Store our family history on the world wide web for the future generations to read and enjoy?

First of all, I am going to break the 500 word rule and the Saturday morning Rant Rule. What I want to RANT about this morning is all about different ways to solve a problem, thanks to two of my relatives, One from Atlanta and one from Australia.

The problem at hand:

1) Why should we use Geni to document Family history? Why not facebook, Orkuchee (orkut), myspace, and other social media collaboration outlets that we currently use?
2) Why document Family history at all?.

Two questions with many answers: I hope I can get decent momentum going here. I don't plan on solving this problem, It would be foolish to do it by myself when I have 222 blood relatives on my Mom's side all participating (begrudgingly I think) on Geni. Insted I just plan on presenting some thoughts, that might provoke deeper insight, in the young minds of the Dsouza clan.

Documenting Family history: I have been a big proponent of documenting Family history for a long time now. I remember about 25 years ago a conversation I had with my Aunty Benna (then a principle of Mount carmel's mother ship) about this. The fact that I am still on this kick should mean something. There is also another reason. When I lived in India, not once was I asked to explain, why I have a Hispanic last name. After I came to the US, I have been asked this many a time. So I set out in search of the truth, at least the documented truth. What I found or did not find surprised me and increased my resolve to find out more.

Why not just use the world wide web as the repository for our family history?

I really believe we can pull this off: But to understand how, we need to look at a similar problem space. A few years ago Google came out with the Google desktop. The feature that made it stand out from the rest was its capability to index all your files and even mail. By doing so they gave us an option to do away with filing/categorizing data. The premise was, you store data where ever and however you want to. Then when you need to retrieve a file, you simply search using key words and it pulls it up. So remember the time we used to spend cleaning our files and filing them away, If you were smart and used this indexing, you did not need to.

Let me give you an analogy. Lets say you lived in a college dorm. Your parents are not around to ask you to clean up your room. You just let it pile up. But mentally you arrive at this ingenious solution. Your mind indexed the contents of the room, so whenever you needed something, it was easy to find. So no sorting, no cleaning, no mus, no fuss. Its all there, and you get it when you need it. Indexing at its sophisticated best!!

The premise was simple: They did away with elaborate folder heiarachies to store and retrieve data, instead they just indexed every word in each document. It is an amazing retrieval system which they developed for the world wide web and just scaled it down to the desktop and it was a paradigm shift from the older ways of thinking about information retrieval.

So In theory we the M&M clan should be able to use any social network out there, and post our Zeitegeist as we live. If at any time any one wishes to retrieve how it came to be that Terry lives in Kalamazoo today, about 12000 miles where he was born. You can serch for Terry+Trichur+Fernandez Lane+Kalamazoo and wallah!! you have the answer.

I got out a couple of concepts there so let me tag them so folks can easily get to this information:
Semantic Web, cognition and recall, Indexing, Social media, Social networks, Search algorithms, Information retrieval.

The question is how do I capture the Stories I heard Dennis Britto tell us when we were young?. How can I capture and convey the moment, when he let us put our finger in the hole in his head? Gary V. is perhpas one answer. Any one who has watched Gary V and his incredible story telling, will agree he is Dennis Britto reincarnated. There are other great story tellers out there: Sir Ken Robinson, Larry Lessing, Jon Steward, Ze Frank to name a few. They all have one thing in common, they use other forms of media to convey their stories.

So lots of questions for the future generations in the M&M clan to sink their teeth into. One thing is for sure, When my Uncles, Aunts, Cousins travelled far away from Managalore (uncle George, Aunty Flavy, Uncle Willy, Uncle Jimmy to name just a few) their only medium of communication was writing letters. Whats more, I am sure there were Stories like Edgar told us the other day about a Dog named Puski that we are not priviy to becuase there was not way to use the world wide web as a repository and google was not aournd to index the information. With the result, we lost a lot of history. What are we going to do about it?

Let history repeat it self?

Listen Now, Hear me later.

I suddenly have this urge to listen. Not sure when it started but its there and it is not going away. So this week I am going to talk about LISTENING

One on One listening
Listening in a Group
Listening to the the World
Listening to Oneself
Listening Tools
Deterrents to Listening, the Noise.

