broadcast, attend a dinner party or pass by a bookstore without someone either praising the benefits of our new hyperconnected relationship economy or bemoaning it as the end of civilization.  

Frankly, I have become more than a bit bored by the binary nature of these conversations and commentary.  Technology isnt good or bad - what we do with it and how we adopt and integrate it into our lives is the challenge.  The Social Web is a mere teenager and although many of us may have grown up on the Internet, the Internet is by no means all grown up.

I am looking forward to sharing some of my thoughts and catalyzing a hearty discussion on this topic at SXSW this week.  Here is the description of my talk - all snarky and fun for the SXSW zeitgeist.  In truth this is less about actual etiquette than about discussing the implications of living in world with emergent socio-normative behaviors. I promise to post my slides and reactions after the show.

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Dear Miss Manners: The Social Web, WTF?

The Social Web is now a teenager –awkward, arrogant, snarky, fearless, experimental and open. She is shaking things up and having a major impact on our culture, social dynamics, and etiquette. What are the new social dynamics and cultural impacts of all these tools and technologies? This session will explore the emerging etiquette issues of our participatory hyper-connected world. What are the new rules? How are our relationships, culture and business assumptions changing? Do we understand the impact of this new relationship persistence?

• Do I have to ask before I post a photo of a friend online? Who has editorial approval?
• Am I required to respond to every inbound communication I receive or is “ignoring” an accepted response?
• Where is the line between encouraging participation and being just plain annoying?
• What are you doing mucking up my activity stream?
• What the heck is a “friend” anyway?

How do we design, build and manage these new spaces? What are the new rules of the online commons and the associated appropriate etiquette? This participatory session will ask attendees to contribute their own real world examples and will lay out a new framework for a new social contract. It’s our job to decide what we want our web teenager to be when she is all grown-up.

If you are attending SXSW please stop in and participate and view the preso here.

 

Tummeling - the art of creating active social spaces

Cross posted from my weekly Tummelvision podcast - where we explore the art of social engagement in business, society and tech

Part of my passion surrounding Tummeling stems from my desire to explore and highlight the dynamics of what is needed to create engaged  social spaces online.  Recently Kevin Marks and I led a session at the recent O'reilly Open Web Foo Camp where we intro'ed the concept to our beloved geek community.  We had a great discussion with a number of  folks including Dale Dougherty [who runs the world of Make], Sarah Novotny [program chair of OSCON] and others.  As Tummlers themselves - they commented on the need for better tools for curators,  creators and catalysts to help them connect with their community and for their community to connect with each other.

The intersection of our human selves and tech were popping up in many conversations and many sessions throughout the weekend.  We are definitely at a unique moment - where the once binary web is just starting to recognize the need to evolve into a more organic entity that better reflects who we are and how we behave - a more reflective  representation of our offline selves.  Let's face it, we take ourselves with us wherever we are.  In one of the sessions led by Brady Forrest we discussed the need for Social Bots - sounds scary - but really it could potentially be about making us smarter about ourselves and our interactions - these bots could help us maintain our social relationships across many groups, sites, and tribes.  They could even be a personal data stream to report back to me analytics about my life in meaningful ways.  But therein lies the rub - as soon as we start heading down the "manage my life" track - it starts getting complex very quickly.  We  need to ensure that in our effort to create a more open web we provide for the likelihood of ever changing connections and the ability to set permissions and identity as we choose.

As both Elizabeth Churchill [Ep 7 Guest] and Shelly Farnham pointed out, not all of us want 100% transparency all the time.  This leads us into many complex and complicated issues of privacy, identity, control, permissions etc.  We are seeing them played out daily - everywhere - and though computers can do a better job of helping us filter and manage some of these complexities it will ultimately be up to us - the humans and the Tummlers to make it all work seamlessly and organically.  The human brain and heart - are still the best at managing the nuances of our social selves.

 

People of the Link - a fun comparative look at the social web

Here is a fun talk I have  given at IgniteSF and at Nokia Ideascamp on the connection between Jewish Culture and the Social Web.  This only skims the surface of all the similarities but it is a fun start.  Once I started down the path I kept finding more and more connections that made sense.  

