Twethics & Twetiquette?

Although my next post was scheduled to be Collaborating for the Environment as the follow-up to Chronocentrism and Social Entropy?, there is one common theme about respect that I am hearing from the amazing people behind the many projects under evaluation to be added into the directory that I wanted to comment about.

This theme that keeps coming up is a simple sense of respect for and understanding of the stakeholders, their needs and agenda.

The points the interviewees made kept reminding me of how impacting social misbehavior can be to any collaboration initiative.

Social misbehavior such as the ones displayed by Tweeters at the Danah Boyd’s keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo or by a single individual member of a project who makes unnecessarily damaging comments about the project or stakeholders via any social media venue should be discouraged since we wouldn’t tolerate them in any other circumstance, would we?

People like Danah Boyd play a role in promoting this social media space. It is disconcerting that smart, professional people used that same space to embarrass her.

I’m not talking about suppressing our freedom to express ourselves or freedom of speech or any of those critical elements of our society.

The people I have been interviewing have expressed how critical for their project’ success respect has been—respect that needs to be earned and given in all sorts of forms according to their collaboration initiative, expectations and framework. Common sense stuff, right?

But, the cases where social media has been used to damage people are many. Social media can enable the spontaneous transfer of some ugly aspects of humanity into the on-line world with much broader impact than they could have in the off-line world.

The reason why I am posting Twethics & Twetiquette? ahead of Collaborating for the Environment is that my support for Maggie Fox’s conclusion in her post reacting to these Tweeters’ misbehavior continues to grow with each of the interviews I’m conducting. This is Maggie’s final point:

in closing: the “old” rules of human decency still apply in this new space. If you tweeted something during danah boyd’s keynote you thought would generate a chuckle, you’re a coward. If you truly wanted to improve the experience, you should have had the courage to stand up, raise your hand, and ask her to slow down a bit.

These interviewees have also emphasized how critical respect and common sense-based human decency is for collaboration in general, not just their projects.

Should we allow the freedom this new technology gives us turn us into destructive mobs, taking away our basic sense of what human decency is?

I’m with Maggie, respect and the “old” rules of human decency still apply in this new space of Twitter. Let’s not forget our ultimate goal of collaborating, cooperating, and coordinating with each other for positive outcomes. Let’s be conscious of the weight of the responsibility this new freedom of voice demands.

So, how about if we star some conversations on Twethics, Twetiquette, Twashame and Twastized?

What do you think?

What is this all about?
The Collaborative Society Directory’s goal is to collect and understand information from different collaborative projects that bring together as participants entities from the three forces that shape our societies: public, private and non-profit. The goal of The Collaborative Society is to explore if such information can provide us with insights of what could be the characteristics that make a society or a community healthy.

Chronocentrism and Social Entropy?

The increasing emphasis by which we are referring to the rapid and deep-going socio-economic changes created by our generation’s adoption of social media technology has made me wonder at times if we aren’t falling victims of Chronocentrism, believing that the impact of our generation’s time in history is superior to all others.

But, then, I try catching-up on health, governmental or environmental issues or try keeping-up with the endless changes in any of the many technology fields I’m so fascinated with, and I find myself believing that NO, we aren’t being chronocentricts.

The social changes our present generations are creating are real and are happening very fast and simultaneously in all the socio-economic, cultural and political fields.

This past weekend, Craig Newmark had a post titled Big news From Washington That Everyone Misses, where he points out some examples of how the U.S. government is getting really serious about giving all Americans a serious voice in running our Federal government.

Whether their efforts are real and succeed or not isn’t the point I’m addressing. What calls my attention is the fact that this conscious effort to engage every citizen in a cost-effective and practical manner can only be possible due to the adoption of social media and open technology by the masses. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is great to see a governmental entity such as CDC consciously recognizing the value and using technology to deal with the H1N1 epidemic.

But the conscious efforts are taking place in all fields. An example is the environmental project Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool EPEAT that engages public and private entities into a collaborative initiative to enable:

…purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select electronic products… based on their environmental attributes.

