Gumption

Communities, Technologies and Participation: Notes from C&T 2009

Participation was the overriding theme at the 4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2009) last week. We can design and deploy technology to support a community, but how do we truly engage that community and motivate its members to participate? One way I was personally trying to promote engagement via technology within the C&T 2009 community was through the use of SlideShare ("YouTube for Powerpoint"); a number of presenters have uploaded their C&T 2009 slides, tagged with cct2009, and I will provide specific links to presentations I know about in my notes below. There are also a number of C&T 2009 photos posted to Flickr tagged with cct2009 ... and a number of tweets from / to / about the conference with the #cct2009 hashtag on Twitter (and I plan to post one more tweet pointing back at this blog post once I'm done).

David McDonald opened up the conference with an engaging keynote in which he introduced the new U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) program on Social-Computational Systems (SoCS), which promotes an agenda of embedding more social intelligence into computational systems. The idea is to combine collective human intelligence with socially intelligent computing, making computers first-class participants in a new breed of emergent intelligence. Although he stipulated that the intention is to "let people do what people do best, and let computers do what computers do best", I got the distinct impression that one goal of the program is to render unto computers what is social ... which may lead to the [unintended] consequence of rendering unto humans what is computational. As a recovering AI researcher, who believes that a little AI goes a long way - and a lot of AI goes a short way - I am, no doubt, rather biased (and perhaps jaded). In any case, the program strikes me as a resurgence of strong AI in HCI clothing (and others voiced concerns about the prospective domination of computers in this proposed partnership during the Q&A after his talk).

On a lighter note, Dave began his talk with an amusing delineation of the "four stages of 'invited' talk" - idealism & excitement, realization, despair, and finally, resolution - and proceeded to highlight the stages of NSF sponsorship of communities and technologies over the years. He noted that many communities arise as a side effect - someone tries something, people like it, and form a community around it (reminding me of the notion of object-centered sociality) - and posed a thought experiment to encourage us to think about charting new applications of community (and technology) ... I found his idea of FlightBagWatch.com - where voyeurs might login and help conduct bag inspections at the TSA X-ray machines in airports (reminding me of the Texas Border Watch program) - particularly provocative.

In the first paper session I attended at the conference, Marla Boughton presented "Supportive Communication, Sense of Virtual Community and Health Outcomes in Online Infertility Groups", in which she looked at the differing impacts on the sense of virtual community (SOVC) offered by emotional vs. informational support in an online infertility support group. Observing emotional support by members of the community turned out to be the most significant positive factor - surprisingly, even more than providing or receiving emotional support in SOVC ("'tis better to observe than to give or receive" (?!)) - while observing informational support turned out to be the most significant negative correlation in SOVC (I forget whether she reported on giving / receiving informational support).

Dana Rotman shared some observations and insights into the world of video blogging ("vlogging") in "The Community is Where the Rapport Is - On Sense and Structure in the YouTube Community" [slides]. Grounded theory analysis of users’ feelings and interaction patterns revealed repeated themes, among which was the distinction between YouTubers (people who post vlogs) and Tourists (who don't). She found that comments constituted the “most important interaction mechanism”, a finding very much in alignment with my own thinking - and blogging - about comments as validation (or as my friend Noah Kagan so pithily put it, "comments make me orgasm"). This finding was particularly interesting given that she also found considerable ambivalence in the vlogger community about whether people who [only] post comments qualify as full-fledged YouTubers or mere Tourists (and I find the ambivalence all the more interesting given my own musings about whether bloggers are more likely to post comments on other blogs than non-bloggers). Other interesting findings include what she called triangulation - vloggers expose their thoughts, feelings and face and [so] comments are all based around an individual (vs. community bulletin board, forum) - and the preference of Gmail over YouTube's own direct 1:1 communication mechanisms. In addition to stimulating content of Dana's talk, the form of her slides - using a tag cloud for the slide titles - was so creative, I just had to embed a copy here in this post:

The Community is Where the Rapport is - On Sense and Structure in the YouTube community

View more documents from Dana Rotman.

Pnina Shachaf reported an experiment on "Answer Quality on the Wikipedia Reference Desk" [paper | slides], in which she compared the the quality of answers produced [collectively] on the Wikipedia Reference Desk (WRD) to those produced by individual professional reference librarians. The experiment was motivated by an interesting series of responses to a question she posted on the WRD asking about the prefix following pico- (one trillionth) in the international system of units, (it is femto-, one quadrillionth) and the discussion about linguistic origins of that term which followed. The collective wisdom of WRD on this topic was vacillating back and forth between Spanish and Italian (and the professional librarian she consulted also posited one of these two sources - I forget which [Update: Prina has uploaded her slides, which have the full story]), but eventually, over the course of discussions in WRD, the Danish origin of the word was established. Other motivations include Andrew Keen's scree against Wikipedia and other forms of social media, The Cult of the Amateur, and the ongoing debate(s) about the relative accuracy of Wikipedia vs. more traditional encyclopedias. Pnina decided to conduct an experiment to test the relative quality of WRD vs. professional reference librarians more rigorously. Using Nvivo 7 for the ontent analysis of 434 messages involving 77 transactions (where a transaction = a question + one or more answers) among 170 unique users (of whom 122 were "seasoned" Wikipedia users), she found that Wikipedia is generally doing as well or better than professional librarians. In particular, WRD was, on average, more responsive (4 hours vs. 18-21 hours), more complete (63% vs. 47%), and verifiable (88% vs. 53%) than professional librarians. The accuracy was the same (55%), and the explicit satisfaction - as measured by messages of unsolicited thanks - was similar (20% vs. 16-20%) [and I'll pass on the opportunity to extend this into an unsolicited rant about how many people are, or appear to be, so ungrateful (ubiquitous ingratitude?) ... a topic I've previously ranted about in the context of community, football and food).] Among the possible explanations she gave for the relatively high quality of WRD answers were: technology (interactive nature of WRD), the likelihood that many WRD volunteers have relevant professional background, type types of questions asked on WRD, and the collaborative nature of social reference, i.e., what she called amalgamated answers - iterative elaborations by both the requester and the responders (WRD questions generated an average of 4.6 responses).

Lev Gonick gave the second keynote of the conference, "From Digital Campus to Connected Community", providing an overview of the OneCommunity project that he is helping to lead in Cleveland. As with with the earlier keynote, Lev led off with some light-hearted fare - a satirical "Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video" ... which either inspired or was inspired by a contest for a positive Hastily Made Tourism Video ... the former has been viewed over 2M times ... approximately 2000 times more than the winning entry of the positive videos.

Lev proceeded to show a photo of the earth taken during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 ([similar to that] shown on the left), noting that this photo produced a new cognitive map of what place meant [I found myself musing on the term "placemeant"], and what community meant - as did another momentous - though more terrestrial (but perhaps transcendental for some) - event in 1969 (Woodstock) - and how a more recent map of the internet ([similar to that] shown on the right) similarly [re]frames our conception of community ... at least within the context of a conference on communities and technologies. Continuing the progression from the larger to the smaller, and from more abstract to more concrete, Lev devoted much of the rest of his talk to describing OneCommunity:

OneCommunity is a connected-community venture, informed by a mission to be a big bold 21st-century community-oriented project that delivers advanced information technology capabilities to achieve community priorities for economic development, learning, job training, research support, preeminence and distinction.

As the CIO of OneCommunity, he emphasized the importance of technology infrastructure (the "glue") but also highlighted that the challenge for us (technologists) is to find a way to get out of the way (of the community that will be using the technology) ... rather than indulging our fondness for complexity, a fondness which is not generally shared by "Joe Sixpack". OneCommunity is partnering with non-industry organiations (universities, libaries, hospitals) so that they can more effectively give away control in community networking projects, which he sees as an essential element in their prospects for success. Impactful community applications developed thus far in the 5 year old project have focused on health and education, including a Green Computing Initiative to collect, refurbish and re-install computers in Cleveland schools, and OneClassroom, a collaboration between Cleveland schools and the Cleveland Clinic to provide students with remote birds-eye views of - and interaction opportunities with those engaged in - surgical procedures conducted at the clinic.

During the Q&A session that followed, some of the questions revolved around the issue of the sharp economic decline that Cleveland has suffered in recent years (which was reflected in the video shown at the outset). Acknowledging this, and echoing sentiments expressed by Rahm Emanuel and others recasting crises as opportunities [aside: I recently discovered that the notion that crisis = danger + opportunity in Chinese ideographical notation is a myth], Lev noted that "we start from pain" and "progress can be measured directly proportional to the real or perceived state of crisis". Coupled with earlier comments Lev made about the need for collaborative teams composed of visionaries and can-do personalities, I was reminded of one of my favorite Rumi poems, "Not Here":

There's courage involved if you want to become truth. 
There is a broken-open place in a lover. 
Where are those qualities of bravery and sharp compassion?
What's the use of old and frozen thought? 
I want a howling hurt. 
This is not a treasury where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change. 
Lukewarm won't do.
Halfhearted holding back, well-enough getting by? 
Not here.

Shifting from poetry to prose - and from 13th century Persia to here and now (or, at this point, a more local and recent "there and then") - Doug Schuler gave a talk in the following session on "Communities, Technology, and Civic Intelligence" in which he defined civic intelligence as "how smart a society is as-a-whole in relation to its problems". Given the increasing economic, environmental and social problems we are witnessing, posed the timely and provocative question: "will we be smart enough, soon enough?" In contrast to Tim O'Reilly's framing of web 2.0 as a business revolution, harnessing collective intelligence, Doug suggested that civic intelligence represents a social revolution in communication, enhancing civic intelligence ... and [so] we have to choose whether we want to promote a paradigm of people in service to the computer industry vs. the computer industry in service to people. Doug finished off with a couple of plugs - for the Public Sphere project and a new book based on one of the project's latest areas of focus, Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution - and an exhortation: don’t rely on the emergence of civic intelligence as a side effect.

Karim Lakhani opened up the second day of the conference with a keynote on "Knowledge Reuse and Novelty in Community Settings", in which he offered some interesting insights into and experiences with collaborative and competitive projects, as well as some that represented a combination of the two approaches. Karim offered Wikipedia ("the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit") as an example of collaborative endeavors, Innocentive (where Seekers post challenges and Solvers compete to produce - and be paid for - the best solutions) as an example of competitive endeavors, and Threadless (where t-shirt designs are submitted and scored by a community of mutually supportive designers) as a middle ground. He claimed that similar motivations appear to be at work for both competitive and cooperative efforts, and has been investigating the relative costs and benefits of each approach in a series of experiments.

One such experiment - that represents a mixture of competitive and cooperative processes - was a one-week MATLAB “wiki-like” programming contest in which the rules specified that participants could view and modify each others' code and see each others' relative standings (though I'm not sure how these standings were computed - e.g., via explicit voting or via more implicit [re]use of code). The contest generated 4402 entries, of which 181 were leaders at some point. The winning entry was based on code borrowed by 30 other participants. One of my favorite quotes from the presentation - not sure if it was from Karim or the winning contestant - was "A successful competitor is a creator, a recycler and a talent scout." In assessing the factors that lead to success in such a contest, Karim and his colleagues found 3 factors that positively correlated with individual success: contributing new knowledge (knowledge = code), combining existing knowledge in novel ways and conformance (which, I believe, relates to the adherence of the code to stylistic guidelines). 2 factors not correlated with individual success were complexity and using existing knowledge (presumably without novel contributions), though these 2 factors - along with the other 3 - were positively correlated with collective success ... I believe the non-novel use of existing knowledge may contribute to collective success due to the implicit voting represented by the use of that knowledge ... but I must admit that I fell behind in my notes, so I'm not sure about some of these details.

The rewards for the MATLAB experiment were fame, glory and a t-shirt. A second experiment was run within the TopCoder platform (which provides financial incentives to winners, as well as a coveted "TopCoder rating" which acts as an unofficial certification used by many software companies in their assessment of candidates), using a problem in computational biology. Participants were partitioned into three "treaments": full competitive, full collaborative and hybrid. The collaborative treatment resulted in the fewest entries, lowest effort and best performance (possibly surpassing the state of the art in computational biology); the competitive treatment resulted in the most entries, highest effort, and worst performance; the hybrid treatment, as one might expect, had results between these two extremes.

During the Q&A, Karim noted noted that most competitive systems operate despite massive failure rates, and [so] learning, signaling and intrinsic motivations are important factors. Among the gems contributed by the audience were Ben Shneiderman's recommendation of Alfie Kohn's book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition (or perhaps he was referring to Kohn's essay with the same title ... which should not be confused with Karim's earlier reference to an article in Nature by Marek Kohn, The Needs of the Many), and Jenny Preece's observation that we should be mindful of cultural differences, e.g., Americans tend to be very individualistic - and thus more competitive - than people from other cultures. [Note: Paul Resnick has also posted some notes on Karim's keynote.]

Mary Beth Rosson presented "wConnect: A Facebook-Based Developmental Learning Community to Support Women in Information Technology", in which she shared some lessons she and her colleagues learned in developing an online community to support the development of women in computer and information sciences. They started out using Bridgetools to create the first version of wConnect, which, while not very successful, helped them understand that they had to "embed wConnect activities within social activities that members enjoy in their everyday lives, and use those interactions to bootstrap the developmental learning community" (as opposed to a "build it and they will come" approach). Their second version used Facebook Groups which simplified many aspects (especially programming), but introduced a number of complications as well, e.g., limited customization, concerns about privacy, marginalization of wConnect members who were not [active] Facebook members, and the merging of personal and professional identities. One of the challenges they faced was how to lower the barriers to enrollment and authentication, while ensuring that only members of their target community - women who are in or thinking about careers in computer and information sciences - have access.

