Quarantined Conferences: Claustrophobic Technophiles or Attentive Audiences?

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 13

Loren Feldman. 1938 Media. Audience Conference.

That’s about as much of a summary as you’ll find about the Audience Conference held in New York last Friday. That’s because there were no open laptops allowed during the performances. There was also no Wi-Fi, no video streaming, no tweeting, and no blogging. Something akin to omertà joined the members of the Audience Conference together.

This bond of silence was at the core of the Audience Conference, and it goes against everything that technology and Web 2.0 events normally stand for: openness, transparency, and participation. You would be hard-pressed to find any information anywhere on the web about any of the Audience Conference content. Tweets during the event were generic (“just arrived at the Audience Conference”) and posts after the event were vague (“loved the conference, got to meet Calacanis”). Nobody knows what happened unless you were a genuine member of the audience.

Many other features of the event were also unfamiliar. There were no sponsor booths, banners, and signs all over the place, the speakers had no slideshows, internet connections, or videos to keep us interested, and there were no press or even questions from the audience allowed. No problem.

That’s because the content and experience was so damn good. It was technology. It was performance. It was even culinary. Loren Feldman, our MC for the day, treated the event not as a conference so much as a 20-act play that he directed from start to finish. Inside the historic Hudson Theatre in New York, the members of the audience acted like precisely that - an audience. We watched, listened, and learned. We didn’t talk, text, or tweet. We sat in comfortable chairs facing the stage, not at round tables facing at all different angles to it. We retained the information we heard instead of regurgitating it for our own audiences. We learned that the essence of having an audience is performing for them on a stage - perhaps a digital one - and telling great stories.

What was the Audience Conference? From the website: "Audience is a conference aimed at those who recognize the need to reach engage and influence audiences of all kinds, an investigation into how this is changing, and a look at how technology has in the past and is now, through new media tools and the social web, changing audience participation and interaction." I would love to tell you about what I learned from Jason Calacanis and Rachel Marsden and Rae Hoffman and Andrew Keen and Jeremy Schoemaker and Joe Jaffe and Melanie Notkin and others. But I won’t. Half the philosophy of the Audience Conference was that events are ephemeral experiences that people attending can share with each other - and people not there cannot experience.

In my opinion, casually live-tweeting conferences is overrated because to a large degree it doesn’t serve an external audience very well. When 30 people are tweeting 10 times during each of 10 talks at a conference, and then people re-tweet the tweets (on a delay, naturally), the hashtag stream is a jumbled mess of disjointed quotations that don’t tell a coherent story. I’ve written about why I think tools like Posterous might be better for summarizing thoughts from events; they serve the audience better.

That said, I disagree with the notion that everything needs to be live streamed, live blogged, and live tweeted merely because we can. I recently attended a conference that was about the size of the Audience Conference, and I had a fine experience there so there’s no need to call them out. But strange to me in hindsight was that the audience’s tables were arranged at 90 degrees to the stage, and furthermore that nearly everybody at the tables was staring into a laptop nearly the entire event. Who is that a great experience for?

Now, I am not going to start calling for a ban on Twitter at conferences. I do it sometimes when I think it provides unique value and perspective. I’ve live-blogged some events myself. Furthermore, banning these technologies at an event like the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo would probably result in an all-out revolt. But what Audience Conference taught me was a new perspective on the actual value that all of the technology adds; if you’re planning an event and you’re more worried about power strips and Wi-Fi than content and experience, you’ve got a problem in my opinion.

The comments on Nicole Ferraro’s blog about Audience Conference might lead you to believe that being able to film and tweet from a private, closed door event was some God-given right of Those Who Possess An iPhone. Sorry, it’s not. Loren Feldman took video of the entire event from six different angles (including a small cam pointed at, you guessed it, the audience) and he will decide how and what and when you get to see anything. Why not? It’s his show, not yours. Can you stream video from a live production of Wicked?

The other half of the philosophy of the Audience Conference was that it’s okay that people are better than you at something. And it’s perfectly alright to just sit back and watch them perform. And we watched performances, to be sure - not just tech talks but also personal stories, poetry readings, and musical acts. (Yeah, musical acts.) Not everyone is good enough to be the best financial blogger, or best personality, or best musical act - that’s a dream. Maybe you’re great at something, but can’t you sit back and relax the rest of the time?