To quote the person that brought this project to my attention: The premier green ratings program for electronics is based on an entirely stakeholder (public/private/govt./etc.) driven process. This is about people getting together to generate a positive impact where the purchasing power of a few could push environmentally friendly specifications that could help us all. I will provide more information about their successes in the next post.

In that same subject, the BetterBuyProject, a joint effort of the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council in conjunction with the General Services Administration, asks and tries to answer the question:

How can we use collaboration and social media to make the federal acquisition process more efficient and effective?

These are conscious collaboration efforts to both enact needed changes and address social challenges.

Another environmental organization that was submitted to be evaluated for inclusion into the Directory is the non-profit World Wild Life and their corporate and government partnerships. This non-profit organization is bringing the three-sectors (government, non-profits and for-profits) together to collaborate and address major environmental challenges.

A fourth environmental organization submitted for consideration into the Collaborative Society Directory is the Environmental Defense Fund that states its approach as We start with rigorous science. Then we work directly with businesses, government and communities.

These environmental projects, where all sorts of individuals and corporations are actively collaborating to address social challenges, are just few examples of how social forces are coming together, voluntarily, to enact necessary changes. In the next post, Collaborating for the Environment I will expand on these four projects, their successes and learned lessons.

But, going back to my question about us becoming chronocentricts when referring to the changes created by our generation’s adoption of social media technology, I have a hard time believing that it is just us hyping up the importance of our generation. Although I am not a historian nor a sociology or anthropology expert by any stretch of the terms, I venture to question that there has been other generation that has simultaneously created so much change in so many different fields so quickly as we are currently experiencing.

But this leads to another question that often crosses my mind when I see the incredible speed of these changes and it is how much are we witnessing and being part of social entropy in key aspects of our societies.

For one thing, it seems that some socio-economic segments (music, newspapers and TV come to mind) had been investing much of their energy trying to maintain their traditional structures in the face of what now looks like the natural decay of their systems.

Which made me wonder when I read Newmark’s post: Can the government actually succeed in giving all Americans a serious voice in running our Federal government? Or is the government simply reacting to the same forces that have changed the music, newspapers and TV industries?

I tend to believe that it is not longer something the government has to give us, but something we already have and the government is having to tap into it and adapt, just like industry at large has been forced to do. I tend to believe our generation is not being chronocentrict, but actually is doing things that surpass the impact of previous generations. I also tend to believe that we are witnessing social entropy in many aspects of our societies.

What do you think?

What is this all about?
The Collaborative Society Directory’s goal is to collect and understand information from different collaborative projects that bring together as participants entities from the three forces that shape our societies: public, private and non-profit. The goal of The Collaborative Society is to explore if such information can provide us with insights of what could be the characteristics that make a society or a community healthy.

The Merging of Epidemics in the Information Age – Part II

In 2007, Katherine Fulton, partner at the Monitor Institute, conducted a presentation at Ted under the title You are the future of philanthropy. During her less than 13 minutes, must-see presentation she provides five challenges to traditional philanthropy that are taking place today enabled by technology:

- Mass Collaboration: We now can do big things for love

-On-line Philanthropy: Organized philanthropy is not just for the wealthy

- Aggregated Giving: The venture capitalists of philanthropy

- Innovation Competitions: The problem is at the center

- Social Investing: Merging of business and philanthropy

She calls our new reality of coming together the Social Singularity, which isn’t just happening in philanthropy, but across our entire socio-economic systems due to the new ways technology is enabling us to connect. She makes a reflective statement:

We are not thinking a new way of acting, we are acting our way into a new way of thinking.

She refers to us coming together to address all sorts of treats by using a quote from the writer Paul Hawken that this is Humanity’s Collective Immune System Response to Today’s Treats.

More than two years after Fulton’s reference to this quote, we see technology playing a role in numerous key issues to deal with all sorts of epidemics. A real-time example is the Center for Disease Control’ Novel H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu) . CDC is tapping into all forms of social networking and community building to enable our Collective Immune System proactively fight this epidemic. I actually signed up for their DailyStrength community and I maybe you should too.

