Aye Sci

I've Got the World on a Stick

2008-09-23T21:47:00.002-04:00

After reading myself cross-eyed for the past month while researching my honors thesis topic, I figured that writing some reflective pieces will help me synthesize what I've learned, guide my literature review, and perhaps spur some readers to further investigation into the countless peripheral questions that come up as I try to conduct my own research on information overload. I won't tackle the stuff on information overload yet, but first some of its facets. This entry, I'm covering the topic of fragmentation. Fragmentation is the dispersal of information sources across disparate devices and personal information management (PIM) systems. A college student case of fragmentation is using multiple e-mail accounts, using university e-mail for one function and GMail for another. It may also be the use of an electronic folder for class documents, and another folder for e-mails, which is the typical limitation for multiple format information sources. Professionals in one study (Dearman & Pierce 2008) averaged holding 6 devices, from cell phones to MP3 players to laptops, meaning many opportunities to become fragmented, stressed, and overloaded.

The key solution to fragmentation is centralization: people have constantly told me of their desire to just stick all of their things in one place. It is a lovely thing to have a personalized web portal like netvibes, or stowing all of one's essential applications and documents on a two-gig stick with Portable Apps. The latter solution is a lot easier on the back and shoulders than a laptop, and there are enough computer labs on campus that I can get work done whenever I need to. There are some hardcore people who stick whole operating systems on sticks, but I am perfectly fine with my PortableApps stick right now. What is even more perfect is that my PortableApps Firefox homepage is netvibes, so fragmentation is rarely a concern. I do have a hypothesis: the more technically savvy you are, the less likely you are to suffer from fragmentation, as you are able to devise centralizing workarounds with your knowledge of data exchange systems and personalization practices. Feel free to research that, and let me know when it's published.

UNC Libraries, Rocking the Boat

2008-08-14T22:31:00.001-04:00

The UNC Libraries main page has had a makeover, which is a supremely risky move for any web site. However, the reorganization is looking pretty good. There is less text than before, and the search navigation tabs now have Google Scholar up there, which integrates very well with the UNCLib catalog. Various services are chunked off a little better so they can be located more easily, and for the bewildered they have an explanatory page with an imagemap to make sense of all the changes. Bottom line: well done.

Facebook and FERPA

2008-05-29T22:03:00.001-04:00

Fred Stutzman has released a retrospective on his experiences with social networking sites in his Online Social Networks class. I was fortunate enough to be among his flock this spring, and I remember seeing how engaging these tools were in the context of the classroom. It could have been that they were familiar tools being employed in a novel setting. It could have been that we were all geeks in a class that specifically treated of these geeky things. Fred talks about these issues in the paper, so go on and take a look! Two of my favorite snippets:

Users of social tools carry “baggage” – the identity they’ve created, their interactions and cultural awareness, their sense of privacy and boundaries. A lack of contextual baggage may free a student to explore, experiment and integrate a social tool into their academic space.

For the students who embrace Web 2.0 technologies, they are leaving behind a rich representation of identity in forms other than the social network profile. These situations should be explored to better under[stand] (sic) educational opportunities and privacy considerations.

These two important points, among the many that Fred makes in the manuscript, tell us a lot about how to integrate these services into an educational setting. First, instructors need to be wary about how their students have come to see these services. It makes me wonder about how successful video games will really be in academia, if the current generation sees them as anything but applicable to school.

Second, the privacy implications are huge when students are ceding this data to third parties. Even the indirectly identifiable information like del.icio.us trails should be scrutinized to see if they can be brought into FERPA compliance, or at least brought into a school’s control.

Coming soon: weighing in on the Orphan Works Bill

Has Jakob Nielsen Researched This? Pt 2

2008-05-20T00:50:00.002-04:00

After looking at what sites may consider in the location of a posting widget like AddThis, we need to look at the cases of custom posting widgets: how does a site decide which of the dozens of services out there will get some precious screen real estate for a maximum return of eyeballs?

I propose a quick and dirty taxonomy of services that these widgets present to users.

