In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them? 

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot. 

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

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This post is based on the talk I gave at Media Camp London 2 last month, with thanks to alex4d who diligently took notes and live tweeted the session. It was useful to see how someone else interpreted what I said. As an aside, in one of those “small world” incidences, Alex and I  had worked at the same radio station back in the 80′s, although not at the same time.

It is a three layer model. Imagine a slice of a pie, with you on the outside, and digital media in the middle. Taking things one at a time:

The Media In Social Media

By media I mean media as in digital content, rather than “The Media” as in the press – the joys of overloaded words in English and the confusion they cause. Social tools use digital media based on the modalities of our senses. Today’s tools are built around the audio or visual modalities (or in the case of most video services, both). So far we are thankfully spared tools based around touch, taste and smell, but who knows what is around the corner!

I like the ideal of “VITAL”, which I first came across via Kosso, of Phreadz fame. VITAL stands for Video, Image, Text, Audio, and Links. I like it mostly because it is a memorable acronym, and is a good reminder that some tools might simply point to the media (with a hyperlink reference). Media deserves more discussion, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Social Tools

The biggest difference between platforms is not the media that they support, it is actually the tool they apply to the media. The predominant functionality of a social networking platform is in how it causes users to interact – that’s why it is called “social” after all. Social media platforms cause people to interact around digital media objects, by distributing them and allowing users to annotate them in different ways. Again, a fuller explanation is for a future post, but remember that the tools that the platform provides are a key differentiator. Specific tools drive behaviours and attract different types of users.

The Community

One of the most frequently overlooked, but obvious, differences between platforms is their communities. Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube et al all have their unique community. Individuals may belong to multiple communities, but it is almost impossible for two different platforms to have identical communities. Even if they did, the communities would still have distinct feels, based on how the tools cause people to interact. There is a further dimension to the issue of community. In the early days, a platform might only have a single “community”, but as they grow the reality is that the community fragments into multiple communities on the one platform. That is actually a good thing (see Dunbar’s Number and social media for more background), and these different communities aren’t completely separate.

Understanding the interaction between the community and the tool is essential to understanding how platforms evolve. A great tool with a poor community is unlikely to survive, while a mediocre tool with a great community can get off the ground – proof that, given sufficient thrust, pigs can indeed fly, on the Internet at least.

So, next time you are trying to understand the difference between two social networking platforms, try breaking it down into these layers:

• Media – What sort of medium is it based around? Is it direct, or link based. Text or Image?
• Tool – How does it operate on the media, and how does it enable users to interact?
• Community – what is the user base, or are their different subsets of users? Who are they?

In answering these questions, you will be able to build a picture of what differentiates the platform, and what use it might be best suited to.

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I was bowled over by the tenacity of my fellow learners. People who had been studying towards their degree for years, on top of their day jobs. People who were still 5-7 years away from getting their professional qualifications (which involve a PhD and chartering for some). This was a group of people who are committed to learning. There again, tenacity is at the very heart of the Open University.

The roots of the OU go back to the 1920′s, when educationalist J C Stobart envisaged a ‘wireless university’. Those words mean something different today – it sounds more like someone using a wifi enabled laptop in the back garden to do literature searches. However, back then it meant using the cutting edge technology of the day to create an open learning platform.

It look a few more decades for the OU to be born, predominantly driven by the tenacity of Jennie Lee (you can read the full story on the OU site). It’s that tenacity again. Today the OU continues a tradition of technology-mediated learning, using social software tools to connect students and tutors to form a gigantic learning organisation. It is the largest Moodle deployment in the world (Moodle is an on-line social-learning platform – think of a blogging, forum and content management system on steroids).

Non-technology industries work on different timescales. A couple of decades working in the technology industry has twisted me into believing that 2 years as a long-time, and 3-5 years is a time window beyond which predicting change is futile. Technology means that software and hardware develop rapidly, driving quick changes. Building institutions and companies takes longer. Much longer. When was the last time you took on a 10 year project? It takes tenacious long-term goals.

