Socks, Drawers, Tidying and Packaging [en]

[fr] Comment une histoire de rangement d'habits m'amène à accepter que j'apprécie le soin porté à l'apparence.

Right at the beginning of 2016, I stumbled upon this article, which in turn led me to this one, which in turn led me to read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

It’s a short book. But, like Sarah Knight, it didn’t take me long to reorganise my sock drawer. I kid you not. Those who know me will be aware I am a proponent of minimum viable tidying. My place isn’t a dump (some hotspots are), but it’s not the tidiest place around and I definitely have way too much stuff.

Tidy Socks

I’m a long-time fan of A Perfect Mess, and Marie Kondo clearly takes the antithetic approach, with a cult of tidiness, order, and organisation which goes way too far for me. I was surprised, as a person who has never held tidiness or neatness in high regard, to find that I was very much drawn to the ideal she describes in her book. I dream of a life with pared-down possessions, where everything has a place, where my t-shirts and underwear are artfully folded in their drawers, where everything is under control.

Control. This is the draw. We crave control in an often misguided attempt to relieve our anxiety. This is not completely stupid: having control on our environment does make us feel better. Less moving parts are easier to feel in control of, one reason maybe why I regularly fantasise about a simpler life, and why we relax better on vacation (away from everything, life is indeed simpler).

So, if I’m not ready to let go of the belief that having a little bit of mess in our lives can be a good thing, what am I taking away from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up? Quite a few things, to be honest, and in a way, it probably has already been life-changing for me.

The first thing I’m keeping is a precious tool to help me part with things: Marie Kondo advises starting with the easiest (hence socks) and emptying everything on the floor, before taking each item in your hands and asking “does it spark joy?” — I’m not too big on the formula, but I really like the idea. Does this object make me happy? Or does it make me feel guilty, bad, indifferent? There are a few things to unpack here.

  1. I like the idea of surrounding yourself with stuff that makes you happy.
  2. I like the idea of choosing what to keep rather than choosing what to part with.
  3. I like the idea of honing one’s parting skills with easy things first.

Number 2. up here reminds me of a packing tip I read long ago, I think it was on Tara Hunt’s blog (can’t find it anymore, and can’t find it on my blog either, though I’m sure I blogged about it at some point). It went something like this:

Instead of asking “can this be useful?” ask “might I be in big trouble if I don’t pack this?”

It changed my way of packing forever. The shift from “can it be useful” to “do I really need it” was really an eye-opener for me.

And Marie Kondo’s “spark joy?” test does the same thing. Instead of choosing things to throw out, I’m choosing what I keep. She also has some interesting thoughts about how to part with objects. Consider what their purpose has been in your life, thank them for it, and send them on their way to where they can fulfil their new purpose. In a very Shinto way of viewing life, Marie Kondo animates objects in a way that makes sense to me.

In that same vein, another takeaway for me is greeting your home when you come back. I’m not sure if I’ll actually do it, but I like the idea of projecting some kind of “personhood” into one’s living space. I just realised that I’ve been doing this for 20 years when I go judo training: we greet the dojo when we enter.

Another major take-away has to do with clothes. I was sure I’d blogged about my desire to try putting together a seasonal capsule wardrobe, but again, I don’t seem to have done it. (Senility? I keep thinking I’ve blogged things but I haven’t. I blame Facebook. For thinking I’ve blogged when I haven’t. For the capsule wardrobe, I blame Andrea.) So, yes, keeping clothes I like, rather than based on criteria like “does it fit”, that makes sense. And then, drawers. Yes, think about it: shelves suck. You can’t access what’s at the back. Piles fall down with time. And my IKEA PAX cupboards actually have drawers that I can buy and stick in them. Done. Ordered. My clothes will live vertically from now on.

I’ve already put this in practice at the chalet, where I’m staying now. I brought some dividers to tidy up my drawers, and have been experimenting with folding my clothes so they can be stacked vertically side-by-side in the drawer. What a revelation! This is similar to when I learned how to take off my socks properly.

I had honestly never given any thought to how I remove my socks. I don’t wear them half the year, anyway. But I did pester against balled-up socks in the laundry. The day I discovered the technique for removing socks without balling them up or turning them inside-out, all became clear to me: with no effort, from one day to the other, I changed the way I remove my socks — never to look back.

I can feel something similar going on with how I fold my clothes. I’ve never thought much about how I fold my clothes. I just fold them, and pile them up on top of one another. Like I was taught. Or hang them. Now a new world is opening up to me, one where I can pull out a drawer and immediately see all the clothes in it, without having to dig through a pile that inevitably topples over at some point.

The most surprising thing is that I’ve found myself quickly folding my clothes and putting them back in the drawer at the end of the day, instead of just letting them pile up somewhere random — on top of the chest of drawers or on the hooks behind the door. Folding is quick, and they have a place, so putting them there is a no-brainer.

Clothes folded in drawer

I think my future looks like tidy, organised drawers.

But this isn’t just about clothes. You see, I’m realising that I actually enjoy seeing a drawer full of neatly stacked underwear or t-shirts when I open it, rather than a big mess.

I have to admit it: I care about appearance.

This is a big thing.

You see, officially, I don’t care about what I call “packaging”. What’s important is what’s inside, right? Who cares if you make things look all pretty, as long as what you’re selling is good? Their true value should suffice.

I’m not interested in — or good at — making things “look good”. I don’t really do it for myself, either: forget make-up, and clothing is practical. I do my nails, dye my lashes and eyebrows, wear jewellery and have a good hairdresser, but that’s it. In my professional life, my disdain of packaging has long been a pain-point: I’m sure it costs me, compared to others who are great at packaging (and might not even have as much substance underneath the shiny wrapping).

I have a kind of snobbishness about it, though I’ve never really managed to pinpoint its origin: don’t let yourself be blinded by the packaging, see the value of what’s inside, blah blah blah.