Social Networking Sites: posting to these sites often alerts many within person’s personal network about an interesting article or other internet discovery. Facebook and MySpace are huge potential audiences and tend to reach wider sharing networks than social bookmarking sites.
News Aggregators: sites like Digg, Reddit, and Netscape rank news items by popularity and approval by a particular community. Getting on the front page of one of these services can drive a huge traffic rush in a hurry.
Social Bookmarking Sites: del.icio.us and ma.gnolia can have a small-scale news aggregator effect, but posted links can also be directed to specific users in a manner similar to sending an e-mail link, but at the same time a little less intrusive to some people’s information-seeking habits (I’d rather get a delicious link than an e-mail).

A little extra consideration may be given to this last group. Some bookmarkers use the SBS service to quickly tag pages for closer inspection later. Putting a bookmark button above the fold in this case is a better practice than lumping everything in at the bottom.

If a site opts not to cover all the bases with a comprehensive AddThis button, having at least one service of each type is a good start to getting helpful publicity from the crowd. But what criteria can be used to pick the right one? One could look at the size of the audience of each particular service and use the most popular, but would that yield the same results as matching the community with the content of the site? Digg and delicious appeal to a certain demographic (geeks, especially Democratic ones), while Magnolia and Reddit feature pages on other topics.

Looking for a best practice of posting widgets, I would say that an approach like NPR’s or PointsInCase makes the most of the situation. Put something above the fold for the skimmers who want to share things conveniently, and put something at the end of the article to remind those who read the whole thing to tell a friend or ten to look at it as well. If space constraints don’t allow for this possibility, on the other hand, stacking things near the top may be the better option.

Has Jakob Nielsen Researched This?

2008-05-19T16:20:00.010-04:00

An AddThis Widget

I'm trying to decide on the best location of an AddThis widget for a certain magazine site, so I took a look at some of the biggest mainstream media sites to see how they place their SNS links in their articles. Here's a breakdown of the placement in various sites, some big name, some niche, but all of them useful for a discussion about what to do with these ubiquitous posting widgets.

New York Times - The share link is to the right of the first paragraph, often front and center of the page.
Wall Street Journal - Bottom of the article
Thesaurus.com- Bottom of the article
Washington Post - To the right of the articles' bylines.
Daily Tar Heel - Bottom of the article
NPR - Share link at top of articles jumps to bottom.
TechRepublic - Digg only, at the top of the page
CNET - Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us at the bottom of the article
PointsInCase - Top and bottom of the article

The two primary decisions to make when implementing this sharing feature are where to place the widget and what services to support. As it turns out, these questions are tightly coupled, so the order in which you address them can determine how you use the posting widget.

We need to find out how to best place the posting widget so that, hopefully, readers will send it along to friends or vote it onto the front page of a news aggregating service. Some factors that may influence the placement are the contents of the article and general information-seeking/sharing habits of people. Let's look more closely at what these factors imply:

Content of the article

What is the length or size of this article? Sometimes the widget can go at the bottom of an article because it will remain "above the fold," a user would not have to scroll down to share the article.
What is the article about? This can influence the target audience consideration, which in turn influences the social networking services one may feature for promotion. Most importantly, it will decide whether or not the article is shared at all.

General Information-seeking/Sharing habits

Can people glean the gist of an article through its headline, first paragraph, or caption? That may be enough to have people pass it along.
The widget needs to be convenient. Putting it at the bottom of the article is good for people who read the entire thing. However, it implies that an audience should digest an article before sharing it with others.

I'll look more into this second criterion, but to summarize, knowing the nature of the audience and the material are instrumental in deciding how to deploy the posting widget. In the next installment of this subject, we'll consider what services should be put in the limelight and come to a verdict about what the best practice is for the posting widget.

Petitions and Pogroms

2008-03-02T10:53:00.000-05:00

danah boyd makes an interesting observation in “None of this is Real”, her paper on Friendster networks. She says that when the properties of online social networks do not fit congruently with those of offline relationships, mutations and reactions occur that spur the emergence of a new culture. When fakesters (profiles of celebrities or imaginary objects) began to be befriended by people around the network, collapsing the distance between profiles, Friendster’s imposed structure of three degrees of separation began to break down.

