Join me on Saturday, February 20, 2010 for a great free conference at the Ohio State University – Digital Media in a Social World (the whole conference is both Friday and Saturday):

Andrew Miller
Bridging the Gap Between Traditional Offline Engagement and Online Social Networking
Does your organization have a split personality? Is your audience getting mixed messages between how you interact online versus offline? Learn how bridging the gap between your traditional audience engagement and your online social networking efforts will provide a stronger foundation of supporters and greater innovation.

Click here to download the full PDF (~30mb) from the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS).

From July 2009 Columbus CEO, Social (Media) Studies:

As you may or may not remember I’ve talked a good bit here and on my personal blog about a social movement I’ve dubbed the digitalocracy. While I’ve skirted around the issue of whether or not it is in fact a new type of socialism writer Kevin Kelly feels secure in calling it exactly as he sees it, this is his idea of The New Socialism.

Mr. Kelly does a great job of relating several technological advances to how we are acting in a very social way (sharing, collaboration and value based on community instead of capital) and how that might change the fundamentals of our offline society.

Most important, and defining, about these ideas and the social movements occurring around them is the fact that they are happening independent of government, industry or national borders. This is a human movement, not one of a single culture, race or creed.

You can see more of my posts related to the digitalocracy here and here. You can read the full article by Kevin Kelly here. Below is a snippet of that article from Wired.com.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

I detailed my proposal in this post if you’d like to see what it is that I’ll be writing about. I’m very excited about this project and look forward to providing you with updates as it moves forward.

So first things first. Ignite is an excellent opportunity to share and listen to exciting ideas and presentations in a very fast paced setting, giving maximum bang for your virtual buck (it’s free is what I mean). Alvin aka @wyliemac along with Dan and several others have setup the next Ignite Columbus #IC3 for Friday, June 19, 2009 from 6-8pm at the OSU Mendenhall Lab. I’ve submitted my presentation “A new social movement I call Digitalocracy” and need your help to make it up to the stage.

Take a moment to visit http://ignitecbus.uservoice.com/pages/general and cast a vote for me. While you’re out there take a look at other ideas and check out the Ignite Columbus blog.

In other blogging and presentation news:

• My blog post “Trust Management” was selected as the Best Trust Post of the Month on the Carnival of Trust website. Initial props were given by the good folks at EGYII who first linked the post up.
• I received an email from the fine folks at Schmap that they wanted to use one of my photos from my St. Augustine trip on thier latest mapping mashup. This is particularly ironic because I took the photo while I was at Flagler College giving a presentation about Social Media and Collaboration – and here it is in action!
• Finally, I’ll be presenting at MORPC on May 1, 2009 with my friend Jody Dzuranin about how non-profits and local communities can utilize Social Media and Collaboration Tools to promote a greener, more sustainable and communicative city. I believe it is open to the public in case you’d like to check it out.
• Oh, and next Tuesday, April 28, 2009 is when my next commentary airs on WOSU 820. This one will be about Volunteering Your Way Out of the Recession – I’ll post it up here as well but tune into 820am!

Keep your eyes out for these upcoming projects that aren’t yet fully cooked yet but will hopefully start to boil in the near future, including:

• This years garden/mini-farm in the backyard will include a new special garden for Sophie.
• Hosting conversations that matter in the city of Upper Arlington.
• Launch of OurUA.org community website and conversation point.
• OSU Communicative Cities presentation.
• OTEC presentation (hopefully).
• More to come about my manifesto, Digitalocracy, and my contribution to another Social Media book project.

Paul Otlet envisioned a mechanized system of shared knowledge back in the early twentieth century. As a peace activist he believed strongly in the transformative nature of freely sharing all of the world’s knowledge as a way of bringing understanding across the globe.

Mr. Otlet had conceived of a system of hyperlinks which not only bound information together but expanded on the understanding of the information by providing context. Unfortunately, given the era and the mechanism he envisioned being purely analog was too significant a technological barrier for the system he dreamt about to become reality.

Not quite a century later you arrive at the modern digital world. In 1993 Tim Berners-Lee devised a system of hyperlinked documents that connect back and forth to each other, forming what he called the World Wide Web. Paul Otlet’s vision had not been fully achieved but an incredible milestone had. The final component was to add context to the hyperlinks so that the information could be turned into social knowledge.

As we move beyond the second decade of the World Wide Web (aka Web 2.0 or the Social Web) the realization of context through a combination of meta-data and machine awareness is starting to bear fruit. The coming decades of this digital world should prove extraordinary in the history of technology.

