The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

One debate that has come up since the earliest days of proselytizing the TeleInterActive Lifestyle has been whether or not having remote access, and especially mobile and wireless access to your business and personal data, adds to or detracts from your effectiveness in either personal or business situations. Our contention has always been that it's a matter of focus.

As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing. The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink. They are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad's shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents' obsession with their gadgets. Bob Ledbetter III, a third-grader in Rome, Ga., says he tries to tell his father to put the BlackBerry down, but can't even get his attention. "Sometimes I think he's deaf," says the 9-year-old.
-- from The Wall Street Journal Online, BlackBerry Orphans, by Katherine Rosman, 2006 December 8; Page W1

Good Morning, Silicon Valley picked up on this WSJ article too...

Of course, for a while at the Balsillie home, Jim was being told to park his BlackBerry at the door when he came home. And of course, he snuck it in. Adults -- what are you gonna do with 'em?
-- from GMSV, C'mon, Mom, I know you're texting in there and I really need to go by John Murrell on 2006 December 8

The opposite is also true. I know 5 year olds who can't imagine not being able to contact their parent at any time during the business day via mobile phone, IM, or email. And the ability to order a meal to be picked-up on the way home from, well, wherever, has no doubt saved many a middle-class family from starvation.

One friend of mine is very much opposed to allowing work into her home after hours - but to meet those long deadlines, she'll be at the work place for 12, 14 or even more hours a day, balancing that with taking afternoons off for soccer games. Which balance works better: longer away but fuller attention, or partial attention in each place?

Since the beginning of this blog, the image that we've tried to evoke is that of pre-industrial age community living. You might be sitting around the fire, listening to a story being told by your child, while mending a leather harness. The problem with this image as an analogy for modern work practices is the level of the brain's involvement. You might be able to divide your attention between something that requires dexterity and even attention to detail, but doesn't require understanding words. But try to read something and listen to someone speak... it doesn't work as well.

As we've said before, thank the designers of all these wonderful devices that they remembered to include the off switch.

Hmmm...

IASC is an association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively. Many will refer to such resources and their systems of usage as "commons".
from "International Journal of Commons" posted in Open

who got it from Peter Suber's Open Access News posting.

Ah, but there seems to be some confusion, for if you go to the organization's web site, you'll see it's IASCP not IASC.

The International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), founded in 1989, is a nonprofit Association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively by communities in developing or developed countries.

IASCP's goals are:

• to encourage exchange of knowledge among diverse disciplines, areas, and resource types
• to foster mutual exchange of scholarship and practical experience
• to promote appropriate institutional design

from IASCP web site

Until you go further into their site, and find the first quote.

I wonder if this possible name confusion will lead to us getting a spate of requests for information about Common Property and the new International Journal of the Commons, as we keep getting requests for information on Aloe Vera farming after an newspaper in India listed the international Aloe Science Council's web site as iasc.COM rather than its true iasc.ORG?

Putting all that aside, the fortchcoming International Journal of the Commons looks to be an important contribution for governments and institutions concerned with the governance of natural resources that are [or should be] held as common property. I'm sure that those involved with open source, copyright, DRM, digital lifestyle aggregators, social networks and similar intellectual property and data-types natural resources will be able to learn from the lessons of other types of common property that will be taught in this journal.

Some time ago, we tried Volantis Mobilizer, a service that purports to take any web site and present for better viewing on small mobile devices. It didn't work with our dynamically generated, PHP on the one hand, CSS on the other, sites. So, we forgot about it.

For a few weeks now, every day, we get an email with the subject "[Volantis Mobilizer] Sites to be removed (first warning)" and the body claims that our site "will be removed after 2006 Sep 12".

Since there isn't a support link on your site, if you should see this, please STOP sending the endless "first notices".

Thanks in advance.

At tonight's PMI meeting, the main presentation involved customizing and deploying project management methodologies within an organization. One of Leon Herszon's key points for the Model of the Unified Project Management Methodology was that a modern PM methodology needed to be web-enabled. Discussing this point with the speaker made it clear that this was a read-only web portal/intranet and that the benefits of the read-write web such as blogs, wikis and forums, or of Web2.0 technologies weren't recognized.

A post-meeting discussion with a PM who was having problems with communication among distributed workgroups and stakeholders through muliple time zones was very interesting in light of the previous observation. Some points from that discussion:

• synchronous communication, whether voice [teleconference], video or text either inconvenienced or left out one group or another
• attempts at asynchronous voice/video communication using recordings of teleconferences didn't work well, and even where the capability was given to record feedback, the results were inconsistent and could led to further isolation of some groups
• recordings of teleconferences are difficult to track, the thread of the conversation is easily lost, and current search tools aren't effective
• in our experience asynchronous text communications such as building support through blogs, developing documentation through wikis, and providing support and conversations through forums overcame all of the above difficulties
• collaboration and online PM tools such as ServiceCycle and dotProject enhanced access and communication for all users
• building information communities [as discussed with Rick Mortensen, CEO of MARVELit in an upcoming Mer^ienda podcast] using portlets and dashboards might streamline communication and effectiveness among distributed workgroups even more
• MMORPGs can replace interpersonal team building boon dogles to make everyone feel included, so what if you're a high elf instead of a Malibu racer - maybe Second Life could help even more
• Open Source Solutions, such as those linked herein and others can allow an organization to quickly and cost effectively prototype business processes and supporting tools, i.e. methodologies, to solve remote, asynchronous communication challenges

As I've been up since 5 this morning, so if the above isn't that coherent, well... We can discuss it later. And for anything not linked, like phpBB, there's always Google.

At NoFoo, I met Bud Ozborn, where we discussed many cool things overlooking a great view. As we were leaving, we agreed to meet again to discuss identity and digital presence. Clarise, Bud and I got together yesterday, starting with morning coffee, through lunch, and into afternoon tea time. It was a great conversation, and Bud pointed us in some directions we hadn't gone before, even within areas with which we're quite familiar:

• loggr
• Scheduling versus workflow
• Language Action Perspective - Terry Winograd
• Zen Body-Being by Peter Ralston
• Open Source BI and Microsoft's advances in BI
• Pros, cons, uses, differences and similarities of Web services, SOA, SOAP, RDF, RSSv1, RSSv2, OPML and Atom
• RSSbus

It was a wondrous day, with great majestic [read foggy] views at Caffè Luca in Montara, and sunny ones at HMB Brewery in Princeton Harbor. Thank you, Bud and Clarise for a marveydoodle conversation. Robert, thanks for introducing us. Bud, I hope you find hosting soon. Dang, I was having so much fun that I forgot to make a pitch on hosting with us.