But it’s hypocritical, because I’m expecting other people to not pay attention to something that I, as a person/consumer, pay attention to.

I appreciate it when people dress well and have good haircuts. I appreciate products and services that are nicely packaged. I love the box my iDevices come in. One of the reasons I use OSX is that it looks good, and I’m staring at it all day, right? When I buy home-made syrup my friend here in Gryon makes, I love the little labels she puts on the bottles. I like wrapping on presents. I like the card the vet sends me for Christmas. I like the pretty price-list my nail stylist has on her door.

However, when it’s my turn to do it, it doesn’t feel worth the trouble. For others, obviously, and for myself — and I’m not talking about self-grooming here. I love my flat, for example, but have never put up anything on the walls, though it’s been on my to-do list for 15 years and I would enjoy having pretty things around. Because it doesn’t feel that important. Because I don’t think I care. I don’t think I should care.

But I do.

And this is what this whole clothes-folding-stacking business is opening my eyes to: despite my official stance on the matter, I do enjoy pretty things. I do value packaging. I feel I am allowing myself to connect to something I have most of the time forbidden myself from acknowledging: there is pleasure to be found in being surrounded by things that look nice — and there is also, therefore, pleasure to be found in making things look attractive.

For me, and for others.

Le monde a changé (Cluetrain 101 pour formation SAWI MCMS) [fr]

[en] This is a "Cluetrain 101" presentation I gave as part of the course I teach at SAWI on community management and social media. It was initially published on the course blog.

Je co-dirige la formation au diplôme SAWI de spécialiste en management de communautés et médias sociaux. Cet article a initialement été publié sur le blog du cours [voir l’original].

Si cette présentation est une “introduction au Cluetrain”, c’est en tant que le Cluetrain Manifesto est le représentant et l’expression d’une culture — et même, si on veut oser les grands mots, d’un changement de paradigme. Mon but n’est donc pas tant de faire un résumé du livre (lisez-le plutôt!) mais d’aborder un certain nombre de thématiques qui permettent de comprendre en quoi internet a profondément (à débattre!) changé la façon dont les organisations intéragissent avec les gens, que ceux-ci leur soient intérieurs ou extérieurs.

Sans vouloir mettre par écrit ici tout ce que je vais dire, voici la présentation Prezi qui servira de base de discussion, ainsi que quelques notes aide-mémoire.

Pas vraiment changé

  • retour à des valeurs pré-industrielles
  • “les marchés sont des conversations” => “les marchés sont des relations” — ça va plus loin!
  • culture de masse comme anomalie historique — traiter les gens en masse comme on traite les objets sur la chaîne de production

Perte de contrôle

  • une des conséquences les plus visibles, et les plus déstabilisantes pour la culture d’entreprise classique
  • démocratisation de la parole publique, redistribution du pouvoir (VRM)
  • on a les moyens de remettre en question les “messages” qu’on nous sert

Objets numériques

  • les lois de la physique n’ont plus cours en ligne
  • donner sans perdre (cf. tout le débat sur le partage de fichiers)
  • économie basée sur la rareté qui perd ses repères dans un monde d’abondance
  • “ideas want to be free”

Différentes conceptions d’internet

  • ville: celle des gens qui y vivent et y créent (des liens ou de la culture)
  • bibliothèque: celle des consommateurs d’information
  • télé: celle des annonceurs

Voix humaine

  • reconnaissable, désirée
  • très différente de celle de la communication officielle, du blabla publicitaire ou marketing
  • écoute, authenticité (qui n’est pas un vain mot), partage, humour, personnalité, transparence (jusqu’où?)
  • c’est la seule qui rend possible la relation (essayez d’avoir une conversation sensée avec un robot de service clientèle ou un communiqué de presse publié sur un blog)

Conversation

  • pas juste deux personnes qui parlent (être vraiment présent, authentique, désintéressé, transparent)
  • il ne suffit pas de dire qu’on a une conversation pour en avoir une (cf. blocages à la communication)
  • importance de la narration — ce n’est pas par hasard qu’on aime les conversations et les histoires
  • les conversations ont lieu de toute façon — l’entreprise peut rester extérieure ou se mouiller
  • on n’est plus dans une logique de broadcast; la profondeur des échanges importe plus que leur nombre

Bouche à oreille

  • le plus grand influenceur
  • en ligne, prend une autre dimension (espace public + objets numériques)
  • libre choix de ce dont on parle, d’où sa valeur
  • véhicule: la voix humaine

Espaces semi-publics

  • difficulté à se positionner
  • le cloisonnement en perte de vitesse
  • impose la réconciliation de discours parfois contradictoires
  • “public” élastique (taille, nature)

Réseaux

  • renversent la hiérarchie
  • réseaux de gens, réseau hypertexte — le double réseau internet
  • chacun en son centre, propagation, veille, recherche

Communautés

  • groupes restreints
  • investissement émotionnel
  • émergent de la complexité des rapports entre les gens et aux choses

Retour à la conversation: en quoi internet change-t-il la donne pour vous? Si on prend quelques pas de recul sur nos peurs, que peut-on dire sur ce qui se passe dans le monde? En y regardant de près, beaucoup des thèmes que nous avons abordés sont présents dans la fonctionnement de l’entreprise classique, mais clandestinement ou inofficiellement.

Liens en rapport, ou notes de dernière minute:

Journée GRI: Web 2.0, remise en contexte [fr]

[en] A presentation I gave to set the stage for a day about "web 2.0". Where it comes from, what it means (and doesn't).

Comme promis, le Prezi de ma conférence introductive, Web 2.0: remise en contexte.

.prezi-player { width: 500px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

N’oubliez pas de lire “What is Web 2.0” de Tim O’Reilly.

Merci à tous ceux qui ont participé au petit sondage sur ce qu’est le web 2.0 pour vous!

How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications [en]

[fr] Notes d'une conférence que je viens de donner à Zurich sur les blogs en entreprise.

