Elmine standing on the Wii Fit plate, and callibrating it.

The Wii Fit is a pressure sensitive plate that you stand on, and connects to the Wii gaming console. It senses changes in your posture by changes in the pressure your feet (or hands when doing push ups) give to the plate. For running excercises you do not use the plate, but put a Wiimote in your pocket. The sensors in it are used to determine your running rhythm and pace. What the Wii Fit and the software it includes do is bring back play into moving and excercizing. Just a it was when you were a little kid. You weren't running because you needed to run, you ran because you were playing.

In general I think these type of interfaces such as the Wii offers are a very interesting development, helping digital information to break out of the laptop screen and key board and become a more integral part of our physical surroundings. Other branches of the same tree in that respect are certain mobile applications, ambient devices, 'roomware' and internet 0 nodes as well as RFID applications. It makes me wonder what Johnny Chung Lee will do with this Wii Fit, having seen what uses he puts the Wiimote to.

It will be different to visit the city without going there for Reboot (which will be in June again, and which Elmine and I will be certain to attend). We visited Copenhagen in 2003 for our summer vacation, and enjoyed the yearly Jazz Festival there. After that Copenhagen and Reboot have been synonymous for me. But not this week.

If I haven't been in touch with you through e-mail, but you would like to catch up on Saturday 29th or Sunday 30th in Copenhagen, let me know.

(The picture was taken in 2003, in the city center.)

How I filter information
For my information gathering I have two lenses. Back in September 2005, I wrote about my filtering, and created this illustration, that is still valid:

The first lens is the outside-in lens, on the left of the funnel. The second one is my inside-out lens, and is directed by specific questions and tasks I have at a certain point in time. My RSS reading serves both lenses. The outside-in in real time (what is going on now), the inside-out mostly through searching in the archives or full text search in the current items. All my RSS feeds are people-based. I e.g. subscribe to your blog feed, delicious feed, Flickr pics, and other feeds that contain your personal on-line traces. I rename all those feeds to start with your name. From it I construct an overview of what is happening in the circles and communities I am part of.

Current feedreader organization
In my feedreader, I have grouped all feeds in to only a few sections. One for 'Dutch context', one for 'German context', one for ' Keeping track' which collects all internet traces I leave myself (self reflection as it were), one for clients, and one 'all' which contains the long list of people writing stuff I usually find worthwile. All in all I track maybe about 300-400 people, though it fluctuates over time.

My wiki may point the way
In the wiki I use on my laptop for personal note taking I also keep pages of people, where I write down some of the context we share. Where we met, the type of exchanges we've had in the past, and where they're from. I have about 240 people in my wiki, largely different from the ones in my feed reader. The way I categorize them is what is of interest here. I put the people pages in my wiki in circles based on social distance. These circles are roughly based on Dunbars number and 'natural' group sizes. As you can see in the screenshot below I have circles / categories for 1 (meaning <12), 12 (<50), 50 (<150), 150 (<1000), and 999 (>1000) where the number in the category name is sort of the minimal social distance I 'feel'. Remember: this is not exact science, it is just an approximation of my own intuitions. It means nothing more, but nothing less either.

If you were to draw these circles as a social networking graph, you would get what in SNA terms is called a network of spokes. Me in the centre with connections radiating out.

Tags or folders to add contexts
To be able to not only look at my social network (as an information filter) from the above perspective, i.e. me at the heart of several circles, I need to be able to add contexts. Single facet contexts like 'my old fraternity', 'people working at client x', 'living in or around Berlin', as well as multi-faceted contexts like 'coders in Amsterdam', 'Drupal community members in Germany', 'coders in Ruby on Rails', 'start-ups around mobile applications', ' stakeholders around client system x'. The former would form community 'blobs' on my circles above. The latter would add spider-networks to it.

Adding the single faceted contexts could be easily done by splitting feeds into folders, or rather allowing the same feed to be in multiple folders. The multi-faceted contexts can not be done with folders I'd say, but need some sort of tagging, where you can filter on combinations of tags to get the context you need. Like drupal+Germany, to give me people working on Drupal, based in Germany. Tags can of course also replace any folder structure completely.

