Gumption

A New Generation of Proactive Displays

We launched our new proactive display application at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto two weeks ago. The application - provisionally called the Context, Content and Community Collage - situates online content in a shared physical context to foster a greater sense of community, representing a convergence of the core themes of our Context, Content and Community project and earlier instantiations of proactive displays. The content currently consists of photos that are slowly and semi-randomly distributed across one [or more] of the eight HyTek 46" LCD touchcomputers we've deployed around the lab.

We call these proactive displays because they sense who is nearby - in this case, via Bluetooth phone IDs - and respond - by selecting photos from public Flickr profiles that people have explicitly associated with those Bluetooth IDs. Although the displays support interactivity (people can move the photos or delete them via the touchscreen), their primary mode of "use" is for the system to proactively select and show photos when people draw near, without requiring any kind of direct interaction by those people.

This work extends earlier work on proactive displays in interesting and [hopefully] useful ways. An earlier installation of proactive displays at UbiComp 2003 used RFID tags and readers to sense who was nearby, drew content primarily from specially-created web-based profiles, and were only in use for three days (during the conference).  The new proactive displays use Bluetooth phones for sensing, draw content from other sources such as Flickr, and will be in use, well, for the foreseeable future (I hope (!)).

I was fortunate during our earlier instantiation of proactive displays to be working with a team of three fabulous interns, and was disappointed about unanticipated events that disrupted that trajectory of research (at that time and place). At this new time and place, I once again feel fortunate to be working closely with another group of three fabulous interns - Max Harper, Ben Congleton and Jiang Bian - along with the rest of the NRC Palo Alto Context, Content and Community team, following through on some earlier articulated intentions for working on context, content and community, increasingly wholeheartedly enthusiastic [again] about prospects for proactive displays ... and feeling a certain affinity for the myth of the Phoenix at the moment.

At the two week mark now, early responses - by people to the displays - is very encouraging, and our short term challenges are how to keep up with all the cool new features people are suggesting ... and how to effectively evaluate the impact these displays have on the people here. It's hard to believe the interns will only be here another few weeks, but I'm confident we'll [continue to] make good progress. Meanwhile, I posted some slides I presented at a workshop a few weeks ago at Communities & Technologies 2007 that outline some of our initial plans and goals, and will be posting some new slides after my upcoming talk at Yahoo! Research Berkeley Brain Jam on August 17.

[Update: Jeff Johnson posted a video he took of a proactive display in action during a recent visit to the NRC Palo Alto site, embedded below.]

[Also embedding my slides from C&T 2007]

Fino, Finis, Finnish: Jukka Soikkeli's Farewell Party (and the Power of Passion)

We celebrated Jukka Soikkeli's 20+ years at Nokia Research Center at Cafe Fino in Palo Alto last night. Besides learning about Jukka's penchant for Corvettes, and some of his tangible and intangible contributions to (and through) Nokia, it was noted that Jukka is a prototypical Finn: a man of few words, the wisdom of which often becomes evident well after they are uttered. In keeping with this tradition, Jukka gave a rather short speech, although the wisdom (for me) was immediately apparent. One of the things he emphasized was the importance of passion as the key ingredient behind successes he'd witnessed (and promoted) in his years at Nokia. He encouraged those of us who will be continuing on with the firm to not pay so much attention to what people further up the chain are saying [I'm suddenly struck by the multiple interpretations one might associate with the "chains of command(s)"], but to follow our instincts when we're on to something we truly believe is important. [I've posted a separate entry on following my instincts in sharing my passion for Amarone last night on my wine blog]

The topic(s) of passion, instincts and authority provided an undercurrent to many of the discussions I had throughout the rest of the evening with several of my colleagues here at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto. I believe everyone believes in the power of passion, but some of the people who have been with NRC for a long period of time have experienced or witnessed changes that I've heard variously described with terms ranging from gentle breezes to earthquakes. While we are regularly encouraged to take risks here, it's very challenging to take risks in an environment that is not perceived as offering a high level of trust and support. NRC Palo Alto is a new lab, and as such we are co-creating a new culture; as we develop and apply our skills in technical areas, we need to consciously cultivate the kinds of social and community support that will offer the scaffolding needed for bold[er] actions ... and to recognize that we are all leaders in this effort.

