Evolving Web

Chasing Bucky

“Aren’t you a .Net shop?” he asked me.

“No.” I replied

“But you built this in .Net.”

“I would have built it out of rice crispie squares if it were appropriate.”

At Gray Hill Solutions, we don’t subscribe to one coding platform.  To do so would be to lose any advances in software tools – which come at a wonderfully bewildering pace.  It makes sense, then, to not specialize in the tools – but in the application of tools in general.

Society has finally caught up with Buckminster Fuller.  Fuller was on a life-long quest to make the world a better place.  That’s a big ticket item.  It’s difficult to make the world a better place through myopia. 

In his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (read, buy), Fuller gave a long and impassioned argument about the dangers of over specialization.  He leads this argument with this passage:

Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.

Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. – Bucky Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The shifts from Leonardos to Pirates and so on were enabled by advances in knowledge.  Merely introducing the number 0 into the human brain created a massive revolution not only in technology and travel, but in how we relate to the nature of work and to each other.  Fuller here was saying that we can all be geniuses in our own way – we just have to pull back the curtain.

To Fuller, the geniuses were not overly specialized.  They could not be.  In order to truly be creative, you need materials from which to create.  Frans Johannson calls this “the Medici Effect”.  The Medici Effect is, in essence, a mashup of ideas that can only come by stepping outside your field of expertise and learning from something radically different.  Fishermen have something to teach Internists.  Astronauts have something to teach pawn shop owners.  You never know, because the nature of insight is that it creatively links ideas that may not seem linkable.

So we are now in a world where we are understanding the world faster than ever before.  Digital technology so vastly speeds up the conversation that innovation and invention are common place.  “What have you invented for me lately?”

We are now all da Vincis.

In order to be da Vincis, we must now embrace Fuller-style generalism. No one is better to examine than Fuller himself for this.  Being a generalist didn’t mean Fuller was mired in reading random books.  Fuller built housing and cars.  He was an author and and artist.  He was practical and theoretical.

Or we can look at Henry J. Kaiser (right).  Kaiser oversaw shipyards, steel mills, automotive plants, engineering firms and a massive health care company.  Dude was hardly stuck in one mode of thinking.

The fact is that today advances in systemic thinking are requiring more holistic visions.  The human body was at one time a collection of fairly autonomous parts that functioned together.  Now, the body is understood more as a system and medicine is reacting to this realization.  But it doesn’t stop there, because the body reacts to lead in your paint, to particulates in the air, to the sun’s rays, to recycled air, to motor vehicles, to stress …  Suddenly being a doctor is even more complicated than before.

Recently when I was in Hospital for pneumonia, the doctors asked me a lot of questions. An not-insignificant number were about stress.  Did I own my own company?  Was business going well?  How was my life at home?  Had I suffered a loss recently?

At that point, at least at that hospital, I knew medicine had turned a corner and that we were starting to embrace Fuller’s wisdom at last.  Our understanding of the world and life is becoming more systemic and holistic.  The advances of technology and the speed of culture are now so fast that expertise is seen as temporal and contextual.  What is our expertise today will be obsolete technologically very soon – but the experience  of learning and applying the technology is what is really important.  The actions are ethereal, the lessons learned are permanent.

Now it’s up to us to let people know those lessons learned and to grow from them.  That’s the new expertise. We are all experts, we are all generalists.

Technorati Tags: Buckminster Fuller,Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,Frans Johannson,Medici Effect,da vinci,trevor blake

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Organizational Entropy and Information Abuse

My friend Jay Fienberg left a comment at the end of my Intellectual In-Breeding post that raised this point:

I think this is an interesting idea, but either overstated or in need of more exploration:

"Information is, by its very nature, subversive. Information tells you the right thing to do."

I think one could just as easily assert that "information is, by its very nature, oppressive. Information tells you the wrong thing to do."

As a conjecture: when has anyone every done the wrong thing without doing so based on some information? – Jay Fienberg (Jay’s Site)

I read this in the car, parked outside Top Pot Doughnuts in Seattle and laughed. It’s an awesome observation.

Cuts Like a Knife

I would argue that information in this context is an object.  A social object. Subversive, Oppressive, Liberating, Enlightening. 