The long-term path of the start ups, now grown ups, I have worked with has been relatively predictable. Likewise, the major technology trends of the last few years have been too. Yes, 20-20 hindsight does make predictions simpler, but technology has strong homeostatic tendencies. After all, it is driven by people and people change slowly, if at all. Today, people drive (or hold back) technology, rather than the other way around.

The emerging web-browser and cloud computing model isn’t that different from my early experiences of computing with dumb terminals and mainframe computers. What is new this time around is a greater emphasis on people-centric design. The nature of application and systems design is being changed by rafts of new technologists with user experience qualifications (many of whom studied the same Psychological theories I was wrapped up in last week).

The area of science that I am most interested in doesn’t really exist yet, but it will, because it must. How does all of this technology change the way that we work? How can we build companies that make better use of technology, and technology that makes better use of people? We can’t do all of our learning at school or university anymore. Successful businesses and people will have to make continuous learning part of their very being, just to keep up.

There is still a long way to go in all of these things. It involves big goals. But tenacious long-term goals have always been how big things get done.

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Like most people, I’ve not had much reason to study bees. At least, not until I started studying the psychology of language. Dave’s bees do fascinating things, like building the honeycomb pictured here. Bees are viewed as hyper productive, industrious creatures, working away industriously. The hive is the very model of business, full of busy bees.

But did you know that bees spend a fair bit of their time wandering about aimlessly, and a fair bit dancing too? Bees major product is honey. Producing honey requires nectar, which the bees stumble upon by foraging. This is where the dancing comes in. The dancing gets work done efficiently.

When a bee finds a source of nectar it comes back to the hive and does a ‘waggle dance’ for its co-workers. The dance communicates the location of the nectar, indicating the direction and distance. The dance also communicates the type of nectar, by including a sample of the newly found treasure as part of the communication process. The co-workers then mobilize to bring back the rest of the new find.

It is a process of innovation and discovery. A single bee, with the time to wonder, makes a discovery. It then shares the discovery with the hive. The process maximizes the return on the new discovery, while minimizing unfruitful searching by other bees.

Do your employees dance? Do they have the time and tools to communicate where the nectar for your business is to other employees? Do they celebrate and communicate success? It is as important to the modern business as it is to the bee hive.

It always makes me sad when I hear a business shutting down communication channels that employees use – be it instant messaging, video conferencing or a community forum. In the wake of that decision is a hive of workers with less information to make them successful, and a less productive community.

Internal blogs and wikis and open communication channels (rather than closed point to point e-mail systems) are an essential tool for showcasing the steps to success. Did you just make a big business win? Then make sure everyone in the business knows. Let them know why it was a big win, and what enabled it to happen. Do a waggle dance! 

It isn’t just for the benefit of current employees. Hopping back to the bees for a minute, the nature of the waggle dance is unique (if you want to know more, check out Karl von Frisch who pioneered the study of bee communication). If you take a different sort of bee and introduce it to the hive, it will not be understood. Although eventually, after some mis steps, the bees will learn to communicate again.

How are new bees in your hive able to learn the language to communicate with the existing bees? Wikis and blogs provide a place for new staff to come and absorb the culture and language of a business. That gets them productive more quickly. They are called business wikis for a reason.

New employee hire orientation isn’t a one off event. It is about binding people into a community and enabling them to be part of it. That is a two way process, requiring good communication tools.

Bees have a specific place where they can come to dance. For some species it might be at the entrance to the hive, for others it is vertically on the comb, but there is a place.

Does your business have somewhere for employees to dance?

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But what is attention? Start by thinking of two book ends. On one side are our senses, on the other is our perception of what is going on. Think of your senses for a minute: Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Thankfully we haven’t entered the era of smellivision yet, so let’s focus on sight and sound.

