Tag Archives for web2

Socializing flight anxiety


Mount Hood from UAL

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

… and other tales from “Web 2.0 meets the Enterprise”

Last weekend, I flew from San Francisco to Portland (and back again) with Leanne and Lucy for Leanne’s 20th high-school reunion. A pretty normal event (the flight — maybe not the reunion!) for most people. If you know me, you know it was a sheer panic attack for me (the flight — actually the reunion was ok!).

I know I know I know I Know I KNOW: “flying is safer than driving,” “you’ll have less luck crossing Market Street in San Francisco,” “these things can pretty much fly themselves,” and all that bit. I’ve been active on fear-of-flying message boards, gone for hypnosis, worn the rubber band, and done the whole gamut to try to analyze and overcome. In the end, for the present, at least, as little advanced notice as possible coupled with as many pills as I can safely take up until, at, and after the point of embarkation, are what keep me from running off the plane (which I hear they don’t like you to do). That, and trying to stay connected with every single person around me. Oh, and thanks for your hand, Leanne, you can have it back now (if I haven’t mangled it too much).

It was no different on the United flights this last weekend. Sweaty palms the night before turned to downright soggy Moya an hour or before the flight. Pills and my daughter and my wife kept me relatively sane, but of course, the whole thing — both flights — were perfectly beautiful and utterly uneventful (and the flight attendants were supportive) — and the views were nice, as I always find them to be. But one thing was a bit different, and maybe helped me feel a bit more, shall we say, grounded.

The difference this time was that I decided to “crowdsource” my flight anxiety, openly “coming out” about it via Twitter , and asking for help. What should happen but all these people — some I know well, some I don’t know at all — went out of their way to respond with kind words to me: @hambox, @calipidder, @panthea, @finnern, @residentgeek, @jyarmis, and of course @lwaldal. With their generosity, they formed a bridge for me between my isolating anxiety and tolerability.

Some people say that this anxiety reflects a wrestling with a lack of control — but for me, it seems that *being connected* is the key. In the past, I’ve gone up to meet the pilots. I’ve insisted on pre-boarding, and have to identify myself to whatever flight attendant I see when I get on the plane — sometimes they are sympathetic, sometimes they look a little freaked, like they’re wondering if I’m going to be “one of those.” Usually they offer alcohol gratis at one point during the flight. So the connection keeps me going. Perhaps the day I can stay connected online during the flight, it will be all the better.

Whether it’s lack of control or staying connected, it strikes me (of course) that there is a parable for “Web 2.0 and the Enterprise” here. People are saying lately that Web 2.0 for the Enterprise really needs to be about secure internal networks over which we can remain protected, determine permissions, and wield access control. I say the big disruption comes from breaking down, or at least in the attempts to break down, exactly those barriers. Call me crazy (by now you probably are), but once again I find that opening up is the key.

We’ve been playing around with a lot of Enterprise-Internal twitterclones lately and I often find myself confused about whether I should post — or am posting — “publicly” or not. Then there are the several different levels of “public” itself, and “follow” — within your whole company, or a hand-picked group? And the groups themselves: we’ve got people inside our company who don’t want to be talking to other teams much less to the whole company much less publicly. To me as a person, I find these levels of fragmentation confusing.

Of course — there are company-internal and group-internal secrets and plenty of good reason not to be open about everything all the time. And it’s often unwise or illegal to be open — and for good reason — and sometimes it’s just downright hard. But come on: if we’re honest, how much of what we’re closed about is really going to be a competitive secret? Like the good folks at Metaweb say regarding Freebase — is it really a competitive disadvantage if companies share their information about coffees (I think it was Colin Evans who said this at the Web 2.0 Expo)? Some of it is simply about being generous with information — and your person. So time and again I return to just how amazing it is when people *do* cast away these boundaries and access levels (for whatever reason) and truly “come out” in whatever way they want to, without having to think “Oh no — who’s going to see this? I better not say it then.”

That “fear-to-the-wind” moment is what happened to me last weekend, and you can ridicule my anxiety if you want, but I asked for and found a new place for the connection I needed, and furthermore, in the process know a little bit more about those environments in which I thrive best.

Opening up – I don’t care whether it’s to your colleague or to a total stranger or to the passenger next to you – that is the fight-or-flight, and that is the key.

