Seriously, it's like Vogon Poetry: "masterful article which i trek be conversant with against a long-winded savoir faire i metamorphose into solidly bookmark it on holler thanks representing this brobdingnagian souvenir" Right?! Probably too long for a t-shirt. 

Today was the end of something quiet and amazing. This was the 9th anniversary of and the end of the road for a regular call hosted by Jerry Michalski (@jerrymichalski) and co-founded by Jerry and Pip Coburn. The call was named Yi-Tan and as Jerry informed us every week, that means conversations about change in Mandarin.  Ostensibly the call focused on tech issues like the Commons, changes in UI, the Singularity, the State of the World - small topics. Subversively though, the call was a community, a space...a space in which people from all stripes and walks came together to listen, talk and debate (gently). It was quite remarkable really.  Much of the credit for the remarkable nature of the space came directly from Jerry. Rarely do you get to meet someone of such rare gifts; intelligence of breadth and depth, a quick wit, an ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate items and somehow make those connections seem obvious without making the rest of us (me really) feel slow for not seeing them earlier. Layer that with an amazingly generous personality and you get someone and something special. Thanks Jerry for making that possible.  Now let's be clear - Jerry isn't dying (no more than any of us are) - he isn't going to another planet (or at least he won't tell us) and a large part of the call today focused on what could become of the space and conversations that Yi-Tan had created and hosted. We're still working on that but it should be testament to the impact of Yi-Tan that nobody on the call today really wanted to let it go. I hope to be a part of whatever comes after this and I'm willing to help out in any small or big way I can - 9 years on and this conversation isn't stale, hasn't degenerated into partisan arguments or personal attacks - that kind of achievement needs to be remembered and in some other form, continued.  That's all except that I wanted to write about it and make sure that maybe a few more people knew about it. I was always torn about telling people about it. On the one hand, you want to bring more people in to share but on the other hand, you kind of want to guard it. So I'll close with thanks again to Jerry and Pip and leave you with these links that you should use: Yi-Tan: the main site and home to an archive of all the past calls REX: the Relationship Economy Expedition (Jerry's ongoing venture) Make me 12 Again: an amazing talk Jerry gave on rebuilding our education system Jerry's Brain: No, seriously.     

Now I'm normally not one of these folks who goes to get the mail and the writes a blog posts about the penetrating insights gleaned from a typically, mundane task BUT this is different; here are the moments that struck me.  Everybody (ok, not everybody but a lot of people) are running for someone else. I was honored to be invited to run on "Team TJ" - a group of friends and family who run to remember SPC Thomas J Barbieri of the 82nd Airborne, who was killed on August 23, 2006 in Iraq. I never knew TJ but I know one of his brothers and let me tell you, if you don't think it makes a difference to run a race like this with someone's name on your back who died in the service of this country, well then I guess we just come from radically different places. I know the couple of times I thought about feeling tired, I thought about our fighting men and women not having that luxury and I kept my civilian butt moving.  One of the speakers at the start of the race was a Special Olympian. I never knew but now I'll never forget the Oath of the Special Olympics. "Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt." I'm getting choked up just thinking about that moment. Again, it was one of those events that pierces the fog of worrying about your shoes or if your number is on right and makes you remember that if the greatest physical challenge you face is feeling sore or achy, then you need to stop and remember how lucky and blessed you truly are.  I was also reminded that the running community is incredibly supportive and encouraging. Everywhere along the route people were cheering runners on and runners were looking out for runners too and congratulating people and keeping them motivated. At the end of the day, all of us were really competing against ourselves. I wish that happened more in more places.  Lastly, I learned that if you train and prepare then you need to trust in your abilities and let go and just run. The Blerch can suck it. 