Bridget Blodgett gave a talk entitled "And the Ringleaders were Banned: An Examination of Protest in Virtual Worlds", offering a brief history of virtual world protests, starting with reactions to a 1993 cyberrape in LambdaMoo, a text-only virtual world, to more recent social uprisings in modern 3D virtual worlds including EVE Online and Ultima Online (I was surprised to discover that there is so much criticism of Ultima Online, the topic has its own Wikipedia page!). My favorite example was one that bridged gaps between online and offline: protests against IBM in Second Life (I was slightly less surprised to discover there is an entire blog devoted to the movement ... and even less surprised to find a YouTube video). In the fall of 2007, IBM removed bonuses and reduced wages for unionized Italian employees, who then went on strike in Second Life (SL), recruited up to 2000 virtual protesters from all over the world (including bananas and triangles, as well as more human-like avatars), managed to shut down IBM islands in SL, and disrupt IBM business (a real IBM meeting in SL). From what I can gather, the protest achieved its goals (in real life), and there is even a SL museum dedicated to the protest. The other examples of protests Bridget shared were all against companies that host virtual worlds. IBM is a global company with a large stake in the physical world, although I should note that IBM has been very active in Second Life (and a recent report suggests that it has reaped a significant ROI through its use of Second Life). Given my longstanding misgivings about the pervasiveness and permeability of games worlds (not that SL is, strictly speaking, a game), I was heartened to see participation in a virtual world yield positive impact in the real world.

Speaking of online and offline participation, the next session I attended was a panel on "Making Participation a Priority", moderated by Ben Shneiderman, in which Gerhard Fischer, Jenny Preece and Marc Smith shared their perspectives on participation.

• Ben led off with a challenge: to become [more] politically engaged. He cited an Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) blog post about strengthening civic participation, the National Initiative on Social Participation he recently instigated, and concluded with a proposal that everyone [at the conference] should dedicate 2 hours per week for outreach to other communities to promote civic participation. [I wonder if this blog post counts]
• Gerhard invoked Stephen Jay Gould's notion of punctuated equilibrium, saying we are in a time of fundamental transformation, in which we are shifting from a culture of passive consumption to a culture of participation. He concluded with an invitation to rethink education, referencing the classic book by Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, in which schools and universities were described as reproductive organs of a consumer society, and [implicitly?] suggesting that we recast our educational institutions as reproductive organs of a participatory culture.
• Jenny led off with a [widely shared] complaint about the mainstream media's news coverage of the death of Michael Jackson eclipsing all other news (e.g., the protests over elections in Iran), talked about her efforts to get students to work not just collaboratively on participatory projects but to choose projects that have impact on outside communities,  proposed criteria for the initiation of future projects - will your project live on after you’re done and continue giving value to a community? - and closed with an exhortation to make all projects international.
• Marc offered some cautionary counterperspective, channeling Howard Rheingold's observation that a smart mob does not necessarily mean a wise mob, noting that not all participation is good - "openness is an attractive idea until it lets in something you're not attracted to" - and warning that the masses are fickle and have short attention spans (later, during dinner, he shared another great quote: "The first of the great operations of discipline is [to] . . . transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities" by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish).

During the audience participation portion of this panel on participation, Jack Carroll - the chair of C&T 2009 - voiced further caution, noting that we [who have been conducting research into communities and technologies] have benefited from being funded like computer scientists, and asking "if we succeed in making social participation an important component of future research [funding], will we be funded like sociologists?" This observation may well be part of the what is driving some of the computational prioritization in the NSF program that Dave McDonald had introduced in his opening keynote. Shelly Farnham attempted to shift the conversation back toward a more positive perspective, noting that while there are some risks to broadening the scope of participation, greater participation is, generally speaking, A Good Thing.

[Update: Ben has since pointed me to a recent article he and Jenny have coauthored - and about which Marc has blogged - that provides much more information on some of the topics discussed in the panel, exploring the progression from reader to contributor to collaborator to leader for [some] users of social media. I'll include a graphic representation of the Reader-to-Leader Framework (Figure 1 from the paper (also included in Marc's blog post)) and a reference to the full paper below:

Preece, Jennifer and Shneiderman, Ben (2009) "The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation," AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (1) 1, pp. 13-32. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5.]

The next day started off with a panel on "Community technology to support geographically-based communities", moderated by Marcus Foth (who co-organized the Digital Cities 6 workshop at C&T 2009 and will be chairing C&T 2011), and included Paul Resnick, Fiorella de Cindio, Keith Hampton and me.

• Paul talked about ride sharing, offering many interesting observations, insights and photos of the practices surrounding slugging (casual carpooling) in U.S. cities, including "slugging etiquette", in which casual carpool riders are expected not to talk to the drivers who pick them up (reminding me of elevator etiquette, and a report I once heard about Inuit culture, in which facing away from the center of an igloo or tent indicates that the ensuing conversation should be interpreted as private - i.e., not [over]heard - by other people sharing the space).
• Fiorella presented some examples of online communities that support real-world geographic communities, including web sites such as FixMyStreet, a UK site where people can report potholes and other infrastructural problems in a metropolitan area, and check back to see whether / when the problems have been addressed.
• Keith offered a whirlwind overview of a keynote on "New media and the structure of community in private, public and parochial spaces" he'd just presented at the Communicative Cities Conference ("Integrating Technology and Place"). Unfortunately, as I was the next one up, I have don't have any notes from his panel presentation - but I will include several notes from his subsequent presentation in the next paper session at the conference.
• I presented three examples of work that I have been involved in using proactive displays to enhance community in shared physical spaces: at the UbiComp 2003 conference in Seattle, at the office of Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, and most recently, in a number of coffeehouses and other "third places" around Seattle. I also intended to provoke some discussion by contrasting mobile vs. situated, place vs. space and online vs. offline ... but we didn't have much time for questions by the end of our opening remarks. In the spirit of walking the talk of encouraging people to post slides of their presentations at C&T 2009 (and, perhaps, shameless self promotion), I'll include my slides from the panel below.
  Situated Community Technology C&T 2009

  View more documents from gumption.

There was time for a few questions, but unfortunately, I did not take careful notes. The only thing I remember from the Q&A session was Doug Schuler urging us not to forget the importance of human animation, citing as an example a woman in one of his classes last semester who always got people talking on her bus (which sounds like a great example of civic participation, but I wondered how the practice was perceived by other bus riders ... and whether there is such a thing as bus etiquette).

The next session I attended was a set of papers on Placed Community, [also] chaired by Marcus Foth. Keith Hampton led off this session with "The Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces: Internet Use, Social Networks, and the Public Realm", a project in which Keith and his colleagues followed in the footsteps of William Whyte's classic work (and book (and video)) on "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" to see how the introduction of WiFi into these spaces affects their usage(s). Keith noted a confluence of trends that constrain diversity: homogeneity within the mass media, privatism, and changes to the physical form and use of urban public spaces. He defined three "realms" of social interaction that affect the public sphere: private (the home), parochial (neighborhoods, workplaces, and many third places, where people are generally familiar with other inhabitants of the space) and public (parks, plazas and other public spaces, where people are generally not familiar with many of their co-inhabitants). Whyte's insightful studies were conducted in an era before the Internet, and before the advent of portable devices that could be used to connect to - and through - the internet, such as mobile phones and laptop computers, so Keith and his colleagues set out to see how these recent technological developments have affected the social life of these small urban spaces.

Keith distinguished between co-located acquaintanceships (people sharing and interacting in physical space) and copresent acquaintanceships (people interacting online with others who whom they are not sharing physical space). Among the interesting findings: 10% of the people using wireless Internet in public spaces were observed to have an extended interaction with a stranger, compared with 13% of people people using more traditional media (books, newspapers), 5% of people using mobile phones, and 0% of people using portable music players, making iPods the most effective portable involvement shields. However, 24% of wireless Internet users were "infrequently attentive" to their surroundings, compared to 15% of print media users, 10% of portable music device users, 7% of portable gaming device users and 3% of mobile phone users. In close observations of the wireiess Internet use - and Keith showed a number of fabulous photos showing just how close his observers were able to get to their subjects - it appeared that 29% visited a social networking website, 8% contributed to a blog, and 43% consumed online news or political information.

There is a considerable amount of research into - and controversy about - the impact of Internet use on society and culture, with some claiming that Internet use erodes the sense of community while others claiming that it enhances the sense of community. Keith cited a 2006 study by McPherson, et al., "Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades", showing that the average American had an average of 2.08 people with whom he / she discusses important matters, and 24.6% of Americans have no such "discussion ties" at all. Although wireless Internet users may interact less with co-located people in public settings, they enjoy an average of 3.82 discussion ties, and only 3.5% report having no discussion ties. One possible explanation Keith offered for this was that wireless Internet use may better balance opposition and like-mindedness to maximize tolerance, deliberation and discursive participation than exposure to provocative and contested public settings. In concluding his presentation, Keith noted that public spaces do not appear to constitute a public realm for wireless Internet users, but may offer new opportunities for engagement - with copresent but not co-located others - in the public sphere ... and while serendipity is nice, it probably is not vital to a public space.

Unfortunately, due to my frantic last-minute preparations for my own presentation at the end of the session, I do not have any notes from the second presentation - "Facilitating Participatory Decision-Making in Local Communities through Map-Based Online Discussion", by Bo Yu.

My presentation was "Supporting Community in Third Places with Situated Social Software" [paper | slides], in which I reported on some studies we conducted on the adoption, use and impact of our Community Collage (CoCollage) application - a system that shows a dynamic collage of photos and quotes uploaded to a web site by café patrons and staff on a large computer display in the café, providing a new channel for awareness, interactions and relationships among people co-located there - in the first venue we partnered with. Rather than say more about it in text, I'll let the slides do the talking:

CoCollage C&T2009

View more documents from gumption.

The final keynote of the conference was by Mark Finkle, a community evangelist at Mozilla, on "Mozilla – Working with the Community", in which he distinguished between the Mozilla Foundation (guidance), the Mozilla Corporation (thrust), and the Mozilla Community (fuel). Mark said that Mozilla wants to push forward an agenda that is not corporate, but advocates for end users. He offered the following interesting statistics about Mozilla's community of communities:

• 300M+ users
• 22% market share
• 3K+ community-contributed extensions
• 70+ languages (and growing)
• 1600 contributors to code base (40% of code)
• 1000s of volunteers and evangelists
• 150+ employees (no sales) – highly distributed (e.g., Mark works out of State College)

One of the most interesting statistics Mark mentioned was that new beta releases of Firefox attract a community of 800,000 volunteer testers, or 0.25% of the user population (!). Dan McComb recently pointed me to a fabulous series of blog posts on Community by the Numbers, and I've been thinking a lot about how many active members a community needs to be successful (and how to define "active" ... and "successful"), so this provided a useful data point.

Mark shared a number of lessons he has learned from the Mozilla approach to "design by community", emphasizing the needs to listen to the community, lead the community and let the community play and explore. Unfortunately, one of Mark's observations about etiquette - "Be respectful until you’re respected" - drew what I consider to be an inordinate number of questions from some in the audience during the Q&A session (I was tempted to tweet "please be respectful of other audience members and allow them to ask questions on other topics #cct2009" ... but didn't ... as I thought that might not be respectful Twitter etiquette).

One of the things I like about the Communities and Technologies conferences is that they represent a community of communities, but in a more intimate setting than, say, the much larger, multi-track CHI conferences. However, I should note that, due to the dual track nature of the conference, I only saw (and am thus only sharing notes on) about half the paper presentations. Apologies to all the other authors who were presenting work at the conference - even with only two tracks, every session required a tough decision.

I wasn't quite as blown away this year as I was at the last conference (C&T 2007), which I suspect is due, in part, to this being the second time I've attended the conference (the first time at a conference is always the most impressive). I still enjoyed meeting and reconnecting with a number of remarkable people. And, as I hope my notes show, I learned a lot of interesting, relevant and useful information about communities, technologies and participation!

Many thanks to the conference chair, Jack Carroll, the program committee, student volunteers, presenters and other participants for co-creating a great the conference!

[I forgot to mention that I've also posted some notes about the Digital Cities 6 pre-conference workshop.]

Digital Cities 6

I finally got a chance to attend a workshop in the Digital Cities series last week at the 4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2009) at Penn State University. Digital Cities 6, organized by Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano and Hiromitsu Hattori, focused on the theme of "Concepts, Methods and Systems of Urban Informatics". The participants and projects represented a broad range of ways that digital technology can enhance people, places, events and other things in cities. [I've posted some photos from the workshop on Flickr, with the "digitalcities6" tag.]

Martijn de Waal started things off with "The Urban ideals of Location Based Media", positing the question "What is a city?" and noting some of its dimensions:

• a bunch of infrastructure
• a cultural system
• a community
• a polity

Among the themes that resonated most strongly with me was his assertion that location based media is not [necessarily] "anywhere, anytime, anything" but here and now, his suggestion that we shift our attention from placelessness to situatedness, his invitation to reconsider the prioritization of efficiency over all else, and his distinction between casting people as citizens vs. consumers. Martijn has [also] posted a set of excellent notes from the workshop.