Inside-out and Outside-in
As I said, all the usual feedreading is for outside-in information-filtering. To get a feeling what is happening in the world of people that mean something to me in one context or another. For finding answers to my own current questions, information pertaining to current tasks, or refinding links to things I want to point to in what I share on-line myself, I like to use an archive on my laptop. Insdie-out information filtering then amounts to full-text searches on that archive. Also because I spend a lot of my reading and writing time off-line e.g. in the train, I like my feedreader to store stuff off-line. Therefore on-line feedreaders are not a workable option for me.

Finding the right RSS reader
Now I can start out with arranging my feeds in my feedreader (currently using Vienna) according to the circles of social distance shown above, but tags and one feed being able to live in multiple folders is a different thing. Do you know about an off-line feedreading client that provides these functionalities (one feed in multiple folders and tagging, or at least tagging)?

The full title of my topic was "The tools I need/want but that don't exist yet, or I am unaware of."

I started with a sketch of the three major quantitative changes I see.
First an increase in connections between people (induced by new global infrastructure like mobile telephony and internet).
Second, an increase in speed and dynamics (when you build roads, you create traffic)
Third an increase in information until the level of abundance.

As our previous strategies to deal with connections, speed and information don't scale into a networked globalized world, we see qualitative answers emerging.

Those qualitative answers are along the lines of:
First a more pro-active attitude, making your own sense of the world.
Second different priorities in existing and new information skills.
Third, new tools and work forms that cater to a pro-active attitude, and different information skills.

The shift I see, also in working with clients, away from the Web 2.0 avant garde, is to a higher level of cooperation: networked co-creation. Here I quoted Ivan Labra from his talk at BarCamp Brussels, where he distinguishes three maturity levels (sharing information, coordinating tasks, co-creation).

When I look at what this requires to build effective working routines, I see things like:
Pattern recognition, and taking those patterns as input signals.
Being human on-line: more subtle and granular negotiation of trust levels and intimacy in information exchanges.
Visualisation: what is the quality of my social network as a filter, where are the white-spots, echo-chambers, dark zones.
True co-creation: simultaneous editing, re-arranging and adding, in real-time.

What resulted was a good conversation, in which others gave some tips and pointers to tools that might provide buidling blocks (though most were familiar). Yahoo Pipes, Megite, Quartz, APML and Open Search were among those mentioned.

I also noted in this conversation how deeply ingrained a notion it is that we look at information piece-meal. Where my point is, that I don't look at individual information pieces when I want to get a feeling for what is happening in my communities. I look at what they are talking about, not what they are saying immediately. When I have a specific question to answer, then I do read individual items/entries that look to provide parts of the answer.

My main take-away however was the realization, in line with the needed pro-active attitude mentioned above, that I need to dig into this deeper myself. Have a dive into sources on data-mining and into the pointers given.

It also triggered me to think about redesigning the way I gather and combine my RSS feeds. That is the topic for the next posting.

More pics of BarCamp Amsterdam can be found in my Flickr stream, and some video's I life-streamed with my phone are at my Qik account.

When I talk to teachers they sometimes think that making learning fun means making it simpler, dumbed down. Once I heard one say learning had to 'hurt a lot' for it to stick.

To me adapting teaching to our networked information-abundant world means making it fun, challenging, and relevant to me instantly. I've never equated fun with easy. Fun just means the learning process is more engaging, easier to stick to, not that the content is of less quality or less challenging. The work done in Umea is a case in point.

(found via the HumLab blog)

But the bigger point behind these Moo Cards is that
1) they build on my own production (my Flickr pics), making it more personal and meaningful
2) they turn my photos into tangible/physical products thus taking digital stuff into the physical realm
3) they create unique items (100 different cards) for a very reasonable amount (15 euros), where we've become accustomed to equating unique with pricy.

I am excited about getting my Moo Cards because it will help engage clients, colleagues and others less aware of what kind of changes Web2.0 is an expression of. I will use them as my business cards. Each unique cards has a story attached to the picture it shows, a personal story. Something you never have with other cards. The card is smaller than usual, but they will remember it better. I bet.