But moving to a world of freely shared, contextual information has far more than a mere technological challenge to overcome. A world such as this has a terrific cultural barrier to overcome as well. Paul Otlet’s vision wasn’t just to create knowledge but to extend it so far as to bring world peace. Our goal is to scale the cultural changes down to the organization and individual. Creating a culture shift at these points should, in fact, have global ramifications. Will they bring about world peace? Maybe not, but they surely will change the way we understand our world.

Within most organizations there lies a wealth of information which is locked away due to both technological and cultural constraints. This chapter will deal with the way that the technological changes in the personal lives of individuals are having a direct effect on the cultural constraints of organizations. The current cultural barriers will be explained in detail along side of current technological concerns that are offering both an opportunity to remove the barrier as well as examples of how this is already being done or might be done.

Through example I will break down the following 10 cultural barriers to embracing social media and the resulting social knowledge.

• The desire to maintain a separation of personal and professional life.
• The concern that use of social media will cause time management issues.
• The fear of exposing oneself or ones efforts to scrutiny.
• The fear of new technology and remaining relevant.
• The security risk inherent in sharing information socially.
• The legal reporting requirements faced by some individuals and organizations.
• The flattening of organizational hierarchy and what that might mean for management.
• The loss of control over subordinates or project scope.
• The loss of competitive advantage.
• The overall fear of a Big Brother organization or society.

The use of social media such as Facebook has created an interesting dichotomy of online persona. On one hand are the very personal relationships in what we used to consider our private life; on the other are the public expressions of those personal relationships and the unforgiving persistence of data in the digital world. Within the United States the prevailing cultural norm has been to expect some level of privacy within your personal life. This is the basis of several of our laws related both to technology and healthcare.

By cultivating an online persona, whether expressly for private or professional use, there must be no expectation of privacy. As we push to utilize these same tools within our community and professional organizations the question arises as to whether or not it is useful to try and separate our private online persona from our professional.

In the physical world this is impossible. What we are learning about the digital world is that separation is similarly counterproductive. Individuals must become more aware of how living their life online influences all aspects of their life: public and private, physical and digital. Similarly, organizations who hire these individuals now have to consider the management of every employee as a potential spokesperson.

When the line blurs between personal and professional life, many organizations fear that the use of social media will cause productivity to drop and time management to falter. In response many have chosen to block these applications all together.

If there is no, or little, distinction between personal and professional online persona then there can similarly be little to no distinction between personal and professional time. These tools can be used to dramatically increase productivity but they require a shift in how management interacts with employees, and how management understands a new, 24 hour time clock.

Under the constraints of a global economy we already expect workers to perform with greater flexibility of time and thus the use of social media merely allows for even greater agility.

A component of all of this public exposure is scrutiny. How many times have you had a coworker, staff member or supervisor who did not pull their weight within the organization? Living transparently provides workers who are well suited for their position to shine while exposing those who might be better repositioned.

For some organizations this could be an opportunity for cost savings while others may see this as an opportunity to reorganize; learning about their employees’ strengths and interests and then better utilizing them.

Public scrutiny, offered constructively, can also open many doors for individuals and organizations by providing advice that otherwise could be costly. At times a fresh set of eyes can see things that others miss.

The vast difference in skill and experience related to using social media creates a fear within the workplace. Social media has presented the world with a sea change in how we interact, making it significant in terms of socio-technological shifts. However, from a standpoint of pure technology, this change is not unlike others we have seen in the past. Craftsman and laborers giving way to machines and robots, secretarial pools giving way to administrative assistants as desktop computing replaced Dictaphones and typewriters.

A singular difference for social media is that it has been adopted first in the home and then transferred to the office, meaning it is much more accessible even to the layperson. Often workplace adoption of new technologies can be staggered by generational differences. Adoption of social media is rapidly crossing generational lines though, further removing this barrier.

One primary source of fear directly related to the technology is the fear of identity theft, or the theft of intellectual property. On a personal level this has the potential of ruining ones’ financial security, at the organizational level this could be devastating both financially and to the organization’s reputation.

Security has always been a combination of technology and culture. Secure passwords, cautious browsing and guarded interaction online can be prompted by technological solutions but only work when users are in a cultural of awareness. I predict in the near future our more open use of social media will actually become our protection.

In much the same way I can identify a close friend by sight, a computer will learn enough about our online persona to “know” when we are who we say we are – or not. For systems to engage people at that level, and for individuals to feel comfortable with that intimacy, we will require new legislation.

Currently the so-called Sunshine Laws provide citizens in the United States with a level of government transparency. Private organizations have far fewer requirements to act in a transparent way.

Transparency laws, the policies that follow them and the individuals administering them, directly affect the cultural opinions of transparency based on how they administer those laws. Some administrators take a narrow view on transparency requirements.