As promised to the participants of this (Monday) evening’s event, here is my slideshow of the talk, notes, and links. note: notes written up on the train on the way home, I hope the links aren’t too broken and that it makes sense; let me know in the comments if there is anything weird.

Thanks to everyone for participating so well 🙂 Please feel free to add notes, comments, further questions, things you took away from the talk in the comments to this post.

note: the beginning of the notes are roughly what I said; questions and answers are not included — there were lots; I gave an accelerated version of the second part of the presentation, as we had talked a lot, and actually, covered much of what was important anyway.

For links related to corporate blogging, see those tagged corporateblogging and 20070924 for those linked to today’s talk. Click on the “related tags” on the right to explore further.

I’ve added slide numbers in brackets roughly when they appear. Not that the slides are that interesting, of course…

[1] [2] Blogging is a tool that brings dialogue, and the point of this talk is to see how that happens in a corporate context.

[3] Two main aims:

  • understanding the “bigger picture” blogging is part of
  • practical advice on introducing blogs into a business setting.

[4] As you’ve probably noticed, I’m not a Powerpoint wizard, so won’t be dazzling you with fancy slides and lots of buzzwords. I’d like to have something approaching a conversation with you. I’m obviously expected to do quite a lot of the talking (that’s what I was asked to come for!) — but you know lots of things I don’t, and you’ll have comments and questions. Please ask them as we go along… I’d rather go off-track from my presentation and be sure to address the things you’re wondering about. note: and yeah, that’s exactly what happened! got so caught up in our conversation that I lost track of time! This way of doing things, you’ll notice, is related to what blogging is about.

[5] First, I need to know a bit more about you. I know you’re communication executives and I’m told you’re already familiar with blogs — that’s a start, but I need more:

  • who reads blogs?
  • who has a blog? (personal, corporate, work-related?)
  • who is blogging this talk? (nobody — hopefully in 2 years from now, half the room)
  • who uses a feed-reader (NetNewsWire, BlogLines, Google Reader)
  • who is in a company that uses corporate blogs?
  • who has employees/clients who blog?
  • who has read The Cluetrain Manifesto? Naked Conversations? (required reading!)
  • who is in a company that is blogged about? do you know?

[6] Before we get to the meat (practical stuff), let’s clarify

  • what is blogging?
  • where does it fit in?

There’s a lot of confusion there.

Blogging is:

  • a tool/technology
  • a culture
  • from a business point of view, a strategy

Different layers.

Blogs@Intel · Intel Corporation

[7] Using just the “tool” layer often fails, because it’s just publishing “official communications” in a different wrapping. And official communications are boring — I hope I’m not breaking the news to anyone. Example of this: blogs.intel.com. Not very exciting.

I think a lot of corporate blogging failures can be attributed to stopping at the “tool” aspect of blogging, and underestimating the cultural aspects.

Listening and Learning Through Blogging

[8] Example that gets the “culture” layer: Listening and Learning Through Blogging on McDonalds’ CSR blog.

I’ve just finished my second posting, and I’ve realized how much there is to learn about the blogosphere. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at other blogs, listening to what others are saying about what we’re doing, and picking up some suggestions along the way. (McDonalds’ CSR blog)

From a business point of view, adopting blogging is a strategic decision, because it impacts the culture. It’s not just a shiny tool we can use to do the stuff we do usually, it’s linked to deeper changes.

[9] So we’re going to concentrate on the “culture, strategy” side of blogging, which is the first part of this presentation. So we’re going to have to backpedal, zoom out, and look at the big picture: [10] The Internet, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

So, what’s the Cluetrain about? It started as an online rant, and grew into a book in 2000. It’s still valid today.

Basically, the Cluetrain says that conversations are happening, inside and outside your organization, and they can’t be stopped.

[11] People are tired of being talked at. They (inside: employees; outside: customers) are too busy having [12] real conversations with their friends, people they know and trust. Offline as well as online. They won’t listen to fabricated discourse (a lot of marketing). I know that when I receive my bank statements, I’m interested in how much I’ve spent, and the flyer giving details about my bank’s latest service goes straight to the bin. What about you?

[13] These conversations are everywhere. They’re talking about you — you the companies. A lot of our day-to-day conversation is about brands, consumer products, services… These conversations [14] can’t be controlled. Control is a big issue when it comes to corporate blogging.

Is communication something you control?
Are conversations something you can control?

[15] We know how important word-of-mouth is in marketing, and in the shaping of buying decisions we make. We listen to our friends (people we trust) way more than advertising.

Do great stuff. Care. Let people know. They’ll talk about you.

[16] Blogging is about jumping in there, being part of the conversation. And this conversation is bigger than just blogging.

Not that easy, but not that hard: remember what it is to be human. To be passionate about something. To care. Bring that into the conversation.

So the important question becomes: how will this fit into my corporate culture — or not? Is it compatible?

[17] What I mean by corporate blogging: blogging that has to do with corporations, businesses. Blogging beyond the tool (culture). Everything is possible.

  • internal
  • external
  • one author
  • multiple authors (group blog)
  • very official
  • unofficial
  • employee blogs
  • news outlet (with the danger of missing the “culture” and falling back into the “just tool” use)

[18] Some quick examples of real “corporate” blogs. A lot of damage control in my examples — one thing blogs are good at.

[19] Who should blog?

Corporations do not blog. Humans do, people. You can’t remove the person from the blog. Businesses with a “do the right thing” attitude. Enthusiasm needed! [20] Bad guys shouldn’t blog. Businesses who mistreat customers and employees shouldn’t either. Not if you’re dull or cheesy or very controlling. (See Naked Conversations, pp. 134-138.)

[21] Why should one blog? Very important question.

  • to communicate differently, humanise the company
  • not just another channel to push the same tired message through.

Where does blogging fit in strategically? => who, what exactly…

See possible objectives here. Basically, anywhere there are people doing things. Except probably high-confidential security stuff.

[22] How?

