“Have you organized a diverse and distributed group of people and moved them to action?”

Code for America asked me a few questions. I thought I’d blog them.

What’s your experience working in or with government?

• My first public sector job was in my junior high school’s stationery store.
• I had a high school internship with the State of California’s Wilmington oil field engineering team.
• I slung books for the Long Beach public library.
• I directed traffic for the City of Long Beach’s convention center.
• I issued and maintained gear in the physics lab at Cal State Long Beach.
• I managed a team for the Naval Supply System Center in Oakland as a GS-8 civilian operations research analyst, assuring fissile material and toilet paper continued to flow to the fleet through new logistics systems. At 19.
• I was a business development analyst for Bechtel National, successfully finding, researching and drafting responses for billion dollar chemical and civil engineering project requests-for-proposal including the removal of nuclear waste from Soviet-era Siberian missile silos.

Can you communicate?

I’ve been a communicator and storyteller.

• Sang in my high school musical, competed on the school speech team, published poetry.
• First civic op-ed published in a major newspaper as a college freshman.
• Designed the U.S. Navy’s community relations program for a major base closing while still in school.
• Sold computers, managed sales people, developed curriculum for b2b salespeople (in case you are interested in persuasive communication).
• Started blogging in 1998 and was one of the metabloggers who defined social media through the mid-2000s.
• I’ve spoken at academic and tech industry conferences.
• Writer and Managing Editor of a Skype-focused group blog from 2005-2011.
• Slideshare featured several of my presentations on their front page.
• Quora named me a Top Writer for 2013 and 2014 and published my work in Forbes.

Can you organize?

I’ve been an advocate for privacy and personal data rights.

• I was a director of the DataPortability Project where we defined the basic right to take your data with you and persuaded some of the largest Internet firms (Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others) as a core practice.

• I was a director for the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium where we helped small firms and NGOs build personal control over personal data into their apps and business models through collaboration, publishing, and strategy services.
• I served on Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center citizen committee with colleagues from the ACLU, EFF and Oakland Privacy Working Group, for 18 months, designing a privacy architecture civic technology.

How about Code for America brigade life?

I’ve been a member of the OpenOakland brigade for years. Along the way:

• I’ve coached teams and been a member of several
• I’m a member of the Executive Team, co-leading the Marketing Director role
• I ended a thriving project and partnership when it didn’t meet our values
• I led CityCamp sessions
• I co-wrote the job descriptions for the OpenOakland leadership team
• I instituted many of our core practices including:
  • a rework of our hack night process,
  • a focus on optimizing the volunteer experience,
  • more use of email and social media to engage our publics,
  • project “stand up” status blogging, and
  • proposed product portfolio metrics and annual strategic objectives.

I co-created OpenCalifornia (now the California Civic Laboratory). CCL’s an alliance of local brigades to work on common applications and problems, especially those where we have more impact together. We’re pioneering ways for brigades to collaborate remotely between hack nights and to blend distance and in-person work. Our first product, the multicity Open Disclosure California, goes live this fall.

Have you organized a diverse and/or distributed group of people and moved them to action?

The long story: My East Bay Kerry organizing experience.

What we did:

• 18 months before the 2004 presidential election, ten of us met in a Berkeley café to organize East Bay Kerry. With no money, no official sanction, and a simple organization design and free online tools, we grew (between 30-35% each month) to 5000 full time volunteers from Alameda and Contra Costa counties for the month before election day. That’s more than 3.7 million person hours over the campaign (1 million person-hours in that last month).
• We made one million phone calls to swing states.
• We set up professional service bureaus of lawyers, geeks, media relations pros, technologists, and creatives supporting field offices in swing states.
• We hosted debates and stump speeches. We trained and operated a speakers bureau.
• Despite not being a recognized “political club,” we elected many delegates to the national convention.
• We sent swarms of people to get out the vote in Reno and in other swing territories.
• We registered and turned out more Democratic voters in our two counties than in the history of California and the party.

