Yesterday I had the privilege to attend an informative talk about effective communication by my friend and colleague Kevin Leahy, aka Knowledge Advocate. One point among many in Kevin’s talk: the content of a communication doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. Kevin, an attorney, said that post-trial conversations with jurors finds that they often recall little about what was said, but much about how they felt about witnesses, based quite a bit on their perception of body language. Coincidentally this morning I find an article about research, conducted by MIT political scientists, that shows how the appearances of politicians strongly influence voters, that people around the world have similar ideas about what a good politician looks like. [Link to the paper "Looking Like a Winner"  (pdf)] 

Sounds like you can take this to the bank: how you LOOK is important, and your BODY LANGUAGE is also important. What you think and what you say? Not such a big deal.

Another point, reading between the lines of the MIT Study: you’re better off if how you look is congruent with people’s perception of your role – there are definite stereotypes. If you don’t look like a politician but you have political ambitions, it’s better to work behind the scenes. (I think politicians already know this).

I’ve been thinking a lot about stewardship as the requisite basis for action in an era of greed and confusion. Stewardship can be defined several ways, but the general sense I get is that it means taking responsibility for something that you don’t “own.” Ownership also needs definition for the sake of clarity, and as a Buddhist I’ve cultivated some depth around the concept of “I” or “self” and the concept of “own.” If the self is an illusion, then ownership is part of that illusion.

But we have to live in the world, and accept consensual hallucinations like the concept of “self.” I can also think of “I” as a bounded awareness, and stewardship as taking responsibility for something beyond that boundary.

The case that came up most recently for me was that of technology stewardship, which I just spent two weeks discussing on the WELL with Nancy White and John D. Smith, authors of Digital Habitats; stewarding technology for communities. We were talking about how people with a community of practice who have relative clue about technology take responsibility for assessing, selecting, and sustaining technology platforms for the community to use, primarily for communication and collaboration. Communities are complex, technology can be complex as well, so there’s much to be discussed in this context. Check out the discussion and the book if you’re interested, but I’m more interested in how the act of stewardship works, especially the attitude behind it.

While stewardship may or may not be through some role that is compensated, it should be inherently unselfish. To effectively take responsibility for something beyond yourself, you have to be prepared to put your “self” aside and think in terms of the best interests relevant to the stewardship role. In technology stewardship for a community, you’re selecting the technology that best serves the interests and capabilities of the community, not necessarily the technologies you would prefer or be most comfortable with.

We also talk about stewardship in the context of The Austin Equation, where I’m involved as a resource on community development, especially online. For that project, a group of volunteers have been defining and mapping scenes local to Austin, with the idea that they will take a stewardship role with the scenes they’ve selected, i.e. help build coherence and effectiveness into a community where the only glue, at the beginning, may be affinity and marginal awareness. How do you step into a community, in a role that the community itself didn’t define or originate, and provide effective stewardship? That’s an issue I keep considering – somehow you have to engage the community and convey the value of your stewardship.

These are some initial thoughts about stewardship; I’d like to have a larger conversation, especially about how to inspire an attitude of stewardship more broadly so that people are generally more focused on helping than “getting.”

May 4, 2010 – As part of the Texas Monthly Talks series, Evan Smith interviewed Arianna Huffington, in town to speak at a benefit for the Texas Freedom Network. Huffington’s flight arrived late, so the talk was abbreviated. Much of the discussion was about the current state of journalism and Huffington Post’s (HuffPo’s) success as new media hybrid journalism – a combination of user-generated and professional content.

Huffington led with the observation that people want contgent, but they also want engagement – they want “to be part of the story of our time.” That’s the essence of participatory journalism. She said that self-experssion has become the new entertainment. Evan: “It all counts.”

Huffington Post has been successful, has a readership apporaching that of the New York Times, and leaving other major online publishing venues in the dust. She says part of the secret of HuffPo’s success is that “we’re not just talking to people who agree with us.”

HuffPo has a thriving community and “human moderators” that maintain the civility of the conversations – “we don’t want it to be the Glenn Beck Show.” When Rick Perry shot the coyote and it was reported at HuffPo, there was an immediate surge of interst – 1,000 comments within a day. In addition to moderators, the Post’s readers police the site – they wouldn’t be able to manage the conversations without help from the community.

