Family History and Standards - a Necessary Evil - ASQ Blogger Kerrie Christian

There's big business in tracing Family History or doing Genealogy - and there are a number of commercial players who dominate the market supplying software to family history enthusiasts. And of course there are conferences held across America and in Australia, UK etc etc. Truly big business.

Often these family enthusiasts  may have compiled huge volumes of information covering thousands of family members. And it is not so easy to move from one software to another - effectively creating walled gardens. However that position seems to be up for a challenge as there are moves afoot to set up standards for Family History Software.

My Great Great Uncle George Hicks- a Boer War  and WWI  hero  - shown  here with his wife Lou.

Recently ASQ's Paul Borawski asked the ASQ Influential Bloggers to explore finding Quality Tools in Unusual Places as their theme for blogging. Family History is one of those seemingly unusual places. But on reflection is it so surprising? Well it's all based on records and of course records management is a key "must" in the quality world. Although sometimes the quality of records can be challenging - as you'd expect really with 100's of years of them from the handwritten-paper era.

Three generations of my family shown here circa 1950 - in our home town Thirroul, 50 miles south of Sydney

Nearly six months ago I inherited the family history archives following the passing of my mother. There photographs and other items dating back to the 1880's, along with so many other items. My husband had been collaborating with my mother using the Brothers Keeper software over the last 15 years so I wasn't starting from a zero base. In a previous post I wrote of using social media tools for quality, so it wasn't a great stretch to extrapolate this approach to our family history. I set up a few Wordpress sites to share the information and photographs with my wider family. Some all it Genealogy 2.0 - Wikis, Google +, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook applications etc etc. The TV series Who Do You Think You Are ? tapped into push for people to uncover their roots.

In particular I used Google Reader and RSS feeds to monitor trends and ideas in Family History internationally. And so the questions emerged of which software package to use going forward - to stick with what we had to use one of the newer on-line packages ?

Some of the gurus had carefully analysed some of the four big guns of the Genealogy Software world, FindMyPast, Ancestry.com, FamilySearch and MyHeritage. There are also Mundia, WikiTree, Rootsweb, WorldVitalRecords, Geni.com, Mocavo, Legacy and more.  And the old off-line standby Brothers Keeper - so there's the question of On-Line vs Local Software. Some of the gurus pointed that their data didn't always map across properly on moving to another software platform. Hmmm. And with the evolution of mobile web technology on Smartphones and Tablets there are Apps emerging for Genealogy on the Go !

A small family get together in February 2013 where I shared some of our families stories of the last 175 years - using information form Brothers Keeper Family Tree software and our Wordpress Family History sites.

Out of that has emerged the Family History Information Standards Organisation, FHISO, formed in 2012. They acknowledge that GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunications) has been the "Industry Standard" over the last decade. seem to be drawing on ISO, NISO,  ANSI and the European Union for inspiration in the creation of a standard for Family History data systems.

Quoting their web site ...

"The Family History Information Standards Organisation (http://fhiso.org/) was created to develop international standards based on the principles of diversity and due process. Standards developed by the organization will better meet the different and competitive needs of all service providers, program developers and users--globally.
Genealogists and technologists will work side by side to define needs and develop solutions. This will provide for a standard that more closely matches universal community requirements.
 Users will enjoy greater functionality and be in the best position to exchange information with other users and between programs. They will be able to connect with information services of their choosing.
 Developers will be able to adopt a single standard with the confidence that their product meets expressed community requirements.
 Service providers benefit because more programs and customers will be able to conveniently access their services."

They are aiming for a system which is :

• Open
• Multi-stakeholder
• International
• Self-governing
• Balanced

Clearly this is an emergent area for a quality focused approach !

Loss of Nuclear Vessel USS Thresher - Lessons from 50 Years Ago

Periodically I attend Australian Standards meetings where I am a member of several Quality related committees and also a committee on Pressure Equipment. These can be dry of course but the Quality one's were often enlivened with yarns by Bob Innes, retired ANSTO & Steelplant engineer. One of the most evocative stories from Bob was that of the loss of the USS Thresher, which occurred 50 years ago in April 1963.

From US Navy

She was the first of a new class of nuclear submarine,  and was lost with her 129 men, inspiring the movie Grey Lady Down. But there was no happy ending & her lessons still apply eg in Australia with incidents such as those of the HMAS Westralia & HMAS Kanimbla naval vessels.

(Note - A memorial service was held in April 2013 Portsmouth USA to mark the 50th anniversary of the tragedy.)

From http://www.submarinehistory.com/Thresher.html

The Thresher sank off Cape Cod during her first descent to her 400m test depth, pushing beyond previous experience, in April 1963. It was believed back then that ...

Ice formed, bursting an engine room seawater pipe (weakened by dealloying or failed silver brazing?). Icy seawater poured in creating a foggy mist, with the control valves scattered about the room. She could not blow her ballast tanks, due to an unauthorised change – a strainer, causing icing up by a venturi cooling effect. Water soaked electrical circuits caused a power outage, the reactor shut down. Losing forward momentum, she slowed, drifted down; her hull bent, twisted, imploded and then split into three sections. 

Why? Political pressure to deploy new weapons systems & so standards were relaxed, due to an over confidence with submarine successes in WW2. They ignored the loss of 52 of 288 submarines, some possibly due to shoddy workmanship, including defective welding. Inspectors didn’t believe that the high standards were necessary. Indeed she was designed & built to 2 different standards ie nuclear power plants were constructed to veryexacting tolerances, while the design criteria in non-nuclear areas were seen only as goals. 

Later review found too many penetrations of the hull, with defects detected ultrasonically in many of the silver-brazed joints on pipes penetrating the hull. But the shipyard commander did not pursue new U/S inspection, considering it wasn’t a dangerous situation. Less accurate x-ray was the usual test & he was only required to try U/S methods. At that time there were no clearcut procedures for correcting the faulty joints. He was trying to meet a deadline, seeking to avoid pipe unlagging delays & increased costs.

Navy procedure allowed the shipyard commander to make such decisions as he was on-site, ostensibly having hands-on knowledge of the ships. In fact, he wanted to test only the repaired joints. But the Bureau of Ships would not allow so minimal a testing program. They compromised however – requiring the testing of only those joints that time would allow & were easily accessible. He did not immediately report the ultrasonically detected defects to his superior officer. The test report did not arrive at the Bureau of Ships until after the sinking.

Later some joints on the Thresher were found to not be brazed at all! Although a brazed  joint on the Barbel had failed earlier, this was not shared, so procedures for the Thresher were not reviewed, nor the Portsmouth shipyard’s Quality Control issues.

”The high performance required of these ships, the exotic materials being used, the pushing of older materials to greater limits, means the Navy cannot afford not to use higher standards throughout”. These were the words of Admiral Rickover, father of the US Navy’s Nuclear Submarine Program, in an address in 1962, before the sinking. Overriding these concerns, his senior officers feared tougher standards would add to costs. Some non-nuclear standards were even lowered. They were working at the limits of technology and not knowing the consequences of not knowing those limits.

