Collaboration opportunity: Internet research for climate impact

Data apprentice sought.

I’m going to try an experiment, but I can’t do it alone. I believe this is a chance to have a horizon-expanding experience that makes a meaningful impact on climate change.  Maybe this is of interest to you – or maybe you know someone it would be a good fit for.

Goal: to help increase the capacity & impact of people working on climate change by building, sharing, and teaching how to use a collection of online research tools for ongoing learning and topic tracking. I believe that access to great streams of knowledge can help people make a bigger impact on the world. We’re going to build and share some streams regarding climate work.

What I’m looking for:

You:

  • Want to make an impact on climate change
  • Can do 5-10 hours of work per week, for the next 3 months. Update: Originally I said this was unpaid, but I’m going to find a way to offer some payment for help with this. I got some good feedback that more people would be available to help if this wasn’t unpaid work. Let’s talk about it.
  • Want to expand your exposure to what people around the world are doing about climate change now
  • Want to learn how to use leading-edge systems for online research by helping assemble them for others
  • Love to learn how to do new things
  • Feel comfortable making judgement calls on the quality of information sources
  • Can help with organizing an online workshop

Work includes:

  • Source discovery: Validate, clean up, and expand lists of the best sources of information (blogs, news sites, Twitter accounts) regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction, using a combination of automated tools, existing research practices, your creativity, and patience
  • Information organization: Organize those sources of information inside of tools to maximize their usefulness (RSS feeds, Google Custom Search, Twitter Lists)
  • Story capture: help build a collection of short stories of successful projects that made a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
  • Event planning: Assist with planning, promotion, and production of a series of 3 weekend workshops introducing people to the climate knowledge tools we create and showing how to use them. (I’ll lead the workshops but I need your help making them happen.)

About Me:

  • I’m a longtime, self-educated, professional online researcher
  • I used to be a NYTimes-syndicated journalist. The tools we’ll be building together are rooted in my journalism experience.
  • I have also been an investor-backed startup founder, political organizer, tofu manufacturer, and convenience store clerk. Today I am a VP at the world’s leading software provider for customer experience management and social media listening.
  • I have become a good manager and mentor. It was hard.
  • I have a strong commitment to social justice, including and beyond climate issues.
  • I love my day job and don’t have much time outside it. That’s why I need your help.

When: Starting ASAP, target date for first workshop is early January, second in early February. There’s no time like the present! Let’s get started!

How:

  • How we’ll collaborate: Outside of 8:00-5:00 PST (before and after my work day), we’ll use chat, video calls, and project management by spreadsheet
  • How to get in contact with me: Please email me at marshall@marshallk.com with the subject line: climate research volunteer. Tell me about yourself and your interest in the project.

I look forward to hearing from you!

10 good articles I read this week

In a time of information overload, careful curation is a way any of us can add value to the the lives and minds of our peers. In that spirit, and on the encouragement of my friend Mike Mathews, I thought I’d experiment with a link-blog type post, which will then be delivered to email newsletter subscribers, and see if that’s something I can do regularly.

Here are 10 things I read, watched, or listened to this week that I found so valuable I wanted to share them.  I cut out the political ones, this time.

Tech

  • Humans in the Loop collective intelligence (Video) “Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together with MIT’s Thomas Malone

This 45 minute talk suggests that we move from the AI concept of “humans in the loop” to a paradigm of humans working together, augmented by machines, or “computers in the group.”

  • Roam Research raises a round of funding, at a $200 million valuation. Roam has already changed the lives of so many of its users, including mine. It’s not only where I do all my digital note taking, it also facilitates entirely new thoughts every time I allow it to. No wonder investors were able to support its ongoing development at such a dramatically high price.

Woop woop, that’s where I work! I’m having a great time and am excited about the future. This got lots of press, but the TechCrunch post was particularly good.

Foresight & Strategy

Futurist Amy Webb offers multiple tools for foresight on her company’s home page. This “Axes of Uncertainty” is a simple and powerful one.

