Turned off by bad news? Try our special Olympic-friendly Internet!
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August 1st, 2008 by Alex
I'm delighted to be writing this post as a OneWebDay ambassador. OneWebDay, which takes place on September 22, is a global day to celebrate the Internet, and the values that make the Internet such an essential part of our society. This year OneWebDay is paying particular tribute to the Internet's role in supporting democratic participation -- a role that is made possible by the Internet's character as an open, global and participatory medium.
I'm a participant in that global conversation, but I'm also part of a local online community in the city of Vancouver, where I've been part of many lively conversations in local WiFi cafes and local community sites. Like the rest of Vancouver, wired Vancouverites look forward to showing our city off to the world when we host the winter Olympics in 2010. Of course, as with any global event, the Olympics also raises concerns about what the world might see when it turns its spotlight to beautiful BC.
I'm pleased to put that concern to rest. While I was reading today's news coverage of Internet censorship at the Beijing Olympics, I stumbled onto the IOC's intranet, where I came across the following draft memo:
February 12, 2010
Dear citizen-journalist,
We are sorry to report that owing to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, and certainly not due to any action on the part of your Internet Service Provider or the IOC, your computer may be unable to resolve certain domains. Our technicians are examining the issue, and we expect this outage to last until roughly 11:59 p.m. on February 28th.
To assist our friends in the journalism community, we have prepared this list of alternative sources:
| Instead of... | ...you can visit... |
| thetyee.ca | www.cannedtuna.ca for the very best alternative news from the pages of CTVCanWestglobemedia, a proud division of AOLTimeWarnerNewsCorporation. |
| changeverything.ca | www.changenothing.ca, the site that celebrates Vancouver's charming condos, shopping malls and car dealerships. They're perfect just the way they are. |
| adbusters.org | www.marketingmag.ca, which takes a balanced look at advertising's essential role in helping us buy more stuff. |
| cannabisculture.ca | www.coniferculture.com, a celebration of BC's favourite form of plant life. (Note: please do not smoke the trees.) |
| happyfrog.ca | www.ecstaticfrog.ca, where you'll learn how Vancouver has become the most sustainable city ever. Vancouver has become the most sustainable city ever. Vancouver has become the most sustainable city ever. Now say it with me.... |
| freegeekvancouver.org | www.bestbuy.com, because really - do you want a computer that some hippy's been pawing over? |
In addition, as per recent directives from the Government of Canada, you may have difficulty reaching any URL containing the numerals 2010, the number 10, the word ten, a combination of 1s and 0s, any reference to human or numerary digits, the word winter, winter-y time images or music, or images of abaci. May we show you something in a 2012?
* * *
It's easy to scoff at the idea of Internet censorship bedeviling the Vancouver Olympics the way it's now causing an uproar in Beijing. But Vancouver is in fact the home of one of the few recorded violations of net neutrality: during a 2005 labour dispute, local ISP Telus blocked its subscribers from accessing a website created by its employees' union.
Whether it's Vancouver or Beijing, daily life or Olympic bustle, unfettered access to the Internet is democracy's best friend. OneWebDay is a chance to celebrate the Internet's role in supporting effective democracy -- and a reminder of those who do not yet enjoy its full benefits.
Halfway to hex: Anniversary gifts for geeks
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July 28th, 2008 by Alex
Today marks the eighth anniversary of our other founding partnership: our marriage. July 29th, 2000 was the Big Day not only for the two of us, but also for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.
We know that popular opinion lays the blame for the Brad-Jen breakup at the feet of a certain Ms. Jolie, but we recognize a completely different kind of relationship pressure. With all the press coverage of their marriage, did you ever see them pictured with matching his 'n hers PowerBooks?
We don't want our own marriage to fall victim to the specter of insufficient technology. And yet the traditional roster of anniversary gifts is still geared towards the analog lifestyle.