Lessons learned from the subsequent Inquiry included:
1. Give equal weight to design & construction of nuclear & non nuclear submarine parts.
2. Cost & time pressures must not override safety in design, construction & overhauls.
3. Communicate near miss events to resolve weaknesses or flaws to avoid future tragedies.
4. Test equipment & parts on receipt & under operating conditions to assess suitability.


For many years the above was the accepted scenario of failure - however in recent years there has been some re-thinking - and utlising evidence now available that was classified at the time. According to an article from the website for Mass Live, it is now postulated that :

"the initial Thresher casualty as an electrical bus failure, which shut down the submarine's main coolant pumps causing the instant reactor scram. Unable to rapidly restart the reactor to regain propulsion, and unable to blow ballast, the Thresher slowly sank toward the ocean floor — a depth of 8,400 feet — with 129 men on board. " '

Regardless of which scenario prevailed back then, we can read how lessons were drawn from the loss - see the Mass Live article   ...

' "The Navy accelerated safety improvements and created a program called "SUBSAFE," an extensive series of design modifications, training and other improvements. People involved in the SUBSAFE program are required to watch a documentary about the Thresher that ends with an actual underwater recording featuring the eerie sounds of metal creaking and bending as a U.S. Navy submarine breaks apart with the loss of all hands.

"Every job we do, we need to have in the back of our minds that we have the lives of the sailors in our hands. It's that critical and it's that literal," said O'Connor, president of the Metal Trades Council.'

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To Whom belongs the Future - Growing up Digital - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Epilogue

In summing up Shirky reflects how in his youth, atomic energy (now nuclear) was considered to be the most likely dominant society-changing technology. He, however, contends that history has borne out that instead the transistor and birth control pills created the biggest shifts in society. From the transistor came miniaturization of so many electronics. And birth control pills gave females whole new options of deciding their futures.

He argues that these two things "changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom." p 295

Further he states that with social media tools, the same society changing paradigms are occurring - mobile phones, digital messaging, Wikipedia and that they enhance group-forming. 

And then questions "What is likely to happen to society with the spread of ridiculously easy group-forming?" p 295

The quick answer - lots and lots more groups. But is that good or bad - Shirky could argue that the good will outweigh the bad.

However he also argues that the good and bad "are incommensurable, which is to say that the value of new sources of knowledge like Wikipedia cannot be measured against the increased resilience of networked terrorist groups" p 297.

No wonder my local uni was able to argue the case for funds to have a research institute for transnational crime established in recent years.

Freedom of speech is another issue being turned on its head by social media - perhaps as with the Third Way - Individual rights can only exist with individual responsibility - else the Tragedy of the Commons argument begins to prevail in this arena.

Also raised by Shirky - the relative advantages and disadvantages of mass amateurization.

However it is one thing to consider this in terms of professional media and say photography - it is another in say the medical field, or engineering design - and as we are finding with renewable energy - which seems to need  a good component of mechanical engineering reliability concepts to ensure that wind towers, wave generators and geothermal all deliver reliably day in - day out - year after year.

In fact Shirky does canvas the dilemmas of the nuclear energy option.

He also notes it was not just the Gutenberg printing press that made the printed book widespread - but that also Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer published a copy of Virgil's works in a smaller size that was able to be carried in a gentleman's saddlebags - thus books became cheaper and more portable.

So perhaps - whence E-Readers today perhaps ? Will the printed book survive ? What about bookstores ? What will libraries look like ?

 "The lesson from Manutius' life is that future belongs to those who take the present for granted ... when a once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we (those older & experienced) are at risk of dismissing it as a fad" p 303

Have a look at Denis Hancock's thoughts in his blog post on "Growing up Digital" over at Wikinomics. 

 

 

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Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 11

"There is no recipe for the successful use of social tools" p 260

"Tools don't completely determine behaviour; different mailing lists have different cultures " p 261

And as we were reminded in a recent blog - social media can't do everything - it's not a magic bullet - you need the fundamentals in place so you can exploit the amplifying power of social media.

"Small groups are ... better conversational environments than large ones and find it easier to engage in convergent thinking, where everyone comes to agree on a single point of view" p 267

Large "groups are better able to produce what James Surowieki has called 'the wisdom of the crowds'  ... distributed groups who aren't connected can often generate better answers, by pooling their knowledge or intuition without having to come to an agreement" p 267

I find it interesting that Shirky says "can often" not "will always" - sometimes it seems that 'the wisdom of the crowds' has become a prevailing mantra - eliminating the need for subject matter experts.

"With social tools, the group is the user, so you need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective, but others will find it so as well, no matter how appealing the promise, there's no point in being the only user of a social tool" p 263

Shirky postulates one approach of "creating personal value for the individual users, allowing the social value to only manifest later ... Joshua Schacter's service for bookmarking and tagging web pages called del.icio.us, serves as a personal archive of web pages;

the value that accrues from aggregating the group's view of the Web is optional for any given user, but enough people have taken advantage of that value to cause the service to grow dramatically" p 263-264

Initially I used the del.icio.us social bookmarking service on an individual basis, however I soon discovered the value of being able to review the pre-filtered bookmarks of other users, as an alternative to web-surfing. It is now part of my weekly PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) routine to check out newly added bookmarks of those whom I follow. I have found invaluable web sources there. Similarly with "LibraryThing" 

And then there is Flickr - as I discovered when my niece & nephew headed off to Europe for an extended period. Their Nan just loved checking out their photos on Flickr after dinner at our place on Sunday nights so she could keep up with their travels - far better than letters and postcards. (Later they made greater use of Facebook than Flickr - so Nan now has a Facebook account to keep up with their travels)

"Part of the promise of Flickr ... was that the public could see your photos" p 264.

Interestingly Shirky notes that "the most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn't until they have a critical mass of adopters ... that their real effects begin to appear"  p 270

"Tools are similarly complex ... most groups are sustained through the efforts of a small group embedded within the large one" p 278

Thus the bargain as Shirky describes it, or the value, differs for the range of participants - from those who only consume to those who create or modify. He describes the failed attempt by Microsoft to engage users of its Encarta product to contribute as was happening with Wikipedia.

However with Encarta, "users had to grant Microsoft permission to 'use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission" for a product Microsoft was going to charge money for. This was hardly a bargain at all, as all the power lay with Microsoft... " p 289 and thus it was doomed.

"Starting with the invention of e-mail... our social tools have increasingly been giving groups the power to coalesce and act in political arenas. We are seeing these tools progress from coordination into governance, as groups gain enough power and support to be able to demand that they be deferred to." p292

 

 

 

 

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Battles of the Suits vs the Geeks - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 10

Chapter 10 seems to be running up the flag for taking on the traditional command & control paradigms of institutional IT departments, along with market domination by commercial IT firms - and rather, arguing for community developed & supported open source software -  viz a pragmatic opening quote from Shirky

" The logic of publish then filter means that new social systems have to tolerate enormous amounts of failure."  p 233

He also comments more about the success of Meetup - 

"Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another " p 235

"By dispensing with the right to direct what its users try to create, Meetup sheds the costs and distorting effects of managing each individual effort" p 236

However it is interesting to observe what has happened recently in Facebook tribute sites - with porn & other insensitive remarks posted hardly appreciated by bereaved family members - there have been demands that Facebook intervene for what the broad community deems to be inappropriate postings.

