Going through the process I realize that this adds a lot of overhead work in order to get it right. I would love

Michael Nielsen

Collaboration for contributions sake is not very effective. Some rare examples break this rule but many more projects fail in experimentation because the incentive to take part in something isn’t correct. Such as the incentive of something that will

There needs to be incentives for collaboration that bring out the hidden. People hoard data, ideas and resources that they have that have potential value to their own advancement. They are afraid to share because of someone else getting credit.

Clay Shirky

How do groups get anything done? It’s a coordination problem.

It is about: Coordination cost – The financial cost for producing a group output. Traditional view – Create an institution that coordinates the efforts of the group, an act of exclusion.

How do we lower the coordination cost?

One way this question has been answered is that we currently can communicate much cheaper, almost free, due to digital advancements. Another way to answer is that we could put the co-operation into the infrastructure. So that the output of the group is a bi-product of how the institution is structured. Crowdsourcing (eg. Ushahidi).

Power law distribution: Appears in unconstrained institutions where people can contribute how much or little as they like. This usually shows a long-tail distribution of the total contributions by person. Meaning that about 20% of the contributors will stand for 80% of the contributions and vice versa.

Using only the left 10% in a power-law distribution model (they account for about 30% of all the content) then you are essentially an institution that has coordinated (hired) those people to do it for you. The question is not one of how much you contribute but if the contribution given is one that you are interested in – quality of quantity.

Single contribution value is unattainable from an institution. Because hiring an engineer that only has one idea in 3 years is not a good hire. Very costly.

Dean Kamen

“You Get What You Celebrate”, let’s celebrate, advocate and incentivize the right things that we are looking for.

Microsoft: “Look 5-10 years into the future and identify productivity blockers that might be addressed using technology.”

Although everything we produced and presented is under NDA I wanted to show the logo/mascot for our project. It is a service, tool, maybe a plug-in or something else (consciously ambiguous). Let me introduce you to “GloBot“.

About the Practicum…

The past two and a half quarters I have been working with Microsoft product planners Leland Hale, Scott Gordon and five other graduate students on a project to come up with the next big thing that we believe that Microsoft should invest in. It was called a Practicum and was part of a pilot program that Microsoft started at the University of Washington and Duke University.

We were chosen from a pool of many teams that applied to the position. For the application I created a team graphic and we got chosen. My team consisted of three MBA students from the Foster School of Business and three MS Information Management students (me included) from the iSchool.

Our process

We went through several stages of ideation, research, more research!, refining the concept and materializing it using slides, a written report and a final presentation at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. My part in this was doing a lot of research, writing internal reports on my findings, creating interesting visual representations of those finding, creating presentation slides and of course presenting. The work was shared by all except the visual design which was my responsibility.

Result

We ended with a very successful presentation in front of the Microsoft product planners. Discussions spun off during the Q&A around the “GloBot” and how it could be used, we ultimately cut due to time running out.

Thanks to all of my great team members who worked very hard getting this done:
Thomas Potier, Steve Brockett, Ashish Malviya, Ajay Pillay and Prashanth Ganapathyraj.

And of course Microsoft (Leland & Scott) for the opportunity to present, participate and learn how things work at Microsoft.

The exchange of ideas and talking between and across cultural and geographic borders is one of the most important aspects of a society. Without exchange and specialization we would regress in our technological advancement. The reason that a person can specialize is because all the other needs that he has are produced by and taken care of by someone else. He merely gives something in exchange for an artifact. Similarly someone else will benefit from his speciality and give to him in exchange for what he produces. It links to the concept of synergy in that parts come together and create a greater whole than the sum of those parts.

None of this can take part without a link between parts. Therefore communication needs a perspective on specialization and ask how it can increase exchange. Applying this on different fields and parts of society, from personal communication & relationships to business & economics, would surface those bridging elements.

Being able to bridge of course has to do with proximity and that is exactly what the telephone, airplanes and the internet has shrunk. We communicate across distances and overcome what before separated us.

Not anything that relays information can be a link and bridge a gap, because of inefficiencies in that element. For example, not everyone has a bridge personality. So even though others might be able to communicate well, a person who has a bridge personality actually overcomes obstacles and is able to nurture collaboration and exchange.

To correctly frame a problem for solving communication we need to see, not merely the creation of bridges for information, but successful synergy and specialization as the end goals. And then the question becomes: What is it, besides the link between parts, that enables specialization and adds value?

Inspiration for this post:

• Matt Ridley: When Ideas Have Sex
  http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html
• Bridge Personality
  http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/and-now-the-good-news/the-bridge-personality.html

Before I describe the project I want to thank all the amazing people at Microsoft Research who encouraged, helped and inspired me. I truly believe the best things are achieved together with others and where every one gets to bring something to the table. You all rock!