“Open Source” as an ideal beyond just software suggests that all organizations should be fully transparent. The effect would be to then put individuals and organizations on more equal footing as social knowledge becomes freely transferrable.

The history of organizations has been one of providing data from worker to supervisor, and then disseminating the data from that point as management sees fit. Technology developed around this idea of hierarchy based workflow. The result being a cultural by-product of standalone and silo data which has helped maintain that now inefficient hierarchy.

Individuals have discovered the power of crowdsourcing through social media, exploiting the social knowledge on a very basic level, at home and in their communities. These people then bring this very efficient way of learning and collaborating into their organizations; causing change from the bottom up.

Standalone and silo data are not inherently transparent and provide the hierarchy with a base of command and control. The more rigid organization’s internal controls are for workflow the more likely that social media adoption is being fought. Opening up this data is a fundamental step towards changing the hierarchal culture.

Utilizing social media as a way of building collaboration across organizations will help flatten hierarchy and will change the control structure over subordinates and projects. Here again we have an opportunity for public scrutiny which can provide an individual or organization with a chance to make significant changes.

At the project or organizational level this public scrutiny may also be seen as an assault on competitive advantage. Management may fear a drop in market share. Looking at the internet development model suggests this isn’t true. Goods and services are being crowdsourced online; that which can be freely used is, while those things that have actual value added are still being bought and sold.

Broad collaboration can provide far superior goods and services than are available today. The vision to see those goods and services to market is what will create profit. Competitive advantage will be calculated more by the quality of the collaboration you can build than by the secrecy surrounding your product.

The final cultural challenge is that of the Big Brother state. While still broadly considered a fear of government the (re)entry of private contractors into the police enforcement and defense market creates a growing fear of this same phenomenon happening via private sector. Massive data collection without oversight in the private sector has similarly added to the fear of a private Big Brother state.

This raises the final cultural question: who owns the data that makes up an individual’s online persona? Through radical transparency these concerns can be alleviated. Introduction of transparent processes and open source data resources at both public and private organizations would allow for watchdog groups to be effective. However, in our current culture the lack of trust between individuals, private and public organizations may prove to be too large a gap to bridge.

These cultural issues are as important to reference and detail as the technology surrounding them. I believe that comfort with the technology and greater use of social knowledge for positive change will break through many of these cultural roadblocks.

I’ve written about Free Culture, Open Source technology, sharing, collaboration and transparency. For many people that I chat with these concepts are very new but for those of us who have lived as “digital settlers” these aren’t just concepts but ways of online life. The natural progression of these ideals is to integrate them into basic learning structures so that the next generation doesn’t know anything but open social movements giving way to a better overall society.

The New York Times writer Tamar Lewin shared this story about Mr. Reshef and his brilliant idea for the world’s first accredited University of the People. Enjoy!

…An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People. {click for full story} …

UPDATE — Here’s a good follow along with that article about Open Source Education, TED Talk Video

I’ve been kicking some thoughts around in my head in regards to an upcoming speaking opportunity. I wanted to share them here because, well, who knows perhaps the opportunity won’t work out or maybe you’ve got some thoughts you’d like to add to it.

The overall discussion is about integration of technology to create communicative cities. The angle I’m interested in is the idea of “hyperlocal” and how organizations can take advantage of the interest people have in their neighborhoods and cities.

People issues:

• Telecommuting doesn’t work for people because being at home is too tempting to do non-work, too hard to focus
• More freelance/consultant type work going on mixed with greater layoffs in current economy
• Mixture of personal/business time means more work happens outside of the office even if you have an office
• Collaboration between people of different practices and a flattening of organizational hierarchies allows for greater creativity and more organizational flexibility

Tech issues:

• Digital technologies provide the speed to work over several connectivity mediums (wired, Wi-Fi, cellular, etc.) and collaborate on any type of media (audio, video, text, db, etc).
• Free and low cost collaboration software allows for a connected workforce regardless of time and space.
• Explosion of the “amateur” class has provided basic information and research at your fingertips. Expertise is often similarly available at your fingertips.
• Changes in intellectual property ownership ideals.

Physical issues:

• Co-working groups co-opting spaces that offer free connectivity (coffee shops, libraries, parks)
• Offices setup for singular use instead of shared space.
• Lack of municipal connectivity.
• Promotion of less expensive urban areas as a solution for people who are able to work remotely.
  

Hyperlocal Strategies

Digital technologies are changing the way people work, recreate and communicate within their physical community. The explosion of social applications has caused vast amounts of opinion and fact based data about local resources and issues to be cataloged. Due to this explosion of information; collaboration and community organizing is building around these issues, ideas and community resources with participation levels not previously possible. This phenomenon is referred to as hyperlocal networking.