The next point that boyd makes is that when a decree from on high tries to commandeer the organic evolution of online networks, much grousing ensues. The fakester genocides provoked a huge backlash from the Friendster membership, with some even migrating to other networks where they could be friends with the Easter Bunny and Rick Astley. Sometimes, the uproar can be efficacious, but in some platforms it seems the CEO has too much money stuffed in his ears…Newsfeeds, Beacon, and Application Spam are pretty good hints to what I’m talking about.

Galileo and the Internet

2008-03-02T10:21:00.000-05:00

Engstrom’s object-centric blog post holds the secret to social networking site success: you need to build a community around objects to keep people returning to a site. After the whole song-and-dance about identity establishment and friend collecting, what motivation will people have to go back to a site? A collection of dynamic, user-created objects seem to be pretty sticky assets for a web site. Flickr and YouTube have claimed visual media, elevating mediation over location to foster community. Meanwhile Facebook initially had the college campus as the locus of sociality, exhibiting what Goodings, Brown, and Locke (2007) call the subjectivist/objectivist dichotomy: the network either provides an outlet for people whose locale lacks a sufficiently large community around their interest, or it reinforces offline connections and helps coordinate real life activity.

Political candidates have become a prevalent nexus for object-centric communities to coalesce around. Ron Paul’s campaign serves as a superb example of how the web can be leveraged by politicians. The “Draft Lessig” movement gauged constituent receptivity in part through a Facebook group. But why stop at bodies of practice based around politicians when you can have politics as a whole be your SNS core?

Re: Is MySpace Good for Society?

2008-02-26T14:21:00.001-05:00

There has been some noise in the blogosphere about whether, on balance, social networking sites are beneficial or detrimental to society. The dialogue has been very interesting to follow as the luminaries pitch in their two cents. Most of them issue a caveat that this technology is too young to understand all of the implications that these sites bring, but I’m not afraid to make a few assertions.

There is a consensus that social capital is increased through the use of this technology. There is a low cost to joining these sites (monetary, that is, I’ll bring up other sacrifices soon), with low barriers to make connections and send communications. boyd notes the property of searchability in social networking sites, meaning that one can directly locate their long-lost contacts and send them a message. Keeping in mind how Granovetter’s latent social ties are now publicized in these sites, and also keeping in mind the exponential growth of network links, we can see improved possibilities of finding help when it’s needed, or even getting a windfall every now and then.

The largest tradeoff with regards to SNS is in privacy. We have to give a little in terms of transparency in order to let people know about our interests, competencies, and activities, but we’re making this compromise to an invisible audience (boyd). Research has been broadcasting mixed messages in terms of privacy awareness and notions of audience. Zefrank mentions a study about privacy policy reading habits, while the Pew Project notes that teens are pretty savvy about reducing their visibility to strangers when they wish to in SNS environments. A paper by Susan Barnes categorizes the solutions that users can employ in policing the information they broadcast, but there’s always the technical hitch that can render all these efforts moot (e.g. the MySpace photo leak).

There are some who question whether these sites are a fad. While the popularity of a particular site is culturally influenced , and while people naturally migrate to different communities (online and offline), these sites as a communications paradigm are here to stay. As boyd remarks in the Freakonomics blog, whether these are good or bad is irrelevant, tools such as SNS are amoral and the subjective importance of privacy make this call impossible to generalize as a plus or minus.

Can't Buy Me Love

2008-02-15T20:33:00.001-05:00

Willet (2008) makes an interesting point about consumption being a part of our identity, especially feminine identity. Marketers are performing a feminist judo, giving young impressionable females the illusion of empowerment (MySpace, YouTube) while peddling their wares or using the girls to assert their brands.

Liu (2007) gauged the overall interests of MySpace, revealing that it’s composed mostly of college kids who listen to Radiohead, read The Da Vinci Code, and watch Fight Club and Family Guy. Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfeld (2007) draw a correlation between the number of profile elements filled out and the number of friends one has in Facebook. Using signaling theory, it seems that we are more approachable when we state our consumer tendencies to the online audience. I’m reserved about using what I take in as a status statement. Doesn’t what one produces say more about a person?

