Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers delivered a presentation at LIFT on a topic that's close to my heart: the future of work, exploring new forms of self-organizing "unorganizations" of creative free agents. Of course, I've been thinking about similar issues as I consider how to scale Remarkk! Consulting, so I took particular interest and had a great conversation with the guys over fondue. (which, btw, is the best part of LIFT!) Friebe's book, Wir nennen es Arbeit ("We call it work") is a bestseller in Germany that has been described as "youth economic manifesto". They organized a conference in Berlin also called Wir nennen es Arbeit Festival-Camp, which looked like tremendous fun and is possible inspiration for a Toronto FreeAgentCamp or Future of Work conference. These guys apparently invented Powerpoint Karaoke (fact check anyone?), and put on events like a poetry slam with sms voting and electro-shock feedback. They are looking to develop coworking spaces to accommodate their starfish adhocracy.  This is not your father's creative agency. Presentation notes after the jump... Notes: Digital Bohemia: The end of work as we know it; people want to work in new structures; how do you integrate individuals with strong sense of self-determination, people fed up with hierarchies; The Penguin Paradox. Their "company" is called Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (Central Intelligence Agency) which they describe as "a capitalist-socialst joint venture, designed to establish new forms of collaboration". People are contributing in Berlin and around the world. They described the operating principles with seven (or so) rules. Seven Rules: Rule 1, The 7 Nos - No office. No employees. No fixed costs. No pitches. No exclusivity (company doesn't own your life). No working hours (results only). No bullshit. Rule 2: Work-Work Balance - balance projects for clients with your passion projects, given equal priority and attention. Rule 3: Instant Gratification - profit immediately with work; no salaries, billable time/project, always keep 10% of profit for the company for play money; pay bills immediately as well Rule 4: Pluralism of Methods - tech solutions for social problems, use online tools for collaboration; Skype, Google calendar, Google Docs Rule 5: Fixed Ideas - live up to your intellectual obsessions and dark desires at work; take them seriously; don't be afraid to offend people; Rule 6: Responsibilities Without Hierarchies - each project as to have one person incharge, but it can be anybody; beginning of year retreat in the country; rethink the business model; sift through projects and leaders take them on; Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination - don't try to be too efficient; good deas will adapt and catch on, even if you neglect them for a while; they have to ripen; there is a natural Darwinism of ideas Rule 7.5: Marketing by Feuilleton - no adverstising, no PR; do something interesting and press coverage will be yours; they get coverage in the culture section Conclusion - A Hedonistic Company not only changes the nature of work, it shifts the domain of that work.

Lifters underground at CERN, originally uploaded by Kooze.

I had a fascinating tour of the Large Hedron Collider at CERN on Saturday. This was one of the last opportunities for members of the public to get inside this amazing, mind-boggling project probing the frontiers of physics and our understanding of the universe before it gets switched on this summer. Something to tell the grandkids.

Our guide Bilge Demirköz is a research fellow at CERN who is searching for evidence of dark matter. She gave a tour through not only the facility, but also across the history of particle physics through 30 Nobel prizes. Her passion for the subject was infectious, as you could sense the excitement of scientific exploration at the frontiers.

Pedro Custodio did a great workshop, an "Online Communities Clinic". Good material, really solid foundation for thinking about and planning user interactions for online communities. Once the slides are on Slideshare I'll update this post and embed. (If you want to see them when uploaded, leave a comment on this post.)

My rough notes follow after the jump....

Overview

Communities need to bring together a unity of goals and actions; they should display internal policies that guide social behaviour; online communities lay on top of computer systems that support the social interaction

Communities necessarily have boundaries; something ambiguous will not be joined; although it is necessary to have boundaries, those boundaries need to be permeable to encourage adoption and movement/adaptability

Online communities architecture:

virtual space -> user interaction -> virtual community -> information

Users Profiling:

Visitors - start as observers
Consumer - as interest raises, so does the involvment at tthis point users
Member - fully active, producing materials, engaging and helping others

Sort communities by kind of Interaction:

Low social interaction - users only interact with the platform, not with each other: e.g. Digg, Last.fm
Built upon "products" - Flickr, YouTube, Threadless - because of the tool, not the users
Highly collaborative communities - real-world communities, moving online for some reason,