There are different theories about how we perceive what we see and hear. Some theories say we shape what we sense to fit our knowledge (experience, biases, expectations and the like). Other theories say we perceive the world more directly. Still others say that we perceive ‘wholeness’ – even if there isn’t quite a ‘whole’ to be perceived, we join up the dots (see “understanding the reality of the situation“).

One thing is for sure, we don’t take everything in. Can you remember the time you arrived at work with absolutely no idea how you got there? Don’t worry, it isn’t that unusual. You were still using your senses (notice you didn’t drive into something or fall off of the train station), you just weren’t paying attention.

We can’t take in everything that goes off – our brains are big, but not that big. We have to apply some filters to the information our senses supply us with, to avoid getting overwhelmed. Again, there are different theories about how this filtering might work. It may be early or late in the scheme of things, but it does happen. We ignore most of the things that go off. Of course, you might argue that some people do this more than others!

This is where attention comes in to play, and why there is a whole industry trying to grab it. Attention controls how we apply the limited mental resources we have. There are two forces at work on your attention. On one side is the concious effort to attend to things – paying attention to what someone is saying or to what we are reading. On the other side, there are unconscious processes that direct our attention. These forces are just as relevant to social media and technology as they are to anything else we do.

If we want to read something, understand it and remember it, we need to direct our attention to it. About two thirds of our brain are dedicated to dealing with what comes in through our eyes, and we need nearly all of that to perform the rather tricky task of reading. On the other hand, if some one wants our attention, they just need to grab it, using one of these unconscious forces.

If you see a police car stopped on a multi-lane road in the UK, you’ll notice it is usually stopped diagonally to the traffic. Why? It is being attentionally conspicuous. Based on road safety research, police cars became very visually conspicuous here in the uk, with bright day-glow stripes across the their backs. However, dozens of people each year still managed to drive straight into the back of them when they were stopped. This kind of accident is so common that it even has a name :- LBFS (looked but failed to see). How many times have you looked at something, but not actually seen it?

You see, these days it takes a lot to grab out attention. We might be used to bright colours, but a car diagonal to the road is very unexpected, and grabs our attention. BP succeeded in grabbing my attention this week with this rather clever direct mail piece:

It’s sometimes called the cocktail part effect. When you are at a party there may be dozens of conversations all going of at once, but the second someone mentions our name? We tune into that conversation. Our brains are tuned to spot ‘interesting’ or unusual things – even more than the bright and the loud.

Designers are getting better and better at grabbing our attention, especially in the on-line world. Slightly moving images, changing text, and a myriad of other subtle techniques. At the computer screen, the expanding number of social communications tools are proving more and more to distract us as well. Bings, beeps and boings from incoming e-mails, alerts and updates all compete for our attention. Everyone and everything seems to want a slice of us.

We can’t control all our attention completely, but we can minimise some of the distractions. Turning of audio and visual alerts that aren’t needed. Running the program we are using in full screen mode (if it has one). These are both tricks.

Thank you for your attention – it’s valuable stuff.

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The podcast makes a number of interesting points from the evolutionary psychology perspective. The whole reptile brain things doesn’t work for me, but many of the points can be made from other perspectives too, and they resonated with some of my recent observations about technology.

The general consensus is that we are adapted to living in small groups – 20-200 individuals – with lifelong interaction within those small groups. Today’s environment is dramatically different, for all sorts of reasons. The Internet enables us to interact with millions, if not thousands, of individuals – how meaningfully is another question. Communications technology has also made business more global and employees more mobile. Being born, living and dying in the same town is a very rare life journey these days (it would be interesting to have a good data source on this).

Brain chemistry has become the primary approach to mental health issues, by which point things are at a severe stage. I wonder if we are too focussed on treating symptoms, rather than causes (Bob Eckridge has some interesting thoughts in this area on his blog). Another approach is to assume that we are maladapted to our environment, and see what we can do to change in it, and ourselves.

Evolutionary psychology is a curious beast, and I think a fair few Psychs would debate the reptilian brain idea. However, there are other perspectives that help us understand what is going on. Social constructivism is a different psychological approach. It argues that we create our idea of who we are through our social interactions (identity is a rather complex issue), and that we also create knowledge that way. That starts to make a lot of sense out of social networking and software.

