An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

Last weekend, my younger brother graduated from Carleton College, with a B.A. in economics. Since I missed his high school graduation, I really wanted to see him graduate from college and hang out in a community I haven’t spent much time in at all, even though half of my family has lived there at some point.

What’s this community? Northfield, MN, population 17,000. Seriously. To put it in perspective… that’s just north of the number of faculty (2,500) and staff (14,000)  for the University of Texas, Austin.

Northfield’s got a few cool things going on for it:

1. Colleges: Home to St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges, Northfield seems to have a pretty good relationship with the colleges, academics, and parents that come visit. The picture above was taken from Division Street, the main street in town. Both colleges have programs that help students get active in the local community. One of my brothers worked on a project coordinating joint St. Olaf & Carleton volunteer/outreach efforts. Both schools are small liberal arts colleges and very well regarded - St. Olaf is a USNWR Top 50 National Liberal Arts College & Carleton is a Top 10.

Carleton even has an arboretum!

2. Cereal: Have you ever heard of Malt-O-Meal? Malt-O-Meal is a major employer/driver of the Northfield economy and they sell cereal in plastic bags for less money on a by-weight comparison to Post, General Mills, and others. I drove by the factory on the way to St. Olaf, and it smelled delicious. It reminded me of being a little girl and triggered a milk craving.

3. Contentment: People in Northfield are apparently happy. I don’t blame them. I’d be pretty happy too, if nice grandmotherly-types gave me flowers for driving by. Oh wait! They did!

Seriously. I was running errands, and these nice ladies gave me some potted peonies that now sit on my mom’s balcony. I gave them a hug when they wouldn’t take money.

Other random awesomeness from my trip:

To address my sociological tendencies, I also drove by Northfield’s public housing facilities. Interesting to note, they differed from other public housing facilities I’ve seen (Chester, PA & Columbia Heights, Washington, DC) in that these public housing facilities had yards with green grass instead of concrete.

Coffeeshops took cash or check. Even out of state checks. Also, wifi bandwidth was widely available and a large cup of coffee could be had for less than $2.00, including tax.

I had a great time - check out Northfield if you’re doing college visits throughout the midwest, like your coffee with plenty of bandwidth, and find yourself wondering what cereal smells like.

Or just check it out because you can or you want to.

Apologies for not blogging as much here - I’m hip-deep (knee-deep for normal heighted peoples) in a transition that keeps me hopping.

The Rumors Are True

I’m gallivanting off to Boulder. To that end, Kyle Mulka (who’s off to Ann Arbor) and I are hosting a party at The Garage in Cap Hill tomorrow night.

Date: 5/9
Start: 7:30 pm
Location: The Garage 

We hope to see you there. 

Why am I heading to Boulder? For many reasons. No 60-second soundbite (or even an 8 bit soundbyte) can explain it. Believe me, I’ve tried. 

I’ve done quantitative and qualitative analysis, made pro/con lists, and slept on it. In my reasoning and thought process, I applied a totality of the circumstances standard and decided that Boulder is where I want to be based. Going into deeper detail would result in a document about as exciting to read as a brief, so I won’t subject you to that. 

I feel incredibly blessed to be part of the Seattle Tech community. Seattle 2.0 Awards last night exemplified the strength and depth of the Seattle startup community. Dave Schappell of TeachStreet kept us laughing, Marcelo Calbucci and the rest of Seattle 2.0 kept things running smoothly. I’ll continue my work with electronic signature and contract execution service provider DocuSign & online scheduling/billing tool Divvy. 

I’ll be back and forth between Boulder and Seattle. I’ve a bit of travel planned for the rest of the summer - my brother’s graduation in Minnesota, time on the East Coast and in the Southwest reconnecting with college classmates and celebrating their life transitions, and of course, time here in Seattle. 

An heading off to Boulder is just a change. In the mean time, here’s a picture of a pony: 

thanks for flickr user swannman

In early March, I had written a post about City Planners and core competencies. The gist of the statement that inspired that post was City planners must consider the whole of a [transportation] system.

Recently, I read from the Ann Arbor Chronicle information about Ann Arbor’s City Council Meeting. This comprehensive coverage of the City’s initiatives included software:

Software

The city and county have already combined their data centers (hardware). On Monday, council authorized a contract worth $263,371 to integrate document-management software as a part of the “City/County IT Enterprise Content Management Partnership.” Based on the cost breakdowns, this particular contract appears to involve city departments.

Chronicle inquiries with the county yielded the insight that the county uses the OnBase system and that the city will be building their applications on the same technology infrastructure. This allows the city to pay for licensing, but not have to buy new servers. Descriptions of the work the individual city departments will be undertaking:

• City Attorney Scope: Implement workflow for contract tracking. Will initially use professional service contracts as the starting point. The developed process will provide visibility into where the contract is at all times. Includes eSignature process from Docusign* and full routing for approval, including external signers.
• Purchasing Scope: Requesting Accounts Payable workflow for invoice coding and approval and simple workflow for Purchase Order requests.
• Accounts Receivable Scope: For storage and retrieval of scanned or electronic documents.
• Clerk Scope: Configure OnBase to store and retrieve the following scanned  document types: Annexation, Ordinance, Council packets, Minutes  Contracts, Easements/Deeds, Liquor licenses and Traffic Control Orders.
• Project Management Scope: Replace eCabinet process and convert existing eCabinet documents to the OnBase platform.
• Assessor Scope: Bulk load of Assessor property cards into OnBase.

