How can opening up your proprietary software/data make any business sense?

The GOV 2.0 conference, organized by Tim O’Reilly and others in the open-source/open-data movement, was three-day event this past month. Open source advocates evangelize that everyone share their data and core technology, with the faith that there are other people out there who can innovate in ways you have not considered. This is most easily illustrated by the iPhone:

The phone itself was developed by Apple.

They opened their code so that other developers could create apps for it.

Those developers pair the iPhone tech with data from a nearly infinite variety of sources: GPS, traffic, medical info, games, social networks, etc. etc. etc.

Those apps in turn create a huge demand for the iPhone.

Everybody wins.

Apple was smart enough to know that no matter how smart they are, they still have a finite amount of resources, and there are a lot of other smart people out there with access to more data and ideas that they can muster themselves. They saw how they could increase marketshare, profits, and overall street cred by loosening their control and trusting the crowd to surprise them. There is plenty of benefit to share by empowering others to innovate.

Crowdsourcing = Smaller Government

It is a common perception that our government is simultaneously wasteful, restrictive, uncommunicative, disempowering, compartmentalized, and inefficient. And a good deal of that is well-earned, having been dramatically illustrated after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and certainly with the current economic crises. Again and again we hear about our government’s duplicated efforts, waste of resources, lack of collaboration, and inability to connect the dots, sometimes with devastating consequences.

Those promoting OS/OD see the same opportunities in government as Apple saw with the iPhone, but with a greater focus on public service as opposed to profit models. Tim O’Reilly gives a terrific talk about this, and here are some other smart opinions on what Gov 2.0 is.

My super-abbreviated take:

Match the right skills with the right data resources: the government has huge repositories of data, much of it non-confidential, which is lying fallow instead of being put to good use. Most innovation comes from the private sector. The math, she is done.

Use existing solutions o increase transparency and collaboration: agencies would be much more results-oriented and cost-efficient if they could communicate and collaborate better. The public has already adopted the social networking and collaboration tools that government could be using, too.

Bring the DIY ethic back to civic participation: there is an untapped potential for innovation if people who aren’t busy running the country contribute to our civic life and democracy in general instead of waiting for our tax dollars to work. Beginning with the development of new tech to the crowdsourcing of data contributions through the final end use by regular folks.

So basically, if we can use government data to create our own solutions, we don’t need the government to do it for us, and government can be smaller. Now, contrary to what conservatives often express, being progressive does not mean being pro-big government. It means that you feel the government has a basic duty to help people achieve a basic level of health, security, happiness, and opportunity. That can mean laws safeguarding civil rights like equal compensation and freedom of speech, direct help which requires tax dollars like unemployment benefits, or indirect help like public schools and homeland security which require tax dollars for infrastructure. It can also mean transparency of data such as the Freedom of Information Act or access to birth certificates, building information, etc. The more that we can safely access ourselves, the less need there is for a government office to have to provide it.

How the TSA Blew My Mind

The first day was the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, a sort of sneak peak of new technologies and the government agencies, private startups, and community volunteers who are making them. Now much of this is common thinking in the tech world - we thrive on collaboration and share info constantly. But this mindset, born of a confidence that sharing is a good thing and listening to your users brings positive results - is less common in government agencies. So I was beyond thrilled when I heard and saw so many speakers talk about moving in this direction. Even those who did not include the jargon of user experience still spoke to it.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is, to many us, nothing more than those invasive, uniformed folk at the airport who make us suffer the indignity of partially undressing in public and who rifle through our luggage for wayward shampoo bottles. Well, they are that, and more. Those people also have the logistically challenging job of following prescribed security protocols developed by analysts far from the field to check every single person who boards a commercial flight in the US: over 2 million people per day. They are basically a widely distributed workforce who had little means for providing feedback and no opportunity to inform the procedures they were stuck with.

Some forward-thinking person high up the TSA food chain saw that there was a high level of customer dissatisfaction and very low employee morale, and realized that the front-line perspective was missing, so they create the TSA Idea Factory. In essence, this is a limited social networking site where users can submit and vote on ideas. The most popular ones filter up to management, who have made a commitment to consider and respond to them. This has proven to be an effective way for employees to be heard, and for management to avail themselves of the best ideas for improvement, resulting in demonstrably higher levels of customer satisfaction and employee morale across the country.  Open collaboration such as this is democracy in action at a level that impacts people’s daily lives. Which begs the question: If this can happen at the TSA, what else is possible?

The very fact that a national security agency would so openly and broadly communicate with its employees signals a huge shift in mindset of government agency. And there were plenty more reasons to be hopeful for more, as I’ll show in my next post.

