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TEDx Austin notes

Here are some notes from my TEDx Austin experience yesterday at the Austin City Limits studios on the campus of the University of Texas, hanging out with 300 or so people, listening to a series of very interesting talks. This was an independently organized TED event, limited by TED policy to 300 people. Licensee Nancy Giordano, who moved to Austin eighteen months ago from Los Angeles, pulled together a local team of volunteers to produce the event. For something put together on a wing and a prayer and a bit of donated time, the results were very good.

TED is about “the power of ideas” or “ideas worth spreading. ” Some think it’s a tech event, but tech is only the “t” in the acro, there’s also Entertainment and Design. Also, per Nancy’s opening, it’s about giving people ideas for a future they can believe in. Overriding theme of this particular TEDx: PLAY BIG.

My notes:

  • Rip Esselstyn talked about his Engine 2 Diet, which is plant-based and excludes any animal products as well as oil. His intro was about the nutritional bases for many common diseases – heart disease, cancer, diabetes. We work hard to find ways to cure or prevent these diseases without looking at the obvious source of the problem, which is the American diet, very heavy on animal products, processed foods, fats. Rip, a former firefighter, noted that 80% of all fire department calls are not about fire at all, but about fighting Western disease. He thinks it’s time for the USA to acknowledge the nutritional problem and make a change, for which he’s evangelizing. Quoted Winston Churchill: “America always gets it right, but only after they have tried everything else.”
  • Doug Ulman said “small is the new big” and talked about changing the label “nonprofit” to something else.
  • Many thought Steven Tomlinson was the best speaker. Coincidentally, my friend Rob Matney was telling me about Steven earlier in the week – “this is somebody you really have to meet.” Indeed. He talked about deciding what you want to do and be and, even if you want diverse things, finding a way to engage wholeheartedly with all of them, as he has done (he teaches business, writes and performs plays, and has attended seminary). We don’t need careers, we need callings. A calling is where your deep passion meets the world’s deep need. We need to stare at things until they inspire us and inform us – “until it becomes in us what it needs to be.” Our fantasies are a first offer of what might be. In summary, practice, pay attention, don’t discard. Show up. Lead with what you love.
  • Chris Mueller of Life Technologies gave a fascinating overview of gene sequencing. As we understand the human genome better we can approach personal genomics which is a foundation for personalized medicine. [I’ve always felt a core flaw with the healthcare system as it is today is in a generalized approach to the human system, whereas each of us is unique – I hear that organ shape, size, and arrangement can vary quite a bit from one human to the next, and we all have a unique cellular code with general similarities. Something to think about.]
  • Chris Shipley said we should rethink how to be big in business – by staying small. She used the analogy of the Sumo wrestler, who is big and powerful but not particularly agile, and the Peloton in a bicycle race, which is agile and collaborative. Small companies do more with less, are more innovative, and the customers of small companies are engaged (because scale creates barriers). The value creation by all small businesses is kind of a long tail – far greater than the value creation the the Fortune 500. She’s an organizer of Innovate 2010, which is sponsoring global “pitch slams.”
  • My friends Suzanne and Dave Armistead did a short version of the much longer “Moving Love” performance, which celebrates their son Davis’s short life. It’s also about their grief over his death, and how responding to that grief brought them to a greater awareness and appreciation of life, and a deeper connection to Davis. Very powerful.
  • Dr. Bill Merrill talked about the devastation of Galveston by Hurricane Ike, and his proposal to build a $3 billion Ike Dike to prevent further disasters. Significant hurricanes like Ike strike the Galveston coast at least once every fifteen years, and with climate change there could be more strong hurricanes than usual. Merrill borrowed his idea from the Dutch, who’ve build a system of “gates” for protection. He said that you can’t really quantify the loss from Ike in dollars – 40,000 monarch oaks were destroyed, and historic iron-front buildings were devastated, probably beyond recovery. Evacuation doesn’t really work – the Rita evacuation was impossibly chaotic, 30 people died as a result.
  • Mark Rolston of Frog Design talked about user experience, the increasing degree to which computerized devices are embedded in our environment. He showed the “Santa Claus of the subconscious” clip of Ralph Fiennes in the film “Strange Days,” the point being that “jack into the matrix” and download experiences. He didn’t really pursue that, burt got into the transformation of objectsin the environment, and made a distinction of first life (physical) vs second life (digital). I don’t know that it’s valid to make the distinction, but it enabled his point that “second life” is grwoing in fidelity and frequency, and starting to compete for mindshare with first life (physical) experience. There’s an entangling of the two, which we see in location-based augmented reality applications that are starting to appear. Human computer interface (his field) is evolving quickly, and touch is an important step (think how so much of the iPhone experience is organized around touch). 3D controls are coming, too, as on the Wii. The computer is learning to interact with our world – he suggests that computers are beginning to “understand.” I’ve always argued that this claim is somewhat bogus – computers intelligence is simulation, I haven’t seen anything to suggest otherwise though brilliant scientists like Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec suggest the possibility. Rolston went on to say that computer experience is no longer tied to devices, that we can tag our world, create map overlays with citizen notes, etc. We are beginning to get embedded or peripheral devices attached to our bodies – “your heartbeat becomes a conversation.” This was probably the talk I resonated with least, because it was a rehash of old thinking with very little that seemed innovative – but for many in the audience, it might have seemed new and stimulating.