And like a knife, it can slice a tomato or your throat.

When organizations lose shared purpose and principles – their sense of community – they are already in process of decay and dissolution, even though they may linger with outward appearance of success for some time.  -- Dee Hock, Founder of Visa in Birth of the Chaordic Age

The game of a new organization is to be noticed. To be noticed, you want to be the best.  Quality is job 1.  This is an expansive mode.

The game of an old organization is to continue to exist.  This is a protective or entropic mode – the focus is now inward.

What Mr. Hock is noting in this quote is that when an organization switches from an expansive mode, it enters an entropic mode. Maybe this is inevitable – that’s for further debate.

When you combine these two observations, the questions become: How do organizations in an entropic state abuse information?   And, perhaps, is information abuse itself a signal that an organization has entered an entropic state?  Can we use it as a diagnostic tool?

The entropic organization is readily recognizable by the dysfunction in how it exchanges information.  So, the last question, I’d give a yes.  The middle question I would give a probably – it’s certainly an indicator that you need to do an entropy check. 

The first question would take volumes.  Rules, policies, even outright fabrication in some cases.  Worldcom, Morgan Stanley, and the Bush White House can all provide ample examples of half-truths and lies being released in the form of information and information that has bowed to the whims of control.

But It Feels so Right

Why do organizations do this?  What is it about entropy that causes this type of bending of information?  Why do people feel that obfuscation and withholding information is useful?

We return to Dee’s Quote.  “When organizations lose shared purpose and principles – their sense of community – they are already in process of decay…”. 

Decay is pervasive.

Systemic.

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
Its not always going to be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away
-- George Harrison, All Things Must Pass

Decay and rebirth are life itself.  Why are our institutions expected to be immutable?

Change requires acceptance. People leading large companies are already scared of tomorrow. Every day they fear someone will build something better, do something smarter, create something less expensive.

Keeping information hidden until the last possible minute is a natural reaction by people in power.  Power corrupts – but corrupt people are not evil.  They have been corrupted, often unbeknownst to themselves.  Retrospection is our teacher in this regard.

Feeling that they are protecting the company, they will hoard information.  There has been no handbook to tell them otherwise. 

The more information is withheld, the more purpose and principles are lost.  The gulf between the organization and the community widens.  And entropy escalates.

I coulda sworn we had it all worked out

Entropy is natural and inescapable. We’ve spent our entire history as human beings denying it. 

Does this mean things are hopeless?

No, it means that systems need rejuvenation and management.  Entropy should be anticipated and accounted for.

IBM has done an excellent job of reinventing itself.  Many governments have sunset dates for their ministries. And (thank you FDR) we have term limits on the US presidency.  With every new presidency, with every new reinvention of self, introspection and forward vision both happen.  Rebirth ensues.

Agile Methods and Lean Principles both dictate frequent reviews and check-ins. Information is designed to flow as freely as possible and create systems to quickly note when it is not. 

Human nature works for us and against us in this regard.  We naturally protect ourselves when under pressure – but we also naturally cooperate when goals are clear and shared.

Leadership becomes critical in open structures.  It’s not anarchy and it’s not communism. Open structures require strong leadership. Someone needs to be on-point to make sure all the members of an organization are comfortable.

This requires true leadership, not autocratic positional power.

Way beyond the shadow of a doubt

Society abhors an information vacuum.

The future requires an introspective organization.  One that won’t stand for misinformation or information being withheld.

Will it still happen?  As sure as the day is long it will.

But it will happen a lot less and be noticed more quickly.

Murphy’s Law stands.  Things going wrong isn’t the problem – it’s things festering.

(And for the record, I really can’t stand that Bryan Adams song and it’ll be stuck in my head for days now….)

UPDATE:  An Bui has posted a thoughtful extension of this conversation.

Technorati Tags: Jay Fienberg,Dee Hock,Agile,agile methodologies,lean,social media principles,social media,FDR,murphy's law,earworm

Blogged at Top Pot Doughnuts on Queen Anne in Seattle, WA – I’m free of the snow!