I liked this too. With all the talk about how everyone is a citizen journalist and everyone is a content producer and everyone needs a digital media strategy it’s easy to forget that most people are horrible at all of this stuff. And that’s not necessarily because people don’t understand whatever shiny object has come along, it’s because many people are not gifted communicators. New media, at its core, is old-fashioned because the instinct to communicate with other individuals predates man. But some are way better than others at it. And that’s okay.

So are quarantined conferences more likely to result in claustrophobic technophiles or attentive audiences? While some in the tech community clearly think that a lack of engagement is a violation of some imaginary social media code and in an age where even live music isn’t sacred it may seem like heresy to sequester people participating in your event away from their new media toolbox. And maybe sometimes it is. But having experienced the Audience Conference myself, I can also say that in some situations people are not entitled to break out the social media toolbox, because they will genuinely gain a more valuable experience without it. In my opinion, if one event wants to encourage new media use and another discourages it, who are we to argue? We’re only the audience.

What do you think? Were people at the Audience Conference correct to obey Loren Feldman’s requests? Should they deliberately continue “hiding” the content of the event from people that chose not to attend? Should other Web 2.0 events disallow Web 2.0 usage in real time??

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Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows - A Conversation with John Hagel

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 2

Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes. Or, you may download the file.

John Hagel spoke yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit on the panel, Web Squared and the Economy of Work I met with John beforehand and wanted to discuss three “Big Shifts” that have dominated 2009 (1) The move to the real-time web, (2) the move from the information web to the Social Web and (3) the rise of mobile. Since John co-chairs Deloitte’s Center for the Edge I wanted to get his take on each in terms of its impact on larger organizations.

This first video covers the Real-Time Web.

The Fun Theory

by Linda Stone | comments: 4

In one of my favorite reads this last year, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, author Stuart Brown talks about play as “an un-realized power that can transform our social and economic lives.”

As I read, I realized:
- We have replaced play with homework--big mistake
- Play is how our passions find us
- Play is where happiness finds us, and
- Play is where failure isn’t failure and isn’t emotionally charged. Play is all about iteration and we iterate on the emerging questions that arise from within us and that we are driven to understand.

Some of the most accomplished people I’ve met--Dean Kamen, Roderick MacKinnon, Charles Zuker, and Nathan Myhrvold--talk about their work as play. When I ask them how they played as children, they often describe activities that explore the same questions and ideas they are exploring today in their work. At a gathering of molecular scientists, more than a few whispered that, as children, they'd electrocuted bugs--they had to know what would happen. Interaction, reaction. One of them told me that his MBA sister had a chemistry set that looked as if it had never been used, while his was trashed shortly after he opened it. He tried everything.

Recently, VW launched a campaign, The Fun Theory. The videos on the site show people:
- Choosing stairs over an escalator in a subway station when the stairs are turned into piano keys
- Recycling glass when the glass recycle bin is like a slot machine, and
- Clearing litter when a trash can offers sound effects as trash is pitched in.

The Fun Theory Award competition is accepting entries until November 15. Short window, competition opened October 1. Radar readers are brainy and creative. A winning combination!

Four short links: 17 June 2009

Word Mining, Open Ideas, Power Meter BotNet, and Realtime Web Traffic Tracking

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. NY Times Mines Its Data To Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse -- the feature that lets you highlight a word on a NY Times web page and get more information about it is something that irritates me. I'm fascinated by the analysis of their data: boggling that sumptuary is less perplexing than solipsistic. Louche (#3 on the list) has been my favourite word for two years, by the way, since I heard Dylan Moran toss it out in that uniquely facile way the Irish have with words. I think Irish citizens get this incredible competence with the English language for free, along with staggering house prices and beer you can walk on.
2. Open Ideas -- Alex Payne's blog of Concepts in the public domain, awaiting collaboration and appropriation.
3. Buggy 'smart meters' open door to power-grid botnet (The Register) -- Paul Graham said that we've found what we get when we cross a television with a computer: a computer. Similarly, intelligent power meters are computers, computers that apparently haven't been well-secured. To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer's smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.
4. Chartbeat -- the sexiest web analytics ever. It gives realtime count of users, whether they're reading or writing (based on whether focus is in a form element), where they're from, mentions on Twitter, and more and more and more. This is a different form of analytics than Google Analytics, which tells you trends and historical access. Love this for the pure sex appeal of a heads-up dashboard that can tell you exactly how many people are on your site and exactly what they're doing. (via Artur)

