Communication Good, Communication Bad

Two articles in the Chronicle at the top of the most viewed list are interesting to contrast. First is "Turnaround President Makes the Most of His College’s Small Size" about G. T. Smith as President of David & Elkins College:

[I]n higher education, Mr. Smith is known as a turnaround artist, a man with the talent and disposition to take a failing college and transform it into a winner.

Quoting Smith, they give the reason for his success as "The underlying thing for me is relationships—hardly anything important happens that doesn't have to do with relationships." For example:

After years of stagnant enrollment at Davis & Elkins—which had developed a dismal local reputation, according to some local high-school counselors—the freshman class was up 50 percent this fall. As of November, the number of applications was more than seven times higher than at this time in 2007, and eight students had already put down deposits. Consider that those numbers came after the college had canceled its advertising campaign and done away with mass mailings in favor of a highly personal approach to recruiting students: getting to know their names, their parents' names, their dogs' names, and conveying the message that at this college of 700 students, you're part of a family.

A bit off-topic, but equally fascinating is his take on the changing landscape of higher education, which I've speculated wildly about in these virtual pages. Pres. Smith's version:

"We can't in a Pollyannaish way say, 'The liberal-arts college will always survive.' We are all under threat or under siege," he says. "It comes down to whether you are going to look at your future based entirely upon your past or what others are doing, or whether you are going to look at the fundamentals, the principles, the basics, and have the discipline to stay with those."

That was "Communication Good." Now the other one.

A while back I blogged happily about the backchannel--the emergence of live chattering by text, Twitter, blogging, etc. during presentations, class meetings, or any occasion where people have the means and time. It's the 21st century version of passing notes and whispering.

Today's references are:

• Chronicle: Conference Humiliation: They're Tweeting Behind Your Back
• Chronicle blog: Tweckling Twitterfolk: Chronicle Readers React to the New World of Twitter Conference Humiliation.
• SocialMediaGroup: Just because it’s a crowd doesn’t make it wise
  

You can gather from the titles what happened. In the case of the last article on the list, a presenter at Web 2.0 Expo was giving her talk with a huge screen in the background showing the conference Twitter channel feed. When some tweeters started making disparaging comments on the backchannel, she didn't understand why the audience was reacting oddly to her talk, and got understandably flustered. The other articles talk about other instances of this "tweckling," a neologism I find kind of cute, even if the behavior is reprehensible.

Interestingly, browsing Technorati for "backchannel" only produces positive-sounding hits, with advice for speakers on how to build one, for example.

The moral of the story? It would be ridiculous to try to generalize anything based on these two completely different articles about communication, so I can't resist. The difference is between high-bandwidth, high-stakes (personal responsibility for words) communication and low-bandwidth, low-stakes (essentially anonymous) communication. It's not that the first is good and the second bad, just that they're very different. And the no-man's land in between--email--is the worst of both worlds: high stakes and low bandwidth. Ever had a joke or off-hand comment interpreted differently than you intended it? Add to that the ease of someone sending your email to a third party, and the potential for mischief multiplies.

One of the articles notes that some conferences post rules of etiquette for the backchannel. Of course, if the tweeters are anonymous, this isn't going to have much effect. In the end, though, there isn't true anonymity on the Internet. Pretty much anything can be traced if there is enough interest in doing so. Best policy, in my opinion, is: if you think it's important to say it, put your name on it, be clear, and be polite. I probably fail on the second point, but it's a work in progress. The best payoff would be to get almost as much mileage out of low-bandwidth communication as Pres. Smith gets out of high-bandwidth communication. That's a powerful idea that could spawn a sea of consultants: maximize the effect of short, text-based, remote communication.

Of course, this is the Internet; someone's probably wrote a book on it already.

Meeting Salad

The other day I mentioned that I was trying to bring some order to meetings with a new form I'd created. This all started from "meeting salad." If the image below of papers randomly drawn from my briefcase seems familiar, then you too have produced your share of the stuff.
The name "meeting salad" is one I drew from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Here's the quote, describing what was swept out of "Mucho's" car (emphasis added):

[Y]ou had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused [...] and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, rags of old underwear or dresses [...], all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair [...].