I wrote recently about how I feel I'm really coming alive again, after having lived and worked through some winds of change and groundshaking experiences myself (in both the personal and professional dimensions). I still feel very much the new kid on the block, having been here just over 6 months, and coupled with my natural naivete and unbridled optimism, I have high hopes about our prospects for creating a high trust environment that will encourage the kinds of risks we'll need to take in order to succeed.

Mashing up the wisdom of Jukka with a quote often attributed to Harold Thurman Whitman:

Don’t ask yourself what the world Nokia needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world Nokia needs is people who have come alive.

Data, Judgments, Feelings and Wants: A Path toward Clarity

I was talking with some colleagues this morning about recognizing and resolving misunderstandings and [other] conflicts. I mentioned a few different perspectives and processes that I've used, and sent along some references. I've blogged about two of them before: the four agreements and love and logic. I was surprised to discover I'd never blogged about a third process, nor could I discover any other references for it on the web. It is the clearing process I learned as part of the Mankind Project.

The core of the process is distinguishing between data, judgments, feelings and wants, and recognizing that each person is simply a mirror for me (and I am simply a mirror for others). When I feel a "charge" about something that someone has said (or not said) or done (or not done), I can clear that charge by recognizing, articulating and processing four dimensions of the energy I'm feeling about the [in]action:

• Data: what are the observable facts involved in the situation: things that have been said or done (or not said or not done), by me or the other person(s)?
• Judgments: what inferences do I draw from those data, e.g., how do I judge the other(s), and/or how do I judge that he/she/they judge me?
• Feelings: how do I feel about those judgments and data, i.e., glad, sad, mad or afraid?
• Wants: given these feelings, judgments and data, what is it I really want (for myself)?

Learning how to distinguish effectively between data and judgments is a challenging (and ongoing) process. I often think of negative judgments such as "you don't respect me" or "you don't take me seriously" as data, but increasingly recognize them as judgments. Getting clear about the actual feelings is also challenging, as the surface level anger I sometimes feel is often a mask for fear. Early on, my wants often revolved around what I wanted from another person (e.g., "I want you to love me") and it is only with persistent practice that I can better realize the value of focusing on wants for myself ("I want to love myself ... regardless of whether I judge that anyone else loves me").

I've omitted a step from the list above, in which I may reflect on how the charge I feel is really about me (radical personal responsibility), and [when appropriate] to go back to the first time I felt the feelings and judgments that are creating the charge. This often occurs between the feelings and wants steps, but I can't think of a good one-word description for this step. It typically results in yet another example of "lessons are repeated as often as necessary".

The framework is powerful, and I've often applied it outside of MKP contexts. I was surprised that googling for "data judgments feelings wants" did not turn up anything I recognized as relevant to MKP (and hope that I'm not violating some principle in revealing the process here). However, the search turned up some interesting items, e.g.,

The Four Preferences: Do we rely on our five senses and want concrete, practical data to work with? ... Most decisions involve some Thinking and some Feeling. ...

ISTJ Personal Growth: An ISTJ's feeling of success depends upon being able to use their ... Their hyper-vigilant judgments about the rationality and competence of others may be a ...

As I've noted before, I'm an ENFP ... and although I haven't noted it before, my wife, Amy, is an ISTJ, and so this google-based serendipitous discovery of potential differences in perspectives regarding judgments, feelings and wants is rather illuminating (in my judgment).

Influence in Digg Nation: Democracy, Meritocracy or Aristocracy?

There appears to be rising indignation in Digg nation over the perception that some users have undue influence in the ranking of articles posted in this popular "user driven social content website" (cf. articles at InformationWeek, Wired Blog, and Wikipedia, the last of which also notes that "diggnation" was one of the names originally considered for the site).  Any registered Digg user can add an article to the Digg news pool, and any Digg user can rate that article: digg it, which increases the rank of that article in the pool, or bury it (along with the justification: duplicate, spam, wrong topic, inaccurate, or lame), which decreases it's rank.  Articles that receive enough diggs appear on the front page, and their placement on the page is based, in part, on Digg user rankings (other, undisclosed, elements are included in the Digg ranking, presumably including recency of votes).  Users can also blog about, email or comment on articles, as well as rate others' comments with a thumbs up or thumbs down (and the ranking algorithm may also take some of these factors into account).  And, users are encouraged to invite their friends to join ... which is, in part, the source of the current controversy.

