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.

In the business I work in, changing the culture of a community of people who do not have a history of sharing information freely isn’t easy. One of the common complaints I hear is when hard-working individuals consistently see their efforts re-packaged as someone else’s (imagine an analyst who writes an amazing paper only to discover that another analyst at a different agency has taken that paper and passed it off as his/her own). The beauty of working in an inter-agency, enterprise 2.0 environment is it’s more difficult to do this because work is transparent. One of the principles I espouse to all the students I teach and train is attribution and how necessary it is in order to create a culture of sharing; because when you take credit for things other people create, it sends the signal that individual gain is above community gain as opposed to being equal.

My question to @cheeky_geeky is: how do you decide when to give Twitter attribution? I and others have noticed that @cheeky_geeky will post tweets verbatim from someone without giving ReTweet (RT) attribution. I can understand it happening once in a while but it happens more than that (I’m sure a script could do analysis on this). Does this become a slippery slope? A tweet here, a blog post there? Perhaps this is part of experimentation. I don’t know. I do know that integrity is consistency…of actions, principles and outcomes.

Enter Steve.

Steve and I were the first set of instructors to support what has become the Sean and Don show – the creators and pioneers of the program. If there is one thing that stands out in my mind about Steve and my initial impression of him, it was his total state of ease. I guess when you’ve spent time as a high school teacher and a software manager at Blizzard, teaching the intel community how to collaborate and share knowledge virtually isn’t a difficult transition.

Steve and I spent a year together in the lab, teaching and running the sabbatical. If I am considered by anyone today a good instructor, it’s because of him. During that time, we talked, a lot. Sometimes we would spend hours just talking, and debating. Most of the time his logic didn’t make sense to me. But that’s what I liked. The lab was the place where you could vent, learn, regenerate, geek-out, trade and argue ideas and thoughts, lay in the middle of the floor in the dead-man’s upward-facing floating position in total exasperation with the world.

1×57 is an inside joke. What it stands for is a foundation, a base…the place where it’s okay to be the renegade, the radical, the rebel, the dissident. That’s why Steve and I started it – our virtual home to be us.

Since I’ve known him, Steve has always been a “trash man.” My earliest memories include him not throwing away a single scrap of paper. And making sure we were first to have a recycling bin as part of a facilities pilot. And him ALWAYS using a ceramic mug and bowl for his morning tea and “mush.” And him reusing his plastic salad container, washing it out EVERY single day. And him rarely buying new clothes – instead opting for trips to Buffalo Exchange, the “hip” thrift clothing exchange store. If there is one thing most people will agree on about Steve, it’s that he’s not wasteful. He has mastered the art of efficiency and resourcefulness. This is who Steve is.

So when Steve told me he was leaving DC to start a non-profit to reduce waste in our country, I thought, “What a great idea,” – but that quickly changed to, “What the f$ck!?! You’re supposed to be my partner in 1×57.” I realized, however, that Steve is doing exactly what 1×57 is all about. He’s following his own truth. People have asked me why I’m helping him with A Clean Life. It’s difficult for me to understand why the question is being asked in the first place. Since when does helping a friend require an explanation? Actually, since when did not trashing your home go out of practice – shouldn’t we all be participating? I could say that my concentration in college was “Environment” and that the thesis I wrote is being used today for JMU’s Sustainability program. Or that starting at age 10, I was asking my parents what happened to all the trash we produced and shouldn’t we care about it? Or that “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”(~Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Ultimately, though, I believe in Steve. From the day I met him, I’ve felt this need – this pull, this push – to help him. I can’t explain it. Our relationship doesn’t make sense to a lot of people and it has changed over the years. But what hasn’t changed is how I know whenever we’re together, whether we’re talking, or fighting, or whatever, it’s worth more than anything material I can ever possess.

First, I thank my colleague Fred for unknowingly interjecting goodness into my ponderance of the notion since my original focus was simply integrity. The fact is, a person can be honestly, wholly and consistently bad yet still have integrity.