You want to get blogs going for all the good reasons, but how does one

  • start blogging [23]
  • blog well? (ongoing work!)

No real “one size fits all”. Many answers to this, depends on the situation/culture of the company in question.

Some general answers, however.

[24] Check out the corporate blogging 101, very precious stuff there.

enable blogging. Encourage employees to blog. Blogging is a grassroots phenomenon, but it needs support form the top. There are maybe people already blogging — find them, and use them to encourage more blogging.

[25] have a purpose (that important Why? question). Don’t blog to blog. Figure out what current needs can be adressed by blogging. You can start small:

  • event?
  • product?
  • “news”?
  • project?
  • office life?
  • expertise on one topic?

This is very context-dependant. Need to understand the context well to be able to choose/advise wisely.

Careful! If you’re using a blog to post the usual “official communications”, you’re missing something.

[26] learn the culture: this is the big bit. Listen to bloggers (online and offline, in-house and out). Get training (this is where it’s worthwhile to put your money, as you’ve saved on expensive software).

Before going to India, I studied the culture, but it couldn’t prepare me totally for what I found when I went to live there. You need to go to a foreign culture to really “get” it. Blogging is a foreign culture.

Learning to blog well can take time. Not everyone is a natural. Ongoing effort!

[27][28] Remember, blogging is about Me & You, having a conversation.

  • dialogue
  • relationship
  • people

[29] Listen. Read blogs. Read comments. Be open. Get a feed-reader.

[30] Passion. Believe. Be passionate. If you’re not interested, it’ll be boring.

[31] Style. HUGE subject. How to write on a blog. It’s difficult.

  • write for the web
  • use “I”
  • use links, make your writing 2D instead of 1D
  • informal
  • short paragraphs
  • simple, direct language
  • no jargon or corpspeak
  • tell a story, as if to a friend
  • author name, but don’t sign posts like e-mail

[32] Time. Don’t kid yourself, it takes time. Commitment. Easily an hour a session, a few times a week. But it’s fun 🙂

If you try to remove any of these ingredients, I doubt your blog will be successful and survive.

Best practices?

[33] DO:

  • eat your own dog-food
  • trust your bloggers
  • read other blogs
  • be part of the community
  • use a feed-reader
  • link! even to competition, negative stuff
  • be human
  • learn the culture
  • use an existing blogging tool
  • discuss problems
  • define what is really confidential
  • give existing in-house bloggers a role (evangelists! learn from them!)
  • tag, ping, use the “kit” and other social tools

[34] DON’T:

  • try to control
  • use a ghost-writer or outsource blogging
  • “roll your own” tool
  • ignore established blogging conventions, they’re there for a reason
  • copy-paste print material in posts
  • use corpspeak
  • force people to blog
  • write happy-clappy stuff
  • write blog posts or comments as if they were e-mails (starting with Hi… and ending with a signature)
  • be faceless (signing with the name of the company instead of the person)

[35] FUD: fear, uncertainty, doubt. Cf. Naked Conversations pp. 140-145 for discussion, really, it’s all there:

  • negative comments
  • confidential leaks
  • loss of message control
  • competitive disadvantage
  • time-consuming
  • employee misbehaviour
  • ROI absent…

[36] ROI of blogging (google for “ROI blogging” — without quotes). Comes up often (need for quantitative measurement), but still very debated topic. Respected experts all over the map, from “it doesn’t/can’t apply” to “here is a way to calculate it”.

Distinguish:

  • hard returns
  • soft returns

There is a return, it’s a worthwhile investment, say those who do it. How to measure it is another story. Sorry 🙁

[37] A closer look at some examples… coComment [disclosure: ex-client]:

coComment blog -- Corporate Blogging Example

[38] Read the first sentence… what is wrong here? Not a human speaking. Don’t post press releases as blog posts. You might cite them, or link to them, or comment on them, but don’t stick them in there as posts. How does the reader think his “feedback” will be received when he’s being spoken at to start with?

coComment -- Corporate Blog Example 1

[39] Privacy concerns raised on other blogs. Good to address the issue and respond, instead of hiding! (it would just get worse… cf. Kryptonite). “Click here” looks bad, though, and hints that the medium (blogging) isn’t really understood.

coComment blog -- Corporate Blogging Example

[40] OMG. What is this doing here? Did somebody smoke something? First-time author on this blog — an introduction would have been more appropriate.

coComment blog -- Corporate Blogging Example

[41] Note that this is a multi-author blog, which is usually the case with an “official blog”, though often there will be one “main author” who carries it. Apology for painful upgrade, that’s good. E-mail-like signatures on each post, however, again point to incomplete understanding of the culture.

Flickr: great example (and great photosharing service too, sign up today).

Flickr Blog -- Corporate Blog Example

[43] Look at that outage notice. It’s fun! Really fun. And there are updates. Two of them. As a user/customer, I feel that they give a damn.

Flickr Blog -- Corporate Blogging Example

[44] Coverage of what’s going on in the community. Blogging is a lot about community, nurturing it.

Flickr: it's not just blogging

[45] Here, a forum post. It’s not just about blogging, remember the “bigger picture”? But same kind of attitude. How you engage with others in the community. Treat them as people and not like numbers. Look at how well this issue is documented, with links and all — and this is a “problem situation”. We’re not shoving the dirt under the carpet here.

Moo note: if you got a business card from me, this is where they come from!

MOO | Blog -- Corporate Blogging Example

[46] So, this is a promotional posting (ad, marketing, oh my!) but look… it feels like she was e-mailing a friend, rings true.

Up for debate (bloggers will tell you “yes”): can you feel if somebody put his/her heart into a post?

[47] Closing notes:

Blogging is a strategy. Deep change in communications. Not pushing a message anymore, but

  • conversations
  • relationships
  • trust
  • people

The question to ask is:

Is my company/department/team ready for this?