And then there's the Italian Google Case - "An Italian judge on Wednesday held three Google executives criminally responsible for an online video of an autistic teenager being bullied — a verdict that raises concerns that the Internet giant, and others like it, may be forced to police their content in Italy, and even beyond.  .... Google called the decision "astonishing," saying it "attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built."  .... Google argued that it removed the video two hours after it received notification from police, which it says is in line with a EU directive that requires it to respond to authorities' requests."

Shirky notes that with digital archiving "is that much casual conversation is now captured and stored for posterity"  p 237 - what was thought to have been ephemeral is in fact becoming more permanent. 

I recall discussion forums, where I had passionately discussed political issues with others back around 1997-98 - then being gob-smacked to see my comments in the forums show up publically on Google searches a decade later.

No wonder we are now seeing tools emerging with which you can destroy your digital archive.

Shirky relates the early stages of the Linux open source computer operating system proposed by Linus Torvalds in 1991 - Torvalds invited others to participate in its genesis & development. It seems to have been a good example of the 90-9-1 rule - once he had initiated the project others were willing to participate - but didn't want to initiate such a project themselves.

I can certainly recall a whole lot of discussion forum emails in the 1990's where so many geeks were advocating Linux as an alternative open source operating system to Microsoft. Perhaps they could see further ahead, then many of us realised back then.

"The existence of Linux has almost single-handedly kept Microsoft from dominating the server market the way it dominates the PC market" p 238

"The Linux project, the most visible open source project in history, has turned the efforts of a distributed group of programmers, contributing their efforts for free, into world-class products...

Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open source systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford ... it essentially gets failure for free ... Cheap failure.. is also a key part of a more complex advantage : the exploration of multiple possibilities " p 243 - 247

"The cost of trying things is where Coasian theory about transaction costs and power law distributions of participation intersect." p 248

"There are many actions that might pay off but won't be tried, even for innovative firms, because their eventual success is not predictable enough" p 248

I found when I was on the governing council of our local university, that as public universities now receive far less financial support from national governments, even they must be more cautious with their research programmes - in order to attract funding grants they have to demonstrate a pattern of success & good rankings on the rating scales.

So it really does need a social capital - open source approach to create "a world where anyone can try anything, even the risky stuff can be tried eventually. If a large enough population of users is trying things, then the happy accidents have a much higher chance of being discovered." p 249

And one of those happy accidents running on open source Linux was the genetic sequence of SARS - achieved through the researchers involvement in various participatory networks. It was questioned why China with vastly superior research resources could not achieve this sequencing of the virus - the answer reportedly lay in the barriers to cooperation created by the Chinese government.

However as seen in the Feb 2010 Jacobsen v. Katzer court case judgement - things can get interesting legally with open source.

Shirky cites another case of a joint ATT (now part of Bell Labs) project in the mid 1990's where the contractor, Site Specifics proposed to use the community supported Perl vs ATT's use of C++, which they had invented & were inevitably wed to (& also the darling of uni IT geeks in the early 1990's as I recall). Perl community members continue to provide support to each other altruistically and so Perl continues - whereas ATT had substantially reduced its value over the 10 years that followed. 

He states "ATT was right to be concerned about community; it has not historically been a good guarantor of longevity. The fact that shared interest can now create that longevity is what makes the current change historic" p 258

However in fact it seems that C++ lives on- and is still an active blog topic in its own C++ social community

- but then often many IT related products are periodically pronounced obsolete or even dead - yet they continue.

As a quality manager I can understand the ATT concerns, in order to satisfy auditors there is increasing pressure on the validation & reliability of software, and to maintain full records for many years, not to mention backwards compatibility of different versions of software products.

So what do you do ? You need the 3rd Party certification to win orders.  

Of course you go with the institution with the proven track record.

Just like Clay Shirky describes.

Even though not all commercial IT firms will survive.

Neither is backward compatibility of different versions of software products necessarily guaranteed either.

But to be honest, taking this debate outside of the IT open source software arena, Shirky's views on community, participation & distributed involvement, may well be  just the sort of collaborative approaches we need to take on problems like global warming - of decarbonising our world economies.  

 

 

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MBTI - Joining the Dots in Communities - Networks vs Teams - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Chapter 9

Having long been exposed to the concepts of ONA & SNA in my organization, I was interested to read Shirky's Chapter 9, with its references to the "Small World network" concept of Duncan Watts & Steve Strogatz, and the Six Degrees of Separation.

"Small World networks have two characteristics that, when correctly balanced properly, let messages move through the network effectively.

The first is that small groups are densely connected. In a small group the best pattern of communication is that everyone connects with everyone.

The second ... is that large groups are sparsely connected ... As the size of your network grew, your small group pattern, where everyone connected to everyone, would become first impractical, then unbuildable .... if you let everyone continue to maintain a handful of connections as the network grew, any two people pulled at random would have a long chain of links between them, far longer than six links, in fact. Such a network would be unusable, since the people in it would hardly be connected together." p 215

"So what do you do ? You adopt both strategies - dense and sparse - at different scale. You let the small groups connect tightly, and then you connect the groups." p 216

"But you can't really connect groups - you connect people within groups ... the network will be sparse but efficient and robust..." p 216

"A handful of people are extremely critical to holding the whole network together, because as the network grows large, the existence of a small number of highly connected individuals enables the tradeoff between connectivity and effectiveness that makes the Small World pattern work in the first place" p 217

These are Malcolm Gladwell's "connectors" ("The Tipping Point") - they are different - perhaps an understanding of the work of Myer Briggs on Personality Types could help here ?

The engineering & technology part of my organization had undertaken a knowledge sharing project in 2004, which kicked off with a knowledge sharing cultural audit and also ONA. There were no surprises with the most highly connected folks - but therein lay the vulnerability - they were babyboomers who could be expected to retire within 5 to 10 years. Interventions were needed to avoid fracturing tightly networked groups and separating existing sparsely connected groups. An intervention was undertaken - Stage 2 of our knowledge sharing project - to create alternative connections. It worked ... according to a followup ONA undertaken several years later. Now key connectors have retired and it would be desirable to do a Stage 3 of the project ... but is on hold for the duration of the GFC.

"Small World networks operate as both amplifiers and filters of information. Because information in the system is passed along by friends and friends of friends... people tend to get information that is also of interest to their friends... things that none of your friends or their friends care about are unlikely to get to you." p 221

Helping things along according to Shirky is "social capital" : bonding capital & bridging capital

"Bonding capital is an increase in the depth of connections within a relatively homogeneous group.... tends to be more exclusive ... creating an echo chamber effect" according to Ronald Burt p 222 - 231 - perhaps at risk of occurring in Teams, especially where there is no one playing "Devils Advocate" ? 