Evan: “What happened to journalism?” Why is for-profit legacy journalism failing? Have they lost sight of their mission, or is it that new media approaches are more compelling. “Are they down, or are you up?”

Huffington responds that they just didn’t get it. When HuffPo launched, legacy media were still skeptical of new approaches (participatory media/social media), but now they’re moving online, moving toward a hybrid model. Pay walls haven’t worked – worked for Wall Street Journal initially, but their subscriptions are down. In this context, she mentioned that traditional tenets of journalism should prevail – meaning that fundamental journalistic ethics and standards will necessarily be maintained in new media. [I've been thinking about this, and want to be involved in training news bloggers and citizen journalists. Matt Glazer of Burnt Orange Report and I have been instigating a conference for this purpose.]

Digital natives consume all their news online. We can’t go back to old ways of doing journalism – can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The Internet has a culture of free content that can be monetized [she didn't specify how, but I suspect she was thinking of advertising and some other mix of revenues associated with brand].

You have to be prepared to take your content to the readers, rather than expecting them to come to you. [This is a 101 new media concept, but always worth repeating.] Evan notes that this implies a “disintermediation of content from the source.” Arianna: “ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

HuffPo includes content contributed by unpaid bloggers, paying only editors and reporters. Is Huffington building an empire on the backs of unpaid contributors? Not at all – bloggers are leveraging HuffPo’s visibility, finding and building audiences, getting book deals, etc.

HuffPo aggregates content from other sites, too – is this leveraging others’ content? Huffington notes that they strictly follow fair use guidelines and have never been sued for infringement. Aggregation and curation of content are essential parts of an Internet information service. Curation means identify what’s important and elevate it, give it visibility. Put flesh and blood on data.

Evan: “Obama – how is it going?” Huffington says she is very glad he was elected, that he inherited a huge crisis. One problem: he’s surrounded himself with Clintonites like Larry Summers, and did everything humanly possible to save Wall Street, but nothing to save Main Street. Huffington is writing a book on the decline of the middle class, and is very concerned that there is no effort to reverse the decline, which has been going on for thirty years. So Obama’s administration should be doing dramatic things to save the middle class – though he may have done a lot already, he’s not necessarily taking the right approach, making bold moves that he should be making to support those in the middle. Some say he saved the economy, but he didn’t – he just saved Wall Street. We still have 25 million people out of work, and escalating foreclosures.

It also bothers her that no strings were attached to the salvation of Wall Street.

Otherwise, Obama is an extaordinary communicator and has improved U.S. standing in the world community – those are real pluses. “I will definitely vote for him again. What’s the alternative?” The “loyal opposition” is not talking today’s issues seriously. They treat governing like it was a debating club.

The administration’s attempts to be bipartisan are wasted effort, she says. She compares it to guys hitting non Ellen Degeneres “and not being told you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Quick followup to my “standing in line for democracy” post: I had complained to Steven Clift of e-democracy.org about the message restrictions on the United States Issues Forum. He followed up with a couple of thoughtful emails. “The goal,” he says, “is to produce a more thoughtful, civil exchange.” He acknowledges that it’s an experiment that might not work. He notes that, in effect, message overwhelm turns potential participants off. This is an old issue with email lists, often a cause for moderation, less often handled with arbitrary constraints like this. I appreciate what they’re trying to do, and I’ve rejoined the list. I’ve been pretty silent on this stuff for a while, preoccupied with other issues, but I’m hoping to find ways to promote more and better conversational environments. What we’re calling “social media” often isn’t as social as we need to be.

Time for the 11th annual Bruce Sterling/Jon Lebkowsky State of the World conversation on the WELL. This year we have a lot to talk about, the world’s off-center and wobbly. We’re off to a good start…

Basically we’ve got an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism. It was deprived of oversight for three good reasons (a) it rapidly brought prosperity to billions (b) under globalization, money is inherently global while governance is inherently local (c) complete regulatory capture of the system — nobody but bankers understands how to bank. There’s no caste of regulators left anywhere who have the clout or even the knowledge to do anything usefully stabilizing. No, not even if you give them guns, lawyers, money and back issues of DAS KAPITAL.