Jonas Fritsch presented "Between Engagement and Information: Experimental Urban Media in the Climate Change Debate" [slides], which included a number of interesting projects designed to promote civic engagement (a recurring theme throughout the workshop and the conference). One project was CO2nfession / CO2mmitment (photo on right), in which citizens could enter a booth at a climate change event in Aarhus to videorecord both a confession of their sins of CO2 emissions and seek absolution through a commitment to reducing their future emissions. These CO2nfessions and CO2mmitments were then shown on displays at the event venue. Another project was Climate on the Wall, inspired by magnetic poetry (and perhaps Tetris), in which words and phrases associated with climate change were projected on the side of a building, and people could physically interact with those projected terms to form statements reflecting their views on climate change via their movement at or near the wall.

Jon Lukens was next up, talking about "Seeing the City through Machines: Non-anthropocentric Design and Youth Robotics", in which he described a workshop to get youth involved in the design of urban robots to encourage them to think critically about different (non-human) relations to the environment helps reveal new design considerations - seeing the city through new [robotic] eyes. The students were given the task of designing a robot to participate in an infrastructure scavenger hunt in an urban area. One group of students produced a video called "Curiosity Killed the Camera", but unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere. Interestingly, while encouraging students to think more critically about themselves and their bodies as they exist in space, one student asked "am I a robot?" I found myself thinking about Stelarc as representing a rather extreme position on the spectrum of reconsidering selves, bodies and spaces.

Laura Forlano shared some ideas about "Building the Open Source City: Changing Work Environments for Collaboration and Innovation" (many of which are described in greater detail in a great blog post about Work and the Open Source City). She motivated this theme, in part, via an experience at Panera Bread in Kansas City, where she stumbled upon some people working at a table with a sign saying "Create Club" and "Jelly" (see photo to the right), the latter of which has become a meme [tag] for casual coworking - people working on different things coming together to work in the company of others at homes or third places. Laura talked about NEWworkCITY, a slightly more formal comunity coworking space (reminding me of Office Nomads here in Seattle), noting that a natural tension arises in such such spaces “for like-minded people” between homogeneity and heterogeneity. She also presented Project BREAKOUT!, part of the Toward the Sentient City exhibition planned for September 2009, in which people will be invited to bring their work out of their offices and into public spaces around New York City (such as parks), in what sounded to me a bit like a flash work mob. She finished off with a brief description of UrbanOmnibus, a project of the Architectural League of New York that seeks engagement from a broad range of urban stakeholders in the design and redesign of urban spaces.

I presented "Ambient Informatics in Urban Cafés", an overview of CoCollage, our place-based social networking application that uses a large computer display to show a dynamic collage of photos and quotes uploaded to a special web site by patrons and staff in a café or other community-oriented place. Rather than writing more about it here, I'll simply embed the slides I used for the presentation from SlideShare ... and encourage any readers who were also at the workshop (or the conference) to post their slides, with the "cct2009" tag (I also used the "digitalcities6" tag for my workshop slides). [Further details can be found in our main conference paper, "Supporting Community in Third Places with Situated Social Software".]

CoCollage Digital Cities 6

View more documents from gumption.

Marcus Foth motivated his talk on "Urban Futures: A Performance-based Approach to Residential Design" by noting a frequent problem in the urban planning process (which UrbanOmnibus is presumably also trying to address): citizens share ideas with urban planners, but they never get any feedback, i.e., they rarely know whether any of their input has any impact on the planning. Marcus and his colleagues created some new ways to elicit ideas from prospective citizens (or denizens) of a future master-planned community about what their ideal house would look and feel like. In an open space, participants were invited to close their eyes, imagine and act out (perform) how they would enter their home, and then record their ideas using crayons and paper on the floor. The outcome is a set of personas representing the kinds of people who might like to live in the planned community. The approach strikes me as an interesting mashup between the TrueHome approach of walkthroughs and interviews to understand personalities in the process of designing a home (which I first read about in Sam Gosling's book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, and I think some of his other insights into possessions, perceptions projections and personalities would also be applicable), and the Focus Troupe approach of using drama and theatre to elicit ideas for new consumer products.

Ross Harley - who traveled all the way from the University of New South Wales, Australia, just to attend the one-day workshop (and not the rest of the conference) - presented "Contactless Contact: Reconceptualising Radio and Architecture in the Wireless City". Ross showed some videos visualizing traveling through airspace in and around airports developed as part of the Aviopolis project. He and his colleagues are now shifting from studying airports to studying air, applying what ethermapping and other methods from experimental geography to explore the politics and aesthetics of invisible radio frequency networks - and their "intersecting thresholds of intensities" (my favorite new term from the workshop) - in and around cities. He cited the Touch Project, which explores potential connections between RFID-enabled mobile phones and [other] physical things, and a paper by Jerry Kang on Pervasive Computing: Embedding the Public Sphere, as interesting related examples of this kind of work ... and I found myself thinking about one of my favorite [dystopian] videos depicting a scenario in which the [RF] airwaves might be mined and mapped in interesting ways: The Catalogue, by Chris Oakley:

Clio Andris presented the keynote, "Urban Informatics in a Digital Revolution", a catalog of projects at the Senseable City Lab at MIT, on behalf of her advisor, Carlo Ratti, who was unable to attend. There were way too many projects presented in this whirlwind tour to describe them here - all can be found at the Senseable City Lab home page - so I'll just mention a few here. One was the New York Talk Exchange, which includes visualizations on varying scales of the different places to which people in New York make phone calls (proxies for the web of the connections and relationships of New Yorkers). The photo on the right is one such visualization, The World Inside New York, representing the connections made from different neighborhoods within New York to different countries around the world. Clio talked about an extension of this work that is / will be applying graph theory to mobile phone calls made around the city (though it may be a city in UK) as a way of approximating the demarcation of the city boundaries.

Another project, Trash | Track, allows users (citizens?) to attach an active RFID tracking device to an article of trash, and then be able to track where that trash goes. The first example is a Starbucks cup that has been tracked in Seattle. The project reminds me of an automated version of Where's George, where dollar bills are tracked via serial numbers manually entered into a web site. There is a blog associated with the project, and there is a set of photos on Flickr, but I haven't been able to find anywhere that people can track any items in real-time. The photo to the left is from one of the recent blog entries, which represents the trajectory of the aforementioned Starbucks cup (as of, approximately, 20 May 2009) ... and the photo to the right is one I took two years at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference (ETech 2007) ... and I'm thinking that ETech 2010 might be a promising venue for a demonstration of Trash | Track. Meanwhile, I'd love to find out how I can participate in Trash | Track locally.

The presentation concluded with some historical context:

• The agricultural revolution allowed us to harvest food to achieve sustainability
• The industrial revolution allowed us to harvest human innovation and capitol labor resources
• The digital revolution is allowing us to harvest information about all agents in the built environment, seen and unseen

I'm not entirely comfortable with the framing of these developments in terms of harvesting - which could be cast as a form of corporatist exploitation and extraction that Doug Rushkoff talks about in his recent book, Life, Inc. - but the presentation achieved its goal of being relevant, stimulating and provocative.

Hannu Kukka presented "A Digital City Needs Open Pervasive Computing Infrastructure", providing an overview of the UrBan Interactions (UBI) program at the University of Oulu in Finland. The goal of the program is to impose a visible and lasting change on the Finnish society (as opposed, or perhaps in addition, to publishing papers about the work). The program is deploying a network of UBI displays - large interactive displays with cameras, NFC / RFID, Bluetooth, wireless LAN and touch-screen capabilities - throughout Oulu. Twelve displays will be deployed - 6 indoor and 6 outdoor (the outdoor display installations will have two screens facing opposite directions). The displays will include user-generated media as well as local information and advertising. They are developing and plan to release open source toolkits for mobile phones that will enable users to interact with the displays, and to develop their own applications for use on / with the displays. Among the recent publications from the project is "Leveraging social networking services to encourage interaction in public spaces" from the MUM 2008 conference ... which sounds very relevant to our current project as well as some earlier work on "The Context, Content & Community Collage: Sharing Personal Digital Media in the Physical Workplace", a paper presented at the CSCW 2008 conference (for which, of course, I posted the slides). It sounds like a very interesting and relevant project - far more ambitious than our C3 Collage project at Nokia - but unfortunately, I can't find any images or videos to include in these notes. [Update: Timo Ojala sent me some links to photos and a video; I've embedded one of the photos above, but the video is a 58MB FLV file that must be downloaded to be viewed.]

Germaine Halegoua presented "The Export of Ubiquitous Place: Investigating South Korean U-cities", including some interviews she's conducted with some of the people involved in the U-City project in Seoul, South Korea (aka the Seoul Digital Media City or DMC) and the Songdo U-Life project outside of Seoul in the new Free Economic Zone (FEZ) created in Incheon. Germaine is interested in what she calls the "cultural geography of media" (another cool new term for me), investigating the places of production and places of consumption of online media. In the DMC, the effort is to integrate new media technology into an existing city (what she called "hybridity" or "coexisting combination"); in U-Life, the goal is to co-develop the technology infrastructure with other dimensions of the planning and architecture - what the developers call a "Synergy City" - and then to export the business model to other cities. A recent photo of the Sondo is included to the right; more photos and a video can be found on their master plan page. Germaine will be traveling to Korea soon, to see how these plans are developing first-hand.

Last, but not least, Andrew Wong presented "Mobile Interactions as Social Machine: Young Urban Poor at Play in Cities in Bangladesh", in which he described three genres of using mobile phones: entertainment, enlarging their social network and creative mobile use to save cost through code. Many of the practices of the young urban poor are quite interesting, but I was particularly fascinated by what he called "missed call signaling" - calling a number and hanging up, sometimes multiple times in succession, to save the cost of an answered mobile phone call. Andrew described the "regional" languages - or perhaps dialects - that have evolved over time (he used the term "hyper-localization of communication"), highlighting how shallow media can be imbued with rich meaning with the right confluence of economic, social and/or entertainment incentives. This nuanced use of signaling reminded me of what was (for me), the highlight of the last Communities and Technologies conference (C&T 2007): Judith Donath's keynote on "Standing on Boxes: Signaling Costs and Benefits in Online and Offline Social Network".

I'll post some notes from the main conference in the near future. For now, I'll end off by noting that one of the many interesting serendipitous discoveries I made in searching around for links relating to the workshop is, unfortunately, a missed opportunity: a relevant project being conducted at Penn State Public Broadcasting - The Geospatial Revolution ("The location of anything is becoming everything"). Unfortunately, I did not see any members from that team at the workshop, despite its being held at the PSU campus ... perhaps we'll see them at the next Digital Cities workshop at C&T 2011, in Queensland, Australia (being chaired by Marcus Foth, one of he organizers of the Digital Cities workshop this year).

Many thanks to the organizers - and other participants - for co-creating such an engaging event!

Twitter: a witness projection program

Twitter has become the ultimate (or at least current favorite) tool for addressing the fundamental human need to matter, to have a witness. The increasingly popular web service "for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" is, more than any tool before it, providing a platform through which we can all bear [and bare] witness to - or follow, in Twitter parlance - others, and others can bear witness to us. And the ability to project our witnesses and witnessees (or followers and followees) into a public sphere - the Twitterverse - adds interesting new dimensions to the satisfaction of this primal need to matter.

Naomi Pollack recently wrote a great Biznik article on Understanding Twitter: Why Twitter is Less Like Facebook and More Like Email that generated more comments - 118, last time I  checked - than any other article I've seen on the Biznik site (I'm not sure how many tweets it has generated). A few of those comments were mine, including one long one connecting Twittering and witnessing that prompted me to take the topic offline - or at least migrate it over to my "home" soapbox, this blog.

The comment centered on my favorite quote from the movie Shall We Dance [I just noticed the subtitle: "A new comedy about following your own lead"], uttered by the character Beverly Clark (played by Susan Sarandon):

We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'."

Although the quote is referring to marriage, I think the general human need to be noticed, to be witnessed, to matter, is behind much of the popularity in all social media, and is captured - or projected - most acutely in Twitter. I don't mean to equate the Twitter follower / followee relationship with marriage - indeed, with most Twitter users having multiple followers and/or followees, this would be akin to an extreme case of polygamy - but I do believe that this quote captures the spirit of the ambient intimacy afforded by Twitter (and intended by its designers).

T.S. Eliot, sums this up in a quote that is short enough to fit in a Twitter post (or "tweet"):

To be of importance to others is to be alive.

Of course, any medium that becomes sufficiently popular will have some who take it to the extreme; online social media just makes the pool of potential extremists much larger. Ashton Kutcher's recent "achievement" of gaming gaining over 1 million followers on Twitter is a noteworthy example. At first, I thought this was another example of someone becoming Internet famous (a la Julia Allison, an online[-only] variation of what I might call vacuous celebutantism - being famous for being famous - perhaps best represented by Paris Hilton). I had never heard of before - I don't follow him in social media or more traditional media - but in reading some of the reports about the 1 million Twitter follower milestone, I discovered he already enjoyed some measure of celebrity before this stunt. All the same, it strikes me as much ado about nothing.