Social media crisis of the day: Bookmarks or Feeds?

roller-coaster bookshelf

roller-coaster bookshelf

I’m trying to organize today’s pile of information, and I seem to be experiencing a little social media crisis. I have a pile of bookmarks I have dragged to my desktop — lots of great “things I want to read — when I get the chance.” It seems to start like this: I start (but by no means finish) reading a cool article such as this — Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined? I’m intrigued by the chart — so of course I go to it on http://www.compete.com/ before I get to the end of the article (cool — cross-the-web analytics!); then of course I go to http://www.goodreads.com/, http://www.librarything.com/, and http://twitter.com/timoreilly/. Somehow or another, though I can’t for the life of me recount how, I also wind up on Nova Spivack’s blog and another blog I don’t even remember that referenced his blog, and I have a haphazard pile of links — AND of course I haven’t even read the first post fully yet — AND the irony is that some of these are about my library of actual physical books — MOST of which, I have not fully read.

I think: I’ll store these — so that I can get to them all later. I start bookmarking some of them in my Google Bookmarks account. I then realize some of these are ongoing chronicles and they instead belong in a reader I’d check regularly — so they should go into Google Reader. Then I run out of time altogether, and I’m back to square one until I get yet another post that’s interesting enough not to finish.

(stomp, stomp, stomp) I go with my big boots to my colleague, Rebecca, who is social-media-savvy. “What’s the difference between a bookmark and a feed anyway?” I mean — I know they’re different, but suddenly I insist that this is my current crisis.

She patiently explains that she mostly uses her feed reader now — and spends a couple of hours every morning digging through her reads and keeping up to date. I stalk away, secretly ashamed. I haven’t managed to keep up to date – either on my feed reader or my bookmarks.

Maybe I just need to realize that “when I get the chance” is never going to happen unless it happens now. Maybe it’s just about letting go — instead of collecting. Or maybe it’s about collecting and NOT letting go but getting better.

Or maybe therein again lies the Twitter rub: thanks to its “minimalism” (thanks again @timoreilly), it’s possible to keep up with the firehose — or is it really just skimming the surface?

For you? Is there a difference? How do YOU cope?

Wie man sich bettet


Secure Tree

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

“It works both ways — you’ve told me that yourself. Our free exchange of information means swifter progress, even if we do give away a few secrets… We’ll show them that Democracy can get to the moon first.”
Arthur C. Clarke — Childhood’s End — 1953

I had an incredible heart-to-heart with a colleague last week. We were talking about openness vs. closedness, specifically in the world of large enterprises.

This colleague has learned some tricky lessons recently, when work that was achieved was not acknowledged where he thought it counted most. Worse, he witnessed what seemed like more powerful factions taking credit for things that other people had directly initiated or even achieved — unacknowledged. He’s now working within an effort to determine how people can get their due credit for their work. Nearly painfully, he recounted how it’s now his impression that when you work in an open atmosphere, you wind up being punished and even exploited. In the future, his colleagues should learn to contemplate hiding their work until the work is quite ready. This was not his initial attitude.

Herein lies the struggle between openness and closedness — the struggle, some would say, between “Web 2.0” and the enterprise itself. Learning to hide, to me, is risky and counter to productivity and collaboration. The risk is that you focus so much more on hiding your work than actually working that innovation is stifled. And by the way — you’re also not very nice sometimes. If colleagues need help and you don’t stand to gain anything from it, you don’t help, which I find risky to the soul. (Maybe what matters is only whether you can live with yourself either way.)

No, I don’t think that organizations, or people, need to be either all open or all closed, nor do I behave exclusively openly – far from it. But I do know that personally, for me, my life has been a heck of a lot more fulfilling when I approach it openly and I don’t have to hide. I’m more productive within an open, cooperative environment in which information flows freely and people (gasp) help each other. This is “the generosity of the Internet” (as I heard Caterina Fake once describe it) and it resonates with me.

And yes, my colleague is right. I understand that within a system of imbalance of power, openness is perceived to lead to exploitation. True, start-ups also have “stealth modes” for a reason, and if you share your work early on, you are at risk for someone else more powerful taking credit for it or even taking it all together. And I’m sure this doesn’t even begin to compare to the world of academia, where credit for ideas is *everything.* So am I naive? Surely. I keep sharing, helping my colleagues and my neighbors and virtual strangers and friends online whenever I can. At least, it’s the world that I need to live in.

Ultimately I have learned I have all the power I need: I have the power to tell my own story, to speak out where and when I see fit, to speak against injustice and praise generosity, to value collaboration and participation, and, if the system no longer supports it, to no longer participate. And I do thank “the generosity of the Internet” for that.