Now, here is a suggestion:

In any community or society, each of the government, for-profit and non-profit sectors must take conscious leadership of the role it is expected to carry out under the responsibility of the social force it represents (See DNA of a Society?) and it should be held accountable for the consequences of failing.

But more importantly, instead of just focusing on accountability, we should measure their effectiveness by how successfully they collaborate and engage each other in order to improve the manner or condition in which the members of a community live together for their mutual benefit.

Could we venture to use CDC example to test such measurement of collaboration lead by a government entity?

A new non-profit called Expert Labs which launched at Web 2.0 Expo and is run as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science seeks to help U.S. Federal Government policy makers tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens…taking advantage of our collective wisdom…and it’s a principal that’s been put to good use by lots of companies and organizations since the beginning of the social web.

Could an organization such as Expert Labs provide us with cases to test such measurement of collaboration?

One last thought and question about the impact technology is making. If we are able to demand transparency of data from the governmental force as the information age continues to evolve ala Sunlight Foundation or any of similar projects, should we demand such transparency from the for-profit and non-profit forces, particularly on their responsibility to help address epidemics, not just data?

Thank you MixtMedia for bringing Expert Labs to our attention.

About The Merging of Epidemics in the Information Age: Evaluates collaborative projects between the three sectors where the social challenge is to prevent and/or address three types of epidemics:
• Healthcare/Disease
• Food Shortage
• Poverty

What is this all about?
The Collaborative Society Directory’s goal is to collect and understand information from different collaborative projects that bring together as participants entities from the three forces that shape our societies: public, private and non-profit. The goal of The Collaborative Society is to explore if such information can provide us with insights of what could be the characteristics that make a society or a community healthy.

“People of Earth, remember.” How do we talk health information? RHIOs Part II

The last couple of days have been just spectacularly beautiful in Denver with that Colorado blue sky that makes you just want to go out and play. But, instead of playing outside I have spent quite a bit of time reconnecting with old colleagues from the social and healthcare services projects I used to volunteer for or work with. Reconnecting with them has made these days even more beautiful.

In a series of conversations about the many issues we face in healthcare, and how IT could help, I was reminded of the Merkel Foundation program Connecting for Health which is a public-private collaboration initiative that brings together over 100 healthcare organizations.

The program seeks to catalyze the widespread changes necessary to realize the full benefits of health information technology (HIT), while protecting patient privacy… Not an easy task when we consider the long list of stakeholders involved besides the patients themselves.

Healthcare’s challenge of connecting information between different providers while keeping our privacy is an issue, as we all know, full of all sorts of controversies (and costs). Connecting for Health is a project worth evaluating under the RHIO series for inclusion into the Collaborative Society Directory.

Another RHIO related project I’m submitting for evaluation is The California Regional Health Information Organization – CalRHIO, which launched its first site back in October of this year at the Coastal Communities Hospital in Orange County. According to their release, 23 hospital emergency departments over the next five months will have secure electronic access to critical medical information…on 380,000 patients enrolled in CalOptima, which covers people in Medi-Cal, Medicare, and Healthy Kids.

The overall benefits and outcomes of the RHIOs and Health Information Exchange (HIE) programs aren’t yet clear since they are on different stages of design and execution. The fact that there are so many branches of these programs provides abundant information for evaluating how collaborative initiatives between the three sectors address challenges in different communities and how they use technology to do so.

If you are involved in any of the RHIO or HIE projects, we look forward to hearing your comments here or sharing submitting them at the Collaborative Society.

RHIO Part I

What is this all about?
The Collaborative Society Directory’s goal is to collect and understand information from different collaborative projects that bring together as participants entities from the three forces that shape our societies: public, private and non-profit. The goal of The Collaborative Society is to explore if such information can provide us with insights of what could be the characteristics that make a society or a community healthy.

Building the Social DNA or Already Part of it?

About once per day I get something from the Tweeters I follow that makes my time invested in Tweeter worth it. Yesterday, via @valdiskrebs I got:

I am really looking forward to this book! “Share This!” by @randomdeanna — http://bit.ly/Xo6FC

I’ve followed Krebs’ work at Orgnet for a while, thus decided to check it out.