Technology Curves and Errant Variables

2008-01-31T23:49:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! research uncovered more empirical evidence of the technology adoption curve some of us learned from Dr. Barreau's INLS 285 class. The sequence goes: a small cadre of early adopters,followed by a drastic increase in use from viral evangelism and curiosity (most services want you to proselytize your address book, and FB notifies non-members about relevant activity while keeping the meaty details behind the garden's walls). Then, there's a trough of disillusionment, which morphs into a more gradual adoption rate.

What interests me is how the adoption curve is affected while the technology mutates. How do video game console sales change when the system's form factor changes (Nintendo DS to DSLite) or when a "killer app" is released? Facebook is in its boom phase, but how was the boom influenced by the Beacon debacle and its unwillingness to participate in the Open Social standards? I actually doubt either of these two factors were significant: everyone's friends are already in the 'Book, and these adjustments are pretty technical despite their importance. It's also unlikely anyone is dropping out soon, after all that work in creating a profile. It wouldn't be hard to resuscitate: a classmate mentioned that FB keeps your information forever, according to its terms of service.

Invisible Audience

2008-01-28T18:53:00.000-05:00

One of the properties of networked publics is the invisible audience (Boyd 2007). It is the capability of our self expression to be seen by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Our works can be divorced from context, as Zefrank can tell you. Sometimes, our efforts to control our audience are circumvented. The MySpace photo fiasco, for instance, shows us once again what Fred Stutzman has told us: on the web, privacy is a bit, and that bit is inevitably flipped by the wrong person. We must be more mindful of what we post, and the Pew Teen Privacy study shows that at least the ones who are coming of age immersed in SNS technology know how to handle unsolicited contacts. But will they be more reserved about their uploaded content, or will they embrace the idea of de facto publicity?

Neo-Luddite Neophyte

2008-01-27T22:37:00.000-05:00

I am a very reluctant member of Facebook. In fact, I’m not so much a member as I happen to have an account on the site. Bigge (Firstmonday XI.12.2006) may call me a neo-Luddite, but my unease does not apply to social networking sites in general, just to the ones with onerous terms of service. These just happen to also be the most popular SNS’s.

I’ve been a military brat all of my life, which means that I have had to reestablish a circle of friends every three to four years, frequently without being able to get back in touch with my pals from a previous residence. As I entered high school, e-mail proved to be a valuable technology in finding out what my friends back in the Mainland (I was in Hawaii) were doing, but the big time one difference made coordinating real-time chats/phone calls tricky. Eventually, I fell off the grid of communication, instead focusing on my new network.

The ties weren’t severed, however. They fell into a latent mode, to be reawakened when we were stationed back in Jacksonville. After encountering several middle school friends and catching up with them, we didn’t hang out: three years of intermittent contact means personalities can change profoundly. I wonder if there would have been a stasis in my persona had there been a pervasive SNS presence back in my middle school years. Would my digital self have changed as I tried to maintain strong ties to my Jacksonville buds? More than likely, it would have reflected my persona that I presented to my friends from Kailua. It’s the offline-to-online relationship translation that typifies Internet social interaction nowadays: we meet in meatspace, then take it to… LinkedIn.

Now, we have unlimited capacity in keeping latent ties, but not enough time and attention to maintain them all and make sure we can call on them for favors. This behavior is reminiscent of a video game; we gotta catch all of our acquaintances, only to rely on a small team to achieve your goals, while having some connections prove useful in situations. The rest of our “friends” collect dust, sending occasional Newsfeed traffic our way.

Bigge mentions a disturbing dichotomy that SNS’s present: we either negate ourselves in real life interaction through our abstention from the network, or we commoditize our identity in these SNS’s and their surveillance marketing. It seems I'm damned either way by the 'book.

First Post for INLS 490

2008-01-21T16:21:00.000-05:00

The readings from this week provide us with a survey of the topics we will be discussing this semester, from the construction of a digital identity to the preservation of privacy in an era of increasingly public lives. This first point is one of the most important issues to me. Turkle’s introduction to her book Life on the Screen mentions that the statuses of our digital lives –we tend to have multiple representations of ourselves online, if Turkle’s MUD observations are any indicator - are becoming as important as the status of our lives in meatspace. Speaking in the context of parallel lives in MUDs, Turkle notes “The experience of this parallelism encourages treating on-screen and off-screen lives with a surprising degree of equality (14).”