Towards a Philosophy of Oblivion, Detroit, Ubik, Power and Couches

A while ago Ed Vielmetti, yeah- the walking guy, grabbed a bunch of questions from 103 Bees and answered them in his blog.  See, 103 Bees mines your blog's search-hit history and analyzes it in various ways. One of those ways is to give you a list of direct questions people have asked and, for whatever reason, Google (usually) has directed them to you.  Also, usually these questions are no where and in no way answered in your blog. 

Many times these questions are outright insanity and you stare at the results trying to figure out how they made it to your blog in the first place.  But, nonetheless, through the great mystery that is "relevance" there they are.  Unrelated questions driving traffic to your site.  

I thought Ed's use of the questions would be a great way to get rid of writer's block.  Well, today I'm working from home.  My back patio is lined with spring plants waiting to make it to the ground or into containers and I have writer's block.

So I'm going to take a few questions from my list from 103 Bees and answer them for real.  Yes, these are real questions real people asked a search engine and somehow found their way to Jim Benson's blog.

Question 1: How do I get oblivion without using a torrent?

I am assuming anyone who would ask this question does not actually want to buy the game Oblivion at full retail, and is not asking how to obtain actual oblivion.  Lucky for you, the Internet includes eBay, a quick search gives you Oblivion on three platforms (XBox 360, PS3 and PC).   The lowest price here is a penny.  I think you can suck it up and pay a penny for something you really want.

Question 2: How do I draw a couch {facing forward}?

A lot easier than you would facing backward.  But if you were looking for a how-to... First, draw a rectangle that is about 4 times as long as it is high.  Now on either end at the bottom draw a little square (make sure they are both the same size).  Now on top of that box on either side draw an upright rectangle that's about twice as high as it is wide and is about the same height at the original rectangle.  Now, at the top rectangle to the left draw a line going up a little bit, now make another line going up that same amount from the far side of the of the right rectangle.  Now join those two rectangles.  If you did that right it looks like a couch.  If you did that wrong, I suggest you look directly at the front of a couch.

 Question 3: 48 laws of power how to read?

I'm including this question because I actually see it fairly often.  I wrote a pretty crummy review of the book and left it at that, but many people have come to the site with searches like this.  How do I read the book?  I'm scared of the book?  Does the book corrupt people?  Is the book accurate?

The 48 Laws of Power is an historical look back on how people of immense power obtained and lost that power.  The overarching principles of how to influence, manipulate, and hoard in the quest of power.  I've had people tell me that they would not read the book, lest some of those lessons actually rub off on them and they would become bad people.

In my opinion, it's a great book and I've used lessons in it to actually avoid falling into the same traps as those who have allowed others to be manipulated.  Ultimately, though, understanding "bad" is a primary key of becoming "good".

We can see many people in the world of "good", from Jerry Falwell to Bill Clinton, who have pontificated "good" and did "bad" and were honestly surprised by it. 

The 48 Laws of Power aren't all "bad", however, many can be mustered in the true service of "good".  Much like drinking, many of the 48 laws are helpful in moderation, harmful in over-indulgence.

As for "How to read?" I would say that the 48 Laws of Power is not a how-to manual, but a book of lessons.  The are delivered in as amoral a manner as possible and it is up to you to fill in the moral lessons.

Be your own Gandhi.

Question 4:  What should be the conclusion of Ubik?  

Philip K. Dick's Ubik is also a major search engine hit for me.  Ubik is a story of pattern matching and the bewildering nature of misinterpretation.  Some of the characters in the book are dead.  We're not sure which ones or how dead they actually are.  A mysterious substance called Ubik may provide relief from this state.  But what is Ubik?

PKD uses all sorts of vehicles to foist Ubik upon the characters and the reader.  Some people know about it, sometimes it's a snack, sometimes it's a cleaning solution.

Written in 1969, Ubik also is fully aware of Marshall McLuhan and the saturation of push-advertising.  Each chapter starts with a gratuitous advertisement for Ubik - each time Ubik is performing an entirely different miracle solution to common problems.

Ubik, in the end, is about corporate control.  Over our choices, over our flows of information, and ultimately over how dead we can actually get.

Or at least that's my conclusion, anyway.

Question 5: How many people have read being and nothingness?

Millions of people have read Being and Nothingness of their own free will.

But I suggest you read No Exit.

Question 6: What happen when city planning goes wrong?

Hmm.

For redlining see Detroit.