Keep being thankful...and do something. I'm sorry I didn't start doing that 30 days of thankfulness thing with a lot of other people, I've got a lot to be thankful for. A loving and lovely wife, a great son, a good and challenging job w great coworkers, couple of pretty cool dogs and some social networks I'm pretty fond of (that means you guys).I want folks to stop for a minute though to think about the things we don't even notice that other people are thankful for - if they have them. Think about water. Often, it's just a side item - "you want water with that too?" - we hear that all the time. Imagine being thankful that you have access to clean water.  Imagine trying to do as good as you possibly can in school...all the while trying to ignore how hungry you are. Be thankful for food.  Imagine wondering if that pesky little mosquito bite you just got carries malaria. Be thankful to not live with that fear.  Have all your arms and legs? Be thankful you do - some people don't.  Now I'm not trying to be a downer and I'm not saying to not express gratitude for the things we do have  but that's not sufficient is it? I am thankful for the things I have like water and food that give me a baseline, a foundation for my other hopes and dreams...and I want others to have that foundation. So I'm listing some of my favorite charities below. Some don't take a lot of money at all to help and some don't even require money to help. On this day though, when we in the U.S. are celebrating what we have, let's all make an effort to spread those gifts to others. Thanks! :-) People around the world spend 3 hours walking for water. Take 3 min to learn why from @charitywater. Video:  How's lunch? *> Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple game that increases your knowledge. http://freerice.com Pledge to support Nothing But Nets & b part of the generation to end malaria deaths http://www.nothingbutnets.net >  Support the Wounded Warrior Project and help the largest generation of wounded service members in U.S. history   1 in 5 U.S. kids struggles w/ hunger. Together we can make #NoKidHungry a reality. Get involved  http://www.nokidhungry.org/problem/overview  Rotary Clean Water for AIDS Campaign  Epilepsy affects 2.2 million Americans.  Support the Epilepsy Foundation-donate, walk share your stories   The USO Wishbook: recognize a special occasion while directly benefiting troops and their families" 

Cyborg Anthropology/Donna Haraway/Cyborg Manifesto/1991/subfield within AAA/Macy Meetings 1941/boundaries of technology and culture/'interface culture'/actor networks/activity theory/social network theory/fractal production of value/frictionless production of value/value crisis/participation architecture-danah boyd/Identity production and the Second Self/Non-places - Auge/Simultaneous Time/Continuous Partial Attention/Panic Architecture/Social Punctuation/Ambient Intimacy/Automatic Production of Space/Manipulation by Defaults/Gibson's Affordances/Norman's Design of Everyday Things/Social Life of Information/Nine Principles of Innovation Networks/Gate's 1995 NGA speech/Shirky - Here Comes EverybodyShirky - Cognitive Surplus/Imagined Communities ~ Benedict Anderson/Histories of classroom/the 'classroom' as technology/TextbookAssertions of authority/the Course/Curriculum/ISD/Ralph W Tyler/Benjamin Bloom/General History/Why don't we have compliance training for PPT?WEB 2.0/Shifts in the Way We Work/Abandon Stocks and Embrace Flows/How Technology Evolves/Subliminal v Liminal/"Please. Don't silence your cell phone"/Hierarchies of expertise/Narrate your work/Fear Control Trust/Saying the wrong thing/Saying "bad" things/Fog of systems/All learning is socially-mediated/Transmission Loss/Inevitability/Consumerization/Blurring line between work/life/Intuitive situational awareness/No more courses. No more universities. No more answers - only questions/Pattern recognition/Curation/Be human/Field Independent v. Field Dependent/Cognitive habituates/Carpentered world/Susceptible to linear illusions/How are Piaget's Universals impacted by culture?/Ecological Validity/Infrastructure Structure Super-structure/Foucault / BenthamPanopticism/Start Small/ Think big / Move fast/Subject-Matter NetworksCan we think of these as kinship systems?/World Cafe / Conversations That Matter/Social Network Analysis/Production v consumption/media has ALWAYS been social/cave paintings as social/TV, the Great Wasteleand, was 'consumed' socially McLuhan/Innovation Diffusion/Speed/Media (Virillio)/Public Sphere/Development pattern of literacies/Paving deer paths/  

Seriously, what do we do compliance training on? Ethics? Sexual Harassment? Information Assurance? Sure. How often do those vectors impact our business on a daily basis at the individual worker level? I mean, there is someone sitting in a cubicle or an office and they're doing their job - are those and other compliance topics impacting them? Maybe. What are they doing though? Sending email. Creating powerpoint slides. Working on Excel. Do we have ANY compliance [read mandatory] training on those topics? Why? Please tell me why - if we are going to understand that there are some topics that are so critical that we need to make sure that everyone is trained on them - then please tell me why we don't force training for things that we do and use every single day? It's not like it doesn't exist. It's not like people wouldn't understand the relevance. Then let's buckle down and use the idea of compliance training for good. Maybe we should also add some compliance training on collaboration - you will collaborate and you will enjoy it! 