The description seems apt. I had googled "meeting notes" to see if someone had published an open-source solution, and found this as the top link:

A common bad habit I have come across with managers and executives in recent years is the accumulation of unprocessed meeting notes. It is heartbreaking to see so much effort go into the creation of meetings and the capturing of what goes on, and the stress created and value lost from irresponsible management of the results. At least 80 percent of the professionals I work with have pockets of unprocessed meeting notes nested away in spiral notebooks, folders, drawers and piles of papers.

So it seems that meeting salad is being produced in mass quantities. The site's recommendation was basically to have more self-discipline and to go through the notes once in a while. I need more than that. Using the form as a start, I will build a little database and form application on top of it, so that my project coordinator or other assistant can enter the data. The beauty of this is that each little leaf of meeting salad will be tagged with a destination, like IT or Assessment Committee. Then, when I'm going to meet with some person or group I can simply query the database for unresolved items and have fodder for a meeting agenda. Right now I'm just carrying the notebook around with me everywhere, but when there are many pages it's not convenient to scan through looking for Earthquake Prevention Committee or whatever.

Once it's built I'll post it at meetingsalad.com, and you can use it too, if you want. I bought the domain name yesterday for a sawbuck, but there's absolutely nothing there yet. If you have comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

On a related note, organizing email is an equal pain. I know that google is coming out with their Wave thing to replace email soon, and maybe that will help (if you haven't heard of it, you've been under a rock). But this morning I stumbled upon Xobni--a tool that integrates with MS Outlook, which I use for email. The problem with traditional email, Outlook included, is that it produces what we may as well call "email salad" -- heaps and heaps of data that are only loosly organized. Yes, you can sort and you can search, but I often find myself dreading sifting through two weeks of messages to find the attachment I was looking for. (Of course, we should be archiving docs with something like openIGOR, and my group does that, but not everyone does.)

Xobni is a free tool that looks like it can help with email salad by providing more intelligence about correspondence. Primarily this is done by focusing on individuals and networks as the main unit of analysis, rather than an individual email. You can see screenshots at their site. It's very pretty and installed cleanly on my machine (although the install dialog was hidden behind another window, which caused me to think it was frozen for a while). The image below (from their website) hints at some of the features, including integration with social networking sites, threaded conversations, message statistics, and easily browsed attachments by person.

Yammer

I heard about Yammer the other day on NPR's All Tech Considered segment. It's like twitter, except for the workplace. Some people swear by twitter, but I haven't been able to see the use of it myself, given the time investment seemingly required. (I know--I probably just don't get it.) Anyway, yammer seems like a solution to a problem.

What problem? Well, spam in short. Not the external kind that clogs up the Internet in general, but internal spam. At a large enough institution, it's an example of a tragedy of the commons. Way more than half of my emails are stuff I don't particularly want to read. If it were tagged with a minimal amount of meta-data then it would be much more useful to me. For example if a message came with standard tags I could instantly decide whether or not I'm interested in reading it. Better yet, if I could just let it blow by without even entering my In-Box, so much the better. That's essentially what yammer does. It's like sending out a chat on a group channel, but with meta-data possibilities. It's simple to embed a tag: just use a pound sign. For example:

Trying to learn the yammer API #web

would tag the message with the web keyword. Users could elect to follow that thread, or even create an RSS feed from it. There are also groups. I'm not sure what the relative advantages are of the two options, other than that groups can be made private.

There is a desktop application that's very pretty. It runs on Adobe's AIR platform. A picture is shown below.
It's very pretty, as you can see.

Is this really a company-wide spam killer? That remains to be seen. I'll first test this in my areas of responsibility and see how it works. With any luck, others will become interested too.

Yammer is free for basic functionality. If you want more administrative functions, you have to pay.

Edit: I can already tell this isn't really a tool to eliminate much internal spam. It generates more traffic if anything. It's for a different purpose, and I will explore this (you can actually see what the creators envision on a short video on their site). I'm thinking that perhaps posting mass mailings to a portal message board is the solution to the spam problem.