Great conversation about AI but I’m putting it in Foresight because one of the strongest points is that AI’s pattern recognition powers makes it particularly well suited to the Observe and Orient stages of the OODA loop, supporting humans as they take responsibility for the Decide and Act stages.

Climate

  • OPML of Green Energy Sources (there’s a download link in this Tweet about it)

If you know how to import an OPML file into an RSS feed reader, here is an algorithmically created collection of the top sources on green energy that others in the green energy field pay attention to. I built it on Sunday because I’m really trying to dig into climate matters.  You might also like this Twitter List of 1K peer-validated climate change thought leaders.. There are almost 10K people following it!

If you don’t know how to import an OPML file into an RSS reader, you’re really missing out. My wife often teases me that I told her about RSS on our first date, and now 17 years later we’re very happily married!

Guess what % of the world’s new energy production capacity installed last year was from renewable energy? Guess what % of global energy used is now from renewable? Great informed discussion here. Happily, the answers to those questions are 80 and 27. I was surprised by both of those.

Even people who find this podcast annoying agree it’s chock full of some very good information and some reason for optimism.

6 minute interview with two indigenous people about the use of fire. I’ve watched this and shared it many times. I encourage you to watch it too.

Beautiful. Tired of the view out your window? Try someone else’s. Not tired of the view out your window? You may appreciate this even more, then.

A good alert can have many false positives

I’ve set up thousands of alerts over my career as a journalist, entrepreneur, and now marketer. SMS alerts about every new blog post on a long list of company blogs were how I beat everyone to the punch almost 15 years ago and became the first writer hired at TechCrunch. Today I monitor for AI-benchmarked anomalous numbers of mentions in a short period of time of a long list of companies related to the firm I work for, Sprinklr.

(Above: the first Sprinklr Smart Alert hit I ever got was a good one. I took action on it; I amplified some good news and congratulated a business partner on an innovation of theirs I would have missed without this alert.)

I believe Alerts of various types are going to grow all the more important in the coming years – and I think we should talk about our expectations for them.

A lot of people get frustrated when they get a non-actionable alert. That’s the price of a good alert, I believe. Any good alert system will weed out 99.9% of potential events, send the .1% of events it thinks you may want to take action on. But you may only find that 50%, 30%, 10% or less are in fact actionable. Depending on how you’ve trained the system. Any way you do it, there’s more work to be done.

An Alert never tells a whole story, it only suggests where there me be a story to find. I love some alerts that are “false alarms” (non-actionable) the vast majority of times they sound. Because I’m willing to sift through noise to find quiet signals.

Furthermore, alerts are great for delivering news of an anomaly and maybe a little context – but the whole story is going to require manual skilled discovery of context, testing of a thesis, and will require decisions to be made.

That’s because almost no full set of circumstances for everything that could be actionable can be described by mortal humans ahead of time. Any Alert that doesn’t surface Unknown Unknowns is something else, something very narrow.

Below: this is not how or where I work.

What changes will we choose, in the face of Covid-19?

This is a time of big change – but at least in our individual lives, the changes most likely to stick are those we each choose to make.  Of course life is a fascinating mix of choice and circumstance. As Sartre once wrote, “freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

What changes do we want to make coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic?  I want to really learn to lead in a more whole heartedly, full-throatedly, networked fashion.   I’m inspired by my online friend Simon Terry, who incidentally mentioned that Sartre quote to me the other day, to not only think but speak in those terms. Simon is the leader of a group called Change Agents World Wide.  It’s a network of people, subtitled “Changing work, one human at a time.”

There’s lots of discussion about how Covid-19 will change us.  I’m intrigued by some of the discussion about how it will accelerate best practices we’d been slower to adopt than we knew we should – like decarbonization and climate change efforts.  (Here’s one big link on that, from McKinsey.)

One specific example I find intriguing is the developer relations community started by boutique firm Redmonk called Flyless, described here. It’s an online community for software developers flying less, or not at all, because they still want to talk without going to conferences – and maybe flying less is going to be a good idea in the long term.  Starting that community is awesome.

I’d like to think about what we want to change, how we can help each other make those changes, how we can hold each other to high standards, “create a container” for changes, and point ourselves in the general direction we want to move in once we’re coming out of this thing.