(these are the 100 pics the cards have been printed from)

My Qik profile page

Registering: your phone put in the centre
Registering for Qik was easy: leave your phone number on the site. I soon got an SMS inviting me to download and install Qik on my phone. Downloading didn't start however. Some real time e-mail exchanges with the dev support people (Qik is California based) helped sort that out, by them adapting the download procedure right there and then. Once downloaded installing was easy, and ended with asking me to create a short video there and then. After making the video I received another SMS with the login info to the site.

I thought that was clever, as it makes sure only people who have installed the application as well as used it at least once, in the end have an active account. Certainly in an alpha testing phase that makes sense.

First user experiences
Streaming video works ok, primarily if you use a wifi connection on your phone. GPRS won't cut it in terms of bandwith, but faster internet connections on your phone do work. Although it delays the streaming a lot at this point. (Taking several minutes to stream a 50 second item). Streaming via wifi is indeed live streaming (with only seconds delay) and works the best by far.

Videos can be embedded of course (as a channel too), linked to directly and also downloaded:

Like I said, the videos get piped into Seesmic as well, if you wish

Other products in the same field
Qik of course is not the only one looking into live streaming video from your phone. There are more.

For instance there is Livecastr (described here on TechCrunch) which is Amsterdam based (and hence generated my interest). Their site however feels all wrong to me (no community, no interaction, just promotion, it looks fake), and the number of questions I needed to answer to register for a beta were a fatal put-off. Especially unanswerable (in some meaningful way at least) questions like "Which community site are you member?" (even ignoring the english) and "How do you plan to use LiveCastr" (emphasis mine) which to me shows a complete lack of understanding in how people acquire and explore the use of a new tool they never saw before. Especially if asked before even seeing anything of the tool. Ask me after having tested something for a while, not at a point where it only serves as a barrier to entry.

And there is Sweden based Bambuser.com, which looks a whole lot better on their site than LiveCastr. Haven't got an invitation to test yet, though. Looking forward to have a closer look at them soon.

Kitchen session at the first Amsterdam BarCamp (and the 2nd BarCamp ever) (more pics)

What is on the menu at this third Amsterdam BarCamp?
First of all there will be a follow-up session of the Federating Social Networks session held last December. That will spill over in a full-blown BarCamp where the agenda of course is set by those attending.

I think I will do something on how web2.0 tools may be more useful in making sense of the world around you. Part of that is the way I'd like federating social network sites to work (taking me, not the networking site as the crucial element). Another part is how I actually build a socially filtered learning environment (aka connectivism) from my Web2.0 tools and what that means for the design and development of those tools. A continuation of my contributions at Barcamps in Brussels and Vienna really.

Interested in learning at and contributing to (which are essentially sides of the same coin) BarCamp Amsterdam? Make yourself known (here or here) and see you there! (Or find out about an upcoming BarCamp near you)

Apparantly some people at Schiphol Airport, airline KLM's home base, are worried/curious about the fall-out of this report.

In my serverlogs this morning:

a) visit from a KLM server.

b) via a Google search on Schiphol Security

c) finding a blogpost of mine as the 3rd hit

d) talking about how they overlooked a screw driver in my carry-on bag in 2006

Funny.

The group of 15 participants are alle involved in realigning the teaching at their institute to the digital reality their students are living in.

We created the workshop, starting from the notion that in order to be able to change their teaching, the teachers need to feel what networked learning can be for themselves. If you can feel it for yourself, you will be better able to transfer that knowledge to colleagues and engage students.

Changing Behaviour of Youth
We started with a short theoretical introduction, repeating the to the participant familiar notions of Wim Veen's Homo Zappiens, and 'Generation Einstein'. Both describe how the lives of young people have changed, under the influence of digital networked technology.
What young people are doing is intuitively responding to their given surroundings. So what is their behaviour an answer to?