Basically - if you want to understand how our society and business worlds need to adapt to a networked, emergent, decentralized world take a look at how Jewish culture has survived in Diaspora for 5771 years. There is a real framework for co-creation, crowdsourcing, participation, attribution [aka Creative Commons] etc.  We get this stuff.  [Note: I am sure that other decentralized cultures and/or religions may share similarities as well - but this is the one I am an expert in].  The entire construct of the Tummelvision podcast that I host with Heather Gold and Kevin Marks comes from this deep understanding that learning and innovating in a meshed world requires art and science. Balancing enough structure with organic emergence and enabling people to provide the connective tissue is how it all works - kinda like Judaism.  Enjoy.

Note - More on this topic posted sporadically over at PeopleoftheLink

People of the Link from deb schultz

Note: no text notes but hopefully you get the gist of it.

World and Web - not as connected as we think

Over on the Tummelvision podcast we chat weekly with a broad swath of people on the intersection of technology, culture and business. Our conversations often reflect the participatory nature of - well - everything.  How our current hyper-connected-always-on world demands and drives interaction. This is forcing a new focus on the skills and tools that are needed to manage and succeed in this environment -personally, socially, economically and artistically.   

We all lives this everyday - signal to noise, ambient intimacy, strength of weak ties, context, curation.  I spend a lot of  time with geeks and developers and it is way to easy to think that computation power is going to solve all of these problems.  The truth is  - it won't.  

The need for better tools to enable these real connections and how technology can be less binary and do a better job of fitting into our human selves vs the other way around.  Interactions are changing the web [social or otherwise}

 As Paul Adams, UX Researcher at Google  eloquently stated:

The next stage of the web won’t have destinations, it will be a distributed network of content and people that will get reassembled depending on context and relationships. The increase in people interactions on the web will mean that  building and managing communities will be important for responding to customer suggestions, queries, and complaints. Communities will need to be embedded in consumer experiences and not built at a new destination.

I just stumbled onto Ethan Zuckerman's recent Ted talk on exactly this subject.

Great Ted talk from Ethan Zuckerman on the fact that we are less cross-linked and cross connected than we think we are. Our argument to avoid the homophily that Zuckerman discusses ? Tummlers, of course!

 

Snackbyte: Take a walk on the Human Side

[Cross posting from my other home on the web at Tummelvision.tv ]

I sniffed out a few great articles that echo the Tummel Manifesto - of bringing our human-selves with us in business, culture and tech [whether online or offline]:

• Linda Stone’s recent piece on “Conscious Computing: A new era of post-productivity computing?
• Dev Patnaik from Jump Associates piece on the link between empathy & innovation: Innovation starts with empathy
• Paul Adams' great preso entitled the Real life Social Network demonstrates how designers are indeed recognizing the need to build a more integrated set of tools that reflect our real life behaviors.

There is definitely something in the air these days bringing forth the conversation on our more ‘human side’.  An often overlooked impact of "Web2.0" or "Social Media" - is the renewed focus on what it means to collaborate, share, participate and how can we create, design and develop systems and organizations that allow these natural behaviors to flourish.  Exciting stuff - it's about time. I hear the original promise of the Web hitting it's mark and it sounds sweet.

All a Chatter - cautionary sign of the times

Salesforce.com officially launched Chatter this week to great acclaim and fanfare.  I applaud their ability to develop, iterate and launch this product in eight months.  Chatter represents their understanding that not all knowledge fits discretely in a database. It is increasingly important to focus on the internal conversation and flow [aka activity streams] that happen daily at organizations both large and small. 

In watching the launch of Chatter, I wondered if the team focused enough on the impacts this tool has on the organizational human dynamics. I pondered a few of the following questions: 

• Is Chatter an example of a tool that will help the Tummler's inside an organization? 
• Will the ability to finally transparently see how information actually flows through siloed structures exposing the true power graph lend more credence to the imporatnce of these hidden individuals in an organization? 
• What does this do to reputation and career path of people inside companies? What would happen if you added a reputation engine on top of Chatter? [shudder]
• How could tools such as chatter do an even better job at exposing the hidden information inside organizations to increase agility and innovative collaboration?