I don't know what it means to be ambiently intimate with over a million people. In a quick perusal of Ashton Kutcher's tweetstream, I see that he discusses Paula Abdul, going trap shooting, going to dinner, riding horses drunk and forgetting things when he leaves the house ... nothing particularly remarkable (or retweetable) ... with the possible exception of this, somewhat ironic, tweet:

“Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.” -unknown

10:40 AM May 1st from TweetDeck

I'm reminded of the million dollar homepage, created by an enterprising 21-year-old college student (purportedly to help pay for his education), on which people could purchase any number of its 1 million pixels for $1 each. It was an interesting idea, and the million pixels were all sold, but I don't know how the money was actually used ... or how anyone else benefited from this achievement. I'm also reminded of Stephen Colbert's Wikipedia stunt, in which he urged his viewers [/ witnesses / followers?] to edit the Wikipedia entry to say that the population of elephants had tripled in the last 6 months. Of course, Stephen Colbert also engages his followers in many, more positive - or at least more benign (and definitely more amusing) - ways, e.g., offering his perspective on the "912 project" initiated by Glenn Beck of Fox News (what I would call a fear projection program ... and network), and urging his followers to join with him on his own "scare and balanced" 10.31 project. I wonder what great ideas Ashton Kutcher will rally his followers around.

A recent article by Simon Dumenco in Advertising Age about The Real Meaning of Ashton Kutcher's 1M Twitter Followers offers further insights into the Ashton Kutcher, Twitter, and media in general:

My point? Just that the utopian rhetoric of social-networking aside, the lesson of media history is that, regardless of the rise and fall of media conglomerates, media is almost always about The Few profiting at the expense of The Many's attention. To put that another way, The Many are actually investing their mind share -- their currency in the Attention Economy -- in a way that leads, for the most part, to the enrichment of The Few. To put it rather cynically, a certain portion of The Many are getting ripped off -- deprived of more and more of their mind share for little or no gain (or possibly a big loss).

There's a parallel, of course, to the housing bubble. At some point it suddenly dawns on millions of people that they've paid way too much for way too little actual value. (If you're one of the people who has read every one of Mr. Kutcher's more than 1,400 Twitter updates ... well, just realize that you'll never, ever get that time back.)

However, I do think there is some good to be found in social media ... although I think it is telling that I often discover the good in social media via more traditional media. Shortly after encountering Naomi's article on Twitter, I listened to an episode of NPR's series This I Believe, entitled Dancing to Connect to a Global Tribe, in which Matt Harding, who has become famous for his videos of dancing "terribly" in exotic locations, (with 41K subscribers to his YouTube channel, and over 13M views of his compilation video, Where the Hell is Matt?).

In stating his belief(s), Matt reported on what he has learned from his travels (and dances):

People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they're curious to hear and see others from places far away.

Interestingly (or, perhaps, curiously), another famous person from Seattle, Robert Fulghum, author of a number of essays and books exploring personal beliefs, most notably including All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, also talked about dancing, witnessing and sitting on the sidelines his This I Believe essay, entitled Dancing All the Dances As Long as I Can:

I believe in dancing. ...

The first time I went tango dancing I was too intimidated to get out on the floor. I remembered another time I had stayed on the sidelines, when the dancing began after a village wedding on the Greek island of Crete. The fancy footwork confused me. “Don’t make a fool of yourself,” I thought. “Just watch.”

Reading my mind, an older woman dropped out of the dance, sat down beside me, and said, “If you join the dancing, you will feel foolish. If you do not, you will also feel foolish. So, why not dance?”

And, she said she had a secret for me. She whispered, “If you do not dance, we will know you are a fool. But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying.”

I was listening to NPR's Fresh Air this week, where Terry Gross was interviewing Gabriel Byrne who plays a psychoanalyst on the HBO series In Treatment, about the art of listening. Terry suggests that his character, Dr. Paul Weston, has "heroicized the act of listening". Byrne has some interesting insights to share on listening (a form of witnessing ... and, as noted in the StoryCorps series broadcast on NPR, an act of love):

We have a real need now, in these times, to be listened to. And I think when people identify with these characters, or reject them, they feel connected in a way that sometimes they don't in these fractured communities that we live in. ... Listening is one of the most profound compliments you can pay to another person - to truly listen - and to feel that you're heard is deeply fulfilling in a deep human way. ... Really, truly, profoundly listening is to be unaware of your self at a deep level.

I don't think anyone would accuse a Twitter user - especially one with an unnaturally large number of followers - as being "unaware of your self at a deep level" ... at least not in the context of posting a tweet (although another recent NPR story, Your Brain on Twitter, reported on a brain-computer interface that may eventually allow people to directly post tweets based on neural activity). In fact, I suspect deep listening - or deep thinking, reading or writing ... or depth of any kind - is the antithesis of the ambient intimacy promoted by Twitter.

I suspect that's what bothers me the most about Twitter and other manifestations of snack culture - the embrace and celebration of shallowness. I recognize that there as many uses of Twitter as there are users, and that it really does represent a social media platform for the masses ... unlike blogs. One of the reasons I think there are so many "dead blogs" is that so few people are willing - or able - to take the time to write in much depth ... and, as Nicholas Carr pointed out in his great Atlantic Monthly article on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", "the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle" for him, and a growing proportion of other "readers". But, hey, anyone can write - or read - a 140-character tweet!

In the interest of full disclosure [on this topic], I will note, in closing, that I am a Twitter user (twitter.com/gumption). I was an early adopter of Twitter, and wrote about it in the context of attention, inattention, appreciation and depreciation at Foo Camp 2007. However, I soon grew weary of reading about what my ambient intimates were wearing, eating or thinking. It's not that I didn't care about the people I was following - in fact, I deeply cared (and still care) for some of them - I just didn't (and don't) care all that much about their activities of daily living. I stopped using Twitter entirely for about a year, but re-engaged with the tool during the closing months of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, when I was obsessed with staying on top of the latest developments in the most exciting political contest of my adult life. During the campaign, I wrote a few politically-oriented blog posts, but given my penchant for depth (or, at least, length) in posting blog entries, I wanted another platform for processing my thoughts, feelings and judgments about some of the actions taken by the candidates and their supporters ... a platform that I could use for shorter, more frequent venting. Twitter was just the ticket. I also started following some newly found (and appreciated) sources for news, such as NPR Politics, The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and Think Progress. 

Since the end of the election, I've shifted my use of Twitter to [mostly] posting inspiring quotes that I encounter in my reading and listening (very few of which, I might add, are retweets, i.e., Twitter is not currently a major source of inspiration). I've added a Twitter widget to my blog (in the right column), and my primary motivation in using Twitter is to have the 5 most inspiring quotes I've encountered (interspersed with occasional short rants) appear on my blog. This helps compensate for the depressingly decreasing frequency of new blog entries. I've been surprised to learn that several people have recently begun following me (or, more properly, my tweets). I hope they are not offended by my lack of reciprocity: it's nothing personal, I just generally don't like following people on Twitter (for reasons noted above). In addition to not following people, I hardly ever check for replies (tweets with "@gumption").

Although many people seem to see and/or use Twitter as a platform for conversation, for me it's primarily a soapbox, a broadcasting narrowcasting platform. I prefer in-depth conversations ... like the kind I enjoy through the comments on this blog. In an earlier post, commenting on commenting, I noted that my blog posts and the comments people post on them represent projections of sorts (and, in so doing, I suspect I may have discouraged some comments - and commenters - that I very much enjoy). In a subsequent post, commenting on validation / validating comments, I admitted that "I really do appreciate (and feel validated by) comments from people who are in some way moved by what I write". In a way, those comments represent a public witnessing to what I've written (and my comments responding to others' comments represent a witnessing to what they've written).

So, it's not that I'm against witnessing or even the projection of witnessing ... it's just that I believe in depth and meaning ... and, frankly, I just don't find - or project - much of that on Twitter.

[Update, 11 May 2009: Prompted by Praveen's comment, I finally re-found a blog entry that danah boyd had posted a while back (December 2007) about valuing inefficiencies and unreliability that effectively elucidates my concern about depth in Twitter. It is the very ease with which anyone can post a tweet that diminishes the meaning of the medium.

The more efficient a means of communication is, the less it is valued. ... Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. One of the things that I've found to be consistently true with teens of rich and powerful parents is that they'd give up many of the material goods in their world to actually get some time and attention from their overly scheduled parents. Time and attention are rare commodities in modern life. Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.

FWIW, danah is on Twitter (@zephoria).]

[Update, 15-May-2009: Tyler (@phillipi) sent me a link to some interesting video commentaries on the Twitter phenomenon: the Twouble with Twitters and Celebrity Twitter Overkill, embedded below.]

The Past, Present and Future of Green

My wife and I attended the Seattle Green Festival last weekend. Amy spent most of her time in the exhibit area while I spent most of my time in presentation sessions, seeking and finding inspiration from Amy Goodman, Lawrence Lessig, Brett Horvath and Gabriel Scheer.

Amy (my wife) spent part of her time helping out at the booth for A Sacred Moment, a local company founded by Char Bennett that provides home funeral vigils, green burials and life celebration services. Amy first read about A Sacred Moment in a Wall Street Journal Magazine article (Death Becomes Her). As a cancer survivor, she has given considerably more thought to death - and burial - than I have, and the sustainable, sensitive and sensible approach that Char offers through her services resonates on many levels with her ... and, judging from the number of visitors to the booth, many others as well.

I also spent some time milling around the exhibit area, and I have to admit I was feeling increasingly self-conscious, wondering what other people might be thinking about me, wandering around in my Weatherproof jacket, "Life is Good" (tm) t-shirt, Lee jeans and Merrell hiking shoes (not to mention the MacBook Pro in my backpack and the iPhone in my pocket). Were the things I was wearing / carrying "green" [enough]? (Maybe the t-shirt.) I was reminded of my days at Accenture, where my lack of style-consciousness in a different value system sometimes incurred negative judgments (I remember someone once referring to my "Mickey Mouse" watch, a Timex timepiece which I'd thought of as rather practical). As someone who thinks green but doesn't often act green, I was concerned that perhaps my true colors were showing.

Fortunately, the person who introduced the person who introduced Amy Goodman's talk - whose name I did not catch - was very welcoming and inviting, assuring us that all people were welcome at the Green Festival, whatever stage of sustainability we may find themselves. She then introduced Kevin Danaher, who described the Green Festival as a "party with a purpose", encouraged us to reach beyond the festival with positive messages (noting "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar"), let us know that many of the presentations at this and other Green Festivals can be viewed at Green Festival TV (leading me to wonder whether the green[er] action would have been to watch Green Festival remotely), and introduced Amy Goodman.

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, took the stage to a standing ovation, and told us some stories about Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. She started off asserting that a healthy population is a national security issue (not just a health or fairness issue), decrying that health care is not a right in the most powerful country on earth (setting us apart from nearly every other industrialized nation), and reporting on an article "Are the Rich Making Us Sick" written by Stephen Bezruchka (back in 2000 (!)), which shows that inequality leads to poor health (the U.S. is among the world leaders in both dimensions).

Asking "Can President Obama redeeem the White House?", Goodman noted that it's not up to him, it's up to all of us (or, perhaps, all of us's). As she put it, "The door is open a crack - will it be kicked shut, or will it be kicked wide open?" She noted that this month marks the passing of some significant anniversaries: the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill (March 24, 1989), and the 30th anniversary of the Three Mile Island meltdown (March 28, 1979), "accidents" whose fallouts are still very much with us today.

Emphasizing the need to break the sound barrier, listening not to the pundits, but to people on the ground in the local communities who are affected by corporate and governmental actions (and inactions), Goodman argued that we can't subsist on sound bites, that we have to allocate time for people to explain alternate points of view if we don't want to be simply and mindlessly repeating what others are saying (i.e., being ditto heads). One of her recent interviews with a person on the ground - and/or in the water - was with Riki Ott, author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Spill, who said that the "accident" was not just a pollution issue, but represents a fundamental threat to democracy. The success of the Exxon-Mobil Corporation - one legal person - in its legal battle against tens of thousands of U.S. citizens who are seeking redress, amends and compensation from the action of this powerful "person", is leading some to propose that we reconsider and revise or revoke the legal status of corporations (some going so far as to call for a 28th Amendment).

Goodman shared stories about heroes such as Peter Chase, a librarian who fought against the FBI's demand for library records, and James Hansen, a NASA scientist who went public with the Bush Administration's efforts to influence or edit his statements so as to make global warming seem less threatening. Toward the end of her talk - for which she received a standing ovation - she summed up her critique of mainstream media with a pair of pithy soundbites:

We need a media that covers power, not covers for power;
a media that is a fourth estate, not for the state.

The next presentation I went to was by Lawrence Lessig, on "Green Culture". The presentation seemed to be a remix of his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, applied to the green movement. But as he demonstrated in his talk, a good remix can be just as engaging and enlightening as the original(s) from which it is created, and I was just as impressed with the content and format of his talk as I was at his closing keynote at CSCW 2004. He started out with a Wikipedia definition of externality: "an impact [positive or negative] on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction". I'll include the entire first paragraph from the Wikipedia entry below:

In economics, an externality or spillover of an economic transaction is an impact on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction. In such a case, prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in production or consumption of a product or service. A positive impact is called an external benefit, while a negative impact is called an external cost. Producers and consumers in a market may either not bear all of the costs or not reap all of the benefits of the economic activity. For example, manufacturing that causes air pollution imposes costs on the whole society, while fire-proofing a home improves the fire safety of neighbors.

Lessig went on to claim that the market tends to produce too many negative externalities and too few positive externalities, and argued that we need interventions to force producers of negative externalities to internalize the costs and to allow producers of positive externalities to internalize the benefits.

