Endless Knots

Were you in NETWORKING? Please pass along

In 1982, Doubleday published Networking: The First Report and Directory, Jeff's and my first book.

The story of how that book came to market someday will, or rather, should appear in the annals of publishing -- first publisher (Methuen, a British publisher aiming to break into the US market) shelved its whole list just after we'd submitted manuscript; Doubleday picked it up, offering more than twice the original advance (great agent at time, Ron Bernstein); we got the contract to do the electronic typsetting, making it the first commercial book to be electronically typeset under auspices of the authors, never having been retyped by its publisher; translated into Japanese by that country's Economic Planning Agency, and on and on -- but alas this post is about the treasure hunt that we're launching here today.

Networking was, as its subtitle says, a "report" on 1600 grassroots and nonprofit networks focused on the seven topics listed on the cover, along with a directory of those networks.

Within the book was everything from the theory and practice of networks -- with a chapter-long essay devoted to each topic -- to the directory itself, organized in various ways -- by organization name, by location, by keyword, and by title of the network's publications.

Those listed range from The Sun Magazine to World Future Society to Franz Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Group (now Practical Action) to Tilth to Aspen Institute to CoEvolution Quarterly to Dr. Dobb's Journal to the National Center for Citizen Involvement, now the Open Library (where our two earliest books, including this one are listed) and Boston Women's Health Book Collective, now Our Bodies, Ourselves, to which we devoted a chapter of its own because of its unique networking skills. The fact that it's still going after nearly forty years makes the point.

We did all the research via networking, beginning with one letter (as in type it, sign it, put it in an envelope, attach a stamp, go to the post office - remember that?) that we sent to one person whom we knew to be a richly connected networker, who suggested nine others, whom we wrote to, who in turn sent us other suggestions -- and within 18 months, we'd received the names of 50,000 "networks" around the world. We wrote to 4000 of them and got back an astonishing 40% response rate - 1600 letters, packages, publications, descriptions, many with heartfelt expressions of why their leaders networked and how they did it. Incredible experience, to say the least. No Internet. Limited email (a little because a few of us pioneers were already online). Need I say: No web, no listservs, and, of course, no Google, Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook. Just the poor postman, who left a trail of whiskey nips along our sidewalk.

So now it's 2009, more than a quarter-century later and we're wondering how many of those networks have survived (I chose the ones above that I could google). Why now? Not just idle curiosity but intense awareness that there are similarities between the early 1980s and today. Principal among them unemployment, as per Paul O. Flaim's, "Unemployment in 1982: the cost to workers and their families:"

The economy entered 1982 in a severe recession and labor market conditions deteriorated throughout the year. The unemployment rate, already high by historical standards at the onset of the recession in mid-1981, reached 10.8 percent at the end of 1982, higher than at any time in post-World War II history.

A few other interesting stats from then: the Dow was, get ready, 776 in August of that year, down 30% from its high of 1011 five years earlier. And, the drop in exports and spending just announced is mere fractions shy of "the 6.4 percent rate drop seen in the first quarter of 1982, when the economy was in a recession that lasted 16 months," according to Lucia Mutukani's "US economy weakens," in the Feb 29, 2009, Boston Globe.

Clearly, we made it through that tough time, not purely because of networking, of course (I'm not that much of a romantic), but in part because people got together and figured out some things they could do themselves. We're interested in how those networks have survived and intend to include them in the new bit of writing we're engaged in, details to come.

So would you please pass this note along to anyone you know who might have been in the book? When we have a spare minute (ha!), we'll scan the whole list and begin publishing that. Thanks in advance! And, Networking networkers, please post comments here.

Telecommute up, says Geek Doc

John Halamka, the vegan-rock-climbing smart-beyond-words if-it-makes-sense-I'll-try-it CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (and Harvard Medical School to be precise) has a great report on his telecommuting initiatives. It's so good that I'm stealing most of it. Execs, telecommute up! Saves carbon, money, time, and releases the emission most treasured by those in charge, productivity. And, friends, John's up for "The 2008 Medical Weblog Awards Sponsored by Epocrates: Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog Category" - I just voted for him. You can too (hint):

Some staff members are working from home on a full-time basis and others are doing so only one or two days a week. We have about 10-15% of the IT workforce (35 of our 350 staff) who work at home on any given day.

What is the impact? 35 people x 260 workdays = 9,100 days per year saved in commuting. That's 9,100 car-days off the road. This reduces the demand for parking, office space, and most importantly the employee stress/strain of fighting traffic.

From a management perspective, the past year has been very successful. Employee turnover is at 2%, employee satisfaction is high, and productivity has improved. Employees spend 2-3 hours a day working instead of preparing for their workday, commuting, and returning home.

Costs of the technology to empower home workers has been low - a partial subsidy of home internet connections, a fixed amount of prepaid cell phone time added to employee paychecks, and the use of the Juniper SSLVPN for secure remote access/desktop sharing.