Four short links: 10 June 2009

App Wall, Negroponte Switch, Data Exploration, Inadequate Innovation

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Apple's Cool Matrix-Style App Wall (TechCrunch) -- a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate. An App Store version of Google's search globe. Information visualization makes activities meaningful, beautiful, and useful, but not necessarily all at the same time. (via dubdotdash on Twitter)
2. The New Negroponte Switch -- "Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things". Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the "Web Meets World" change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.
3. Odesi -- web-based data exploration, extraction, and analysis tool. (via scilib on Twitter)
4. The Failed Promise of Innovation (Business Week) -- I have a post building up inside me about how irritatingly of the mark this article is. Until that post erupts, however, you'll have to just read it yourself and form your own view of its flaws. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

The Myth of Macroinnovation

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 13

An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we're entering a Golden Age of Macroinnovation is bunkum, I'm happy to report.

Scale matters, scale has always mattered, but scaling is not innovating. It's true that there are many opportunities for businesses and governments to do big things. That's always true—all my friends who worked at Yahoo! and Microsoft said one of the attractions was the ability to write code that would be used by hundreds of millions of people. However, the article basically says, "large institutions are tackling large problems." That's wonderful news, much better than large institutions ignoring large problems, but has nothing to do with innovation.

Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps scaling is a form of innovation. Innovation is characterised by disruption and the unknown. Think of those governments and large corporations and ask yourself: are these the birthplaces of radical thinking, new ways of getting things done, and risk-taking leaps into the unknown? Of course not. Governments are the most risk-averse institutions in the world, more so than medicine where lives hang in the balance—doctors at least listen to evidence, whereas the definition of bureaucracy is "we follow the rules regardless of reality". Governments exist to preserve the status quo that elected them, not disrupt it.

Don't go hoping for a change in government's risk aversion any time soon. Every penny is spent knowing that to fail means to be vilified for "squandering public money". Doing something new risks failure. Like a puppy that has been harshly house-broken, Government associates failure with pain and so responds with fear, hostility, and concealment. With that mindset you can never learn from failure, and so unless you luckily get it right first time you'll find your Government road to delivering something new to be harsh, difficult, and largely untrodden.

Do you think things are different now? Consider Obama's billions on health record rollout. KP have a model EHR system, "KP HealthConnect". It cost $4B and took five years to buy and roll it out. This is KP's second go at it: in 2002 they wrote off $770M they'd spent with IBM trying to build their own EHR system. Do you think that the Obama Administration will get a second chance if his first attempt at EHRs loses $770M?

Big businesses aren't much different: a large company is a small Government that has more flexibility on HR. The profit focus of a business is a help and a hindrance as Innovator's Dilemma so clearly showed. The NY Times piece quotes Clayton Christensen saying, "The good news is that, once they recognize the benefits of disruptive thinking, the big companies have all the resources necessary to induce change.”

My experience with large companies and governments shows me that it is not a simple or trivial matter to recognize the benefits or marshal the resources. A common failure mode is where the leadership say they want disruption and innovation, the grass roots want it, but the middle management tiers aren't incentivised to deliver it because their bonuses are tied to metrics on existing product lines. Disruption eats into existing businesses. "Maximizing Shareholder Value" is a wonderful focusing device but, without an explicit timeframe for that value, innovation risks shareholder lawsuits for sabotaging profitability.

In his delicious.com comment on the NY Times piece, Michal Migurski observed, "New New Deal is at heart a massive, all-fronts realignment—where's the role for the small and the nimble in this universe?". It is premature to declare Mission Accomplished for reinvention of Government (see the Government 1.5 meme). At its heart, this is an attempt to get Government to use the Web 2.0 tools we built in the last decade ... tools that were largely the product of one or two people. I don't see bureaucrats using decade-old tools as an "innovation" that the small and nimble have to worry about.

I love that governments, NGOs, businesses, and citizens are going to be tackling large and meaningful problems with the aid of the tools and techniques developed by researchers, entrepreneurs, and hackers around the world. But to mistake using those techniques for inventing them is to ignore that great lesson of Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 3

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas.
In this interview Clay talks about

• The effects of low cost coordination and group action.
• Where to find the next layer of value when many professions are being disrupted by the Internet
• The necessary role of low cost experimentation in finding new business models

A big thanks to the FASTForward Blog team for hosting me there.

Work On Stuff That Matters: Video Interview with Tim O'Reilly

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 9

Over the past few months I have been interviewing various people that are "on our Radar" so to speak. It recently occurred to me that we had never done a video with Tim. So last week Kirk Walter (bless him!) grabbed his camera and Tim and I took a walk behind the O'Reilly offices in Sebastopol. We had a wide-ranging discussion (from Government to Cloud Computing) but started off with the theme that ran through many of Tim's talks last year; "Work on Stuff that Matters" These videos are a companion piece to Tim's recent blog post, of the same name.