A study from the consulting group faberNovel mentions three peculiarities of digital identity:

· Fragmentation: the identity is broken up between several networks and websites and these different pieces of identity might not be coherent

· Fantasy: digital identity can be easily fantasized

· Temporality: identity might not evolve over time ( a comment or an old profile is not automatically removed) (13)

Fragmentation should be on the wane in the coming years, as the efforts of DataPortability.org and OpenID are being augmented by big players like Google and Yahoo!. Consolidating sign-ons will be more convenient, though there is a security risk involved with such a monoculture. One password will be all that is needed to wreak havoc on someone’s online life, although currently that isn’t far from the truth, as we use one password on an average of five sites, and accessing just one site (Facebook) under another’s guise can be devastating anyway.

Veracity is hard to determine through the Internet. An identity in many sites requires only an e-mail address, and an e-mail address basically requires two fingers and an internet connection. Being able to fabricate personalities has its uses, however. Whistleblower protection, for instance, can benefit from obfuscated origins.

Lastly, identities are temporal. What happens is that there is the potential for multiple versions of one’s self, captured in time and archived by search engines. The problems that arise from this can be as benign as dated or confabulated information to being as malevolent as outright libel. The former can be resolved by one’s efforts in maintaining their own online identity, but cases of the latter must first be brought to the victim’s attention. That may be hard to do, given the vastness of the Internet.

In Sum

2007-12-13T18:28:00.000-05:00

Through the INLS 285 course, I have grown in understanding the nature of organizational culture, leadership, and strategy. It has also become clear to me how information is collected, interpreted, and applied at the individual and organizational level. The readings and lectures have shown me multiple perspectives in how organizations are structured. Although it felt a little like, as one professor put it, navel gazing, understanding what exactly information is helped me to realize that the concept is very contextual, and that controlling that context can help an individual better utilize that information for their productive duties. As evidenced by the links throughout the blog, I have also been primed to see how the organization/environment relationship mutually shapes the two parties, and where information falls into that dynamic.

Leadership Styles and Organizational Life Cycle

2007-12-13T15:06:00.001-05:00

While discussing the organizational culture of several groups I belong to, I began to wonder whether particular kinds of leadership are best suited for specific points in Daft's Organizational Life Cycle (above). Going by Bast's leadership styles (below), I figured these would be the best matches for each stage organization's evolution:

Entrepreneurial Stage: The entrepreneurial stage requires a leader with a lot of determination to face the obstacles sure to beset any fledgling organization. A star will have the tenacity to get an idea off the ground, and a synthesizer or futurist may be attached strongly enough to their idea to make it work. In certain instances, Partners may be the best inaugural leader for a group.
Collectivity Stage: As the organization gathers momentum, it may need to shift its attention to cementing the bonds of its constituents. An idealist at this stage will focus on pursuing the goals of the organization and will set an example that the subordinates can emulate. A diplomat will keep the group content, but may fail in advancing the organization to the next level of its development. An innovator can provide the fuel and ideas to propel the growth of the organization while staying in the constraints of the organization's proposed mission.
Formalization Stage: A mentor can step in to help one of the idea-centered (star, innovator, synthesizer) leaders construct the structure that will give the organization its definition and standards, its culture. They'll have the wisdom to know what has worked and enable the idea leader to systematically pursue the prize.
Elaboration Stage: The advocate may supplant the mentor at this point to take over the real administrative work while the innovator keeps the organization from stalling and stagnating. A team-oriented leader (diplomat, futurist, partner) can also keep the organization going, but through recruitment and retention instead of diversion and reinvention.

Barreau v Anderson

2007-12-13T15:06:00.000-05:00

Barreau v Anderson

One of our slides on innovation listed the trends going on in technology, among them the devices becoming more portable and powerful. These two aspects will be the key developments to bridging the digital divide between the United States and the globe. Jan Chipchase notes how cellular phones are becoming a symbol of survival and a key to communication in the developing world.