"Bridging capital is an increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups ... tends to be more inclusive  ... and at greater risk of having good ideas " p 222 - 231 - more enhanced within communities,  as opposed to teams perhaps (refe Stan Garfield's Communities Manifesto - Principle 5 - "Communities should span boundaries; they should cross functions, organizations, and geographic locations")

We sometimes found that the person who was the designated wise sage or guru wasn't necessarily the best connector - although they could be - and then they could be at risk of creating a bottleneck due to shear overload of requests for assistance.

Social media tools such as MySpace and Facebook, to a degree also LinkedIn, help with connectivity with "perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools ... (lying) in the increased leverage they give the most connected people.

The tightness of a social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support." p 225

Shirky then cites Ronald Burt's 'The Social Origins of Good Ideas' : "most good ideas come from people who were bridging 'structural holes', which is to stay people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department... Second, bridging these structural holes was valuable, even when other variables... were controlled for .... bridging predicted good ideas; lack of bridging predicted bad ones "  229-231.

Shirky, quoting from Burt " People whose networks span structural holes have easy access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another"  p 231

Of course not everyone needs to be a connector - but it is vital to ensure a succession planning strategy is in place - for when the connectors depart or are on leave etc to minimise the risk of structural holes opening up.

Communities of Practice are one way to bridge these structural holes - especially where they link geographically dispersed COP members - all the while strengthening organizational social capital.

The fields of ONA & SNA have attracted a lot of attention - people such as Valdis Krebs (2008 post), Laurie Lock Lee (Optimice), Graham Durant-Law are names that come to mind.

Ironically in my organization, inspired by Professor James Reason, we also speak about the potential for disaster looming when all the holes in the Swiss Cheese line up - so, by addressing potential "structural holes" arising from baby boomer retirements, could we also minimise the risks of the "knowledge loss" generated holes in the Swiss Cheese ?

 

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Trust - is the Enemy of my Enemy my Friend - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 8

"We all face the Prisoners' Dilemma whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups" p 191

Shirky discusses Robert Putnam's 2000 work "Bowling Alone" aka the weakening of community & the decline of social capital - with its associated implications for the USA.

"One cause of the decline in social capital was a simple increase in the difficulty of people getting together - an increase in transaction costs, to use Coase's term. When an activity becomes more expensive, either in direct costs or increased hassle, people do less of it, and several effects of the last fifty years - including smaller households, delayed marriage, two-worker families, the spread of television, and suburbanization - have increased the costs for  coordinating group activities outside work" p 193

Social capital was not a term I had heard widely used outside of government & political circles prior to 2000. I had learnt of it from Community Services Department personnel, town planners & social planning fraternity, who all well understood its benefits. To lose social capital creates more reliance on the State, social exclusion - fragmentation  & invariably increases the tax burden on the community. To improve social capital creates more resilient societies.

In my local community a Community Development project was established in 1989 - differing from the usual community neighbourhood centre which offered services. This project was about mentoring & facilitating communities to advocate for themselves & to spread it through their networks. Thus increasing social capital. It was an intervention in an era of declining social capital. It was a model I used in my 12 years as an elected rep - teaching people "how to fish" - ie how to navigate the system, ethically of course, instead of being beaten or ignored by the system.

We were fortunate from at least the 1980's, with the number of people donating their time to participate in Council's Community Liaison Committees - seeing it as a benefit & freeing up scarce Council strategic planning dollars. After I had left, many committees were dismantled - being seen as a cost rather than the value of the services that the volunteers provided. Later, recognising their value, some committees were re-established by the Council.

Shirky relates how Scott Heiferman on reading Putnam's "Bowling Alone" decides to set up a service, an intervention to combat the decline of social capital, using cyberspace to connect people with common interests who had previously found it too challenging to connect up. The aim was that people would connect face to face - hence Meetup was born.

"The groups that actually used Meetup didn't look anything like Heifermen expected... " p 197 3 broad categories emerged - the first includewitches, pagans, vampires etc "people who share some religious or philosophical outlook but have no support from the broader US culture..... Presbyterians aren't on this list because they don't need Meetup to figure out when and how to assemble" p 198

"The second category of Meetup groups includes the members of websites and services who would like to assemble with other users of those services in real life ... Slashdot,... Ultima ... Bookcrossing" p 198

"The third category includes fans of cultural icons whose work is quirky enough that those fans want to be in one another's presence" p 199 eg Tori Amos fans.

An interesting 2003 article from Clay Shirky " A Group is its own worst Enemy" has recently been tweeted & retweeted on Twitter.

Shirky conjectures that groups & individuals can now more easily self publish and/or distribute news & music - but that this leads to 3 kinds of loss :

1. job losses in the activities now overtaken by mass amateurization
2. control of the media eg during last days of an election campaign - impossible when content can be published overseas from the country having an election
3. online networking can make negative groups more resilient to preventative activities eg terrorists / criminals & authoritian regimes using social media tools (WSJ Feb 20 2010) although recent reports claim US military using Social Network Analysis tools to track down Saddam Hussein

"Meetup didn't end up recreating the old model of community, because it provided a different set of capabilities; the groups that took first and best advantage of those capabilities were the groups with a latent desire to meet but had faced insuperable hurdles" p 200

Banning "bad" groups on hosted social media sites may simply lead to their relocation elsewhere - it's even easier now to set up a group in MySpace or FaceBook

"When it is hard to form groups, both potentially good and bad groups are prevented from forming; when it becomes simple to form groups, we get both the good and the bad ones. This is going to force society to shift from simply preventing groups from forming to actively deciding which existing ones to try to oppose, a shift that parallels the publish-then -filter pattern generally" p 213.

But has the horse bolted already ? Although Australian Knowledge Management & Social Media Maven, Keith DeLaRue recently tweeted

"Always shut the gate after the horse has bolted - there may be other horses still in the paddock ... "

 

 

 

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Trust - is the Enemy of my Enemy my Friend - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 8

"We all face the Prisoners' Dilemma whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups" p 191

Shirky discusses Robert Putnam's 2000 work "Bowling Alone" aka the weakening of community & the decline of social capital - with its associated implications for the USA.

"One cause of the decline in social capital was a simple increase in the difficulty of people getting together - an increase in transaction costs, to use Coase's term. When an activity becomes more expensive, either in direct costs or increased hassle, people do less of it, and several effects of the last fifty years - including smaller households, delayed marriage, two-worker families, the spread of television, and suburbanization - have increased the costs for  coordinating group activities outside work" p 193

Social capital was not a term I had heard widely used outside of government & political circles prior to 2000. I had learnt of it from Community Services Department personnel, town planners & social planning fraternity, who all well understood its benefits. To lose social capital creates more reliance on the State, social exclusion - fragmentation  & invariably increases the tax burden on the community. To improve social capital creates more resilient societies.