How? Some of our hacks:

• We pioneered using the then-new Meetup.com to recruit and organize events each week.
• We designed an intake experience (often in cafés) where people told their stories of why they wanted change in America, connecting them to each other and reaffirming their sense of purpose. We:
  • Oriented them to the organization so they had a sense of how they fit in
  • Put everyone to work right away so they’d feel a sense of accomplishment and proof that this was a way to get things done
  • Connected them with a team so they belonged and would have people to connect with as the campaign continued.
• When teams got too big, they split up, keeping each team personal and nimble.
• We adopted medicine’s “watch one / do one / teach one” practice for moving people rapidly from newbies to leadership.
• We used blogs, mailing lists, and drupal sites to communicate.
• We tried to be gracious to volunteers for other candidates, inviting them to meet with us before and after the primary election, successfully bringing other cadres and communities into ours without quashing their spirit and ambition.

We learned:

• The Edge. Decentralized authority can work at scale.
• Faith. Commonality of purpose is a prerequisite. It lets volunteers sacrifice their time and egos to work together.
• Every volunteer matters. The volunteer is “the customer.”  Design everything so it gives the volunteer satisfaction and enjoyment and they’ll come back for more and bring their friends.
• Hide the Administrivia. Some volunteers thrive on admin work; sequester it so everyone else can enjoy their work. This is a special case of…
• Tailor work to the person. Exploit their skills, talents, and enthusiasms. This means intake is often about helping them find where they can be of service.
• Steal from work culture. We helped our volunteers solve our campaign problems using what they brought with them and the ways they already knew to get things done.
• Scale needs a managed social graph. We limited cross-talk so teams could focus. We set up “ambassadors” to manage communication between our organization and the many others.
• Not every volunteer matters. We walked away from people without Internet access and mobile phones: our connective glue. We walked away from people who wanted to backseat debate public policy instead of trying to help our candidate win the election.
• Seek Forgiveness. Bold action affirms every volunteer’s power to initiate. New teams, new projects, new approaches were tried at the edge. Successes were spread within the organization and to others.
• Keep processes and communication channels simple. Every time we tried something complex, it broke down.
• Onboarding. Intake was our strongest tool. It was a rite of passage. It modeled their next steps. It showed how to be a friendly, warm, inclusive leader. It introduced them to new friends and comrades. It turned them from potential volunteers into productive contributors and future evangelists.

I’m ready for something even more challenging.

What is the future of email as far as business communication is concerned?

Answer by Phil Wolff:

Let's start from what computing and communications in general will be like in 20 or 30 years. I assume they'll be:

• more pervasive (seamless connectivity, internet of things, etc.),
• more wearable or built-in (contacts, cochlear implants, dermal displays, etc.),
• and we'll have new services to help us bring that universe from overwhelm to whelm.

One more assumption: Natural Language Processing will completely blur the lines between spoken and written language, and even which language (Hindi,  Pirate, American Sign Language) you use. So you'll be able to choose how you want to communicate.

So, in that hypothetical future, email is part and parcel of the whole mix of conversational media. Conversational media have several basic events:

• discovery,
• conversation initiation,
• consumption (reading, listening, watching, feeling, smelling, haptic senses), and
• expression (speaking, drawing, singing, writing, gesturing, etc.).

Discovery. How do you find who to talk to? In the 2010s, work-persona directories (LinkedIn (website)) and enterprise discovery services help find the person or group of people to contact for a given purpose. Since we'll be awash in personal data long before 2040, we'll have more than "white pages", "yellow pages", or "social networks" to find people. People Match systems, serendipity services, topic networks, reputation networks like Connect.me, tribal event networks like Meetup (company), and location services will help you discover the right person to work with or talk to at the right time.

Initiation. In thirty years your software agent/proxy/broker will field offers of new conversation before they reach you. Think spam filter meets alerting service meets professional assistant. Services will compete on how well they interact with you, how accurately their filters reflect your preferences for interruption and notification, and how well they negotiate a mutually agreeable blend of time and media. These "inboxes" will have a wealth of data to use to calculate whether, when, and how to notify you or to start a conversation: social proximity (you're both friends of your ex-husband), prior interactions with you and others, affiliations (works for x, belong to y) and endorsements (your mentor says you should take this call), verification of identity, commercial offers (will pay 元10 for nine minutes in the next hour or a Starbucks cup of coffee), alternative ways to spend your time (you're in line for a concert), your interest in the subject, whether you're on company/personal/family time, etc. In 2013, Facebook decides which updates of thousands from those you trust fit into the fewer than 100 updates the average person reads in a day; in 2040 you'll have more control of what shows up in your inbox.

[Side bet: Microsoft or Google will be better than you at choosing which 'inbox' items are the most interesting to you by 2020 based on user satisfaction tests.]