I see three quantitative shifts, that trigger a change in behaviour.
Those three, mutually connected, quantitative shifts are

1) increase in connections between people (due to network infrastructure like internet and mobile telephony)
2) increase in speed and speed of change (where there are more roads, there will be more traffic. Where there are more connections, there will be more exchanges. We built highways and cities for exactly the same purpose)
3) increase in volume of information (extra connections, create extra exchanges, along multiple paths and channels)

Quantative Shifts Lead to Qualitative Answers
The point is that above a certain point, quantitative changes cannot be answered with the same existing strategies. At some point conventional strategies stop scaling. The quantitative shifts reach a qualitative tipping point.

Three qualitative answers to these quantitative are:
1) A more pro-active personal role (as sense maker, as producer and consumer, as pattern-hunter, active sharing)
2) A different set of information skills (pattern recognition, social filtering, validation/authentication and evaluation skills)
3) A different set of tools (web2.0, social software) and work forms (open space, communities of practice, networked organisations)

Our youth have stumbled upon aspects of these qualitative answers, using the tools they find available. It is important to note here that this does not necessarily mean a technological or digital answer. The same effects are visible off-line, in other aspects of our lives.

Being pro-active, using network skills, and networked tools, also changes the way we learn and handle knowledge. This is where George Siemens's Connectivism comes in. He positions knowledge as being connected, and learning as building new networks of meaning, adding connections.
This has a systemic impact on education, turning it into optimizing the value of those networks of meaning.

After this more theoretical framework, it was time to take a look at how an average working day looks for me, and how being continuously networked is having an effect on how I make sense of the world, work and learn.
This makes the theoretical framework more tangible, and also introduces the use of social software / web2.0 tools.

Building Your Own Socially Filtered Learning Environment
The rest of the day (actually most of it) were spend first at familiarizing the participants with a number of tools and second at building a starting point for a personal networked, socially filtered, information environment. We listed 8 steps for this:

1 Connecting within tools (participants adding eachother to their buddy lists in different tools, this time primarily delicious.)
2 Creating a dashboard (in this case Netvibes or iGoogle)
3 Adding theme based feeds to your dashboard
4 Adding your buddies from the tools in Step 1 to your dashboard
5 Finding and adding people through themes
6 Finding and adding people through people
7 Actively sharing what you find
8 Actively sharing your own opinions, annotating your finds

Key point here is that sharing is a prerequisite to be visible to your network peers. If you don't share you don't exist.

It was a good and intensive day. We did not succeed in completing the entire programme we had planned, but I think we did get the main points across. We hope that the participants will be able to use the workshop as a starting point for building their personal learning network.

The sheets we used during the workshop (in Dutch but with lots of images):

| View | Upload your own

My life as a self-employed consultant started with a little trip to Paris. There I attended our yearly winter-session of the Medinge Group, a think-tank on humanistic and ethical branding I am part of. It was a very inspiring trip, because of meeting my fellow Medingites, but also because I have never been to Paris before. It is a beautiful but fast paced city. (for the photo's see the Medinge set and Paris set on Flickr)

Apart from working in the background on launching a 'business' website, and modernizing my blogs somewhat, building new networks and connections, and other tasks that come with starting your own business, I am involved in a number of client projects. These projects ensure that my schedule is virtually full at least untill the summer.

What am I working on?
For a higher-ed institution I am working on designing a community of practice in which teachers explore ways of adapting their teaching to the new digital realities their students are living in. The project is aimed at increasing professional development. This is a project that will run through the entire year.

Also, together with Elmine, we will be giving a day long workshop on networked learning (a la George Siemens), where together with a group of higher-ed teachers we help them start their own social network based information and learning filter. I am looking forward a lot to doing this one!

For a department of the Ministry of Housing I am part of a project team helping a community of practice getting of the ground. For the Ministry of Transport I will be supporting anchoring knowledge oriented attitudes and processes in a newly formed organisational unit of several hundred people. Both projects will run well into the summer of this year, both build on the core of my KM expertise.

Then there is a newly formed research consortium on deploying social software behind the firewall I will be joining. The consortium otherwise consists of a number of universities and research institutes, as well as a multinational and a big international bank. Potentially a three year thing.

