As the “digital convergence” continues along its path, I see more opportunities for researchers online. If you’ve ever “felt my pain,” this blog’s for you. I wanted to share some of the resources I and other colleagues have found to be most effective for combining the research process with the speed and accessibility of modern global connectivity and tools. Some are targeted specifically at researchers, but many are general purpose tools that have significant advantages when applied to the research process.

Click the + at the end of each branch of the mind map below to reveal more information. If you have other resources that have been invaluable to your own research process, drop me a line and tell me why I should include it in this map. Hopefully we will make life just a little easier for researchers everywhere.

http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/public_map_shell/39513233/research-tools

* Special thanks to Marilyn Price-Mitchell for contributing to this map.

MobileMe to the Rescue?

My partner Tracy and I both have original iPhones, and we’ve updated them with the latest 2.0 software. We have several calendars between us, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll talk about 3 of them: Tracy, Gabriel, and Abby. We manage Abby’s calendar as a family and our own calendars individually. However, since iCal’s publish and subscribe features presume a single person “owns” a calendar, to date there has been no way for both Tracy and I to manage the Abby calendar. That’s the “holy grail” of family organization I was hoping for with MobileMe.

Unfortunately, MobileMe does not currently provide us the ability to share calendars editable calendars with each other. In fact, calendar sharing functionality is noticeably lacking in the current implementation of MobileMe. 

Enter BusySync

While searching the web for possible solutions, I came across BusySync, a software add-on to the Mac’s System Preferences that provides the ability to synchronize Apple’s iCal calendars with Google Calendar and it enables multiple people to update the same calendar. It does both of these jobs quite nicely.

What does synchronizing with Google Calendar have to do with the iPhone and MobileMe? Good question. It turns out that it’s part of a rather complex but functional workaround to enable over-the-air synchronization of iCal calendars for iPhone users. If I update an event on Abby’s calendar from my iPhone, here’s what happens:

1. Gabriel updates an Abby Calendar event on his iPhone.
2. Gabriel’s iPhone syncs over the air to MobileMe.
3. Gabriel’s Mac syncs the change from MobileMe to iCal.
4. Gabriel’s BusySync syncs the change from iCal to Gabriel’s Google Calendar.
5. Gabriel’s Google Calendar syncs the change to Tracy’s Google Calendar.
6. Tracy’s BusySync syncs from Tracy’s Google Calendar to her iCal.
7. Tracy’s Mac syncs from iCal to her MobileMe account.
8. Tracy’s MobileMe account syncs to her iPhone.

First of all, it’s important to remain calm and stay in your boat. Novice kayakers will bail out of their boats in challenging situations. Once you are separated from your boat, the boat itself becomes a danger that could pin you against a rock, not to mention the fact that you’re now swimming the rapid you were once kayaking — using your body instead of your boat to bounce off of rocks and other obstacles. In business, your boat is whatever keeps you afloat — your team, your partner, your kids. Don’t abandon them when the going gets tough. If you do it will be a bumpy ride and it just might do serious damage to them or to you.

You’re still in your boat and you’re stuck in a hydraulic that is churning you up and down as if you were inside a huge washing machine. You’re stuck in it sideways, so the hole is trying to suck your entire boat under water. You’re not sure what rocks are underneath. You put your paddle out to the downstream side and move it back and forth, front to back to brace yourself and avoid turning upside down. You try to use this feather brace to move to the side of the hole, hoping it will kick you out if you can get part of your boat into the downstream current. But this particular hole is a “keeper” — it’s not going to let you go.

The next thing to try is to “go deep.” Every hole is made up of water that is flowing downstream but has been temporarily diverted into the recirculating hydraulic. If you turned off the flow, the hole would disappear and all the water would flow down hill. So the secret is to find the nearest place where the current is moving strongly down stream and use it to your advantage. Often in a big hydraulic that place is down deep. So you do what feels counter intuitive, you turn upside down and reach your arms down toward the bottom of the river searching for the down stream flow. You feel it instantly when you reach it… it’s the stronger of the fundamental forces at play. Your arms are pulled back and your body and boat follow, pulling you out of the hydraulic. Now you can roll back upright and get some air, safely downstream of the hole.

The keeper hole is a metaphor for a business process or relationship that keeps you stuck in one place, impeding forward momentum. You try to work with it, respecting its boundaries and moving left or right to see how you can get what you want. But ultimately it’s not a good situation to be in and you need to find a way to move on. Look for the downstream current — it may be as simple as articulating your business goal as aligned with the goals of an authority figure in your organization. It may require their direct endorsement. Or you may be able to ally with another effort that has already figured out how to avoid the hole that trapped you. Their momentum could pull you back into the flow. Find a way to make the hole irrelevant by working effectively with more powerful forces going in the direction you want to go.

