500 Ways to Be Inspired by Wikis

When I visualize a positive future for the world, it’s networked, interconnected, creative, and emergent.  It’s collaborative and aware of its history.  It looks like a wiki.

Like podcasting has, wikis (beyond Wikipedia) may still prove to be a technology that saw a burst of nerdly excitement, then a long period of obscurity, and then a break into the mainstream.  I’m hoping so.

The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in Portland, Oregon in 1995.  It’s still up online!  Cunningham has now been working on something called Federated Wiki, a very cool project that celebrated its 7th birthday this week. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and in an era of rapidly increasing information warfare, there are few communities as experienced and prepared to help as the community of Wikipedia. Google, Facebook, and all of us should give it a lot more money.

One year ago this Summer, I was reading that first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, and thought – I want a wiki of my own!  And so my private, personal, mobile-responsive wiki was born.  (I use PMWiki software unloaded to my web host account.) It’s now my second-most visited site on the web (after Twitter) and I adore it so much! I put all my notes from reading in there, my notes from meetings, personal brainstorms, lots of things. I LOVE MY WIKI! I usually edit and read it on my phone. I love my “all recent pages” page, I love my “randomized list of 3 other pages” page.

I was talking to internet pioneer Howard Rheinghold about wikis on Twitter today, just because I noticed that we had discussed wikis on Twitter ten years ago in 2008! I brought the conversation back up, some other people joined in, we talked about what we needed today for a good wiki UI, and why it seems like wiki software development has slowed (Howard guesses Google Sites and Docs have filled a lot of the needs). It was great fun.

In celebration of the larger wiki world, here is a network map of 721 wiki experts, thought leaders, organizations, and more on Twitter. (zoomed in details below, graphs made by Little Bird, of Sprinklr) The accounts are the nodes, and the lines are a sample of the follow relationships between them. Sub-communities have formed where, for example, the community colored green was discovered by noticing that these people all follow each other more than they follow people in the yellow community. Flavors of wiki community – try them all!

Also notable, back in 2008 when Howard and I were talking on Twitter about wikis, only 123 out of 721 (17%) of these wiki community leaders had created their Twitter accounts yet! Ten years later, Twitter and at least Wikipedia are powerful, widely used platforms enabling public discourse. May many more wikis flourish in the coming years.  If you’d like some more inspiration, here are some people and organizations that are right in the thick of it!  Here are 500 of them in an easy-to-explore Twitter list.

Another good bot.

 

Simplicity, Gut, and Complex Decisions

There’s a saying that simple decisions are best made with rational thought alone, but complex decisions benefit from a big dose of gut feeling as well.

I’ve been employing two methods for dealing with both types of decisions that I thought I’d share here.  I think of things like these as tools I can learn, practice with, get better at, and then deploy in my work.  I typically pick them up reading online, record them on my personal wiki page for reading notes, then transfer them monthly into a variable repetition mobile flashcard app where I review and learn them over time.

For simple, but hard, decisions, I’ve been using for several years a method I call “write it all down and pick 6.”  I learned it in a print edition of HBR that I picked up at an airport , I think it was Stanford’s Baba Shiv that suggested it but to be honest I didn’t write that part down!

The idea is: write down all the factors to take into consideration in your decision.  As many as you can possibly think of.  This feels great, like you’ve really given it a good thought.  Then, pick a very small number of those factors that are most important – at most 6.  Now look just at those 6 most important factors and honestly ask yourself what decision they support making.  This may be more powerful than it sounds.  It’s great.

Second, when you’ve got a complex decision, it can be helpful to break it down into simpler considerations first. “Simple is about relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths,” writes Adrienne Marie Brown in her wonderful recent book Emergent Strategy.  “Part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.”  Brown credits  Rachel Plattus of Beautiful Solutions with that insight.

That’s a new model I’m going to try out. If it’s a simple decision, use Pick 6.  If it’s a complex decision, try to create some simplicity by thinking about constituent relationships, then pick 6, then add gut feeling.  Gut feeling is high-bandwidth, high-context, powerful stuff too.

Related: The Conscious Competence model. When you start learning a new skill you are unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, then consciously competent with practice, until ultimately you can be unconsciously competent. Competent with far less effort.  That’s from Ed Batista’s blog post on Authenticity and Leadership.  Ed credits Martin Broadwell, a Bible teacher in Decatur, Georgia, who developed the Conscious Competence model in 1969.

