We’re still on the lake, and it’s still raining. It’s still nice to be sailing again.

We’re up on Lake Ossipie for a couple of weeks. The rain has been relentless. Fortunately it’s a nice place to watch the rain. I’ve gotten in a couple of bike rides, though it’s been very wet. In these parts it’s all sandy, flats and gravelly hills - glacial moraines. We’re hoping for a sighting of the sun tommorrow.

We went up to the northeast side of Willowdale last night. We did 12 miles, 2:30 (the end of the track was in my car - forgot to stop the GPS).

NEMBA Willowdale at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: Share GPS Tracks

Took a bunch of waypoints.

willowdale with waypoints at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: Share and Plan your Trips

We had a nice ride last night - 8 or so people showed up. This track shows the way to some really nice new single track to the north.

NEMBA Easy Ride - Willowdale at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

This the the ride I’ve been doing with Jeff. It’s mostly single-track, and varies in difficulty, with much of it being smooth, through there are some rocky climbs that give me trouble. We’d like to add in more single track rather than turning around. there’s more to be had to the north and east, but in our last attempted we ended up riding roads in Ipswitch after losing daylight. I need to transfer this track to the official park map and marker numbers so we can piece it together.

What we’ve got so far is about 4.4 miles, and takes us 1:05 to ride.

Willowdale ST out and back at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

At times working groups can use e-mail in a way that seems to exploit all its weaknesses. Here’s some problem areas that seem to crop up.

Tone
The tone of an e-mail can be somewhat harsh, cold, and even accusatory. Getting across the emotion in written correspondence requires some skill and effort, and often we lack the time and inclination to give tone proper care. This can lead to e-mail threads full of defensive posturing and tangential commentary. It’s best to interpret e-mail literally, and ignore tone, since it’s often misleading. If someone asks, “Have you reviewed my report yet?” don’t imagine they’re saying you’re lazy, just assume they want to know. If you’re concerned about sub-text, switch to another better suited medium to address it; in-person conversations or phone calls, if working remotely. It’s difficult to build positive, comfortable working relationships over e-mail. Keeping touch in a casual way via IM can bridge the gap.

Transience
E-Mail can be a great way to hash issues out. The problem is that an e-mail thread is a poor record of any conclusions that might have been reached, or agreements that have been arrived at. E-mail archives are hard to manage and search, and the thread can be subject to interpretation dependant on out-of-channel communications . Worse still, progress can be lost on the issues, and thrash can take hold for days or weeks, only ended via fatigue and frustration.

Wiki’s are a much better tool for hammering out issues. Discussion can happen in comments, changes can be tracked, and the resulting artifact should be well organized and searchable.

Format
For complex discussion, e-mail in practice has some difficult formatting issues, mostly around quoting and commenting within the thread. This is due to different tools and users behavior when quoting earlier messages. Some folks top-post, others bottom-post, or mix the two. Some messages are plain text, others are html, and attachments of various formats maybe used. The solution to this problem is to agree on some standards on quoting and format. If simple standards become difficult, it’s a sure sign some other medium should be used, or the discussion is too broad to make progress on.

My recommendations are:
- Minimal quoting (don’t quote unless it’s really necessary)
- Bottom-posting (comment after the quote)
- plain-text only.
- Use URLs to reference material on a web server instead of attachments where possible.

Martin the lizard arrived last week. We’d been preparing for him for a while. We got a fairly large glass terrarium for him, and set up lighting. Martin is a Bearded Dragon, a species from the dry inland of Australia. He needs warms temperatures, bight light that includes UV-B rays, and eats mostly live insects and worms.

He’s a very alert lizard. He’s behind where I sit at my desk at home, and every time I look, he seems to be staring at me. And he doesn’t stay still - he’ll shift his position, turn his head, but one eye is always pointed my way. It’s a little weird.

The problem with social media is that in it’s current, most popular form, it’s constructed at cross purposes to getting work done. If social networking is to support work groups engaged in productive work, it needs to have the following characteristics: Coherence Transparency, Telepresence, Authentication, and Attribution.

Facebook emphasizes growing your friend network. For most people, anyone you know is your friend, and their prestige is based on the total number of friends. This causes a lot of diffusion and noise, as the list of friends gets populated by many people you have little in common with, much less any shared goals for getting something done. Facebook also has groups and networks, but again, these things are based on growth, mainly because Facebooks’ business model depends on growing the user community, not on building groups of people who accomplish any particular goal or task. What’s needed is Coherence - formation of association around common goals or purposes.

In it’s current form, social networking is interesting because of its extensions to on-line life, making it much easier to find people and keep track of what their up to. The opportunity presented is for Transparency. This makes it fun, but a huge waste of time. Some sort of project system, where people could agree on a set of goals and end-results of an effort, and filter the noise outside of that, is were social media has to go.

It’s missing a couple of other ingredients: Authentication and Attribution. It’s hard to say who people really are on Facebook, and what their real accomplishments are. Similarly, Linked-In offers networking in a business-oriented way, and has some basic “reputation” features via its peer recommendation system, but it’s pretty hard to verify what people say they’ve accomplished.

Authentication is more than just keeping the bad guys out - it really needs to be there so that you can be sure people are who they appear to be. In real life, we have finely evolved skills for recognizing faces and voices - there needs to be an online equivalent.

Similarly, attribution must be linked to authentication so that we all know who has done what. Reputation systems are a bit different, telling you what others think about an indivitual - attribution is more about allowing you to make your own judgements. An attribution system would like like a cross-discipline version of IMDB, where you could find out what someone has worked on, and in what capacity.

Beyond attribution and authentication there are merit systems which provide a ranking or shorthand of how accomplishments compare to the group. Think of boy scout merit badges - a summarisation of various relevant accomplishments.

After struggling with lack of structure in my own work, and reading Time Management for Anarchists, it seems to me that project-based social media could serve the purpose of providing the structure that we used to rely on the corporate office for.

With authentication and attribution providing the foundation for reputation and merit systems, we could understand how we might work and contribute across multiple projects and programs, and causes.