To celebrate our half-hex anniversary, we're proud to present a new, geek-friendly set of recommended anniversary gifts. Do note that the recommended 8th anniversary gift is a nice, fresh web link...hint, hint.
| Year | Traditional | Geek | Notes |
| 1 | Paper | Manuals, documentation | Electronic documentation is just as appropriate as paper manuals. |
| 2 | Cotton | Tech conference and tech culture T-shirts | 100% cotton and size-appropriate, please, if you want to create passionate users. |
| 3 | Leather | Protective cases, luggage | Before you buy that leather laptop case, make sure your geek isn't a vegan. |
| 4 | Fruit, Flowers, Linen, Silk | Apple product | To a true geek, there is no fruit besides Apple. |
| 5 | Wood | Fonts, input devices | Early typewriters were made from wood. |
| 6 | Sugar, Iron | Red Bull, energy snacks | Sugar, in its geek-preferred form. |
| 7 | Wool, Copper | Circuit boards, hardware upgrades | Circuit boards use copper circuits. |
| 8 | Bronze, Pottery | Web links | Bronze is used for bells, i.e. a way of drawing people's attention. |
| 9 | Pottery, Willow | Data storage | For holding things -- the modern equivalent to willow baskets. |
| 10 | Tin, aluminum | Enclosures, CPUs | CPU enclosures are often made from aluminum. |
| 11 | Steel | RAM, memory | RAM chips are typically held in a computer by steel clips. Think of this as the digital equivalent of a wedding photo album. |
| 12 | Silk, Linen | Security devices and software | Silk is made by worms. Security software protects against computer worms. |
| 13 | Lace | Portable electronics devices | Microchips, like lace, used to rely on women with good eyesight to do the manufacturing (both have since automated). Assembly of small products still relies on fine motor work by women. |
| 14 | Ivory | Electronic instruments, speakers | Piano keys were originally made from ivory. |
| 15 | Crystal | LCDs | Liquid CRYSTAL displays. Get it? |
| 20 | China | GPS | Ceramics are part of the miniature antennas used in GPS devices. |
| 25 | Silver | Digital photography equipment, image capture | Silver used in early photo processing. |
| 30 | Pearl | Smart phones | Like the Blackberry Pearl. |
| 35 | Coral, Jade | Linux boxes | The Linux OS, like coral, is made up of thousands of individual contributions that are nonetheless "commonly perceived to be a single organism". |
| 40 | Ruby | Web applications | Preferably applications written in Ruby on Rails. |
| 45 | Sapphire | Laptop computers | Laptop screens use LEDs; some LEDs use a sapphire-like crystal as part of the manufacturing process. |
| 50 | Gold | MP3 players | Gold is used in semiconductors; radios were one of the earlier applications of semiconductors. |
| 55 | Emerald | Code, custom software | As created on the Emerald Isle. |
| 60 | Diamond | Pre-release alpha technologies | Synthetic diamonds are projected as a future material for superconductors, capable of withstanding great heat. |
Online collaboration for your right brain, part 2: MindMeister at Social Signal
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July 24th, 2008 by Alex
Click here to read part 1, an introduction to digital mind mapping.
MindMeister works a lot like MindManager, with the features I've come to see as essential for a good mind-mapping experience:
- rapid creation of new nodes and node "children". (Hitting return creates a node; tab creates children of the node you're on.)
- automatic linking of nodes. When you create a node, it's automatically linked to what's already on the map (as opposed to a tool like OmniGraffle, in which you manually link nodes.)
- support for visual elements to illustrate/highlight
- control over color and font of elements
- attach files or hyperlinks to any node
- intuitive and visually pleasing interface
- drag-and-drop editing so you can quickly reorganize your thoughts
- share maps with colleagues
- track edits to your mind map via e-mail or Twitter
- publish maps to your blog or elsewhere online
- use offline (via Google Gears)
- Skype integration to chat with your collaborators
- change tracking to see who added what
See who added what when viewing a shared map.
- optional automatic link maker (links the selected node to the most relevant web page for that term)
- enterprise version to brand MindMeister for use with clients
- browser extensions and widgets that make it easy to add to your default mind map
- and of course, an a.p.i. (developers, start your engines.)