On the topic of technological adoption, Chris Anderson traces the distribution and domination of a new product in a four stage model. It is not unlike the adoption curve by Barreau below:

Anderson’s talk, however, focuses more on the adoption of a product in society at large, not really discussing the political factors behind endorsing one technology standard or another within an organization. Inertia for adoption can be traced to more than just cost:

1. It can mean job displacement, extremely undesirable if the job happens to be one of the more managerial positions in an organization.

2. It usually requires moving out of an organization’s competencies and knowledge strengths (.doc link).

3. Adopting a technology for technology’s sake will rarely be beneficial enough for justifying such a move.

Competitive Intelligence and Sun Tzu

2007-12-13T14:54:00.000-05:00

Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a prescient work on the importance of competitive intelligence. After all, what is more competitive than war? Actually, managers have consulted this seminal treatise on war to help run their businesses. Art of War provides insight into the psychology, strategy, and politics of war, but any competitive organization can adopt the advice for their strategies. Information is the essential requirement for victory, as Sun Tzu emphasizes deception on the ruler’s side while gathering as much information as one can about the enemy. He notes: “Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.” This is information about the terrain, about the morale of one’s own men (competitive intelligence), and, through espionage, the enemy’s status.

More apparently practical are Sun Tzu’s precepts on leadership. Defining values and objectives for the leader to live up to is a good way to establish the intended organizational culture at large: “The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness.”

Pizza Pizza

2007-12-13T14:35:00.001-05:00

After a little test to see what sort of a team player we were, Dr. Barreau split us up into groups to formulate the business plan for yet another Franklin Street pizza establishment. We were prompted specifically to make ourselves memorable, to distinguish ourselves from the competition. Seeing that I was the lone Brainstormer in a small group, I realized that I would have to pitch as many ideas as I could to help get the ball rolling. There wasn’t much opportunity for the two Networkers to use their friendly resources, but the Realist helped balance out my flights of fancy. If the group were bigger, some of the more team-focused types, like the Peacemaker, the Coordinator, or the Cheerleader would have been more useful to keep us on track and on friendly terms.

Having read the book Software for your Head, I was a little skeptical of being typecast in this “Group Voodoo” activity. The test concedes that everyone is of every type to a certain extent and in certain situations, and knowing I was a certain dominant type could have influenced my behavior in this activity. What if I found I was a Thinker and just kind of sat there, furrowed brow and all, and wondered?

Buckland and the Jets

2007-12-13T13:48:00.003-05:00

According to Buckland’s “Information Handling, Organizational Structure, and Power” (1989), efficiency lies in the concentration of decision-making powers. Delegation is a response to the power’s inability to shoulder all decisions, but information technology can return the authority to the upper echelons of the hierarchy. Buckland cites several military examples to illustrate this point, such as the abysmal communications system that allowed the Battle of New Orleans to be fought in 1815. Continuing the martial style, we can see this tendency of centralization in a new vehicle being introduced to the Army’s arsenal. The command and control on-the-move (C2OTM) increases the necessity of the hierarchy instead of reducing it. The culture of the military seems to demand this discipline, this top-down approach to strategy. Information’s value is highly inflated in the industry(?), and anything that dispels the fog of war has an immense demand in at least one branch of our armed forces.

Has there been a technology that was welcomed because it gave power to the people? Andrew Keen dismisses the Internet for promoting dilettante knowledge instead of empowering expertise. However, I lean towards Malcolm Gladwell’s stance that collective intelligence will be the new genius, and the Internet’s connecting capabilities will help the smart people come together to create new knowledge. The question is, where do said smart people congregate online so that we’ll know where to look?

Organizational Culture 3, Emerging Culture

2007-12-13T13:48:00.001-05:00

Yet another organization I’m involved with is Technology without Borders. Its mission is to facilitate the economic development of Latin America through computer education. It is a very young student-run organization, with this year being its third year of existence. By Daft’s model of the organizational life cycle, it is in the entrepreneurial stage. There are eight regular members, and these members are mostly veterans of TWB’s summer project: a trip to Mexico to set up a computer lab and instruct the community the use of computers. Its current goals are threefold: increase regular membership and promote awareness of the organization throughout campus, raise enough money to subsidize the summer trip, and prepare the next generation’s leaders for the club’s expansion and formalization. Positions in the club are still crystallizing, being catalogued in our hard copy handbook and our wiki. We are still establishing contacts for future projects and documenting procedures for the maintenance of our current labs.