Consumption. One of the things people like about Skype is it's easy to throttle up and down a ladder of intimacy. At the low end are slow-changing mood messages and presence indicators. IM lets you throttle up from asynchronous messaging to live back-and-forth chats. When that's not enough you can add voice. And when you need to see faces and body language, you move up to video. In thirty years we'll have more UI presentation methods to choose from like holographic avatars or Rapid serial visual presentation or having your tweets sung to you in the style of Taylor Swift. You'll have new metaphors and design surfaces for consuming asynchronous conversation. And we'll find it smooth to rapidly switch among any media and any visualization paradigm.

Expression. Thirty years' ago in the early 1980s we didn't have Internet, smartphones, electric cars, free video conferencing, private spacecraft or nanotechnology. We're now in the 1980s of 2040, the subject of costume dramas and kids ironically 3D Printing our fashions. By 2040 we should have at least a few more billion people connected to cyberspace, some very intimately. The range of available connectivity, devices, and media will continue to diverge with haves and have-nots.

When talking human-to-human you'll be able to toss original content – data from what you say or perform – into the conversation flow. The channel should take care of converting it from how you choose to express yourself (longhand, typing, talking, foxtrot) into forms preferred or needed by the other other person; consider this automation of the interpreter relay services provided for the visually impaired or the deaf on phones today.

Your channel will let you play "live streaming producer" on your part of the conversation, feeding media objects into the conversation as you like. You'll even be able to merge and fork live threads/streams (think git for live conferences).

You'll also have some control or influence about other attributes of your conversation. Who has the right to share the record of this conversation? How much? With whom? Can records of this conversation be destroyed in real time the way some email services delete email after expiry? Can we have this conversation permanently archived in public? How much anonymity or pseudonymity will you accept?

Toasters and insulin pumps. But email is not solely the province of people. We've been hooking up machines to email for decades. By 2040 we'll have trillions of sensors and devices engaging in conversation with people and each other. Notifications from our bodies (Quantified Self), our things, and our places will be in our Personal Clouds. Our inboxen will test Inquiries from stranger devices just like inquiries from strange people: Is this notification from the bus you're riding worth your attention now? If so, what's the best context and form for engaging with it given you're in a space where it's impolite to talk and you're using your hands to hang on for dear life? Some conversations just don't need words, after all. You may just need to see a chart or hear a message; you may just need to grunt or wave in response. Remember to buy a premium personality for your pacemaker: for an extra two percent, the Bollywood star of your choice will be its living avatar.

Personal vs. Work. Do you remember when you had separate email accounts for each job, for your personal life, from your school, and for volunteer gig? Umpteen mailboxes? Whilst it keeps your peas from touching your potatoes and your boss from talking with your mistress, the actual act of juggling mutliple accounts is painful. You'll have one queue, one spew of inbound offers to talk from every part of your life. You may offer different faces/handles/personas for each context the way you hand out personal and business email addresses now, but your single, seemingly self-aware "inbox" will let you wear the appropriate mask and project the appropriate identity for each. New legal constructs, like The Limited Liability Persona, will support this.

Work vs. Talk. You asked specifically about email for business. Email and other electronic media are part of how labor markets work today and how workers get things done together. So let's talk about the Future of Work for a moment. Thirty years from now, on the other side of wars, famines, depressions, disruptions, and alien invasions, many elements of work will be the same: many of us will rent our time to people or organizations that will pay us. But expect much of that work, to be done with, if not through, your communication channels. There will be no need to have separate toolkits for conversation vs. metawork (work about work, like scheduling, to-do lists, project management, budgeting, etc.) vs. collaboration. Context providers will let you "skin" your full-body-browser to add the features that blend work, metawork and conversation together. Think of it as Bring Your Own Inbox/Phone/Reality. So whether you're sortieing with your squad for work, tweaking your bots for fun, or negotiating a contract for your family, you'll use the same conversational media.

Somewhere in 2040, email as we know it in 2012 will continue to flow. But we'll be thinking about "email" then the way we think about teletype consoles and punch cards now: antiques that paved the way.

What is the future of email as far as business communication is concerned?

Ten Ways ‘Customer’ is the wrong frame for #CustomerCommons

Some founders of the Customer Commons have an emotional investment in the use of the word “Customer.” I believe we can do better.

