"What mystified Grove was the assertion, voiced by the economist Alan Blinder and others, “that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” This was not only inhumane, Grove declared; it was idiotic."

"If you adopt economical driving habits, you’ll end up putting less gasoline in your tank.  But if you skip past the economical driving habits and just put less gas in your tank, you’ll end up muttering grim imprecations as you trudge down the highway with a gas can."

"Because sharing data resulted in a citation, I wonder how long will it take for Open Data advocates to start using this “open data citation advantage” as an argument for sharing data?"

"…In this work, we give a short overview of traditional community roles. We adapt those models and apply them to virtual online communities. We suggest a community membership life cycle model describing roles a user can take during his membership in a community. Our model is systematic and generic; it can be adapted to concrete communities in the web. The knowledge of a community's life cycle allows influencing the group structure: Stage transitions can be supported or harmed, e.g. to strengthen the binding of a user to a site and keep communities alive."

"Since the collective beliefs are not given to modifica- tions within short timescales, the best approach for one opinion to win is to focus on getting as many as pos- sible inflexibles along its side. However this goal could demand to overstate the validity of some arguments to sustain and legitimate that opinion. In contrast, such a behavior could rise ethical questions.…"

'*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of ideas. The idea here is to organize groups of people to innovate, develop new ideas, and solve problems that have eluded organizations that have attempted these things on their own. There are lots of examples of this, from the famed InnoCentive site (most recent challenge: clever solutions for responding to recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico); to the $1 million Netflix competition (which enabled the company to develop a superior recommendations system); to the very recent $1 million Edmunds Toyota Prius challenge (“re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that problem and prove the whole thing to us”), to the many experiments that are being conducted at Ideascale, a platform that “empowers communities to drive innovation” by enabling them to collect ideas from “customers, give them a platform to vote, the most important ideas bubble to the top.”'

"Noticing the pain as soon as possible and then fixing the problem - whether it is a rigid design, fragile tests or something else - requires skill. Not everybody is alert to the pain, but instead they keep on writing bad code until making changes becomes too expensive and a rewrite is needed. Not everybody fixes the problem when they feel the pain, but instead they implement a quick hack and leave an even bigger mess for the next developer. But for those who have the necessary skills and discipline, TDD can be a powerful tool and they can use it to write better code."

"So I offer this as a supplementary consideration: take an interest in what your users are good at. Take an interest in how they are good at being social with and through your service or application. Learn how to observe what users are doing and how their social habits vary. Think outside yourself and from the perspectives of other people.

Their behaviors may not give them away entirely, but if you develop a palette of personal and social skills that you can use to relate to people different from you, your design insights will be that much smarter."

"Please join us on March 24 for Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge below (click ‘pledge’ after you have completed the reCaptcha) and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010."

"So it probably would not take much for politicians to be persuaded that the press is essential to democracy, and that its survival ... depends on government support. Advertising revenue would be replaced by government subsidies, raising predictable questions about the impact on content.
The alternative is to focus on what communication technology cannot do: create rather than transmit a good story or a good policy. There will always be a market for quality. The disruption caused by emerging communications technologies consists in the fact that the best pens may not be on the staffs of newspapers, and that policies need not be formulated only in the corridors of government."

"So why not incorporate it into a savings account? Take a small interest rate cut, say a tenth of a percent, from each savings account, and then randomly give that to a few members, conditional on them saving money. I think it’s brilliant, and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s started with credit unions, where some of the most consumer friendly innovation is being tried. Where most commercial banks are looking to payday lenders for innovation, credit unions appear to be looking at cutting edge behavioral “nudge” style work for innovations to help people build their financial lives. How cool is that?"

“… these spaces have been shown to make significant contributions to the energy and robustness of the local entrepreneurial environment, and have become an increasingly common way for cities to promote themselves as supportive of the new breed of entrepreneurial venture.”

"Two important men are having a careful conversation on military training. What do you call the guy who, having no particular competence or interest in the matter at hand, jumps in the conversation, systematically contradicts everyone with contrived arguments, ridicules the two competent discussants, orients the conversation on a completely different topic, then leaves the audience baffled and walks away, laughing? That Troll is Socrates in Plato's Laches. True, Plato's Socrates seldom hops in uninvited, and most of his interlocutors do not consider him noxious. Indeed one wonders why the whole city grew so irritated that they voted to condemn him to death. But Plato, like all philosophers and sophists, had a stake in defending his colleagues. In other views of Socrates (like Aristophanes' caricature), he is unmistakably trollish. "

"One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen."

"Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge. In contrast, traditional knowledge management systems are inherently diminishing returns propositions. Since existing knowledge is by definition limited, it requires more and more effort to squeeze the next increment of performance improvement as existing knowledge gets more broadly distributed."

"On a distributed Scrum project, individual team members need to meet each other face to face. If the whole team cannot get together, one or two members from each team, at least, should spend time visiting team members in other cities. Think of them as ambassadors. I’ve found that the personal relationships established by ambassadors can be extremely valuable even long after the ambassador returns to native soil."

"Pick up a document, turn it over and see what’s on the back. If you find diagrams, that suggest the need for clarity as people were drawing on it to explain things."

"It seems most people on that flight were aware of the $20 charge; overhead compartments were filled up completely, mostly with “carry-on” bags significantly larger than the one piece of luggage we had checked. As a result, a number of people had to check bags at the gate. Now here is the interesting thing… because so many people had to check bags at the gate, and those bags had to be available upon deplaning, none of us were allowed to exit the aircraft until after the bags that had been gate checked were brought up. Because so many people were trying to avoid a) waiting at the baggage carousel and b) paying twenty bucks for a piece of luggage, everyone had to wait longer. Perverse incentives lead to undesirable outcomes."

"According to Mental Floss Magazine, Kennedy managed to work all of the Ku Klux Klan's most secret recruiting and organizational practices into his 1940s radio serial, "Clan Of The Fiery Cross." And as a result, the Man Of Steel dealt a crushing blow to the racist organization:"

"Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many people marching behind the Agile banner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat people. I’m less worried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explicitly humanist. Lean is more likely to be an attractive nuisance because the idea of driving out waste appeals to executives who find it less work to remove waste than to convert it into value—executives who get license to act sociopathic because they have a fiduciary duty to treat business as a machine for maximizing shareholder value, externalities be damned. I worry about Lean in a business culture where we are trained out of empathy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is."

What I'll be doing in November

"The Agile Skills Project is a non-commercial resource that will establish a common baseline of the skills an Agile developer needs to have, including a shared vocabulary and understanding of fundamental practices. The Project intends to:

establish an evolving picture of the skills needed on Agile projects;
encourage life-long continuous learning;
establish a network of trust to help members find like-minded folk, and to identify new mentors in the community."

"Made possible by an $8 million gift from the entrepreneurs for whom the program is named, the Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering, MKSE, will be the first course of study to fully integrate the disciplines needed in this emerging science. The intellectual core of the program will encompass network science, algorithmic game theory and other disciplines relevant to engineers and scientists as they consider human incentives and behavior in developing modern technological systems."

"Even eBay, with the most well-known example of public negative karma, doesn't represent how untrustworthy an actual seller might be-it only gives buyers reasons to take specific actions to protect themselves. In general, avoid negative public karma. If you really want to know who the bad guys are, keep the score separate and restrict it to internal use by moderation staff."

"I just read the most plausible of law review papers suggesting the potential for protection of a private space within social network sites (SNS). Fellow UNC grad student Woodrow Hartzog proposes the use of Promissory Estoppel as a means to protect self-disclosure in online communities. It would create a type of contract or agreement between users of a site whereby a protection would exist for information disclosed in that community or site. If someone else shares the disclosed, private information, with a few caveats, they can be held accountable."

Reminds me of deep problems at Distributed Proofreaders....

"A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose continuing participation is key to the sites' success. As we show, people's propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time. This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com."

"Building communities is vital today, whether it's to build a reliable support network, serve as a valuable source of new ideas, or provide a powerful marketing tool. In The Art of Community, you'll learn about the broad range of talents required to recruit, motivate, and manage community members. The book takes you through the stages of community, and covers topics ranging from software tools to conflict resolution skills. "

"Here’s the idea: A mobile, outdoor co-working space. That’s pretty much it."

"If our biggest foundations could break the habit of cautiously supporting tiny, specific aspects of an organization’s activities and begin ensuring sufficient capitalization and providing multi-year general operating support, we’d go a long way towards fixing at least 2 of the problems I identified at the beginning of this post. (The good news is that I’m starting to see a few moves in this direction, but that’s a subject for another post…)"

"Are you paying attention, Pinky?"

