Calm Technology at the Center for Civic Media on May 12, 2016

I’ll be speaking at the MIT Center for Civic Media this May! The speech will be a lunch talk on Thursday May 12th, 2016. It will be in Building E15 room 334.

When and Where

• Thursday, May 12, 2016 – 12:00pm

• MIT Building E15 room 344

About Civic Media

The Center for Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. It represents a group of diverse people and inventors of new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action. The center coordinates community-based design processes locally and internationally. More about MIT Center of Civic Media.

RSVP

You can RSVP for the talk here! The talk is open to more than MIT students and lab members. Please RSVP 24 hours in advance to ensure you’ll be able to get lunch.

Photo of MIT Media Lab by the Knight Foundation.

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On the Problems of Human Scaling

It's 2013. I'm employed full time at Esri. I've given more than a hundred industry talks. That's a lot of new people. Far more people than I grew up with (I had a very small family and no siblings). One issue that's happening is the number of people who want to "have a coffee".

I get at least 5 E-mails for coffee a day (coffee also being a stand-in for lunch, dinner, breakfast, coffee, drinks, virtual calls, conference speaking or chatting on the phone). I call this:

The "Let's Have Coffee" problem.

I'm only one person, and one person can't meet with everyone. It doesn't feel great, because meeting lots of new people feels like an obligation instead of something exciting. The number of inquires might scale, but I can't. Once I tried responding to someone that I had too many coffee interests, to which they sarcastically replied, "look who is popular!" with a snide remark. It's something I'm still trying to figure out.

This is an attempt at examining the core issues involved in this problem.

Calculating the Hidden Costs of a Coffee Meeting

One coffee appointment is not actually 30-60 minutes long. The coffee appointment is actually made up of a number of hidden time sinks, outlined as follows:

• 45 min to 1 hour for the actual duration of the coffee time

• 15-30 minutes of transport time (assuming an average meeting is 15 minutes away from your default location.

• 30 minutes to an hour over 1 day to 2 months to actually nail down the coffee appointment time between two people.

• 15-30 minutes of uncertainty per appointment. Someone may arrive early or late. Someone may need to cancel.

• 15-30 minutes writing up information gathered during the coffee meeting, writing intros or following up with the new contact.

• The entire process over again if someone is late or cancels.

A single 45 minute coffee meeting = 180 min of transit, planning and communication over an average of 1-2 weeks

Muliply this by 5 and you can begin to see that merley scheduling and transporting oneself to coffee appointments alone would result in an average of over 10 hours per day.

If I took all of the coffee requests in my inbox, I'd have a 70 hour a week job. I would have no time for anything else, especially digesting and writing up any information I received during said coffee appointments. Furthermore, a lot of these coffee appointments want connections to someone I'm connected to, and there's post-processing after these meetings.

If a coffee meeting is successful, the parties might request an additional meeting. This would add a multiplier onto the initial coffee appointment with each person.

Assuming 3/5ths of coffee appointments warranted future meetings and additional social maintenance, the demands on me for future appointments in a single year would outweigh the span of my lifetime.

The problem is that I feel rude to decline coffee requests. I'd like to have the time. There's nothing more enjoyable for me than to meet new and interesting people and help them work on what they need help with. It's not sustainable. I want to connect well. But I'm one person. A single individual is not scalable.

Coffee Appointments Don't Scale

The one-to-many (maybe one-too-many) social situation is a curious one to optimize. As a simple human, I don't scale very well. An event allows people to scale socially, so having many people meet in one place for an hour or two vs. one meeting at a time allows for a feasible meeting opportunity. I'm also just one person. I have limited knowledge that's easily used up. The more people involved in a social setting, the more easily I can connect people to each other, not myself.

So What Do Coffee Meetings Accomplish?

In a business-related coffee meeting, the person requesting the coffee meeting is usually looking for advice, introductions/connections, picking one's brain (although this always sounds to be like picking one's nose), or just getting to know someone.

The most successful meetings have resulted in me introducing the coffee requester to the person they actually wanted to meet in the first place.

Why not bring all of those people together in the same room? Why not invite them all to dinner or a private/public networking event? Why not collide communities together?

I realized my most successful networking with people was when I rented a studio in Chinatown, Portland. I had events every few weeks at the tiny studio and invited people in my network. Dozens of people met each other through having a place to meet, and I didn't have to do much but introduce them! A lot of them went on to build interesting and successful projects.

Conferences and Networking Events Do

My general solution to all of this is simply to visit conferences or hold networking events where I can meet many people at once, and then give a speech at the conference. Giving a speech is the easiest way to meet everyone in a room.