For all else see every suburb in North America.

CLOSING

Okay, so there we have it.  I skipped these questions:

how do rabbits brains work - (three brain lobes, hopping, carrots, bunnies)

how do street dealers work - (cell phones, guns and bling = profit)

and my favorite

how do I know that my wife likes women? - (as opposed to hating them?)

I skipped those among others.  I have about 40 of them I think. 

 

Technorati tags: 103bees, ed Vielmetti, blogging, urban planning, philip k dick, ubik, sartre, no exit, being and nothingness, existentialism, detroit, suburbs

Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer

Degaussing Business

Only Jay Fienberg and John Hagel make blog postings so dense and meaningful that I actually have print them out and write on them.  For some reason I haven't blogged about Hagel for a while.  If you go back to the beginnings of this blog, you'll find him mentioned quite prominently.

Today, though, he took on Power Laws and it's some pretty intense stuff.   I'm going to just ask you to refer to his post for background because it's too much to try and summarize.

Suffice it to say, power laws (the Paretian model) are structurally different than bell curves (the Gaussian model).  Bell curves assumed a great leveling and averaging of capabilities, contact, and cause & effect.  Power curves assume a massing of a very few of these and then a nearly infinite number of minor ones.

In the past we've focused on a Gaussian model because it was more relevant (less travel, less contact, difficult supply chains, high cost of change).  Today, we are rapidly shifting to a Paretian model as all these elements are turned on their head. 

John Says:

Our institutions (not just businesses, but also educational and governmental) are largely designed for a Gaussian world where averages and forecasts are meaningful. As a result, we have evolved a sophisticated set of push programs that have delivered significant efficiency. In a world of sudden, severe and difficult to anticipate shifts, push programs become much less viable and we need to become a lot more creative in terms of designing pull platforms ... Bottom line: our institutional architectures, not to mention our technology architectures, will need to be redesigned to cope with a Paretian world.

and:

There’s another form of extreme event that also becomes more prominent in a Paretian world – this is the tendency for extreme forms of clustering in social networks, whether it takes the form of clustering in mega-cities in physical space or clustering of links and traffic on web sites in virtual space. Economic value inexorably follows these social clusters. This also has powerful implications for business, ranging from where to locate operations in physical space to how to redesign institutional architectures to accommodate thousands of business partners. There’s also a public policy implication – in many domains we are likely to see degrees of concentration and consolidation of economic power that is unprecedented (although Pareto just over 100 years ago observed that 20% of the population in Italy owned 80% of the land).

So we end up with a strange Push-me-pull-you situation here.  Large institutions are built to push information to a most common user archetype.  People, being largely unable to communicate with those who might share their deviations from the archetypes in the Gaussian world, had to deal with the one-size-fits-all model.

But now, because people can cluster, they no longer fit into the big artificial cluster of the imposed bell curve.  People can find "social clusters" which have economic value - but increasingly in the long tail. 

My wife is currently thinking about opening a chocolate business.  We've already been talking to potential buyers for her extremely-high-end chocolates.  These are hand-made, have all organic ingredients, highly temperature sensitive and a very very short shelf life.

This ain't your Mars Bar, here.

So we had to find a very specific niche that would be willing to pay and had the ability to rapidly use the product.

It's a business model that is entirely doable in the Paretian world that would have been highly unlikely to succeed in the Gaussian world. 

John also said:

In a Paretian world, surface events can become a distraction, diverting attention from the deep structures molding these surface events.  Surfaces are extraordinarily complex and rapidly evolving while the deep structures display more simplicity and stability. These deep structures are profoundly historical in nature – they evolve through positive feedback loops and path dependence.  Snapshots become misleading and understanding requires a dynamic view of the landscape.

The key here is that an understanding of your architecture is vital.  Architectures need to be able to support changing demands of their users. 

At Gray Hill Solutions, we are developing a new technology that stores specialized data in a very flexible way and provides an immediately customizable interface.  The data that we have will be constant, but our end-users have very different needs to that data from day-to-day.  The Interface framework is designed to allow users to completely change their interactions at-will.

I thought we were doing that because it made sense.  I thought my wife was working with chocolates and her clientele because they were fun and interesting.  But now I see we're reacting to a larger shift in the perception of human interaction. 

