I am a heavy WordPress.com user (this blog, learningscenarios.org, Gamechanger 3.0 and have been impressed with way that Automattic has organized itself. Two of their staff talked about how they can hire the most talented people and let them work from where they are already located.
Lori McLeese is the HR lead of Automattic (she is the only HR person at the company of about hundred people now). Nikolay Bachiyski is a developer. The company is 100% distributed and has been like that from day one. They are located in 24 countries and 79 cities. In only 7 cities do they have more than one “Automatician” living and working. They do not have offices and no set working time. Most people work on a single big project: wordpress.com
One thing that they’ve found is that it is hard to build personal relationships. They test new staff in a trial project to see if they are a fit for the culture of the company. The trial can last for a few weeks or even a few months. Once you finish it successfully you are “welcomed to the chaos” and will have to do your first three weeks working in “happiness” which is their customer support team. This helps you learn in a safe environment and teaches you to respect the happiness engineers. You are also learning that it is always ok to ask questions, to bug people and to over-communicate.
Not a lot of technical people are used to this type of communication, so they give new people a mentor (or a buddy). This can sometimes lead to some negative feedback. They have done three things to manage this well:
Hire the nicest people.
Just communicate more.
Face-to-face time is still important, so they have a grand meetup once a year where they all get together for a week and mostly work in temporary teams. Each individual has to prepare a 5-min flashtalk about themselves or about something they are interested (they really can be about anything). They also use this time to get to know eachother. They are now with 100 people so they can’t really have quality time together anymore. So each team comes together 1-4 times a year and do mini-projects and brainstorming (which is hard online).
P2 [pi tu:] is their main form of communicating with each other. It is just a WordPress theme geared for collaboration. It helps make things transparent: all P2s are public inside the company and many decisions have started in some form at a P2. Another advantage is that they are permanent and searchable. There is a culture of oversharing in which P2s very often get personal (there are a lot of “water cooler” P2s). This has led to a lot of company memes. The official company meme is “blank in a blank” in which people photograph themselves inside something small. More examples: an AFK P2 on which you can find out if somebody is away from their keyboard for a while and why. Next to P2s they also use a lot of voice and video chats and hangouts.
They also encourage Automaticians to attend their local WordCamp so that they can really get involved with their open source community. They also often meet at conferences were all staff is encouraged to speak. People are also encouraged to visit each other.
In Automattic’s company creed it says: “I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company.”.
They would say that their productivity as a company is dependent on how well they communicate. There is also the aspect of personal productivity: there are many examples of how liberating it can be to be able to really make your own schedule and be flexible. It can also be challenging to get to focus sometimes. In their employee-edited employee fieldbook they have collated a set of advice on how find focus for your work. The best way to help people focus is to have them work on something that is challenging and meaningful.
If you like how all this sounds, then maybe you will want to apply for a job with Automattic.
Philipp Schmidt from the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) talked about big online learning communities. P2PU is non-profit organization that runs an open source platform that you can use to run courses. Their starting point (and that of their community) is not the institution. Their three values are: peer learning, community and open. Here are my quick notes on his talk.
There is a wave of Massive Online Courses that has captured the imagination of academics. Philipp considers things like WordPress and Wikipedia the starting point for collaborating at scale. Another thing that is at the roots of this movement is the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig from Stanford have shown us that it is possible not only to scale content, but also scale assignments and assessments. More than 100.000 people registered for the course and around 25.000 students actually finished this very hard course. Thrun has now left Stanford and has started the for-profit Udacity in which he is trying to help companies with finding good computer programmers by selling the performance data of students in their courses. Other people from Stanford have started Coursera. Another example is MITx which will offer a portfolio of MIT course for free for virtual communities around the world.
This part of the MOOC universe has received a lot of attention, but there is a parallel reality of people who have been experimenting with this for a long time. Jonathan Worth, for example, teaches photography. Jim Groom is the poster boy for Edupunk. He runs a course called Digital Storytelling 106. At Virginia Tech they are running a course titled The Plaid Avenger. Nearly all these courses use open source and free tools that they open to the world. They invite people in and manage to attract great speakers because of the amount of students they manage to sign up for these courses. There is likely a much larger community than we can expect.
So what does this all mean? Thrun has said that he cannot go back to Stanford again to teach a normal course. Lots of people online are denouncing the university because of the alternative to them that these massive open courses show. Philipp is interested in thinking about how you would scale online courses in a way that doesn’t stink. P2PU has done some experiments in their School of Webcraft with self-paced and self-directed problem-based (“challenges”) courses. There are a few areas to consider:
Open content
Allocation of expertise
Assessment
Recognition/Certification
Community
I will definitely continue the conversation with him on each of these topics.