- export to FreeMind, Mindjet and other formats (premium only)
- prompt, non-bureaucratic customer service (i.e. when i asked them for my free upgrade after Rob paid for his premium service, they didn't hassle me about the process whereby I'd referred him)
But what makes MindMeister rock my world is the fact that it lets two or more people work on a mind map at the same time. No locking and unlocking the document; no waiting a minute while your collaborator's changes show up. If you and a colleague are editing the same map concurrently, you'll see each other's changes in about five or ten seconds. This makes the experience of collaboration a lot less like Google Docs (which we use regularly, in exchanging drafts of a document) and a lot more like SubEthaEdit (which we use constantly, to collaboratively write or note-take in real time).
MindMeister goes to work for Social Signal
As an almost real-time collaboration tool, MindMeister unlocks a whole new way of working together. You're not limited to linear structures (like task lists, documents and even wikis). You can take notes, jot down ideas or capture information -- then dynamically and collaboratively reorganize it. Where document sharing (at its best, i.e. real time in SubEthaEdit) can feel like writing together, with MindMeister you can actually do your thinking together.
We've been using MindMeister for a little over a month, and already we've used it to:
- plan and outline writing projects
- wireframe the navigation structure for a website
- outline a community engagement plan
- diagram an organization chart and decision tree
- map out deliverables for a complex project
- figure out the relationship among multiple overlapping technical terms
- map out responsibilities on a complex project
But if you really want to understand what MindMeister can do for you, you've got to see it in action. So here is the very latest mind map we've created -- a map of where mind mapping fits into the big picture of collaboration tools that we use here at Social Signal.
(Click and drag on the map to move it around so that you can see the whole thing. The tools with the hearts are the ones I personally use every week, if not every day. Click here to see the map in all its glory on the MindMeister site.)
Share your thoughts for a chance to win a free year of MindMeister premium
Are you using MindMeister yourself? Curious about -- or experienced with -- some of the other tools on the Social Signal map of online collaboration tools? Have another approach to collaboration that you prefer? Tell us your ideas about mind mapping and online collaboration, and you could win a free year of premium MindMeister service, which lets you maintain more than 6 maps, download your maps to your local machine, attach files to your topics, and is 100% ad-free.
Share your thoughts by:
- leaving a comment on this blog post
- responding on your own blog or site, linking back to this post
- creating your own MindMeister map (please link to it by leaving a comment below)
- any other nifty collaborative online way that you want (just let us know what it is!)
Online collaboration for your right brain, part 1: an introduction to digital mind mapping
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July 23rd, 2008 by Alex
Most online collaboration tools engage your left brain: that part of you that likes structure and organization, and supports linear, sequential thinking. Think of Basecamp, with its careful system of tasks and milestones. Or Google spreadsheets (I have dozens of them!) organizing everything from budgets to menus in neat, orderly rows and columns. Even wikis seem to work most effectively when they are gardened into a coherent structure, with some kind of intentional hierarchy of information.
That's ironic, because the web itself is a very right-brain medium: hyperlinks let you flow from site to site in the same kind of random, intuitive and creative way that your right hemisphere works.
The latest addition to the Social Signal toolbox is a terrific online application that engages your right brain very effectively: MindMeister.
MindMeister is an online mind mapping application that lets you collaborate in producing visual representations of information or ideas. A mind map typically looks like a tree or network: you put your title or central idea in the middle of a piece of (real or virtual paper), and then you draw branching lines outward to capture related ideas and most crucially, relationships among ideas.
In this two-part blog post I'll introduce you to mind mapping and to MindMeister. Part 1 (you are here) introduces mind mapping and some of the options for digital mind mapping. Part 2 looks at MindMeister's features, and how we use MindMeister for collaboration at Social Signal. Part 2 also includes a MindMeister-generated map of a range of online collaboration tools at Social Signal, so even if mind mapping doesn't seem like it's for you, you may want to check out some of the other tools on our map.
Birth of a mind mapper
The king of mind maps is Tony Buzan, who has written more than a dozen books about mind mapping and its various uses for improving memory, study habits, et cetera. Buzan argues that mind mapping
harnesses the full range of cortical skills - word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness - in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain.
I became quite a dedicated mind mapper while in grad school, using mind maps to take most of my notes on course readings, chart entire sub-fields of political science, and outline my own papers and thinking. That was back in the olden days, so I did my mind maps on paper, which had the advantages of being very immediate and making it easy to implement Buzan's recommendations to engage visual thinking with lots of colour and imagery.