Technorati tags: john hagel, power curve, bell curve, Gauss, Gaussian, Pareto, Patetian, architecture, gray Hill Solutions, chocolate

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Forget Your Troubles C'mon Get Happy

My friend Jerry says that your brain will reward you if you forget your troubles and get happy.

Jerry says:

Researchers are discovering -- finally -- that brains reconfigure themselves all the time.
ScienceDaily recently reported that scientists in Lausanne detected neural reconnections on an hour-by-hour basis. In an interesting twist, my favorite passage in the article draws a parallel between brain function and social networks:

"The circuitry of the brain is like a social network where neurons are like people, directly linked to only a few other people," explains [researcher] Markram. "This finding indicates that the brain is constantly switching alliances and linking with new circles of "friends" to better process information."

Oddly this is exactly what meditation has always been for - to clear out associations in the brain that are baggage or unproductive and to focus the brain on understanding the task at hand.  In essence, it's like an operator switching the alliances in the brain in an optimization effort.

But there's a sinister part of this, that repetitive messaging works.  This is a human autonomic response that is easily gamed.  Say, for example, you wanted to convince people of a course of action - anything from buying Coke to supporting a war overseas.  Well, the best way to get what you want it repetitive messaging - so the brains of your target audience gradually and unwillingly associate Coke with Life and Iraq with Terrorism.

"I am in control of my own brain, I am in control of my own brain, I am in control of my own brain, ..."

 

Technorati tags: Jerry Michalski, Sociate, Social networking, brains, neural connections, coke

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

The Location of Innovation

John Hagel brings together two opposing viewpoints today regarding the location of innovation.  These are flat and spiky earth concepts.  The first, Tom Friedman's flat earth, proposes that due to the egalitarian and open nature of the Internet, modern communications and travel, innovation need not be concentrated in historic urban centers.  The second, Richard Florida's Spiky Earth, suggests that these same forces actually increase the gravitation toward acknowledged centers of innovation.

John suggests that they both may be right, but are missing the point that the world's innovative landscape evolves over time.  Different locations may assert themselves at different times and may grow to prominence and lose prominence as someplace replaces them.

Historically, many cities have been the "center" throughout history.  Florence, Milan, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, etc.  But this is not a static state.

It's much like initial network theory.  There was an assumption that a strong centralized node had a degree of permanence, but this was shown not to be the case.  But that does not mean that strong nodes don't remain important .. they might just lose their dominance.

This can be seen in the case of Estonia.  Why would anyone want to innovate in Estonia, one would have asked.  It was totally off the market.  Until all of the sudden there was Skype.  Then a community of innovation suddenly started to exist in Estonia.  It grew out of nowhere, capitalized on native talent.  Then started to import talent.  A perfect example of the flat earth concept.

Until a few weeks ago when they were consumed by eBay.  The major hub re-asserted itself.  Skype went from belonging to Eastern Europe to belonging to the Bay Area.

This indicates that there is play between the two concepts.  You can innovate and be eaten too. 

At issue here is two rather limited theories that assume that people do or do not want certain things as a unit.  That people are, in essence, all the same.  But they are not.

The Bay Area is a great concentration of innovative thinkers.  I try to go there at least every eight weeks if not more.  I go for conversation and community.

On the other hand, I don't want to pay $800k US for a house that's about to fall over.  Many people are willing to pay for that because the opportunities are numerous and the conversation is that good.

But Ameritrade is innovating in Omaha.  Fast Servers is innovating in Iowa City.  People are innovating all over the place.  Because they've been able to start their own conversations and build up critical mass to give them legs.

The Internet gives their conversations reach.  I can extend my reach via this blog, or trips to Palo Alto or having coffee with friends.  All of these help me build what Frans Johansson calls "Intersections" in his book The Medici Effect.  For Johansson, innovation happens when people are exposed to multiple ways of thinking - cultural, professional, etc.  As we are so exposed, we begin to pull truths from one discipline and import them into another.  This extension of doctrine to incorporate thought from outside the doctrine is the essence of innovation.