And finally, a project dear to me, I am working with Delft University and ten primary schools from my home region, on adapting lessons to 11 and 12 year olds to their digitally enabled lives. This is part research, looking at what kids that age do with technology, and how it changes their way of working and learning, and part consulting, translating the research into practice. Scheduled untill June.

Knowledge work, learning and social software are key elements, just as I like it, in all these projects.

Does it feel good? Yes, it does. Very much so.

First day as an independent consultant: Medinge Group meet-up in Paris.

The day focuses on what it actually takes to work as an independent, operating in a network of your peers. What it means to be independent in a connected world (which I have been calling interdependent since I started this blog)

Different people like Stephanie herself, our friend Martin Roell, the fun and challenging Stowe Boyd, and Suw Charman, will share their experiences. Since June last year on a little list for independent social software consultants in Europe we have been exchanging these experiences, and those have been very worthwile conversations. It helped me a lot in taking the step to going solo, as I did last month. So I am sure the conference will be worth a visit.

Going solo, or already went solo? See if you can add Lausanne to your schedule in May.
(See Upcoming and Facebook as well)

GTD, what it does
GTD is about making lists, more effective lists, to manage your time/life better.
The biggest benefit in GTD, as I understand it, is in not asking you to attach priorities or times to activities in your list, as time management systems generally do. It assumes that once you have good lists you will know what to do, based on time and energy available, as well as your own sense of urgency. This is a true diamond, as it trusts you to be human, and doesn't demand the conveyor belt mindless behaviour other time management systems ask for ("once you have the right list, you're on mindless autopilot")

The other big benefit of GTD is its multiple feedback loops. The short one, shared with other time management systems, informing you about tasks, and tasks that are waiting for someone else. The longer feedback loop(s), the reviews, allow you to step away from the task units, and look at your goals if they are still valid, and if your tasks still serve those goals. This helps you prevent to be running because you are busy, without knowing why you're busy and what it's all for. Doing good reviews (both back and forward looking, so review is a partly misleading term), and doing them regularly however is not easy.

GTD, what it does not
The biggest problem of GTD is that it is based on lists. Because list making is an old and time-honoured information strategy. GTD in essence says: if your inbox and the amount of tasks is growing and your life is getting more complicated make better lists.

That amounts to, when someone does not understand you, repeating yourself saying it LOUDER. In stead of choosing different words to convey your message. GTD is trying to apply the list making strategy better, in response to a failing list making strategy.

However when I see what I and others are trying to do with GTD it is navigating an increasingly fragmented and complex environment. The root causes are quantitative rises in the connections between people (small world), the speed of change (world becoming a metropole), and the amount of information (information abundance). The internet, and other preceding media, as infrastructure play a very big role in these quantitative shifts.

Quantitative changes, qualitative answers
These quantitative shifts are by necessity begetting qualitative answers, because conventional methods (like making lists) stop scaling. Web2.0 tools have some of those qualitative answers (active sharing and sense making, social relations as information filter, networks of meaning) as design principles. Other qualitative answers are becoming part of our information skills (pattern recognition, knowing when to stay focussed amidst distraction, knowledge as being connected/networked, learning as building networks).

I find I apply those qualitatively different information strategies before I can get to the level of things where GTD lists make sense. I hunt for patterns in my RSS feeds, and then those patterns become inbox items. The RSS feed items themselves are not suited to treat as inbox items, simply because the items themselves are not the relevent units of information for me.
I already have marked 90% of my incoming e-mail as read without reading them, before I get to seeing them as true inbox items that warrant a decision to respond to, put on my task list, send to someone else, or delete.

I also find that a very important piece of my work does not get affected by GTD at all: staying aware of my social network and context. Keeping track of the people I know and the communities I am part of is my premier source of learning, of landing projects, of bringing my goals closer, and it is all to a very large extent based on peripheral sense. It is based on not looking directly at it, nor on focussing on it, but glancing at it,. Like the way you keep track of what is happening in a pub by glancing around, while you are actually focussing on the conversation with the person in front of you. Or like the way in the dark you see more out of the corner of your eye, than right in front of you. Like with my RSS feeds this is pattern hunting. And only the patterns I find ever reach my inbox where I focus on them to decide what to do next. Tuning my antennas on my surroundings, and pro-actively define what type of patterns I am currently especially interested in also takes a large chunk of time and energy.