In a recent blog post, Digg the rigged?, jp shared some observations, statistics and analysis about how a small group of Digg users was responsible for a large number of front page articles (Jacob Gower had earlier raised similar issues on ForeverGeek).  jp reports patterns of digging by a small group of friends that quickly promote articles up the front page, and while he acknowledges that Digg is a "true democracy", he notes that, in practice, a "small aristocracy" appears to wield disproportionate influence over the system.

The Digg user interface includes a summary of friends' activity over the past 48 hours, including counts of the stories friends have dugg, agreed on (stories that more than one friend dugg), dugg upcoming, commented on and submitted. [The screenshot from the left is from Wikipedia -- I don't have any [Digg] friends.]  It's easy to imagine how friends might naturally check to see what their friends have dugg, and if they share similar interests, they would be likely to digg the same articles, so this disproportionate influence may simply be an innocent instance of the network effect ... or, more specifically, Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its members.

However, it's also to imagine how a group of friends may intentionally "game" the system. I'm reminded of an incredibly insightful presentation on Putting the Fun in Functional, given at eTech 2006 by Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director at Shufflebrain, that I read about at we-make-money-not-art.  Amy Jo highlights five key elements that can make online games engaging to the point of addiction -- collecting, earning points, feedback, exchanges and customization -- and notes how many online social networking services (e.g., MySpace), exhibit all of these elements ... and thus may be considered games, broadly speaking (contributing to my own sense of the growing pervasiveness and permeability of games worlds).  Digg exhibits these five elements, and so it would hardly be surprising if some users -- and groups of users -- would make a game of promoting news and infotainment.

Kevin Rose recently announced some changes in the Digg ranking algorithm that are intended to promote diversity, through differential weighting of diggers' influence based on how diverse their diggs appear to be.  I see this as an attempt to shift from a pure democracy to something more of a meritocracy, where behavior deemed undesireable is penalized, whether that behavior is intentional or uninentional.  This shift may address some of the concerns, however, I suspect that if the gaming is, indeed, intentional, then the gamers will find a way to accommodate this -- perhaps a network of networks of friends that can help each other diversify via pseudo-random diggs.

Years ago, my colleagues and I at Accenture Technology Labs confronted similar issues regarding how best to allocate influence over a shared resource.  We were designing a system, MusicFX, to enable people to influence the music played in the fitness center while they were exercising.  The system offered fitness center members the opportunity to create a profile of their musical preferences based on a 5-point scale, indicating whether they love, like, don't care, dislike or hate each of 91 different genres of music (via DMX).  As each person entered the fitness center to workout, they badged in to identify themselves, and their preferences were added to the pool from which the "best" music would be selected.

We witnessed some gaming of the system shortly after deploying the system at the Accenture Technology Park fitness center (where it continued to run daily for over 4 years, until Accenture sold the building in 2001).  On the first day, one user used the interface kiosk we setup in the center to change his rating of the genre that was currently selected from "don't care" to "hate" (similar to the "bury it" rating in Digg).  This had the effect of a veto, given the way we had configured the algorithm weights at the time, and the station was immediately changed.  The user repeated this process a few more times until he had vetoed the stations he didn't like, and the algorithm had settled on a station he did like; then he went back to working out again.  That night, we changed the settings to ensure that no one could wield veto power.  The next day, this user called his friends in the fitness center over to demonstrate his new-found veto power, and was rather chagrined to discover that the system no longer responded so instantly and dramatically to his preference changes.

We considered a variety of elaborate weighting schemes to try to achieve greater diversity, both respect to the different musical preferences of the members and the variety in music genres selected.  We setlled on simply introducing a weighted random selection operator that would select one of the most popular genres, but not [always] the top rated one; this provided greater diversity without the additional complexity in the algorithm -- or in the models users had about how the system worked.  At one point, in our near-obsessive concern over fairness, we went so far as to design a market-based version of MusicFX, where we setup virtual emotional bank accounts for each user, and devised a system through which virtual money would be transferred from the accounts of users who liked or loved the music that was being played to the accounts of users who disliked or hated the music being played.  We instituted regular bidding cycles in which virtual agents for the users would bid on music genres, where the cost of the genre was based on its popularity; over time, people who had outlier preferences would eventually accrue enough capital to outbid the people with more "normal" preferences, and get to hear their music.  In simulations, we found that the market-based version resulted in a more equitable distribution of "wealth" (where wealth = listening to music you like or love) as compared to the non-randomized regular version, but when the smidgen of randomness was added to the regular version, there was not much difference in equitability.  When we considered the potential negative impact on the overall fitness center population to occasionally hearing genres that most people hated, we decided not to implement a real-life trial of the market-based system ... the trade-off between conducting good science and maintaining good service (for a deployed system).

