NetDynam 2.0

Interest in collaborative technologies gets a rocket pack?

Join Federal Computer Week and Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for an informative eSeminar:

Cross-agency collaboration

Federal Computer Week will present an eSeminar with Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an eSeminar at 11 a.m. Wed., Oct. 28, where she will discuss how technology can be used to increase innovation and collaboration within government agencies.

In the past few months, the government has accelerated its adoption of Web 2.0 tools. Much emphasis has been given to public-facing blogs, but government agencies are equally focused on enhancing their internal communications. While security concerns remain a barrier to adoption, several agencies have embraced collaboration tools, tapping the ideas and insights of their workforce and creating new spaces for dialogue and engagement.

This presentation will address:

– Tools and technologies currently being used;
– The importance of providing access to common platforms across the agency;
– The role of culture and change-management in fostering collaboration;
– How to find ways to engage the public and facilitate an open exchange of ideas;
– Barriers to collaboration – including security concerns – and best-practices for overcoming them; and
– Creative solutions that NASA has employed – such as holding meetings in SecondLife – to explore the future of collaboration.

Following the presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. The entire eSeminar will be made available in an online archive.

As Frank points out elsewhere, this is coming a little late to the party…

Let’s hope that change-management can engage the culture securely. But is holding meetings in SecondLife a “solution” or an experiment? I guess we’ll have to tune in to find out…

Extracting meaning and coherence from diverse streams of information on noisy channels is a challenge that has been examined in detail.

Heuer emphasizes both the value and the dangers of mental models, or mind-sets. In the book’s opening chapter, entitled “Thinking About Thinking,” he notes that:

[Analysts] construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

This process may be visualized as perceiving the world through a lens or screen that channels and focuses and thereby may distort the images that are seen.  To achieve the clearest possible image . . . analysts need more than information . . . They also need to understand the lenses through which this information passes. These lenses are known by many terms— mental models, mind-sets, biases, or analytic assumptions.

In essence, Heuer sees reliance on mental models to simplify and interpret reality as an unavoidable conceptual mechanism for intelligence analysts—often useful, but at times hazardous. What is required of analysts, in his view, is a commitment to challenge, refine, and challenge again their own working mental models, precisely because these steps are central to sound interpretation of complex and ambiguous issues.

This quote is from the introduction to the  book “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” by Richards J. Heuer, Jr.,  available in it’s entirety from the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence Library.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jill Nemiro was recently interviewed by Vern Burkhardt on the topic of  “Virtual Teams” for IdeaConnection.com, a virtual worker’s marketplace.

Dr. Nemiro is the author of “Creativity in Virtual Teams: Key Components for Success”, and “The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams”, and co-editor of “The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook”.  She is also Assistant Professor in Psychology and Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research interests are in organizational team creativity, and the virtual workplace.

She offers several insights in the following excerpt:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just because we have friends in Turkey, what could possibly be gained by strangling a manatee? Perhaps an investigation would be in order.

Scandal, intrigue, covert social networks and automated keyphrase analysis all presented by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show with a delicious sense of irony.

Your Government Not at Work – Jane Harman Scandal

thedailyshow.com

This conversation doesn’t exist.

In reflecting on the Web 3.0 presentation by Kevin Kelly mentioned by Frank and the posting of the Hans Rosling presentation (courtesy of eldon) on data as visualized by his (then) new software, I came across this presentation by Tim Berners-Lee at this years TED discussing “The Next Web”:



Together, the three presentations focus our attention on where the web has been, where it is today, and where current development efforts around the world look to take it.

But it is the very pace of change that seems to overwhelm any individual effort to come to terms with it, resulting in what Michael Wesch has called Context Collapse.   The emergence of participatory culture as documented in his “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” is an organic response, a humanizing response, to the crisis of individual significance.



This signaling of the changing nature of the web and the tools it puts at each of our fingertips coalesces into a larger picture – the ecosocial environment in which we find ourselves, in which we carry on our discourse, and ultimately, in which to acknowledge the group impetus to carpe diem.

This is why I consider Hoon’s posting of the excerpt from Paul Thibault’s book  Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Body particularly significant in understanding what links the various individual efforts comprising this eclectic NetDynam group.

drawing inspiration from Theo Jansen as I work…

Read the rest of this entry »

hoon, this one’s for you:



“go on – you’ll be amazed!”

kudos to kutiman and thru-you.com for the incredible mashup.

(and thanks to my friend Costas for finding this video.
check out what he’s been up to!)