The creation of environments that lead to this type of innovation is made much easier by modern technology.  The flat layer of our world is much thicker.  But this does not negate the fact that people are social animals and the value of the intersection is enhanced by face to face interaction.  Like it or not, we're still human.  Human beings like to hang out with human beings.

We have the capabilities of a totally flat society.  We have the social needs of a spiky one.

((Please be sure to go back and read John's article, I didn't quote from it enough))

Reviewing Double Click

Love With a Paper Trail

Reviewing Double Click: Romance and Commitment Among Online Couples

Book:  Double Click | Author: Andrea J. Baker

Cities: Seattle, Vancouver -- Dates: 25 to 30 July 2005

One Paragraph Review

Happiness does not sell soap. This is why the news so frequently shows the monstrous decay of society, regardless of how real it might be. So too has been the coverage of online relationships. Andrea Baker finds that people who participate in online relationships are not desperate, lonely, ugly, sex addicts and child molesters; despite common depictions. Baker interviewed and tracked 89 couples that met online and started a relationship. Some of these failed, others did not. The participants filled out her extensive two part survey and gave her a tremendous store of first-hand information. Imagine what a great day it is for a sociologist to find a love affair with a fully time-stamped paper trail! The study finds that online partners find each other in social settings, talk and grow their relationship in private, encounter obstacles, overcome some of them, and make decisions about their futures. The major finding here is that there are considerable and demonstrable benefits to a relationship which starts online. Perhaps some counselors should take note.

Pack Up Your Troubles in your Press Kit Bag

There has always been tension between the press and elected officials.  There has always been a healthy distrust of both by the electorate.

The electorate in turn has always been divided on key issues.  If they weren't, we'd have consensus on everything and we'd have no need for government decision makers.  Government would merely be administrators of the thing we all uniformly agreed on.

Wouldn't that be handy?  Wouldn't that be boring?

Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery After Blogging

Good night nurse....

Canada's Canoe reports on Flu Bloggers who are smartmobbing the potential upcoming flu outbreak.  This is an ad hoc community gathered rapidly and naturally from a concern looming on the horizon.   There are several elements of this that interest me.

Natural ad-hoc cohesion - Most of these bloggers came to be associated with each other due to a common interest that they, themselves, started in isolation.  After the start of their blogs, they were able to join together as a network.  So they started as radical, isolated nodes and achieved cohesion due to the instantaneous selective searching capabilities of the internet.  They could not have formed as a group without starting as inspired individuals.

Internal Discord and External Accord - Like most groups, these participants see the benefits of the entire group but also its warts.  Conscientious researchers are paired with wacky conspiracy theorists due to the open structure of the internet.  In the aggregate, however, these bloggers learn from each other and refine their posts to build on information learned and analyzed.

Hard Science meets Human Interest - These situations leave the door open for many possibilities.  Researchers, finding a community of interested people, could tap this resource for article research, case studies and distributed computing.  Imagine if you were studying a particular strain of influenza and needed to model its growth.  There are many ways to model a contagion, but you only have the computing power or time to do a subset.

Politics meets an Informed Populace - The flu is more than something that sells Nyquil.  It's an issue.  Flu vaccine distribution, community health preparation, school system policy, worker compensation, quarantine rules, and many other factors are intrinsically linked to the flu.  As situational blogging like this grows (and it likely will), the "special interests" that currently are credited with influencing public opinion will both draw from and be challenged by these communities.  Lawmakers will find themselves being educated by these bloggers and find these bloggers formidable and sophisticated foes should they find themselves on the wrong side of an issue.

Take a look at a few of the flu blogs and see how you feel....

Culture and the Feeding Tube

I was very moved by this NPR story this morning regarding Terri Schiavo.  Overall, my own feelings about the case were so strong and clear that I was not going to write about them.

It didn't seem like it really fit with this particular blog or its goals of exploring elements of cooperation.

However, given yesterday's blog entry, this is an amazingly powerful piece.  In it Barbara Bradley Hagerty explores the situation by expressly asking religious scholars from many faiths what their interpretation of the case is and why.

My friend Trevor once told me "Never condemn someone for trying to do good."  It is clear that people here (Terri's parents and husband) are trying to do good, although we are witnessing it in a very public and ugly way.

Cooperation and mutual understanding are very difficult in a situation so emotionally charged and with such immediate consequences.