dangerouslyawesome

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the weird spot I’m in, career wise. For the last couple of years, I’ve been giving the larger percentage of my work away. Karmically, it’s done some pretty amazing things. Whuffie points are wayyyy up. But if 80% of your work is done for karma points, no matter how good the other 20% is, it’s still only 20%.

Many of the people I speak to are surprised that I’m not making money from IndyHall. IndyHall was never designed to pay me, it was designed to sustain itself and the community it helps provide a home to. It’s doing a great job of that, in my opinion, and not many people would argue that point.

I’m actually kinda glad that IndyHall, as it exists today, doesn’t pay me. My interests would be conflicted. The fact that, like everyone else that works here, I’m responsible for finding my own work. Everyone here looks out for one another, that’s just part of the dynamic.

Why. The answer to the question of “why?” isn’t as complicated as it might seem. If my interests in creating IndyHall weren’t purely fiscal, what were they?

Because as Tara points out, my long tail self interest is key to this operation. By the entire community succeeding, together or individually, we’re each able to succeed. IndyHall breathes due to organic collaboration.

In each project we that collaboration takes place around, everybody needs to be able to win. One of my core goals for IndyHall Labs is trying to make that process even clearer.

I’m still really impressed by the positive response still coming in from my first post on Mashable, now a few weeks old. The team over at Mashable has also been super supportive…and excited for more.

Sharon Feder, Adam Ostrow, and myself have been corresponding about ongoing posts for Mashable, and they’ve extended an opportunity my way that I’m pretty excited about.

When Sharon came to me after my presentation at BlogWorldExpo in Vegas (co-led by my buddy Jake “CommunityGuy” McKee), her initial concept for me writing at Mashable was something that had me hooked pretty quickly. She liked how I had answered questions during our Q&A/discussion portion of the session, and wanted to harness that.

I’m stoked to announce that Mashable is giving me the opportunity to do a weekly Q&A column on their site, related specifically to social technology and community development (relevant topics for their audience, and my interests).

I’m even MORE excited that the structure of this model gives me an opportunity to mix my own answers/thoughts/opinions with interviews with other industry thought leaders. I’m personally looking forward to regularly connecting with the people who are really making great things happen, online and off, related to the topics we’re interested in.

So why am I announcing this here…not on Mashable. And why am I announcing it before I’ve got my first piece written?

Well it’s tough to do the “A” portion of the “Q&A” spot when I don’t have a backlog of “Q’s”. So we’re going to be taking submitted questions from each week’s comments section, via twitter (just @alexknowshtml in the message, I’ll get it), as well as things coming in through my comment form. Each week or so, we’ll pick one question to focus on.

I truely believe this is a great opportunity for sustainable contributions rather than me running my mouth about what I think is important. Even I get bored of that stuff. So send in your questions and let’s get this party started!

Back in the spring, I wrote about Dave Troy organizing Social Dev Camp East, and an address of a 37 signals blog post about building web companies outside of San Francisco.

Social Dev Camp East II

I unfortunately missed the first Social Dev Camp East, though I DID finally get to meet Dave when I was in Vienna for Amy and Thomas Fuchs’ wedding back in September. Dave’s a great east coast entrepreneur and social technology developer, and I’m excited that he’s got Social Dev Camp East II coming up in just a couple of weeks.

On November 1st, a few hundred of the east coast’s finest social technologists will gather at the University of Baltimore to for a day of exchange and creation, relationship and application building alike.

There’s WAY more info on the Facebook event, and even more on the wiki. The event is fast approaching capacity, so sign up soon. If you’re in Philly and planning on going, reach out and we’ll try to carpool.

New Work City Kickoff Party

One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to be in two places at once. In the mean time, I’m planning on driving really, really fast between Baltimore and Manhattan because later in the evening on November 1st, Tony Bacigalupo and the team behind New Work City will be having a launch party to celebrate their opening of their Manhattan community-powered coworking space. I’m so excited for this because it’s such a long time coming. Just a few weeks ago Tony remained uncertain as to whether or not it could happen. Now they’ve secured desks at an office at 200 Varick St, sharing space with consulting firm element^n.

The party goes down at 8pm until “2am”, but I know what it’s like to party with Tony and doubt we’ll call it at 2. The Facebook is the place to RSVP, and you can be certain that it’s not to be missed. If you heard about the insanity that went down at the IndyHall anniversary party, a good number of the same people will be making the trip from afar. I’m quite excited. You should be too.

In my last post (just a few hours ago, I know), I mentioned how I was most fulfilled when I was doing.

I wanted to further clarifiy that point, in that I was most fulfilled when I was doing something that makes life better. Makes the world better. Makes something better.