"In the next series of posts, I'll use examples to describe the 4 (maybe 5) sub-networks in a truly transformative philanthropy network. I'll offer a graphic that will show each part and then how they all fit together."

"So again, the foundation can help the collaboratives process what is happening - in real time as they "rapid prototype" - and make sense of what is happening. Does what they are doing feel like its going in the right direction? What have they been surprised about? What did they notice? What do they need to learn about? Who can they learn that from? For this kind of learning to lead to breakthroughs, the foundation as network guardian will need to make sure the reflection process includes participants and observers as well as the organizational staff. "

"In upcoming posts, we'll review some of the ways people are starting to organize online and look at the key design elements of self-organizing, whether online or off.

Jean pointed out that some of you are already experimenting, so please let us know what you are doing by responding to this post!"

"The Mechanics’ Institute sprang up in 19th century England for the ostensible purpose of imparting upon the working class mechanic knowledge of the sciences, literature, and arts. In actuality, a myriad of purposes shrouded the creation of these institutes, which were ultimately appropriated by the middle class when it became apparent that the working class was not as receptive as had been anticipated. ... As the middle class began to move in, the working class retreated to the Institute’s libraries and reading rooms, where they were free to discuss topics that interested them. One of the unintended consequences of the failed Mechanics’ Institutes was the aiding in the creation of a democratic infrastructure for working class access to printed materials.... In short, despite being borne from a desire to regulate, they were an important precursor to the establishment of public libraries and a liberated mass reading public."

"We've never actually seen a true global recession in a Web 2.0 world. What's it going to look like? How is it going to differ from a recession in a pre-internet world? Is it going to accelerate the hollowing-out of the retail high street as economy-conscious shoppers increasingly move to online shopping and comparison systems like Froogle? Are we going to see homeless folks not only living in their cars but telecommuting from them, using pay-as-you-go 3G cellular modems, cheap-ass Netbooks, and rented phone numbers to give the appearance of still having a meatspace office? Is the increasing performance curve of consumer electronics going to give way to a deflationary price war as embattled producers try to hold on to market share as Moore's Law cuts the ground away from beneath their feet?"

"According to Malik, Detroit is one of the leaders in community gardening. The networks supports church gardens, backyard gardens, container gardens and school gardens. Malik placed special importance on school gardens as a means to educate children, not just see them as consumers. He stated that kids who cultivate vegetables want to eat them, and that these gardeners encourage their parents to start backyard gardens at home."

"... If the bus company has to meet labor, environmental, and equipment standards to cart passengers around for a fee, it could easily be undercut by unlicensed shared-ride operations, it says. Whether that turns out to be true or not, Trentway finds itself in the same basic situation that existing business like Encyclopedia Britannica faced when free or low-cost upstarts like Wikipedia threatened to crowd-source their core product into oblivion"

"... Unlike most pollsters, Penn never releases his raw numbers, only his analysis. So we must take it on faith that his methodology is rigorous, his polls accurate and his interpretations fair. This book is our first opportunity to observe, at length, how adroitly Penn handles raw data. And the answer is stunning, even to a doubter like me. Mark Penn cannot handle numbers. If this book were turned in as the final to an entry-level statistics class, Penn would not only be failed, but the professor might well retire in shame."

General point: "How can people of good conscience within such populations change the cultures that are stifling them?"

Please, entrepreneurial startuppy convocations of the movers-and-shakers of local human-scale community-supported life with programming and Your Very Important Book: watch and hear. Watch. Hear.

"Elected officials don’t run our government. Government employees do. Every citizen interested in changing our country must understand this."

Almost every one is truly useful.

"You can never have too much of this really early-stage capital."

"Dungeons & Dragons made me a professional futurist."

"Although some skeptical researcher labels them as "bullshit", there's probably something more, from a psychological point of view, justifying their strong appeal."

"If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question."

Questionable, but worth a try.

The Goldilocks Point becomes public knowledge. Another of my consulting secrets revealed. Drat you, Kevin Kelly! You think too loud!

Funny, but sad. So many people broken.

Important.

Send things. Get things. Many cool.

Interesting comments thread, displaying disparate understandings of the phrase "walled garden".