One of my favorite quotes from Lessig's talk was a quote he shared by one of my heroes, Aldous Huxley, who in 1927 wrote about an atmosphere of passivity:

In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

This reminded me of the parable of three storytelling societies - the Reds, the Blues and the Greens - that I shared in an earlier post about mutual inspiration, which was inspired by Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks (briefly: Red storytellers are hereditarily determined, Blue storytellers are democratically determined, but everyone is a storyteller among the Greens). I suppose this passivity and delegation (or relegation) is one of the natural consequences of the specialization of labor that was accelerated in the industrial revolution. Lessig suggested that we're seeing a concentration or professionalization not just of labor but of culture itself.

Lessig defined two types of culture: read-write culture, in which people participate in the creation and recreation of their culture, and read-only culture, where creativity is consumed (e.g., in an atmosphere of passivity). Changing technologies often change ecologies, as well as changing what makes sense to regulate. For example, the carbon emissions produced by coal-fired power plants are, essentially, free, and yet media produced by the entertainment industry is heavily regulated. There have been zero U.S. laws regulating carbon emissions passed in the last 20 years, and yet there have been 22 laws regulating the use of copyrighted media. Lessig argued that our culture (and, I would argue, our global civilization) would be better served if those trends were reversed.

He shared a number of examples of fabulously entertaining media that were produced by remixing prior media that was protected by copyright (making all the examples, technically, illegal):

• Movies: Tarnation (made for $218, but music rights to the soundtrack [would] cost $400K)
  
• Music: The Grey Album, Girl Talk and my personal favorite, ThruYOU
• Television: Read My Lips, synchronized presidential debates
• [Other] Videos: Yes We Can

As these examples demonstrate, Web 2.0 offers a platform on which others are inspired to create, and share their creations, in a participatory "call and response" or conversational culture. However, the powers that be are colluding with Congress to stifle this read-write culture, declaring war on copyright infringement and using the rhetoric of war (e.g., weapons to kill piracy). Lessig argued that we need to give up on the obsession with "copy" and make meaningful distinctions between copy and remix, as well as professional and amateur uses:

Professional copies of creative works ought to be protected by copyright, amateur remixes ought not be regulated, and professional remixes or amateur copies are greyer areas.

Noting that there have been 22 laws governing copyright in the past 20 years, but zero laws governing carbon emissions, Lessig proposed a new angle on the Green Revolution: eradicating the corruption of money (greenbacks) in U.S. politics, which has led government to do nothing on the most important policy issue facing us and to do the wrong things on a less important issue.

Lessig invoked his hero (and one of my heroes), Al Gore, and showed Gore's presentation on averting a climate crisis at TED [aside: having recently watched the disturbing PBS Nova episode on Extreme Ice, documenting the imminent meltdown of glaciers across the world, I like the language shift from "climate change", which seems so benign, to "climate crisis"].

Lessig highlighted the segments where Gore is emphasizing the importance of - and interactions among - optimism, belief and behavior: "We have to become incredibly active citizens ... In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis". He went on to say that the democracy crisis is that we don't see democracy as a tool to solve problems (another dimension of the "atmosphere of passsivity that Huxley wrote about). We have to act green - be environmentally conscious in our behavior - and also act against green[backs] - fight against corruption, and the addiction to / dependency on money.

Lessig differentiated between evil soul corruption (e.g., former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich) and good soul corruption (living inside a system that is corrupt and not changing it), and noted that most members of Congress exemplify good soul corruption. Comparing political corruption to alcoholism, he said we have to solve the addiction (to greenbacks) problem before we can solve the other problems, and invited those who are interested to learn about - and do - more at ChangeCongress.org. One near-term action he invited us to take was to actively support the Fair Elections Now Act that was introduced this past week by Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (D-CT) and Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC). If anyone reading this is inclined to take such action, here are some links on how to contact your U.S. Representative and how to contact your U.S. Senator.

The final presentation at the Green Festival I saw was - fittingly enough - entitled "What's After Green?", by Gabriel Scheer and Brett Horvath, co-founders of Re-Vision Labs. Motivating their talk, the presenters articulated two fundamental problems with the green movement:

• Green has lost its focus (environment, energy, social justice, food?) How do outsiders know what to make of us? At this transformational moment, it's critical that we define ourselves and communicate our values.
• The Green movement is unsustainable (fueled by a real crisis and a fake economy). Green Industry piggy-backed on the housing bubble. How many green businesses can survive the economic downturn?

Green consumerism means that our only - or at least our main - weapon has been our wallet. There are only so many donors, customers, foundations, investors, volunteers. The growth of the green movement is not sufficient to keep pace with the growth of the crises we hope to solve, and so we most grow and adapt.

Steering us toward "collaboration, not congregation", the presenters suggested that the goal of the Green Festival next year should not be so [solely] an increase in attendance but an increase in impact in governments and other organizations. For example, they noted that no faith-based groups were represented at this year's festival.

In order to grow and adapt the movement, we need to build more bridges and become more [obviously] relevant to more groups, as is exemplified by the Blue-Green Alliance between labor and environmentalists, whose goal is to create "good jobs, clean environment, green economy", and Van Jones campaign Green for All (and its companion book, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems) [aside: Jones' recent nomination as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) seems to opens the "door" that Amy Goodman referenced a little wider.]

Another example is the T. Boone Pickens Energy Plan, which redefined the energy crisis by reframing it from an environmental issue to an economic and national security issue, and signed up 1 million people in its first 7 months (and is now at 4.5 million), representing the potential for what they called a trans-ideological movement: "enviro-enthusiast meets NASCAR fan". One of the presenters, Brett Horvath, who is Director of Social Media for the PickensPlan, claimed they achieved a faster pace of growth than Al Gore's Repower America organization. This may be true, but I was glad to see that Repower America, which I believe was formed about 4 or 5 months ago, has 2 million members ... and I wonder how many people are members of both organizations.

While I'm in favor of seeking trans-ideological solutions, I'm not sure I can support an ideologue like T. Boone Pickens. I find it ironic that the man who is now championing energy independence helped fund the deceptively named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which torpedoed John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, and helped keep George W. Bush in The White House, where he was able to continue colluding with his anti-environmental advisors, increase his dirty legacy and thwart many of the efforts of the green movement, ultimately leaving us more energy dependent than ever before. I wonder how much more progress the green movement (however it is defined) would have made, and how much more energy independent we would be, if John Kerry (or Al Gore) had been in the White House instead of Bush. President Obama, ever the community organizer and unifier, whose speech on trans-racialism was so inspiring, is willing to seek common ground with Pickens and his plan (and its supporters), and while I continue to distrust Pickens, I'm willing to withhold [further] fire in an effort to form a more perfect union ... and a broader, more inclusive community in the green movement.

Scheer and Horvath invited us to view - and focus - the green movement through the lens of community, noting that what brings us together is the desire to create healthy and powerful communities. Despite their earlier critique of a lack of focus in the current green movement, they proposed a rather broad agenda of 8 core components to growing and expanding the movement in the future: economy, ecology, governance, story, design, networks, commons and food. I found myself wondering whether, given the shifting priorities brought about by the current economic recession, the utilization of Maslow's hierarchy of needs might help add more structure to what might otherwise be a linear list of issues.

Invoking images of the front porch, the water cooler, and the campfire as prototypical examples of community spaces, they defined three dimensions to modern healthy communities: built space, spontaneous physical interactions and online networks (interestingly related to the themes that motivated our design of the Community Collage place-based social networking system). Reframing the Internet as a network of people (vs. a network of computers), they argued that a healthy network builds community, and that even "ungreenies" (online and offline) understand the power and necessity of healthy communities.

Scheer and Horvath made a compelling case that the current power of our movement is no match for the gravity of the crisis, and helped me think - and hopefully act - more broadly. Perhaps next year's Green Festival should be renamed "The Community Festival".

NPR Freeloading Considered

It's pledge week at both of our local National Public Radio affiliate stations: KPLU and KUOW. I've been growing increasingly angry about the interruptions in news programming required to raise money to support the stations: every "pledge break" means one less news story I get to hear. I understand - and support - this practice, and I support my local NPR stations (I'm a member of both) ... and [so] I'm angry about other listeners in my community who also rely on NPR for their news (or [other] entertainment), and yet do not provide financial support.

In December, the Washington Post reported that due to declining income, NPR was cutting 64 jobs and 2 shows (Day to Day and News & Notes, both of which broadcast their last episodes a week ago Friday) in its first organization-wide layoffs in 25 years. A more recent Washington Post article reports that the number of NPR news listeners is up by 9% (20.9 million listeners per week), presumably due, in part, to the intense interest in the momentous news reported in the past on NPR. The only estimate I can find regarding the proportion of NPR listeners who are members (i.e., contribute financially to their NPR stations) is in a 2005 article by Steve Coffman on What if You Ran Your Library Like NPR?, in which he cites a Corporation for Public Broadcasting report that "on average 20% of a station's core audience are now contributing `members' who give an average of $73.44 per year". So, if the number of NPR listeners have gone up by 1.7 million, and 20% of those listeners are contributing $75 (just to simplify), NPR should see an increase of about $25 million, and yet the Washington Post reports that income is falling short of its $160 million budgeted expenditures by $8 million. That is, despite audience being up by 9%, revenue is down by 5%.

Anyone who listens to NPR - or most any other source of news - knows that we are in the midst of a serious economic recession (The Great Recession of 2008, as some were calling it as far back as December 2007). Job losses and cutbacks in wages or hours among the general population are surely affecting NPR members, and declining revenues among most companies are surly affecting those who are corporate sponsors of NPR, and so I can understand that some individuals and companies are cutting back on their financial support of NPR. The 2008/2009 Global Wage Report, published by the International Labor Organization, predicts that "the U.S., average wages are expected to decrease by about 1 per cent in 2008 and fall even further in 2009". But this decline does not account for the large discrepancy between the increase in listenership and the decrease in membership.

According to an August 2008 study on key news audiences by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 54% of NPR listeners are college graduates (NPR tied with the New Yorker / Atlantic for the highest proportion of college graduates comprising any news audience in their survey). A 2003 report by the Educational Resources Information Center on The Value of a College Degree (based largely on a 2002 U.S. Census report on The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings - shows a strong correlation between higher levels of education and higher levels of income. For example, in 1997-1999, the estimated average income of a full-time worker with a college degree was $52,200, compared with $30,400 for a full-time worker with a high school degree (and no college). And a recent report in the New York Times on Job Losses Show Breadth of Recession noted that "unlike the last two recessions — earlier this decade and in the early 1990s — this one is causing much more job loss among the less educated than among college graduates." So it would seem that, all things considered [pun intended], NPR listeners would be in a better financial position to contribute to their local stations than the general population.

Speaking of All Things Considered, the venerable NPR afternoon news show broadcast a story on Groups Unite in Dislike of Freeloaders in April 2006, that may help provide a partial explanation for my anger:

A new study offers hints about how societies correct the behavior of freeloaders. The answer involves evolution, altruism -- and punishment.

Scientists say the explanation is important because individuals have so many incentives to let others in a group do most of the work [like financially supporting NPR]. James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, uses the example of two neighbors who want to build a dam.

"You're best off if your neighbor builds the dam for you and you get to do other things," he says. "If evolution favors those individuals, it's puzzling why we might cooperate."

Yet we do cooperate.

The report, based on an unnamed article in the journal Science (but which I believe is "Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions" [reg. req'd]), goes on to describe an experiment in which two groups of students attempted to attain a goal in an iterative game; one group had to rely solely on voluntary cooperation and another group could apply sanctions to any member who didn't [voluntarily] cooperate. The sanctioning group outperformed the voluntary cooperation group every time, due to the fact that there were fewer freeloaders (and, thus, more people contributing to the common good).

Another item included in the report triggered another anger touchpoint for me:

The results of the study, which appear in this week's issue of the journal Science, may explain a lot about how one culture evolves to dominate another.

Rob Boyd, an anthropologist at University of California, Los Angeles, says one example of this sort of cultural evolution is the decline of paganism in ancient Rome.

"Pagan Rome didn't have much a social support network," Boyd says. "So when people got sick, or when there was a plague, or things got bad, they were just out of luck."

By contrast, the Christians expected members to take care of each other. That gave them a competitive edge, he says, and led Romans to gradually switch to Christianity.

This religious reference reminds me of a good friend - one of the smartest people I've ever met, a voracious and regular listener of NPR, and a Jew - who refused to support NPR financially ... due to his judgment that NPR exhibited an anti-Israel bias. Others have disputed this bias, arguing that the "bizarre attack on NPR as "anti-Israel" shows how fringe groups are pushing Mideast debate". Another, more recent report claims that NPR exhibits a pro-Israel bias. In any case, what really angered me was that, despite all the other areas of the news for which my friend presumably believed that NPR's reporting was fair and accurate (and [thus] useful), he refused to offer any support to the single most important source of his news. It is only with great restraint that I was able to resist the urge to participate in NPR's This American Life host Ira Glass' invitation to "turn in a friend" during the last pledge drive:

I'm writing to ask you to turn in a friend. If you know someone who listens to public radio avidly, several days a week or more, talks about stuff they hear on Morning Edition or Car Talk or our show, but they never pledge...I'd like to give them a call. I'll be nice, I swear. But I will ask them why they don't pledge. And I'll try to talk them into pledging. And I'll record the whole thing and—if it works—I'll put it on the radio.