Lately social media has become, in my opinion, obsessed with online influence and predominance. Sites like Twinfluence that measure things such as reach, velocity and social capital are amusing to me if only because I look at the lists and think “so what?”  Take for example the Twitterer who at this time has the *most (based on the site’s calculation) Reach, the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). At this time, it is Scot McKay, self-described dating coach, author, podcaster, firestarter, karaoke hack, Dannie and Micky-Mac’s dad and @emilymckay’s knight in shining Under Armour. If Scot McKay says the milk section of the grocery store is the best place to meet a potential dating interest, do people flock there? (PLEASE NOTE: I do not know or follow Scot McKay and to my knowledge he did not tweet this).

I don’t find number of followers interesting. A person can be a celebrity, make a lot of noise, but not get people to act. Influence is the ability to affect a person, thing, or course of events and I’m more interested in the integrity of a person and his or her motivations for doing what they do. I’m more interested in people like Laura Fitton (@pistachio in Twitter) who, when she asks her readers/followers to support a cause she is passionate about, they contribute.

As more and more light has been shed on economic/financial power players like the Bernie Madoffs, Phil Gramms and Allen Stanfords of the world, I’ve been contemplating the price society pays for a lack of integrity and goodness. This weekend I attended several sessions at Transparency Camp in DC and I found two sessions extremely interesting: one on Social Network Analysis by Valdis Krebs, Erin Kenneally and JC Hertz and the other by Kevin Connor, a developer of LittleSis.org, a site that helps spot the symptoms of corruption and cronyism in the political process and promotes government and corporate accountability.  I think we will be seeing a trend of companies, organizations and citizens taking a greater interest in how much integrity a person or entity has and the relative “goodness” of their pursuits since the current trajectory of social transparency means it will be more and more difficult to “behave badly” without folks knowing about it. The price of things such as blind greed or even prejudice might get significantly more expensive. This could benefit societies at large since the culmination of an individual’s lack of integrity and solely self-motivated pursuits has the ability to hurt the greater good. Take for example former executive director of the CIA, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo who had a record of misconduct that stretched over 20 years. When the public reads stories like this, I guarantee his association with the agency does not go unnoticed and very likely denigrates the integrity of the agency as a whole.

People are social creatures. We like to conform, as shown by studies like the Asch conformity experiments, a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. The danger in this lies in the fact that just as quickly as something or someone can become popular, the reverse is true and if you look at social markets in the same light as financial ones, then the predisposition towards large “unexpected” fluctations should hold true. For this reason, I think we’ll start seeing people and entities question their associations with more rigor than in the past, or potentially pay a price.

As such, here are two for 2009 that Amy and I are most interested in. They are the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactice and the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. What you will find below is a write-up about the conferences that I create for my customer and bosses. I really hope to get one of them to come with us this year.

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SXSW Interactive

The Brightest Minds in Emerging Technology

Summary:

SXSW Interactive Festival covers a full range topics, from blogging trends and CMS techniques to tech-related social issues and wireless innovation. There will be more than 180 panel sessions on the following topics:

• Advertising / Marketing
• Business / Entrepreneurial
• Community / Social Networks
• Content
• Digital Filmmaking
• Human / Social Issues
• Mobile / Wireless
• New Technology / Next Generation
• Programming
• Web / Interface Design

Keynotes:

• Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com)
• Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, author of the “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More,”
• Guy Kawasaki (of Apple and several VC companies)

Date/Location:

• Friday afternoon, March 13 through Tuesday afternoon, March 17
• Austin, TX

Website:

• http://sxsw.com/interactive

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O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

Summary:

The event gathers together the world’s most interesting people to bring to light the important and disruptive innovations that we see on the horizon, rather than the ones that have already arrived. ETech hones in on what’s going to be making a difference not this year, or maybe even next year, but around the corner as the market digests the next wave of hacker-led surprises.