The same is true in business. Every project has its complexity, and there will be points along the way that feel like minefields. You need good fundamental skills and enough momentum to keep moving through the field. It’s only temporary and the very same water will eventually quiet down if you can keep moving downstream.

A big nasty hole might be a challenging customer, employee, co-worker or process. These are situations where energy is focused intensively in one place. If you can figure out how to take advantage of that energy without being overwhelmed by it, you will gain momentum. Follow the seams on the sides of big holes and never stop paddling. Your goal is the same as the water’s — to move downstream.

A week of being completely unplugged created the space for me to focus on what the river has to teach me at this point in my life. After 20 years of paddling I’ve learned that the river always has something to teach. Sometimes with a gentle reminder, other times with a cold slap in the face. This particular trip was all about “flow” for me. I remember one of my earliest whitewater teachers helping us learn to read the river and begin to dance with it. He would say “See that boulder 100 yards down on river left? I can eddy out behind it in 3 strokes.” He would take off and we would follow one by one, taking as few strokes as possible, and learning to speak the language of the river — current, eddy, pillow, hydraulic — until we could feel it with our eyes closed and our bodies would adjust instantly to meet the water in its fluid dance.

The river is like life. It’s always moving and changing, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. A small number of fundamental patterns combine in an infinite variety of ways to create a complex, living environment that requires the mindset of a dance partner rather than an engineer.

Patterns

Standing waves retain their shape even though the water flowing through them is constantly changing.

Diagonal waves reflect off each other and bounce off the river bed to create a seemingly chaotic maelstrom that can rise up or fall away underneath you.

Eddies are places where water rushes upstream to fill a void, creating an opportunity to rest and assess your next moves… or to head back upstream and try again.

Hydraulics (or “holes”) are places where water flows over an obstacle and creates a recirculating pattern of aerated water. If you know where they are and how to read them you can use them to your advantage — or avoid them completely if they’re too big and hairy. If you don’t know where they are or don’t know how to read them, some can grab your boat and shake it violently, turn you upside down, and then do it all over again. In those situations you need to know how to surf and you need to know how to roll. Sometimes, if you get stuck, you can turn upside down and reach toward the bottom with your paddle. The current underneath will pull you out of the hole where you can roll back up and continue on downstream.

Bringing it Home

As I ease back into my work, these river fundamentals are sticking with me as metaphors. I am thinking of my work and each project as yet another river, each one a tributary to the big stream of my life. There is a general direction of flow, there are big waves and small ones, fast and slow currents, and there are periods where we seem to be stuck going around in circles. Each of these is important to the life of the river and the life of the work. It’s not about trying to change these patterns, but rather learning to work with the current and gracefully move where you want to go with the least effort possible. When that happens, you can feel the state of flow.

I can eddy out behind that rock in 2 strokes.

(Here are some pictures of my recent trip down the Middle Fork.)

The concept of Emotional Machines has been around for a number of years. Biofeedback machines have been used since the 70s to monitor things like heart rate, the electrical conductivity of your skin, blood pressure, and sweat. The US Military and scientists interested in human consciousness have used these technologies to train people to master their emotions and change their energetic state when needed. Using these techniques, Navy Seals are able to stay calm under enormous pressure, retaining energy and focus that would otherwise be wasted. Using similar techniques, though generally without the benefit of technological feedback, some Buddhist monks have the ability to sit in meditation and raise their body temperature enough that they can dry out a cold, wet blanket while sitting on a frigid stone floor.

Modern technology such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has helped scientists discover very specific regions of the brain that are active when certain emotions are in play. Imagine wearing a pair of glasses that contains sensors which can scan your brain for this kind of activity, feeding it wirelessly to a nearby computer. If you were playing a computer game, the game might get more intense until your heart rate reaches a certain level. At that point it might ask you to calm yourself quickly in order to be prepared for the next level. If you do, you get to enter the doorway, if not, you go back to another round of heart-pounding action and the cycle repeats until you either wear yourself out or discover how to shift emotional states.

This kind of scenario is being designed today by video game companies and will be on the market within 3 years.

It could also be used to train autistic children to activate parts of their brains that are less active. Or any of us for that matter. Imagine software that lets you pick your phobia, draws you into a heightened state of anxiety, then invites you to try different things to reduce that anxiety. You would in effect be training yourself with new coping mechanisms, new patterns of thought, that would be useful in other life situations.

My description above is a positive vision of how this technology could be used to help us expand our emotional intelligence. It could also be used for less admirable purposes that may not be so healthy. Since this technology is here, it’s time to ask, “how will we use it?” What purpose does it serve? Let’s make sure it serves both people and pocket books.