The application form gave me a great opportunity to clarify my thinking around some of the feelings I have, and why I want to be involved in this experience. Being a UX person means you are constantly putting your own perspective aside and adopting that of your clients, users, and other team members. It’s challenging and I’d be lying if I said I was 100% successful at doing so. But I think that the associated ability to look at an issue from multiple viewpoints and a deep desire to find the sweet spot where everyone’s needs and capabilities intersect bodes well for participation in diversity work.

I’ve copied the text of my application here, and wonder what anyone out there might have to say. When asked why I want to be a part of the discussion series, I  said:

“At the most basic level, I just want to create more real friendships with people of color. I know how naive that sounds, but stay with me.

I believe there are some big, unnecessary barriers on the white side of racial issues that can be overcome. I’m not talking about converting overt racists…that’s beyond my goal. I don’t know how to deal with people who hold real hatred in their hearts, who are products of generations of perceived racial superiority and unperceived ignorance. And I don’t mean apologism, either…as a white liberal, I’ve found that to be ego-driven and insincere and rarely followed up with real personal change. Lots of talk, too little walk.

I mean that there are a lot of white people who have a real desire to break through racial social barriers, who are, for the lack of a better term, ripe to open our worlds up and see about changing the socially segregated lifestyles most of us live, but we lack the tools and perspective we need to do so.

It’s all about handling fear - fear of social awkwardness, fear of being perceived as racist, fear of being the object of ridicule, fear of having to bear the weight of a history we can’t relate to, fear of offending anyone, fear of being too apologetic, fear of being too insensitive, fear of being too earnest, fear of being the object of anger, fear of physical harm, fear of being wrong, fear of being responsible.

Just as many POC don’t want to be burdened with the ambassadorship of all things POC to white people, so white people are afraid, and indeed, incapable, of representing all things white to POC, either. No white people know what being “white” means because except for supremacists, we do not build our identities around our colors. It makes us defensive to be defined as white because it is such an indistinct cultural identity, and yet we don’t really understand POC feelings about being defined by their color, either.

Even such an obvious concept as white privilege is irrationally threatening because white people don’t usually equate their struggles or successes with being white, and lack the framework for applying it to their own experience without accepting a tremendous amount of guilt, and that’s a responsibility that we don’t know how to deal with and often feel resentful for having put on us.

I lived in neighborhoods that are superficially racially diverse in what is purported to be one of the most open, tolerant places in the US for most of my life - but in reality, it’s like we live in parallel dimensions that don’t really meet. No one, not POC nor white people, wants to deal with the subtle and overt negativity we are confronted with from all sides when we stray outside of our usual company.

I want to see how I and other white people can help effectively bring communication and interaction to a personal level without neglecting to understand the context of who we all are, what’s shaped our thinking, and what drives our feelings. I’m not an academic, and have no interest in keeping this a wholly intellectual pursuit. I think the only way to make this work is to put myself out there, actively listen, and get to know more POC who are willing to be awkward with me.”

Which got me thinking about my own practice. I want to add this to my skill set, not just my resume. So what do I do, how do I get to a point where I can accurately evaluate my clients needs and devise a social media strategy that will be truly beneficial to them?  Only then can I call myself a social media consultant/strategist/ grand poobah or what have you.

I was very lucky to get into User Experience when it, too, was still something of a nascent practice in the tech industry in 2000.  I was privileged (even if I didn’t recognize it as much as I should have back then) to work with smart strategic thinkers like future UX rock star Alex Wright and my early mentor Kristee Rosendahl at a premium boutique full-service web shop where I learned how to collaborate with visual design and engineering. The atmosphere was encouraging, their  “hire for culture, train for skill” motto pre-dating Zappos’ culture-first philosophy by a good ten years. (No slight against Tony Hsieh, I am *thrilled* that he is promoting this healthy business and life practice with such success now).

This time around, I have another incredible opportunity to be involved in a nascent and vital technology practice. But the setting is different. As a freelancer, I am not in a position to watch the rockstar from backstage and take notes. I may be in the first couple of rows, but I’m still out in the crowd jostling for a good view.

I’ve been sorting through the hundreds upon hundreds of posts, practitioners, experts etc., and dove even deeper into the sea of social networking. If I could turn reading Mashable into a full time job, I absolutely would. I worship at the throne of Beth Kanter and  dive into Facebook’s Marketing Solutions .  I immigrate to the Twitterverse and tweet about my work at smartest-content-on-the-web FORA.tv and other orgs, while maintaining a real friends-only account where I can say anything. I finally start this public blog so I can get back to writing in more than 140 characters. Keep it authentic by participating on sites I actually use and enjoy like LinkedIn and GoodReads. Make sure all my Kiva activity and NetTuesday meetups post to my Facebook account. Go to conferences, lectures, and meetups until I’ve got videos and webinars and ideas coming out of my ears. Draw on my experience as a discussion board moderator and online community participant years ago on Burning Man’s Eplaya as a cautionary tale about fear-based management, and look with delight at the examples of positive interactions happening all around now. I revel in the evolution of the catch-all “community” term to specifics like “engagement”.