The next few days I will be attending South by South West (SxSW) Interactive in Austin, TX. I will mostly focus on the “Future of Work” and the “Health + Education” tracks and will be reporting on the sessions and panels that I will attend in this blog.
SxSW seems to still be the leading edge of consumer IT culture. The consumerization of IT (the fact that new uses of technology hit the consumer market before they reach the enterprise) makes this the place to find and understand the digital and cultural trends that will affect enterprise IT in the next couple of years. To give a clear example: if you were at the SxSW launch of Twitter a few years back then it would not have hard predict the rise of enterprise versions of these tools like Yammer.
If you are at SxSW and would like to talk with me about juggling, digital civil rights, the Big Lebowski, education, philosophy or technology and society; then do come and find me (probably easiest to connect on Twitter.
He calls universities “knowledge enterprises”. He is trying to move away from bureaucratized and routinized science and technology and away from silo-ed thinking. By changing how they do things, they have managed to double their number of engineering students. Usually universities find smart people and then focus them as narrowly as possible. Universities shouldn’t be structured like that. At ASU they are very much focused on exploration (science as a means). They are also very interested in origins and have built another way of organizing “genius” around that. Many scientists and engineers are pursuing “valueless engagement”. Why don’t we have at least some of the knowledge enterprise have an objective purpose outside of science itself. At ASU this objective function is sustainability, a value to be pursued.
I personally loved how provocative Crow was: I think he really managed to show how little clothes the emperor is wearing in the academic world (e.g. “The status of the university should not be achieved by who you exclude from the university”).
Envisioning the Future Panel, moderated by Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson started by talking about the word “vision” which implies some coherence. The history of the last 110 years or so can be used to show the importance of have coherent visions of the future and how that relates to “valueless engagement”. If you take somebody from 1900 and put them in the now, they would lack the vocabulary to describe the things around them. If you’d take somebody from 1968 and bring them to here, that wouldn’t be the case anymore. Somehow and somewhere we seem to have lost our ability to envision coherent futures that can actually come about. Stephenson dislikes making predictions, he is now starting to call the future the “F-word”.
Brian David Johnson@intelfuturist is Intel’s futurist working in the The Tomorrow Project. The project started in 2010 and it asks science fiction writers to write science fiction based on upon science facts. The five-step methodology is captured in a book Science Fiction Prototyping. He then showed a set of examples of the work that was done in the last two days. He likes to ask the following question: “If the future is in your hands what will you do with it?”.
An artists and a psychologist created a book with artifacts about time from the past and statements about the future. They also interviewed people on the street to ask them what they thought life in a hundred years would look like (“pets would live forever”, “school would take five seconds a day”). One of my favourite pages from the book looked something like this:
Disasters are not just instantaneous events
Gary Dirks led a scenario session titled “Humanist Narratives for Energy” with “How will Arizona consume and produce energy in 2050?” as the central question. They came up with two axis:
Capacity for investment (high – low)
Energy freedom who decides (centralized – decentralized)
They then created four scenarios: Green Silicon Valley (high, decentralized), Desert Power (high, centralized), Hippies & Cowboys Separate But Equal (low, decentralized) and a fourth title that I missed. The scenario planner guru Napier Collyns was present during the work.
The methodology for this is very similar to the work I have been doing with Willem Manders and other on creating scenarios for learning in the future.
It’s All Gardening, Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand, calls himself an environmentalist and started his talk with demographics and the move towards the city. The subsistence agriculture that was a poverty trap is disappearing (and being taken back by nature). People are moving into the slums of the mega-cities in the world. They are quickly moving out of poverty: you cannot hold them back. They will use more energy and will require higher quality food. The largest cities are now in the developing world and five out of six people live in the developing world. The next 30 years is an interesting demographic period where the world is mostly new cities full of young people dealing with a residue of old people in old cities. Where do you think the action will be?
He laid out the irrationality of Germany banning nuclear energy (after the Fukushima disaster) while not trying to ban organic food after bean sprout killed 42 people. He showed a set of small nuclear reactors that have now been designed and Integral Fast Reactors which use nuclear waste as fuel. There is a lot of potential in Thorium.
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are finally giving us a toehold into making food in a better way. We have been very conservative in adopting them. But we have had a lot of success with it. The Amish actually like to use it. There are many examples of where genetic engineering can feed more people in a green fashion. Biofortified foods are coming and The Nature Conservancy is now writing “Could Conservation-Friendly Farming Include GMOs” But the green movement (i.e. Greenpeace) is still blindly objecting to all kinds of experiments.
Biotechnology is an incredibly fast moving field. We are moving from the “Earth National Park” (a notion from the Sierra Club) to the realization that it is all gardening (a friendlier way of saying that it is all engineering. The previous generations used “KEEP CALM and CARRY ON” as advice to their people, now there is a generation of people with “GET EXCITED and MAKE THINGS” as their motto. We have the whole make movement, but we are also trying to bring back species that have gone extinct (e.g. the passenger pigeon).
