Musings & Meanderings

People don’t contribute because they don’t know why they should.

It’s a well recognized and commonly referred to reality. In every contribution analysis I’ve read about on the web, the percentage of frequent contributors is minute, ranging from 1-5%, while the percentage of non-contributing community members is usually the majority. Every time I read one of these, I think that most of those non-contributors aren’t community members, by my personal definition of community.

Those of us who comprehend the motivation to contribute keep trying to find a way to condense that motivation and all the reasons for it into a selling proposition for everyone else. This does not work. The only thing a selling proposition can do is motivate one specific action or behavior by answering the ‘what’s in it for me’ question. The ‘what’s in it for all of us’ question cannot and will not submit to the confines of an elevator pitch, which has no room for evolutionary processes that encompass things such as responsibility, interdependence, multi-dimensional relationships, and chains of consequences. Another motivational tool development goal I see expressed regularly is making the pitch or proposition irresistible and fun, so much fun that supposedly a brief preliminary engagement will lead to a permanent involvement/commitment. These approaches are perfectly appropriate to selling a specific product or service, but of little value in getting people to learn new things and contribute to the community.

People do contribute when they can see the whole picture.

Let’s use the example of a community fundraising or charity event, and let’s make the participants a large but informal group, rather than an organized non-profit organization with a formal corporate structure. They could be the citizens, stakeholders, and supporters of a school, town, or a church or other religious institution.

This group has identified and gathered around one common goal, typically recognized first by individual proponents who eventually fueled and spread that recognition widely enough to make it a shared or common goal. One of the activities planned for achieving that goal is a big fundraiser. Organizationally minded individuals identify the main tasks required and broadcast them, over and over if necessary, until someone finally volunteers. This volunteer will design and place ads. That one will co-ordinate kids and vehicles for the distribution of flyers. Another will be in charge of tickets and the door. And so on.

Inevitably, this informal community will have forgotten to plan a lot of little details …but that’s ok. They’re not highly organized professionals, so even more things than usual will go wrong, and that’s ok too. The community is motivated and involved. Dozens upon dozens of volunteers will be preparing the event space on the day of. Someone will realize that rental coffee cups arrived without saucers, and will react at hyper speed to deal with it no matter what it takes. Other problems will be discovered and addressed the same way. Anyone can ask for help and will get it immediately and without question. Even those without last minute crises will join the collective energy flow and contribute something unplanned …flowers in vases, perhaps. If a specialized need comes up (i.e. a toilet flooded), whoever discovered the problem goes directly to the most qualified member of the community to get it dealt with. Everyone that does something is likely to do the absolute best they can, specifically because of the level of motivation and collective energy.

The result is inspiring. None of the participants spend time asking themselves why they are doing it. If you asked them, a general answer would be that “we’re doing it for us, we’re doing it together, we’re doing it because we care”. That natural answer, though, is mostly about the personal and immediate connection. Few people would respond by describing what led them to that point of personal connection.

What, then, is the key factor in this example that created all that motivation and communal effort and collective energy and contribution?

Every person understood the same big picture.

If the goal of the fundraiser was to build something for the community, people contributed not only because there was something in it for them, but because they could see all the potential benefit, for their kids or elders or even future generations, and also because together they could accomplish something that none of them could alone.

To use a broader example, Rudy Giuliani’s implementation of the Broken Windows theory in NYC motivated citizens to fix their own windows. This was motivation by example, as powerful a communal motivation as there is, but it was the understanding of what the entire community, leaders and citizens alike, were doing together for a common benefit that everyone comprehended which really elicited community participation.

If we fervently believe that getting our community to follow a course of action, adopt new behavior, go out of their way to contribute, will result in a real measurable benefit to all, we must make that ultimate benefit, and how to achieve it, widely understood.

Then people will, and do, contribute.

We are asked a thousand times a day to do something. Buy this product. Read this article. Give to charity. The endless clamor for our attention and action is unending.

The fact is that most of us want to do something. So we buy a product, read an article, give to charity. I really believe, though, that most of us want to do something that matters. As many competing voices as there are bombarding us with calls to action, rarely if ever do we hear how we can contribute to something more important, something bigger, and something that not only will create lasting value but give our actions value as well. Doing things for others, things that those others could often do for themselves, may serve the personal needs of a few altruistic or co-dependent souls, but most of us have all we can handle taking care of ourselves and our families on a day to day basis.

Being a contributing member of a community, however, is a completely different thing. A community we belong to is larger than any one of us. It can set and achieve goals larger than any one of us can alone. The more we comprehend the big picture, and see both what can be achieved and the benefits of it to us all, the more likely we are to be motivated and contribute.

Most people wouldn’t understand big pictures and goals, you say? They don’t have enough knowledge, or education, or intelligence? As an example, think of the thousands and eventually millions of blue collar workers with rudimentary education (if that) who, after putting in grueling 12 hour days, traveled to gatherings, often at great personal risk, to learn and understand the concept and potential consequences of unionization. People don’t require a lot of formal education to understand and participate in a long term communal goal. The bigger the positive change that can be achieved, the more contribution people will make.

I don’t want to be aggregated into a mass. I do want to belong to and contribute to a community, and I want to devote my resources to things that are meaningful. There are many things that I am good at doing. Doing them for myself and for my family may be a priority, but contributing to every community I’ve been part of during my life is, for me, a way in which we make our world the best it can be.

There is such a thing as community on the internet, but I see it mostly in tech specialty areas. Business communities are mostly private for obvious reasons. Vibrant and vital special interest communities exist, but, as widely used as the term community is in describing the web these days, the number and scope of real communities is relatively very small.

Are anonymity and security issues an insurmountable barrier to many public community activities? If so, then I believe that the average person’s computer use will continue to create more human alienation than connection, and that its greatest value will remain limited to management of and access to information, as a supplemental communication aid, and to personal entertainment. Other applications of technology, including scientific and medical, promise exciting developments, but most of us are neither scientists nor medical researchers.

If real community is to be built on a larger scale on the web, then I believe that the big picture, with its entire multiple and inter relational facets, is an essential part of the foundation.

This has both nothing and everything to do with commerce and economics. Individuals and communities both, earn, raise and spend money as a natural part of some of their daily transactional activity. Here we have yet another ‘either or’. Web developers tend to focus first on either how to make money or on how to get people involved, with the intention of shifting to the second focus after the first is achieved. The result is mostly a hodgepodge, with something excellent created now and then, which usually doesn’t scale well, or something large but limited created, that is not expandable easily in more than one direction.

I’ve read the phrase, “the web is a mess”, more than once. Is it the web itself that’s a mess, or is it what people are doing and not doing on it?

We increasingly live in a time and place where we wish our ethnic origins to be irrelevant, a place where they sometimes actually are, and a place where actively avoiding consideration of them is commonly considered a proper goal.

In getting to know someone well, I am always intensely interested in their personal and family history, and sometimes disturbed by the fact that few share this interest and are often surprised by it. The differences in how people react to revealing this aspect of themselves differ markedly between new immigrants who are generally thrilled to describe their distant home and culture, first generation settlers, many of whom display 2 different ways of relating and aren’t always comfortable displaying both to the same person, second generation settlers who often display a fond yet distant nostalgia for their grandparent’s stories, and those whose nationality and primary culture remains singular beyond their living memory.

In forming relationships, and learning to comprehend another’s point of view, cultural background can often provide as many ‘aha’ moments as current or past life experiences, in business as well as in friendships.

My own heritage determines who I am in many ways. Although I was born here, both my parents came (separately) from the Soviet Union after WWII. My first language was Russian, which I still speak a bit and also read and write.

Communism is anathema to me, as I was raised in a shadow of my grandmother’s and mother’s experiences of persecution and paranoia, the force-feeding of dogma, and a KGB that took people away in the night. I value liberty and rebel against authoritarianism, and though my nature is egalitarian I prefer a meritocracy within a free market system. These beliefs could arguably be somewhat different, based on my nature and life experiences, but yet remain inextricably linked to my immersion from infancy in the effect of a political system on my people and their culture.

I have been told that I have a Russian soul, with its brooding darkness balanced by a passion for brilliant pageantry. Although I am neither a spendthrift nor a miser, extravagance in others delights rather than disturbs me, and I am also deeply respectful of the motivation of those who pinch pennies.

I sang Russian lullabies to my sons, although they and their father spoke not a word of the language, and I was drawn, in studying the history of art and design, to the Paris of the early 20th century and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

I remain first a Canadian with American tendencies (for a variety of reasons). People I have come to know well, though, have definitely understood me better within the context of historical facts such as the few I’ve mentioned, the same way that I have seen others more clearly within the context of theirs.

In today’s social and business world, what we call the free world, anyway, ethnic origin matters less and less, and the internet advances that development by further leaps and bounds. Many people nevertheless still go out of their way to associate with their own kind, because they understand each other easily. Encountering many of our rich and varied cultural heritages, though, remains a source of delight for me and a way of understanding better every one I interact with.

What are some of the ways in which your own, or your family’s, heritage contributed to the person you have become? Have friends from different cultural backgrounds broadened your own horizons? Or do you wish for, perhaps, a utopian ideal of one people?

Two things. Reality and perception.

Every single person has strengths and weaknesses. Those who excel are stronger than others in at least one performance aspect, and those we take as mentors or leaders generally outperform everyone else on many counts. Appearances will only take you so far, it is ability and skill on which you go the distance and, especially, stay there. For most of my life, until recently, I believed that perception and spin were nothing but an extra edge, and did not give handicaps or weaknesses much thought until recently.

Being highly competitive, I always play to win, and playing every card I’m dealt to its highest advantage is a given to me. Weaknesses must be fully assessed and covered, and strengths properly exploited. The winning hand is as much about how you play the cards as about which ones you are dealt, and a slew of high cards or trump make a single weak card of little consequence. End of analogy: the little guy playing against the house or a stacked deck isn’t relevant here.

The most successful of us are, among other things, the best at:

1. Identifying our weaker areas
2. Understanding exactly what dangers result and how to avoid them
3. Compensating through alliances with others whose skills and talents are complementary
4. Concealing our weaknesses
5. Leading with our strengths

Having had the privilege of working with and knowing many self made men, I can say that every one that I observed applied these 5 criteria. These people divide roughly into 3 categories, those who made it and never fell, those who fell from a lofty height and climbed back up, and those who fell and never managed the full climb again. The difference in perception of weakness among the 3 groups at any given stage is dramatic. The reality is that #4 in the list above can, all by itself, create failure. This plays out in a way that is utterly primal. Still, a seriously wounded animal can not only still win a fight, but can become supernaturally stronger and more ferocious. Some of that is pure adrenaline, a body’s natural narcotic as well as fuel, but the greater part of it is simply how much the fight matters, or what the stakes are.

Humans, though, are a lot more complex than animals. Common wisdom tells us that the player who has least to lose has an advantage because of being willing to risk more. That easily explains why there are many 20 year old entrepreneurs (who do not yet have spouses, children, and mortgages) for every 40 year old one. It doesn’t explain, though, how to get in the ring, keep getting back in after losing, and stay there. More importantly, it doesn’t explain who the prize fighters are, or how to recognize whether you, or others, are one.

Here’s an example where handicaps, including age, didn’t matter:
“I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.” Ray Kroc, on the founding of McDonalds Corporation

This was an entrepreneur who understood perception and spin to the max. He was a consummate salesman whose greatest sale, it’s been said, was the purchase of the original restaurants. I did not meet this man personally, but would make a bet that one of his self acknowledged weaknesses was a penchant for risk. Was he, perhaps, over compensating in the rigid, old fashioned management style he employed in building his final empire, and if so, did that over compensation turn into a bastion of strength?

Leaders, whether successful entrepreneurs, businessmen, or politicians, boast among their number a disproportionate percentage of manic depressives (now called bi-polar disorder) and borderline (BPD) personalities. Although the personal styles they present to the world can vary widely, can as easily present as brute strength and charisma or as suave and sophisticated, they are all, underneath, powerful alpha creatures. Most learn quickly that much can be achieved via perception and psychology, once primacy has been established. There are also plenty of normal guys who originally entered the fray with plenty of ability and ambition. A majority of them elect to semi-retire by or before middle age, and most, given a trust level, will confide the event that made them withdraw from the ring. The sentence I’ve heard most frequently in describing the turning point was, “I realized I didn’t have the stomach for it.”. At a higher trust level, and providing you know all the players, you might hear a specific story of betrayal.

The alpha fighters I am describing, often have what should be really serious weaknesses.

Weaknesses that have to do with literacy, or numbers, or money management. I’ve frequently marveled at the fact that there are invariably at least several, and sometimes a lot more, people around such an individual, who contribute to covering and compensating. This would argue that the serious weaknesses should become widely known, yet they do not. I hardly think that all enablers in such relationships are simply co-dependent and dysfunctional. What does become clear with experience and observation, is that the ability, scope, and skills of these individuals are such that even serious weaknesses are outweighed.

In the case of those who succeed, sustain no serious falls, and go the distance, the compensation mechanisms become as smooth and finely tuned over the decades as a hand built exotic car. The presentation dazzles, the engine purrs, and all is right with the world. Steve Wynn had already lost most of his vision when he lost the Mirage and started on the Bellagio, long before the recent painting accident. Many people, likely in the thousands, had knowledge of this, yet would tell you how incredibly smart the man is without a thought of mentioning the loss of vision.

Those who are truly determined and have outstanding ability are usually spurred to greater determination and performance by handicaps. This can sound perverse to some, but it really isn’t at all. If you have the personal power and drive and ability to achieve, the fire and passion to grab life by the short hairs and give it your all, then the never-ending contest itself, with both its losses and gains, is your motivation.

There is plenty of writing and advice on business and entrepreneurial success. If you aren’t out getting an MBA first (no determinant of success in itself), study and familiarize yourself with the materials relevant to your business activity anyway. How much you learn through studying, and how much through firsthand experience, though, is not the deciding factor in whether you want to and can, get and stay in the ring. This type of reading, a blog called Leaders on Leadership, is just as important to understanding the challenges and how to use your own abilities in terms of combining reality and perception.

We live to develop and exercise our talents and abilities to their fullest, and strive for happiness and success (in or out of the ring). Knowing our weaknesses and addressing them fully is the one critical factor far less spoken of or written about. Perception of strength or weakness is equally critical.

One of the most powerful individuals I met over the years, Edward J. DeBartolo Sr. (you used the full moniker until granted the right to address him by his given name), was a fairly small man physically. Few people, however, could stare back into those piercing eagle eyes for long, or stand up to the iron will. Even at the age of 90, this man still answered his business phone beginning at approximately 5 am, every single day.

If the fierce intensity of such a gaze is revealed to and turned on you, there’s only one involuntary response that signals your place in the ring. That response is a thrill of excitement and anticipation in the knowledge that you also will do whatever it takes to achieve your goals and stay there.

Those closest to you will know who you really are, but in business you deal with hundreds and sometimes thousands of individuals who will stubbornly see you as the first impressions you offer them. Making good ones may not matter substantially if you’re in the position to continue and perform brilliantly, but occasionally it will matter, and the rest of the time it’s like a free opportunity to put some extra money in the bank. It is also a gesture of respect, and that is always a good way to begin.

It seems to me that the focus on classification of data is disproportionately large compared to the focus on classification by, for, and of users. There’s a huge ‘either or’ gap between data structures created by experts and streams of user created data. Among other things, we’re so used to the users being anonymous, and, by definition, that means that no responsibility is taken for any data they generate.

Does classification of organically grown content on the web have to be an oxymoron? There’s quite a conundrum behind this question. Enabling free unlimited growth to create value results in both lower value and increasing chaos. Establishing structures and imposing rules limits growth and concentrates (shrinks) power.

We talk constantly about enabling users, but what we really mean is giving them a useful tool that we either sell to them, or give in exchange for their tacit agreement to become part of our asset. No one talks about giving the individual an identity and a role. The best thing we have doing that is still eBay, and that is just a platform connecting individuals to one another. Blogging accidentally serves a corner of the human need for individualization, but what an unwieldy and disconnected hodgepodge it is already, and how does it connect, for most of us, to communal contribution and benefit beyond, once again, those individual personal connections?

The Google model, based on putting the search in the user’s hands is really great, but its resulting offer of quantity without quality remains frustrating. I’ve noted the Google search altering somewhat as a result of social networking aggregating the traffic of individuals who have learned to play the link game, combined with the element of popularity which is supposed to reflect quality content. Therefore, I now get a lot of blog and ‘news’ clutter on searches about certain medical or legal topics (for example). Specialized engines such as Lexis Nexis are fine for many things, but I know that there’s a lot more out there.

I see the internet as a looping linking maze. There are billions of web sites, many of them formally organized by one authoritative entity or another. Anyone with a website learns to work on how to be listed and categorized and found. Many an individual user, however, can often feel like a piece of flotsam, retreating most often to a safe corner (such as a community they’re comfortable in), and venturing out to wider realms only in determined forays for a specific result. Could addressing differentiation of identities and acknowledged value contribution make a difference to them, and each of us, as well?

Most users, for example, wouldn’t take time to tag, or to contribute to Wikis, on today’s web. They come here to find something for themselves, and then leave. I think only part of that is due to people being busy and/or selfish. What’s in it for me? is a question most ask automatically in response to such a proposition from an anonymous stranger. It is not necessarily our first or only response to an identified person who recognizes and knows us in a community where we have an identity and a sense of belonging. Millions of us do things every day for our common good and without wanting public credit or compensation. We often do these things anonymously. We don’t, however, spend time doing them for anonymous strangers about whom we know nothing. We have to be able to clearly make the connection between our personal contribution and a specific rewarding result in order to reach square one and be open to motivation. Since it’s not likely that the majority of users are going to ‘get’ the potential of the internet and become passionately devoted to it anytime soon, isn’t working on a place they ‘will’ want to contribute to and inhabit worthwhile? …unless, of course, the real future here belongs only to an elite few.

Has this already been done or tried?

Can a traditional hierarchical structure be automatically modified by searches and, separately, by tags? If there were set thresholds inherent in the modification instruction, such as 10 or 100 either search word combinations or tags attached to the same image or word combinations, would that address the random clutter problem? Could potential risk to the database(s) be addressed sufficiently through security filters?

The related question is how many and how wide a range of different modification rules and rights could be assigned for a single data structure. If you have a dozen or more classifications of users with different access and privileges, does each of their input enter via a different track, or can segments of it be pooled after leaving the space where the user status is defined and protected?

Credentialed users, for example, could create sub categories without limit, make multiple and faceted entry of items, etc. New users, at the other end of the spectrum, could make their own tags and links in their accounts and these would form a component of communal classification which would be automatically collated via being pooled. Between the two, various levels of intermediate and non-tech expert users could be given appropriate levels of access and rights, and so on. So I’ve imagined it, anyway.

Giving a non-tech user a way to make faceted entries would obviously have to be done in common language rather than jargon. As an example, apples can relate to (beyond food and fruit) cooking and dessert and even biblical symbolism. Sorting things from one’s own special interest list could be both easy and popular fun. There’s an assumption in this concept that a user putting a ‘gemstone’ tag beside an apple picture or article is going to be an aberration. This example does, however, indicate a requirement for defining category levels and relationships between them, as apple could easily be found at a different level down a sculpture or jewelry branch.

Many, perhaps even all, of the different components in my imaginings already exist, but the applications of them, in my experience, are usually very limited. It sometimes feels as though every basic body movement (in analogy) is already enabled, on a computer, over the internet, on a website or through a web app. Continuing the analogy, I have to go over there and sign in to lift my little finger, and somewhere else to walk, and somewhere else again to sit down. Spending too much time on the web is beginning to make ‘me’ feel like a jigsaw puzzle that no one has assembled, so that fragmentation of my identity results. Enterprise applications, on the other hand, make me seem (to myself) rigidly 2-dimensional, like a cardboard cutout figure. Sometimes, if they work well, the image is of a paper chain of figures. Not exactly fragmented, in this case, but rather constrained within a 3rd party’s narrow definition.

Although I specifically made the original question in this post about a single traditional data structure, I am also naturally wondering about applying it to relational databases together with ontological meta-tagging. The first focus of my thinking, though, remains on how to begin achieving balance between authoritatively compiled data and user generated data, while retaining the maximum value of both.