Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Saturday morning links on the love of words:

# Cory Doctorow in Forbes on the future of books and publishing and the (not?) Dead Medium: “I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.”

# Wordie.org OMG, it’s like a social flickr site for words! here’s two of mine: “aa“, “bobulated” (okay, one of these I made up).

# Ze Frank on scrabble: priceless.

# oh also, did you know you can type “define: anything” into google and google will return only definitions? try it yourself

what are your favourite word links you’ve come across?

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song of the day: the fantastic Working out Words – by the Diableros
Click here to play:

Jerry King writes “[in New York Times Magazine] From an Enterprise 2.0 perspective, terrific article on how Web 2.0 tools are remaking the business of national security environment.”

He’s right! this is a longish article that you should absolutely check out. It’s about how internal U.S. government agencies CIA, FBI and now Homeland are coping with information overload, dysfunctional IT/intranets and bureaucratic barriers by turning to… blogs and wiki’s etc to solve the problem. A few choice bits..

The promise of social media to the spy agencies:

“Spies … could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. … Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.”

initial success

“He told me the usefulness of Intellipedia [Internal Wikik] proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out.”

to the adoption challenge

“…the challenges are only in part about technology. They are also about political will and institutional culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change…

The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top, like Fingar, Meyerrose and their colleagues at the office of the director of national intelligence, are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the “iron majors” — career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies. They might find the idea of an empowered grass roots to be foolhardy; they might also worry that it threatens their turf.”

“Enterprise” 2.0 is absolutely about organizational change and for this reason, the greatest benefits won’t come easily. It’s a patter we’ve seen before, top management buys in to the promise implicitly, the youthful don’t just understand 2.0 – they demand it – yet in the middle lies the opportunity from for resistance from those in the organization who’s power is most vulnerable to disruption. And yet it may be the knowledge pool and tacit capital of these same experienced managers that could be most required to make the new system at all viable.

More thoughts to come on solving the adoption problem…

Mark Kuznicki has posted an insightful and entertaining look at the future of democamp and also the ever-burning issue of the ordinary-male-nerd to female-nerd to Hot Gay Nerd ratio. This later issue as something I’ve definitely noticed at least the half of (not that the deb’s, leila‘s, malgosia‘s, sacha‘s, jo brown’s, mira’s, estelle‘s, amber‘s, Siobhan‘s, Shelley‘s and many others of demo camp aren’t worth an entire demographic of women each on their own).

Naturally it’s hard for us to easily solve the WHOLE problem of women in geekdom all at once. For instance, others some argue it’s nature, others decry nurture, society the school system and so forh. Even others, more radically, might go so far to argue that (oh my!) it’s not women that have the problem (the so-called: Actually, “it’s because they all found better things to do” theory).

In any case, democamp content and culture is still a factor. We should be careful of habits like becoming over clique-ish as in the typically male/high-fidelityesque alphageek tendency to challenge the “do you have the geek-cred to join our club?” mentality. Elsewise…

Casecamp is at least half women. Enterprise20 Camp does okay. And UsabilityCamp too (leaving aside debates about whether the last was strictly “usability” or “campy” etc.). I have a feeling (I’m not one so I must resort to conjecture) that women are more drawn to application-focused camps. As in more design focused and what does it mean and what can I use it for camps as opposed to the raw techy tech demos/camps.

But what is democamp for? Is there not value in the raw transfer of bleeding-edge deeply-geeky innovation? There’s an argument that could be valid for democamp to just embrace it’s inherent geekness. Own it as it were.

Still, even with the most never-been-done raw techy-tech demos/camps there’s still wide disparity in perception of quality. One person’s killer fascinating hack seems to be another’s 15 minutes of life they’ll never get back. So this is why

I’m back to supporting Jay’s and Dave’s current working plan for boosting the quality of DemoCamp. Their ideas include:

1. A digg-like interface to vote on demo-applicants one week prior to event. Sounds great.
2. more focused democamps, do a general free-for-all DC at most once every three, meanwhile why not a just-mobile DC or a just platform-specific or what-have-you democamp
3. Embrace the spin-off camps (okay this was Mark’s, and one I’m partial too) but a solid idea for drawing wider involvement and for drawing connections outside the mono-culture.

Let’s give this a shot and see what happens.

As for Kuznicki’s more specific complaint, namely how can we help our dear friend hook up with more Hot Gay Nerds ^(tm) I think the solution here is clear. Obviously this problem cries out for a new niche web2.0-enabled online social networking community. shorely… somebody can easily have somthing whipped up in rails in time to demo ‘fore the camp is called to session?