Thinking about identity as rooted in who we interact with, and how we interact with them, starts to enable the creation of some useful software applications. Creating interactions (on and offline) that enable people to express their identity is an essential part of building a community – just take a look at people’s facebook profile pictures, then get them to talk to you about them, and you’ll see what I mean.

We are, whichever psychological perspective you take, social beings. Isolation does us no good, at least not beyond short bursts. So far, technology has enabled us to be more ‘connected’, but actually resulted in us being more isolated (one-way media such as TV, physical social isolation such as Internet enabled remote working). Social software to the rescue, hopefully!

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My longest experience with business social software has been with wikis. I first used a Wikis in a businesses about ten years ago, and have now seen a number of projects across different companies. Case studies are still hard to come by, partly because introducing wikis touches on some sensitive issues. It is not just about the technology, it is about a cultural shift. In many command-and-control cultures information is (seen as) power, but social software moves people towards sharing it. That is a big change.

Be Careful What You Measure

The major benefits of wiki technology are tangential ones. As such they present challenges for metrics, but I have seen multi-million dollar roll outs of ‘traditional’ applications hit their metrics, but be a productivity disaster. Metrics cut both ways, and there is the risk of MacNamara’s fallacy:

“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

The quote is from Charles Handy, but it came via wikipedia and I’ve already said enough about wikipedia research. The Adam Curtis BBC program ‘The Trap’ explored this topic well, if you have the chance to watch it, it is well worth it.

Measuring human systems, like users with a wiki, is non-trivial. You change what you measure, simply by measuring it. This is not to say that things shouldn’t be measured, but they should be measured with caution. It might sound a little trite, but there is truth in saying that the most valuable things are invaluable (or immeasurable).

Wikis are most successful when they are introduced while the company is still small and growing. That way they become part of the culture. Not to say that big businesses can’t be successful with wikis, but it requires a good training program around them. The only wiki-failures I have found were in very large companies, where the technology was introduced with minimal training and no clear objectives, and predictable results.

What are the major benefits of a wiki to a business?

These apply just as well to any form of social workgroup, not just to businesses. They also apply for groups of two to hundreds, but the scaling of wikis is a topic for another day.

Knowledge Availability

Wikis remove much of the chance factor in finding knowledge in the business. Most intranets contain woefully out of date information, through no fault of the intranet owners. Users are left to chance upon the right person who is ‘in the know’. Wikis also reduce the dependence on key knowledge workers for answers to common questions.

Even if the answer isn’t on the wiki, at least users can glean an idea of who to ask (based on who has been adding what to the wiki). This speeds up the business and offloads the burden on senior staff. This is especially important when you are in a hiring phase. No new hire pack? Search the wiki.

Change Control

Basic, but missing from so many information systems in common use. The ability to rollback and track changes is inherent in most wiki software. This can be a life saver and is why wikis are the enterprise CMS of choice for me.

Knowledge Permanence

Wikis are the most constructive and least disruptive way of documenting projects that I have found to date. If someone leaves, at least some of their knowledge remains within the organisation, on the wiki. The same is true for extended absence due to illness, travel or long holidays.

Knowledge Creation

Sparks come from striking two things together. The same is true with knowledge. I have watched brilliant ideas emerge in real-time on a wiki page, right in front of my eyes. Something new on the wiki combined with something someone already knows leads to new knowledge in the business, across multiple people.

Geographic Freedom

Wikis work across geographic boundaries and across time zones. That supports remote offices and remote workers on a global basis. This is key to keeping a business competitive. Water cooler chat is good, but it doesn’t scale across national boundaries.

Cross Platform Portability

Because wikis are web based, the only client required is a browser. That means wikis work across different operating systems and even for mobile devices like Blackberries and smart phones.

So, hopefully now you can see why I am a wiki fan.

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