In my local community a Community Development project was established in 1989 - differing from the usual community neighbourhood centre which offered services. This project was about mentoring & facilitating communities to advocate for themselves & to spread it through their networks. Thus increasing social capital. It was an intervention in an era of declining social capital. It was a model I used in my 12 years as an elected rep - teaching people "how to fish" - ie how to navigate the system, ethically of course, instead of being beaten or ignored by the system.

We were fortunate from at least the 1980's, with the number of people donating their time to participate in Council's Community Liaison Committees - seeing it as a benefit & freeing up scarce Council strategic planning dollars. After I had left, many committees were dismantled - being seen as a cost rather than the value of the services that the volunteers provided. Later, recognising their value, some committees were re-established by the Council.

Shirky relates how Scott Heiferman on reading Putnam's "Bowling Alone" decides to set up a service, an intervention to combat the decline of social capital, using cyberspace to connect people with common interests who had previously found it too challenging to connect up. The aim was that people would connect face to face - hence Meetup was born.

"The groups that actually used Meetup didn't look anything like Heifermen expected... " p 197 3 broad categories emerged - the first includewitches, pagans, vampires etc "people who share some religious or philosophical outlook but have no support from the broader US culture..... Presbyterians aren't on this list because they don't need Meetup to figure out when and how to assemble" p 198

"The second category of Meetup groups includes the members of websites and services who would like to assemble with other users of those services in real life ... Slashdot,... Ultima ... Bookcrossing" p 198

"The third category includes fans of cultural icons whose work is quirky enough that those fans want to be in one another's presence" p 199 eg Tori Amos fans.

An interesting 2003 article from Clay Shirky " A Group is its own worst Enemy" has recently been tweeted & retweeted on Twitter.

Shirky conjectures that groups & individuals can now more easily self publish and/or distribute news & music - but that this leads to 3 kinds of loss :

1. job losses in the activities now overtaken by mass amateurization
2. control of the media eg during last days of an election campaign - impossible when content can be published overseas from the country having an election
3. online networking can make negative groups more resilient to preventative activities eg terrorists / criminals & authoritian regimes using social media tools (WSJ Feb 20 2010) although recent reports claim US military using Social Network Analysis tools to track down Saddam Hussein

"Meetup didn't end up recreating the old model of community, because it provided a different set of capabilities; the groups that took first and best advantage of those capabilities were the groups with a latent desire to meet but had faced insuperable hurdles" p 200

Banning "bad" groups on hosted social media sites may simply lead to their relocation elsewhere - it's even easier now to set up a group in MySpace or FaceBook

"When it is hard to form groups, both potentially good and bad groups are prevented from forming; when it becomes simple to form groups, we get both the good and the bad ones. This is going to force society to shift from simply preventing groups from forming to actively deciding which existing ones to try to oppose, a shift that parallels the publish-then -filter pattern generally" p 213.

But has the horse bolted already ? Although Australian Knowledge Management & Social Media Maven, Keith DeLaRue recently tweeted

"Always shut the gate after the horse has bolted - there may be other horses still in the paddock ... "

 

 

 

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Blitzkrieg - Schweik Action - Beyond Moldova - Clay Shirkey - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 7

Great opening quote

"As more people adopt simple social tools, and as those tools allow increasingly rapid communication, the speed of group action also increases, and just as more is different, faster is different" p 161.

And different was the Barak Obama Presidential Election campaign - communications & coordination key planks according to Colin Delaney

"The more ubiquitous and familiar a communications method is, the more real-time coordination can come to replace planning, and the less predictable group reactions become." p 175

To illustrate his point, Shirky draws on "Flash Mobs" where there is more focus on coordination of participants than on layers of detailed planning.And he cites a few other cases, both political & military, where coordination was crucial.

The military example was the Panzer blitzkrieg across France in late 1940, where Shirky notes that the French tanks were superior, but they were not used in the innovative strategic fashion of their opponents. Nor did they have the radios in the tanks which allowed their opponents to share information, to make quick decisions on the run. Interesting ... especially as the innovative use of technologies and, in particular, communications was a key learning outcome from the earlier WWI.

"Contrary to its image as an overwhelming ....force, blitzkrieg was in fact a strategy for using a smaller but more nimble force against a well provisioned opponent .... the flash mob is a relatively new addition to the repertoire, the ability of weak groups to coordinate their actions against strong ones is the hallmark of much political action."p 173-174

The consequences of these differences in strategy & coordinating technology in 1940 were to have widespread impacts on the French people for the remaining WWII years.

Other examples cited were how customers can usual social media tools to respond poor treatment by banks & airlines.

"Many people care a little about the treatment they get from banks, but not many care enough about it to do anything on their own, both because that kind of effort is hard and because individual actions have so little effect on big corporations. ... The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn't care more and the general population wondered why those obsessed people didn't just shut up." p 181-182

Now with social media tools, Shirky argues "the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become active themselves." p 182

In the late 1980s' a small social movement, Schweik Action, emerged, well before the emergence of social media tools. They saw maintaining coordinated communications, particularly phones & later ICT, as a key requirement during times of political unrest. Interestingly social media have proved invaluable in various humanitarian disasters since the 2004 Tsunami.

The context has now been created. And now we see social media tools being used as part of suite in early warning systems eg for severe weather, bushfires, flooding, tsunamis.

The development of Blogger by Evan Williams' company Pyra is mentioned as an aside to their development of the micro-blogging tool, Twitter, pimped up 21st Century version of the 1980's BBS Bulletin Boards. Shirky briefly describes the use of Twitter by Egyptian activists in 2004 - well before their use by Moldovian activists and later the Iranian Green Revolution activists in June 2009

The reach and influence of social media has become very great - also creating challenging new paradigms for journalists, as noted in Chapter 3..

 

Back to Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6

Forward to Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Epilogue

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Built for comfort - not style or Why E-mail won't die - just yet - Clay Shirkey - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 6

My fav quote on e-mail from Chapter 6...

"What does e-mail have going for it that the other attempts at many-to-many communication didn't? Cost, for one... With e-mail, having a large, long-lived, and geographically widespread conversation entails no expenses. E-mail delivery is almost instant, unlike ordinary mail, and unlike the phone, it doesn't require the sender and the receiver to be synchronized." p 157

Interesting - well I had e-mail at home some years before getting it as an elected political rep and before I got it at work. Initially at work there was only one account per team, and in some areas shared team group e-mail accounts continue - in fact this can make sense to orgs where work place operate 24 x 7 x 52 - to ensure key communications are not lost.

The internet has "the flexibility that allows people to design and try new communications tools without having to ask anyone for permission." p 157-158

"Social tools don't create collective action - they merely remove the obstacles to it..  many of the significant changes are not based on the fanciest, newest bits of technology but on simple, easy to use tools like e-mail, mobile phones, and websites, because those are the tools most people have access to, and critically, are comfortable using in their daily lives." p 159-160

Our community had long been a mining & industrial centre with many blue collar workers. In the late 1950's a fledgling university college was establised - becoming a full uni in 1975 and growing to international rated status over the following 30 years.Professional people began to move in from Sydney.