It’s tempting to think that a centralized authority will be the determining factor, or that a “great man” will determine the direction of history, or that it’s so much bigger than us we have no control over it – but has there ever been a time when it was more clear that we’re all connected, for better and for worse?  What do we want to do about it?

Help wanted: INFLUENCER RELATIONS MANAGER

I love my job. I get asked every other month what my Employee Satisfaction score is and at last report, it was a 10 out of 10!

I’ve worked at Sprinklr for more than 3 years now and it just keeps getting better. And by that I mean I just keep learning more every day. And we’re making it a better place to work almost every day.

The team I manage has an average score of 9 out of 10, so they’re not as happy as I am yet – but they’re pretty darned happy too.

I’d like to invite you to be a part of our team, if the following job description sounds like a good fit for you. When will I be filling this position? I’m not entirely sure, but soon.

If you’re interested, please email me at Marshall.kirkpatrick@sprinklr.com with the subject line “influencer marketing position.” I expect between 20 and 50 people to email me about it, but we’ll see! I’ll try to respond to everyone personally. I look forward to hearing from and/or meeting you!

Help wanted:

INFLUENCER RELATIONS MANAGER

We’re hiring a smart, communicative, B2B Influencer Relations Manager responsible for the development, execution and measurement of influencer marketing and collaboration campaigns used to drive both customer acquisition through demand generation and sales support, and internal learning from influencers who can contribute knowledge and insights to internal stakeholders throughout the business. This position works with cross-functional teams, especially Content Marketing, Events, and Analyst Relations. The position will be based in either Portland, Oregon or New York, (remote? Maybe…) reporting into the VP, Marketing.

About Sprinklr

Sprinklr’s mission is to enable every organization on the planet to make their customers happier. We do this with the world’s #1 social suite, which helps enterprises deliver memorable customer experiences with an integrated suite of Market Research, Customer Care, Social Media Management, and Social Advertising. Headquartered in New York City with 1,300 employees in 22 offices, Sprinklr works with more than 1,500 of the world’s most valuable brands, including: Allstate, McDonald’s, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nike, Signify, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Santander, SAP, Shell, Verizon, and Visa. Sprinklr’s partners include Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. For more information, visit sprinklr.com or follow us at @sprinklr.

Primary Responsibilities of This Position

Help scale execution of influencer collaboration programs, ranging from weekly video and audio podcasts to influencer collaboration on blog posts, webinars, events, and more

Collaborate closely with VP of Marketing to build effective, smart campaigns, balancing demand generation with long-term relationship building and maintenance, learning, and integrity

Configure and use customer experience software (Sprinklr) to monitor for influencer-derived insights and opportunities

Collaborate with internal teams focused on content generation, advertising, events, and more.

Solve problems and generate business value.

Minimum Qualification

3+ years marketing experience executing marketing programs

Demonstrable intellectual curiosity

A growth mindset

Better-than-average written and verbal communication skills

Could this be you? If so, send me an email! Do you know someone who could be a great fit? Pass this along to them!

15 Notes: How Data is Revolutionizing the NFL

I attended SXSW 2019 with my employer Sprinklr, and one of the sessions I got a lot out of was titled How Data is Revolutionizing the NFL.  I took notes on paper and now that I’m back in the office, I transcribed some of the most interesting notes from the session and thought I’d share them here.

I’m not a football fan, but I love data analysis, and this session was a lot of fun.  I think there’s a lot here that can be a source of inspiration for work in just about any sector, especially work that involves data.