So how do I effectively translate all this great knowledge and experience being shared on this crowded cloud into true value for my clients?

My research into the core aspects, tools, techniques and measurements of user engagement through social media will be on going, that is a given. But if there is one thing I’ve discovered about myself is that I’m a hands-on learner. Theory doesn’t sink in until I can put it into practice. I’m working on a pro bono social media plan for the amazing Women’s Foundation of California so I can learn by doing.

I’m interested in format for social media plans that folks are doing. What are your deliverables, why do you use them, and how do they benefit your clients?

He made recommendations “for a Twitter-based strategy, assuming there’s a little bit of lead time.

- getting people to sign up for Twitter in advance
- including Twitter in training sessions (and perhaps classes at schools and universities)
- having simple printed and online instructions in several languages to help people sign up with Twitter
- establishing a hashtag
- establishing a trustable shared account for important announcements, which is important for situations where the hashtag is overloaded and/or troll-infested
- encouraging bloggers to install “tweet this” buttons on their blogs, and providing instructions to make it easier
- publicize proxies and Tor, and give instructions on how to use them for when the government shuts off access to Twitter
- tipping off friendly media that there’s a story in progress about how you’re using Twitter
- getting volunteers, ideally in international locations, to translate important tweets
- deploying technology to deal with trolling and disinformation (something tcot, tweetleft, and Twitter Vote Report have all done)”

I think it’s a terrific list and told him so. I can see evolving it for disaster response & relief coordination, too.

But to get back to the main question, my response was:

“Sorry to let myself get suckered into a semantic argument, but I feel it’s important since so many people misuse these terms and having discussions around them always require definition.

For the greatest clarity, I would phrase as follows:

Twitter is a *tool*.
The Twitter tasks you list are *tactics*.
Your *Twitter strategy* is the thoughtful definition of, goals for, and execution of, that collection of tactics as a part of your larger overall strategy.”

Opinions vary, and I’m happy to hear yours, so please feel free to comment.

Twitter has turned my head in so many ways, and one of them is a new affinity I feel with various celebrities because they twitter in the exact same way as my friends and colleagues. They are big dorks excited by technology and interaction just like anyone else, and many are not afraid to be themselves in this public sphere. They promote themselves no more or less than anyone else I know, and just like us, they are seizing opportunities to participate in good works and political issues, and without being shielded by handlers or distorted by yellow journalism.

Right now I’m following two actors who shocked the heck out of me with their non-acting efforts:

RainnWilson whom we all know and love from The Office, is a frequent twitterer and is using his fame as a means for energizing debate around spirituality and creativity, and has started a great new site called SoulPancake. Religion is not my favorite of subjects (mostly due to those who feel that spirituality does not exist without religion, and religion used as justification for bigotry), but creating a safe fun place for youths and others to talk about having purpose and hopefully tearing down some destructive approaches of religion is fine by me. He tweeted about his appearance on Oprah’s Soul Series and when I visited the link I found myself riveted to hear an actor (or anyone, really)  talking thoughtfully about religion and creativity and not sounding delusional or daft. He also tweets a lot about his delight in his young son, and plenty of LOL-sequiters. In short, he sounds just like all my other geek friends on Twitter.

When social media consultant Tracy Sheridan advised me to check on Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter stream, my skepticism was impossible to mask. I knew little about the actor beyond a movie that I *still* regret being talked into paying to see (Dude, Where’s My Car?), and a tv show that thrived on fear, anxiety, and humiliation (Punk’d). OK, I did think that Guess Who? took a brave stab at addressing racial bigotry in a social context that is almost never honestly attempted in entertainment, but did not really give Kutcher credit for that choice. I had no idea how fully he embraced the social medium, and was surprised to find a thoughtful, frequent twitterer whose tweets ranged from challenging himself to authentic experiences outside his comfort zone (I appreciate conscious growth however and in whomever it manifests) to discussing social issues to random observations, all with what appears to be a total lack of fear around interacting openly with whomever lobs a question or snarky comment at him, also using his network to inform more people about charities and causes that are important to him. Again, just like everyone else I know.

I think there is something significant and delightfully subversive in the fact that people living in such a manufactured world, as far as traditional media goes, are able to so easily bypass the paparazzi who are paid the exploit and often misrepresent them. Paparazzi exist because of fans and anti-fans obsessive need for further connection with their fantasies. What happens when they are confronted with the real person?