In researching material for this blog post, I stumbled upon another religiously inspired NPR freeloader, who I've never met: Joel Belz, who wrote about being a happy freeloader in a 2001 article published in World Magazine ("Today's News | Christian Views"). Despite liking the classical music on his local station, and being a self-proclaimed "news junkie" (and admitting to getting regular fixes from NPR), he claims that "public radio in my area—and I assume this is the case in your locality as well—carries an agenda that is thoroughly and unabashedly anti-Christian". He goes on to cite a litany of shows that he believes exhibit this anti-Christian agenda, including A Prairie Home Companion, a show which, ironically, another NPR listening (and, I believe, supporting) friend of mine refuses to listen specifically because of its heavy Christian / gospel messages (!).

The Wikipedia entry for Joel Belz says that he is an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, and his father is/was a Presbyterian minister. I found myself wondering how he feels about people who regularly attend Presbyterian services, but due to disagreement with some of the perspectives and/or actions of the church, refuse to provide any financial support. Would it be acceptable - to him (or the Presbyterian Church) - for them to be "happy freeloaders"? What if everyone who disagreed with some aspects of the Presbyterian Church withheld financial support from the church? 

So, even though I disagree with the "principles" on which some people withhold financial support from NPR, I suspect - or at least hope - that such "conscientious freeloaders" make up a relatively small proportion of the audience ... and that much of the freeloading is due to either individual unconsciousness or a growing sense of what might be called informational entitlement (information wants to be free) ... a perspective which, I fear, might be becoming part of our collective unconscious.

One of the two major daily newspapers in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer, printed its last edition on March 17 (3 days bfore the last episodes of NPR's Day to Day and News & Notes) and I've heard reports (on KPLU) that the major daily newspaper - the Seattle Times - is also in danger of shutting down [it's print operations] ... which probably heightens my concerns about the future of NPR.

Information may want to be free, but if we're not willing to pay anything to anyone to produce it, I suspect the quality of that information may suffer, as will the quality of the lives of those of us who consume and use that information.

If anyone wants to join me in supporting our local NPR stations in Seattle, I'll conclude with links to pledge support to KPLU and/or KUOW ... and my heartfelt thanks for becoming a member!

[Update, 1-Apr-2009: Mary Dunaway, KPLU Manager of Listener Relations, reports significantly lower membership numbers (via email) than was reported in the web article I'd referenced:

7% of our entire audience also supports the station. The numbers you listed below referencing 20% those are core audience numbers (people who listen more often then the overall audience). Our percent of core listeners giving is about 10%.

This is even more infuriating - increasing my desire to "correct the behavior of freeloaders".]

A short tour of small colleges in the Pacific Northwest

My wife, 17-year-old daughter and I toured four colleges in Oregon during her mid-winter break: Reed College, Lewis & Clark College, Linfield College and Willamette University. I wanted to record a few impressions of the different places while the experience is relatively fresh, and decided to post them here, in case they are of use to others ... or in case others might have relevant insights and experiences to share via comments.

In my recent post about positivity, praise, practice and perseverance, I wrote about some of my struggles with respect to projecting my self - and my past - onto my 13-year-old son - and his future. During our college tours, my wife and I - who first met while we were students at Ripon College, a small midwestern liberal arts college - both encountered variations on this struggle with respect to our daughter during our initial college tour with her. Although she has far greater motivation, discipline and achievements in her academic pursuits than either of us had at this age, we both have to remind ourselves - or, more commonly, each other - that we want our daughter to choose the school that she believes is best for her, not the one that we believe is best for her ... or, the one that we might like to believe we would have liked to attend ourselves.

Before sharing some observations about the colleges we visited, I want to provide a little more context. Our daughter is primarily interested in a small liberal arts college within reasonable driving distance - or a short flight - of our home in the Seattle area. As a junior in high school, she does not yet know which subject(s) she wants to major in yet, but is generally interested in Biology, Spanish, International Studies - or, at least, studying abroad - and Psychology. She wants a challenging and supportive learning environment in which she can explore these - and other - interests, and where she can interact with other students who are highly motivated and disciplined in their academic pursuits. Debbie Cossey, of Rainier College Counseling, has been very helpful in helping our daughter (and her parents) identify the most important criteria in her consideration of colleges, as well as proposing a specific list of colleges that best meet those criteria, including the four colleges on this tour.

Finally, I want to note that although we have some money set aside to support education, financial aid provided by institutions will be an important factor in our deliberations, especially given the high costs of many of the schools we're considering, and growing economic uncertainties. It is challenging to figure out how much financial aid would be available to any given student at any given institution; definite calculations of costs will have to wait until applications are made by prospective students, and admission decisions are made by the institutions. One institution on our list of candidates, Pacific Lutheran University - which we did not visit on this tour - doesn't even provide tuition information on it's web site, only noting that "On average, when scholarships, grants and other assistance are factored in, the average PLU student’s yearly total is closer to $11,000". I frankly don't know whether we'd be able to afford any of the colleges on this tour, but we thought it would be good to aim high, at least at the outset. There are several places that we're planning to visit in the future ... some of which are considerably less expensive than the ones we've started out with.

Our first stop was Reed College, in the southeast part of Portland, which has an enrollment of 1,464 students. Of the four schools, Reed appears to be the most selective and academically rigorous ... and the most expensive; it also had what I found to be the most inspiring motto: "Inquire within". Reed accepted 34% of applicants to the class of 2012; among those who entered the class of 2012, average high school GPA was 3.9, SAT scores for critical reading and mathematics among the middle 50% of incoming students ranged from 1290-1470 (or 1940-2210, with writing scores included) and 65% of students were ranked in the top 10% of their high school class. Students must complete a senior thesis in order to graduate, which I would expect is helpful preparing the large proportion of students - the third highest of any college in the U.S. - who continue on to graduate study. All of this comes at a price, of course: $39,120 in tuition and fees, $9,920 for room and board, for an annual estimated cost of $49,040.

What impressed me the most during our tour of Reed was the student:faculty relationships. The student:faculty ratio was relatively low (10:1) - as was the average class size (15) - and the quality of relationships seemed relatively high. During our visit to the library, we went to the room where all the senior theses are stored. I picked out a few random volumes, and was struck immediately by the Acknowledgments sections in each one, where people who I inferred were professors were being referenced by their first names. I asked our tour guide about this, and she confirmed that was very much the norm at Reed, and went on to say that professors typically invite their students to dinner each semester, and regularly meet with them for lunch or coffee. There was only one department at Ripon where we commonly addressed professors by their first names (Marty, Seth and Steve in Politics & Government), and I only saw the inside of two of my professors' houses during my four years there ... and never shared a meal or coffee with any of them. The relatively low power distance index may help explain why students seem to be highly empowered and relatively autonomous at Reed. As one example of this, they not only have theme dorms, but the themes are proposed and voted on by the students. The relatively wide variation in styles of dress may be another indicator of high autonomy and independence. I also noticed a surprisingly large number of cigarette smokers on campus.

We stayed overnight at Hotel Lucia in Portland, which has a great location (just south of the Pearl District), very comfortable beds (though they were only double beds), and an intriguing collection of photographs (by David Hume Kennerly), but a rather small bathroom (especially for use by three people). Our daughter was hosted for a dinner on campus by a Reed student, while Amy and I enjoyed a fabulous - and surprisingly inexpensive - dinner at The Farm Cafe. We strolled around the Pearl District for an hour or so, before turning in for the night.

The following morning, we visited Lewis & Clark College, in the southwest corner of Portland. Compared with Reed, Lewis & Clark has a larger undergraduate population (1,999), is less selective in its admissions (56% acceptance rate, with an average GPA of 3.69 and middle 50% SAT score ranging from 1200-1380), has a higher student:faculty ratio (13:1) and higher average class size (19), and is less expensive ($33,726 tuition and fees, plus $8,820 room and board, for an estimated annual cost of $42,546). One of the things we find especially appealing is that over 50% of students study abroad at some point in their college experience.

When we reached the campus, we were immediately struck by the grandeur and beauty of the Frank Manor House and its spectacular view out the back toward Mount Hood. Our tours at the other colleges were relatively small - one or two students and their parents, at most - whereas there was an extremely large tour group at Lewis & Clark. Even after breaking up into three subgroups, each with a separate tour guide, I'd estimate that each group had somewhere around ten students each. And I don't know if it was the size of the groups or the personality of the student body, but our group was "acknowledged" far more than anywhere else with a variety of greetings ranging from jeers of "Prospies!" (presumably short for "prospective students") to a student shouting "You should come here, you'll love it!" as he whizzed by on a bike. Other things that stood out for me, especially in comparison to Reed, include a stronger focus on fine arts - they have strong programs in Art, Music and Theater - an NCAA Division III sports program, graduate programs in Education and Counseling and Law, and a policy of not allowing freshman students to have cars (on campus) - the only school we visited that had such a restriction. Like Reed, Lewis & Clark offers theme housing. After the tour, the three subgroups reconvened in an auditorium, where the Associate Dean of Admissions was available to answer any and all questions.

After a quick lunch, we headed southwest to visit Linfield College, in McMinnville. Linfield has 1,693 undergraduates, and compared with Lewis & Clark, is less selective in its admissions (80% acceptance rate, with an average GPA of 3.56 and middle 50% SAT scores ranging from 990-1220), has a similar faculty:student ratio (13:1) and average class size (18), and is less expensive ($27,414 in tuition and fees, $7,970 in room and board, for a total cost of $35,384). Although they have no graduate program, as with Lewis & Clark, there is a strong emphasis on study abroad, with nearly 60% of students spending some portion of their college career outside of the U.S. They actually require student majoring in a foreign language to spend a full year studying in a country in which that language is spoken (requirements for a minor include a semester in a foreign country).

Several things impressed us during our tour of the campus, which in many respects seemed like a midwestern campus plunked down in the Pacific Northwest. The mostly brick buildings and the grounds were very well kept, and had a very open, expansive feel to them. Everyone we encountered was extraordinarily friendly, with many students on campus making eye contact and smiling as we passed. We saw more school sweatshirts at Linfield than all the other campuses combined, suggesting a strong school spirit (and, perhaps, a stronger emphasis on sports, though Linfield, like Lewis & Clark is NCAA Division III). During our 1:1 meeting with the Admissions Counselor, we learned about an annual scholarship fair each February, in which prospective students are invited to visit campus to compete for departmental scholarships.

We had an early dinner at McMenamins Pub at Hotel Oregon, where we had great salads, but so-so entrees and average beer; next time we'll try the Golden Valley Brewery & Pub. We then drove down to Salem, where we stayed at the Phoenix Grand Hotel, which offered a more spacious double queen suite than we had the previous night. Everyone was tired, so we didn't take advantage of the hotel location to explore downtown Salem that night.

The next day, I left early for a business meeting in Corvallis while the women explored a bit of Salem on their walk over to the Willamette University campus. Willamette seems to represent a sort of middle ground among the institutions we visited, with 1,780 undergraduates, a median GPA of 3.74 among the entering class of 2012 (not sure what the mean is) and a median SAT score of 1850 (reading + mathematics + writing). The faculty:student ratio is 10:1, with an average class size of 14, and 57% of students earn credit for study abroad. The university includes graduate programs in Law, Business and Education. Some of the statistics Willamette provides are slightly different in nature than those provided by other institutions (e.g., medians vs. means), so direct comparisons are difficult.

Unfortunately, by the time I returned to Salem, the official tour was over, but I heard that the tour and tour guide were both great. Amy gave me a quick mini-tour, pointing out three highlights of the campus: the open areas within the Olin Science Center in the middle of classrooms, labs and faculty offices where students and faculty can hang out; the student-run on-campus coffeeshop, The Bistro, which seemed to have more energy and activity than coffeeshops we saw on other campuses; and the grove of five giant Sequoias - the "star trees" - in front of Waller Hall, the main administrative building. She also mentioned that there is an Amtrak train station - with service to Seattle - right across the street from the campus.

Seeing the campuses first-hand helped highlight some differences that we hope will ultimately help in selecting the best college, i.e., the institution that provides the best environment to both challenge and support our daughter in her academic pursuits and personal growth, balanced against the cost of attending the institution. The costs of attending the institutions we've visited thus far are pretty high, and we'll be visiting other candidates that are considerably less expensive. Quality:price ratios are much harder to calculate than student:faculty ratios, given the complex array of factors that influence both the benefits and costs of college for any given individual (and family). Our first round of campus visits was helpful in assessing some of the benefits, but ascertaining the actual costs may well have to wait until applications are sent, admission decisions are made, and financial aid packages are offered.

A recent New York Times article on "Colleges fretting over admissions" notes that colleges and universities are also facing challenges in their calculations - who to admit, how many to admit, how much aid to offer, how to increase the probability that admitted students will commit to attending - due to the growing economic uncertainties. These uncertainties may ultimately work in students' (and parents') favor:

For students, the uncertainty could be good news: Colleges will admit more students, offer more generous financial aid and, in some cases, send acceptance letters a few weeks earlier. Then again, it could prolong the agony: some institutions say they will rely more on their waiting lists.

But there is no question, admissions officers say, that this year is more of a students' market.