  • Carrie Contey, who focuses on prenatal and perinatal psychology, talked about “the power of the pause.” Her studies suggest that the brain reaches a kind of saturation point, and at that point it’s important to pause in some way. She talked about a baby turning away at some point, shutting off attention in order to process. She talked about “big being in a small body.” Development is doing and being. The brain lights up, then pauses to integrate, at which point what happens is 1) orientation, 2) regulation, 3) integration, and 4) inspiration. In stillness, there’s room for creativity to bubble up and pop. In being, there is more room for our authentic self. In modern life, with so many sources of stimulation, it’s important to pause – pausing should be a priority for us. Creativity requires space; do less and be more. This meant a lot to me – I’ve been dealing with a lack of creative space.
  • Turk and Christy Pipkin showed their more recent work via the Nobelity project. They have a new film near release, “One Peace at a Time.” “You can’t build a wall by starting at the top.” They’re reading out to people, trying to get many small donations. They’ve been working in a particular African village to bring clean water and nutrition – which should both be considered a human right.
  • Bob Hunt is a former nuclear engineer who, disenchanted after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, left that industry and became an entrepreneur and inventor. He created a wind turbine that was inspired by the way a wind chime works. He realized you could integrate gravity and thermodynamics to get more power. He developed a Gravity Assisted Airplane, and a Gravity Assisted Wave Energy Device. More recently he’s been developing a gravity-assisted way to extract geothermal energy from existing dormant wells. Others who have attempted to do this got undramatic output, but his system should be more effective. It occurred to me that this would mean shifting the wells from production of transportation energy to production of energy for the build environment. (Though in fact the wells are inactive, so the real shift is from inactive to active in a different context).
  • Richard Garriot talked about the new space race. Many of us were disappointed that the Kubrick/Clarke vision of space travel by 2001 never came to be, and on February 1st, President Obama ended funding for planned manned space projects. However private industry will step in, and the government and others can contract manned missions and space development, as they currently contract satellite launches. He talked about major players in the field, and how the “NASA primes” (those who were part of the original government space efforts) are getting involved with the private efforts. In a conversation between sessions, Richard told Derek Woodgate, Brandi Clark, and I a bit about his own space mission, how seeing the earth from space, it was clear to him that we’re more resource-constrained than we realized. He’s retooled his home and cars to conserve energy, and has taken an interest in sustainability projects.
  • John Phillip Santos, formerly a poet, brought up DNA again, and talked about genealogical genetics. We’re learning more about our ancestral code. E.O. Wilson talks about reinventing an ethic of our origins. What are we becomgin? What is our true origin? Advocating a mestizo world view. Shows a partially-erased (by the subject) image of Carlos Castaneda. Brown is the new white? Yellow is the new brown? Actually, mixed is the new white. We have mixed cultures that have emerged through patterns of migration. Borders are less meaningful. “No borders will stand.” How will genetics be encoded into personal devices? Into persons? Genetics will change from read only to read/write.
  • Philip Berber: every three seconds a child dies because they’re too poor to live. One in five in the third world will not reach their fifth birthday. Every year we give three billion to charity in the U.S., but only 5% of that to international causes, because we don’t trust that the money will be used as intended. Fears of mismanagement. Berber left business, has created a nonprofit with his wife called A Glimmer of Hope Foundation. Focusing on projects in Ethiopia. Asked locals what they need and want: clean drinking water, a place to go to the bathroom, classrooms for their children. Empower them to lift themselves out of poverty – they have the motivation, but they need funding. Partnership: “We buy the bricks, they build the walls. We buy the pump, they dig the hole.” Giving a hand up and a handout. The way out of poverty is to have money via microloans. Funding women in Ethiopia, who are very good at putting small businesses into operation. Donors just need to be able to make informed choices about where their money goes.
  • Final talk was by Mark McKinnon, who talked about how his wife’s bout with cancer taught him to value her and to value life. He has a jar full of beads, as many as he’s estimated he has days left in his life. Each day he takes a bead from that jar, and drops it into another, and thinks how thankful he is to be alive.