This creates a scope where GTD is effective but only after the problems caused by the size, fragmentation and speed of the world around me have already been dealt with using other strategies. GTD gives me very effective lists, but only after I have created a qualitatively better 'inbox' myself. GTD can deal with complicated stuff very well, but I have to deal with complexity myself first.

How GTD could be better
One way in which the GTD method could become more valuable is if I could get patterns from it about what I do, that became inbox items again. Another if I could shape my GTD reviews to help me tune my antennas for the peripheral vision better as I described above. Something to think about further

The international collective of brand practitioners meets annually in August at a secluded location outside Stockholm, Sweden, and collaborate on the list, judging nominees on principles of humanity and ethics, rather than financial worth. The Brands with a Conscience list is shaped around criteria including evidence of the human implications of the brand and considering the question of whether the brand takes risks in line with its beliefs. Evaluations are made based on reputation, self-representation, history, direct experience, contacts with individuals within the organizations, media and analysts and an assessment of the expressed values of sustainability.

Last year, the group added a unique category commendation, the Colin Morley Award, recognizing exceptional achievement by an NGO. Mr Morley, a member of the Medinge Group, died in the London Underground bombings on July 7, 2005. The award commemorates his visionary work in humanistic branding.

For 2008, the group has singled out the following organizations:

Aveda
Chocolonely
Hennes & Mauritz
Happy Computers
International Watch Co.
Pret a Manger
Dame Anita Roddick

and the 2008 Colin Morley Award for a non-governmental organization is given to Star School.

Announcing the 2008 Brands with a Conscience, Stanley Moss, CEO of the Medinge Group and chairman of the initiative, called them 'solid indications of the trend towards humanistic branding--this year's list shows a renewed interest in ethical conduct, accountability and outcome. The 2008 winners remind us that at their essence, brands are for people.'

'The continued shift away from "branding-as-persuasion-to-buy" to "branding-as-how-we-improve-the-world"--with authentic, human considerations at the core of the organization--really gathers pace,' observed Tony Quinlan, a Medinge member. 'This year's award winners effectively counter the ridiculousness of the profit-above-all approach which too many organizations take. Congratulations to such a diverse group, working in diverse sectors--all deserving of our praise and gratitude.'

I am pleased to spread the word on the brands we have selected this year. Ever since I joined the Medinge initiative, now 5 years ago, I have enjoyed the discussion and energy in this world wide group of people. It thoroughly changed my outlook on the role of branding, from a mere marketing perspective, to how a brand can be the focal point of energy for everything I think is crucial in true collaboration within organisations, and stakeholder networks. For me knowledge and change management and branding overlap greatly. Acknowledging those organisations for whom their brand is the expression of how they see themselves as part of society, where the bottom-line is not the only and unique yard stick to measure success, seems therefore a logical extension of my vision on knowledge work, innovation and learning in a globally networked world.

The awards ceremony will take place in Paris next month, where I will look forward to not only meet this years award winners, but also my fellow Medingites again.

So, another of these "get-together" initiatives I'm launching is the World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day, which we'll call WoWiPAD from now on. Unless you're super-organised or are already a GTD black belt, you probably have piles of receipts to sort, papers to file, expenses to invoice, forms to fill in, and various administrative things that just pile up and don't get done, because, let's face it, it's way more fun to be earning $$ doing exciting stuff with clients than spending the day drowning in stuffy papers alone at one's desk. (See her blogposting on WoWiPAD)

We're with ten people, virtually connected (via Facebook), working away the piles of paperwork that have slowly gathered on our desks, and other flat surfaces that would look much better cleared.
As I am starting on my own this year, today is also the day I will create my own bookkeeping system (My bookkeeping training from years back now comes in handy), as well as write my very first invoice.

I'll publish a photo, once the office has become presentable again ;)