His tweet refers to Deanna Zandt’s upcoming book Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking and it links to a post where Zandt has a slideshare presentation with the fourth slide titled DNA: the more the merrier . Since I introduced Collaborative Society’s purpose under the blog post titled DNA of a Society? this slide obviously caught my attention. Zandt’s point about that slide is that:

Creating a just society is sort of like the evolution of species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety – new strains of DNA – and you create a stronger species.

She states that her book is a blueprint for how each of us has the chance to radically redefine major structures in our society. Present and past generations have had and taken that chance. Building and redefining structures and entire societies, over and over, is a primary directive of every generation.

People connecting and collaborating to change the world is nothing new. Society itself exists because of needs that can only be solved by individuals coming together. What is new is that our present and future generations have a more efficient and effective way to connect with those sharing our goals or needs, regardless of location.

In her post, Zandt’s talks about the country club pool that banned African-American kids from swimming back in June:

As the dialogue continued, people started to share stories on Twitter and Facebook about the first time they had been discriminated against. I read story after unfiltered, unedited story, written by friends. The stories were devastating; so was the fact that I hadn’t heard them before.

Few hours after I read this post I got one from from Dave Pollard from a different side of the spectrum, The Environmentalist’s Dilemma: No Point in Arguing, where he details his reaction the Net Impact 2009 Conference. In this post, Pollard asks:

But these young idealists, with few exceptions, are technophiles (believers that technology, ingenuity and innovation can address the coming crises), unwavering believers in the political and economic system (they mostly think that Obama has a plan for all this, and he just needs more time), and most seem unaware of even what the Long Emergency, peak oil, the growing debt crisis, the transition movement and permaculture are all about.

The point in the above paragraph is valuable within the context it was written and should be considered by any of us who is drumming up the impact of this new power we have at our fingertips.

Pollard also makes a point that made me pause:

If we create cellular networks to organize the work of reconnection, learning, action and creation needed to enable a better world, could these not easily become, as so many religious networks are, vehicles for indoctrination and exploitation?

This relates a bit to Andrew McAfee’s point during the E 2.0 2009 Conference that one of the things that made him nervous was the creation of more silos, which he referred to as allowing Walled Gardens to Flourish.

I would love to be a fly in the wall listening to a discussion between Pollard and Zandt (can anyone arrange that?).

I believe we will reach a “walled community” fatigue and push to get rid of some of the walls due to lack of sustainability or participation. However, each of the stories we have contributed to them will make it to the DNA of this new society we are creating.

Zandt’s recollection of the discrimination against African American kids reminded me of the many projects that focus on avoiding this type of damages to our society. One of those is Global Kids which I will submit for evaluation to the Collaborative Society Directory under the education category since it seems to satisfy the directory’s basic requirements.

What is this all about?
The Collaborative Society Directory’s goal is to collect and understand information from different collaborative projects that bring together as participants entities from the three forces that shape our societies: public, private and non-profit. The goal of The Collaborative Society is to explore if such information can provide us with insights of what could be the characteristics that make a society or a community healthy.

“Collaboration Over Time”

There is a chapter in Keith Sawyer’s Group Genius book titled Collaboration Over Time where Sawyer refers to several inventions and discoveries, including Morse’s first working telegraph line and Darwin’s The Origin of the Species to make the point that:

Collaboration makes the mind more creative because working with others gives you new and unexpected concepts and makes it more likely that your mind will engage in the most creative types of conceptual creativity…

Sawyer also uses several cases to illustrate that the most impacting innovations are developed over time, usually involving a good deal of collaboration, and that often:

An outsider with no prior knowledge or expertise hears the same information as other people; suddenly he has a leap of insight that changes the world.”

As we continue to find new ways to use the World Wide Web to connect and work better with each other and to empower ourselves with collective knowledge available at our fingertips, we will continue generating insights that change the world—possible at a pace so fast that only retrospectively could we recognize the impact.

For fifteen years now, the San Francisco-based non-profit Sustainable Conservation (SucCon) has been engaging businesses and private landowners into advancing the stewardship of natural resources using innovative and pragmatic strategies.