Kudos to Ann Arbor for online sharing of city initiatives and plans. Other information includes street closings, repavings, public art installation and more. The depth of coverage and discussion reveals some evidence of considering the whole system of IT.  I’m interested in seeing how DocuSign and OnBase work together, and if Ann Arbor uses DocuSign’s API to extend OnBase.

For now, I’m happy to see a city government sharing civic information on the Web and integrating technology into their processes to cut costs. 

*disclaimer: DocuSign is a client

What motivates you? Recently, a good friend Craig Sutton asked me: “What gets you really motivated and excited?”

I thought it a valuable question.

Why?

Motivations matter - they matter to employees, managers and leaders. Great leaders understand what motivates their team and have the ability to drive the team in the same direction. When everyone works towards a common, understood outcome, the thinking is no longer “what are my tasks?” or “what is my job?” but rather “what can I do to get us closer to achieving the desired outcome?”

This thinking is one of the reasons why kanban systems work. This thinking also enables individuals to use (and/or develop) good judgement to make decisions that move a process forward, minimizing cycle time. Autonomy in knowledge work is necessary to value creation, as much of the value comes from integrating ideas in new, innovative ways to cut costs or drive revenue. Autonomy also drives trust. Without trust, the organzation’s environment is not about cutting costs or growing revenue - it can become about fear, an unsustainable motivator.

Sustainable motivations help teams build trust, execute, and learn from their mistakes.

I ask again - what motivates you?

This is a companion piece to 10 Principles of Social Media series. This post provides a framework around understanding Free Information in the context of a private, pre-IPO/aquisition organization, Amalgamated Suckup dot com.

Company: Amalgamated Suckup dot com

Industry: Startup

Location: Anytown, US

Corporate Environment:

Amalgamated Suckup Dot Com is an organization that just closed their second round of funding and is tasked by investors to create a new widget for a market of users. The primary revenue model is contextual advertising/user data.

Situation:

The organization chart for Amalgamated Suckup Dot Com follows:

McOrg Chart courtesy of ourfounder.typepad.com

Each level of the org chart represents a gate through which information can pass, depending on the decisions made by information holders. In other words, Do I cc the whole team, or just the leads? Do I use bcc so others on the thread don’t know I’m sharing it with others?

At the bottom of each silo, you see those tasked to execute - these are the people who push the hypothetical button to create a widget.

Why were the widgets out so very different from the widget vision, widgets users wanted and used, that the VCs funded?

Analysis:

The scared and the clueless are scared and clueless due to the lack of information and/or barriers to access. They’re clueless because they don’t have the right information to make high judgement decisions. They’re scared because they’re making decisions and executing tasks on a daily basis and integrating new information is a decision about their pay grade.

They understand that they’re supposed to be making VC-funded widgets. The charts, graphs and managers all say that the market will love widgets and their options will be worth something.

What if customer service learns that the extra ‘e’ is problematic and that users really want widgts? Do they, can they tell marketing and product development? What if marketing realizes that widgts can be used to address users’ needs in a very different way than originally thought? What if producing widgts cost 1/7 of the cost of production for widgets?

What would happen if it were easier for customer service to talk to marketing and product development?

Social media provides another pathway for information sharing within the organization. Information sharing will enpower people to make better decisions on what work to do, how to do their work and move product. Employees feel good about their work, users love the product, VCs make their money and everyone is happy.

Read more about Amalgamated Suckup on Jim Benson’s blog, Evolving Web.

This post is the third in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

Having discussed information evaluation in Information Wants to be Free, this discussion of findability expands via discussion of content creation.  

Findability is Power:

Without findability, the information’s ability to provide and create value is greatly diminished.

Search (and searchability) gets us only partially there. Searchability, in this context, is an attribute of a piece of content (text, video, sound and so forth) that means it can be indexed such that when a user uses a search engine to ask for information, content with relevant information is returned.

For example, I needed my mother’s address and asked my younger brother to email it to me. He sent:

Searchable Email?

The information sought came without a subject, without a city, without a state, without context. Even with Gmail’s search, this particular content is not highly searchable because I’d have to remember my mother’s street, house number, or apartment number.

Great. Even if there were more information such that I could search “mom’s address” or “address MN” and have it return my mother’s address, the information isn’t necessarily findable.  In the above email, I can very quickly find the information I’m seeking. The nformation sought, while not highly searchable, is highly findable.

What if the needed information was buried in a 1,000 word email? Maybe there’s important information there, maybe there isn’t. The email is easy to search, but the information may be hard to find.

Social media tools such as Twitter, Slideshare, and Facebook enable users to find information by helping users connect with each other. While Google, Yahoo and Live Search still serve valuable content, social media tools facilitate connecting, crowdsourcing and community and provide another avenue to augment available information and add more value by introducing other ideas and perspectives.