This is part of a paper-based mind map I created while studying for my general exams in political science in 1997. It summarized the major debates and authors in the field of political culture. (This is just a snippet -- click here to open the entire map in a new window.)
But it had some significant disadvantages: there was no easy way to edit or move around elements within a mind map, and I usually arrived at my afternoon seminars with my forearms covered in a rainbow of ink (from letting them rest on top of all the coloured pens I had open while mapping).
Thanks to the popularity of Buzan's work, we now have lots of software options for ink-free mind mapping. I've tried out a lot of these over the years, and have found that different tools work well for different kinds of mind maps.
Mind mapping goes digital
If you're creating a map to diagram an organization or information structure you're actually going to implement, you need a lot of control over layout options, so something like OmniGraffle is great. (That's what we usually use for information architecture work, i.e. planning out the navigation structure of a web site.) If you're creating a map to organize your thinking, it's better to use something that automatically creates relationships among elements and lets you work very quickly: after years of searching, I was recently delighted to discover MindManager, which I now use regularly. 
I've also tried using Personal Brain, which I discovered through Jerry Michalski: it has the potential to become your primary tool for information management, since it can grow to virtually infinite size (Jerry has thousands of items in his brain), and can even replace your finder or file browser. In addition to letting you map topics, Personal Brain lets you attach notes and URLs to each item in your brain, so you could actually use it to replace your current system for managing bookmarks.
I took it for a spin over a few weeks in February, but it feels like the kind of tool you'd need to work with for quite a while before understanding its full potential or assessing its fit for your personal workflow, and my trial license ran out before I was ready to commit to it. If Personal Brain establishes del.icio.us integration, so I can keep del.icio.us links synched to a brain, I'll be tempted to try it again.
As a committed mind mapper and a devotee of social web applications, it was inevitable that I'd want to get a little peanut butter in my chocolate. Rob and I do a lot of our writing and thinking together, and most of our creative tools are eventually subjected to the "but can we do it together?" test. Thanks to my recent love-in with MindManager, it occurred to me to Google the phrase "collaborative mind mapping" and voilà, I found the extremely fabulous and user-friendly MindMeister.
Kris Krug on Web 2.0 at STT
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June 22nd, 2008 by Alex
Technology and copyright
Technology is obsoleting copyright law. Encourages people to use Creative Commons for all their work.
» bonus tip: When publishing with Creative Commons, use the attribution noncommercial license, which means that any non-profit can republish your content, as long as they credit you as the original author (or photographer). But businesses won’t be allowed to take your content and make money with it.
Promote ownership of your brand
Let people remix your content. Give them creative assets to work with.
Let go of control. Don’t make the mistake the music industry made — trying to loc down their content, and alienating their fans.
Document everything
If it didn’t happen on the Internet, it didn’t happen.
The power of open source
Open source software development is inherently tied to social change. They are building things for the common grood while working around traditional power models.
Vision Vancouver debate
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June 5th, 2008 by Alex
So far no huge policy differences except on the idea of a “speculator tax” (Gregor: pro. Al: con. Raymond: ?)
A great member question: your supporters can select a 2nd choice on the preferential ballot. What can you tell them about your two opponents’ qualities and contributions to guide their decision?
I was sorry that none of the three responded with specific praise for the others’ virtues. It was such a nice opportunity to transcend the “fight” paradigm.
Bringing your online community to life
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June 2nd, 2008 by Alex
You've spent tens of thousands of dollars creating an online community site. Your organization has a big vision for how this new community can engage your customers, members or the public. Your developers, communications team and fundraisers are all bleary-eyed from the effort and dollars it's taken to get you to launch day. Now what?
That's the question we tried to answer during last week's session at NetSquared. The conference itself was a great reminder of the number one law of community-building: you can set the stage, but the community will define itself. And when we helped CompuMentor launch the NetSquared online community three years ago, we could never have envisioned the depth and breadth of expertise and enthusiasm that the community now encompasses.
This year's NetSquared showcased the very best of what's possible when development know-how meets community vision: the twenty-one projects that were showcased in the Mashup Challenge demonstrated a wide range of ways that content or tools can help drawn people to a site.