The project I would like to submit today to be considered for the Collaborative Society Directory is SusCon’s Brake Pad Partnership project, which brings together industry, government, and community groups to research the potential environmental impacts of brake pad debris shed through normal wear.

My first reaction when I learned about this project last year was “brake pads, really?”

But, last week, while watching a video where the speaker asked the question “why does it take so long for the automobile industry to address problems whose solutions have already been identified decades earlier?  I remembered Sawyer’s point about outsiders sometimes being the ones who bring about the needed changes. That made me dig up all the collaborative projects I had collected around the automobile industry to find out if any was directly or indirectly generating industry changes from the outside.  The Brake Pad Partnership satisfied the first Collaborative Society Directory’s requirement of bringing entities from the government, for-profit and non-profit sectors together to try to address a social challenge, in this case an environmental one.

The project accomplished building a partnership that conducted a 10 year-long research and drafted the SB 346 (Kehoe) bill , one of many initiatives across the country that are seeking changes to take place in different industries based on environmental impact issues.

There are many cases where collaborative partnerships bring about changes to industries from the outside.  However, partnerships of entities from the three sectors to achieve industry changes are hard to find and many of the reasons are obviously economic and political ones.

If you know of any such partnerships, please share them with us at The Collaborative Society.

What is this all about? The Collaborative Society Directory’s goal is to collect and understand information from different collaborative projects that bring together as participants entities from the three forces that shape our societies: public, private and non-profit. The goal of The Collaborative Society is to explore if such information can provide us with insights of what could be the characteristics that make a society or a community healthy.

The point of 2.0 isn’t ROI, or is it?

There is lots of discussion going around about Web 2.0 return on investment.

On the Gov 2.0 side, Citizen’s Tools’ A better question than what’s the business case for Gov2.0…makes a simple, but powerful statement about making the business case “tell us about your agency’s relationships, and the case will become obvious.”  He then goes into actual examples where organizations are attempting to address real needs using technology to tap into the power of the collective.

On the Enterprise 2.0 side, CMSWatch’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference wrap up effectively summarizes what I witnessed during the conference with regards to ROI.

I have been reviewing many collaborative projects to identify potential submissions for inclusion into the Collaborative Society Directory.

At times it seems that some of these projects are creating sub-silos within silos. Some silos seem to result from an effort to make a case for the technology instead of finding actual solution to a real need.

With all the talk around ROI, I found myself asking what is really the point of 2.0?

So, I checked Wikipedia’s Web 2.0 entry

… web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

… Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee who called the term a “piece of jargon”

Can you remember what the point of Web 1.0 was?  Can you easily point out to an organization’s tangible ROI directly tied to its investment on Web 1.0 technology, outside vendors and investors?

I venture to think that if we were to exclusively focus on what is the point of 2.0 ala Citizen’s Tool, we would have a lesser struggle finding where the value is for this project or that goal.  But, then, there are the technology vendors who are searching for sustainability and have to make the case for their “solutions”.

The project I’m submitting today to be considered for the Collaborative Society Directory is one of several I will be submitting in the next weeks that look at a collaborative project with a very clear financial goal.

The Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (WAICU):

The WAICU Collaboration Project is a comprehensive initiative to perform administrative support (back office) functions of Wisconsin’s 20 private nonprofit colleges and universities on a collaborative basis.  The objectives are to save money, to improve the quality of services to students, faculty, and staff, and to serve as a national model for controlling college costs.

…The WAICU Collaboration Project has been identified by the U.S. Congress as the national model for advancing this Congressional objective…

This project combines many aspects of collaboration and ROI:

This project moves beyond incrementalism.  It sends a message to the entire nation that something transformative has taken place.  The project is modeled on the consolidation of back office functions which has taken place in the banking and other industries.  Back office operations include functions such as health care plans, purchasing, and information technology.

I will try to find out if Web 2.0 has had any role in their learned lessons or successes and will search for others where we could learn from actual executions of Web 2.0 in collaborative projects that involve entities from the three segments of government, non-profits and for-profits.