Geoengineering will become imperative too. He showed the example of the Stratoshield. We are still thinking about the norms that are needed around this. One set of guidelines that has emerged are the Oxford Principles:
Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good.
Public participation in geoengineering decision-making.
Disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results.
Governance before deployment.
Independent assessment of impacts.
Designing the Future Panel, moderated by Merlyna Lim
Daniel Erasmus and Dave Conz worked with a group of participants to craft archaeology from the future. The process was straightforward: they made an object (not to imagine and make, but to make and then imagine), print it and then listen to how people interact with it (to use it as a string to pull on a tomorrow), redesigned it and printed it again. They then created descriptions of what the objects could do and might mean.
Another workshop led by Julian Bleecker and a companion was around the convenience store of future (inspired by a newspaper they created. They wanted to focus especially on the ordinary and mundane things. They created a set of products with stories attached to them (i.e. synthetic panda jerky, or Tic Tac pheromone+) and then created a film on the basis of this. Read more here or watch the video:
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/37870061]
The third project was titled “The People Who Vanished”. This workshop explored the people that lived in the valley around Phoenix around six hundred years go. These precolumbian (the person on stage kept calling them prehistoric) people built many wide canals that were incredibly well engineered. Their presentation ended with a quote from Stewart Brand: “Fiction has to be plausible, reality doesn’t”.
Evocative objects, Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle has done a lot of work on contemporary technology and how it affects our psyche and is now Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her talk was about objects and what they do to us. She talked about three things:
My path in (the memory closet), or how she got interested in evocative objects. She referred to “bricolage” (thinking with things) as talked about by Levi-Strauss as particular passion of hers.
What makes an object evocative?
Vignettes: two examples of people who were inspired by objects.
This talk certainly wasn’t very tweet-friendly: her story was very anecdotal and hard to reproductive in a blog post here. One last question she finished with was quite insightful: objects are concrete and protect us from virtualization and simulation, what does it mean when we digitize everything?
Embodying the Future Panel, moderated by Colin Milburn
This panel was moderated by Colin Milburn who reminded us of the Alan Kay quote: the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
David McConville (of Geodome fame), Gretchen Gano and Ned Gardiner led a workshop titled “Starting with the Universe”. Looking at the universe in a way is looking at the operating systems of our paradigms. McConville showed some great examples from Buckminster Fuller and his example of the “trim tab”, the little rudder that moves the big rudder, basically finding the leverage point where the least effort would have the most impact. “To make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.” is the Buckminster Fuller Challenge
Ken Eklund, best known for his work on the World without Oil alternate reality game. They worked for a day and a half on creating a alternate reality bases around the ludic affordances of the common padlock. Games seem to be both a tool and shaping process. The means to make games is being democratized and that will finally fill in the missing ingredient for games: relevance.
Alan Gershenfeld and Sasha Barab led a workshop around Games for Impact in which a game was designed in 1.5 days (I was part of this process). The starting point was to imagine a future in which fab-labs would be everywhere. The group quickly landed on the concept of conscious makerism based on the fact that everybody making everything themselves is not necessarily sustainable. The game is then a “tutorial” for a fabricator machine teaching people the fact that resources are limited and data exists about these resources. I personally got a bit disconnected with the project because it wasn’t addressing the questions that I find interesting about a world in which making is ubiquitous: which is the question of access and freedom. When hardware becomes software how will things like licenses work for example? How much of our physical world will come with usage restriction (read this piece by Doc Searls to get some idea of where this is going).
24 Hrs 2 Massive Change, Bruce Mau
Bruce Mau also started Institute without Borders showed us that the number one challenge of CEOs is “creativity” (an IBM study) and quipped it might have been better if it had been ethics. He shared is personal story of how he became a designer. He defines design as “science & art” and then translates that into “smart & sexy”. He now works with people like Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry.
When Mau wanted to teach his design methods somebody told him “Bruce, you’re so old fashioned, You should have 300,000 students not 30”. So he decided to try and massively change education. Education is currently: outmoded, slow, boring, expensive (if it not expensive it is suspect). It is piling up debt (United States has more student debt than credit card debt). It is only reaching 1%. Education is about:
Research
Innovate
Communicate
Educate
Network
He has started the Massive Change Network and they are working on a project titled “24 hours to massive change” in which they will create twenty-four one hour experiences that connect you to the most effective design methods. The first one is about leadership. Number eleven is “compete with beauty”. This is a very interesting concept that is very true: you can only make people change if you create alternatives that are more beautiful because we won’t make a step backwards (the Tesla is a good example of this).
Science, Art and Design in Tomorrow’s Network, Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling treated us with a little on stage performance. Watch it online when it appears.