One on One listening:
Face to Face listening, mostly falls into two categories, Same time/Same Place and Same time/Different Place but they both involve direct one on one conversations. The stake of each participant in the conversation defines the intensity with which they listen. The higher the stake, the greater the intensity. It could be a conversation with a child, spouse, significant other, a friend, an acquaintance, a relative, colleague, superior, the list goes on. Fact remains that in a conversation you have to listen, which defines the quality of the exchange of information. Listening is a such an integral part of our lives that we seldom stop to measure how well we listen or how much we gain out of a conversation. How well we listen also depends on the deterrents to listening, the Noise that comes into play as we listen. A lot of the noise is our own mental chatter, our predispositions and our confirmational biases that we have grown to accept as part of our make up. Srikumar Rao has talked about mental chatter in his book " Are you ready to Succeed" . Any good Knowledge management book or course will tell you that Confirmational Bias is a strong deterrent to effective listening. So there is a good chance that we dont listen effectively at all and perhaps we should start paying attention.
Listening in a Group:
Again as in the One on One listening, Listening in a Group, falls into the two categories of Time/Place. In a social setting when there are more than a few folks interacting, listening can take on a different path. If the group comprises of like minded people, you will hear what you always wanted to hear and what sustains your interest in the subject. In a group, listening follows the traditional norm of followers and leaders. We tend to listen to a strong leader more than the collective intelligence. We often prefer listening to the trickle down from a few strong leaders still after so many years of evolution. So what does it take to listen to the collective intelligence?. To understand that, we need to look at how the social media movement has generated listening tools and how these tools can provide us plethora of avenues to fine tune our listening skills.
Listening to the the World:
An extension of listening in a Group, listening to the world is becoming far more possible in the 21st century. We do hear more about Wars, famine, hunger, disasters and we hear about them faster than we did in the past. Development in Media and technology has pushed the envelope to the point where we are starting to see an information overload. We cant listen effectively to it all, but we can listen effectively to what we choose to. We are a planet of 6 billion people, of which today may be a billion can tap into the resources through the internet, telling us that we have a long way to go, and we should get there sooner than later.
On a side note, for those of you are into technology, we will run out of IP (IPv4) addresses spaces in the next 3 to 4 years, so get ready for a change to IPv6. We might have to revisiting our addressing technology on the whole.
Listening to Oneself:
Listening to ourself has become so engrained into us that we seldom stop to think of how we do it. Unless ofcourse you are studing the congnitive process in a academic setting. But it is important particularly becuase of the mental chatter I mentioned before. This mental chatter has a way of distracting us from effectively listening. There have been various forms of meditation tracks that have tools to manage the mental chatter, but we seldom have the time or inclination to work at fine tuning the art of Listening to Oneself.
Listening Tools:
In IT Operations management, listening tools are huge, and so are Unattended Event Notifications that are driven out of the listening tools. As human beings we have invented these tools that can help us manage our business. There are some pretty incredible algorithms and slick methods developed that help us with the competitive advantage. So why not scale those techniques down to the individual? We are slowly starting to see a progression in that direction. There are many technology evangelists like Chris Brogan who are pushing the envelop in this area, perhaps we should all STOP and LISTEN.
Deterrents to Listening, the Noise:
Finally deterrents to listening: If you lived on a farm or in a remote place, they say the pace is slower. They say you dont need to multitask as much. They say your head is clearer, the air is sweeter, the water more refreshing and so on and so forth. In fact those of us who can afford it even take vacations to sleepy villages in Portugal to enjoy this serenity. Deterrents to Listening is the lack of serenity perhaps and does not have to be limited to some places/some times? So what does it take to reduce the deterrents to Listening?.

I really belive it takes more that using tools to manage your time better. It take more than following the 7 habits of succeful people, and countless others who have made it rich by writing books about how to effectively manage your precious time.

It really might be as simple as listening to your self once in a while. Leave your confirmational biases at the door, and start LISTENING, it might just make a difference.

Thats my Saturday morning Rant for this labor day weekend. Happy Listening.

What you stand to gain through Social Media.

A few years back, I got my family and friends to sign up with JotSpot, yes before they were bought out by google, to do pretty much the same thing as what can easily done by facebook, Orkut or myspace today. Long before that, there were the IRC channels that I would use to gain insight about veritical topics, but today twitter, friendfeed and the likes makes that easy.

When I joined twitter, it was becuase I was into the "knowledge elicitation" kick, born out of a KM class I was taking at DePaul, thanks to Alan Burns. That was about 3 months ago. Today I have about 46 followers and I follow 37. A drop in the bucket when you compare those numbers to that of Shelisrael, Scobelizer, Chrisbrogan, davewiner or Techcruch and the likes. But while it might be important for some to have a large number of followers, what is important for me, is to be able to get at the important bits of imformation that is flowing through these channells. To understand that in quantitative terms, if each of those listed about have about 10K followers, I have access to the information flowing through their conversations, provided I know how to extract that. That is where the skills of ETL come in handy.