* Each player has an individual game plan for each game (I didn’t realize that but of course it makes sense.  When I put my work to-do list on my calendar, that makes me feel a little like I’ve got an individual game plan in support of my team’s plan.)
* LA Rams analytics team has 3 people: a forecaster, a data architect, and a front end developer for internal systems.
* Whether it’s today or the 90’s before there were analytics teams, there have always been people looking at data, looking at probabilities, and trying to help teams make good decisions
* When you see players who are successful, you look to see if you can discover any new traits they have. Then you can look to find other people who have those traits as well but who may have missed other benchmarks and thus not been discovered.
* One person can’t do analysis of all the data available, but if the work is documented and reproducible, then you can come back later and repeat it, or pick it up again to iterate with new data and knowledge. As long as you’re iterating in your analysis, that’s good.
* These analysts are working with R, Python, SQL databases, and spreadsheets are often the final product that’s sent to someone
* You’re not going to be 100% correct in your forecasts, in fact your failure rate is going to be very high – and you just have to get used to that
* Much of the analytics are used for tracking player workload for optimization (makes me think about capacity management in an information worker’s worklife)
* The NFL is using data to try to make fans smarter, so they can hang out with their friends and say “you should look out for this when the game is being played.”  When you put the names of receivers and who’s covering them up on the screen, people love that. (cool validation of this as a commercially viable value add)
* For QBs air yards is a key stat. Everything these days is a quick, controlled game. We’re asking QBs to throw shorter passes and they should have about 60% pass completion rate
* Data science is a great place for people from diverse backgrounds to showcase your abilities by analyzing public data and find new perspectives. You can showcase your abilities, get attention for it, demonstrate, show your work, share your code
* Communication is super important. As an analytics person, you should be able to translate your work to anyone who could use it. That’s just as important as the ability to do the work itself.  (I’m pretty sure it was Namita Nandakumar who said that.)
* People think stats are going to tell you something dramatically different than what you think – but they often don’t. They often tell you something smaller, like who on your team has the potential to play a larger role.
* You can support people moving toward more statistical thinking in an incremental fashion: show one success first, then move toward more grey areas
* Having discipline in this job is key because there are so many interesting things you could be analyzing, you must constantly assess and reassess projects

Those were my notes, I hope you find them useful as well!

The growth benefits of blog subscription

I’m not going to write yet another post about how to grow your blog subscribers (in my experience working for blogs like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, our key tactics were to write regularly and to break news on topics of widespread interest) but instead I want to share some thoughts on the personal and professional growth opportunities presented by ongoing reading of subscriptions to one or more specific blogs.

You may follow bloggers on Twitter or email, but I find it useful to subscribe by RSS for an interface dedicated to long articles. I do that through Feedly and lately through Pocket, via IFTTT, in order to get the articles read to me aloud on my phone when I’m in transit. (My new favorite is The Living Library, about data and society.)

There’s a four part “growth mentality” model I’m going to use here to talk about the benefits of subscription, but you might appreciate using the model itself for other things as well.

What are the benefits you could capture by growing in this way? I’m motivated to subscribe to blogs for one reason in particular: they are a powerful way to be exposed to thoughtful perspectives on matters that may be useful to me later. I regularly get to cite something at work that’s really useful and that I read on a blog. I high five myself in my mind when I do. Regular reading of high quality longer form sources is a fast track to building out the mental toolbox.

If I could really nail regular reading of my subscriptions, I think I could add a lot of powerful timely knowledge to what I have to offer at work.

What’s something else I’ve succeeded at that’s inspiringly similar in challenges and opportunities? I have totally succeeded at adding both daily work logging and daily personal journaling, after deciding I wanted to years ago and struggled for a bit. So I’m confident I could add regular reading of my subscriptions too. I have, but this is the second question in the model – and I could get all the better at reading my subscriptions, too.

Who is someone else I’ve seen successfully grow in a similar way? My wife has added some practices to her intellectual life that I find pretty inspiring.

What would I say in a letter to a friend advising them how to grow in this way? I’d advise anyone to find an interface that works well for you, to refactor and clean up your subscriptions regularly, to not worry about unread items, and to consider a relationship with your items that is optimized for quality over quantity. One article considered deeply and connected to other matters in an actionable way may be worth 10 articles or more quickly scanned and all-but-forgotten. Finally, I’d recommend using the BJ Fogg method of building new habits: keep it small, tie it to an established anchor habit, and celebrate each time you do it to train your brain with positive reinforcement.

There you go! Now I’m going to take action on this. Next thing will be to try to figure out how to write blog posts regularly again, using the same growth model as well. 🙂