The work within Valve Software has produced pioneering titles such as the Half-Life series, CounterStrike, Portal, Team Fortress, and the Left 4 Dead franchise.

From a business perspective, Newell understands how to create an environment where highly creative people expect that they will be doing cutting-edge work each day, and he offers some management insights.

However, I want to point out some pieces in his presentation which reflect a sea-change within the way that business works. Starting at 3:15, Newell describes how digital rights management (DRM) has essentially created a wall between game developers and consumers — where consumers have essentially been forced to experience games within walled gardens designed by the game’s developer and publisher.

Instead, Newell discusses the ecosystem of collaboration between Valve and its fan community (starting at 6:30). Fans produce custom mods and maps for many of Valve’s titles, and they’re allowed to share these modifications with the community. In fact, games such as CounterStrike have remained popular years after release because the community remains engaged in the development process.

In the digital age, bi-directional collaboration has found a place within the world of marketing and even product development. Fans/customers provide real-time feedback (and often participation) with the manufacturer or service provider. However, the world of learning and development has lagged behind in this trend. Organizations still push content out from their central core to learners.

In the traditional model of training, learners are consumers of content. They get spoon-fed learning within walled gardens of classrooms and e-learning modules. Learners then have little opportunity to contribute or collaborate. However, that model has become antiquated through so many collaborative technologies that now exist. Instead of forcing learners into a passive role, organizations must re-envision the process of learning within the organization. The members of the workforce must become active collaborators in the production of learning.

If I were teaching an entry level instructional design class, I might ask students to differentiate between Valve Software’s view of “customers as collaborators” with Ubisoft’s seeming approach that all customers are potential software pirates. Ubisoft’s approach has generated an uprising (including frustrated individuals launching DDOS attacks).

Quite simply, do you serve your customers’ needs or do you try to force them through unpopular and potentially ineffective processes to suit your own needs?

Even in the world of learning and development, we must align our solutions with our learners’ needs. More importantly, we must respect that they likely know much more about those needs than we do. We must invite them to collaborate with us to find effective solutions.

Think about it. Individuals can launch coordinated cyberattacks on nation-states. An American can open a web-browser and participate in an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) or the sites of Iran’s Supreme Leader or its president. If the U.S. military conducted these actions, they could legitimately be considered acts of war (or interfering with another nation’s internal affairs).

But, how do we describe a volunteers who decide on their own to become involved? Unlike the Lafayette Escadrille (American aviators who went to war in France prior to America’s involvement in 1917), the people joining today’s DoS attacks do not have to travel to Iran or put themselves at risk. They’re not soldiers or traditional warfighters.

• If residents of China do not like the policies of the United States, should they launch a DoS attack on key US websites? What if these angered Chinese citizens targeted Bank of America, and Amazon’s websites?
• If a popular blogger, radio host, or television show host encourages a denial of service attack on their own government or another government–how should the sponsor’s home nation respond?

We’re looking at a form of asymemetric civil-disobediance or guerilla warfare. It’s easy enough that a ten-year-old child can participate in the DoS attack on a foreign nation. The child can open a browser before bedtime and the computer will attack while he/she sleeps.

We’re seeing a potential change within geopolitical discourse between nations. In the past, we looked to leaders to see how a nation would respond to a situation. Now, individuals can act before a leader can even formulate a response to global events. Who will lead and who will follow?

Traditional state-to-state political discourse will long endure (through embassies, treaties, and multi-national bodies). However, we’re looking at a force which wants to drive politics to a peer-to-peer level.

In my writings about social capital, I’ve often said that an individual working in Chicago may have few meaningful connections with co-workers in the same office. Their work may be more connected with folks in London, Atlanta, Singapore, and Dubai. Increasingly, Gen X and Millenials live and work with people around the world. Those bonds, over time, exert a peer-to-peer pressure.

Will it moderate actions between nations or will it provoke more extreme responses? The answer will vary from scenario to scenario. However, the nature of political discourse has clearly changed.

As my father (a reference librarian) used to say, “You don’t need to know the answer yourself. You just need to know how to find the answer you need.”

Tony essentially models LinkedIn as a cocktail mixer of people he’s met, reserving his recommendations to people he trusts. This model allows him allows him to expand his reach to locate resources within his network who can answer his question. However, number of “connections” does not confer expertise on any single person.

From a social capital perspective, he’s expanded his potential access to information–without immediately creating deeper social capital. He still must find reasons for casual acquaintances and 2nd level contacts to help him locate the answer he needs.

His approach aligns closely what I’ve described many times here. LinkedIn itself is just a network.

• Using Status Updates to Mobilize Social Capital
• LinkedIn Wants You to Learn Social Capital Theory
• Social Networks vs. Social Capital
• What Should My Network Look Like?

If you use any social network passively, you’ll see few benefits, but if you actively invest time into it, you will see a significant return.

However, today’s news focuses heavily on social capital on the macro level.

Political discourse has changed through digital social media tools, and it’s not just happening in today’s democracies. Every government and nation must accept the fact that they cannot fully control the media anymore without disabling every mobile phone, every camera, and every portal to the Internet.