We will be releasing the other segments over the next few weeks. They will also live on at www.thefutureatwork.com (where the video series has a home).

Part One:

Part Two:

Seeing New Possibilities in Existing Technologies: An Interview with April Allderdice of MicroEnergy Credits

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 17

This interview is with April Allderdice, CEO and cofounder of MicroEnergy Credits. MicroEnergy Credits has developed a mechanism using microfinance institutions and GPS cell phones to allow carbon credits to reach small households in the developing world. Until now the relatively high transaction costs involved in set up and verification of a carbon trade has made the market available only to large companies.

During our interview I was reminded of another fantastic idea with similar characteristics. Simon Berry, CEO of ruralnet UK, proposes “that Coca-Cola use their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute oral rehydration salts. Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as 'the life saving' compartment.” (join the Facebook group here to pressure Coca Cola) Once you plug into Coca Cola’s already-existing distribution channels the cost of delivering small amounts of vital medicines to remote parts of the world drops precipitously.

The genius of both of these ideas is that they are using something “old” to do something very new.

If you know any other examples of innovations that use existing technology to get things done - please put them in the comments.

A Critical Choice Regarding Innovation

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 28

This morning, via twitter, I came across two contrasting blog posts, one from JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth), and one from Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars), that seemed to me to sum up the very essence of the problem I've been calling out in my "work on stuff that matters" talks.

In Faster Horses in the Age of Co-Creation, JP argues that Henry Ford's maxim, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses’ “, is wrong, that the essence of innovation today is giving the customer what he or she wants:

That customer knows that part of what she wants is to be able to figure out what she wants. She is both consumer and producer, a partner in the process of co-creating value. The senior partner in the process of co-creating value.

So today, if she asks for faster horses, we don’t build her a car. We need to find out whether she meant a roan or a piebald or a chestnut or a bay. When she tries the piebald out and decides she wanted the roan, that’s what she gets. Our job is to make it easier for her to buy or rent or lease the horse, to make it safer for her, to make it more convenient for her in terms of where the horse is to be picked up and dropped. To make sure the horse is well, that the riding equipment is securely and safely fastened.

Now, to be sure, JP is making a valid point, namely that in consumer marketing, we need to listen to and empower the customers, not try to ram products down their throat.

But it's unfortunate that JP used the Henry Ford story to make his point, because in so doing he set up a straw man that ignored what Ford was really saying: that breakthrough innovations don't come from market research, even from "web 2.0" market research via deep customer engagement. They come from the singular vision of an inventor pursuing his or her own passion, cutting a Gordian knot that others simply accept as "the way things are."

The Wright brothers would never have gotten to the airplane by listening to customers; Henry Ford would never have sought to put an automobile in every household; Tim Berners-Lee would never have gotten to the World Wide Web; Jimmy Wales wouldn't have started Wikipedia; and Jack Dorsey wouldn't have started twitter, where I became part of this particular conversation.

That's why Martin's post is so poignant, and so important. Where is the Future We Were Promised? he asks:

Five years into the 20th century, Einstein was living his Annus Mirabilis. Where is our patent office today? Who is our Einstein? Are we the first generation in many years incapable of true innovation? And let’s not just talk about things as complicated as the theory of relativity. I remember complaining about the drill when I was young, and my dentist telling me that when I was grown up he would have to find another job because we would have a vaccine against cavities. Where is this vaccine against cavities? Where are the cures for catarrh and AIDS? Where is that future devoid of poverty in which robots were going to do everything for people and we were going to dedicate ourselves to art and culture?

Unfortunately, when I look around me today, during the end of 2008, I see humanity leading an unsustainable life based on technology that should already be obsolete. I believe that it is time for us to engage in some serious self-criticism and start to invest in science again, because the list of unsolved problems grows longer every day. If we continue on like this, not only are we not going to have a future, but we are going to end up without a present.

Like JP Rangaswami, Martin overstates the case a bit. I believe that there is some truly amazing innovation happening on the net, in alternative energy, and in life sciences, and that we are going to wake up one day and be blown away by the future we're creating. And oddly enough, many of those innovations will come from harnessing the collective intelligence of all those people that JP says we should be listening to. But it won't just be to give them what they want; it will be to put them to work in new ways, getting them to contribute to an inventor's vision, not just to customize it for their better enjoyment. Breakthroughs in speech recognition and automatic translation, for example, are driven by the data we all contribute; similar effects will soon be felt in personalized medicine, robotics, and many other areas.