Cities and organizations can take advantage of this hyperlocal networking and (re)develop around user groups who self identify through digital communities. In Columbus these user groups form on sites like The Columbus Underground and Columbus Tech Life, etc. Through monitoring and participation in these hyperlocal networks the approach to civic and private projects can be specifically targeted. The very same networks can then be used to market (re)development in a micro-targeted way; creating grass roots networks that evangelize for you.

Hyperlocal networks utilize the free tools of the internet to aggregate and re-use the data being creating. The result is knowledge repositiories as micro as a city block. Often what is developed by these networks can be directly adopted by other entities or easily remixed to fit an even more specific need.

During the ferocious Mumbai terrorist attacks that occurred in November 2008 a stream of real-time data was being remixed by individuals, participating in hyperlocal networks, to build useful information such as Google mashups that plotted the danger zones and Wiki’s with health and safety information; all the while developing a historical record of the event as it unfolded. An unfortunate side affect of this information may have been to provide the attackers with data to further their destruction.

At the heart of the hyperlocal network is individuals with a passion based, instead of profit based, motive for the focal issue or resource. An important distinction of hyperlocal networking is the rejection of hierarchy and a general distrust of push (one direction) information.

Engagement at the hyperlocal level is only effective if a strategy is in place for sustaining the interaction and understanding the resulting information. It is important to interact transparently otherwise your efforts will be rejected as being manipulative. The short-term reward for engagement is a relatively low (or no) cost research and data development group. The long-term reward is greater buy-in from user groups and a healthier and safer community.

In The Numerati, author Stephen Baker discusses the importance of mathematical modeling in our modern world; specifically the mathematical modeling done to insure that individuals fit profiles most profitable to the organization seeking their patronage. The current paradigm is that individuals make an agreement that they will provide this constant data stream to organizations in return for some sort of beneficial trade off. An example of this is that when I go to my local grocery store they scan my shopper card, collecting vast data about me and in return I receive coupons on products they believe I might be inclined to like and discounts on regular items. Realistically I am not getting anything for this trade. The grocer has re-baselined the products at a higher price to allow for the discounted price to be more or less a normalized price. The coupons I get are mostly an attempt to get me to purchase products that are at a higher price than what I most often purchase. This is exactly what the mathematical modeling is meant to do. Since I am not really getting anything of value in return and I am providing this business the opportunity to market even more precisely, shouldn’t I at least have the benefit of owning my data? Sadly the ownership of the data is only a small part of it; the data is your digital DNA and giving someone control over your DNA is an awfully big leap of faith – particularly when you don’t have any expectations of being told what they are doing with it.

We must start questioning how the systems are designed to deal with making those decisions about individuals. I’m not only talking about the basic code behind the software technology but also the business rules and processes that are related to the decisions. As individuals’ digital lives become more and more transparent to those with the financial where-with-all to track and decipher them (and thus correlate the data to the individuals’ analog life) we must realize that it is important for the individuals to also have that level of transparency of the organizations.

Using very similar data, applied to local population bases, we can see how this information is being used to further differentiate individuals and segment people. The most recent Presidential election revealed the level of data collection being done by the Obama campaign. Using MyBO, local voter records, and other available databases the campaign was able to pinpoint voters in categories such as: “definite supporter” “leaning towards supporting” “leaning away from support” “definite opponent”. In a much more negative example the mathematicians used digital datasets to find increasingly larger and larger groups of people to target with subprime loans – an industry that lead us to the fall of banking giants such as Lehman Brothers. Ever increasing use of the core life data of individuals gives powerful organizations; those who make decisions about laws, healthcare, social service, financial service and etc. the ability to deny rights and opportunities to individuals and groups as they so choose.

In democratic nations the development and application of laws by the government are carried out in a very transparent format so as to attempt to maintain a level of fairness across the population. Obviously this system has not performed successfully in all cases; notably civil rights law. Now however the digital world has expanded our daily interaction and existence beyond the reach of many legal statutes with our digital person at risk of being co-opted and manipulated by organizations with no social contract towards openness and transparency. Only through this transparency of process and system can the populace at large protect the rights and equality of the individual; minimizing the chance of minority group marginalization.

So if we are to create transparency across all organizations won’t we essentially remove the security that protects both an organizations competitive advantage as well as individuals’ privacy? I believe that in the current climate the individuals’ privacy is already lost from the vantage point of organizations. An organization’s competitive advantage is not secured by privacy but through innovation, agility or share. The larger question then is how transparency may provide greater security than privacy has, both for the individual and the organization.