But drawing people to your site is just the first step. How do you motivate them to actually participate, to contribute their own time, ideas and content? In other words, how do you bring your site to life?
My presentation at NetSquared drew on four kinds of resources to help answer that question:
1. Questions to ask before launching your online community.
Rob has written a great introduction to the questions you need to ask yourself before launching an online community (PDF). Some highlights:
- What's in it for your users...and how do they know?
- How do you want people to behave toward each other?
- How will users know their contributions are valued?
2. The ingredients for a community engagement plan.
We often help organizations answer this question by creating engagement plans. If you want to roll your own, we'd suggest including
- key messages
- audiences (with relevance, messages and channels for each)
- incentives for participation (contests, recognition, points, etc.)
- outreach best practices
- blogger outreach plans and sample outreach e-mails
- media outreach plans
- sample e-mails for outreach to e-mail lists
- sample e-mails for outreach to friends and colleagues
- recommended outreach collateral (e.g. stickers, brochures) with creative
- plan and texts for internal channel outreach (e.g. main web site)
- timeline for first 3-6 months of post-launch activity
- animation guidelines
- do's and don'ts for site management
- FAQ responses to questions about the project
- pre-prepared texts for responding to emergent challenges (e.g. criticisms)
The session covered key topics like:
- an effective invitation
- the role of rules
- incentives
- community ownership
- effective animation
- gateway participation
- balancing quantity and quality
By popular request, the content slides are now posted on SlideShare. What you won't find there are the slides that structured the various activities we undertook as a group; I have to keep a few tricks up my sleeve for future presentations!
4. The contributions of the (session) community.
If there's one lesson we continually learn and re-learn from each of our online community projects, it's that the community always knows more than we do. That's just as true for a live community, like a workshop or presentation audience. So my NetSquared workshop focused on surfacing the knowledge and insights of the talented folks in the room -- and they had a lot to contribute! You can find some of the highlights in the Twitter feed for N2Y3, and from session live bloggers Laura Whitehead and Ivan Boothe.
Hungry for more? Come to the Social Tech Training in Toronto later this month. There's a special discount for members of the NetSquared community.
Free tix to Sex and The City…and some help for sex trade workers
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May 30th, 2008 by Alex
Today marks the release of Sex and the City: The Movie. With the news that SATCTM tix are selling out, your friends at Social Signal (part of the original Change Everything team) want to save you from the nightmare of a Sex-less weekend. We've got twenty tickets to the 8 pm show on Saturday, May 31st, at the Fifth Avenue Cinema on Burrard Street.
The first twenty girlfriends to e-mail me (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com) will be our guests on Saturday night. We're also working on a plan for pre- or post-film cosmos (let us know what works better for you when you RSVP).
If you'd like to pass on the love, Social Signal will match any ticket-sized donations you make to WISH, the Women's Information Safe Haven.WISH provides female survival sex workers with shelter, essential needs supports, and alternatives to their high-risk lifestyles. You can donate online or in person on Saturday night.
We hope to see you on Saturday!
See Sex and the City with your friends at Social Signal
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May 30th, 2008 by Alex
The first twenty Social Signal girlfriends to e-mail me (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com) will be our guests on Saturday night. We're also working on a plan for pre- or post-film cosmos (let us know what works better for you when you RSVP).
If you'd like to pass on the love, Social Signal will match any ticket-sized donations you make to WISH, the Women's Information Safe Haven. WISH provides female survival sex workers with shelter, essential needs supports, and alternatives to their high-risk lifestyles. You can donate online or in person on Saturday night.
We hope to see you on Saturday!
Mary Robinson on media freedom
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May 30th, 2008 by Alex
Fighting lice in Vancouver
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April 29th, 2008 by Alex
We knew this day would come. Lice...yuck!
As we struggle to contain the lice outbreak on our kids' heads, we share the following resources and insights:
- Think carefully before using pharmaceutical lice remedies like Nix. They are based on a natural derivative from chyrsanthemums, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily safe or effective. At the very least, you may find that your household gets MORE itchy before it gets LESS itchy. (That's how it worked over here.)
- Don't just treat your household. Ensure your daycare or school CAREFULLY examines all kids' heads, and commits parents to treating kids with lice or nits.