Food for Thought - Social Media from An Bui

Jim Benson and I spent this morning discussing Principles of Social Media. Throughout the course of the morning, the list went from 10 to 13 before we folded various thoughts into the others to make room for the thoughts resulting from my feedback.

Moving forward, Jim will discuss each principle in turn and I’ll be offering my thoughts in response or conjunction with his.

My approach to social media considers information and relationship hiearchy and prioritization, so that you can make decisions that are optimal for you, given desired impact, value and the constraints of life/business.

Jim says:

These principles help us communicate and relate better. With these principles we can establish networks and understand our place in them. These principles give coherence to the creation and exchange of value. All of these help us build better communities and working relationships.

These principles help us communicate and relate better to each other and surface ideas, thoughts, formulations we find interesting and that we can build upon. Quick iteration of ideas plays like a high speed game of telephone. As they spread, the value proposition changes, with new (or more) information. The ability to make optimal decisions (and what those decisions are) also changes.

My interpretation of the principles follow, in a different order of importance:

1. Decentralization is freedom: Freedom enables us to pursue our thoughts and interests in a social space. Thus decentralization is of primary value.

2. Information wants to be free: The cost of obtaining information is rapidly declining, but still capable of providing and creating value. Freedom is necessary for free information.

3. Findability is power: Without findability, the information’s ability to provide and create value is greatly diminished.

4. Karma is real: The more you give, the more you get. You just don’t know what at the point at which you’re giving.

5. Rules beget rules: At some point, organization happens so that common understanding of interactions are possible.

6. Economies have currencies: Trade is possible with Karmic infrastructure and rules of engagement.

7. Communication is blood: Communication is the transport mechanism for information flow.

8. Immediacy in all things: Acting on new, validated information when appropriate moves things forward more quickly than before.

9. Context is fluid: Things change more often, as does your frame of reference. Think about the information you have at various points and look at developments along a continuum.

10. Associations are inherently good:
I’m not sure I believe that they are inherently good. I’m leaning towards associations are agnostic - it’s the value you add that make them good.

Note: I’m using principle in the philosophic sense, to guide my thinking about social media and by extension, digital culture.

Data fascinates me - at any given moment in time, I’m processing a multitude of information from my physical and digital environments. Sometimes these worlds overlap. When this happens, the information relevance stems from context.

What is context? Context is the space, role, and place in my life of related information. For example, I talk a lot. I talk a lot about companies, productivity, Twitter, value and qwitter. I care about community, relationships and social media. The multiple (and some would argue redundant) social media tools I use to integrate physical and digital worlds provide meaningful data because the communities from which this information comes tells me about exchange constraints and the information source. Likely, I’ll think about 140 characters from a tweet differently than I’ll think about a 140 word blog post differently than I’ll think about a 140 word comment. I’ll consider other easily accessible information when processing the information provided.

I can minimize points of misunderstanding by having redundant, related information attached to geographic places that I relate to by virtue of professional or personal roles in my life that is temporal and spatial. For example, if I were still living on the East Coast and talking about a short, weekend trip to Portland, is that Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon?

Would your answer change if you knew that I had an older sister (with whom I enjoy a close relationship) living in Portland, Oregon and no relationship to anyone in the state of Maine?

Would your answer change if you knew that I were dealing with a personally challenging experience and felt incredibly overwhelmed?

Ok, enough about the hypotheticals - to get to the point:
What I fail to understand is how brand managers or evangelists can fail to link their companies’ products or services to each touch with a consumer or user. By dropping this link in interactions, consumers/users lose context behind the interaction and derive less meaning and value from both the interaction and the product. SnagIt’s Betsy Weber will always have a place in my heart because she’s an awesome person who lets me know to let her know if I have problems with SnagIt. She’s also interesting - she travels, lives in the midwest, shares her life with me. I don’t abuse my access to her because of context. I have an arm’s length, personal relationship with her and that’s enough for me to understand why she reaches out to me and engages me about the product. She doesn’t abuse my ear with shameless self-promotion because of context. Understanding that value makes me want to share this story.

Brand isn’t what you’re saying about yourself. It’s what others are saying about you.

Thanks to Jim Benson, for providing the conversation that sparked these thoughts on context. Read his thoughts on context on his blog, Evolving Web.

Tonight I talked to an old friend from undergrad, Ryan Croken, about the construction of the online identity. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a few days - there’s quite a bit of literature about the construction of gender, masculine, and feminine identities, but how much is out there about the online identity?

How should we even look at online identity? Does each distinct social networking site/application equal a distinct online identity, even if the creator/owner of the account is one person (ie, Are my twitter, facebook, digg, pownce, whrrl, and all like services separate online identities for me)? What about multiple accounts on the same service, but for different audiences or purposes (ie, personal or professional accounts)? Does your online identity derive from the aggregation of the accounts you control or does it come from Google search results?

Ryan was kind enough to share with me his notes/response paper he wrote for Professor Ken Gergen’s class while at Swarthmore. My first thought - “Looks like a blog post.”

This post? A response to Ryan’s thoughts he so generously shared with me. I look forward to reading and responding to your thoughts.