One last note – via my good friend Honoria Starbuck as we talked… she said her advice to people how are down is this: “Save your pessimism for the good times.”

Complete speaker list with links. Watch the TEDx Austin site for videos!

Another set of notes from my friend John McElhenney provide another perspective – and more about Doug Ulman’s talk. (For some reason I took few notes while Doug was speaking.)

Here’s another account by Carla Thompson at Guidewire Group.

Information/culture wars

In creating with a history of the “climate fight,” Dr. Spencer Weart has created a history with interesting points about the democratization of knowledge. [Link] He talks about a decline in the prestige of all authorities, expansion of the scientific community with greater interdisciplinarity, and a decline of science journalism.

These trends had been exacerbated since the 1990s by the fragmentation of media (Internet, talk radio), which promoted counter-scientific beliefs such as fear of vaccines among even educated people, by providing facile elaborations of false arguments and a ceaseless repetition of allegations.

Mike Hulme’s response:

I think Spencer is helpful by suggesting there is a much bigger story happening in the world of science, knowledge and cultural authority of which the climate change incidents of this moment are just part. These are going to be increasingly difficult challenges for many areas of science in the future – how is scientific knowledge recognized, how is it spoken and who speaks for it, and how does scientific knowledge relate to other forms of cultural authority. It’s not just about the politicization of public knowledge, but also about its fragmentation, privatization and/or democratization.

In comments, Bob Potter says

The key phrase is “expert public relations apparatus”. In the mid 20th century scientists had the luxury of public respect. People believed what they said. As public confidence in authority figures of all types waned, scientists took no notice. When global climate change became a serious issue scientists still assumed that a “word from the wise” would be sufficient, and that is all they brought to the fight. They lost the war because industry had a public relations army and they did not.

All great points: we’re in the midst of culture and information wars, and the concept of “authoritative voice” is less meaningful, if not lost. We can’t fix this by going backwards… as so many of us have said before, we have to focus more than ever on media literacy. Should be right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Realtors are thinking about social media

I gave a social media talk to some realtors yesterday. They were attentive, energetic, and really seemed to get what I was telling them, which (briefly, but of course it’s more complicated) was to focus on relationship-building narrative. As I told Jay Drayer on Facebook, best question I had was from a woman who worked mostly with investors,
and was concerned how casual her online persona could be without
potentially turning investors off. We discussed the importance of
authenticity, and balancing professional with personal online. Broad agreement in the room that authenticity is important and it’s okay to reveal your “secret identity.”

Realtors are thinking about social media, and they totally get that overt advertising is inappropriate in a social media space. They’re social all day long, and they generally know how to expose their expertise without flashing the real estate banner. Their challenge is to find time to be social outside their business-focused conversations, building relationships that won’t necessarily lead directly to business. It takes time and exploration to build an authentic presence, a social life online, that’s also business-relevant.  Even experts in this space are still getting the hang of it, still learning.