I try to be a runner. I run about 5-7 times a week. I'm slow but I plod along. I'm also an app freak. Love em. Constantly installing and trying and then removing them so it's not odd that I currently have 3 running apps on my phone. My goto apps have been RunKeeper and MapMyRun. Why two? Well, simply RunKeeper is the better mobile experience and MapMyRun is the better Web experience. Runkeeper's main web page looks boring and it's tough to know where to go to get the information you want. Contrast that to MapMyRun's web page which has a dashboard architecture and shows my recent runs, achievements and so on right there.  On the mobile side though, Runkeeper brings it. I think Runkeeper has a better display in terms of getting to information quickly and seeing things like split times on different runs and comparing times on runs of similar length.  I can also rank order these apps in terms of how tough they are on you in terms of time/distance. Runkeeper is easily the harshest one, meaning my pace is consistently recorded as slower on this one than on MapMyRun and Runtastic is the most lenient with my times beating my RunKeeper times by as much as 30-45 seconds.  I will say that Runtastic has two great features - the heat map and the countdown. The heat map shows your pace as a colored line changing from red to green (hot to cold) as your pace changes. Great visual reference. The countdown is so logical I can't believe no one else has it. You hit the "Go" or "Record" button and Runtastic gives you a countdown from 15 seconds to get your gloves on or get your iPhone stored in your running armband. Great feature.  The thing that kills me about Runtastic though is how much they've chosen to hide behind their "Pro" level. $4.99 doesn't seem like a lot but when I've already got two apps that work pretty well and the features that differentiate you from then look like they can be developed fairly quickly, you need to woo me more before hitting me for the $$. The thing that running apps have going for them is that I can't export my data easily from one app and import it into another. I'd love some version of an OPML file for running. That just means that every time I run, I'm making a decision on where I store that part of my running history. Stats are important to runners - we like to see improvement and track it. Hitting me right away for $4.99 just so I can get voice feedback on a run - too much too soon. I hope one of these apps nails all the strengths from the other two. We're out here waiting. 

We all have rosters of the people at work. Names, phone numbers, physical locations maybe even their Twitter handles or link to their LinkedIn Profile - all there. There is so much missing though. If every employee is an ambassador for your brand (and they are whether or not you believe it) - then what do you really know about your ambassadors? How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? How many followers on Twitter? Do they blog? Write on Medium? What is the ACTUAL reach of your organizational network? Now in no way do I mean that companies should have access to employee accounts in a username/password way - I do think it's only smart for a company to know what networks (size and shape) are represented in it's employee pool.  Now I'm thinking about how you'd do or represent this. I don't know about having some internal-viewable Klout score (this would be different than having an internal Klout score related to an internal network)...but something would indicate size and vectors of networks - it's probably not critical to know that an employee at a IT company is a leading quilt blogger but you never know. I'm also not advocating for any kind of censorship at all  - just an awareness of the potential reach of your employee's networks.  Still a formative thought - open for input. 

I'm not breaking up with Typepad but I did want to try out Medium. So I wrote a post about patterns, something I actually think is very important. I hope you enjoy the post but I also wanted to mention my thoughts about using Medium as a publishing platform.  First reaction - look to blank to me - where are all the WYSIWYG editor toolbars? Oh, they're all based on contextual action so they don't clutter the landscape when you don't need them. Cool.  Second reaction - this is nice. Almost typewriter-like in the sense of putting a blank page in the typewriter and having it stare back at you. Its uncluttered design really brings you back to the writing. Sure you can add an image (I do like how every post can have a 'cover photo') but picking out the right image isn't the heart of what you're doing. You're there to write. The font is super-clean and readable.  Third reaction - I need to understand better how to link Medium to Twitter or LinkedIn - maybe I can't and maybe that's part of the design - I just need to investigate that.  Overall reaction - I like Medium. I resisted for a long time but I like it. It's clean and easy and somehow the UI keeps me focused on the writing. Now I have to decide if I'll use it more....that would be a pattern. ;-)

I find the work by Loomio compelling. @nilofer, in "11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era" argues that "In the Social Era, the power to make decisions doesn’t come from your spot on the org chart, or rank, or any fancy-schmancy title. Power to make decisions comes from knowing which ideas matter to the organization and why." I agree. One issue though is that our current enterprise systems aren't built to recognize input at a decision level from multiple levels in the org. We are working to change that but I like the path that Loomio is showing us. The system is set up well with decisions at the heart of the process. The one thing that I'd point to is in this image >>See those options? Some of them are pretty powerful - especially that last one - BLOCK. Now imagine your CEO proposes an idea and everyone else jumps on it but you disagree with it and state you case and vote BLOCK. If you were the only one in your org to vote to block the idea - would you be comfortable with that? If not, then we have more work to do on the org design and change management side - because that comfort level - that is what it mean to BE a social organization.