Blogging is a grassroots phenomenon, so bottom-up (you can’t force people to be passionate about something and blog about it), but needs support from top-down. There are maybe already blogs in your company, and you might not know it!

Read The Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations to start. (I’m serious.)

Eat your dog food. If you’re going to introduce blogging in your company, you need to start blogging — before. Open a WordPress.com account and start writing about stuff you’re interested in. Use your blog as a backup brain, writing things as they occur to you. For you first, and for sharing with others in case it’s of interest to them.

Blogging is technically cheap, but culturally expensive.

[48]

Some extra stuff, off the top of my head (some from off-presentation discussion):

Blogging tools: WordPress, Movable Type and Typepad (SixApart), Drupal.

Looking up stuff in blogs: use Technorati or Google BlogSearch. Use Technorati Cosmos to see who linked to a given blog post.

The “Because Effect”: I make money because of my blog, not with my blog.

Discussion of trust and reputation in the blogosphere. Auto-regulating medium.

A few sketches I made while preparing this talk, but didn’t use:

Cluetrain 101 Sketch 1

Cluetrain 101 Sketch 2

Cluetrain 101 Sketch 3

Open-sourcing the invitation copy.

Good example of an “event blog”: LIFT conference (and go to the conference, too, it’s a great event).

promotional 😉 note: if you would like to have me come and give this talk (or another!) elsewhere, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. This is one of the things I do for a living.

BarCamp à Lausanne le 29 septembre [en]

[fr] BarCamp in Lausanne, September 29th. Come and join us!

Réservez la date du 29 septembre : BarCamp débarque à Lausanne !

BarCamp Lausanne Banner

Barcamp ? C’est un rassemblement informel, généralement d’un week-end, de personnes qui vont échanger leurs expériences, réflexions, et savoirs. Disons que le thème qui rassemble ces gens est Internet, au sens très large : il sera donc question de technologie, mais aussi de toutes les problématiques stratégiques, économiques, sociales, et même philosophiques touchant aux bouleversements numériques que vit notre époque. Et si un autre sujet pointait le bout de son nez… Il serait bien entendu le bienvenu.

Ce n’est donc pas une conférence : c’est une non-conférence. Un BarCamp est initié par une personne ou un groupe de personnes, et souvent sponsorisé, car l’événement est généralement gratuit pour ceux qui y participent. Chacun est encouragé à mettre la main à la pâte en aidant à l’organisation ou à l’animation de la journée, en faisant une démonstration, une présentation, en modérant une discussion, ou au minimum en étant un auditeur actif lors des séances. Si vous êtes curieux, allez donc lire comment le concept est né.

Vous l’aurez compris, le succès d’un BarCamp repose sur la participation de la communauté, et non sur les épaules d’une ou deux personnes qui organiseraient le tout pour les autres. Le BarCamp sera ce que l’on en fera. Ce n’est pas un événement totalement anarchique, cependant : il y a quelques règles.

  • 1ère règle: Tu parleras de BarCamp.
  • 2ème règle: Tu blogueras à propos de BarCamp.
  • 3ème règle: Si tu veux faire une présentation, tu dois inscrire ton sujet et ton nom dans un slot de présentation.
  • 4ème règle: Des intros de trois mots seulement.
  • 5ème règle: Autant de présentations à la fois que l’infrastructure le permet.
  • 6ème règle: Pas de présentations réservées à l’avance, pas de touristes.
  • 7ème règle: Les présentations iront tant et aussi longtemps qu’elles le doivent, où jusqu’à ce qu’elles se heurtent à l’heure de début de la présentation suivante.
  • 8ème règle: Si c’est votre première fois à BarCamp, vous DEVEZ présenter. (Bon, on ne va pas vous forcer, mais essayez de trouver quelqu’un avec qui présenter, ou posez des questions et soyez un participant actif.)

source

Concrètement ?

« Ah oui, sympa, je vais venir voir mais je présenterai quelque chose la prochaine fois… »

Justement pas ! Un BarCamp, c’est justement l’occasion rêvée pour expérimenter, se jeter à l’eau, et prendre quelques risques. On est entre nous. Pensez « animer une discussion sympa avec une poignée de gens intéressés », et non « donner une conférence ex cathedra avec présentation PowerPoint léchée devant un parterre de 150 inconnus qui vont vous juger ».

Program for Blogcamp.ch

Chacun a quelque chose à raconter, à partager, à montrer, à discuter. On est tous des passionnés. Pas besoin de choisir un « grand sujet », digne d’un livre ou d’un dossier dans un magazine. Si vous êtes en panne d’inspiration, demandez à vous lecteurs, ils sauront, eux. Si vous êtes prêts à vous lancer, voici un article (en anglais) qui vous donnera de bons conseils.

« Mais c’est tout en anglais ! On est en Suisse romande, non ? »

La page d’organisation de BarCamp Lausanne est effectivement en anglais, mais l’événement lui-même est multilingue. Les présentations et discussions peuvent avoir lieu en n’importe quelle langue (mais merci de préciser !)

Vu le côté inévitablement un peu « local » de ce genre d’événement, on peut s’attendre à ce qu’il y ait une majorité de francophones, mais il y aura aussi certainement des gens venant de plus loin, ou quelques-uns de nos amis suisses-allemands.

Donc, voilà. La langue, j’avoue que c’est un sujet un peu flou, et malgré mes grandes réflexions sur la pluralité linguistique, je ne suis pas certain qu’elle serait la meilleure formule. On verra donc ce qui se passe ! Ce qui est certain, en tout cas, c’est que ce ne sera pas monolingue, et qu’il y aura donc la place pour tout le monde !

Suw Charman at Google: Does Social Software Have Fangs? [en]

[fr] Mes notes de la conférence que mon amie Suw a donné chez Google aujourd'hui.

Here are the notes I took of Suw Charman‘s talk. They’re not necessarily well-constructed, and may even contain inaccuracies. I did my best, though!

It’s trickier than it seems when using blogs in business.