In the continuing effort to get off my soapbox, I wanted to highlight someone that I met recently that continues to impress the daylights out of me and inspires something unique, I would hope, in all of us.

I was walking back from the lunch break at BlogOrlando along side a guy named Erik. Erik and I were exchanging small talk, he asked me if I was from nearby, and when I said I’d come from Philadelphia, he first remarked how far I’d hiked…then asked, “oh…are you the guy from IndyHall”?

We chatted about coworking, why I was in Orlando (fact is, I really dig the scene there and am continually impressed by their potential). The walk back didn’t really afford much time beyond the ability for me to find out that Erik lived in the general area and was also involved in the local social tech community.

I was ashamed at the end of the day to find out that the closing speaker was the same Erik, Erik Hersman. Moments prior to him taking the stage, my buddy Alex started talking up this guy and how rad he was. He didn’t even get close.

Uploaded on September 30, 2008 by seanosh

As it turns out, Erik is a long time techie. Furthermore, while his family is in Orlando, he grew up in and continues to spend a great deal of time in Africa. He’s a notable technology leader in regions like Kenya and Sudan, where he grew up. I’ve since subscribed to his personal blog, WhiteAfrican, as it gives some insight into the very cool stuff Erik is up to: most recently, some great breakdowns from during and after BarcampJozi (that’s Johannasburg, as I learned). I also now check AfriGadget, which highlights gadgetry and handmade innovation in Africa. Read the first page of this blog. You will have a whole new outlook on technology.

On WhiteAfrican, Erik recently posted follow up from MobileActive08 (also in Johannasburg) which was attend by Blaine Cook, formerly of Twitter, and Rabble (who created Yahoo’s FireEagle platform). What do these three guys have in common, and what does that have to do with Africa?

Well, that’s where my admiration for Erik comes in. In the beginning of this year, he helped create a tool called “Uashahidi“. Erik’s knowledge of technology in a place where not many of us understand it’s importance (or availability) allowed him to leverage technology, specifically mobile technology, to make something better.

There was some serious political turmoil leading to violence in Kenya towards the beginning of 2008. Erik knew that mobile technology was reasonably ubiquitous, even if it only was the simplest forms available. He took that as a prompt to prototype a system that took citizen updates from mobile, email, and web, and map them: both for journalistic intentions, as well as for relief purposes. From the website:

The core [Ushahidi] engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time.

Think about that for a second.

This was not building something to cut jobs, improve project turnaround, or increase profits.

This was not something built to chat, discuss, banter, whine, or kvetch.

This was not something built to gather friends.

This was not something built with a “market” in mind.

Ushahidi leveraged two of the most important technology concepts of our present: mobile and socially contributed content for the purpose of making something that really sucked – a violent nation – and gave it simple tools to make it better.

As you might imagine, this project caught the eye of the news and Erik and the team (all of whom I now desperately want to meet) and got some much deserved press. Since, they’ve secured funding and grown the team, and will be launching a new version of Ushahidi this fall. Open Source.

<applause></applause>

We’re talking about an application that can be applied to real life problems domestically and abroad because it uses a least common denominator and takes into account some basic human interaction.

How is Ushahidi different from most other (not all, just most) “social software”?

I’d venture to say the same way “coworking” stands out from “desk sharing”.

Ushahidi was created because someone cared.

This is the kind of doing that I like to see. This is the kind of doing that I hope to accomplish.

I’m a developer.

I’ve spent some time catching up on videos from FOWA London 08, including highlights of some of my good friends giving really great presentations about things that they believe in and think are important.

It’s got me thinking about the audience of FOWA, and how developer-centric the audience is. I think that’s one of it’s greatest strength, really, and a large contributor to it’s ability to focus. FOWA Miami 08 was one of the best conference’s I’ve been to, hands down.

So looking over the roster of presenters, and thinking about their roles…and then comparing them to my own interests to the tune of, “if Ryan Carson asked me to present at FOWA, what would I say”, I came to some important conclusions.

If you’ve had the pleasure of talking to me sometime in the last couple of weeks, there’s a good chance that you’ve been met with a wicked tongue spitting some admittedly harsh words in the direction of social media, social marketing, and PR “two point oh”. There’s an important distinction that I’ve pointed out repeatedly, and it’s that I came from a different background. Having been a developer prior to…whatever I am now…I spent the time building, or building with, the tools that social media marketing is infatuated with. It’s a lot harder for me to be distracted by shiny objects because, to me, those shiny objects are just tools. As I always did, I’m looking for ways to use those tools, assemble the most powerful toolkits, and doing things with them.