Protecting you from your own happiness at any cost: http://savecalifornia.com

I can’t express how much it pains me that anyone in the design community can be so mercenary or, worse yet, so on board with this that they would help create such a great site for such a sick purpose. How can I welcome a diversity of thought when these people want to criminalize innocent women and keep 10% of our population as legally conscripted second class citizens? Who designed this site? What kind of person would proudly add this to their portfolio?

Even more befuddling to me: How can they believe they are blessed with Jesus’ love by acting so consistently, unrelentingly hateful? Their complete lack of compassion is a poison to my beloved home state, to the internet, to anyone who believes in freedom and justice. How these people can call themselves Christians is a mystery I will never solve.

Please, y’all, help me remove the hatred in my own heart for these miserable people. Go donate $5, just a mere $5, right now, today to the wonderful organization of you choice to keep hatred and ignorance at bay.

Good works by good people:

Equality California http://www.eqca.org

ACLU http://aclu.org

Planned Parenthood http://plannedparenthood.org

“Community” has been such a catchword over the past few years that my friend DaBomb (BURNcast) turned it into a virtual drinking game. The still-prevalent sense around the term among my clients is that it refers to the p2p interaction area of a site, and the people who spend time there, casing trouble on discussion boards while virally marketing a product or brand. Clients don’t necessarily know what communities do or need, but they know they want them because of some kind of magical brand loyalty they keep and further.

The idea of p2p and b2b social interaction is of course valid and worthy of time and energy. But community exists in many forms. The AppExchange is a common space that supports very little in the way of p2p interaction - there are discussion forums on another salesforce.com web property that are key to developer support - but the very exposure to other developers’ products is what drives further innovation. salesforce.com developers range from the proverbial guy in his garage office to major developer groups. No immediate need for chat or groups or friending anyone - this developer community is inherently DIY and helpful on its own. The community exists outside of and beyond the site itself, and it was our job to support it, not try to shape it. There is a high degree of trust - augmented by a rigorous testing and submission process - between force.com and its developers that they created by simply providing good service, providing access to real-live humans for questions and issues, and a fundamental understanding that supporting their user base would result in broadening audiences, greater adoption, and *then* profit.

I come across clients who are expecting the same magic to come from throwing Facebook around rather than really understanding that as wonderful and effective as they are, Facebook, Twitter, message boards, private messaging, etc. are just tools: they are no more useful than the people wielding them. True community (drink!) comes from building relationships with your users, and require sincerity and a degree of transparency that most companies are not culturally set up to provide.

How to change that? Great question. Company culture is so often top-down, and community tools can not be effectively implemented by people who don’t use them. Until CEOs see their consumers as people, their ability to nurture communities will remain as limited and short-lived ad their latest ad campaign. salesforce.com has a long history of talking with their users in customer support and research efforts, and the result is going to be huge, even without “friends”.

Check out this webinar demo’ing the new AppExchange.

09/3/31 UPDATE: More AppExchange love http://icanhasapex.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-forcecom-appexchange.html

The schedule is an embarrassment of abundance, and thanks to the wonderful folks at The Social Collective my itinerary is loaded with about 3x as many talks, workshops, and parties as I can possibly attend. My absolute must-be-there list:

How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics - hey I ain’t too proud to orientate

The Digital Future of Philanthropy: Engaging Donors with Online Video - thrilled to see how video is moving beyond TV shows and internet memes.

When Worlds Collide: Human Centered Design Meets Agile Development - because as much as the waterfall process-loving designer in me sometimes wishes differently, UX and visual designers have to learn how to create cohesive design systems for projects that don’t allow for the big picture thinking time we often prefer

Can Social Media End Racism? - silly name aside ( believe the answer is “no, but it can reduce it by making people of different races, especially youth, more real to each other through the exposure of online social interaction”) I’m interested in all forms of communication for good, and also I get to feed my ever-growing internet crush on Jay Smooth

How Not To Be Evil (Even By Accident) - if anyone out there knows how to fight the good fight, it’s the EFF

And of course  The SXSW Block Party, because it just might be the only time I get to hang out with my brother, who’s going for the whole conference but is anchored in film.

This is my first trip to Austin, to boot. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about  it from every Californian who’s ever been there. It’s going to be a great time and I can’t wait! Now to go nail down the last few details like accomodations and transportation…

I’ll admit it: I’ve taken a fair amount of pride in the fact that I have been steadily working as a freelance user experience designer and strategist without any professional online presence all this time. But sitting on my laureled word-of-mouth reputation isn’t playing the game right anymore: it’s time I start sharing my work and participating more fully in the discussions of our day and age.

So here we go. Hello, world.