Will talk about using blogs and wikis internally. What can you do when things go a bit wrong?

Software is easy to install, so companies install it, some people start using it, but they’re not getting everything they can out of it.

Wikis are for collaboration, blogs are for publishing. Clear how the technology works, but not clear why some people don’t adopt social software internally for their work.

Suw Talks at Google

Reasons?

Low-level fear of social humiliation. How are they going to come across to their peers and bosses? Fear of making mistake. People don’t realise they’re afraid, they just feel a bit uncomfortable talking /publicly/ to their collegues. E-mail is different because it feels private, it’s 1-1 communication. You’re not exposing yourself as much. People become “shy” when you give them a very public place to work.

Also, some people aren’t comfortable in writing. Some are better talkers than writers, and are not comfortable writing in a semi-formal environment. E-mail is more informal. Blogs and wikis are perceived as requiring a higher level of writing skill. Again, people don’t admit to this.

This doesn’t happen in very open organisations, but often if permission isn’t explicitly given to use such tools, that will really get in the way. “Blogs as diaries”, etc — psychological mismatch. What the boss /thinks/ blogs are, and what they are used for in business.

Trust in the tool. “So you mean anybody can change my stuff?” for wikis. “Can I stop them?” Not comfortable trusting the content placed in such tools, and the tools themselves. “What if the tool loses everything?”

Will the tool still be around in one or two years? If we pour our data into this wiki, am I going to just lose everything if management pulls it down?

Many people just don’t see the point. See social software as something they need to do /in addition/ to what they’re already doing. Parallel with KM disasters.

Biggest problem: how to get people involved. Two basic routes: top-down, and bottom-up.

Top-down can work all right if you have a hierarchical company and control what people are doing. Will work while managers go “you have to use this, or…” but people will abandon it when pressure disappears.

Bottom-up. Trojan mouse. People start using stuff because they think it’s useful, and it spreads through the organisation. Grassroots can be very powerful in getting people to use this kind of software. Risk: incompatible software, duplication of efforts, managers closing things down.

Go for the middle way: support from above (yes, you can use that, we encourage you to use this) but rely on the “bottom”, people using the software to have it spread.

Adoption strategy:

  1. Figure out who your users are, not globally, but as small groups with shared needs. You need to understand what these people do every day. Good place to start: look at how they’re using e-mail. E-mail is a very abused tool. CCing just to let you know stuff — we get a huge amount of e-mail for things we don’t really need. Or things like conversation often happen badly in e-mail: somebody missing from the CC list, or somebody replying to one instead of all. And you can’t just access somebody’s inbox. People send out attachments to half a dozen people, and they all send back with comments, need to merge. There are places where these things can be done better/quicker. Identify who is influential within your area — supernodes — who can help you spread adoption, push a tool from something that is used locally to something that is used business-wide.

  2. How is this going to make their lives easier? Some use cases can be very small, not very impressive, but very practical. E.g. coming up with a presentation in a short time by using a wiki. Doing that by e-mail wouldn’t work, not in four hours. Another thing is meeting agendas. Put it on the wiki instead of sending out agendas in Powerpoint, Excel, Word… The minutes can go on the wiki too. Looking for places where conversations are fragmented => wiki. Blogs: look for people publishing stuff on a regular basis. Start with those simple use cases, then these practices will spread to other uses. People are bad at generalising from a high level (ie, wikis are for collaboration — d’uh?)

  3. Help material on the wiki won’t help people who aren’t comfortable with it. Print it out! Or people are so used to hierarchy, that they recreate it in the wiki, even though it might not seem necessary. If this is the behaviour they feel comfortable with, then we’ll enable this. Come up with naming schemes to make this possible. Be very open to letting the people use these tools the way they want to: coffee rotation, sports page, etc.

  4. At one point, requests for help etc. dropped. Critical mass had been reached. People were self-organising.

Top-down stuff: Suw’s more in favour of bottom-up, but often needs to be married to top-down.

Important thing: having managers who accept the tools. Some people can really get in the way of this kind of adoption project. Work around them in a way.

Managers who are the most successful in getting their people to use these tools are those who are the most active, who blog, use the wiki, encourage their people to use it. E.g. manager who would put everything on the wiki and send one-liner replies to e-mails containing questions about this with pointer to the wiki.

Use the tools regularly if possible. Easy to slip back into the old ways, but go back to using the tools.

Beware: adoption and usage is not the goal. Getting your job done is.

Q: what about privacy and secrecy?
A: easy to create little walled gardens in a wiki. also, everything that happens on a wiki is logged.

Need for wiki-gardners. Most of the problems are not technological, but cultural. How people react to the environment. Social vs. hierarchical organisation.

Tool recommendation: depends a lot on who is going to use it. E.g. MediaWiki sets business users running screaming, because it doesn’t look like Word. Happier with SocialText, maybe. What is the users’ comfort zone regarding tools? What about the existing IT infrastructure? Businessy users tend to like shiny stuff, branded, Word-like. More technical users tend to be happy with bland-looking things that might even be broken.

Q: external use cases for blogging?
A: “blogs are diaries” => scary for businesses. Some very mundane use cases: Disney used blogs to announce events (threw away their customer crappy tool). Personal knowledge management — “what have I been doing, what stuff do I need to find again?” Person who has to report on what he’s doing: blog about it, and let boss read. Competitive intelligence. What’s happening out there/in here. Also, “oh this is interesting!” — people blogging about social things, not business-related things. Actually good, allows people to get to know each other. steph-note: I think Google understands that. We tend to underestimate the importance of social relationships in business.

Update, July 3rd: the video

BlogCamp: Multilingual Blogging Session [en]

[fr] Mise par écrit des notes de préparation pour ma présentation hier au sujet des blogs multilingues, lors du BlogCamp à Zürich. En deux mots: il faut des gens pour faire le pont entre les îles linguistiques sur internet, et la façon dont sont conçus nos outils n'encourage pas les gens à être multingues sur leurs blogs. C'est pourtant à mon avis la formule la plus viable pour avoir de bons ponts.