I’m most fulfilled when I’m doing.

I’m not a hater, really. I DO hate playing bad cop, and consciously aware that being a cop at all doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. No matter how strong your police force, people will keep committing crimes.

So while I’ve made a decision a few months back to step away from software development on the code side and put my focus on consulting the in the industry of social technology, I’ve inadvertently slipped into the “social marketer” role for a number of the projects I’ve gotten involved in. Whether or not this a strength of mine is not something I even wish to see through, as I think more about the skills that I’ve had historically.

I’ve been a developer in one way or another for the majority of my life. A problem solver. An analyst. I’ve had a knack for marketing myself and the projects I’m involved in. But when that’s the only role I have – being a megaphone – I’m unfulfilled.

Honestly, I don’t think I could ever be an independent marketer long term. I don’t hate on it, I just don’t get off on it either.

So do I need to be a “coder” in order to be a developer? I don’t think so. I never want to step away from code 100% because I truly love writing code, but there are others who are even more whiz-bang than me. If I have something else to offer, I want to give it a go.

I’m still pretty open about the fact that I’m transitioning, and I’m not 100% sure into what. I’ve been admittedly following demand, for the sake of my bank account not bottoming out. But I’m also admittedly desiring fulfillment. I’ve got an undeniable knack for examining a specific market problem, and acting or advising based on the values of openness, authenticity, permissions, community, and social interactions. You can ask some of the people I’ve shared ideas with, formally and otherwise. I enjoy that work, but the closer it is to being a “marketer”, the further distanced from the project I feel.

If I think about my career path in terms of “What would I present at FOWA”, I realize that I should put focus back on development. Not necessarily on code, but on developing concepts, solving problems, developing relationships and opportunities for collaboration. Focusing on the values of coworking as applied to business. Focusing on the values of collaboration as applied to business. The lessons that Geoff has taught me, and the lessons we’ve learned together.

That’s what IndyHall has been all about for the last 2 years, finding better ways to collaborate. We’ve discovered many, we’ve blindly stumbled upon many, many more. How do I share what we’ve learned, share what I believe in, with others and make that my livelihood? I believe that the discussins surrounding IndyHall Labs is an important step in that direction.  I think that it’s based on an a blend of business plus organic creation, software or otherwise. My hope is that it’s a solution worth sharing at FOWA.

I hate to add to the droves and droves of commentary and confusion around the fact that our economy is, well, not doing so well.

So I’m not going to talk about it.

What I am going to talk about is my view on how it will affect me, and my corner of the industry, my friends, and my peers.

I hope that I’m not naive in my estimations, because I’m neither an economist nor have I weathered an economic downturn like this. I’m just making my own predictions based on what I believe to be true from the past experiences I do have, and the ones that I’ve observed.

Here’s one way I see this playing out, from a couple of different vantage points:

It’s pretty well accepted that the first things to be cut from the agency side of the industry are going to be: marketing budgets, and contractors. That doesn’t mean that work doesn’t exist for contractors, or that marketing doesn’t need to be done, it means that the agencies aren’t the ones that are going to be the ones in the middle.

Let’s be clear: just because the economy is in the hole DOESN’T mean that companies are going to stop selling, and advertising is part of selling. What does change is that they’re going to need to be more efficient in their expenditures, and large agencies with big overheads and process process aren’t going to fit the bill anymore. And bringing the work in house…well…we all know how that usually goes.

So back to the agencies: I firmly believed they are going to be pinched at both ends. Their clients will be looking to cut costs, and that not only puts accounts at risk but it also puts agency employees at risk. I think that this will lead to many agencies dissolving or downsizing to a core focus that is sustainable through the downturn.

In the mean time, with talent leaving the agencies (on their own or by force), that leaves a smattering of independent talent in the same arena as the companies that recently fired their expensive, lumbering agencies and are looking for a cheaper, more agile (albeit, potentially riskier) solution.

So far, so good, right? Only the most focused of agencies stick together, and the talent that’s newly independent has plenty of work available…if they know where to look, and how to get their hands on it.

That’s where…you guessed it…coworking comes in. As communities of freelancers form, the stratification of experience in freelancing within those communities becomes an asset. The experienced independents help the newbies get better at whatever they are trying to get better at, and the newbs help the experienced weather the influx of newly available work.

If constructs like coworking allow independents to be SMARTER and MORE EFFECTIVE freelancers, to bridge the harder gaps to cross when getting your legs as an independent, they have the best chance of enduring through economic crisis. In fact, the freelance market will not only survive the trying circumstances we’re in, but I think it will actually thrive.