Anyhow, I mention all of this, not only because MusicFX was one of my favorite projects (I could spend pages and pages telling more stories about our experiences with the system), but also because I think some of those lessons may apply to the current challenges Digg faces in reallocating influence among its population of users.  I think that if they overly complicate the model, it may turn off some of their regular users, who won't know why their diggs don't seem to count for much anymore, and anyone who is intent on gaming the system will find a way to do so.  The changes run the risk of harming the "innocent" without accomplishing the goal of effectively deterring the "enemy", though Digg nation would certainly not be the only nation in which ineffective overreactions to low probability threats are taking place.

The Dance of Leadership

A healthy community is like a dance, with different dancers stepping forward to take the lead at different times, and others following those leads.  Even followers are leaders, as we lead ourselves along paths or sequences illuminated by those who we consciously or unconsciously agree to allow lead us.  A leader creates a safe space within which others can more effectively recognize and express their magnificence.

These are some of the insights that emerged for me over the weekend, as I participated in a leadership training course (LT1) offered by the Mankind Project.  As with other MKP trainings in which I've participated, I don't want to reveal the specifics of any of the exercises -- as that may diminish the impact for any future trainees -- but will elaborate further on some of the results (for me).

The notion of leadership as a dance arose as I noticed that all of the participants are leaders[-in-training], and recognized that if none of us was willing to step back at times -- and allow others to step forward -- little would be accomplished.  As I became more conscious of this dance, and who was stepping forward in different contexts, I ruminated on what distinguishes a leader, and wanted to be able to encompass a range of leaders from Ghandi to Hitler. I arrived at the following definition of leadership:

Leadership is the modeling and communication of passionate commitment to an inspiring goal, principle or path.

Throughout the weekend, I was reminded of related wisdom shared by others, including Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Dee Hock and Dan Oestreich. 

In the Prelude to Oriah's book, The Dance, she asks some provocative and insightful questions, including:

What if it truly doesn't matter what you do but how you do whatever you do?

What if you knew that the impulse to move in a way that creates beauty in
the world will arise from deep within and guide you every time you simply
pay attention and wait?

These help me remember that it doesn't necessarily matter whether I am leading others, but that in leading my self, I stay fully conscious and true to my self, and that it is in trusting my own instincts that I can lead my self -- and others -- most authentically.

I've written about Dee Hock's inspiring principles on Chaordic Leadership before.  His insights into power, listening and judgment repeatedly came to mind over the weekend, and his prescription for leadership was resonating deeply for me:

Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.

I also had occasion to practice his advice for recognizing, admitting, correcting, learning from and rising above mistakes over the weekend, as I became painfully aware of how much of my father's patterns of leadership in marriage and parenthood I have adopted.  Although my father had many wonderful and admirable qualities -- many of which I hope I am perpetuating -- there are other characteristic that I have unconsciously adopted.  I renewed my commitment to making mistakes wakefully.

Dan Oestreich, an inspiring leadership coach (and friend), has shared many insights into the gold and shadows of leadership in his Unfolding Leadership blog.  Many of them were reverberating through me during the weekend.  Perhaps most poignantly, I was ever more aware of the path on which he has helped me embark toward my unfolding radiance.  I will invoke yet another element of Oestreichian inspiration, and apply the representation of a möbius strip, which I first used in ruminating on preaching what I want to practice, to the paradox of leadership (and followership):

There were other sources of wisdom invoked by the leaders of the leadership training, including

• Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, by Robert Greenleaf
• King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
• Leadership from the Inside Out, by Kevin Cashman

A quick search of Amazon reveals that there are other books related to the dance of leadership, including

• The Dance of Leadership: The Art of Leading in Business, Government and Society, by Robert B. Denhardt and Janet Vinzant Denhardt,
• Dance of Leadership by Robin Denise Johnson,
• The Leadership Dance: Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Effectiveness, by Richard Knowles (Director of the provocative sounding Center for Self-Organizing Leadership)

For the moment, however, I am content to follow the beat of my own, inner drummer, dancing with the shadows and gold that were illuminated for me over the course of the weekend.