Since 2002, ETech has put onstage the blue sky innovation, from thought leaders finding ways to solve the world’s ills to hackers modding, breaking, and building for the fun of it, from P2P and swarm intelligence to social software and collective intelligence. Radical and unknown at the time, today many of the ideas first seen at ETech are on the tongues of investors and business pundits–and in the hands of consumers, fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and play.

Topics:

• Mobile & the Web
• City Tech – Can technology create a livable, prosperous, sustainable city? Which emerging technologies are poised to deliver a brighter, greener future?
• Health – What are the breakthroughs in technology, genomics, medicine, anti-aging, drug development, and delivery that will make a difference in extending our lives and enhancing our quality of life?
• Materials – We’ll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new developments. What mechanisms will be possible? How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives?
• Life – What are the emerging technologies that promise to infuse themselves into our cultural and social fabric to help us work smarter, more efficiently, and create greater connectivity?

Keynotes:

• Mary Lou Jepsen, dubbed one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2008
• Joi Ito (Creative Commons), Creative Commons – Creating Legal and Technical Interoperability
• Drew Endy, David Grewal (BioBricks Foundation)
• Jason Schultz (UC Berkeley School of Law), Building a New Biology
• Eric Paulos (Carnegie Mellon University), Enabling Citizen Science
• Jane McGonigal (Avant Game), Superstruct: How to Invent the Future by Playing a Game
• Aaron Koblin of Google, Making Art with Lasers, Sensors and the Net
• Tony Jebara (Columbia University), Mobile phones reveal the behavior of places and people

Date/Location:

• March 9-12
• San Jose, CA

Website:

• http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/content/home

This is what I learned:

1. I have a relationship with Twitter: it provides me with the social interaction that I as a social being need. On the flip side, I wonder if my Twitter habit precludes me from picking up the phone or meeting in person to have a robust conversation that is more substantive and fulfilling.
2. Facebook and Twitter are my social network relationship managers: I keep up-to-date and make social plans using these two tools. I have a horrible memory and am a fairly social person so seeing what other folks are doing in Facebook and Twitter reminds me of what events I want to attend. And I regularly use Twitter or Facebook to find folks to attend these events.
3. The “noise” of Twitter is addictive. Information addiction is becoming more prevalent as we have access to more sources. Our brains are pattern recognizers and it loves new information because it’s trained to seek it out. Twitter offers many things, including fictive learning (the exploration of could-have-been-experienced) and could be just as powerful as experiential learning.
4. Twitter lets me see everything that’s going on. Since birth, I have displayed an active curiosity in everything. A few months ago, I asked my mom to describe me as a young child and what I was interested in and she replied, “You were constantly moving. You could never sit still, you could never stay put. You were interested in EVERYTHING. And got into EVERYTHING.” Since i don’t have a cable/internet connection at home, I rely on twitter via my iPhone as my main source of news and communication (for world, family, friend and work updates).
5. Anyone can listen and jump into the conversation (but since I couldn’t participant, I had little interest in what was going on). This is a critical aspect of social change. Groups or individuals who are neglected, overlooked or dismissed will not exhibit a need or desire to participate or contribute and will therefore be apathetic.
6. The bar is very LOW to participate. Anyone can throw in 140 characters worth of information. This is great for actions like making mental notes, expressing a feeling, asking a question and sharing links or event headlines. However, many things in life cannot be captured in 140 characters and other formats and forums must be used or suffer the consequences of gross misunderstandings and inefficiencies.
7. I was very productive during this period. It was refreshing not to share, to focus on me and be primarily self-focused. When I wasn’t consuming information, I was able to process and create it. Since Twitter and social applications are noisy and addictive, I must train myself to limit my usage and exposure to them and I now make a conscious effort to “turn off the noise” and schedule planned periods of time to use them, either as a break to checkout what’s going on or share thoughts.
8. I don’t know who I don’t know and I can share with these people. A great learning experience was when I needed to disseminate information for an event to which I didn’t have an attendee list. Not having Twitter at my disposal hurt potential recipients.
9. Twitter is not the value..I am. There’s been much discussion over the value of Twitter and the most obvious aspect is the user and customer data. Twitter owns a very lucrative repository of its customers (aka Tweeters) buying, thinking, and behavioral cues and patterns . Companies, government agencies, even potential dating partners are interested in learning about “me” and social applications like Twitter provide a very convenient platform to execute against the resume and influence others.