It's still early in the process for us - early applications aren't due until November, and regular applications aren't due until next February - but I think that visiting the campuses helped make the prospect of college more real for our prospective student. Amy and I were both significantly influenced by our visits to Ripon College (as prospective students), and our visits to these four helped us formulate some relative rankings, and to be better prepared for what to look for - online and offline - during our exploration of other candidate colleges in the future.

Positivity, Praise, Practice and Perseverance

I was recently given an unsolicited opportunity to practice what I've preached here on my blog, about being positive (or filling buckets, as I'd put it) in the context of my family. My son came home with a mid-term report card that wasn't all As, and I immediately focused on finding the causes for the low grades (two Bs) rather than praising him for his good work in achieving the As that were on the report card. His negative reaction to my negative reaction helped me to reflect on the episode, and on some underlying issues I hadn't thought much about - nor, apparently, practiced - lately.

There are a number of painful ironies in this episode. One is that the book that prompted my earlier blog post, How Full is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life, by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, reports on a study - that I have never been able to track down - on parents' responses to children's report cards in different cultures. The hypothetical report card lists an A in English, an A in Social Studies, a C in Biology and an F in Algebra. In the United States, 77% of parents focused on the F, while only 7% focused on the As. I would have liked to think of myself as being in that 7% minority, but apparently I'm not (or at least not consistently so).

Another irony is that I had mentioned my son in that blog post:

The main resistance I have to fully embracing the concepts in this book was immediately obvious to my 10-year-old son when I read him the theory of bucket filling and dipping: "I thought you said it shouldn't matter what other people say about you?" As I've noted earlier, I have an ongoing ambivalence over independence vs. interdependence, or how much I choose to be affected by others' actions (or inaction) -- or, indeed, as a social animal, how much power I even have to choose. The second agreement in Don Miguel Ruiz' book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom states Don't take anything personally, i.e., anything anyone else says to or about me is really more -- or perhaps entirely (?) -- about them rather than me ... and, conversely, anything I say to or about another person is really about (and often for) me. I think Don Miguel himself has some ambivalence about this, since one of his arguments for the first agreement, Be impeccable with your word, is that our words can have significant positive or negative impact on others ... and, thus, one might reason, others' words can impact us ... um, even if we don't take anything personally (?).

In the current context, I believe that my son took my negative reaction personally, but I know that I hadn't mastered the Second Agreement at 13 (and, in fact, despite having subsequently written an entire blog post on Don't Take Anything Personally, I have still not mastered this agreement ... but in the spirit of the Fourth Agreement - Always Do Your Best - will persevere in my practice).

Reviewing this passage in the post, I started to wonder whether students ought to take grades and report cards personally (parents' reactions to them notwithstanding). I also wondered about whether I was taking the report card personally, i.e., whether my son's report card was somehow about me (vs. him (or his teachers)), but I'll return to this in a bit.

In another passage in my earlier blog post on positivity, I'd noted a study that demonstrated the effects of [deserved] praise:

Rath and Clifton report on a study done in 1925 that showed how students whose work in a math class over a 5-day period was consistently [and deservedly] praised by a teacher showed far greater improvement (71%) than those whose work was [deservedly] criticized (19%) or ignored (5%).

This reminded me of more recent research I heard mentioned by Jonah Lehrer in a KUOW conversation (interview) about his new book, How We Decide. While the 1925 study by Elizabeth Hurlock demonstrated the importance of praise, studies conducted over the last 10 years by Carol Dweck and her colleagues demonstrate the importance of what is praised. Her article on The Perils and Promises of Praise, in the October 2007 isue of Educational Leadership, differentiates between students with a fixed mind-set and those with a growth mind-set, and shows how the objects of praise influences the development of those two mind-sets.

In the fixed mind-set, students care first and foremost about how they'll be judged: smart or not smart. Repeatedly, students with this mind-set reject opportunities to learn if they might make mistakes ... When they do make mistakes or reveal deficiencies, rather than correct them, they try to hide them ... They are also afraid of effort because effort makes them feel dumb. They believe that if you have the ability, you shouldn't need effort ... Finally, students in the fixed mind-set don't recover well from setbacks. When they hit a setback in school, they decrease their efforts and consider cheating.

By contrast, in the growth mind-set, students care about learning. When they make a mistake or exhibit a deficiency, they correct it ... For them, effort is a positive thing: It ignites their intelligence and causes it to grow. In the face of failure, these students escalate their efforts and look for new learning strategies.

She then goes on to describe an experiment that has been replicated in several cultures that shows how praising students for their intelligence - promoting a fixed mind-set - rather than for their effort - promoting a growth mind-set - diminishes their performance over time.

• 5th grade students are split randomly into two groups and assigned a set of problems to work on; after they complete the task, one group is praised for their intelligence ("You must be smart at these problems"), the other is praised for their effort ("You must have worked hard on these problems").
• When offered the chance to next work on either a more challenging task or an easier task, the majority of those in the first group chose the easier task while the majority of thsose in the second group chose the more challenging task.
• The students were then assigned a more challenging task (intended for 2 grade levels higher); everyone failed to solve the problems, but the students in the first group lost their confidence, while the confidence - and eagerness - of students in the second group remained strong.
• The students were next assigned a set of problems at the same level of difficulty as the original task, and the students who were praised for their intelligence performed 20% worse than they had on the first set, while the students who were praised for their effort performed 30% better.
• Finally, 40% of students in the first group lied in reporting their scores, compared to 10% of students in the second group.

Based on these insights, Dweck and Lisa Blackwell experimented with an intervention for junior high school students, noting that this is a time of "great vulnerability":

School often gets more difficult in 7th grade, grading becomes more stringent, and the environment becomes more impersonal. Many students take stock of themselves and their intellectual abilities at this time and decide whether they want to be involved with school. Not surprisingly, it is often a time of disengagement and plunging achievement.

In their report on the intervention, 7th graders at Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem who were showing a decline in math grades were taught to think of the brain as a muscle, and that through exercising it - exerting the effort to take on new challenges - they could make it stronger. Students who were taught two lessons - totaling 50 minutes - about exercising the brain showed an improvement in math grades, compared with a continued decline in math grades for a control group that was not taught the "brain as muscle" principle (both groups were also taught study and time management skills).

This cultivation of empowerment - thinking about intelligence as a trait that can be developed rather than a fixed or innate quality - is very much in alignment with the second agreement, and with promoting intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations at an early age:

Adolescents often see school as a place where they perform for teachers who then judge them. The growth mind-set changes that perspective and makes school a place where students vigorously engage in learning for their own benefit.

Po Bronson shared additional details and insights on these themes in his article on How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise, which incorporates additional research into the effects of the relentless focus on promoting self-esteem in children that has been the norm in the U.S. since the 1970s. He notes a 44-page review of the self-esteem literature by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues, Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles? Among the findings:

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

I can now return to one of the themes I'd mentioned earlier, Don Miguel Ruiz' Second Agreement: don't take anything personally. Although I'm not consciously aware of projecting myself onto my son's performance [ratings], or seeing his performance as a reflection on me, there may be an element of this at work here. I often tend to be a perfectionist - perhaps reflecting a fixed mind-set - and so I want my son to be perfect - and get perfect grades - as well. But I think there's also some personal history - and additional shadows - involved in this.

Bronson's article goes on to explore a related issue that strikes close to home: praise junkies - people who are addicted to constant praise.

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located the circuit in a part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there’s a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it’s telling the rest of the brain, “Don’t stop trying. There’s dopa [the brain’s chemical reward for success] on the horizon.” While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit?

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

I am a praise junkie, or perhaps a recovering praise junkie, having grown up with one parent who was so effusive with praise that it seemed like background noise by the time I reached adolescence (and another parent who had effectively disengaged from the family by that time). Up through the end of 6th grade, I was a straight-A student, but around the time of 7th grade - the aforementioned period of "great vulnerability" - my interest in school, and my grades, declined. I wonder if I had developed a fixed mind-set around that age.

I coasted along with Bs and Cs throughout junior high, high school and my first two years of college, putting in very little effort, and using my [innate?] skills in test-taking and writing to maintain passing grades, and score high marks on the PSAT and SAT tests. My junior year of college is when things turned around, where I became a more active and engaged learner ... and earned grades that put me on the Dean's List for my last 4 semesters. I attribute this turnaround to three significant changes that year: several of the closest friends I'd made my first two years of college left (partly due to then President Reagan's cuts in financial aid), I started taking courses in computer science (enabling me to refocus my intellectual energies after having become increasingly pessimistic about Philosophy - my major course of study - and life), and I became involved in my first non-platonic relationship with a woman (who would later become my wife).

In some ways, I think of my experiences during junior high, high school and first two years of college as a sort of middle ages - or perhaps dark ages - with my third year of college representing something of a personal renaissance, which enabled me to not only finish college, but continue on to graduate school. I'll share experiences in one course from each of the two periods that I believe illustrate my shift from fixed mind-set to growth mind-set. Despite having gotten nearly effortless Bs in honors courses in mathematics throughout high school, when I took Calculus as a freshman at Ripon College, I studied one hour for the first exam, and got a grade of 40 (out of 100). For the second exam, I doubled my study time to two hours, and my grade was 26. I had a solid enough grounding in basic mathematics to recognize that there was an inverse correlation to effort vs. reward at work here, and so I dropped the class. Other classes I was taking came much more easily to me, and so I followed a path of lesser resistance and majored in Philosophy.

In my coursework at the University of Massachusetts, where I earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science, there was only one course for which I did not get an A: a course on Theory of Computation, which involved a great deal of highly abstract mathematical reasoning. Despite working an average of 40 hours per week on this one course, and spending lots of time with the professor and teaching assistant during their office hours really trying to understand the new ways of thinking that were required to master the material, I only got an A-. The important thing, in this context, is that I was willing to persevere in the face of challenges, unlike my earlier unwillingness to exert effort in my first year of college.

In any case, if I'm projecting anything onto my 7th grade son now, I suspect it is primarily my fear that he, too, will spiral down during this period of great vulnerability and enter his own personal dark ages. Although I don't - or didn't - believe I have been propagating the trait of constant praise, I've long suspected that many of my parenting practices reflect an unconscious adoption of the practices of my own parents. Fortunately, over time, as I have experienced new contexts in which I have been exposed to more "intermittent reinforcement" - one of many areas in which my wife has helped promote my personal growth - I have been able to recognize and compensate for my early conditioning. Although there are many dimensions of my life in which I carry a rather fixed mind-set (as my wife, children and work colleagues can all attest to), I like to think I've developed a growth mind-set in some areas over time. One area for future growth related to all of this is my ongoing dilemma about acceptance vs. striving, but for now, at least with respect to my interactions with my son (and the other members of my family), I will strive to be more accepting :-).

I'll finish off with yet another ironic - and embarrassing - item from my post on positivity 3 years ago:

I recently wrote about how I am becoming increasingly -- and painfully -- aware that I have not been paying much attention to my family (especially my children). I now recognize that, despite my best intentions, I have been dipping more often -- and filling less often -- than I want to. I also recognize that attention itself is a currency that can be used as a bucket-filler, and that I run the risk of passing on the attention deficit I inherited to my children, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. The simple terminology and concepts introduced by How Full is Your Bucket will help me be more conscious of how I choose to focus my attention -- and other actions -- in the future.

So once again, despite my preaching, it looks like I still have much to practice, with respect to persevering with positive attention to those I love. As one small step in this direction, I shall disengage from this blog post, and re-engage with my family ... here and now.

Augurs of hope, past & present: MLK, Milk, Obama & all of us's

Last week, on Martin Luther King Day, Amy and I watched the film, Milk, about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California (back in 1978). When we got to the Egyptian Theatre, Amy asked for two tickets to see "M-I-L-K", spelling out Milk's name. We laughed about this presumed priming effect (from it being MLK day), but it also primed my synchronicity radar as we headed in to see the movie.

Among the most powerful scenes in the movie was Milk's "Give Them Hope" speech:

Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there's a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that she or he is gay, knows that if the parents find out they'dl be tossed out of the house, the classmates would taunt the child, and the Anita Bryant's and John Briggs' are doing their bit on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet, suicide. And then one day that child might open up a paper that says "Homosexual elected in San Francisco" and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said "Thanks". And you've got to elect gay people, so that that young child and the thousands and thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world, there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those blacks, and the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us's ... without hope the us's give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.

I really find this reference to us's positively inspiring, reflecting wisdom I've gleaned from other sources, perhaps most notably Oriah Mountain Dreamer, who suggests that we can either try to identify and empathize with others, or seek to differentiate others from ourselves; essentially choosing to view others as "us" or "them".

Turning from us's to hope, another civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about this theme in his "I Have a Dream" speech:

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

While Milk makes explicit references to the civil rights of blacks in his speech, as far as I can tell, MLK never made any explicit references to the civil rights of gays (much less lesbians, bisexuals or transgenders/transsexuals). Of course, they were from different eras - Milk was able to figuratively stand on MLK's shoulders in his crusade to win full equality for LGBT people.

Black people do not have the option of hiding their race in the closet, while LGBT people do, but the perpetration of shame or the withholding of rights based on sexual preference is no more justifiable than that based on race. And if "we're only as sick as our secrets", discrimination based on sexual preference may be even more insidious. Milk urged LGBT people to come out of their closet(s):

We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets ... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives

The 2000 U.S. Census estimates that 12.9% of the population in this country is black; there is no official census for LGBT, but unofficial estimates range from 4% to 10%. While LGBT people have gained some civil rights in some places (nationally and internationally), for reasons I have never been able to understand, allowing people of the same sex to legally marry is opposed by a majority of people in this country - 55% according to a recent poll.