...by level of Commitment:

Communities of interest; very specific; will not be active for your whole life, but will join when you need it
Communities of passion; subtype of interest,
Communities of purpose; common short-term goal; afterwards it will dissolve
Communities of practice;

Better Usability means Better Communities? Not only user-centered interfaces...we need community centered interfaces! Need to plan ahead for the behaviour

Communities are conversations; so look for Conversational Maxims; Apply the same ground rules that run daily interactions in real life:

Quantity - the amount of information that each party should provide; should limit how users interact; length and frequency of posts
Quality - deals with truth and authenticity; credit and reference to expertise
Relation - relevancy of participation
Communicate in a fast and reliable way: post message, was it delivered?
Interface should be as transparent as possible; the tool mediates, but it shouldn't get into the way
Allow user to cancel

Community Design Pattern Types:

1. Community support - sustains the community itself
2. Group support
3. Communication support
4. Awareness - perception of the others, part of something bigger

Community Support Patterns:

Quick Registration: as quick and lightweight as possible, very important for them to enter quickly to evaluate the community; but still protect the community from strangers; leave profile info as a later process, noncontingent; need to track the process in order to identify dropouts; PROBLEMS - fear of commitment, because trust has not been established; BOTs are problematic - Catchas, email verification;

Login: force users to identify themselves before using/entering the community; easy recovery mechanisms

Welcome Area: list new members of a community and present them to other members, ensuring that new members won't go unnoticed; e.g. email communities, introduce themselves to each other; USE WHEN: a long-standing community who know each other very well, large collective history, subgroups inside the larger community, resistance to entrance of new members; PROBLEMS: newcomers may not want to attract so much attention at first; veterans have to be made sensitivie;

User Profile: virtual presentation; a personality and skills aggregator; the bridge between the real and the virtual individual representing the user across all interactions with the community; Digital Identity Mapping image - FredCavazza.net;

User Gallery: USE WHEN: hesitation on first contacts, hard to remember who's a member of a community; you know their names, but want to know more about them; PROBLEMS: must be searchable, carefully balance amount of public information without further involvement or identification (user levels-> information levels)

Buddy Lists: friends list is the new centre of the universe; "through others I define myself"; "Tell me who you go out with, and I'll tell you who you are!";

Group Support Patterns:

Groups: need ways to form, short-term and long-term communications; shared repositories; group awareness - feeling of being part of something; E.g. Flickr - friends or family, that's it; USE WHEN: send out multiple artifacts to same users multiple times; select multiple users before interactions; users don't clearly know who they interact with; PROBLEMS: by interacting with groups of users, one might not develop group awareness - no awareness outside the ; additional workload for users; group create strong borders within the community; group moderation;

Invitations: allow user to plan interaction with others; PROBLEMS: time to turnaround; rejection fear; need to sort out

Shared Editing: allow users to edit simultaneous user of data/documents; USE WHEN: need for collaborative editing; missing group collaboration in context of isolated user actions; PROBLEMS: single-user applications don't help collaborative environments; WYSIWIS - what you see is what I see

Reputation and Differentiation: metrics to store reputation, a projection of their status; users with more friends, more photos, more music;

Messaging: provide ability for direct messages within community

Chat: allow users to communicate synchronously; if messages aren't being responded to quickly;

Comments: on specific artifacts; not a message to you in particular, to the community about an artifact;

Forums/Blogs: provide means for persistent, asynchronous conversations; important role for newcomers, a way to learn about the community; persistent nature of the community;

Patterns for Awareness:

Overview: Give users a sense of the other; understanding or realizing the others' activities; communities with high awareness are highly collaborative; creates the feeling that there are many others, than they are; you are just a dot, but you're not alone

Neighbours: proximity pattern; providing information about user's interactions with the platform; Last.fm - people who played similar music; keyword discovery for people you want to meet; Proximity: six degrees of separation concept;

Interactive user Info: make information about others users clickable and connect it with means of communication; quick action spots

Activity Logs: record information about users activity; most famous - Wikipedia tracked changes; memory; users don't have a lot of time, can't be on all the time; need a reminder of what's been happening; merging past and present activities it's hard; scale - ensure many users can update simultaneously; ensure users know what activity is tracked