Here’s why we should try.

Customer is the wrong frame, invoking the wrong preconceptions.

‘Customer’ is akin to ‘consumer’: weak, disadvantaged, requiring protection. The person behind the counter has power, the customer lines up with all the other customers waiting their turn. We should invoke strength and power. ‘Warrior Commons’ might be overstepping but that’s the right direction.

A ‘Customer’ is merely a node in a network; the real juice is in the connections among the nodes (relationships) and the topology of the network (clusters, intermediaries, proximity, flexibility). Our true focus has been on how to help people use the network to their advantage. If this were television, ‘customer’ is like a passive ‘viewer’ in the creative YouTube and Ustream era.

‘Customers’ can only buy/not-buy. We’re creating a world where people’s relationships give them more power and more active choices like collective action, bargaining, trading non-cash behavior for non-cash benefits.

 

‘Customer’ limits relationships to the lifespan of commerce. Our relationships are multilayered, longer.

‘Customer’ says commerce, cash, and money is the measure of a relationship. That is only true sometimes. For example…

• ‘Customer’ ignores Person-to-Person relationships. Children aren’t their parent’s customers.
• ‘Customer’ misses government-citizen relationships. Citizens aren’t customers.
• ‘Customer’ leaves out student-teacher-school relationships. Students aren’t customers. Employees aren’t customers.
• I don’t want to use tools built for ‘Customer’ to flirt. I’m a man, not a wallet.
• ‘Customer’ excludes NGOs. I am not my congregation’s customer.

Finally, this is not how I want to identify with our project.

‘Customer’ is the slave name given to people by marketers and the people who pay them.

I reject it.

So what is the path forward?

The relationship.

The vector, not the node. Interpersonal relationships and person-to-institution relationships, perhaps even institution-to-institution relationships (Persona LLC, anyone?).

Relationship Commons.

Connection Commons.

Interaction Commons.

Engagement Commons.

Just focus on the ties connecting people and we should be great.

My two cents.

Transformers on Immigration Reform [spoilers]

Transformers is a great summer action flick. I saw it Monday night at a sold out 11pm showing. Its US immigration policy subtext is not so subtle. [spoilers]

— Part 1 – The Evil Alien Invasion —

Aliens show up.

No passport. No visa. No border patrol. Just falling from the sky. 

Bad aliens that kill people, attacking American soldiers, breaching security. They are here to destroy our lives.

They look strange. They hide among us, online and off, often in plain site. Walking down the road, is that a car or a killer? A Nokia N93 or a fire spitting monster?

Easy movie making: a few minutes of slithering, exploding violence set up the first wave of aliens as bad guys. Prime the xenophobic pump.

— Part 2 – The Nice Aliens —

Good aliens show up. Only a handful.

You get to know them as people, as individuals. They wear bright colors, apologize for stepping on the grass, exercise restraint, crack jokes. Some have trouble speaking English but connect through pop culture. They wear all-American GM trademarks.

They help our hero get the girl.

And these good aliens serve with the U.S. Army, earning the right to stay when the war is over.

Harder movie making: at least half the film spent defining characters, relationships, showing the humanity behind alien masks.

— Part 3 – Humans Respond —

At first all aliens look alike, are treated as bad guys. We see good guys captured, threatened, held without warrant, and tortured.

Only when humans personally intervene, risking their freedom for alien friends, are the good aliens freed to fight the bad aliens.

Even then, the good aliens are forced to hide their true natures, to stay in American costume, to assimilate.

— Part 4 – Themes —

Explicit Good fighting Explicit Evil. (The movie’s marketing emphasis.)

Appearances can be deceiving.

Xenophobia is easy. Compassion is difficult.

Resolving the tension between who we really are and how we portray ourselves is worthwhile.

You need a car to win a girl’s heart.  

— This Transformer Blog Post Sponsored By —

Good guy product placement: eBay, GM cars (Chevy, Camaro, Pontiac Solstice, Shelby GT), Motorola, The Strokes, My Little Pony, Lockheed (F-22, F-117 stealth fighter, C-130 gunship), Xbox-360, Sirius radio, Pepsi, Apple computers and cinema displays, Burger King, Panasonic, Furby, Hostess Ding Dongs. 

Bad guy product placement: eBay, Nokia, F-22, Mountain Dew soda, Saleen cop car (“To punish and enslave”).

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