How does the fledgling TWB compare with the established organization of Phi Sigma Pi? The decision-making process is top-down autocracy rather than Phi Sigma Pi’s democracy. The club’s co-president and I believe that showing definite, steadfast leadership at the outset of an organization’s life is necessary in establishing credibility and would be more effective than trying to logroll a 3-3 vote during a debate. I may go into Bast’s leadership styles and their appropriateness through the Daft cycle in a later writing.

Organizational Culture 2, Refined Culture

2007-12-13T13:47:00.003-05:00

BoUNCe Magazine hopes to be the neon bar light that glows in the gloom known as college life. It is a satirical magazine that lampoons university life and current events, hoping to provoke critical discussion of social norms in between fits of raucous laughter over jokes about pudenda. It is an organization that values the knowledge assets of its staff, and would possibly favor innovation over efficiency in its business processes like distribution or publicity. The staff are always throwing parties to foster camaraderie. New positions in the staff like online editor and social chair are formalizing their responsibilities; I’m working on my knowledge transfer process (a “howto” and mentorship program) while preparing to step down for next semester’s staff elections.

Communication in the organization is largely through the listserv, with staff working on issues through an MSN Groups workspace. I’m looking into transferring the process to Mambo, which has richer features than MSN groups and is closer in PIM habits for UNC students, since it relies on Onyen authentication and many student organizations use the Mambo content management system for their official business.

I would put BoUNCe near the end of the formalization stage of the Daft life cycle. Some challenges that it faces are smoother transitions to new staff and receiving more quality submissions from the University’s students. The first issue comes up because of how my own appointment to online editor proceeded. After being selected, I was given a briefing on how the web site was set up, but I was unfamiliar with the program that my predecessor was using. There was no formal documentation, but then again, organizational memory is a fickle thing: people like having archived information, but referring to it is rarely a priority other than in special circumstances, since it is largely disorganized and removed from the present context.

The second issue, quality submissions, leads me to propose two solutions to the problem. Adding diversity to an organization often leads to creative ideas and innovation, and BoUNCe’s staff is racially homogeneous. Admittedly, we would have to avoid tokenism and would have to try to preserve the cohesiveness of our current staff, but a cultural twist may be the Whack we need to break set and get new ideas. Second, we can do a PR or information dissemination campaign to let students know that everyone, not just staff, can reap the benefits of pseudo-celebrity in writing for BoUNCe. Maybe an INFORMATIONAL listserv announcement would do the trick.

Organizational Culture Part 1: Defined Culture

2007-12-13T13:47:00.001-05:00

I am a brother in the co-ed honors fraternity Phi Sigma Pi, an organization with nearly a century of formative experience for the organization and over fifteen years of establishment for the Chapel Hill chapter. PSP serves as a prominent personal example of a well-defined organizational culture. While PSP was initially a professional fraternity for teachers, education majors are now a small constituency in its membership. Nevertheless, PSP pays respect to its origins by endorsing the nonprofit Teach for America as its national philanthropy. The fraternity’s espoused values of leadership, scholarship, and service are emphasized by chapter activities such as 5K runs, volunteering at retirement homes, computer training sessions (guess who led those), and Founders’ Day gatherings.

Demographics and MOs

The UNC chapter currently has about 60 active brothers and a roster of 75. The membership is subdivided into committees headed by one or two chairpersons. I’ve found that this departmentalization doesn’t result in exclusivity in the focus of an event; service activities often have instructional value while bringing brothers together. Coordination of events is done mainly through listserv announcements and chapter web site postings, along with weekly hard copy bulletins passed out at chapter meetings.