The purpose of the project was to suggest and envision a new way for exploring news content on the web. Initial research and development of the back-end was already underway. But what was missing was a vision for the front-end design and user experience. It was published as a challenge paper in the HCIR 2010 workshop.News Sync: Introduction

The basic idea of the web application was that news results now are shown in long lists which are hard to filter through. By the use of dynamic clustering and algorithms that find out importance based on indexing metadata and article text we could create a more compelling and new way of searching for news! If 1000 articles were returned from one search, they then got grouped (clustered) into 3-4 collections of articles that ‘belonged’ together. This enabled the user to further pick on group of articles to search on and then zoom in and out of the content in that group using filters on date, keywords and place.

Process

Here follows a quick run through the process. Except for some white boarding, icons (by UX DesignLead Jim St. George) and the sparkline code I was responsible for the creation of all deliverables below.

It started out with near daily meetings as we brainstormed, sketched and iterated upon ideas. One lesson learned here was the more I prepare for presenting my visual vision the less time is have to spend later describing misunderstandings (Tip: Don’t overuse “scribble lines”).

They want us to imagine what has not been imagined yet and create a solid case for the feasibility of  whatever vision we get. The deliverable is an in-depth analysis of market opportunities and efficiency inhibitors together with recommendations for what we envision can be accomplished in those areas. The team comprises of 3 MBA students together with 3 MSIM students. We all have different areas of expertise but wanted to present this in a different way than simply writing it down. So we did some brainstorming and came up with a visual representation. We were thinking of pillars representing each person and of pie-charts. Our first few ideas:

Being on a tight timeline for getting this done – within the day. A pie-chart is ultimately not correct since it percentages/ratios between certain areas. We wanted to represent a team. I created a first draft of what it could look like based one of the visions above. But, the team somewhat liked the idea but wanted it to be more personal so we sketched over this with an idea of having pictures:

The next iteration looked better and I proceeded to created the final product.

Whether it is a business meeting, planning what to do with your evening or designing artifacts, we need to, in the words of Bill Buxton, get the right design first and worry about getting the design right after.

There are so many different takes on this same problem. Probably the most famous is “fail early to succeed sooner” – IDEO. Another one is that the whole reason why brainstorming is a method considered to add value is that it helps us getting all ideas and notions on the table.

It seems that even when we know all of these things we need to consciously create an environment that encourages many ideas at an early stage. Because from experience it seems to me that we don’t do this naturally. Or perhaps it is not a question of what is natural but that the social context (culture) of our meetings, projects and work simply has to much fear that it inhibits our ability to be ok with being wrong.

Fear is the one thing that simply cannot be allowed to grow in a group. Any type of fear for other people or the fear that ones own ideas/suggestions are not up par, is harmful. First attempts usually suck. Another famous example here is how it took Edison thousands of tries before he got the light bulb working. So how do we keep the balance of coming up with many ideas, which increases our chances of getting the right idea, while working hard enough on an idea to get it right?

I believe in the end that we need to accept failures. First off, in our initial ideas and second in our attempts to realize which ever idea we choose to implement.

And to accept failure means to overcome fear.

“Anything you learn about technical development will need to be updated, the reason why I still am active is because years ago I learnt something that stays the same. Understanding people –  it will never change, what you learn today you will be able to use at anytime time in future also.”

- Bill Buxton

During my internship with Microsoft Research in Redmond I got the privilige of talking to Bill Buxton, I showed him my work and we chatted a bit. Amongst many things that were good he pointed out the above statement was one thing he said right before we were done.

Based on that and a question I asked at UXExchange I have started to learn more about cognitive psychology, visual perception, etc. One of the resources I found were Mental Notes, created by Stephen Anderson: (in his own words)

“Mental Notes brings together 50 insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications.“

Although I haven’t mustered up the cash for one of these lovely decks there is a sample PDF with seven sample cards that I printed out and have studied so far. The way in which these insights have been created are really nice and they will no doubt be a good tool for team projects and brainstorm/ideation sessions. A must have!

We should react because it matters, not because it hurts.

You have probably heard the expression “Kill your darling“. If you haven’t just imagine any idea/design/code/work that you have done. Now someone comes along and points out, rightfully so, that whatever we made isn’t good and needs to go. This hurts a little but has to happen – kill your darling.

Now I had this happen to me not to long ago when I had created a document that I took to someone who was going to add their things into that same document. Sitting besides her I watched as she probably took out 70-80% of what I had taken time to create.

Now you might think – who is this delete-happy person? Well actually she is really nice and awesome at her job so I just let her do it. But when she took away something that mattered I politely asked her to back-up and take an extra look  at it. And it stayed.

To read another good post on killing your darlings go over to Tereza Brazen’s post at Adaptive Path.

So why am I writing about this?

Because I noticed that everytime she took something away that I had spent time on – it was a little painful. But how much pain is involved isn’t the metric that should trigger our response. But rather how much it impacted on the value of the overall document. Did it get better or worse?