"Not-so-lonely planet"

Oliver Morton, author of Mapping Mars and Eating the Sun and features editor for the journal Nature, has a brilliant piece about our extraordinary little orb, where it fits in the history of the universe, and how to draw a line between the durability of life here and global warming. Very few authors are capable of this kind of range, this manner of huge thinking, and this unusual insight. Read his NY Times op-ed, "Not-so-lonely planet," and you'll feel much better about everything.

Knights and Dames of the round table

This appears to be it, with nominations today of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Illinois) for Secretary of Transportation and Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) as Secretary of Labor. Click, wait for OrgScope map of US Gov to load and open, and you've got the Obama round table of cabinet nominees. You can dive down into the departments, change what you're looking at by clicking on the menu bar, and have a high ole' time.

Or just get used to the new faces here. (FYI, Dennis Blair nominated today as National Intelligence Director--thanks to Siobhan Gorman at Wall Street Journal for that news; still waiting for final touches at CIA, Federal Election Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and FDIC - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and a host of other agencies -- none of which are cabinet-level jobs.)

The real green team

You know how interested I am in green teams, which I first wrote about here almost exactly a year ago (Carbon neutral, or shall we say, green teams).

Now PEBO has gone and appointed one that can really make a difference. Here's the scoop from CNN's Steve Hargreaves's piece, "Obama names energy team, vows new tack:"

The team -- the subject of speculation for weeks -- includes physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner in the newly created position of "climate czar." [Ed. note: One more czar - soon we'll need a Council of Czar(ina)s]

The team also includes Lisa Jackson, a former head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, as director of the EPA; and Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor from Los Angeles, as head of the Council on Environmental Quality.

So guess what? We've added them to the ever-growing map.

And here are their faces with their organizations, all in one little picture. Clockwise, Lisa Jackson at EPA; Nancy Sutley at Council on Environmental Quality; Carol Browner (welcome back, EPA head during Clinton administration) at Office of Energy; Climate & Environment; and Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy ("Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has headed the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004"). Go PEBO Green Team!

For the telework skeptics

Kurt Cagle's "Is Telework the New Face of the Agile Workforce?" is a love letter to all those wondering whether people who work at home are: 1. actually watching Oprah; and 2. thereby burning up a whole lot more watts. Say it ain't so! He does in a piece worth the clicky:

...Sun's ergonomics people connected P3 International's Kill A Watt meter, a portable power meter that can connect into a workstation, onto both their internal computer systems and the participants home (or mobile) connections. What they discovered was that teleworkers consumed about 64 watts per hour, while their office counterparts consumed more than double, 130 watts per hour, just on their equipment.

Yet the vast benefit came in slashing the commute. The energy costs involved in running office equipment accounted for less than 2% of the total carbon footprint for an employee, while almost all of the rest, 97%, was involved in the commute to and from the office each day. By reducing trips to the office to 2 ½ days a week, a typical employee managed to save 5,400 kilowatt hours per year, according to Kristi McGee, senior director for Sun's Open Work services group.

How about a little sociology with that technology?

My Google alerts for virtual teams and collaboration runneth over, thanks to the high price of oil. Who'd'a thunk it?

Many reporters, for example, The New York Times's fine one, Steve Lohr, whose article, "As travel costs rise, more meetings go virtual," took the headline earlier this week. Nothing wrong with Lohr's article, good, solid reporting with news for the newbies to the area: Cisco's telepresence offering, high price tag aside, makes participants feel like they're "there;" "companies of all sizes are beginning to shift to Web-based meetings for training and sales;" and this, worth the pull quote:

A report last month by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, a group of technology companies, and the Climate Group, an environmental organization, estimated that up to 20 percent of business travel worldwide could be replaced by Web-based and conventional videoconferencing technology.

Twenty percent? Me thinks a lot higher. But, numbers aside, where Lohr's article is like all the rest - and where it misses the point - is in this: Technology alone does not solve the problem. I've harped on about this before. Our old motto, "90% people, 10% technology," is being drowned out by the reflexive action whereby companies/organizations throw technology into the hands that once held airline tickets.

It's not enough. Virtual meetings, including those conducted by Cisco's telepresence, can be very good indeed but I wager that the technology only contributes a small fraction of the reason attendees deem these meetings as good. It's the process by which the meeting is conducted, the inclusiveness of their facilitators, the hard work of the leaders - and their exemplary virtual behaviors - that make such meetings sing.

I've written about this a lot - here's an old favorite, "Bored on conference calls? Relief!"

It's the sociology, telecommuters

The New York Times wisely runs a full page of op-eds today on the impact of high gas prices, "Is Your Tank Half Empty or Half Full?", but none deals with the biggest problem introduced by telecommuting: How to really work effectively at a distance. The Times is not alone in headlining telecommuting (well, in truth, only one piece in today's paper, "Pajama Life" by Nicole Benson Goluboff, actually even touches on this). I've seen dozens of articles about the sudden move to telecommuting in the past few weeks, dozens. Having covered this topic in rather excruciating detail over many years, let me leave it at this for now: Our old slogan, "90% people, 10% technology," remains true. It's not about bandwidth, whiz-bang software, or mobile devices. The magic is in the sociology. Keep four things in mind, correct as necessary, and your telecommuting will work just fine: People, Purpose, Links, and Time.

Checklist for green teams - beta version

The folks over at The Content Economy led by Oscar Berg's efforts (sparked by my post, "Carbon neutral teams") are working on a checklist for "green teams." Do you really need to meet face-to-face or will virtual meeting via conference call or videoconference work? When you do travel, what small gestures can you make that also reduce CO2 emissions? What can you do right this minute, today, to contribute to wiser use of our precious natural resources (ah-hem, always turns off your computer, perhaps)?

After brainstorming with his colleagues (they met face-to-face in Stockholm, he took the train from Lund in the south of Sweden), Oscar has posted their first list on their blog in the hopes that others will comment. Let's call this the begining of a collaborative process of creating a checklist that we all can use to make wiser decisions about how we meet. Check it out and add your thoughts there. Great work, you guys! (For the record, I don't "know" Oscar at all; we've never even exchanged emails but our mutual interest in this topic has sparked this creative undertaking via our blogs.)

And in the interest of getting as many people to think about this as possible, I'm poaching their list right here as well. Please think about what Oscar and his colleagues have come up with and make some comments, which we can share back and forth among blogs:

1. Start with yourself and where you are – think of how you can reduce the CO2 emissions that you cause at work (we already assume that you think of what you can do at home). Here are some of all the things you can do:
   
   - Turn off your computer when not using it – and unplug the power adapter
   - Drink water on tap (filtered if necessary) instead of drinking bottled water
   - When you go to meetings nearby - take the bike, public transportation by train or bus, or share a car
   - When you stay at hotels - shower instead of taking baths, reuse your towels, choose a hotel with a climate policy…
   - When you need to eat - choose seasonal fruits for the fruit basket, walk to the nearest restaurant, eat locally produced food…
2. Ask yourself when a face-to-face meeting that requires travelling is really necessary - and when it’s not. Reflect on and question your own behaviour – are you sometimes travelling because you like it or get a feeling that you are an important person when doing so?
3. If you need to meet but not necessarily face-to-face, ask yourself if any of there are other ways to meet and communicate than by a face-to-face meeting in real life - phone conference, instant messaging, group chat, web conferencing…
4. If a face-to-face meeting is really necessary, is it an option to meet virtually? Video conferencing, virtual meeting place (Second Life)…
5. If you really need to meet face-to-face in real life, check if you can meet at a location where as few of the meeting attendees as possible have to travel to the meeting, thereby shortening the total distance travelled by the meeting participants. Also question what persons really need to participate in the meeting (identify and try to stop meeting professionals from attending).
6. If you need to travel yourself to the meeting, check what transportation options you have at hand. Try to choose the means of transportation that produces the least CO2 emissions but still offers a reasonable travel time and cost – and be sure to include the cost for any CO2 emissions in the cost! If it takes a few hours longer by train than by plane – can you motivate taking the train if you can work during the travel?
7. If possible, always try to compensate for the CO2 emissions that you cause by traveling. You can calculate how much CO2 emissions you produce and how much you should pay on the CarbonNeutral Company’s web site: http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/businesscalc.asp
8. Finally, be open and proud about your achievements when it comes to minimizing CO2 emissions. Tell others that you choose not to travel to a meeting because you did not find it necessary to meet and that you solved it with other means of communication instead, that you walked instead of taking a cab to the nearby meeting, that you chose to go by train instead of flying, and so on. It will not only show that you care about the environment, but also that you are a responsible and caring person in general. It builds trust. Don't be afraid of how other people might react. For some, it can be an eye-opener and they might be impressed with your reasoning and behaviour, and eventually they will start changing their own behaviour. Others might be offended since it might cause bad conscience. But whatever kind of reaction you will get, telling others about your choices will help move things in the right direction.

Oscar takes the challenge

Further to our new friend Oscar Berg in Sweden, who's thinking about green teams. Go, Oscar! He's "taking the challenge to write a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible."

A post by Jessica Lipnack about “carbon-neutral teams” gave me the idea and being quoted on her blog provided some extra motivation. I am involving my fellow bloggers Henrik and Anders (Anders wrote a peace called “Are we finally ready for eco-meetings?” a while ago). Anyway, we are compiling a list of candidate items for the checklist and I hope to present it in some time.

By the way, do you know that you can calculate how much emission of carbon dioxide you cause by flying? The CarbonNeutral Company offers calculators and the airline SAS actually allows you to compensate for the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) that you cause when you travel with them. Good initiative. But what we need is to do is also to compary flying to other transportation alternatives.

Let’s take my flight next week from Malmö to Stockholm and back again as an example. By taking the plane, I would have caused an emission of 0.1644 tonnes of CO2. By taking the train instead, I will cause an emission of only 0.00012 tonnes of CO2. Do I need to say more? I guess not. I will take the train from now on.

And I posted this back to Oscar's blog (nothing like self-quoting): "I played with the numbers a little to make them more understandable to those of limited intelligence like myself: if a ton is 2000 pounds, then your flight would release the equivalent of a sumo-wrestler worth of CO2 (328 pounds), while the train ride would release something like a cup of coffee, four ounces."