Liminal states

How can an entrepeneur planning a startup that’s going to develop some revolutionary software that relates to how people work together discover truly game-changing product and business model possibilities?  One approach is to look at a situation in a different way than everybody else.  Easier said than done, typically … unless you’re lucky enough to discover a collective blindspot in current thinking.

Scott Page’s book The Difference highlights the importance of diversity in situations like this. The way I think of it is that a non-diverse crowd will fail to explore a lot of the possibilities.  Strategically the best opportunties are likely to be in the areas that the are getting marginalized today.  So whenever I see a #diversityfail related to the “web 2.0” and mobile technology/business world, my ears perk up and I start paying attention.

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DRAFT!  Work in progress!

Update, July 9: my brother Greg of The Happy Accident had some great feedback on this draft: he didn’t know until the last paragraphs why he was reading it.  Until then, it seemed like an attack on Alex — which wasn’t at all my intention.   Why we do drafts, chapter 1023 and counting; thanks, Greg, for the feedback.   Apologies to all for any offense or misimpression.  I revised the final version of the post substantially.

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The notes from the “birds-of-a-feather” session I led at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy are written up on the CFP Wiki. Alas, we didn’t get the online aspects to work; still, we had a dozen people there in person, including Get FISA Right members Thomas Nephew and Chip Pitts. It was a great discussion. The opportunities we identified include

• building a broad, diverse coalition
• focusing on cost, dignity, and human rights issues as well as privacy and the constitution
• using anti-corporate activism against the companies supplying equipment and profiting from surveillance
• involving the technical community and domain experts

and a lot more. We also discussed some of the tactical issues about the upcoming PATRIOT Act vote: the need for an accurate vote count; a pressure campaign on key Congresspeople like Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid; and the importance of powerful visual images.

Check it out!

jon

An as-yet-unnamed potential startup company is planning to develop some revolutionary software that relates to how people work together.  One of our first steps is to set set up a research community and making some ethnographic observations — in other words, getting an understanding of how people work today.  We’re especially trying to get a diverse set of participants: not just techies, not just straight white guys, not just Microsoft-related people.

At the end of the first round of observations, we’ll provide all the participants with a summary of our findings.  And as a way of showing our appreciation, we’ll also give each participant a free copy of our first product once it’s available.

Interested in being a part of it?

To start with, we’d like to spend about half an hour on the phone with you interviewing you about your experienes related to meetings.  We’re very early on in our thinking about product lines, so it’s important for us to hear a lot of different perspectives.   We’ll also ask you to spend a couple of minutes online after the meeting: quickly double-checking our notes, filling out a quick survey, and sharing any additional thoughts.

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“I think the filters and the restrictions have been going on for so long in Iran that the experienced people are already prepared for this,” said Jon Pincus, a former Microsoft project manager and digital activist who works on projects promoting online freedom.

Iranians dodging internet censorship , Doug Gross, CNN

The OpenNet Initiative’s Cracking down on digital communication and political organizing in Iran is a good summary of the situation there, and their research report has a lot more details.  Thus far, at least, the internet is largely routing around censorship: despite severe filtering by the government, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube have played huge roles in the protests.

The Mir Hossein Mousavi میر حسین موسوی Facebook page is one important example, updated regularly with instructions and requests for help and information.  Tuesday, when the sites hosting the “guide to cyber-warfare in Iran” were going down under DDoS attacks, they sent a link to a text version of this to all the supporters.  This is a very efficient way to get credible information distributed broadly internationally, in easy-to-forward form — and even when Facebook is blocked in Iran, information can flow back into the country through whatever other channels are open.

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Another Shakacon presentation, this one from Deviant Ollam.  The short answer: fly with firearms.

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Sarah Blankinship and I are presented Securing with the Enemy: Social strategy and team of rivals at Shakacon today.  More about our talk later; this post has notes from the keynote presentation on The Art of Espionage, by Luke McOmie (aka Pyr0) of British Telecom.