Unless, of course, you suck. My entire thesis is based on the fact that you are good at what you do, and you focus on that. Agency or independent, this is based on your willingness to work your face off. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s massive opportunity if you’re willing to hustle and stay focused.

On the other hand, if you’ve been riding the coattails of your coworkers, or slacking off at your cushy agency job. Then the odds are…

yes. You’re completely screwed.

I’ve been involved in a lot of talk recently about community building versus community development, or even community design. It’s mincing words and splitting hairs, but this is an interesting discussion to be having right now. The bottom line is, you can’t really build a community, in the truest sense of building from nothing. Communities exist, together or fragmented. Many times, there are people doing things that could be done better together, but they don’t know about each other yet. You can help a community develop and grow, and you can even guide that process to a certain end. But you certainly cannot impose community. It’s like an organ transplant without any blood type matching. Even with it, it’s got a very high rate of rejection.

I’ve had a wonderful experience working on IndyHall with Geoff DiMasi for the last year and a half evaluating the existing community, interacting with it, and helping it mature. The process that we started is one that we share the hope lives long beyond us. The fact is, it was there before us, it just needed some nurturing at the time we came along.

One of the decisions we made in how we’d lead the community was just that: we’d lead the community, by example, and watch for other leadership to step up and encourage and foster that. Ultimately the end goal was for the effort to be sustainable. That meant that over time, it no longer needs us. This mastermind plan is part of Geoff’s overall education philosophy and something that I think is brilliant and important for everyone to think about.

So community related to “open source” projects, and not just code, has a number of very tangible examples. Coworking is one of them. Barcamp is another. These efforts have experienced MASSIVE growth in short periods of time, not just because they were good ideas, but due to the “open source” and starfish nature of their structure.

So the book in question that illustrates the Starfish model is by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom and is called “The Starfish And the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations“.

This is a TRAGIC subtext. The book explores decentralized organizations. Their structures. Their implications. Their strengths. Their weaknesses.

The book goes through several examples of successful “starfish” organizations and puts focus on “catalysts” as the people who effectively do what Geoff and I have done: provide a construct in which a “leaderless” organization can form.

What’s curious to me is when the leaderless organization grows to a certain size, and frankly, needs leadership. In the model that I described, we’ve intentially created a system in which new leadership can step up. That’s important.

But the “sleeper” point here is that organic communities and leaderless organizations and open source collaborations are NOT leaderless. They are NOT 100% de-stratified. If they were, they would not remain productive. Someone still needs to be there to pull the trigger, or clean up the mess. Right? I think that leadership is critical, even in “leaderless” organizations.

Also curious is, what the implications of community at the heart of a business versus community in other scenarios. I know there are differences is, and I’m thinking quite a bit about them. Communities and interacting with other humans are instinctive actions for us. Are business and commerce as instinctive?

So here’s the question that I’m grappling with: when a community grows due to it’s starfish nature and, later on, grows to a point where its starfish structure is becoming a hindrance, how do you identify the leaders? Who does, or do they identify themselves? What responsibilities do they have? Should there be decision makers? At what point does a starfish organization need committee?

I firmly believe in organic growth. But it’s the gap between growth and sustainability that I’m not sure about.

Update: Looks like cone provided some more details in a revised copy of the report that’s now available. The survey is based on 1,092 surveyed, 525 men, 567 women. 1000 people is NOT report-worthy. 2.5x that follow my lame ass on twitter.

So I caught wind via Jackie Peters (whose path I crossed repeatedly during my last month of travel) of a report by Cone, INC that threw out the most absurd statistics I’ve ever seen in a report. That’s probably because I don’t waste a lot of time reading reports, though.

At any rate, the Cone report stated:

According to the survey, 93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

Now hang on a second. 93% of Americans believe the same thing? Any thing? I don’t buy it. 85% of Americans believe that companies shoudl interact via social media? How many Americans have even HEARD of social media? Not 85%. I’m pretty sure that the percentage of Americans who’ve heard who the presidential candidates for the 2008 election are is less than 85%.

Of course, I know that these statistics are based on a census or survey, skewing the results based on whatever census audience the agency chose. This is the problem we’re up against, folks. No WONDER companies think that social media is a cure-all, and are willing to drink it by the gallon (to the tune of $400/hour).

Seth Godin said during the ONLY time I’ve seen him speak that “you can be the best in the world at anything you do because you’re in control of what ‘the world’ is”. Unfortunately, that same technique that’s helped many small companies and individuals self perscribe some happiness can be used for a dasterdly alternative. And reading this report is one frightening example of that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go rinse my mouth out with some Kool Aide.