Please share any related thoughts.  Thanks!

Finding new value in old notes

One of the journals I keep is a Daily Q&A journal, which asks the same question each calendar day every year for five years. It’s a great exercise in seeing what’s changed in your life and what’s not; where I’m moving toward my goals and where I’m stuck.

That ability to better understand the present in context of the past is one of the many things that’s valuable about old notes. I’ve thought for some time that if I was going to start another company right now, it might focus on re-surfacing new value from old notes. I love thinking about how old wisdom or information sheds new light on new circumstances. That’s a phenomenon I’d like to think about a lot more. For now, some specific examples.

Today my daily Q&A journal asks “what was the best thing you read today?”

On this day in 2014, I said it was a Chomsky interview in The Sun. Incidentally, I’m reading a wonderful Chomsky book right now that I got in a Free Library walking down the street. (I live in Portland, there’s Chomsky just laying about here.) Why did it take me four years to get back to reading Chomsky? Because the interview wasn’t that good. The book is great though! It makes me think that a great author shouldn’t be judged from one piece.

On this day in 2015, the most interesting thing I read was my own Evernote file of important thoughts recorded in the month of May. I still keep a file like that and I still review it regularly! One difference is that I now transfer those thoughts to a flashcard app called Anki for review and I record them in the first place in a private wiki instead of Evernote. My beloved personal wiki turns one year old next month, in fact.

In 2016 the most interesting thing I read on May 30th was an HBR article on five key steps for building support for your ideas: show up face to face to describe them, give a good speech about them that frames the discussion, have strong allies, have strong moral beliefs, and be persistent. That’s been in my flashcards ever since then but it’s something I could really use right now. Thanks for another reminder, old journal entry!

Last year on this date I was reading Eric Barker’s incredible book Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He tells a story about how comedians experiment with all kinds of jokes at small shows on the road, often telling jokes that fall flat, but taking note of those that land well. Then when they do a national show, that quantity of experiments provides enough proven wins that they can put together a show that’s 100% funny. That’s inspiring!

Have I produced enough content over recent years that I could piece together a really solid presentation or piece of writing where I know every item would make an impact? Not formally, but perhaps informally. That seems like a smart thing to make a wiki page about: points made that made an impact.

What did I record this year in response to the question, “what’s the best thing you read today?” I said, “my own note I took down some time ago that said, ‘when you say something powerful, stop.'”

Why you shouldn’t rely on social feed algorithms alone

“We run the risk, with social news algorithms,” Czech media philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote, “of losing our human capacity to select information, an essential part of making decisions, of being free.” (From the Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search)

That’s a powerful  way of saying it.  Making decisions is the essence of freedom, and selecting which information to focus on is a particularly important kind of freedom in an information-dense world.  As is the case with so many other forms of freedom, it’s also overwhelming and frightening.  Exercising it is a skill that we (hopefully) build.  (Mortimer Adler defines a skill as “a habit of following a set of rules,” in his great book How to Read a Book (video summary).)

I like to exercise my information freedom through source selection (following specific people, subscribing to RSS feeds), source categorization (making Twitter lists, folders in my RSS reader), reading the most recent updates from those sources, AND appreciating social news algorithms that bring selected updates to the top.  Today I retweeted my wife for the first time in a long time, because Twitter’s “You may have missed” algorithm made sure I saw her post.  I appreciate that.

Flusser’s exploration of the implications of these algorithms goes into more detail.  “For example,” he says, “redundant info isn’t removed, but highlighted, creating pressure to conform.”

If freedom is important to you, looking outside the boundaries of the algorithmic stream is important.

3 good tactics for building a platform ecosystem

‍Building a platform ecosystem can be a great way to build community and energy around what you’re doing. Three best practices I’ve learned from software developer platforms are as follows. These aren’t the only things to focus on of course, but I do like these three tactics.

(1) Provide some free level of access that people can immediately begin experimenting with at any hour day or night (Mashery taught me that before they were acquired by Intel).

(2) Make sure you tell people what types of functionality you want them to build on your platform and what types of things you intend to build yourself, even thematically (Several years ago Twitter published the quadrant diagram below and told its ecosystem which of those quadrants it wanted outside developers to focus on and which ones to avoid. The upper right was one to stay away from, they said.)

(3) If you can, it’s great to offer a high-touch preview of your roadmap. Salesforce regularly does a registration-required live video walk-through of what they’ve got coming over the next months.

Those are some of my favorite tactics. Anyone have anything else you’d like to add?

5 ways to find people, the ultimate source of insight

Let’s say you’re working on something that would benefit from the perspective of a really knowledgeable person in addition to yourself.  In fact, you probably are.

I think people, especially smart ones focused on particular fields, are the ultimate source of knowledge and insight because they are dynamic.  They just keep going.  Books and articles and such are great – but there’s nothing like finding a really great person for taking your understanding of the work you’re doing to the next level.

I’ve been in the people-finding business for almost a decade now, but today online a friend asked me how to find people who aren’t on social media.

I came up with this list of 5 ways.  What am I missing?

Ask people who are on social media

Social media is the easiest way to discover relevant people, either based on what they’ve published or based on who is connected to them.  The easiest way to find people is on the internet, and one of the best ways to find people who aren’t on the internet is to ask the people you find who are, who else you should talk to.

Search news

It would be great to extract this automatically, but just for a fresh test: I searched for “artificial intelligence” and “social justice” on Google News and the first result that wasn’t a TED Talk was an article about a conference and the first name in it was of an important college professor who has no Twitter account, 9 contacts on LinkedIn, and a blank avatar on Facebook.  He’s got a big CV though.

Search books (try Google Talk to Books)

Google’s new semantic search engine of books, called Talk to Books, is a pretty great way to explore around any topic.

Go to events

You know who the king of going to events and finding incredible people is? Kent Bye, host of Voices of VR and Voices of AI.  Thats where he gets his interviews.  And he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews.

Leade.rs

Loic Le Meur’s new startup Leade.rs is a great looking way to find public speakers on hot topics.  It’s a directory. Is it social media?  Maybe.

 

Also: From the remarkable new Pew study titled “The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World,” based on responses of more than 1,000 experts, some perspective:  Stephen Downes, a senior research officer at the National Research Council Canada, commented, “The internet will help rather than harm people’s well-being because it breaks down barriers and supports them in their ambitions and objectives. We see a lot of disruption today caused by this feature, as individuals and companies act out a number of their less desirable ambitions and objectives. Racism, intolerance, greed and criminality have always lurked beneath the surface, and it is no surprise to see them surface. But the vast majority of human ambitions and objectives are far more noble: people desire to educate themselves, people desire to communicate with others, people desire to share their experiences, people desire to create networks of enterprise, commerce and culture. All these are supported by digital technologies, and while they may not be as visible and disruptive as the less-desirable objectives, they are just as real and far more massive.”

One key step in effective influencer engagement: A good system for seeing opportunities

When it comes to cultivating long-term relevance and quality relationships with industry thought leaders, showing up is key.  Here’s my advice on how to make that easier to do.

I’ve been engaging with influential people online, building relationships, learning from them, and collaborating when it makes sense, for more than a decade. The number one tactic I always recommend is this: set up a really easy way for you to see the updates that your people of interest are publishing throughout the course of your day.  Not all of them, just some of them, regularly.

This should be something you can’t help but trip on as you’re looking at your email inbox, or you’re visiting Twitter, or when you’re opening a new tab in your browser. I have a VIP Twitter list I’ve organized and I’ve dragged the link to that list’s tweets down to my browser toolbar. Whenever I want to visit Twitter, that’s where I start. That’s pretty casual, for my heavyweight business needs I use enterprise software from Sprinklr of course, and it is the best interface for influencer monitoring I’ve ever seen. But the point is, you’ve got to have the opportunity to engage right in front of you.

Now once you’ve walked past your email folder full of influencer newsletters, or your Facebook Group you use as your Facebook landing page, or your awesome social media listening dashboard, don’t just rush past that point to get to where you intended to go. Linger a little. Make a habit of slowing down to look at a few recent updates from the influential people you’re monitoring. You don’t have to read everything, but you won’t engage with anything you don’t read. There are probably 1 or 2 opportunities to reply, reshare, or otherwise engage with something in the first 3 to 5 items you’ll scan over at the top of your list.

Wash, rinse, and repeat. Regular engagement with influencer content isn’t sufficient to build a relationship, but I’d argue that it is one essential part if you’re really focused on building long-term relationships and learning from these top thinkers in your industry.

A fun advanced tactic: sometimes I like to pretend I’m at a party offline and someone walked up to me and said the first thing I see on a list of tweets, right to me personally. What would I say if they said that to me? I think about that a little, and then I say it on Twitter.