- Educate yourself. The most detailed resources we've found are at http://www.headlice.org
- Spring for the fancy tools. The plastic lice combs that come with most lice treatment products don't begin to do the job. The tea tree oil-based Lice Stop product available at natural health stores contains a much better, metal comb; you can also buy a higher a quality comb from your pharmacist.
- Expect to spend a lot of time and money solving the problem. We're currently spending 2-3 hours per night going over each head with a finetooth comb; and we've already spent $100 having bedding and clothing laundered after we ran out of hot water. (To kill lice, you have to use HOT water and HOT dryer heat.)
- Consider getting professional help. We've just called in the pros at http://www.lice911.ca to make sure we get the job 100% done.
- Build lice checks into your routine. We realize our little one has likely had this problem for a while. If we'd been doing weekly lice checks, we could have tackled this problem much earlier, and had an easier time of it. From now on, we're doing weekly checks on each kid.
- Whatever you do, don't blog about your family's lice. It will only lead to trouble. I'm just sure of it.
Every Human Has Rights makes human rights personal
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April 23rd, 2008 by Alex
For the past two months, I've been part of the digital strategy team for The Elders, an extraordinary NGO that was launched last year by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. The vision is to convene a council of elders for the global village; the founding elders include Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mary Robinson and Kofi Annan.
As part of this work, I've been supporting the web team for Every Human Has Rights, a campaign to spread awareness and support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This year is the sixtieth anniversary of UDHR, and being part of its celebration is a wonderful echo of one of the first pieces of work I did as a grad student at Harvard, thirteen years ago. (Ouch!) At that time I was a research assistant for Andrew Moravcsik, helping him research an article on international human rights regimes (PDF) that he published in time to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UDHR.
Moravcsik's article focused particularly on the creation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), which, unlike the UNDHR, was designed to be an enforceable document that would give individuals the legal standing to pursue human rights issues in an international court of law. What the ECHR advanced was the idea of personal, individual-level responsibility for human rights advocacy; what it lost was the boldness and breadth of vision of the UDHR.
The EHHR project recognizes that online networks provide a way to have your human rights cake, and eat it too. EHHR is focusing on each of the core themes of the UN Declaration, a sweeping document that addresses basic rights in areas from religion to employement, and from freedom of expression to healthcare. But by asking people around the world to sign on personally -- over the web -- as supporters of that Declaration, it's reawakening the idea that each and every one of us has a role to play in supporting human rights.
And that role doesn't need to be limited to a courtroom. One of the key partners on the EHHR project is Witness, an online NGO that uses video and web technology to tackle human rights abuses around the world. Through EHHR and Witness's user-driven site, The Hub, anyone in the world can be an active advocate for human rights -- a personal witness -- by contributing a video or online story.
EHHR and Witness are just two pieces of a large and growing online ecosystem for supporting human rights worldwide. Global Voices Online gathers bloggers from around the world, including many who are writing under adverse -- even life-threatening -- conditions in their home countries. Ushahidi and the Tunisian Prison Map are putting human rights abuses in Kenya and Tunisia on the map (literally). The Martus project provides digital security tools to protect the effectiveness and safety of people working on the front lines of human rights protection.
The growing online human rights ecosystem of which EHHR is a part didn't exist when Moravcsik wrote his article. At the time, the courts were the best option -- really, the only meaningful option -- for individuals to engage in the public sphere of human rights. What made that interesting to Moravcsik was the way that human rights agreements allowed governments to dig themselves into structural commitments to human rights, with citizens serving as the hypothetical watchdogs.
Today there's a whole new set of tools to give those hypothetical watchdogs real teeth. But now, citizens don't have to wait to be invited into that role, nor do they have to find their way into a courtroom. They just have to pick up a cell phone, a camera, or a keyboard, and they can hold human rights violations accountable in the court of global public opinion.
The technologies are all there....all that's missing is the recognition of meaningful personal accountability for human rights. That's what EHHR puts back in the picture, by asking and every one of us to sign a personal commitment to the bold vision the UN set forth sixty years ago.
Of course, when the Declaration was written, most UN members would not have envisioned a world in which access to global communications could be virtually universal. Now that we have it, it's time to make human rights universal, too.