I presented a session about multilingual blogging at BlogCamp yesterday in Zürich. Thanks to all of you who attended (particularly as I was competing with Xing’s Nicolas Berg!) and wrote about the session (Bruno of course, Sarah, Sandra, Maira, Jens-Rainer, Waltraut, Jokerine, Antoine…let me know if I need to add you here), and to Greg in particular for filming the session.

Although I’m rather used to giving talks, this was the first time my audience was a bloggy-geek crowd, so it was particularly exciting for me. I prepared my talk on the train between Lausanne and Bern, and unfortunately prepared way too many notes (I’m used to talking with next to no notes), so I got a bit confused at times during my presentation — and, of course, left stuff out. Here’s a rough transcript of what I prepared. Oh, and don’t forget to look at this photo of my cat Bagha from time to time to get the whole “experience”.

Steph giving her talk.
Photo by Henning

Talk notes

In the beginning there was the Big Bang. Space, time and matter came to exist. (Physicists in the audience, please forgive me for this.) We know it might end with a Big Crunch. Internet looks a bit like this Big Crunch, because it gets rid of space. With the right link to click on, the right URI, anybody can be anywhere at any time.

However, we often perceive the internet as a kind of “space”, or at least as having some sort of organisation or structure that we tend to translate into spatial terms or sensations. One way in which the internet is organised (and if you’re a good 2.0 person you’re acutely aware of this) is communities.

Communities are like gravity wells: people tend to stay “in” them. It very easy to be completely oblivious to what is going on in other communities. Barrier to entry: culture. Language is part of a culture, and even worse, it’s the vehicle for communication.

What is going on in the other languageospheres? I know almost nothing of what’s going on in the German-speaking blogosphere. The borders on the internet are linguistic. How do we travel? There is no digital equivalent of walking around town in a foreign country without understanding a word people say. Note: cultural divides are a general problem — I’m trying to focus here on one of the components of the cultural divide: language.

Who speaks more than one language? In the audience, (almost) everyone. This is doubly not surprising:

  • Switzerland is a multilingual country
  • this is the “online” crowd (cosmopolitan, highly educated, English-speaking — though English is not a national language here)

Two episodes that made me aware of how strong language barriers can be online, and how important it is to encourage people to bridge the language barriers:

  • launching Pompage.net because at the time of the browser upgrade initiative I realised that many French-speaking people didn’t have access to all the material that was available in Anglophonia, because they just didn’t understand English well enough;
  • the very different feelings bloggers had about Loïc Le Meur when he first started being active in the blogosphere, depending on if they were French- or English-speaking, particularly around the time of the Ublog story.

A few questions I asked the audience (mini-survey):

  • who reads blogs in more than one language? (nearly everyone)
  • who blogs in more than one language?
  • who has different blogs for different languages?
  • who has one blog with translated content in both languages? (two courageous people)
  • who has one blog with posts in various languages, mixed? (half a dozen people if my memory serves me right)
  • who feels they act as a bridge between languages?

So, let’s have a look at a few multilingual blogging issues (from the perspective of a biased bilingual person). Despite the large number of people out there who are comfortable writing in more than one language (and the even larger number who are more or less comfortable reading in more than one language), and the importance of bridging cultural/linguistic gaps, blogging tools still assume you are going to be blogging in one language (even though it is now accepted that this language may not be English).

What strategies are there for using more than one language on a blog, or being a good bridge? Concentrate first on strategy and then worry about technical issues. Usage is our best hope to make tool development evolve, here.

A. Two (or more) separate blogs

  • not truly “multilingual blogging”, it’s “monolingual blogging” twice
  • caters well to monolingual audiences
  • not so hot for multilingual audiences: must follow multiple blogs, with unpredictable duplication of content

B. Total translation

  • a lot of work! goes against the “low activation energy for publiction” thing that makes blogging work (=> less blogging)
  • good for multilingual and monolingual audiences
  • technical issues with non-monolingual page (a web page is assumed to be in a single language…)

C. Machine translation!

  • getting rid of the “effort” that makes B. fail as a large-scale solution, but retaining the benefiits!
  • problem: machine translation sucks
  • too imprecise, we don’t want more misunderstanding

D. A single blog, more than one language (my solution)

  • easy for the blogger, who just chooses the language to blog in depending on mood, bridge requirements, etc.
  • good for the right multilingual audience
  • technical issues with non-monolingual pages
  • how do you take care of monolingual audiences? provide a summary in the non-post language

“Monolingual” audiences are often not 100% monolingual. If the number of people who are perfectly comfortable writing in more than one language is indeed rather small, many people have some “understanding” skills in languages other than their mother tongue. Important to reach out to these skills.

For example, I’ve studied German at school, but I’m not comfortable enough with it to read German-language blogs. However, if I know that a particular post is going to be really interesting to me, I might go through the trouble of reading it, maybe with the help of some machine translation, or by asking a German-speaking friend.

A summary of the post in the language it is not written in can help the reader decide if it’s worth the trouble. Writing in a simple language will help non-native speakers understand. Making sure the number of typos and grammar mistakes are minimal will help machine translation be helpful. And machine translation, though it is often comical, can help one get the gist of what the post is about.

Even if the reader is totally helpless with the language at hand, the summary will help him know what he’s missing. Less frustrating. And if it’s too frustrating, then might give motivation to hunt down a native speaker or do what’s required to understand what the post is about.

Other bridging ideas:

  • translation networks (translate a post or two a month from other bloggers in the network, into your native language)
  • translation portal (“news of the world” with editorial and translation work done) — check out Blogamundo

Problem I see: bloggers aren’t translators. Bloggers like writing about their own ideas, they’re creative people. Translating is boring — and a difficult task.