Here is a draft of one I created earlier today, then subsequently used during a client discovery meeting. It represents the pieces that must be balanced in the right proportions to have a successful experience using an online environment. A compelling purpose is at the center — without it, the environment is likely to fail. From the purpose, a set of goals is identified, and from the goals, in the context of the people and organization(s) involved, a methodology is chosen. The methodology informs the kind of facilitation required to achieve the purpose, as well as the kinds of Technology that will support the method. Physical access to technology and ability to use technology comprise the Access cloud. The level of Access informs the kind of Facilitation and the kinds of Technology that will be appropriate.

Every situation is a little different, and the proportions must be adjusted accordingly.

This is such an interesting study of systemic change — it reveals the normally “invisible” systems we depend on for modern life, it mobilizes our desire to help each other as fellow human beings, and it highlights how some of the ways we provide help are less than helpful, given the circumstances.

———
Email from Greg Ansley 9/15/05
———
I’m back home.

I spent 10 days in the Gulfport/Biloxi area. Did not even go any farther west than Hancock county.

To give you an idea of how bad things are from a roads and bridges perspective, New Orleans is “very far away” from Gulfport at this point. Toward the east, the east bound bridge for I-10 about 30 miles west of Mobile is out after being hit be a run away tug and 3 barges and this was not even over a a navigable channel!

Still no potable water in the 3 coastal MS counties. Power, cell and landline telephones have been gradually improving. When I got there, you where lucky to get a call out on the 10th try, by the time I left it was only one are two tries to get through. A dusk to dawn curfew is still in effect.

BSL [Bay St. Louis] and all of coastal Hancock county are severely damaged (major understatement). Waveland is just gone. There are no functioning county government buildings in Hancock county. The Hancock county sherif’s department is using 20 rented pickup trucks since all of their vehicles were destroyed.

The Pass Christian mayor quit because “there is no longer a town to be mayor of” and the police chief is AWOL of to help his own family.

Harrison county is in better shape since in still has a functioning local government. However they too, have a long road to recovery. The sewage plant is at 1/3 capacity and will have to be rebuilt since the storm surge undercut the large circular cement processing tanks, and they have all been cracked. This alone is a multi-year project.

Everything south of the CSX railroad tracks is decimated and is an exclusion zone, only rescue/recovery workers are being allowed in. Residents can get a 24 hr pass into the area with proof of address.

The Red Cross, Salvation Army and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief are making and amazing effort, but they are completely overwhelmed. In Biloxi alone, one kitchen is producing 16,000 meals a day and as I was leaving they were trying to setup a “super” kitchen to produce 50,000 meals a day just to try to feed everyone.

For the 16,000 meal kitchen they were going through 2000 gallons of water (trucked in), and 16 tractor trailer loads of food per day.

If anyone is still thinking about trying to help out, the best method is a monetary donation to the disaster charity of your choice. It is much more efficient to have items delivered in bulk, palletized and ready for distribution vs. a truck load of “stuff” that has to be sorted be hand and then repacked and distributed. There just isn’t the manpower available for that kind of operation.

The running joke about the local officials is that next time we won’t let the feds “help”, just send in the military, and leave the bureaucrats behind!

For my part, if I never have to eat another MRE (Meal Ready to Eat aka military rations) or use another port-a-potty (or worse) again it will be to soon! You would also be amazed how good a shower you can make out of a perforated beer can duct taped to the end of a hose, even if the water is undrinkable!

Please remind all you come into contact with, that just because the news media is not covering the disaster as much, the crisis continues for those in the effected region, and they will be needing help for many months to come. Also remind them that even though the Red Cross has collected almost $500 million, that is still less that $500 per person affected by the storm.

Greg

Unfortunately the information space related to Katrina is currently very confusing to navigate. Someone in my family registered a missing family member (my uncle) on the International Red Cross’ site, for example, and a day later another family member sent out an email saying the missing person had been found. It turns out the Red Cross’ website is confusing and what was “found” was the request to find a missing person. Luckily for us, my uncle was finally able to call in and let us know he is ok.

As a result of this experience, I am thinking about Open Source Disaster Recovery. It’s an open standard and set of practices to mobilize the response of a distributed world community, taking advantage of localized efforts and yet making it easier for those in need to navigate and retrieve information quickly. While locating people is certainly the first important step, it would also facilitate the distribution of resources, including goods and services needed in specific places.

The folks over at Social Source Software have teamed up with others to publish a specification to aggregate missing persons databases related to Katrina. This is a great example of reacting in an appropriate way using networked technology.

I would like to start asking the question: What kind of responsive infrastructure do we want to have in place the next time something like this happens in the world? Can we envision a disaster recovery system that lets everyone play to their strengths, and does not depend on any single point of failure? A system that provides a conduit for the outpouring of heartfelt energy, resources, and ideas that follow a catastrophic event. A way for individuals to take responsibility in ways that will have a positive impact on the whole, while keeping information safely distributed and easily accessible to those who need it.