For example, today @Shelirsrael put out a request to get a list of businesses that were using twitter. I wont go into the model of using twitter to enhance the customer service experience, you can do that if you follow the stories of Zappos and the like, but instead in a few minutes, @shelisrael got a link to Twitter Brand Index , which is truly mind boggling.

Most twitter users are very proficient at following conversations, and use it in clever ways, but I am new to this game and every time I stumble onto something that is powerful, I like to share, so here goes.

I am following @shelisrael (one of the 37 that I follow), I see he puts out a request for a list of businesses who use twitter. A little later, he thanks everyone who sent in good information. Thats a trigger. I go to http://search.twitter.com and search for @shelisrael, it lists all his conversations, with the most recent ones on top. From there, I just drill down into conversations and get the information needed.

@Chrisbrogan put out a really nice blogpost on the 5 tools of social media, a while back. I find that a very interesting post or rather a great social media strategy. If you are a intentional social media leverager, it 's a must read. If you are hooked into social media then read his other posts as well.

I will leave you with this for today. If you are new to the twitter scence, and would like to LISTEN and learn, (with a slant into technology, mostly information systems), follow the guys and gals on the list that I follow. I am @mibdepot on twitter and you can get to me via http://twitter.com/mibdepot.

Happy Listening.

It's all about passion

There is a great tradition at Winchell, it's called a happy hour, once a month, one household hosts and invites the entire neighborhood. Since moving here last year We have been to 3 of these and I must add, the reclusive me does not mind it one bit.

I have met a quite a few folks and like hearing their stories. Particularly what brings them or brought them to Kalamazoo. Okay you are wondering what does this have to do with passion?. Well be patient Kemo Sabe.

At the last happy hour, I run into this couple, both Geologists, who picked Kalamazoo for a variety of reasons, after having lived in many major cities in the US. Well that perked my attention. One thing led to another and we got talking about kids. My friend told me that his son was a national merit scholar. Well I started digging deeper.

After some knowledge elicitation, I got this:

Teach your kids about being passionate about what they do. It does not matter what they do, all that matters is they do the best they possibly can or they become the best they can be in what they do. That's it.

I remember the days when I would often work late, and would leave work around 3 or 4 in the morning, take the train, it would be me and the homeless folks on the train. I would often say to myself, WTF?. and the answer always was, it takes Passion Terry!!.

I share this bottled secret of passion with you, Enjoy.

Blogging with Consistency

Consistently blogging. It could mean a couple of things.

1) Blog every day or blog on a specific frequency
2) Blog consistently about certain topics
3) Blog on a specific frequency about specific topics
4) just Blog

If you are building up a brand, I believe item3 would be the way to go. But we dont always blog to build a brand do we?.

I for one like to blog, staying line with the "Captains Log" approach. Remember Captain Kirk, oh what would we do with out his logs. But it is important to be consistent, and it is also important to Write, not just cut and paste. The writing part is good training. You will thank me for that 30 years later (notice the long tail theory cynicism there) I am sure.

So does this mean I am not consistent? or will not be consistent?. For a fact the content I blog about will be free for you to use and reuse. It also will bring some value to you is my hope.

Social Media Interaction: Four Buckets

Four Buckets

Skill+Cycles Bucket = Skycles Bucket

• members of the community advertise their skills and cycles available

Need+Cycles Bucket = Nycles Bucket

• members of the community advertise their needs
  

Solution+Cycles Bucket = Soycles Bucket

• algorithm matches Needs to Skills and dump it into the solutions bucket
  

Happiness+Cycles Bucket = Happycles Bucket

• Solutions bucket, every one is happy
  

A community can improve sustenance through Four Buckets.

Smart folks leveraging Social Media networks for Upscale Customer Service

There are some smart folks out there leveraging social networks to provide customer service of a unique kind. The example I came across is a gentleman at Dell, who appears to be watching the social networks for any dell related questions and then finds you an answer, He also maintains a blog, that is actually a corporate blog with a personal brand. http://richardatdell.blogspot.com/

The other end of the spectrum, I needed some Server power consumption data. Most of my research using google and similar search tools, generated a lot of noise, but nothing precise. I posted a request on Twitter. I got an answer in about 20 min. Sort of a global IRC. How cool is that?.

Here is a pull model for customer service: Search for all the complaints against your company's brand, and on various social networks, compile it and try to find the answer. You will make a lot of customers happy. Your Sr. Management will be happier.