Some more techy thoughts:

  • use the lang= attribute, particularly when mixing languages on a web page (and maybe someday tools will start parsing that)
  • CSS selectors to make different languages look different (FR=pink, EN=blue for example)
  • language needs to be a post (or even post element) attribute in blogging tools
  • WordPress plugins: language picker Polyglot and Basic Bilingual
  • excerpt in another language: what status in RSS/atom? Part of the post content or not? Can RSS/atom deal with more than one language in a feed, or do they assume “monolingualism”?
  • indicating the language of the destination page a link points to

Extra reading

The nice thing about having a blog is that you can dive back into time and watch your thinking evolve or take place. Here is a collection of posts which gravitate around language issues (in a “multilingual” sense). The Languages/Linguistics category is a bit wider than that, however.

Blogging in more than one language:

About the importance of language, etc.:

BlogCamp: Bruno Giussani — Bondy Blog Story [en]

[fr] Bruno Giussani nous raconte l'histoire du Bondy Blog. Naissance d'un média qui est devenu national, mais de la perspective des banlieues.

notes from blogcamp.ch presentation. may be inaccurate.

Bruno Giussani: special projects for l’Hebdo => involved in Bondy Blog thing.

Bruno Giussani speaking about Bondy Blog

The Story

Riots for 3 weeks. 9000 cars burned. 2921 people arrested. Outskirts (suburbs).

Special reporters flocking there from everywhere, and then disappeared (as soon as the curve of violence started going down).

Suburbs: journalists stay in a nice hotel in Paris, eat there, go out reporting during the day, then back to nice hotel. Don’t actually stay there.

L’Hebdo did things differently: chose Bondy, one town in France, to do old-fashioned reporting. They sent their 20 reporters there (weekly rotations). Set up an office in the local football warehouse thing, slept there, with a DSL connection.

Objectives:

  • write about the situation in that city for the magazine
  • blog between magazine issues

What happened?

  • journalists used to a weekly rythm started reporting on stuff on the blog they would never have talked about. “Smaller things” which are part of Real Life and never ends up in the press. Or big things (“Les filles de Bondy parlent”) which fired national controversy.
  • journalists would come back completely enthusiastic (journalistic freedom recovered) when they left because they “had to”

Everybody wrote about this story. Old media. Curious about what is going on in the blogosphere but don’t know how to handle it. And suddenly this small magazine does something and everybody wants to copy/learn/understand. (Here, being “Swiss” had an advantage.)

Once the newsroom ran out of journalists, what to do? Successful blog, tons of comments… can’t let it die. Instead of sending people again, reached out to young people in Bondy to see if they would take over.

Brought them all to Lausanne for a week of blog/journalism training, then were given the password to the blog and were sent back. Midway between classical blogging and journalism. Have a weekly meeting, etc.

About a dozen bloggers now, covering their life. For the first time, this 50’000 person town has a local publication. Telling their story in their own voice.

Started doing reverse reporting (sending their people to rich neighbourhoods in Paris, for example).

Financed by turning part of the content of the first year of blogging into a book.

Important consequence: the banlieue had a voice at the beginning of the presidential compaign! Dec. 15, Bondy Blog guy asks Sarkozy for his phone number at a press conference, and actually gets it!

Sponsored by Yahoo France now. Have been building a network of correspondants in 15 different banlieues in France. A national media from the banlieue perspective!

Journalism in the P2P world is not about antagonism (old vs. new, professionals vs. amateurs, paying vs. free, controlled vs. open) but it’s hybrid, being complementary.

Discussion

Roughly 6000 visitors a day when they switched to Yahoo.

Background: where did the idea come from? came up during a news meeting, but the year before they had a kind of blogcamp for the newsroom.

New projects in this direction? L’Hebdo launched 8 blogs since then. Has influenced how the journal thinks.

Bruno is a little more radical about how magazines should do things (steph-note: hope I understood this right): shouldn’t have a traditional website (but journalists should blog, of course, and put the magazine content online for free), but should invest heavily in this kind of operation, including training. (Throwing blogs at people doesn’t work, we’re starting to know it.) Big problem in the newsroom: publication brand vs. personal (journalist) brand.

Bondy blog (network) become a sort of training ground for banlieue people to become recognised as contributors, and Bruno guesses that probably some of them will be hired by “old media” once the elections are over.

Bruno: l’Hebdo never planned for all that. It just happened, organically.

"Learning Blogs": GWNG Meeting Presentation [en]

[fr] Présentation donnée vendredi passé au GWNG à UNAIDS.

Here are the slides I used as a backbone to my presentation of blogs as educational tools during the Global Net Manager Networking Group last Friday at UNAIDS. You can download them in three formats. As specified on the presentation, they are licensed CC by-nc-nd.

Teenagers and Skyblog: Cartigny Powerpoint Presentation [en]

[fr] Une présentation que j'ai donnée en juin lors d'un colloque de recherche à Cartigny. La présentation powerpoint contient un "tour d'horizon" plutôt visuel de ce que j'ai pu rencontrer durant mes "promenades" sur la plate-forme Skyblog. Cela représente assez bien les préoccupations des écoles qui me contactent afin de venir parler de blogs aux adolescents, aux parents, et aux enseignants (pas tous en même temps bien sûr!)

Earlier this year (in June) I was asked to give a presentation on teenagers and blogs at a medical research workshop in Cartigny, near Geneva (Sexual Health of Adolescents in the Internet Age: Old Concerns, New Challenges). I’ve just received an OK to put it online, so here it is: Teenagers and Skyblog, Powerpoint [8Mb].

It’s basically a very visual “collage” of what I’ve found during my expeditions on the Skyblog blogging platform which a lot of French-speaking teenagers use. It reflects the kind of issues that I’m asked to come and speak about in schools (to teenagers, parents, and teachers — not at the same time, of course).

My excuses for the format — no powerpoint on this machine, so I can’t convert it to anything nicer.

I’ve just discovered SlideShare and uploaded the slides there. You can view them below: