I'm buying the book-- I want my reading to be portable, but if you're into free then here's the whole thing. Have at it. Now you have no excuse for not joining in the HighTouch Bookclub fun.
We’re going to be rolling out the free digital forms of FREE over the next two weeks. First up: the Scribd form, right here on the blog (and anywhere else you want—it’s embeddable). This is the whole book!
I'm ready to start the third book of the Hightouch Book Club. We read books that "touch on the intersection of technology and culture (loosely defined)". I hope you'll consider getting the book, reading along, and even commenting.
The book club can be a lonely place. I know that a few people at least read the last book, The Whuffie Factor because they told me. No one commented in the Friend Feed room, however. It's been so quiet that I had to question the value of the activity. I realized that the exercise satisfied the Delicious Lesson: personal value precedes network value. For me, the value is that I am completing books where in the past I almost never did. I can't count the number of partially read books I have on the bookshelf. Since starting the book club I've finished the last three. Kind of sad that I have to post the notes in order to finish, but that's my reality.
That said, the next read will be Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. Yes, I know about the unattributed lifting of some of the content from Wikipedia-- I don't care so hold your breath. This book will be available Tuesday, July 7. I hope you'll get it, read along, and maybe even join in the conversation.
The ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article on people's lack of interest in the Obama Administration's open government initiative. It highlights the paltry participation numbers:
An Open Government Directive page for a drafting phase has now been extended until July 3. Although the OSTP blog states that "well over 100 drafts of open government recommendations" were submitted by users, contributors number just 201 users, and fewer than 1,000 ratings have been registered by the site.
It then speculates as to some possible reasons for the failure:
Do you think the U.S. government did an adequate job of publicizing its Open Government efforts? Do you think political and technology bloggers with a critical mass of traffic should have done more to spread the word and encourage user participation, much in the way that music television channels consistently harass youngsters to "rock the vote"?
Do you think that trends of citizen apathy have finally peaked to a point that - even when tools for participation are free and available via a simple Internet connection - no one cares enough to weigh in?
Of course, the correct answer is none-of-the-above. All that has been proven, once again, is that it is extremely difficult to build destination Web sites. It doesn't matter who you are-- even the President of the United States with a community of 306 million. If you build it they won't come.
The failure says nothing about the people's penchant for open and participatory government, but everything about how the Internet is changing. If you want to engage with people you have to go to them. How many times must this failure be repeated before people get it?
Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration.
Targeted at the community college system? Okay, I buy that. If your primary interest is in job skills for the largest number of people then this makes total sense. What doesn't make sense is the proposal's old economy emphasis on face-to-face learning to the tune of $18.5 billion while supporting online learning with a paltry $500 million ($50m a year x 10 years). The goal for this $50 million is to produce 20-25 "high quality" courses a year. Wow, $2 million per course? I wonder what little goodies are buried in this proposal that have little to do with learning?
Then there was this little gem about the Federal Government "owning" the courses:
The courses would be owned by the government and would be free for anyone to take.
That can't possibly be right? If it is, this would represent a major shift in policy. Things produced with the people's money go into the public domain. Period. That has been the law since forever. Surely the people behind this proposal are smart enough to know that? Any attempt to change the Federal Government's approach to intellectual property in such a draconian fashion must be resisted. I'd rather nothing be done than for it do be done so wrong.
We all have those people in our lives, you know, the ones who say something and you know immediately that the opposite is true. Recently my certain someone proclaimed that Twitter had peaked and was soooooooooo dead. Hehe.
Personally, I think Twitter is irrelevant. Twitter is just an application. It is what people are doing with Twitter that matters, and that is anything but irrelevant. It's the future. Twitter is changing the world because it's changing the way we communicate. It's changing our expectations in regard to: timeliness, transparency, flatness, engagement, and even the way that knowledge is constructed. Hint: it's a social process.
Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.
What is more important is a real sea change that is occurring which shows that in business it’s real time or it’s no time. While it may not be practical or even possible to have true real time for everything, most companies should be tapped into some form of real time availability of information that occurs outside their four walls. If not, they stand a real chance of being left behind.
I'm in complete agreement that expectations around timeliness are accelerating. It's no longer acceptable to make them wait. Focusing on speed alone, however, misses the most important trend-- people expect to be an integral part of the process.
Bottling knowledge for later consumption is an industrial era model. Knowledge is not something that you package and put on the shelf. It's not something to be found at the end of a Google search string. Knowledge construction is a process. It's a conversation, thinking-out-loud, learning. It's a journey that people embark on together.
In the future (which is now) if you're going to survive, the artificial walls you've constructed around your organization are going to have to fall. The sooner you realize this and start tearing them down the better your long term prospects for survival.
I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop this morning (The Royal Bean in Raleigh) fooling with my iPhone, and I overheard the most interesting conversation. It was between a woman and her SO, and it was obvious she was not happy. The conversation went something like this:
HER: I have my (inaudible) fundraiser this Thursday.
HIM: I'm doing a game that night.
HER: What time does it start?
HIM: Six o'clock.
HER: The fundraiser starts at eight.
HIM: I'd be hard pressed to be there before 8:30, but I am behind the plate.
HER: What difference does that make?
HIM: I can make a bigger strike zone, and speed up the game considerably.
In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.
Then it applies this principle to organizations:
So what happens when we compete with each other? What are the consequences when we decimate each other? What happens when one departments competes with another department in the same company? What happens when one person competes with another for a salary and bonuses? What happens when society competes with Wall Street for their 401K? What happens when the competition is already lost – do we continue competing or do we then cooperate?
Which is exactly why adding extrinsic incentives totally borks the conditions which make peer-production systems work. People who don't understand how these principles work, well meaning people, try to incent what can't be incented, and they totally break it in the process.
It's the same thing with education. Want to improve education tomorrow? Then stop this competition madness immediately. Throw-out that which destroys learning: competition. Recognize that most learning is socially constructed, and do everything in your power to promote those social elements.
I saw a wonderful one-person play this week about the life of George Washington Carver, Listening to the Still Small Voice played by Paxton Williams. He had a take-away line that would be a perfect mantra for education, Lift as you climb. You can't lift when you're devoting your energy to finishing on top.
To the extent possible under law, Kevin J. Gamble
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
HighTouch.
This work is published from
United States.
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