Part of our passion surrounding Tummelvision is stems from our desire to explore and highlight the dynamics of what is needed to create engaged  social spaces online.  Kevin and Deb led a session at the recent O’reilly Open Web Foo Camp where we intro’ed the concept to our beloved geek community.  We had a great discussion with a number of  folks including Dale Dougherty [who runs the world of Make], Sarah Novotny [program chair of OSCON] and others.  As Tummlers themselves – they commented on the need for better tools for curators,  creators and catalysts to help them connect with their community and for their community to connect with each other.

The intersection of our human selves and tech were popping up in many conversations and many sessions throughout the weekend.  We are definitely at a unique moment – where the once binary web is just starting to recognize the need to evolve into a more organic entity that better reflects who we are and how we behave – a more reflective  representation of our offline selves.  Let’s face it, we take ourselves with us wherever we are.  In one of the sessions led by Brady Forrest we discussed the need for Social Bots – sounds scary – but really it could potentially be about making us smarter about ourselves and our interactions – these bots could help us maintain our social relationships across many groups, sites, and tribes.  They could even be a personal data stream to report back to me analytics about my life in meaningful ways.  But therein lies the rub – as soon as we start heading down the “manage my life” track – it starts getting complex very quickly.  We  need to ensure that in our effort to create a more open web we provide for the likelihood of ever changing connections and the ability to set permissions and identity as we choose.

As both Elizabeth Churchill [Ep 7 Guest] and Shelly Farnham pointed out, not all of us want 100% transparency all the time.  This leads us into many complex and complicated issues of privacy, identity, control, permissions etc.  We are seeing them played out daily – everywhere – and though computers can do a better job of helping us filter and manage some of these complexities it will ultimately be up to us – the humans and the Tummlers to make it all work seamlessly and organically.  The human brain and heart – are still the best at managing the nuances of our social selves.

Heather and I did a brief video interview with Howard Greenstein [our episode 23 guest] after out Tummeling Session at Supernova explaining the concept.  Enjoy!

Zing moments:

Heather bringing in Arthur Miller’s classic line from Death of A Salesman – “A man is not a piece of fruit.”

Debs comment that we “don’t want to live in a world where twitter becomes the form letter of yesterday.”

Episode Notes

Thanks to Johnny Goldstein check out his stuff at Envizualize

Nice piece entitled “Team Coordination Is Key in Businesses” by the Heath bros on the importance of coordination for success.  As they smartly point out:

We tend to underestimate the amount of effort needed to coordinate with other people. In one academic experiment, a team of students was asked to build a giant Lego man as quickly as possible. To save time, the team members split up their work. One person would craft an arm, another would build the torso, and so forth. (At least one person, of course, was charged with tweeting compulsively about what the others were doing.)

Often, the parts were carefully designed, yet they didn’t quite fit together properly, like a Lego Heidi Montag. The problem was that nobody was paying attention to the integration. The researchers found that the teams were consistently better at specializing than they were at coordinating.

The skills required for coordination and collaboration are indeed the skills of the Tummler!  Now to discuss the HOW – the how is to reward and ensure that the role of the Tummler is indeed recognized, encouraged and rewarded.