Month: June 2009

25 things…

*a response to 25 things… by Amy Senger*

You may or may not know about the Bear aka the @sengseng:

  1. If you are lucky enough to see her right when sunlight enters the room, she smiles and giggles like a blissful child
  2. She cannot drive in peace, instead she requires madonna and or loud dance music which she then dances in her seat to
  3. She doesn’t need to but drives a total beater
  4. If she puts her hair up and tight then no one recognizes her
  5. She uses that deception trick to her advantage
  6. When she kisses me I secretly open my eyes and watch her, she sticks her lips out, chin up, and has a perfect smile
  7. She is afraid of commitment
  8. She has an undying need for growth
  9. She achieves the amazing but fears the simple
  10. She believes in energy and gets really, really bothered when people with bad energy are messing up her energy
  11. She obsessively cleans up her workspace (but her car is always a total mess)
  12. She may not know how to “settle down”
  13. If you put her in a room for more than 10 minutes her leg will start thumping and she will start finding anyway to leave the room
  14. When it comes to our relationship, she inspires me and makes calm me
  15. She has a ginormous but
  16. She sends me secret naughty texts
  17. She is crazy about her niece, Sarah
  18. After I professed my love to her, she talks to me in a calm voice I have never heard before
  19. We were friends for 3 years until a road trip and a lot of talk about When Harry Met Sally passed
  20. I can see the center in her and I love it
  21. We have a calendar that tracks her period so I can tell when to prepare for the worst and best
  22. Amy has an amazing vision, eagle eye senger. This is true physically (like spotting things far away) and mentally (she can see and make things happen that others cant)
  23. She says Im the only man to ever reject her
  24. She throws things at me when I am purposely making her mad
  25. She is beautiful inside and out

Creating a Culture of Collaboration – Part II

Several weeks ago, I posed a question to Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky in Twitter) about tweet attribution and I was glad to see the variety of responses it generated. The question was prompted by something I tweeted and something he tweeted subsequently – which I’ve provided below. In Mark’s defense, I posted the original blog without providing specific details, on purpose. I was interested in his response (and I simply wanted to get the question out there since I was leaving for a 10-day cross-country road trip the next day!) If you notice, in the example I provided, Mark’s tweet is very similar to mine but he clearly changed a few words so it is not verbatim.


I asked the question out of curiosity. My intention was most definitely not an attempt at a light smear campaign. Mark has over 7,000 followers, ranks in the top 30 Twitterers in Washington, DC and is on the program committee for the upcoming Gov2.0Summit – he is clearly one of the top Twitterers for Government 2.0. And I am not passing judgment on what is considered right or wrong for social software behavior. In the case of the example tweet I provided, I don’t particularly care that the essence of my tweet was re-tweeted without attribution because the information was shared with a larger audience (Mark’s 7,000+ followers) – and this is a good thing. But I do care why he did what he did so we can learn – Mark clearly could have just re-tweeted verbatim and still had enough characters to include a RT @sengseng but he took the time to rearrange some of the words and add the location. Perhaps he felt including the venue was more important than providing the source. This doesn’t seem unreasonable. (I am curious about tweets that are re-tweeted verbatim without attribution. Do they all fall under the category of a character constraint or redundancy due to a link to the source’s website?)

When it comes to social media and collaboration, what is the formula, the nuances, and the components for getting a message out to elicit participation, as well as growing a large, vibrant, active community of members? More importantly, what are the personal gains and losses versus the community gains and losses of our actions in these online social forums? At the end of the day, I want the leaders of this brave new 2.0 world to be asking and answering this question. We create a social conscious based on our actions in these virtual environments and in my opinion, we cannot afford to experience the same failings of the finance industry or the real estate market or the automobile industry with Government 2.0.