Too big to fail. So, what can you do? Cross your fingers, basically. Make some reassuring noises. Cheerlead instead of reforming the infrastructure. And pawn what’s left of the credibility of government.

Twenty years ago, it seemed like this situation might lead to shareholder power, a kind of pension-fund ownership society. It kind of did, for a while. But over a longer term, the poor engineering told on the rickety, fungus-like structure of finance. The wealth and the executive capacity drifted into the hands of moguls. Not governments, big institutions, megacorporations, multinationals, but moguls, weird eccentrics, like Russian moguls. Madoff figures, Enron. Nobody was left to look. Even if they did look, all they could possibly see in Madoff and Enron was a genius, highly charitable head of the NASDAQ and the world’s most nimble and innovative energy company. It’s like looking at your SUV and seeing drowning polar bears. Just a minority viewpoint.

I like to think climate change is settled – we have scientific consensus, we know it’s happening, we generally understand the human actions that have accelerated climate change since the dawn of the industrial era. Many of us are feeling energy about reducing our carbon footprint and our overall planetary impact and concern that it’s too late for mitigation, time for adaptation. I personally have been involved with projects like Austin350, Worldchanging, and Powersmack, and I’ve blogged about global warming at Change.org. I’ve been thinking and writing about global warming since Bruce Sterling made me aware of it in the late 1990s. I worked with him on the Viridian Design Movement and wrote an article on climate change for the issue of Whole Earth Magazine he edited. In researching the article, “Being Green in 2001,” I learned that scientists were concerned that their commitment to scientific method – to hypotheses rather than certainties – was misinterpreted as uncertainty about the anthropogenic drivers of climate change. Since then broad scientific consensus has developed, especially via the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.

I was surprised, then, to have a conversation recently with an intelligent, articulate local businessman who told me that this scientific consensus doesn’t exist, and while he could acknowledge that the climate is changing, it’s a natural cycle associated with solar activity. He’s sent me various charts and links. He’s just forwarded an email that mentions Ian Plimer and his book Heaven and Earth, Bjorn Lomborg, and Kimberley Strassel’s Wall Street Journal op ed piece, “The Climate Change Climate Change,” which says that “the number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.” Among other things, she mentions a list that Senator Jim Inhofe has assembled of scientists who supposedly deny that human action is associated with global warming, and says that the earth’s temperature “has flatlined since 2001.” (Has it?) If you read the comments on the op-ed piece, you see that the question of human action and climate change has been politicized – challenged by the right as a left-wing scam. This is really unfortunate – the science is lost in a fog of political wrangling.

Friday’s “Open Government on the Internet” conference at the LBJ Library opened with Bill Bradley, who discussed his (and President Obama’s) profound interest inmaking government more accessible. The conference explored various aspects of government openness and transparency, but at the core of the conversation is an intention – affirmed by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra – to put all data online and to open up government databases, making as much data as possible accessible via clear and usable application programming interfaces. Bradly talked about data and information as raw material for sculpting democratic outcomes. For example, he supports a searchable Federal budget with links from each budget item to the appropriations bill, the authorization bill, information about the committee that passed the bill, who testified and who they represented. This would be a series of connections that would let you see who did what to affect spending at a granular level.

Bradley said we have the opportunity to leverage the ideas of enormously talented people throughout the U.S. via crowdsourcing or “ideastorming.” Truly open government ios not just about providing information from government sources to the people, but also about flowing ideas back from people to the government.

Most people, he said, are not extremely ideological. Their political views may be more complex, not well summarized by categories like “right” or “left,” “Republican” or “Democrat.” He imagined individuals having personal political pages that include more detail about their views, and from the contents of these pages, you could build constituencies around specific issues (the kinds of “adhocracies” that I envisioned in 1997, when I wrote “Nodal Politics” as one chapter of a never-published book about the Internet’s potential as a platform for democracy and political activism).

Following Bradley, there was a keynote by Vivek Kundra, the new Federal CIO he directs Federal technology policy and strategy. The Federal Government has a wealth of information, he says, that taxpayers paid for and have a right to access and use. Obama issued memoranda on transparency and open government as a first move after he took office – it was his highest priority. We have the Freedom of Information Act that LBJ signed when he was president, and we should assume that transparency and accessibility of information is the default, and not an exception that requires a special request.