In a post about Learning Technologies 2012, I’ve asked four questions to a set of learning (technology) experts. In reaction, some people have asked me how I would have answered the questions myself. Here goes:
1. What will be the most exciting (professional) thing you are planning to do in 2012?**
From April 1st my role in the company I work for will slightly shift: instead of solely focusing on learning-related technology the scope of my innovation work will be enlarged to encompass all HR related technologies. This will include renumeration and benefits, talent, recruitment, health and more. It will be a challenge to try and replicate the innovation methodology that I used in learning inside these other domains. I very much look forward to engrossing myself in completely new problems with completely new solutions.
Another exciting thing is the work I am doing inside the Gamechanger team. Gamechanger is a very successful organization and is on a journey to see how the recently emerged hyper-connectedness of this world could influence the way it works. There will be more public information about that project on gc30.com very soon.
In 2011 I have given a lot of attention to serious games for learning and I am hoping to make a next step with that in 2012 by trying out a safety-related 3D immersive game in the field and measure its impact.
2. Which corporate learning trend will “break through” this year?
Here are two predictions and one thing that is imminent to happen, but will likely not make it for 2012.
2012 will mark the start of a slow but sure shift away from courses towards resources and networks. This means that learning organizations will have to start creating new business models for themselves as the way that their value proposition, benefits and costs align is going out of whack. If your budgetary unit is a course, if you separate design from development from delivery, if your recovery model is based on course fees, how can you ever move into more of a performance support or community management role?
Even though there is a crisis all around us, we will see a revival of classroom and face-to-face training. It will be driven by people who are getting tired of the hyperconnected world and are trying to create “reflective retreats” away from the daily business pressures. Yes, I understand this is contrary to the point above, but we are not looking at a homogenous world!.
“Social Contextualization of Content” is a trend that will become ever more noticable in the consumer space (“How do I know whether to buy something if don’t know what my network thinks about it?”). At some point smart companies will start stepping into the opportunity space for this type of technology in the enterprise market. They do this by delivering two things: a flexible way to capture and represent the social graph of employees (preferably one that also works from an outside-in perspective), and a platform for capturing, managing and displaying meta information about all available content (because everything is starting to become URL addressable it will likely be the browser that is the point where this technology meets the end-user). I would like to develop this argument a bit further in some of my speeches this year. Get in touch if you want to help push my thinking forward.
3. Which company (other than your own) is doing interesting things in the learning space?
I could have named others, but I would like to name three (unlikely) companies here:
Mozilla, creators of the Firefox browser and shepherds of an open and free Internet are becoming more and more active in the education space. Initially driven by their mission to skill up people on all things Internet and (web)development, they are slowly increasing their scope and reach and are even proposing an alternative architecture for certifications: open badges. Not only is what they do remarkable, the way (or how) they do it is inspirational too. Imagine working for a company in which everything that you do would default to open. Mozilla applies this to their source code, but also for example to their meetings. When they come together to talk about learning, the telcon details, the agenda, the ability to join the conversation and the minutes are all openly available. Refreshing right?
StackExchange is step by step creating the ultimately way to do Question and Answer sites for one particular set of questions: the ones that could actually have a perfect answer. Their platform is contineously improving and makes use of the latest understanding of how we tick (gamification anyone?) to entice people to keep coming back, ask more questions and give more answers. If you haven’t used it already I’d urge you to go to a community that interests you and try it out. It is a real shame that they have stopped delivering te technology in a “white label” fashion, but I do appreciate their somewhat noble reasons (they only want to have successful communities).
XTeam Training is based in Israel. They are one of the many companies who have jumped on the Unity 3D bandwagon to start delivering games with a purpose that is external to the game. They are the first however that I have seen to productize their game (rather than offering their services for bespoke development to solve particular problems). Their team development/assessment game is rooted in practical experience working with teams in outdoor sports and they have come up with a few clever concepts that make sure that the people playing the multiplayer game learn certain lessons about their behaviour and the behaviour of others.
Mission Island from XTeam Training
Finally I want mention (again) the person who has given me the most insight in the last few months and somebody who I believe isn’t appreciated enough in our community of practice: Stephen Downes. If you haven’t signed up for his newsletter yet, then please do it here. Try reading it every day for at least a week. If you aren’t intellectually tickled by this particular blend of learning- (actually “living”-)related mix of philosophy and technology with free sharp commentary, then I’d rather not sit next to you at our next dinner party (and you would probably not enjoy sitting next to me either).
4. What was the best book you have read in 2011?
I read in public (although my friends at Bits of Freedom are probably right when they tell me that out of principle one should not give over your reading habits to some foreign company. To see the books I have read that I have rated with five stars, go here
One more thing
Let me finish by asking you a question: Which four questions would you like to ask learning professionals when you meet them?
