meish dot org: life, unfolding

I don’t usually write a lot about work on this, my personal site, but I read Derek’s musings about commenting on newspaper sites with interest, and felt moved to share this, a single slide from my communities and media presentation, which I’ve given to a number of audiences over the last 18 months or so. It’s relevant here, so I hope it bears repeating.

When media organisations think about community development and management, or dealing with potential problems, they need to consider the holy trinity of community management and not just one part of it.

Human (or organisation) solutions include anything which involves throwing more people or organisational muscle at a challenge: policies, procedures, hiring armies of moderators (or external teams to do it for you), extending rotas, writing community into people’s job descriptions and responsibilities. All of these are important, but they’re not necessarily scalable. Human solutions can be a lot like that game you play at the fairground, whack-a-mole, except it’s probably more like whack-a-troll. Employing people to bop away problems isn’t efficient, and ultimately rewards bad behaviour with attention.

Technical solutions are things which allow technology to help with the management of the community. This can include powerful moderation tools and filters which can be applied (like StupidFilter or disemvowellment, but can also include reputation management, recommendation, user hierarchy and/or associated weighting, rate-limiting, peer moderation, pre- and post-moderation and the like. Technology can very powerful in helping to manage a community, but it’s not very effective when used on its own.

Editorial solutions are often overlooked, and are crucial to community development on media sites. They might include journalist (and other staff) participation and highlighting/featuring valuable comments or users, as well as informing the more general editorial approach to community – how does it reinforce or complement content? What is the value or proposition behind user interaction? Why are people there? And what do you expect (or hope) from their interaction? What is the quality expectation? How do active community users reflect your readership, or not? How do you use conversations to address (or reinforce!) power imbalances between you and your readership? Is the role of the journalist to start conversations or to provide platforms for conversations to occur? Thinking about how community participation is influenced by, impacts on and interacts with other kinds of content on the site is key.

The point of this diagram – this whole concept – is simple: you can’t do one of these bits and expect everything to work out great. You have to think about what can and needs to be done in each bucket – quantities and blends vary wildly depending on the kind of content and kind of community – but they’re all important.

This is something I’ve been working hard to make a reality within guardian.co.uk‘s community activity over the past 15 months (all three aspects, but with a big focus on organisation and technology, the fruits of which are ripening now) and also in all future community strategy, development and management. It’s definitely starting to make a difference.

While m’colleague Neil and I have been whinging about the temperature* in our office for a few weeks, we haven’t, until today, been able to do so with statistical verification.

I brought a cheap thermometer into work this morning and we’ve established that – even with a portable A/C unit blowing through the open door – the climate in our fifth floor cubbyhole is balmier than Bankgkok, Harare, Bermuda, Mexico City, Calcutta, Athens and Istanbul, to name but a few.

As I write, the mercury has just reached 36°C (97°F), which I think must make it one of the hottest offices around.

Unless you know different?

I invite you to head to your nearest purveyor of temperature recording devices (most hardware stores, some bigger newsagents and supermarkets, pretty much all DIY emporia) and plonk your thermometer somewhere for a bit, before taking a photo of it and uploading to flickr (we’ll make a pool if we get enough). We need photographic evidence because otherwise you could just say your office was 60°C, couldn’t you?

Post a link to it in the comments here, or let me know via flickr or something. The inhabitant of the hottest office will win something suitably cool.

[No cheating, now: I don't want to think of you clamping a thermometer between your thighs to get it up to a suitably impressive level, y'hear?]

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The other day, while sorting through some old paperwork, I found a document I’d written in 2004, while working on a project team for a groundbreaking new product, within a big global internet company which shall remain nameless. I left that company a while ago and the project ownership was shifted stateside the year before (as most juicy projects were), but the product itself finally launched late last year.

It wasn’t the groundbreaking, game-changing thing I’d dreamt up with a few people in 2004 and shepherded through the early stages of the political, business and technical badlands of a large and complex organisation with a growing identity crisis. But there were some resemblances.

The initial idea creation, proposition development and project validation had been done by a small group led by me for a year or so, working on this first as a side project with the blessings of the senior leadership team, and then full-time.

But soon enough, the project got senior-level sponsorship (the CEO of the entire global shebang said “There is no more exciting project within this company at the moment”, which either said a lot about the project or the company…) and as a result, everyone and their dog wanted to get on board and hop on board the glorytrain. I was swiftly relegated to “project visionary” and consumer experience lead – the spiritual owner of the product, with significant influence over what and how we should deliver, a license to interfere in all sorts of areas but no real power – and the message from The Powers That Be was clear: get it done. Fast.

So, in absence of the power to slap people and structure how we should work and exactly what we should deliver, this document was intended to unite a global team (working across five geographic locations and in disciplines from design to development and marketing to business planning) around a common set of values – an operating approach statement. The idea was that anyone on the team should understand that these points would inform and influence every decision which was made around the project, and anyone not on the team would understand why we might be doing things or asking to do things in a different way.

I present it below without commentary, mainly as a historical artifact showing how much things like this become unfortunately necessary when you’re working in a diverse, distributed organisation and struggling to change the way it worked.

I still believe that sometimes a team operating statement can be a very useful way to align people’s approaches – the end result might be very well understood, but sometimes the process can be very bumpy.

In work, as in Fun Boy Three and Bananarama collaborations, It Ain’t (just) What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It (and That’s What Gets Results).

Or, to remix it slightly: the way that you do it can often affect (in both good and bad ways) what you do. Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination.
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I’m a visual person – it helps me to see things laid out visually (either via doodle or diagram or otherwise) to see how they relate or work, or to help me think things through. It also helps me to remember things – my visual memory remembers the way things are laid out on a page or a screen (or a table) which means I’m terribly good at pelmanism and Kim’s game, and while if I write down your phone number, I probably won’t remember it, but if you write it down, I probably will.

I’ve written here before, years ago, about the effects of having a visual memory:

When I was studying for my finals in uni, I realised that the best way for me to remember key things like dates, quotes, definitions and key translations was to remember them visually. I would draw up elaborate A3 sheets in coloured pen, with words and paragraphs and numbers written in different colours, or underlined, or at a weird angle, or next to a doodle of a tree.

Sometimes I would get other people to write things for me – my flatmate, boyfriend, neighbour. My landlord even wrote something once when he came around to collect the rent: in brown pen on the top right hand corner of a sheet – Banisteriopsis, the latin name of the most widely-used hallucinogen in the Amazon. I still remember it now.

I remember because after writing the sheets, I would tape them over my windows, and then sit at my desk and stare at them. I would memorise the relationships of the objects, the way they were written, and then later, in the exam, I would be able to re-draw them in my mind.

So anyone who’s ever worked with me will probably concur that I think best with a whiteboard marker in my hand, and that the notepad I bring into meetings isn’t for taking notes but for sketching conceptual maps or doodling circles and arrows and venn diagrams to illustrate my points.

And as with ideas, so with time.

One thing I’ve always found annoying about the increasing digitisation of my life is that most electronic time planners and calendars only cover specific periods – a day, a week, a month – and as a result it’s hard to get an accurate picture of what “the next few weeks” looks like, at a glance. It becomes all-too easy to agree to various things months in advance only to discover that they’re happening all within the same week of each other, because “October” seems like an age away. And it’s difficult to tell, as a couple, when our various independent and joint social, administrative and work commitments overlap and where they clear away to leave a magical, marvellous week free in which we might be able to take a holiday.

With this all in mind, earlier this year I grew very frustrated with trying to find increasingly sophisticated ways to synchronise my work calendar with my personal one, and all of that with P’s planner, all overlaid with other interesting things which are going on but which aren’t specific commitments (e.g. exhibitions ending), in a way which would make sense to the visual, information retrieving bit of my brain.

So I went old school. I made a powerpoint template calendar, and printed out a few months in advance, and stuck the pages in a long line on the wall of the kitchen and the wall of my office. I then scribble in the big things – the awaydays and conferences and speaking engagements and days off and days in transit to elsewhere, plus on the one at home, the various BBQs, parties and cat-sitting commitments we’ve taken on, plus things like the fact that we need to get the MOT done at some point before the end of June.

Not very hi-tech, but it works surprisingly well to give the coming weeks and months (especially the latter) shape in my mind.

In case you have the same problem, here’s the ppt file which goes through to 2010 (which is how far my current commitments stretch, rather incredibly). There are, of course, sites which do this for you, and undoubtedly a host of cleverer solutions. However, this is the one which has worked for me…

Powerpoint calendar (month by month)

Another post in the series of musings about Facebook as user experience and social microcosm…

The trouble with Facebook is that it’s a confused social space. There are too many different facets of personality being exposed through social openness. So much so, in fact, that it gets a bit difficult to manage.

For example, at present on Facebook, I have (among others) the following listed as “Friends”:

• My husband
• Several people I’ve known since I was 11
• College friends I haven’t talked to in 15 years
• My boss
• A couple of people from university I’d lost touch with
• Several people I know from t’internet, but haven’t met / don’t actually know
• A few people on a mailing list I belong to
• A handful of family members
• A few people who work for me
• At least one ex boyfriend
• People who I’ve seen around the office but never exchanged more than words of greeting with

While I obviously wouldn’t have connected with these people via Facebook if I hadn’t wanted to, it’s pushing the definition a bit to lump all of them together into the same bucket, labelled “friends”. Why? Because most of them aren’t strictly friends (although they’re all lovely, obviously).

Or rather, they may well be friends, but not all friends are equal. As we all know, there are different sorts of relationships, some of which are better kept distinct.

Put simply, I wouldn’t consider having a party to which they were all invited at the same time – apart from a wedding – so how can I expect to engage with them socially in a single setting online?

And most people I know are in the same boat.

Where in life we are each at the centre of a Venn diagram of all our social groups…

…in Facebook, it’s one big mixer.

All contacts are friends, regardless of their relationship.

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When I was at college, in Canada, I had a facebook. In fact, everyone at the college did.

It was a physical thing – a slim volume handed out at the beginning of the year, containing photos and pertinent information about each student and faculty member. The photos we’d had taken in a classroom a couple of days after we arrived young, blinking and mostly jetlagged onto the campus on the western edge of Canada, photos which had been used already on student IDs and bus cards, were reprinted in the book along with the scantest of details – each person’s name, details of hometown, birthday, which class-year they were in and hall of residence.

This facebook – which we called the directory, but same difference – became invaluable as we started freshers orientation and then classes. It became my habit to consult it at night, back at the student residence, as I struggled to reunite rapidly forgotten (or unknown) names to recently met faces.

As the days progressed, the pen came out and the facebook became gradually annotated, with each entry scrawled beside with cryptic symbols, and accompanied by a legend on the back page. By adding extra little nuggets of information – facts or shared things or relationships – I was able to make sense of the names and faces in the book, and use that information to build relationships.

Over time, I got to know everyone’s names, and their faces become so familiar by being seen every day, sharing classes and meals and hikes and so on, meaning that I no longer needed to rely on the directory. Eventually, I sent the facebook home to my sister in London, covered in scribbled notes, so she could see a slice of my new life in Canada and put faces to some of the names which were featuring in my fortnightly calls home.

The margin scribbles provided colour and context, and indication of my relationship with the person: This person is in my English class. This guy is dreamy. This girl is in my dorm. He’s a good friend. She’s been nice to me. These two are an item. He plays the cello. Her mother is English. This photo is terrible. And so on.

Without the notes, the scrawls, to provide colour, it would have been just a list of names and faces, with limited interest and utility. Which is why it’s interesting to see how Facebook – the site, not the physical object – is developing beyond lists of names and faces of identifiable, casually connected classmates.

Facebook, like other identity-driven social networks, has crossed the line from being an end in itself, to being a means to an end. There comes a point within these sort of social applications, at which having a list of friends isn’t enough. What then?

I’ve got a few posts half-written on recent developments and thoughts about Facebook and social networking in general, which I’m going to try and publish over the next week or so. I’m hoping that by putting this commitment in writing, I’ll be goaded into action…

Watch this space.

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So, anyone who reads this site at meish.org rather than via the feed might have noticed (via the little speaking events chunk on the right hand side of this page) that I’m speaking at NMK Forum tomorrow. Actually, I’m participating in a panel in the morning, which wil explore the following burning questions:

How is so-called MSM (Mainstream Media) facing up to the new wave of interest in social media? Is it absorbing social media strategies or ignoring it? What does social media mean for the bottom line of big media? And how do the social media startups view their efforts?

Forum chair Mike Butcher has asked each of the panellists to provide a short positioning statement to serve as a starting point for the discussion. I decided to go for the short & sweet approach this time around, so without further ado:

New technology and community approaches are challenging and changing established media businesses to rethink the creation, consumption and curation of content – and even what content itself means in this era of user-focused, user created media. Much of what was once known and safe – The Way We’ve Always Done Things – is now ripe for reinvention, including issues of control, user engagement, distribution, monetisation and more. These are exciting – and sometimes daunting – opportunities for MSM organisations.

The other panellists are Nico MacDonald (spy.co.uk); Jem Stone (BBC Future Media & Technology); Tom Bureau (CNET Networks); Adam Gee (Channel 4 Television); Paul Pod (Tape It Off The Internet); and Ashley Norris (Shiny Media). It should be an interesting discussion in the middle of a very stimulating day.

I’m looking forward to it.

I spent last Friday at the Women, Business and Blogging conference at DMU in Leicester, at which I was giving a talk about new ways of thinking about content and publishing in the era of the social web.

My presentation essentially covered the different sorts of content activities and their established and emergent forms online.

This then provided a context for talking about…well, context, actually, as well as publishing models and control and the lack thereof.

I wound up by talking about community, and more specifically, user engagement and community management, including the ways that communities can be nurtured and supported for growth.

I found the event to be really interesting – and very stimulating to be involved with, which is always a bonus – with a rich mix of people from varying backgrounds attending, plus good opportunities for networking talking over refreshments, of which were were many. Opportunities, that is, not refreshments, though now you come to mention it…
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Tomorrow night (Thursday 10 May), I’m participating in a panel (and audience!) discussion entitled Soapboxes in cyberspace: how can the media facilitate debate online? The focus of the event will be to consider some of the challenges and (sometimes missed) opportunities for mainstream media in making (or letting?) online debate and Weblog-based commentary happen around politics and current affairs.

This is another in the series of Innovation Forum discussions initiated by Nico Macdonald, aimed at bringing together people from different disciplines to share knowledge, and I’m chuffed to be appearing alongside such an interesting bunch of people, including Lee Bryant from Headshift, Andrew Calcutt from the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies (University of East London), Daniel Mermelstein from BBC News and Olivier Creiche from Six Apart.

As many of you will know, I recently joined Guardian Unlimited as Head of Communities and User Experience, and it’s been fascinating to start understanding the many issues and opportunities that community presents to a major media organisation, as well as beginning to help others understand and make change. But it’s been equally exciting to explore how a successful online media organisation can learn from its user community.
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When The Office appeared on our screens a few years ago, I barely watched it. This is because despite there being some very perceptive – and no doubt funny – writing, Ricky Gervais makes me want to grind my teeth into sand but also, and probably more significantly it was, in some ways, too close for comfort.

The thing is, anyone having worked in an office environment, whether large or small, can identify with and recognise the reality in many of the situations it depicts – team bonding training days, bosses who want to be liked and feared at the same time. Petty workplace resentments and squabbling. It’s uncomfortable. It’s cringesome. And I haven’t been able to watch it because of that.

In a similar vein, on the recommendation of a friend and colleague, I’ve recently been reading Martin Lukes’ book, Who Moved My Blackberry, which is based on his popular and long-running Financial Times column.

Although documenting the ins and outs of someone in a much more important position in a much larger organisation than David Brent at Wernham Hogg in Slough, it is, in places, so uncannily accurate a representation of experiences I have had or heard about from friends in other companies, that I have occasionally found myself having to check the name of his company on the back of the book to confirm that no, he’s not writing about any company I know or have experienced.

In addition, so much of it – dealing with life coaches, innovation agencies, organisational consultants and global teams – is so close to the bone that it makes me have to close the book, put it down on my lap, and take a few deep breaths while looking out of the window of the bus for a bit, just to stop my blood pressure from rising.

I think it’s the buzz-words and management consulting guff that rankles me more than anything: the deliberate obfuscation of meaning and sense by burying information under piles of nonsense, wreathing knowledge and data in pointless complexity and turning everything into a powerpointable diagram or analytical framework.

Speaking of which, I’ve collected a few of bits of consultant-garbled data-free knowledge voids over the years, via contacts in many industries around the world. I thought that the “relationship jigsaw” was fairly out there, but this is my favourite (actual data removed, for obvious reasons):

Just the sort of thing that would come out of Mr Lukes’ department, I’m sure.

Don’t get me wrong: I understand that frameworks for analysis can be very useful, and as a visual thinker, I’m drawn towards explaining concepts via pens and whiteboards, as well as words. But there comes a point when the message gets lost – buried, even – under the medium.

If you are a consultant in the business of providing information, then make the provision of information the primary focus of your output, rather than demonstrating how clever you can be at dressing datapoints up so that it looks like Cheops which means you can call it “The Pyramid of Pricing” or whatever. Pur-leeese.

In some industries, the more you dress information and insight up, wrap it in frameworks and and polish it to present via powerpoint, the more valuable it is. Surely the opposite should be true? The more clear, useful and actionable information and insight is, the more it can be understood and acted upon. If time is money, then surely hours spent on templates and getting curvy lines for a speech-bubble to come from the month of a clip-art character extolling the virtues of X initiative is a criminal waste, compared to the same time being spent on actually implementing the initative?

I’m a big fan of clear communication, which includes plain english, absolutely, but also includes common sense and clarity when communicating any message: Is it clear? Is it appropriate? Do people know what you expect them to do with this information, or how they should respond?

Same with data presentations: is it clear? Does it contain an appropriate level of detail (with access to more, if required)? Does the recepient know what the point of you presenting this information is?

This latter bit is what I like to call the “so what?” Whether I’m creating a presentation or an email or an announcement, I try to think about the “so what?” factor, to make sure that there’s value there for the audience. Otherwise…well, so what?