Obligatory comment about Google Buzzzzz

I feel obligated to post about Google Buzz, as a social technology evangelist and follower of all things Google. It’s another way to post drive-by messages in random activity streams, conveniently integrated with  Gmail. If you don’t use Gmail, and especially if you’re already feeling deluged, this probably isn’t for you. I don’t think it’s a Facebook killer or Twitter killer – it’s just another example of Google acknowledging and implementing a communication pattern that many people find useful. It’s also another step toward the Google singularity, i.e. the plausible future wherein all the Google collaborative tools-in-development are integrated in a more seamless way. The great Google pie is still in the oven, and we find ourselves dipping our fingers into it – it’s very hot.

The impact of “social” on organizations

Austin’s Dachis Group talks about social business design, defined as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.” I find the Dachis overview (pdf) interesting, if a bit scattered. David Armistead and I at Social Web Strategies had been having conceptually similar conversations for the last couple of years, looking at the potential culture change associated with social technology and new media (with Craig Clark), the need for business process re-engineering (with Charles Knickerbocker), and the power of value networks. This morning while sitting on my zafu, I had a flash of insight that I quickly wrote down as five thoughts that came to me pretty much at once…

  1. Organizations are already using software internally and have been for some time – email lists, groupware and internal forums, various Sharepoint constructions, aspects of Basecamp, internal wikis and blogs, etc. What’s changed? I think a key difference is high adoption outside work – more and more of the employees of a company or nonprofit are having lifestyle experiences with Facebook Twitter, YouTube, Flickr et al. The way we’re using social media changes as more of us use it (network effect) and our uses become more diverse.
  2. Organizations see knowledge management as storage, basically, but we can see the potential to capture and use knowledge in new and innovative ways, e.g. using multimodal systems (Google Wave, for example) to capture and sort knowledge as it’s created, with annotations and some sense of the creative process stored with its product – knowing more about how knowledge is produced improves our sense of its applicability. (It’s exciting to be a librarian/information specialist these days.)
  3. Organizations will increasingly have to consider the balance of competition and cooperation with internal teams. I’ve seen firsthand how a culture of competition can stifle creativity by creating a disincentive to share knowledge. I’m thinking we’ll see more “coopetition.”
  4. Who are the internal champions within an organization? There will be more interest at the C-level as social technology is better understood and success stories emerge from early adopters. It would be interesting to know what current champions of social media are seeing and what they’re saying. Also – how much of the move toward “social” will come from the bottom up, and how will that flow of new thinking occur?
  5. How does the new world of social business (design) relate to marketing? Operations? Human resources? To what extent to the lines between departments blur? How will the blurring of the lines and potential cross pollination transform business disciplines?

A final thought: all the minds in your organization have a perspective on your business, and each perspective is potentially valuable. How do you capture that value? Do you have a culture that can support a real alignment of minds/perspectives/intentions?

Rethink “marketing”

Dave Peck’s written a blog post where he says his clients are questioning whether they want to use Twitter as part of a social media mix. The arguments he quotes suggest that his clients have an experience similar to the experience we have when we go to a “networking event,” and find that everybody in the room is hoping to sell, and nobody’s looking to buy. Dave asks “can somebody really get clients from Twitter? Is Twitter Overrated and Overhyped?”

A few responses to his post, including mine, make a point I would think is obvious: if you think of Twitter as a platform where you “get clients,” you’ve already stumbled, fallen, can’t get up. I use an old media example that we all still use, the telephone. All companies have telephones, but not all companies do telemarketing. Many people place themselves on a “do not call list” because they specifically do NOT want to be interrupted by sales calls from strangers, and in general telemarketers are regarded as a lower life form. You don’t want that for your company, right? But the telephone is still a valuable tool for authentic voice communication, and it can be business critical even if it’s not about “getting clients.”

If you set up a Twitter or other “social media” account for your company to “get clients,” you’re not understanding the new world of bottom-up personal media. That’s okay, nobody expects you to shift paradigms overnight, it takes a while to sink in – broadcast media is losing mindshare to personal media, what we’ve been calling social media, where everybody can be both producer and consumer, in contexts where they can control we all have increasingly more control over which messages we receive. It’s Darwinian: people are selecting environments where they can exclude or skip interruptions from strangers coming in from outside their preferred focus of attention – i.e. the broadcast television/radio approach doesn’t work, because the captive audience has been liberated by technology.