In essence, I never have free time until I am at a social tech event. At social events my purpose is clearly defined as one of socialization. I often conserve a lot of energy for these events because they're a more efficient use of energy.

Ways to Transform the Coffee Appointment

1. Invite the individual to a group dinner

You can collect interest people over time and invite them to smaller dinners that happen every few weeks. Brewster Kahale has a standing dinner at his house every week for the past 16 years. Different people each time, and he has a massive network this way.

I've been looking to organize dinners with people in the future, because there's a lot of coffee appointments and it often takes longer to schedule a coffee meeting than it does to actually spend the time talking at coffee! The dinners bring together interesting people that should be meeting each other anyway.

Chances are if we met up, I'd be trying to get you to meet half of them anyway, resulting in another set of coffee scheduling! Mind if I add your name to the list of invites to the next dinner events? They will be in a small room with a curated set of awesome people who think and do exciting things. Would love to have you there! Just let me know, and I'll invite you to the next one!

2. Host a BCC Party!

Invite a bunch of people to a private event where none of them know they exist.

Where did the idea for a BCC party come from? The story I heard is that it came from some folks at Google. The invite was pretty simple - the three hosts sent out an email blast to all their friends, putting everyone in the BCC line. They called their mixer a BCC Party.

I went to a great one in Portland recently that included about 50% awesome people I knew but didn't have the time to catch up with on a regular basis, and 50% people I had never met before but were vetted by the group that put it together.

3. Invite the individual to a public networking event.

Know of an event they'd like, or one you'll be going to in the future? Invite them! It makes it easier to get the conversation started.

4. See if you'll be in the sample place in the future

SXSW, XOXO and other places may have people you know already. Dopplr was the best way to see when other people would be traveling to the same place in the future.

5. Organize an Industry Networking Event

If you don't have one, organize one! Use a public bar and having a standing meeting every week. Portland's widly successful Beer and Blog event started this way. It grew from four people on laptops to over 150 people a week at it's apex. I was introduced to my co-founder there, and it's where I directed anyone to go when I got the coffee emails.

6. Forward the person to someone else

This isn't always the best idea, as half the emails I get come from people who don't have time for coffee so forward someone onto coffee for me.

7. Give them your phone number and tell them to call you

Chances are they won't, but if they do you can always limit the call to 15 min and get right down to the point. Sometimes you'll end up surprised and talk for hours. Either way it doesn't involve scheduling, driving or viking, picking a place to meet, waiting if someone is late, ect.

8. Go on a hike or walk with them

Take walking meetings is a great way to enjoy nature while talking about complex ideas.

9. Host an open office hours.

This is what some professors do. They schedule all of them in the same day and have people sign up on a Google Spreadsheet.

10. Charge for the time

    
    

A lot of my recently coffee meetings have started with "I'm here to pick your brain". All this after I've spent half an hour driving or biking across town to a coffeeshop that is out out my way.

Most of the time, the person meeting me is late, and they don't even offer to buy a coffee. There isn't much more than a hi (usually not even a handshake or a "sorry I'm late" or a "thanks for meeting me here"). The next hour is a "brain picking" that feels like an extraction, and none of the advice is followed up on. I've been working on a way to figure out when a meeting is going to become one of these. It doesn't feel like I'm even being treated as a person in this case. It's just an, "I'm here to extract as much of your life force as possible in order to further my own interests". None of these kinds of meetings end with a "thank you".

These are the kinds of meetings that could be done virtually, with a payment up front. Accumulating experience takes a long time. Giving it away to someone whenever they ask feels cheap. I'm learning to do this better.

Some of these same folks have then used this opening to ask for (months later) me to write a recommendation letter for their son or daughter to get into college (writing a letter for someone I've never met). And there is a fair bit of pushback if I say, "I don't feel comfortable writing a letter for someone i do not strongly know the character of". I've been called selfish. This kind of interaction set really made want to write a post that investigates why

Don't reject the idea of coffee altogether

There are some times when coffee is good. Sometimes coffee is great. You just want to make sure you save the coffee meetings for the really wonderful people.

When to take a coffee meeting:

Often coffee people want advice or support, or want a connection. Sometimes you're just in the way of that connection. Why not find out what they want up front and adjust accordingly? This doesn't count for epic discussions about interesting things, or meeting of the minds.

When the invite somes from someone referred to you from strong, close connections (by close, I mean, people that know you well and are non-extractive). I met my current co-founder when he wrote me a very level-headed email with unique and interesting questions about how I approadhed the world. I had him meet me for coffee across the street from my apartment at a very early hour, and not only did he show up, but he was on time.

Update: Since I posted this, I had some of my mentors, as well as some famous-ish writers and media people tell me that not everyone needs a response to an email. Famous people get emailed all of the time. There isn't an expected response. I'm still feeling that I'm not famous, and that I owe the people emailing me something, although I'm hoping it will become more clear over time how I can gracefully accept, decline, or ignore requests on my time.

Conclusions

If you send me an email and I don't respond, I greatly apologize. Hopefully this is enough of an explanation of my behaviors and physical limitations as a human being.

Mobile Communities and New Technologies | An Urban Grind Tweetup

Urban Grind North West is, I think, the predominate manufacturer of Twitter synchronicities in PDX” - Jeremy Wilkin, via Twitter.

An amazing discussion happened today between a number of Tweeple, namely Gabriel (@sirgabe) and @jerwilkins of Tinderbox Creative. Of course, @brampitoyo was there, and @donpdonp & @pdxflaneur also stopped by. Also, @xtalwiese was there for a bit (but had to leave for Psychology class in the middle).

I wish I could have typed more about what was said during this encounter, but it was too loud at Urban Grind to use a tape recorder. The following is a brief recap.

A Discussion Begins

The conversation started with various subjects, business cards were exchanged, and favorite websites were visited and recommended. But quickly the conversation turned towards the future of technology. A bit of Cyborg Anthropology was discussed (as @jerwilkins knows a classmate of mine who took Cyborg Anthropology a year before me), which morphed into a discussion of the new physical and sensory boundaries Internet access has given humans.

Amber: With a cell phone, the capability of your ear has been expanded thousands of miles. With a computer, your hands can take you to Japan and back in seconds. With the profiles you’ve created, you can literally be in 400 places at once, while others interact with the pieces of yourself you’ve saved different times and spaces.

Bram: What is that called? Omniscience.

Amber: Omniscience, Omnipotence. There is such a great extension of the self/senses occurring!

A Short History of the Telephone

Amber: There was a lot of controversy when the first phone came out. Some people couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that one would enjoy going into a closed room to talk at the walls. To disembody a voice, the essence of one’s character, and pipe it through a device, seemed literally insane!

Then came the cordless telephone. There’s a story behind this one. Innovation comes in amusing ways.

I met the grandson of the inventor of the cordless telephone at an SEO conference in February. He told me that his grandfather was sitting in a comfortable chair while watching television when the phone rang.

He said that he didn’t want to make the effort to get up and answer it. (In reality, he was a WWII veteran and had lower back pains from his time in the military).

George Sweigert actually used a part from his washing machine for the invention, and in doing so created the cordless telephone to releive the efforts of the handicapped (more on this on the Wikipedia article on George Sweigert).

And with the arrival of the mobile phone on the scene, speech suddenly became mobile. The ability to talk in virtually any segment of time and space became available (provided reception existed).

The Rise of Mobile Communities

And now, communities are also becoming untethered from time and space. As time and space compress, so does the amount of space it takes to represent community. People are coming back into social interaction from the formerly fragmented, private world of the suburbs. The current economy simply cannot withstand the amount of luxury and waste an expanded and separated social reality takes to run smoothly.

I was reading a book at the Library of Congress on Urban Development that had a diagram of the back and forth flows a city makes when it expands to suburbs and then contracts back into itself. It’s a natural cycle, and we’re seeing a move back in with the help of mobile technologies and mobile communities.

Twitter, is like having a mobile social group on hand at all times. Little friends in the palm of your hand or on your screen. An entire community that goes with you, wherever you are. A lot of people can Tweet with friends and family and stay connected across vast distances while at conferences. Formerly the speed of E-mail and Letters did not afford a level of real-time response that signifies belonging to a community.

Technology as a Mediating Vector

Jeremy: Technology I’m curious about the effects of these mediating vectors.The cell phone instantly appearing, and then the fact that suddenly every has this amnesia about living before the cell phone’s existence.

The Emotive Epoch

Gabriel brought up the concept of the “Emotive Epoch”.

“Have you heard of it?” he asked us. “It’s a set of Emotional Hotkeys. You can send hot keys to any sort of emotional brain signal you sent out. You can use these to control games.”

Amber: Cool, so if you get really angry in Photoshop, a new file could be created!

Gabriel: (laughs) Yeah, it might be a little tricky for applications that aren’t games.

Jeremy: Using EEG readings and biofeedback mechanisms as interfaces is really starting to blur physical and mental boundaries.

Gabriel: There’s also The Audeo. It’s a voice box for people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease that helps people create queries via thought and then spits them back out as text to speech.

In the tests, they had people thinking a question in their minds, and then getting the feedback as text to speech in their headphones.

It’s incredible. Imagine thinking a search query to Google and then getting the response back in speech.

Jeremy: Yeah, (pauses) …”thanks Wikipedia!”

Amber: It’s interesting that these technologies are emerging because of a human pain. The fact that there is now a lot of money pouring into charities that support research to eliminate/solve human pain and suffering.

Jeremy: It’s kind of like Buddhism, really. Suffering is almost a vehicle of expansion.

In the beginning we start with the idea that something is inherently something that it should not be, and we ask ourselves, “how do we make it something that should be?

That plays really well into the hands of technology.

Amber: And in the Tao, there’s the concept of oneness and wholeness. Humans have always had this idea that they are separate from others, especially in suburban areas, where space is privatized, and personal vehicles abound. And there’s the moment when a child first recognizes the image in the mirror as a reflection, or an ‘other’, or of the mother as ‘other’.

Jeremy: The concept of ‘I’, instead of the idea that we’re all just extensions of this same basic thing.

The saddest thing is the words I, Me, Mine, like “this is the space that is me”.

Gabriel: There’s this norm that exists in identifying things by boundaries, but the box is just in our minds and we don’t realize that this box is inside out.

Jeremy: I think transcendence is about dissolving this box.

Gabriel: Then perhaps technology is a vehicle — we persue transcendence through technology.

Amber: What we’re experiencing right now is like a replica of the industrial revolution. The beginning of the 20th century saw massive amount of patent filings and new technological developments. It also saw the carving up of minor roads and the construction of massive buildings and highways.

Today we’re seeing all sorts of patents are being filed, but they’re being filed for ideas — for intellectual property. All sorts of new roads and buildings are being built, but they’re being built online. The difference is that tearing up a highway to make a redirect in the past cost millions of dollars and many months.

Now the time and space it takes to reroute traffic can be done by the simple implementation of a 301 Redirect, and this probably takes the relative equivalent of $20 of time and skill to pull off.

Jeremy: So then these redirects are protocols — symbolic protocols, of a more literal construction of highways. Data highways.

Amber: Yes. We’re becoming a more organic society as this happens. Traffic can adapt to changing conditions, and roads can change to accommodate new locations. The shape of space makes users move, and the direction and number of users shape space.

Sociologist Emelie Durkheim said that as a society matures, the whole of it changes from a mechanical state to an organic one. Things begin to flow more smoothly.

Cell Phones as Biological Cells

Amber: A cell in the human body has a phospholipid bilayer that keeps things out while keeping the important cellular organelles within its center. At the core lies the DNA of the cell, while the more temporary RNA that the cell uses to duplicate information has more mobility, especially in times of the protein manufacturing that goes on inside the cell.

In computing, the DNA is equivalent to hard drive memory, and the RNA the Random

Access Memory, as RAM is more temporary memory. But there’s also the channel protein, which lets information in and out of a cell (on a cell phone this would be the imput keys), and the identification protein, which allows the ID of the cell phone to relay to cell phone towers. So cell phones really function like cells. The macro and the micro are self similar. We’re a self-similar universe.

Jeremy: Everything is based on organic data. Lots of machines are based on things that only animals can do. Airplanes, helicopters, ect.

A Brief Note on E-mail and Twitter

Amber: In biochemistry, chemical reactions are helped along by catalyst. It takes a certian amount of activation energy for a chemical reaction to occur, and if there is not enough activation energy, the reactor halts and never happens.

The activation energy to author an E-mail is often higher for the user than a short tweet in Twitter, and thus a user, once acclimatized to the Tweet-space, will find that the profile to interaction ratio is higher than one’s E-mail list. The reduction of time and space that exists in the world of Twitter acts as a catalyst for greater communication.

Greater communication leads to smoother and more enjoyable conversations in real time and space, as Twitter members are used to conversing quickly about a number of things. Bram Pitoyo and I also noticed that everyone we meet from Twitter is highly involved with a particular interest, be it a company or a project or talent.

15 Megabytes of Fame

One of my coworkers told me that social media was no longer about having 15 minutes of fame, but having 15 megabytes of fame. And those 15 megabytes can be unevenly distributed across many sites and times.

Next time there will be a better portrait of the discussion. I am slowly practicing towards an adequate representation of events.