One of the keys to my 1-week social software sabbatical was creating an incentive to break my habit since I didn’t know all the opportunity costs of my participation. So I, the competitive being that I am, contrived a wager with Andrew McAfee that is available for public viewing here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddz85z7r_13gpj74bd4

Since I was ruled successful in completing the terms of my part of the agreement, it’s Andy’s turn to complete his end of the bargain.

I started using Twitter in mid-2007. I don’t know the exact date because I have over 8,000 updates and unless someone can prove otherwise, Twitter and Twitter-tangent apps don’t allow me to dig back into the archives this far.

I have often debated the value of Twitter, most notably with Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School and Enterprise 2.0, Boston Red Sox and New York Times crossword puzzle aficionado. Since his first tweet on June 4, 2008, he and I have exchanged jabs, on the verge of SNL Point-Counterpoint diatribes, over each other’s usage, with him calling me an “emotion-junkie” and me calling him a “repressed hoarder.”  I can’t deny his accusation since I believe emotions are self-illuminating cues to what both drives us as well as areas for attention and self-betterment.

*NOTE: I saw Andy on June 1, 2008 at the Government Leadership Summit and took the opportunity to ‘lightly’ antagonize him for not using Twitter.  Three days later, @amcafee arrives. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

My ongoing debate over the use and value of Twitter with my Twitter antagonist led me to examine my own usage and re-evaluate the value of Twitter.  What were the costs versus the benefits to both me and my followers for my participation in Twitter?  I decided the best way for me to answer this was to step off of the Twitter playing field for a week and take a “carrot and stick” approach to break my addictive behavior. I, the competitive being that I am, conceived a wager in which the reward would provide me something I infinitely desire – insight into people, and in this case, a person.

For one week I would refrain from using Twitter, Facebook, and Blip (my three most favorite online community applications ) in exchange for one day of Andrew McAfee departing from his usual perfuctory, minimum participation  in Twitter.  The product was a wager built collaboratively and transparently in a Google Doc:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddz85z7r_13gpj74bd4

Today is my final day of silence.  I have kept a journal throughout the week which I will be publishing, including insights I have gained.  I can say regardless of whether or not Andy ends up executing the terms of his side of the wager, the value has been in the journey, not the destination.

This year, The Economist Intelligence Unit wrote about The role of trust in business collaboration. Interestingly enough, the article concedes that “the role of trust is not easily defined” in terms of collaboration. I believe trust is having confidence that the participating parties will do no harm, will do no wrong to the other.  How we, as individuals, convey this precept in collaboration is nebulously difficult in the absence of multisensory queues such as hearing tone of voice, seeing another’s eye movements, or even feeling for the presence of a weapon.

Despite the challenges of creating trust virtually, it still remains the vortex and vertex for collaboration, with the absence or loss of it instigating the dissipation of collaboration and the creation of it elevating participants and activities to new heights and dimensions. As a former date coach and someone who has personally been through the very methodical and comprehensively intricate act of creating a prenuptial agreement, I believe the fundamentals of creating trust in any relationship are universal, and we can leverage much of what is espoused by the extremely profitable business of marriage, things like “State who you are – loudly” and “Make sure your words match the message.”  When I think about my best, most successful collaborative efforts – and evaluate them against a marriage counselor’s 10 Crucial and Surprising Steps to Build Trust in a Relationship – I find all ten elements present.

To begin to build trust, we need not look any further than ourselves.  Our thoughts, our actions, our emotions – are all pieces of the puzzle to “us” and the only way to create the full picture is to take them out of the box and spread them out for exploration. This is our virtual handshake.

And now let me apologize for not doing this sooner: Hi, I’m Amy.

You can get a glimpse into my life at: www.twitter.com/sengseng