Each chapter establishes measurable goals at the beginning of the semester, and then evaluates how effective it was at accomplishing its objectives. There are consultants who traverse the chapters in specific regions, observing the strengths of chapters and proffering ideas from successful chapters for shoring up weaknesses in the chapters they’re advising. This boundary crossing reinforces the national unity of the brotherhood while allowing each chapter to retain the identity established by the unique environment of the campus it’s based in. The consultants’ contingency approach is suitable because of the matured culture that the organization enjoys; it knows how to do what it needs to do, and it’s written the book. I would put it in the elaboration stage of Daft’s organizational life cycle. The turnover from graduation and initiation requires some adjustments, but the core of the chapter’s membership has been through at least a semester in the Brotherhood. Some challenges the chapter faces are increasing brother participation in local events, hosting more events with other chapters and organizations, and finding new, sustainable community service activities.

A Personal PIM

2007-12-13T13:45:00.004-05:00

I’d like to think I have more sophisticated PIM habits than most of my peers, since I know how to use tools like RSS feeds, assign common programs to hotkeys, and apply filters to sort my e-mail. No one knows what I’m talking about when I mention RSS, and most people I’ve spoken to outside of SILS have at most configured a local e-mail client instead of relying on Webmail for their e-mail management system. I have never heard of anyone using Yahoo Pipes, and I know exactly five other people who use del.icio.us or another social bookmarking tool to keep track of interesting web discoveries. In real life, my books are arranged by genre and author, and my notes are put in separate notebooks and usually stored in order of class time.

I am a little deficient when it comes to maintaining my social network information, though: most of it is on my phone or e-mail address book. I have a LinkedIn account that I haven’t checked in months, and I abstain from the Myspace and Facebook phenomena that have infected the large majority of my peers. There are three main reasons for this:

Privacy concerns, though even the slightest bit of data can reveal one’s identity nowadays
The incongruence between my definition of a friend and what Facebook’s glib term for a hyperlink is.
I’m an Information Science major with a minor in Computer Science. I spend way too much time in front of the computer anyway. Give me some rich, meatspace interaction, please.

PIM habits are hard to reform, and people need to see a clear advantage over their current system before they make a change. It is like the adoption of any innovation, but because of the personal nature of PIM, there is more psychological resistance to admitting a deficiency on the part of one’s information management habits.

The Ethics of Facebook’s Beacon Program

2007-12-13T13:45:00.003-05:00

Facebook is an essential for the personal information toolbox of most college students, with an 85% market share of the 4 year university demographic. While most students appreciate the utility of the site, Facebook has its own agenda for the information it collects. Information is a commodity, and the personal information broadcast in users’ profiles allow marketer to draw an unnervingly accurate bead on product advertisement demographics. Microsoft and Newscorp know how valuable this data can be.

The company’s most recent endeavor, Beacon, has drawn a lot of flak from privacy advocates. SNS gurus danah boyd and Fred Stutzman both examine the tactics that Facebook has employed in several privacy-compromising feature rollouts, and the ethics are a little questionable. Facebook’s strength, its low barrier of entry, means that less computer savvy users can still log on and use the service. It also means that when Facebook rolls out a mostly invisible, technical feature á la Beacon, it’s likely to go under the radar, at least for a little while.

Presidential Information Management

2007-12-13T13:45:00.001-05:00

The Independent Weekly reviewed the web sites of the 2008 U.S. presidential election candidates. The Indy took a look at the aesthetics, layout, and functionality of each candidate’s site and graded how they are leveraging the potential of Soapbox 2.0. Candidates were also evaluated through other signs of web presence, such as cross-referenced YouTube videos, social networking site profiles, blogs, podcasts, even Second Life avatars. World of Warcraft lewt details were not examined at this time.

Voters who want more information about a candidate can likely turn to a candidate’s official web site for reliable information on a politician’s viewpoints. It gets trickier when one goes to other venues. How do you know that it’s the real Myspace profile for John McCain or that a video accurately reflects the policies and viewpoints of Barack Obama? Veracity is extremely difficult to establish in online sources, especially when one factors in the Principle of Least Effort in most users’ online researching habits. Also, politicians recognize the double-edged sword of publicity. Word travels fast, light speed fast, on the intertubes.