But I also believe that the choice is stark: just give people want they want, leading us deeper into a consumer culture whose very financial fabric is wearing thin, or seek out big, hard problems that other people take for granted as unsolvable, and remake the world.

In a talk I attended many years ago, Joseph Campbell said that the Knights of the Round Table were the archetypal myth of Western civilization, the idea that each of us, alone, must go off into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, populated by monsters, on a quest to make the world a better place.

DisasterTech: "Decisions for Heroes"

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

One of the most interesting DisasterTech projects I've been following is "Decisions for Heroes" led by developer and Irish Coast Guard volunteer Robin Blandford.

Decisions is like Basecamp for volunteer Search & Rescue teams. The focus is on providing "just enough" process to compliment the real-world workflow of a rescue team, without unnecessary complexity. One of Robin's design goals is that:

User requirements are nil. Nobody likes reading manuals - if we have to write one, we've gotten too complicated.

This is the winning approach for building systems that "serve those that serve others", and is echoed by InSTEDD's design philosophy and the Sahana disaster management system.

Teams begin by entering their responses to incidents and training exercises. They then tag them with things like the weather conditions, the tools and skills required, and who from the team was deployed.

As a team's incident database grows this information can be used to show heatmaps, and provide powerful insight on the locations, weather conditions, and times of year that various incidents occur. Over time this kind of data could be analyzed in aggregate across multiple teams and regions and create an incredibly powerful resource for Emergency Managers. This is very similar to what Wesabe does for consumers with financial transaction data today (disclosure: OATV investment).

Rescue team members enter training dates and levels. The system tracks certification expiration dates and prompts team members & leaders to plan classes and remain current. This is a huge issue for volunteers who have to manage professional-level training requirements with the demands of a regular career.

As more incidents are entered into the system, it compares the skills required for each of the rescues with the team training exercises. This allows teams to identify areas to focus, train, and develop new skills.

Sprint blocking Cogent network traffic...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 3

It appears that Sprint has stopped routing traffic (called "depeering") from Cogent as a result of some sort of legal dispute. Sprint customers cannot reach Cogent customers, and vice versa. The effect is similar to what would happen if Sprint were to block voice phonecalls to AT&T customers.

Here's a graph that shows the outage, courtesy of Keynote :

Rich Miller at DataCenterKnowledge has a great summary of the issues behind the incident, which has happened with Cogent before. Rich says:

At the heart of it, peering disputes are really loud business negotiations, and angry customers can be used as leverage by either side. This one will end as they always do, with one side agreeing to pay up or manage their traffic differently.

I think this is particularly Radar-worthy because it provides an example of the complex issues around Net Neutrality . In this case customers are harmed and most (especially Sprint wireless customers) will have no immediate recourse.

(continue reading)

BarCampBank is spreading

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 1

When Ben Black and I organized the first BarCampBank in North America last year, we hoped that it would spread. According to William Azaroff's post on NetBanker, the movement is there and growing:

What's all this about BarCampBanks? From a North American premiere in Seattle almost a year ago, we've witnessed two more in the last few months, and eight more are either scheduled, or in the planning process.

Well, maybe not exactly “planned.” BarCampBanks emerge more than they are planned.

[...]It started as a technology summit, an un-conference where developers and technology geeks could share exploits, connect, and find like-minded companions to extol the virtue of open-source and emerging technologies over pizza and wine.

And then someone decided that this forum would be a perfect place to talk about banking and finance. Weird. And yet it works.

The next event will be BarCampBankDallas on June 21-22nd at the American Bank of Texas Building in Frisco, Texas. William has details on the other events this year on his blog, and a current list can always be found on the main BarCampBank wiki.

DisasterTech from Where2.0

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

I was honored to speak with Mikel Maron at Where2.0 about innovation in Disaster Technology, a topic that is extremely important to me. Here is the video:

This talk covers the ongoing efforts of: World Shelters, the UN Joint Logistics Centre, Humanitarian.info, InSTEDD, and Humanlink.

You can read about the development of SMS GeoChat, the Sahana effort for Burma/Myanmar (Radar post), and the Mesh4x KML sync engine on Eduardo Jezierski's blog and on Jon Thompson's Aid Worker Daily.