Professionals linked with working class people in community pressure groups when controversial developments were proposed. And the professionals were IT literate & will to share. In the early days of Web 1.0 a group really needed to have 1 or 2 people capable of doing some basic programming - I'd done Fortran, Pascal & a little C++ at uni, so teaching myself rudimentary HTML for WYSIWYG websites was no stretch at all. Ultimately there would be many around like me. And more working class people in the pressure groups began to use e-mail when they saw the benefits.

Back in 2000, I don't believe the Administration where I was an elected rep had grasped the way so many geographically distinct community pressure groups had morphed into a giant collective social movement - all helped along by e-mail.The City Council subscribed to a media monitor service - but it couldn't monitor the e-mails of all of the members in the coalition of community pressure groups. Regardless the Council struggled to deal with the issues raised with them directly.

"Now that we have ridiculously easy group forming, .... organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are now facing challenges to that previous bedrock principle" p 155

This was a social movement where the common ground, rather than the divisions, were recognised, and so it became far more powerful. About 5 or 6 years later, & after I had retired from politics, the council would axe the then official local Precinct Committees, officially known as Neighbourhood Committees - ostensibly because they were unrepresentative - but many attributed it to them being too obstructionist.

Some time later in early 2008 the Councillors themselves were sacked by our NSW StateGovernment following an ICAC corruption inquiry - where 4 of the 13 were found to have engaged in corrupt conduct.

"Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviours" p 160

Since that time Web 2.0 has exploded and it is now a no-brainer to set up an instant group on FaceBook - just look at what happened during last year's NSW school HSC exams. Groups would spring up the day that an issue emerged and membership exploded. A parody group "Bored of Studies" satirised the official "Board of Studies" who governed the HSC exams.

An ex-councillor from years earlier, one of the least IT literate at the time, has embraced technologies and has his own anti-corruption blog ! Our Australian Prime Minister & last few NSW State Premiers are tweeting on Twitter. The Wharf Theatre Revue included Web 2.0 political send-ups in their latest show "Pennies from Kevin"

And we now await the return of democratic elections in 2012 - nearly 5 years without an elected City Council - what a different world of community consultation they will face.

 

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Wikis as Mosaics - Social Capital - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 5

 

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger's Wikipedia morphed out of their original 2001 idea - Nupedia - which had an amazingly bureaucratic process of vetting & approvals before content could be published - if you ever been on a standards writing committee you will know what it feels like... it was overtaken by its offshoot Wikipedia .. "a hybrid of tool and community" p 136

However it actually followed the first user-editable Wiki developed by Ward Cunningham in 1996 predicated on the then radical assumption "groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another. If this was true, then a small group could work on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process" p 111.

Interestingly Wikipedia was conceived as an open encyclopedia .. becoming "a general-purpose tool for gathering and distributing information quickly, a use that further cemented Wikipedia in people's mind as a useful reference work"  p 117

I find it intriguing when fellow techo professionals pronounce that one shouldn't use Wikipedia as a professional resource let alone cite it - personally I choose to do so - as a first pass - Dummy's entry point if I have to learn something new - like Non Tariff  - Technical Barriers to Trade at the World Trade Organization. It's easy to read - commonsense approach helped me enormously to get started as I tried to navigate the WTO & EU web sites - ultimately I created a wiki in Sharepoint - like a breadcrumb trail to find my way in and out of these seemingly impenetrable maze-like sites.

And my Teen finds the same works for her - she really likes Wikipedia but knows that she needs to cite other more acceptable & reputable sources !

The driver for me in creating wiki pages in Sharepoint was just as Shirky described for Wikipedia ...

"Someone decides that an article .... should exist and creates it. The article's creator doesn't need to know everything ... Once an article exists, it starts to get readers. Soon a self selecting group of those readers decide to become contributors. Some of them add new text, edit the existing article, some add references to other articles or external sources, and some fix typos.. No one person was responsible for doing or even managing the work "  p118-119 . Shirky describes the wiki format as a form of "publish-then filter". - p 135

And so the wiki and its wiki pages seem as though they are becoming a fascinating & evolving series of mosaics - where sometimes you can't see the whole immediately.

Pic 1 Athens - Pic 2 & 3 Delphi Mosaics - Pic 4 Istanbul Topkapi Palace - Pics 5 & 6 Istanbul Hagya Sophia

See the full gallery on Posterous

In fact I find with my org's Sharepoint pages that not everyone wants to edit online but they may tell you verbally or email you suggestions. It seems that many struggle with the concept of "publish-then filter" - preferring to edit repeatedly before publishing. I recall attending a Knowledge Management Round Table where attendees at my table felt too afraid to embrace the "publish-then filter" approach.

This seems to align with Shirky who describes participation in Wiki activities as following a power law distribution - others call it the 90-9-1 Law - ie 1% of folks will initiate content, 9% may comment or amend it and 90% (sometimes called the Lurkers) will only read it but not initiate nor amend. Similarly - this probably reflects public involvement in government consultation initiatives - how some government bureaucrats bewail the "self-selected".

And it explains why Twitter remains highly successful - even if most users don't tweet - they may still value reading the tweets of others they respect. Same effect showed up when my org's ICT surveyed users about one of our Communities of Practice - more folks liked to read, even if they didn't contribute themselves. I shared this with my Management Team yesterday when we began reviewing the state of our Knowledge Sharing programme

"you can't look for a representative contributor, because none exists. Instead, you have to change your focus, to concentrate not on the individual users but on the behaviour of the collective" p 128

Shirky also suggests that this power law effect is what lies behind Chris Anderson's Long Tail. Reflecting further he distinguishes between tightly connected small groups and those larger ones with weak ties drawing the wedding reception analogy where the bride and groom can only "talk to most of the guests for just a few minutes" - p 130.

So the tool is there with Wikipedia & other wikis  - but why do people bother - when there are no financial incentives ? But then why do some folks volunteer to coach kids sporting teams or in Australia deliver "Meals on Wheels " to older frail folks ?

Shirky suggests 3 reasons : to use some unused capabilities, vanity and to do a good thing. He also argues that "Wikipedia exists because enough people love it" p 141

And the nagging question - does anyone care about the wiki contributions anyway ? According to Shirky "Wikis reward those who invest in improving them. This explains why both experts and amateurs are willing to contribute" p 135

His final words in this chapter ...

"When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love .. " p 142 -  in this case for the concept of what Wikipedia means.

 

 

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I write - You write - Therefore We Are - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 4

Ch.4 : More great Shirky quotes  as I continue with my personal learning journey on Here Comes Everybody  ....

"When people talk about user-generated content, they are describing the ways that users create and share media with one another, with no professionals anywhere in sight  ...