So much of our thoughts and attitudes about marketing and selling were developed within the context of mass marketing, because that’s where we lived, but it was really a blip in the evolution of media. “Markets are conversations.” In the past, we had real conversations with the people who sold us products and services – this was before the “mass” phase created a sense of abstraction both ways – customers were numbers, and the actual sellers were ghosts somewhere beyond the actual touchpoints, unseen, only imagined. In the future, we’ll have real conversations again, this time mediated by technology. How this scales is still a big question, part of the bigger question of how we reorganize around the robust, data-intensive, increasingly mobile communication technologies we’re evolving in the 21st century.

But you have to rethink the whole client acquisition thing. It’s more like “how can I build and sustain relationships that are relevant to my business (or nonprofit, or cause, etc.)”

Personal Kanban 101

I heard Jim Benson talk about Personal Kanban on the Yi-Tan conference call, and thought it was a cool idea, but didn’t really get into it – “I already have todo lists, etc., and I’m getting things done, do I need this?” But my load keeps increasing, it’s harder to sort out, and the todo list lacks depth. A week ago I finally pulled out an easel and set up a basic personal kanban with backlog, work in progress, and completed work columns. Visualizing my workflow and limiting my work in progress has already had a powerful impact. For one, I could see clearly what was in my “todo” queue that was urgent but not critical, and it was easier to separate nice-to-do volunteery things from income-producing work – priorities are much clearer.

Here’s a slideshare that explains the basics:

Personal Kanban 101

View more presentations from Jim Benson.

Jon L.’s iPhone in the NY Times

I’ve been interviewed by the New York Times before, but usually for the technology section. Who’da thunk I would turn up in “Fashion and Style”? Katie Hafner included me in a piece called “When Phones are Just Too Smart.” She originally asked how I find iPhone apps, and I realized I have no one method – some I find online, some I find by searching the store for a particular kind of thing, or I might search for the app that goes with a specific service (like Yelp). Others I see friends using – like “Bowl” (Tibetan singing meditation bowls) and “Bloom” (Brian Eno’s virtual musical instrument app), both of which I found via David Armistead.

I counted around 80 apps on my phone, and I use about 20 of those regularly. As Katie mentions, I found several Buddhist apps, including the very useful “Meditator,” a mediation timer. (Looking for the link, I discovered that Simple Touch Software also has an app called “Meditate.” Checking that one out, too.)

I’m really digging music apps, like Soma.FM’s, and DJ Spooky’s interactive app for his new release, “The Secret Song.”

Definition of social media

Working hard today on a February social media workshop, I realized I didn’t see a social media definition that I particularly liked, so I wrote my own:

Social Media is a fundamental transformation in the way(s) people find and use information and content, from hard news to light entertainment. It’s an evolution from broadcast delivery of content – content created by a few and distributed to many – to network delivery, where content can be created by anyone and published to everyone, in a context that is “many to many.” Said another way, publication and delivery by professionals to mass audiences has changed – now publication and delivery can be by anyone, professional or not, to niche audiences through networks of many channels. This is because the means of production are broadly accessible and inexpensive.

As a result of all this, attention and mindshare are fragmented, there’s emphasis on relationship, new forms of media are conversational, and transaction costs for communication approach zero.

I’m sure that needs work, but it’s a good start – I think a little better than the other definitions I found, including the definition-by-committee (including yours truly) that’s found on Wikipedia.

It’s arguable whether “social media” is the best label for the thing we’re talking about, but it’s the one that’s stuck for now.

Samadhi, intention, direction

Notes I made a couple of weeks ago while listening to Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain:, talking about samadhi (concentration). This advice resonates well with my own practice, wanted to make note of it here for reference (mine and yours).

  • Set an intention – which sets the mind to a particular direction.
  • Relax, settle down.
  • Help yourself feel safer.
  • Activate positive emotion. Think about things that gladden the heart (activating dopamine and norepinephrine).
  • Keep the critters out. The voices in your head aren’t necessarily friendly or helpful.
  • Build a wholesome neural structure.
  • Intend and sense/evaluate benefits – “How’s that going for you?”

Linchpins and hierarchies

Seth Godin has a new book, Linchpin, and it looks like another good one. I haven’t read it, but I’m noting this quote, found in Amazon’s product description:

The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

The review goes on to summarize:

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. Like the small piece of hardware that keeps a wheel from falling off its axle, they may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.