Hearts and Minds, Us and Them, War and Peace

Curtis Johnson shares some insightful -- and potentially inciteful -- views on new ways of thinking about -- and acting on -- the issue of terrorism in an article entitled "Towards Effective Global Influence".  After starting off with a quote from Marine Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson

"Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people"

Curtis notes the "obsessive reversions to what they know and understand" typically followed by the United States' Defense Department and State Department (and indeed, almost every organization I've ever known), and highlights three key weaknesses in current strategies:

1. Confusion about the Target Population
2. Bi-Polar Thinking
3. Focus on One-Way Influence

He goes on to propose a "robust, integrated, strategic relationship strategy ... requiring deliberate, thoughtful, and costly study; sober reflection; humility; and a flexibility in policy and mindset " ... actions that are extremely challenging for any organization -- or individual, for that matter -- to apply.

Curtis' own organization, the Advanced Concepts Group of Sandia National Labs, is a rather unique collection of individuals who "think different" and thrive on challenging conventional wisdom in a variety of domains that in some way affect the health and/or security of the nation.  Central to Curtis' critique is the prevailing us vs. them (or, perhaps, U.S. vs. them) perspective that appears pervasive among the policymakers in the U.S. government.  Curtis points out that there are many who are neither with us nor against us (yet), and therein lies the opportunity to influence, rather than control, opinions of the moderate majority.  By employing hard-nosed, single-minded, pure-push attempts to control the relationships we have with [people in] other countries, we risk further alienation, isolation and and retaliation.

I came upon Curtis' article after reading about a workshop on "The Warfare System and Beyond" led by Sam Keen, in which he helps participants recognize, and [hopefully] reverse, the tendencies of people, tribes and nations to dehumanize our enemies.  This reminded me of one of the ACG's focus areas, Future of Warfare, and a "think-fest" they held on the topic recently; one of their observations was that "control is illusory and short-lived" ... a point which Curtis significantly expanded upon in his article.

Personally, I think that Web 2.0 and The Wealth of Networks offer very promising emerging technologies, ideas and models for addressing the problems that Curtis raises.  Unfortunately, given the natural organizational tendency toward "obsessive reversions to what we know and understand", these new trajectories may not be welcome at the Departments of Defense or State, or even Sandia National Labs (though perhaps more welcome at the relatively free-thinking Advanced Concepts Group).  Of course, it's also a question of priorities, and whether the powers that be really want to embrace the hearts and minds of people and achieve real peace, or continue in a state of perpetual war.

Update: Gene Becker has a recent post that reminds me that at least one government agency is willing to implement a "pull" (vs. push) model of interaction:

The Network Effects of Awareness, Energy, Trust and Serendipity

The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations, by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, illuminates far more than I expected about the different types of social networks that exist within and across organizations, and the way those networks impact, and are impacted by, the organizations in and through which they flow.  In addition to "the usual suspects" -- the people in an organization, the information they use for problem-solving and learning, and the way that information flows (or doesn't flow) among them -- the authors shine the light of social network analysis onto the flow of awareness, energy and trust, and highlight the importance of creating time and space for serendipity.  The book is filled with interesting case studies, and a collection of charts and graphs, the latter of which typically depict people or groups in an organization as nodes in a network, and the information -- or other types of currency -- that passes among them as links in the network.

In an awareness network, the links represent what people know -- and value -- about other people in the network.  When people are unaware of the knowledge (and other qualities) possessed by their colleagues, teams are likely to miss opportunities and fall short of the full potential of achieving high performance.  The authors suggest ways of increasing awareness such as skill profiling systems and staffing practices in which teams are composed of people who don't already know each other very well.  However, they also note that it is "serendipitous interactions that often reveal people's expertise".

The links in an energy network represent who energizes whom.  Simply sharing knowledge is often not sufficient for successful projects and teams: what really matters is whether someone can motivate a group to put ideas into action.  Energetic people tend to be high performers, and they attract and energize other people, who in turn tend to be more energetic and higher performers, creating a positive reinforcement network in building momentum for an endeavor.  [This illustrates another dimension of the positive contagion effect I recently blogged about in a post on unfolding radiance, which was prompted by a post by Dan Oestreich and a mutually inspiring quote from Marianne Williamson in which she notes that "as we let our light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same" ... a blogospheric sequence which is, itself, an illustration of positive contagion].