Timeline: e.g. Facebook news feed;

Period Reports: inform users at regular intervals of relevant changes/actions; weekly what happened in the community - brief;

Aliveness Indicator: show an indicator on the virtual environment that reflects user's activity

Conclusions:

It is about identity; the more I know about the others, the more I feel engaged in/by the community; Features for more advanced users will scare off less advanced users; overlap the experience level profile with the adoption of the features; Foster personalization, production and sharing of content; Plan the social interactions

Scalable Platforms: Can never know when your community will explode; can't predict; development, support, moderation; Open and well documented APIs; the Social Graph;

Pleased with the validation of having our TransitCamp article published in Harvard Business Review (co-authored by Eli, Jay and I), we were looking for ways to continue to develop the TransitCamp community from that first event exactly 1 year ago. We wanted to spread the idea far and wide. Well, it looks like we'll have our wish - and on a bigger scale than we were imagining. On the anniversary of the first TransitCamp, I am excited to announce that Remarkk! Consulting, working with a stellar cast from the TransitCamp and OpenCities communities, has been engaged by Metrolinx (aka, the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) in order to adapt and extend the TransitCamp community across the vast city-region of the GTA and Hamilton and from transit into all aspects of integrated regional mobility, including roads, bike routes and pedestrian experiences. What is TransitCamp? TransitCamp is a solutions playground, not a complaints department. TransitCamp is an open creative community. As described in the Harvard Business Review article [Sick Transit Gloria], we will use open source tools (including unconferences) to bring together community members from across the GTA and Hamilton to participate in intense, participatory and fun face-to-face and online happenings to reimagine the future of the region’s transportation system. This will be, above all, a community-led experience. While we are helping to build the platforms, it is people passionate about transit and transportation issues in the region who will provide the content. We were delighted to discover that Rob MacIsaac, Chair of Metrolinx and the Metrolinx planning and communications staff are open to new ideas and approaches. The community will have an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to the future of the region in a very tangible way. Metrolinx is responsible for developing an integrated Regional Transportation Plan in 2008 and is the Ontario government agency responsible for deploying at least $17 billion in new capital to projects across the region. But this is a Camp, so it's not all serious. We're also going to have a lot of Campy fun. There will be accordions and chickens and other mayhem. When is the next TransitCamp? No date has been set just yet, but we would like to have the next TransitCamp in March. Watch this space! We are planning a series of TransitCamps across the GTA, so we can look forward to doing more than just one event over the coming months. How do you get involved?

1. Join the TransitCamp Google Group. You will receive updates from the organizers, and also be able to join the discussion and participate in the design of the unconference experience. (Twitterers can follow here. You can also join the Facebook group.)
2. Read about the original TransitCamp experience from February 2007. There are many links of interest on this wiki page.
3. Check out the Regional Transportation Plan papers on the Metrolinx site and start imagining the future.
4. Participate!

What does participation mean? Help us design the events and the online community spaces and help fill them with your aspirations, ideas and passions. Tell us what you would like to do together as a community. You can leave comments on this blog post, or start a thread on the Google Group, or blog about it, share videos, photos - express yourself! (tag: transitcamp). If TransitCamp is a solutions playground, every game on the playground needs basic rules so that the participants can have the best play possible. What kinds of games would you design? Who is already involved? Eli Singer; Jay Goldman; Sean Howard; Misha Glouberman; Michele Perras; Daniel Rose; David Eaves; Mark Surman; David Crow; Jed Kilbourn (don't worry, we'll get him a blog soon); and soon many others.... FAQ Links: What is an unconference? Why "unconferences" are fun conferences What is a wiki?

torontotransitcamp, transitcamp

Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

For TransitCampers out there, here's a shout out to the prolific and knowledgeable transit blogger Steve Munro at stevemunro.ca:

January 31, 2006 saw the first post on this blog, a retrospective of my Film Festival reviews from years past. That was something just to get the wheels turning, and the reviews took a back seat to transit right from the start. Over two years, this site became an important venue for discussions about many aspects of transit planning, operations and funding, not to mention the odd flight of fancy. All of this could not happen without the readers and contributors to the site. [From Steve Munro’s Web Site » Blog Archive » Two Years]