I am skeptical that Salesforce has thought about any of this.  My colleague Susan attended the Chatter launch and relayed that Benioff shrugged off any implications or ramifications resulting from him 'unfollowing' an employee at Salesforce.  Really?  How would you feel if your CEO or your boss stopped following you? Metaphorically that could be the equivalent of being cut out of meetings or conference calls.  We need better rules of engagement and understanding around  the cultural dynamics of these new tools.  

I dont meant to pick on Salesforce, they are one of many companies and tools that fall short when exploring the downstream human implications of what they are building. The good news is there are lessons to be learned from across multiple disciplines that we can bring together to improve this new world. We require a MUCH greater understanding of the human dynamics and impact of these tools.   We need to build and integrate the social interface design work of UX designers  [such as Christian Crumlish Adrian Chan and Derek Powazek] and organizations such as SigCHI and their related conference as well as organizational pychologists, industrial designers  and ethnographers to gain a better understanding the dynamics of developing tools and implementing them.  An entire new area of expertise is cropping up around Social Design. I am spending a lot of my time focused on just this area.

The oxymoron of our current networked, digital, data-driven real time web is that as we get more technologically advanced it becomes INCREASINGLY important to focus MORE on the human side of technology.  I want software to adapt to my behavior not force me to retrofit my complexities into an oversimplifies set of features.  I expect developers and companies to understand the dynamics at play and the impact of their tools.   Social is not a channel it is infrastructure it is behavior - it is the grease that fuels our participation.

Note: Interested in an going conversation on these issues? Join Heather Gold, Kevin Marks me and our eclectic group of guests [including business folks, artists, designers and developers] weekly on Tummelvision.  We hack at these topics LIVE every  Thursday at 5pm PST/8PM EST over here. Please join us.

[photo credit: elasticcamel]

Spring is in the air: stretching and getting back to blogging shape

 Despite my silence here, I've been pretty busy over the past few months.  As the fire hose volume of info on the web has been turned on super high, I have felt an even greater pull to connect more in real life and spend time on good old fashioned face to face conversations as well as a lot more pithy poking and prodding over on twitter. 

I am by nature a curator of content and connector of people. I am also a creature of habit. I had a flow of writing one longer rant each week and then curating my collected links of the week in one post.  Ever since I lost my beloved magnolia I have not taken the time to find a better method for sharing my links [that fits my workflow] I  also forgot how to take my own advice and "just do it" and stop over-thinking all the stuff running around in my head.  

Probably most importantly, I felt a need to take some time off and be silent.  I was not feeling very inspired.  Rather that write some big post announcing a hiatus from blogging - I quietly snuck away. Maybe it is because spring is in the air, or because I have been encouraged by friends to 'start blogging again damn it'  or maybe it is because there are some new exciting projects in my life.  It is probably all of the above.  I have been slowly feeling the itch to jump back in. So here I am with the kind of post I often feel is redundant and annoying - explaining why I am or am not blogging.  Hopefully you will excuse this rambling preamble and check back as I start flexing my blogging muscles.

As a warm-up, here are links to some stuff I have done off this site:

Tummelvision: Heather Gold, Kevin Marks and I have started a new podcast on the 'art of social engagement". Our show has been steadily gaining momentum and we are really enjoying discussing the intersection of tech, culture and business at the heart of our networked world and the interesting challenges as these worlds collide.  We are grateful to Leo and the gang at TWIT for giving us our start. Here is a recent fun video I did when down in Australia at ConnectNow explaining the the concept of a Tummler. Enjoy - and let us know what you think!

Nokia Ideas Project: I was recently asked to part of Nokia's ideas project.  Here is the three part snip from that interview - where I talk about the need for more social tools, how businesses need to adapt to the network and we need to own and take responsibility for our data.  I strongly suggest checking out all the interviews on the site as their is some really great thinking going on over there!

Bringing back the Soul to Business

Gary Hamel nails the need for bringing soul back to business in this article entitled "The Hole in the Soul of Business"

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance. In so doing, it transforms great talent into exceptional accomplishment. That’s a fact—and it leaves me wondering: Why are words like “love,” “devotion” and “honor” so seldom heard within the halls of corporate-dom? Why are the ideals that matter most to human beings the ones that are most notably absent in managerial discourse?

This article brought back to mind one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies - Dead Poet Society.

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

The nature of our networked world in which we now have the power and ability to participate is pretty darn exciting.  We just have to remember to not strip technology from it's human essence.