Meanwhile I found a post by Godin at Huffpo where he seems to be just now figuring out that we’re seeing a structural transformation from command and control to network infrastructures for organization. Surely he saw this long ago? A quote:

But if your business deals in ideas, control will stifle them. If your organization deals with the public, control will inevitably alienate your best customers. When United Airlines tries to control the way customers deal with their policies, they end up with United Breaks Guitars, not profits or market share.

Worse still, a rapidly changing competitive environment means that control is a losing strategy. Record companies tried to control technology and they lost. AT&T thought they could control how people used a telephone and they lost as well.

Is there any doubt that the world is going to go faster, not slower? Any doubt that non-state actors are going to have more influence on world affairs than ever before? Any doubt that technology will continue pushing us along a slippery slope where control is not a winning strategy?

Social software, social media… what’s happening

Three years ago I started thinking about how I might do consulting around my knowledge of online communities and collaboration, social networks, and general web strategy. I started meeting with David Swedlow, then Bill Anderson and Honoria Starbuck joined us. We were thinking how organizations could work through their social networks to build collaborative efforts. This could include viral marketing and collaboration with customers and clients. Bill and I had an engagement with an academic client that seemed to work as a proof of concept. I went on to form a partnership with David Armistead at Social Web Strategies, and as we worked through the construction of an ontology for our potential work, a couple of things happened. First, marketing communications professionals started seeing one point that we had been discussing – that mass aggregation of mindshare was becoming a thing of the past, that attention was fragmented and distributed among many niches and applications. Second, Twitter caught on with marketing professionals and they started thinking how they might use it, Facebook, and other social networking platforms to create presence for their clients. We started to see the label “social media,” and a few people who sort of knew marketing and sort of knew social software started building buzz for a new discipline, hoping they could sell consulting hours based on their (more or less limited) knowledge. However, well-established large consultancies started adding social media expertise, and selling social media consulting as just another of many services. Also, just incidentally, the economy crashed and money stopped flowing. (We started thinking about low barrier to entry/low cost of production as a social software plus, and we also started thinking hard about the impact of low transactional costs – thinking how we could consult on the uses of social software for coordination and collaboration inside companies – what others later started calling social business).

So now I’m seeing that the enterprise will buy social media marketing expertise from the same large consultancies that they’ve always used, and the same will probably be true of social business expertise, as thinking about the impact of social media on internal operations evolves. Medium-sized companies seem to be hiring rather than outsourcing expertise, if they’re willing to spend money at all. Small companies are doing what they can on their own. As a consequence of all this, there’s not much of a market for small social media consultancies and freelancers – I keep hearing of “social media consultants” who’ve gone to work for larger companies doing community management or working with marketing groupss to help address social media channels.

At Social Web Strategies, we saw that our best option was to do corporate training. We’d been doing these workshops anyway, so it makes sense to build a business around them.  I changed my relationship to the company, giving up my partnership but staying on as a principal, partly because I didn’t want to be as focused on training, and partly because I wanted more time to think and write – hard to do when you’re charged with building and running a business.

I also think that we’ve lost “social” in social media like Twitter and Facebook, that are set up for drive-by posting but don’t facilitate real collaboration very well. I’ve been working (with Kevin Leahy of Knowledge Advocate) to become a Google Wave expert, because I think Wave really does support collaboration. I want to help people build true collaboration and true community, where connections become sustained relationships and lead to authentic experiences. I’m also interested in support for collaborative innovation, and how R&D works in an network environment (I’ll post more about this later).

Currently I’m freelancing, and planning to write more here and elsewhere. I’m also still working for Social Web Strategies, and will be co-presenting a training on social media for entrepreneurs in February, based on Dave Evans’ book Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day.

Haiti: Person Finder

The “Katrina People Finder” technology has been updated by Ka-Ping Yee at Google, and placed online. It’s embedded at the State Department’s web site. Not sure why they changed it to “Person Finder,” but it’s simple, easy to use, and has two components: a search, if you’re looking for someone who’s lost, and a way to report information about someone that’s found, confirmed dead, etc.

I’m embedding it here, as well: