We Hold These Truths to be Transparent

Last week the Boston chapter of the SIKMers riffed on a recent op-ed polemic by David Weinberger, one of KM's most lucid and original explainers. His case that transparency is the new objectivity argues that objectivity and objectives part company as soon as the subject climbs into the ring to greet the predicate.

This false god of objectivity has a familiar din in the blogosphere where the only distinction between a PR hack and a venerated journalist is whether they count a media conglomerate on their pay stub or the client retains them directly. Weinberger moves smartly beyond the tired trashing of media elites to the more complex unpacking of what it means for: (1) defining the boundaries of context, and (2) ultimately the quality of information grown and cultivated on the public web.

He notes that "fair and balanced" is unattainable for reporters and all second-party relayers of primary events. From fact collectors to checkers and from theory rejectors to truth selectors we hold this truth to be transparent -- that all humans create subjective realities. But then Weinberger sources the downstream implications for retiring this myth: (1) Its tendency to overstep its own authority, and (2) its coercive power to mislead those it seeks to inform with its self-referential perspective.

Can reasonable people seeking the refuge of a higher ground still find their way to a common, middle ground? Weinberger goes onto conclude that the achievement of objectivity is not only widely questioned but dismissed as an agreed-upon goal between senders and receivers (or what used to be called "the media" and "the public.") Yet the myth lives on. Why?

Even our well-intended skepticism cannot conceal another gaping need once (and still) serviced by the myth. And it has little to do with column widths, how many people still read newspapers, or how many of us document what we say and think based on what we see and hear. That insistent need in the mind of the news beholder is credibility -- the emerging gold standard of information overload. Only through the lens of credibility can we buy arguments, accept a premise, or decide who's right between the fraying edges of our national discourse.

Now that the limits of objectivity are on full display in our search results and our cable systems Weinberger argues that transparency is the new surrogate for credibility, ready to step in and referee for the brave and free inquirers and deciders of all spectral stripes:

That’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to accept ideas as credible the way the claim of objectivity used to.

This change is epochal.

In this world the biases are stripped away. Don't take the reporter's word on it? Click through to their sources and question what was pursued and what went begging. The blind-spots blink right back at us. The truth is stripped down to its naked accessories, made all the more discomforting by conclusions reached before any reporting ever takes place. Of course that level of open documentation assumes an audience as active in their news consumption as the reporter in the production of their story. Only a third-party with a firsthand stake of an outcome proposed or influenced in the reporting would exercise their full transparency options.

It's also sobering to consider the lengths that reporters have gone to protect their sources in this new golden age of transparency -- precisely because the story could stand on its own through the testimony and firsthand experience of those troubled by their own confirming observations.

That's the sniff test for credibility whether it's delivered through myth or hyperlink. When we open ourselves up to persuasion how much of our heads run interference for our hearts? How scripted is the appeal? How self-serving to the caller is the call for all good humans to come to the aid of the unaided? Bottom-line: what is this costing them -- particularly among members of their own group in untold horse trading and political capital?

We see things not as they are but as we are. The greatest threat to public credibility is 'politics as usual' -- the extent to which power protects itself regardless of the laws, morals, public trust, and, loyalties it compromises. How our leaders behave in public is routinely compared to our perception of the way they act behind closed doors. The gap between what we 'see' and what we're 'told' forms the basis of 'character'. We know them so we accept what we cannot understand. Our leader is a jerk. But they are 'our' jerk.

Public leaders with strong character are said to resist politics as usual -- sacrificing their own grip on power for the greater public good, a higher principle, and/or, the belief that such a sacrifice will prompt greater beneficence among other participants, including adversaries. That kind of trading is called integrity. It is the highest form of credibility -- and the rarest.

My hope from Weinberger's insights is not that transparency will even the playing field or cast a redeeming light in a dark corner but simply 'be' the playing field. We will not all play by the same rules. But neither will the eyes of the world look away when we're drawn to that harsh, clarifying spotlight.

We Hold These Truths to be Transparent

Last week the Boston chapter of the SIKMers riffed on a recent op-ed polemic by David Weinberger, one of KM's most lucid and original explainers. His case that transparency is the new objectivity argues that objectivity and objectives part company as soon as the subject climbs into the ring to greet the predicate.

This false god of objectivity has a familiar din in the blogosphere where the only distinction between a PR hack and a venerated journalist is whether they count a media conglomerate on their pay stub or the client retains them directly. Weinberger moves smartly beyond the tired trashing of media elites to the more complex unpacking of what it means for: (1) defining the boundaries of context, and (2) ultimately the quality of information grown and cultivated on the public web.

He notes that "fair and balanced" is unattainable for reporters and all second-party relayers of primary events. From fact collectors to checkers and from theory rejectors to truth selectors we hold this truth to be transparent -- that all humans create subjective realities. But then Weinberger sources the downstream implications for retiring this myth: (1) Its tendency to overstep its own authority, and (2) its coercive power to mislead those it seeks to inform with its self-referential perspective.

Can reasonable people seeking the refuge of a higher ground still find their way to a common, middle ground? Weinberger goes onto conclude that the achievement of objectivity is not only widely questioned but dismissed as an agreed-upon goal between senders and receivers (or what used to be called "the media" and "the public.") Yet the myth lives on. Why?

Even our well-intended skepticism cannot conceal another gaping need once (and still) serviced by the myth. And it has little to do with column widths, how many people still read newspapers, or how many of us document what we say and think based on what we see and hear. That insistent need in the mind of the news beholder is credibility -- the emerging gold standard of information overload. Only through the lens of credibility can we buy arguments, accept a premise, or decide who's right between the fraying edges of our national discourse.

Now that the limits of objectivity are on full display in our search results and our cable systems Weinberger argues that transparency is the new surrogate for credibility, ready to step in and referee for the brave and free inquirers and deciders of all spectral stripes:

That’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to accept ideas as credible the way the claim of objectivity used to.

This change is epochal.

In this world the biases are stripped away. Don't take the reporter's word on it? Click through to their sources and question what was pursued and what went begging. The blind-spots blink right back at us. The truth is stripped down to its naked accessories, made all the more discomforting by conclusions reached before any reporting ever takes place. Of course that level of open documentation assumes an audience as active in their news consumption as the reporter in the production of their story. Only a third-party with a firsthand stake of an outcome proposed or influenced in the reporting would exercise their full transparency options.

It's also sobering to consider the lengths that reporters have gone to protect their sources in this new golden age of transparency -- precisely because the story could stand on its own through the testimony and firsthand experience of those troubled by their own confirming observations.

That's the sniff test for credibility whether it's delivered through myth or hyperlink. When we open ourselves up to persuasion how much of our heads run interference for our hearts? How scripted is the appeal? How self-serving to the caller is the call for all good humans to come to the aid of the unaided? Bottom-line: what is this costing them -- particularly among members of their own group in untold horse trading and political capital?

We see things not as they are but as we are. The greatest threat to public credibility is 'politics as usual' -- the extent to which power protects itself regardless of the laws, morals, public trust, and, loyalties it compromises. How our leaders behave in public is routinely compared to our perception of the way they act behind closed doors. The gap between what we 'see' and what we're 'told' forms the basis of 'character'. We know them so we accept what we cannot understand. Our leader is a jerk. But they are 'our' jerk.

Public leaders with strong character are said to resist politics as usual -- sacrificing their own grip on power for the greater public good, a higher principle, and/or, the belief that such a sacrifice will prompt greater beneficence among other participants, including adversaries. That kind of trading is called integrity. It is the highest form of credibility -- and the rarest.

My hope from Weinberger's insights is not that transparency will even the playing field or cast a redeeming light in a dark corner but simply 'be' the playing field. We will not all play by the same rules. But neither will the eyes of the world look away when we're drawn to that harsh, clarifying spotlight.

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

Giving Voice to Learning

I just completed a first cycle of online instruction for a section of the Professional Investigations Program at Boston University. I've been teaching the classroom version for a few years now but it's always been a forced fit to teach an online class offline. The paradox was a real boon for my online PIoneers who were sandwiching their curriculum inbetween forced feedings of social networking, day jobs, working double shifts, financial acrobatics, and putting kids to bed.

But as much as the freedom from time and distance is a liberation I seriously needed to connect -- not passwords to logins or even names to faces but from experiences to voices. There is a reason there is no "text of experience" to replace that expressive voice for communicating the aspirations and endeavoring spirit. It's the voice of experience that each participant conveys in the faith that their investment in virtual learning will pay off in tangible, transformative ways.

I pushed the program administrators to consider adapting at least the option for an opt-in phone conference to clear the air about the voices -- even at the risk of having the stronger personalities dominate the discussion. There was also the concern that enthusiasm for the subject might push against the pressures carried by online adult learners. But given the tight deadlines everyone is under, I'm not sure that's a lasting concern of our students. They want to be heard -- especially in a forum of their peers.

Either way the voice is more than a phone call. It's also the willingness to parlay one's life experience into the program curriculum. That's not a theory of learning. That's an application of doing. The learning and the doing are one in the same. In my class that's called the PI blog. The basic blocking and tackling generates a container of news and commentary about the passions of our aspiring PIs. More importantly it's a chance for them to insert themselves into a conversation between those interests and the role they would play for shaping them.

• Looking for a primer on getting into the PI field? Look no further than Robyn Kervick's Aspiring Sleuthhound.


• Working the PI job leads? Brian Dodge factors in the exacting qualifications with PI or not to PI. Deb Burress addresses similar job-hunting turf with a more diary-like approach.


• Reporting on the latest scandals in corruption-prone institutions? Nick Jamieson keeps the stakeholders honest in his Government Investigations.


• Interested in the need for improved transparency and better forensics standards? Emmy Balon writes with eloquence and authority on Becoming Nancy Drew.


• Fishing your way out of foreclosure and the rights and responsibilities of homeowners when their debt loads are clamoring for higher ground? Tune into Ligia Tanney's Real Estate Solutions Radio.


• Looking to source anonymous and potentially malicious phishers and schemers? Check out Mark Williams Skip Tracing News.


• Finally Allan Bowlin crosses state lines to put his GPS expertise to work in Digital Forensics.

All these niches blossomed in the last compressed week of the course. I look forward to seeing how each one of these seedlings take root in the Internet Research soil tilled by these insatiable investigators (or "truth tellers" as Program Director Tom Shamshak likes to call our students). Long may they testify.

Giving Voice to Learning

I just completed a first cycle of online instruction for a section of the Professional Investigations Program at Boston University. I've been teaching the classroom version for a few years now but it's always been a forced fit to teach an online class offline. The paradox was a real boon for my online PIoneers who were sandwiching their curriculum inbetween forced feedings of social networking, day jobs, working double shifts, financial acrobatics, and putting kids to bed.

But as much as the freedom from time and distance is a liberation I seriously needed to connect -- not passwords to logins or even names to faces but from experiences to voices. There is a reason there is no "text of experience" to replace that expressive voice for communicating the aspirations and endeavoring spirit. It's the voice of experience that each participant conveys in the faith that their investment in virtual learning will pay off in tangible, transformative ways.

I pushed the program administrators to consider adapting at least the option for an opt-in phone conference to clear the air about the voices -- even at the risk of having the stronger personalities dominate the discussion. There was also the concern that enthusiasm for the subject might push against the pressures carried by online adult learners. But given the tight deadlines everyone is under, I'm not sure that's a lasting concern of our students. They want to be heard -- especially in a forum of their peers.

Either way the voice is more than a phone call. It's also the willingness to parlay one's life experience into the program curriculum. That's not a theory of learning. That's an application of doing. The learning and the doing are one in the same. In my class that's called the PI blog. The basic blocking and tackling generates a container of news and commentary about the passions of our aspiring PIs. More importantly it's a chance for them to insert themselves into a conversation between those interests and the role they would play for shaping them.

• Looking for a primer on getting into the PI field? Look no further than Robyn Kervick's Aspiring Sleuthhound.


• Working the PI job leads? Brian Dodge factors in the exacting qualifications with PI or not to PI. Deb Burress addresses similar job-hunting turf with a more diary-like approach.


• Reporting on the latest scandals in corruption-prone institutions? Nick Jamieson keeps the stakeholders honest in his Government Investigations.


• Interested in the need for improved transparency and better forensics standards? Emmy Balon writes with eloquence and authority on Becoming Nancy Drew.


• Fishing your way out of foreclosure and the rights and responsibilities of homeowners when their debt loads are clamoring for higher ground? Tune into Ligia Tanney's Real Estate Solutions Radio.


• Looking to source anonymous and potentially malicious phishers and schemers? Check out Mark Williams Skip Tracing News.


• Finally Allan Bowlin crosses state lines to put his GPS expertise to work in Digital Forensics.

All these niches blossomed in the last compressed week of the course. I look forward to seeing how each one of these seedlings take root in the Internet Research soil tilled by these insatiable investigators (or "truth tellers" as Program Director Tom Shamshak likes to call our students). Long may they testify.

An American Tradition -- Wasting Time on the Web

In 22 years of being online I can tell you the number one time waste is guessing that the person you're searching on is really the individual who keeps coming up in your search results.

Even if you know where they went to high school or their middle initial, the incomplete details of a partially formed profile can open up more doors than it closes.

I created a confidence ratio for my PI students to gauge the accuracy that my pre-class Googling of them was really then. I told them that I put together this puzzle to show them:

1. Some examples of semantics and operators -- two of the components comprise the work we do in query formation


2. A fact-based way to gauge the likelihood that they'd nailed the right guy

But beyond the math and science there's also a lot of frustration spent on the nailing -- the obsessing over whether we have the right guy or not. In an investigation where our fact base is limited to the actions of one suspect then there is little choice.

I've seen, all too often though, that investigators tie themselves in knots because they don't allow for a range of outcomes that includes several possibilities -- be it witnesses, experts, interpretations, or even competing explanations for why the crime occurred.

I tell them that as we get deeper into the Internet realm of criminal research a range of productive outcomes is a lot more realistic (and healthier on your heart) than fixating on one suspect and nailing them to whatever ... they deserve.

Oh yeah, there's one other reason I dragged them through this. Second biggest time waste on the web? It's not Britany Spears or Michael Jackson. That's right -- it's vanity searches. And until we either make introductions or Google one another, that's all we have to go on.

An American Tradition -- Wasting Time on the Web

In 22 years of being online I can tell you the number one time waste is guessing that the person you're searching on is really the individual who keeps coming up in your search results.

Even if you know where they went to high school or their middle initial, the incomplete details of a partially formed profile can open up more doors than it closes.

I created a confidence ratio for my PI students to gauge the accuracy that my pre-class Googling of them was really then. I told them that I put together this puzzle to show them:

1. Some examples of semantics and operators -- two of the components comprise the work we do in query formation


2. A fact-based way to gauge the likelihood that they'd nailed the right guy

But beyond the math and science there's also a lot of frustration spent on the nailing -- the obsessing over whether we have the right guy or not. In an investigation where our fact base is limited to the actions of one suspect then there is little choice.

I've seen, all too often though, that investigators tie themselves in knots because they don't allow for a range of outcomes that includes several possibilities -- be it witnesses, experts, interpretations, or even competing explanations for why the crime occurred.

I tell them that as we get deeper into the Internet realm of criminal research a range of productive outcomes is a lot more realistic (and healthier on your heart) than fixating on one suspect and nailing them to whatever ... they deserve.

Oh yeah, there's one other reason I dragged them through this. Second biggest time waste on the web? It's not Britany Spears or Michael Jackson. That's right -- it's vanity searches. And until we either make introductions or Google one another, that's all we have to go on.