Luke’s consulting includes “real world risk assessments”, which sometimes involves breaking into his clients’ companies to test their security.  So it’s a great opportunity to hear about the kinds of techniques the real bad guys use.  Fascinating stuff!

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TommyXtopher: Playboy Magazine Officially Hates Women, Conservative or Otherwise http://bit.ly/1aqcMe.* I hope other liberals join me in defending women, #tcot or not, from this crap.

jointheimpact: AT&T Latest Advertiser To Leave KRXQ Confronted By Advertisers, Media and Community … UPDATE: McDonald’s Is 10th Company to Pull KRXQ Advertising http://bit.ly/ki7vc //zomg! Amazing! (via @Andy_Marra)

nerdette: Join me in blogging this weekend against hate http://bit.ly/JqdDr We can #dobetter than use violence to change minds.

— from Twitter, June 1-5 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

In nerdette’s Don’t get mad, ORGANIZE call to action for the “We can do better” blogathon she discusses how online and offiline organizing are increasingly blurring together.  The swift reactions to Playboy’s article about hate-f***ing conservative women and KRXQ radio hosts encouraging violence against transgendered youth are two good examples of this — and both have gotten immediate results.

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Raw notes …

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“Fight for me!”
— a privacy-loving Facebook friend, wishing me luck at the conference

Here’s our opportunity to realize the promise of the Net that was so present in 1990s when CFP started.
— Deborah Pierce on the CFP blog

The program for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is outstanding even by CFP’s high standards.  The mix of technology, legal, policy, and activism perspectives is particularly strong this year, and with the new administration and Washington DC location there’s significant involvement by government employees for the first time since the 1990s.  As well as CFP regulars like Jennifer Grannick, Jim Harper, Ed Felten, Nicky Ozer, Alessandro Acquisti, Stewart Baker, and Lillie Coney, speakers incude first-timers like Marcy Wheeler, Dori Maynard, Paul Ekman, Shireen Mitchell, Rebecca Mackinnon, Nancy Scola, and Ari Melber.  Don’t take my word for it — check out the program and prepare to be impressed.

Best of all, with streaming video, the #cfp09 Twitter backchannel ,* live-blogging, and a community wiki, the conference will be more accessible onine than every before.    Kudos to Katy Nelson of the ACLU and Robert Guerra of Freedom House for taking the lead with the video streaming, and to all the volunteers of the online visibility team for all the great work on the blog, Twitter, and Facebook.  The online schedule has details, we’ll do our best to keep the web site updated regularly, and the Twitter feed will be best way to keep up what’s going on.

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Along with Deborah Pierce, Shireen Mitchell, and Ari Melber, I’m presenting n the Twittering in the trenches workshop today at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference.

If all goes well, it’ll be streamed at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cfp09 … and the Twitter hashtag is #cfp09.

Deborah’s post on the CFP blog has some background.  Check it out!

I’ll be at CFP all week … stay tuned for more.  For now, here’s the program.

Work in progress.  Feedback welcome!

Starbucks’ recent social network ad campaign is a great illustration of the kinds of dynamics I’ve been talking about in the Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists series.  In yet another example of Twitter’s buzz-creation power, the ad campaign got coverage in the NY Times and Time even before launching.  On the other hand, in Skittles and infowar I concluded that anybody engaging in Twitter-based marketing or activism should expect interference … and that’s just what happens here.

Simon Owens has a good summary on Bloggasm:

Unfortunately for Starbucks, liberal activist and filmmaker Robert Greenwald, founder of Brave New Films, came across that Times article early Tuesday morning. Greenwald, who has directed films for major studios and launched Brave New Films a few years ago, had been working for months on shooting an anti-Starbucks video that debuted on YouTube that very day. The mini-documentary features interviews with several former and current Starbucks employees and makes the argument that the company –  despite popular perception that it treats its employees well — has unfair labor practices and has aggressively fought off union organizing.

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