The newly inaugurated president, Barack Obama, is the offspring of an interracial marriage - an institution or practice that was illegal in some states at the time of MLK's speech. The right of states to ban interracial marriages was in effect until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against such laws in the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967. And yet, despite his interracial marriage ancestry, Obama claims he is opposed to legalizing same-sex marriages (although, according to a recent San Francisco Chronicle article on "Gays, lesbians hopeful despite inaugural pastor", he supports the extension of full rights to same-sex civil unions, and opposes a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages).

Unlike some critics, I was inspired by Obama's inauguration speech - from its inclusive opening of "My fellow citizens" (not restricting his remarks to his fellow Americans), through his highlighting of the crises we face, and the "new era of responsibility" we must embark on in order to address these challenges and remake America. However, having just seen Milk the preceding day, I cringed when he got to this paragraph:

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

How can he promote this "God-given" promise that "all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness" and yet oppose the legalization of same-sex marriages? Does this opposition not deny LGBT people their "full measure of happiness"? I don't know if opposition to same-sex marriage under the guise of "defending" marriage is childish, but I do believe that as we, as a nation, mature in our perceptions and judgments about homosexuality (and marriage), we will come around to supporting this civil right that has been denied to a persecuted group in our society.

I was - and am - excited and hopeful about the election of Barack Obama. And yet, that same day, voters in California voted to approve Proposition 8, adding an article to the state Constitution stating

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California

and thereby striking down any municipal laws legalizing same-sex marriages.

Rick Warren, the tremendously influential and socially conservative pastor and best-selling author who delivered the inaugural prayer on Tuesday, supported Proposition 8. As with the aforementioned section of Obama's inaugural speech, I cringed when I heard Rev. Warren say the following:

Help us, O God, to remember that we are Americans, united not by race, or religion, or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all.

Freedom and justice for all ... except, of course, for homosexuals who want to marry.

If Harvey Milk were alive today, and were to give his Give Them Hope speech today, I suspect he would amend it to include Rick Warren along with Anita Bryant and John Briggs - who had actively campaigned in support of Proposition 6 in 1978, the so-called Briggs Initiative, that would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone who supported gay rights, from working in California's public schools. Fortunately, that measure failed, and while Milk is no longer with us - assassinated by a fellow (or formerly fellow) city supervisor - anti-gay forces are alive and well, in California and elsewhere.

Although there were many other striking and/or synchronistic aspects to the movie, I'll finish off noting that the person who came to a podium at San Francisco City Hall to announce the assassination of Harvey Milk - and then-mayor George Moscone - was then-city supervisor Dianne Feinstein ... who was also at a podium during Tuesday's inauguration, as the master of ceremonies. I'd earlier written about ignorance, incendiaries, ironies and inspiration in the 2008 presidential campaign, and my concern that the incendiary invectives uttered by McCain supporters might increase the risk of assassination for Obama. I was relieved that there was no replay of the last time I'd seen Feinstein on the big screen (having seen Milk the day before the inauguration).

I have a difficult time believing that a leader who could compose and deliver an inspiring message of moving toward a more perfect union could really oppose same-sex marriage. However, given the range of risks and challenges faced by Obama (and the rest of us's), it may be a while - perhaps another generation - before any public leader at that level can come out publicly in full support of full civil rights for all people.

[Update: Another augur of hope was unveiled this week: [Washington State] Lawmakers announce 'everything but marriage' bill: "Expanding the rights and responsibilities of state registered domestic partners" (Senate Bill 5688 and House Bill 1727). Equal Rights Washington has posted a page through which citizens can support domestic partnership expansion.]

16 month update on my elbow Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) treatment

In November, I visited Dr. Allan Mishra's office for a belated followup on the platelet rich plasma (PRP) treatment for elbow tendonitis he'd administered in July 2007. As was the case before my six month followup visit, I was feeling a bit disheartened at the condition of my right elbow. And fortunately, as was the case after that visit, I was once again heartened (reheartened?) at both my current condition and future prospects.

Despite over 16 months having elapsed since the PRP injection, I was still feeling pain after any kind of even moderate exertion, e.g., giving my wife a neck massage while sitting together on the couch. Although the pain was relatively minor, it was still recurring regularly (I like to give Amy neck massages), at a time when I had hoped that everything would finally be back to normal.

I was supposed to return to the Menlo Sports Medicine clinic for a 12-month followup visit, but due to a job change, I hadn't been in the Bay area since last January. Amy had mentioned the ongoing lack of full resolution to a local orthopedic surgeon who was treating my son's broken knee in July, who suggested we may want to consider surgery. Around that time, I had a paper accepted to the CSCW 2008 conference in San Diego (held in November), so I decided I'd stop off in San Francisco on my return to visit Dr. Mishra and see what he had to say.

After describing the persisting symptoms to Dr. Mishra, he examined my elbow, performed a few tests, and asked me where exactly the pain was located. The tests revealed that my grip strength was holding steady at 135 psi, with a pain level of [at most] 1 out of 10 (compared with a pre-injection grip strength of 65 with pain level 5), my wrist extension was a full 5 out of 5 with a pain level less than 1 (vs. pre-injection levels of 4 / 5 and a pain level of 9), and palpation - level of tenderness in my elbow - had decreased from 8 or 9 down to 1. I pointed to the the outer part of my forearm, about an inch or two below the elbow, as the area with the pain. When he asked whether there was any pain in the elbow itself, I realized that there was none (doh!).

Dr. Mishra told me that however long a joint has been in a state of injury or disrepair, it typically takes twice as long - after [successful] treatment - for it, and the surrounding area, to fully heal. This is, in part, due to atrophy in the affiliated muscles that occurs after long periods of reduced use or disuse. Given that my elbow was in a compromised state for a large portion of the nearly 3 years prior to the injection, it could take 5-6 years for the elbow - and the upper forearm - to fully return to normal :-(

Despite this rather sobering news, he told me he considered me a "poster child" for PRP treatments for the elbow. My elbow had been in the worst shape of any person he's yet treated solely with PRP; typically, he would have combined the PRP injection with surgery for someone who had suffered so long. The progress I've made thus far has been very encouraging to him, which offers further encouragement to me, and he thinks that it likely that I - or, at least, my elbow - will eventually return to normal.

We then talked about the theraband exercises he'd prescribed, I admitted I'd not been very diligent in doing them (probably around once every several weeks, rather than several times per week). I also told him that the exercises often triggered elbow pain (and pain in the upper forearm), and so he asked me to show him how I was performing them. He noted that I was going overboard in the exercises - bending at the elbow rather than the wrist, and thus placing unnecessary (and counteproductive) stress on the elbow joint. He said this was a common misapplication of the exercises, and after showing me how to do them correctly - bending slowly at the wrist - I suggested that maybe I could create and post a video of the right (and wrong) ways.

So, after some delay, I've created and posted my first public YouTube video, Elbow Exercises, post-PRP treatment:

As I note in the video narration, I'm hoping that this public posting of the video will both help others perform the exercises correctly, and provide additional motivation for me to perform them more regularly. And hopefully, sometime in the next few years, I'll be able to post yet another update, reporting that my elbow has completely healed.

4 months, 4321 miles and 92 gallons with my 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid

I wrote about buying a 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid - my first new car in 21 years - a little over 4 months ago. My appreciation for the car has been growing over time, and I wanted to share some of the insights and experiences that have unfolded during this extended "break-in" period.

First of all, as I'd noted in my earlier post, fuel efficiency was a primary motivation in purchasing this car. Marco, the salesperson at Honda Auto Center in Bellevue who sold me the car, had advised me to ignore the real-time fuel efficiency feedback display and to resist "babying" the car during the first thousand miles. I varied the speed regularly, ran the car through most of the range of RPMs (without approaching too close to the "red line" mark), and avoided harsh stops and starts as much as possible.

Marco had warned me that I might only get 35 miles per gallon during that period, but I got over 40 mpg on that first tank of gas, and was achieving nearly 45 mpg by the end of the first thousand miles. Shortly thereafter, I heard a story on NPR in which a fuel efficiency expert was claiming that the federally mandated 55 mile per hour speed limit that was imposed during the oil crisis of the 1970s really was the ideal speed limit for achieving high fuel economy in most automobiles. So, I experimented with driving at a maximum of 55 miles per hour for one tank of gas, and achieved a high of 50.0 mpg (see photo at the right, taken after driving 455.7 miles at speeds of 55 mph or lower). [Another NPR story reported that, for a short period of time, driving 55 mph in a Honda Civic along a specially engineered stretch of roadway in California with precisely spaced rumble strips achieved a perfect pitch rendition of the William Tell Overture (more details, including videos, can be found on the Honda web site ... and, of course, on YouTube ... see below).]

While I have found myself staying within posted speed limits more and more regularly as maximizing fuel economy gradually becomes a higher priority than minimizing time to destination(s), there are times when conserving time is still more important than conserving fuel. In any case, at this point, I'm delighted to report that I've averaged 46.8 mpg over the first 4,321 miles, well above the EPA estimates of 41 mpg city / 45 mpg highway. I should note that much of my driving is highway (vs. city) and that I rarely have any passengers or other sources of extra weight in the car ... and, of course, it [almost] goes without saying that YMMV.

In addition to the fuel economy, I've discovered other interesting, and mostly positive, features of the 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid. One is what I might call contextual maintenance (as contrasted with scheduled maintenance): instead of being instructed to change the oil at regular intervals based on time or miles driven, this car monitors the quality of the oil and will let me know when I need an oil change. At this point, the instrument panel tells me I'm only 50% of the way to my next (and in this case, first) oil change. I also found out that the Civic Hybrid uses 0W-20 oil, a specification I'd never heard of before ... though there is some debate about whether and why 0W-20 oil is required.

I also found out that there is a way to disable the automatic door locking "feature" that was the default setting when I picked up the car. Initially, the car doors would automatically lock every time I drove above 9 mph, but after reading the manual, I discovered that there are three different possible settings, including automatically locking the doors as soon as the car is shifted out of "park" and never automatically locking the doors (the current setting I've selected).

This is the first car I've had with leather seats (as I noted before, it's also my first hybrid ... and I suddenly realize it's the first sedan I've ever owned). The seats are generally comfortable, providing good support (at least on short to medium length trips), e.g., the head rest fits neatly into my neck area, unlike airline seats in which the headrests tend to push my head forward. However, I recently drove to Portland, and around 3 hours into what turned into a 4.5 hour drive, I found myself feeling a bit stuff in places. I've driven the Camry back and forth to Corvallis, OR (twice) - a 4.5-hour drive - and never had any noticeable stiffness.

My daughter has driven the car a few times, and pointed out that the post between the front and back doors is rather wide (compared to our 1994 Camry, which she now drives). She does not like the digital speedometer, though I actually prefer it to analog speedometers. She also pointed out that the dashboard is reflected in the window on sunny days (I have the beige interior).

Speaking of colors, the one black mark against the car when I first picked it up was the black wheel well edge guards that were initially installed on the car. When Marco called me shortly after I bought the car to see how I liked it, I told him that was the one thing I really didn't like about the car (every time I approached the car I found myself thinking "if only those wheel well edge guards weren't black"). He immediately arranged for them to be replaced with white wheel well edge guards (actually, they are white door edge guards that can be used in the wheel wells), and I've approached the car happily ever after.

And speaking of protective measures, I also picked up floor mats for the car. After considering various options, including the relatively inexpensive generic mats they sell at auto parts stores, I read a thread on all season floor mats in the 8th Generation Honda Civic Forum, and decided to go with the Honda all season floor mats. They have worked great ... and I'm especially glad to have them now that the first snow has fallen this winter.

Another thread on the 2009 Honda Civic in the forum reported that the new model was scheduled to go on sale August 19, which may help explain why there were so few 2008 models left - and why they were being sold at such a high price - when I made my purchase earlier that month. Oh, and speaking of prices, I forgot to note in my earlier post that the Kelley Blue Book suggested retail value of a used 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid (with 12,000 miles) was $23,616 (it's now $22,300) - more than $300 more than the $23,270 MSRP for a new 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid at that time. The current KBB suggested retail value of a used 2008 Honda Civic Hybrid with 4000 miles is $24,100 (a new 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid with leather seats has an MSRP of $25,420). GIven that I paid $26,000 for the car four months ago, the value has not held up quite as well as I'd expected at the time, but given that our investments in the stock market have plunged far more than 7% since August, it would appear that this turned out to be an unexpectedly wise and timely reallocation of portions of our investment portfolio.

In an article appearing in The Seattle Times (originally written for The New York Times) at the beginning of August, "End of the road for the American Dream Car?", Mireya Navarro talks about how the high fuel prices (at that time) were changing perceptions of what constitutes an ideal car for a growing number of drivers. The precipitous plunge in gasoline prices over the past few months - falling 60%, from a high of $4.12 per gallon (average price across the U.S.) the week I bought the car to $1.65 per gallon now - may have resulted in a re-reassessment of that ideal for some (see the chart from GasBuddy below).

I have to say that the gasoline price plunge has helped me overcome some of the hybrid smugness I had been feeling at first, but given yet another NPR story I heard yesterday on 'peak oil' (reminding me of my introduction to 'peak oil' via The End of Suburbia four years ago), I still feel good about becoming more conservative in this one particular dimension of life.