Not everyone is generating and attracting positive energy; there are also energy sappers who exhibit "an uncanny ability to drain the life out of a group".  The authors note that such people also generate impact that extends beyond specific interactions, as others in their network spend time preparing for (dreading) such interactions, and time afterward processing (venting) ... and they may be more likely to drain energy from others in their subsequent interactions, creating a negative reinforcement negative effect [Kathy Sierra recently wrote quite a bit more extensively on the emotional contagion effects of angry/negative people, with lots of insights and references].

The importance of knowledge work, and thus knowledge management (and wisdom management) has received a great deal of attention in business and academic circles.  The notion of energy work has traditionally been the purview of non-traditional (i.e., non-Western) or New Age theories and practices.  Energy can be measured in the physical domain (E=mc²), but is much more elusive in the psychological, emotional and spiritual domains.  The authors use a self-reporting mechanism to analyze the energy in the social networks they examined, asking each survey participant "When you interact with this person, how does it typically affect your energy level?" using a 5-point scale where 1=strongly de-energizing and 5=strongly energizing.  Although there are reliability issues in self-reporting (which may affect all of the dimensions of analysis presented in this book), I don't think anyone would deny that the flow of positive and negative energy in a social network are key factors in the strength and capabilities of that network.  Thus, energy management -- of self and others -- is an important component of effective leadership.

The flow of trust is another important component in social networks.  Trust is founded on integrity, openness, vulnerability and compassion, and provides an essential foundation for the flow of information and energy in a network.  If I don't trust someone, I am less likely to ask a question that might expose my ignorance, or seek other forms of support from that person ... and am less likely to ask questions or seek support from others when that person is around.  In fact, I'm less likely to take any kind of risk in a low-trust environment, and thus less willing to experiment or innovate. 

While trust is crucial to sharing information and collaboration in the workplace, the authors found that

If anything surprised us from our interviews, it was the importance of relationships developing on a personal front to become effective professionally (in terms of information sharing and collaboration). Almost universally, people reported that their most valued information relationships had connected on issues outside work, and this process was often identified as a major milestone in the development of the relationship.

Therefore, they go on to propose that organizations can foster stronger social networks by "creating opportunities for people to connect on non-work-related matters".  Specifically, they outline a persona book that includes a photo, contact information, professional background, but also hobbies, educational background and answers to "idiosyncratic questions".  This information can be made available online or offline (e.g., baseball cards), and their followup assessments indicate that the availability of this non-work-related information was important in deepening relationships.

The value of serendipity is highlighted in several places throughout the book.  I counted nine references to the term serendipity, and numerous other references to the concept, e.g.,

• a reduction in serendipitous hallway meetings, due to a physical move of part of a team, resulted in a series of operational problems in one organization they studied (p. 7)
• in another organization, "except for channels formed early in a few meetings, additional relationships developed only by serendipity" (p. 29)
• "people often described to us five-minute hallway conversations that had significant impact" (p. 64)

Not surprisingly, I have an idea for serendipitously providing access to non-work-related (personal) information in a workplace context that can help build and strengthen social networks in an organization: proactive displays.  Large displays located near employee entrances could show content from people's online profiles as they enter or exit each day.  At Accenture, our office park had turnstyles with badge readers for employees to "badge in" and "badge out"; monitors in the security guards' desks displayed the person's name and photo, to help ensure that the employee badges matched the employees.  What if the photo, name and other information was shown on a shared display, so that everyone could learn more about the nameless faces and faceless names around them. 

I remember having a "nodding acquaintance" with a number of fellow employees who seemed to be on similar schedules; I sometimes knew what kind of car they drove, but little else.  Who knows how many collaboration or knowledge sharing opportunities we all missed, but if we were each presented with tickets to talk on a large display as we came and left, e.g., a photo from my daughter's last softball game, a photo from someone else's family ski trip, another person's new dog, we'd have daily opportunities for expanding and strengthening our social networks in the workplace.  Our cafeteria had a point-of-sale terminal system that enabled us to pay for our food with our employee badges ... another opportunity for deploying a proactive display that can show content relating to people nearby, in order to promote awareness and interactions.  The Human Resources department could also add a content stream to such displays, using them to acknowledge accomplishments and milestones achieved by the employees, providing new congratulatory opportunities among co-workers.

In case it's not obvious, one of the reasons I was so excited about this book is that I see proactive displays as serendipitous connection facilitators, promoting the flow of awareness, energy and trust among those sharing a physical space by taking advantage of existing online content, identification technologies and human practices ... bridging the gaps between people by bridging the gaps between people's online and offline representations of themselves ... and thereby unleashing some of the hidden power of social networks.