Note the Human Genome Project, which put the genome data in the public domain. This resulted in a global explosion of innovation in treatment development, over 500 new drugs. Also consider the democratization of satellite information and its impact on navigation and mapping.

By opening up and making data available across disciplines, we can tap into the ingenuity of the people. The true value of technology and data lies at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Crowdsourcing is powerful – the crowd might see patterns the public section lacks the resources or attention to spot. Looking at innovation at a grassroots level, and lower cost of technologies.

Kundra is looking at agencies that have led the way, and new ways to leverage networks. It’s not enough to merely “webify” exiswting institutions. We should fundamentally change processes. There are 24,000 web sites within Federal government, but we need to think about moving government and services where the people are, systems like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Ebay, etc. where there’s high adoption. How do we move our applications where the people are, and fit them to context? We need to provide services in contextgs people are most comfortable with.

Wayne Caswell asked about broadband objectives. Kundra says the intention is to aggressively ensure that we extend broadband access into rural and underserved communities. Services should exist across the entire spectrum, and solutions should work everywhere.

Dennis Mick asked about the possibility of intrusive surveillance. There are robust privacy committees within the CIO council and within the White House. The idea is to bake privacy protection into technologies as they’re developed. They’re working closely with the General Services Administration to negotiate model agreements and ensure privacy protection.

Sharron Rush asked about accessibility. The Feds have rules about accessibility of web sites, yet not all the Fed sites meet accessibility standards (e.g. recovery.org). Kundra says part of the problem is in failing to address accessibility up front and bake it into the procurement process and the architecture of solutions. This will be corrected to make sure no one is disenfranchised.

Gary Chapman, Director of the LBJ School’s 21st Century Project and an organizer of the event, spoke next, saying that the discourse and vocabulary of enterprise computing is being challenged by a new discourse and thinking about consumer technology. What is the bridge between enterprise computing and the new consumer model that is encroaching on institutions?

Sanjay Khanna reporting on The New Yorker’s “Next 100 Days” policy summit: [Link]

…it seems our human nature leads us to insist on turning towards increasingly discrete, expert-dependent disciplines to save us from ourselves. Which is why this could be a good time, as [Malcolm] Gladwell smartly hinted, to question our pretense of control. After all, every day, beneath our conscious awareness, the Earth spins around its axis and revolves around the Sun, while the biosphere in its every realm demonstrates that the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. It may seem glib to say so, but given that we’re simply a small part of that infinite complexity, it might serve us well to ask, hat in hand: What is it we believe we can control, exactly?

A Guatemalan Twitter user has been arrested for “inciting a panic” with his tweets. Great reporting from Xeni at boingboing: “Twitter user “Jeanfer” was
arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited
in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the
control that corrupt entities have over the state-controlled financial
institution.” [Link]

I made these notes a few days ago while researching our Monday Emergent Leadership presentation. Thought it worth posting here for reference:

Joi Ito conducted a “happening” to discuss the concept of “emergent democracy” in 2004. This was a conference call plus chat room (for visual feedback) plus wiki (for gathering notes) plus QuickTopic (for later discussion and creation of a collaborative document). This itself formed an ad hoc organization, with Joi as instigator and leader.

After much talk about a democracy of conversation, wherein many voices are heard, I suggested that democratic conversation or deliberative dialogue was insufficient to produce real governance, and Joi agreed: we needed to decide how decisions are made within democratic groups or groups that run by consensus.

This is where I started thinking about the concept of emergent leadership. If we assume that emergent democracy can be effective, then when we reach decision points, someone must be able to make the decision. In a traditional command and control vertical hierarchy, “who’s the decider” is determined by assignment or election. In a self organizing group, or in “organizing without organizations,” there’s no one to make the assignment, and there’s no formalized election, Instead, leaders emerge, and to the extent effective leaders emerge, these “dis-organizations” can be effective.

Steven Johnson, in discussing the Dean campaign, noted how it had been effective at clustering – bringing people together – but less effective in coping. (Longer term, the organization actually was effective, but that’s another story.) This lack of effective coping is an issue of leadership. In the case of the Dean campaign, there were internal issues that subverted real leadership. I have an idea what those were, but the point is that the campaign grew quickly but lost its bearings in Iowa.