Consider these two posts made from candidate MirHossein Mosavi’s Twitter account:

@Mousavi1338: We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster.

@Mosuavi1338: @twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down

The second post refers to the fact that Twitter was scheduled for regular overnight maintenance on Monday night (US time). These posts were likely not written by the candidate, so they’re a media blast between a politician and his constituency–similar to how Obama used Twitter during the 2008 presidential election. On its own, that’s nothing new.

Social media gives a naked, almost voyeuristic look, into individual human moments. In the past 48 hours, we’ve seen many bloggers and tweeple from Iran posting by-the-minute reports. I used to wonder whether you could say anything of value within 140 characters, but many of the tweets have revealed moments of bravery, fear, and raw humanity.

• @Change_for_Iran: “it’s worth taking the risk, we’re going. I won’t be able to update until I’m back. again thanks for your kind support and wish us luck”
• @PersianKiwi “people are running in streets outside. There is panic in streets.people going ino houses to hide. #Iranelection”
• @Tehranbureau “shooting resulted in killing. at least ‘one young man’ she saw shot in the mouth. she said it was NOT police. says it was Basij.”

When we look at social transformation through the lens of social capital, we recognize two different effects:

1) an individual can communicate with more people (a broader social network) and draw them closer into the events of the moment. Videos taken at street-level by mobile phones show students being beeaten. This humanizing effect produces a peer-to-peer response (without a mediating presence through media).

2) the whole network’s capacity for communication has increased. While there’s certainly been a lot of noise in the twitterverse, more raw information has come out to an information hungry world. A government cannot just eject international reporters and assume that events will not be seen on a global stage.

So much information has been tweeted in-the-moment, that it’s likely some contains mistakes and inaccuracies. In fact, you’ll probably find many breathless accounts, overstatements, and perhaps even misinformation.

However, in the short-term, a social network can function without trust. Over time, low-quality or disreputable reports may be revealed. Trust becomes a requisite for a long-term social network’s functioning.

These ad-hoc networks are short-lived and transitory. Most people will shift their attention elsewhere before long-term factors of social capital become requisite.

Today, you don’t have to open your newspaper or watch CNN for news, you can read reports written by people who are geolocated within the situation itself. However, you may feel like you’re being hit by a deluge of often-contradictory (and confusing chatter.

There’s a tangible and real darkside to this political discourse, and I’ll explain more in my next post.

• http://www.facebook.com/bill.sherman
• http//www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1544430393&ref=nf

Now, I’ll admit, I was one of those people who logged on to acquire my custom url. My name is common enough that it’s hard to get it on social media. Mashable.com reports that 1 million user ids were claimed within the first hour and 3 million user-ids were claimed within 24 hours.

Now, the landrush wasn’t prompted by a cool new technology innovation. Other social media tools, such as livejournal have allowed custom usernames for ten years.

So, there’s a broader point here. Today, sites like Facebook and Twitter are the social media tools of the day. However, they have to constantly evolve, because there’s a low-level of brand loyalty between users and the brand. Formerly popular websites–such as Friendster and now MySpace, have struggled as users have abandoned their platforms.

With new applications, such as Google’s Wave, today’s platforms must continue to evolve.

Users want to communicate and stay-in-touch with their core friends as well as their remote acquintances. They want to be able to schedule parties, participate in viral memes, and scribble notes to each other. Those core desires can be met through a variety of applications.

When designers look at social network applications, they need to think about the underlying principles of social capital–does the application increase a user’s ability to locate or mobilize resources within their network? Instead of becoming charmed with the latest feature, developers should go to the core of what their users truly want to achieve.

It’s interesting to compare this past week’s events with other protests:

• Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004-05)
• China’s Tianamen Square Protests (1989)
• Czechosolovakia’s Velvet Revolution (1989)
• Poland’s Solidarity Movement (1980)

Would Poland’s change have occured quicker if the union members and organizers had access to today’s social media? How would Tianamen Square’s protests have changed (if any)?

Yet, the thought-experiment becomes even more striking when we move further back into history and look at popular uprisings–The French Revolution of 1789; the Revolutions of 1848; and the American Revolution of 1776. Here are a couple early-American examples:
Paul Revere
Paul Revere would could have saved himself a long midnight ride with just a few keyclicks.

• @PaulRevere. “The Redcoats are coming out. Please RT.” (RT = re-tweet/pass-it-on)

After a quick Tweet, he could have gone back to sleep. Generations of students would be spared the task of memorizing Longfellow’s poem. But, on a more significant level, more information would have passed than just that one single tweet. Bostonian Twitterers would have erupted with distributed information passed peer-to-peer rather than through a single network node. The structure (and communications) within the early days of the American Revolution would have looked very different.

Malcolm Gladwell explores the story of Paul Revere and a less-successful rival in The Tipping Point and comes to the conclusion that Revere succeeded because he was a connector with pre-established connections (essentially someone with a large social network and a high degree of social capital within that network).

Declaration of Indepndence