cc 2.0 by somethingstartedcrazy

Here’s a piece producer Andrew brought to our attention about Digital Nomads. It’s becoming increasingly common for web folk to travel as they work.

My life was totally like this on the road when I did #<3trip in the fall.
Sean Bonner who writes for boing boing lives like this and made its connection to the rise of minimalism really nicely. Staying in motion or moving with emergent impulse is an embrace of fluidity. This means you are working from the moment which is key to making agile development (software) and lean start ups (businesses) work and tummeling and UnPresenting as well. You can’t create conditions for engaging conversation or action if you do not embrace fluidity.

See also: gender as a textbox on Diaspora discussed in TV 45 with Willow Witte and Sarah Dopp

For me, the point of 20,000 web geeks squishing into a few blocks of downtown Austin for a week is to hugely increase the chances of having interesting conversations with old friends, and making new ones.

It’s the Peer Group and a Stiff Drink principle made manifest. If you want to understand it, read Laura Fitton‘s excellent introduction post.

If you want to find us, here are our speaking sessions (and those of our guests), and the one’s they’re attending or tracking.

As Laura says, keep your eyes open as we’ll be around plenty of other places too.

We’re grateful for the work of so many of our guests and community who are doing great work to make the web and the people and places in their lives more connected and centered around human needs.

In lieu of a live episode this evening, please enjoy the embedded video below, a classic TummelVision episode with Zoe Keating.  Tara Hunt will join us on December 16th.

Join us live again beginning next week December 2nd with Stowe Boyd. We have a fantastic live chat with some of the more phenomenal minds and wits and we really encourage you to join us live for shows which always include unpredictable, fun pre- and post-show conversations.

Many thanks for their help in the past year to TWIT.tv and Leo Laporte for launching TummelVision, Squarespace for NY studio support, Rob Blatt and Mike Vardy for production help and our former listener now producer Andrew Hazlett.

I find it kind of funny and I find it kind of sad w/Zoe Keating – Ep 13 Tummelvision from heather gold on Vimeo.

Doc Searls

On Thursday, November 11, the TummelVision crew welcomes a special guest star, someone who’s worked on the web for a longtime as a leading advocate for customers advocating for themselves Doc Searls.

If you have a question for Doc, or suggestion for topics you’d like to hear discussed, please leave a comment below, tweet @TummelVision or #tummel, or email us at tummlers [at] gmail.com.

Please also join us for the live audio stream of this episode at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT on Thursday at Tummelvision.tv/Live.  During these broadcasts (and “after parties”), be sure to check out our always-lively chat room.

As one of the authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls has been a tireless advocate for many of the ideals cherished by the Tummlers.  Among many other current activities, he runs Project VRM as a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. Doc wants tools and platforms to allow people manage the way vendors (companies that sell you stuff and services) have relationships with them.

Doc’s very committed to a more humanized world, so how does tummeling fit into his vision for VRM? At what point do tummlers manage the relationship between customers and the company and when do business recognize they need tummelers to manage the company in a networked environment? How will the new VRM technologies work for real people doing this work? Or was the Cluetrain Manifesto a pipedream and a wish that peopel working for companies treat people as people?

 Doc’s perspective is a rare blend of seasoned wisdom and up-to-the-minute expertise.  We hope you’ll join us for this “very special episode” of TummelVision.

The people in authority who make the rules interfere with the people who know how to do the job and are in direct contact with the situation. The people who make the rules know nothing about the work they’re interfering with.

-Kevin Carson, Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies

Kevin’s post give me food for thought. It’s my preference not to abstract the hierarchy / network thing into information but view it as people problems or challenges. Tummeling is a kind of human self-networking that happens even within hierarchies. Many corporations function because there are individuals who take it upon themselves to make connections and bring people together across “silos” (man I hate that word). Sometimes it’s an admin assistant or project manager or someone with low “authority status” (something else Carson’s post critiques, the mistake hierarchy managers make when they look to what they see as authority rather than actual experience).

What’s most important to me about what Carson refers to as “people who know how to do the work” is not their abstract knowledge but what is experiential. Experience happens in the present. It’s where all real authority and creativity emerges.

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.

The 3 of us were actually in a room together to tummel the first Crowd Conference: a conference about crowdsourcing work.

We’ll be back next week!

This week you can relive our episode that featured Allee Willis.  Check it out here at our regular time (Thursdays at 5 pm PST/8 pm EST).

See you next week!

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.”

Thanks to Johnny Goldstein check out his stuff at Envizualize

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.

Chat on twitter at #tummel

or here on freednode

Salon’s Scott Rosenberg had a tummel-savvy piece on this subject recently. Ironically I heard about it around the same time I saw NPR’s Andy Carvin live tweeting an event and mentioning outsourcing the moderation of comments. Andy later clarified the thing he saw as outsource-able was the human filtering of spam.

Going first is a really key element to successful tummeling. Confidence / lack of self-consciousness provides an emotional container and invitation for others to to join. This is an amazing example. Here’s the long form original without my commentary.

Joining us is game designer Nicole Lazzaro, a participant in the Social Interaction Design Blog and an expert in the role of emotion in gaming.

You can chat with us and the rest of the Tummlers at http://irc.twit.tv .

This show will be livestream only for the first few months from TWiT. Well post audio files and video files if recorded by the TWiT army here once we get them.