It's easy to see this as a kind of failure. Who would want to be a publisher with only a dozen readers ?  ...

It's simple. They're not talking to you.  

The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community,

... and they are enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall" p 83-85. 

Just like the sporting community folks at the Vietnamese restaurant last Sunday night .... a couple of really loud raucous tables sharing the conversations of their community with the rest of us, their accidental audience  .. and they not caring a hoot what we heard.

Shirky observes the difference between audiences and communities :

"An audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users"  p 85

"A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack"  p 85

In fact Shirky argues "people are all talking to one another in these small clusters also explains why bloggers with a dozen readers don't have a small audience :

they don't have an audience at all, they just have friends.... most of what gets published is public  but not for the public " p 80 - 90

Further the self-actualization thing .. "Writing things for your friends to read and reading what your friends write creates a different kind of pleasure than writing for an audience" p 90

And "if people can share their work in an environment where they can also converse with one another, they will begin talking about the things they have shared  

... conversation is king

... content is just something to talk about " p 99 - ever been at a party with school teachers or IT geeks ?

Shirky describes an evolution to a community of practice - where the conversation becomes

... "how did you do that ?

 ... trading tips abut certain kinds of repairs, thus educating each other in the lore not covered in the manuals

... there are thousands of examples of communities of practice  

.. Gaia Online is a community for teenage fans of anime and manga

... like how to draw girls with really big eyes ..." (followers include my Teen - but to me Gaia had been the all encompassing Mother Earth Environment concept ! ) p 100-101

Recently Stan Garfield's Communities Manifesto (nb not to be confused with the Cluetrain Manifesto) has reached almost iconic status

eg see one of many bloggers' posts  it's generated.

But regardless, there's still Dunbar's number - how many people can you really effectively interact with ?

"No matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade email with only so many people

... someone writing for thousands of people, though, or millions, has to start choosing who to respond to and who to ignore, and over time, ignore becomes the default choice. " p 91

Maybe it sounds like how some politicians deal with particularly persistent & pesky constituents ?

"Every webpage is a latent community.... In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the ties are too weak

... or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf or time, and so on " p 102

Perhaps the above challenges have been, in part, the basis of Twitter's success - you can scan "sound bite sized chunks" of more folks, even more so with Twitter lists, and then choose which of their blogs to click through, to read the full content ?

"It is easier to ask a question than to answer it, we get the curious effect of a group of people  all able to overwhelm one another by asking, cumulatively, more questions than they can cumulatively answer

... The limiting effect of scale on interaction is bad news for people hoping for the dawning of an egalitarian age ushered in by our social tools " p 94-95

 

... perhaps in this there is a warning from Shirky, to be heeded by the prophets of Government 2.0 ? 

 

Back to : Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3

Forward to : Chapter 5 / Chapter 6/ Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Epilogue

 

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Trialing with Feedly vs Google Reader - Issues with Tags-Search Your Own Feed-Email

So far I am working with Feedly as my Google Reader subsitute.

It doesn't take Tags across from Googlereader as yet - possibly may in future - so there is a manual cut and paste approach which I've started doing - also taking the opportunity to rationalise some of these tags along the way.

I am still waiting for my feeds to go across to The Old Reader - think they've been swamped.

Also I discovered this morning that it seems that you can no longer search your own items on Feedly - ie "But Feedly says it current search-your-own-feeds service didn’t scale well enough to work with the influx of new users. So the company has removed it for now, planning to bring it back later this year."

More information is available from - Feedly's blog - http://blog.feedly.com/2013/04/02/announcing-the-new-feedly-mobile-and-welcoming-3-million-reader-refugees/

It was supposed to be still able to be accessed with a work around - http://liliputing.com/2013/04/feedly-updates-its-rss-apps-but-removes-a-favorite-feature-for-now.html

"Update: It turns out you can still search your own feeds, just not from the search box in the sidebar. Using the Feedly browser plugin, type “gg” and then enter your search term and then choose the “in my feedly option."

But now that work around option seems to have been turned off as well.

I can understand the issues that Feedly is having with the increased uptake - but being able to search my own items was a key factor in my using Google Reader and why I went with Feedly. 

However there is another work around for searching your own feeds in Feedly

http://www.feedly.com/home#search/X
eg to search my feeds for IAQ I do this ... http://www.feedly.com/home#search/IAQ

and if you have more than one word, between each one place this:
%20X

eg to search for Google Reader in my feeds ...
http://www.feedly.com/home#search/google%20XReader
seems to be working so far -  sort of - as this search seems to return up to only 30 items from my feeds 

other issues emerging on Feedly's blog

Send by email button has been removed
"The previous implementation did not scale to meet the demand of all the new users who joined feedly over the last 2 weeks. We retired the button until we have a new implementation ready. Between now and then, you can use the email capabilities of the G+ button. Works really well."
and
"We have temporarily removed the direct gmail forwarding, and we’re currently working on making it better integrated. In the meantime, the work around is to use google+ email capabilities to share articles. On feedly for desktop, in thew article view click the g+1 icon (below the article name). Add email addresses in the bottom box and click send. This workaround using g+1 also works on feedly mobile."

It's a journey and must be a challenge - Feedly is claiming that they have picked up 3 million Google Reader refugees ... that's a lot to deal with in a really short time frame

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Social Media - Cloud Tools - blessing or curse for the Quality Field - Quality in Unusual Places

Quality Management needs and Social Media Tools in the Cloud often seem totally unconnected. So is finding a long term quality tool in the social media cloudy universe probably asking too much or not ? I chose this as my theme when ASQ's Paul Borawski asked the ASQ Influential Bloggers to explore finding Quality Tools in Unusual Places as their theme for March 2013.

Both Quality and Social Media share a focus on improvement and innovation. However Quality Management requires procedures with documents and records to be kept for extended periods - whereas the Social Media in the Cloud paradigm is more rooted in ephemera and the ever ephemeral - also seemingly all too trivial to some.

Nearly 5 years ago, as the Global Financial Crisis exploded onto the world stage, I found my Quality Manager role totally shaken up. For the previous two years it had mainly required a "steady hand on the tiller". But as my company wanted to expand its export efforts it faced an ever increasing number of non-tariff barriers aka Technical Barriers to Trade aka TBT's. As Quality Manager I was tasked with working through the maze and getting the certifications in place.

The amount of information I had to sift through to understand the global trade and standards system of each country or region that I was dealing with seemed insurmountable - as various countries fled increasingly into the use of the TBT's to protect their domestic economy. The US Trade Representative's report of 2010 showed how the number of TBT's experienced exponential growth. So a lot of work for me, but when you consider each boatload of steel sent to Europe was worth 15 million Euro's - it became quite compelling to get on top of those evergrowing mountains of information.

Coincidentally in late 2008 I had attended a National Knowledge Management Conference in Canberra Australia where newly emerging social media tools were being enthusiastically shared. Initially hesitant, but by March 2009 I had decided to dive in head first into the social media tools pool to help deal with the TBT information overload :

• storing & sharing favourite websites aka bookmarks - (thenYahoo's) Delicious
• scanning for information - Twitter & Hootsuite microblogging tools plus Google Alerts, groups in LinkedIn and powerpoints in Slideshare
• blogs - although back then the number of Quality related blogs was still quite low - initially I used Google's Blogger but then moved over to Posterous which was a little friendlier to use
• RSS feeds & RSS reader - when great sources of information were located I could feed them into Google Reader where I could read them in one place without doing Google searches or going to individual websites - a great time saver - and the articles could be tagged eg Quality, Records, Audits, TBT's etc. And it was all searchable and shareable. Over the following years I evolved to become one of Google Reader's Power Users.
• and I managed to get them inter-connected and talking to each other - my own beautiful little Quality ecosytem.
• I then shared the information in a Company Sharepoint site via a wiki - a great tool for on-boarding a new team member. And to also minimise a whole lot of people going off and doing the same Google searches over and over again. My new team member soaked up the knowledge and information on that wiki like a sponge.

Togther these tools all made up my electronic Quality Personal Knowledge Management System Toolkit.

My company achieved certifications for several Asian countries and for the European CE Mark Construction Products Directive & Regulation. Using the Social Media tools helped save my sanity back then. And over the following couple of years, more folks in the Quality space began using these tools too, as well as ASQ, ISO, SAI Global etc - so it was all a great resource as my Quality Manager role expanded.

Then a few ripples and ructions.

I was headed to an ISO TC 176 SC2 Working Group meeting in Sydney Australia looking at the future of ISO 9001, when I heard that Yahoo decided to drop Delicious in December 2010. I had so many Quality related websites favourited in Delicious so I was definitely shaken by the news. A few days later I moved to Diigo along with quite a few others. Delicious was subsequently reincarnated - so I decided to use both - a sort of back up plan if either should fall over again.

Twitter bought Posterous Blogging and there were whispers that the end might then be nigh for Posterous - although this was denied - so I started moving copies of my blog articles over to Blogger as a backup just in case. I also began using Wordpress in late 2012 when I set up the social media tools for a local resident community group, but I hesitated to copy all of my own Posterous articles to the Wordpress Blog site - wouldn't copies of the same article in three places have been overkill ?

And then in February 2013, on the day I was heading out to South America for 6 weeks vacation, Posterous's demise was announced by Twitter's CEO - with no access available from May 2013. I was relieved that I would have time on my return to make sure all my article posts had gone to Blogger. And I began to re-think posting them all into Wordpress after all.

Finally in mid March 2013 when I was still vacationing in South America, Google announced it was retiring aka axing Google Reader as part of its "spring clean" - now that had me worried. So much of my Quality related information was in there. Previously I had put aside niggling thoughts of what to do if this ever happened.

By the time I was back home in Australia, possible solutions were emerging - 500,000 people had moved to Feedly - which looked prettier, but didn't have all the functionality of Google Reader although it is promised. Will it make the July 1 2013 deadline ? Who knows ? However it seemed the best of what was on offer.

Two other big guns, Digg and Wordpress have promised to develop solutions - and there is an alphabet soup of other products out there - but many were anchored in Google Reader so how they will go once it is axed - then again, who knows ?

Google advised of a tool to download your stored data from Google Reader, cutely entitled "Takeout" - unfortunately for some of the power users like me, we had to wait for even more tinkering to get our information downloaded.

Various folks began to remonstrate - can you trust Google - can you really trust social media tools in the cloud? Is it wise to develop such a reliance on them ? (Harold Jarche and John T Spencer). Others were like ... just get over it and move on - Beth Kanter - with references to Spencer Churchill's 1988 "Who moved my Cheese?"

Indeed the pace of change in this field of Social Media Tools in the Cloud is so great - such a very short half life. But for some of us, we need a much longer information half life - eg for Quality certification requirements or operation of physical infrastructure like power stations, highways and dams etc. Finally, I read, a couple of days ago, that some folks were beginning to recognize these differing half life paradigms.

I liked the comments on educationalist John T Spencer's blog post  on Google Reader's demise. He ended up agreeing it's worth using these tools - but make sure you have educated the students to understand change - and be sure you have a back up plan in case the plug gets pulled on the tool.

I would still advocate the use of these tools for the finding and sharing of supporting information in the Quality Management field - and definitely agree you need a back up plan to ensure continuity of this information. But for that key information, documents and records needed for Quality Certification, I would contend that they be kept in a place where you control their destiny - and not the boards of companies like Google, Yahoo and Twitter.

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Brazil - Eco Sustainability - Joining the Dots.

Our journey into South America has continued - visiting the World Heritage listed Iguacu Falls in Brazil was beyond awesome. Likewise on the Argentine side of the Iguazu Falls.

And of course the Magellanic Penguins and Sea Lions in the Patagonia in the areas of Puerto Madryn and Puntas Arenas etc. And it is clear that EcoTourism is an important part of the economies in these areas. To be honest I can't recall seeing so many people with Digital SLR Cameras with 200-300mm telephoto lenses as I did at Punta Norte, near Puerto Madryn in the wild Argentine Patagonian coast. All keen to get their own penguin or sea lion shot... not to mention a whale!

At the Agenda 21 activities on Rio in 1992 and 2012, the importance of the Environment has been recognized, as well as at the various International Intergovernmental Climate Change meetings, the COP's, ( Council of the Parties) eg at Cancun Mexico several years ago. NGO's and colourful protesters attend as well to lobby the various government representatives from around the world.

Back in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Agenda 21, the International approach to the Environment was initiated under Gro Bruntland, then leader of Norway- with the message communicated in "Our Common Future" - its ethos inspired from First Peoples -

'we do not inherit the earth but instead hold it in trust for future generations.'
This 1992 Agenda 21 initiative led to the beginning of a a change in philosophy - The Precautionary Principle - in assessing prospective development projects.

So with millions of people visiting these world heritage listed areas in South America each year, it's no surprise that management systems have been initiated to protect the environment. A water pipeline in the Iguacu Falls area displayed its ISO 14001 certification. ISO9001 certifications are also displayed at various tourism businesses - like Hotels. Recycling bins are plentiful at tourist sites to deal with waste - and cruise boats have Ocean Care to discourage tourists from throwing waste into the sea.

So in order to improve the environment we need the protestors to raise awareness, sympathetic governments and also strong NGO organizations. But also groups like ISO and its member organizations to develop confident accreditation systems such as ISO14001 - to help deliver the outcomes desired by
communities, as we face challenges such as climate change- global warming.

Listening to our guide in Patagonia he shared of the changes already occurring. Frogs now exist there, whereas previously they did not prior to the climatic and eco changes that have already occurred.
The reality is that there is still much work still to be done by ISO and its member organizations with all the environmental challenges. And the guardians of Quality cannot treat such issues as Externalities to be ignored in Quality systems. The March 2013 meeting of ISO TC176's committees in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, has some big issues to address.

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