Environmental Scan Blog

A new working paper from Harvard Business School on filesharing and copyright policy suggests that:

Copyright protection exists to encourage innovation and the creation of new works—in other words, to promote social welfare. … It’s difficult to argue that weaker copyright protection has had a negative impact on artists’ incentives to be creative.

Furthermore,

We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

The full working paper is available for download.

Canada, like many other countries, continues to chip away at privacy protections for online information. Two good articles here:

From Michael Geist:

As expected, the Government has taken another shot at lawful access legislation today, introducing a legislative package called the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act that would require mandated surveillance capabilities at Canadian ISPs, force ISPs to disclose subscriber information such as name and address, and grant the police broad new powers to obtain transmission data and force ISPs to preserve data.

And, on the same topic by Lawrence Munn, a Canadian lawyer specialising on legislation and policy development:

Section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act provides that the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the head of a police service constituted under the laws of a province may designate a limited number of persons who may request particular personal information from a telecommunications service provider. In some respects this power is similar to section 7(3)(c.1) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), legislation which applies to private organizations in the federal sphere, which permits the disclosure of personal information collected by an organization without an individual’s consent if a “government institution” (which presumably includes police) requests that the information be disclosed. However, under section 7(3)(c.1) of PIPEDA, the government institution must identify its lawful authority to obtain the information, and the request must be made for the purpose of enforcing a law, carrying out an investigation or gathering intelligence. In contrast, section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act contains no similar limitation: the designated person need only request the information.

You can’t really critique online privacy protection without knowing something about what privacy involves and how hard it is to maintain. A new book on the topic, just published by the Oxford University Press, is available for download under a Creative Commons license, “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the importance and impact of anonymity and authentication in an networked society”. Sponsored by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and containing chapters from international experts and researchers, it’s a terrific basis for discussion on the issues underlying privacy and anonymity.

For example, the chapter on redeeming privacy for battered women describes ‘the feminist rejection of privacy’ and analyzes the need for privacy (enabling women to hide from their abusive partners) as well as its dangers (enabling domestic abuse to be carried out under the veil of family privacy). The book also has chapters on anonymity and the law in Canada, the US and other countries. And ‘Soul Train: the new surveillance in popular music’ looks at “the close links between surveillance and culture, and control and entertainment”.

Michael Geist, the Canadian law professor and anti-copyright hero, has posted an analysis of how copyright lobbying relies on

a clear strategy of deploying seemingly independent organizations to advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations. Over the past three years, this strategy has played out with multiple reports, each building on the next with a steady stream of self-citation.

This kind of analysis should be done more often in policy development. The use of self-referential key documents with overlapping contributors is probably pretty common, and not necessarily sinister. It’s a good case study of how advocacy groups can create a sense of momentum with relatively few papers and organizations that look independent but aren’t. However, it can also lead to bad policy based on an insufficient research base, as in the case of the emerging international copyright laws.

An inconvenient talk: An article in Walrus Magazine on the end of the fossil fuel age has finally convinced me that policy analysts need to include low-energy scenarios into all our planning. Our entire way of life is based on essentially free energy. According to Thomas Homer Dixon’s Carbon Shift, “oil and coal are such rich energy sources (for example, 3 tablespoons of gasoline is the equivalent energy of an entire human’s day of labour) that it’s hard to replace them ‘one for one’ with renewable energy sources, at least using conventional technologies” (from an article in SpeakUp Winnipeg describing how radical energy reductions might affect Canadian cities).

Appropriate social policy responses, as far as I can see, will be to develop systems and services that will be resilient in the face of decreased energy consumption. In other words, when we design social responses to poverty, ill health, etc., we need to consider how feasible they will be given two or three reasonable scenarios for the next 20 years. That would include the necessity of educational systems that are based around neighbourhoods within walking distance, increased use of online communication to replace travel, etc. Depending on the severity of the scenarios we may need to use railways for food delivery in urban areas, supplemented by urban agriculture, and build community services around those activities.

A New York Times article about Dr Kessler, the former head of the FDA, on how the food industry has engineered food to literally make it irresistible. Kessler is recommending a social shift in how we deal with ‘hyperpalatable foods’ in the same way that society stopped tolerating cigarette smoking. In this online speech about the neurology of eating, he describes how prepared foods are designed to elicit over-eating. Individuals are not able to resist the conditioning alone; as a society ‘we should be saying that this is a deadly, disgusting product’. It’s a fundamental public policy issue.

Wired has pulled together a set of recommendations for transparency of government data in response to the Obama administration’s policy of open government.

The article includes ‘models for opening and using government data’, including:

Socrata

Socrata is a social data discovery site which hosts lots of government datasets with a simple appealing UI to browse, search and analyze the data.

Infochimps.org

Infochimps is dedicated to finding and hosting free, redistributable datasets. It’s a simple but absolutely enormous mission. So far, they’ve got thousands waiting for you to use.

Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America

Sunlight Labs is an organization dedicated to “turning government data into useful information.” They are currently hosting an Apps for America contest to design web services that promote transparency in Congress.

From Tech Crunch:

A coalition of non-profit organizations, technology developers, designers, marketers and others has unveiled the alpha version of a new Web service dubbed All for Good in an effort to build some sort of ‘Craigslist for volunteer services’. …

All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network.

It’s not clear why the group behind All for Good didn’t work with existing sites such as volunteermatch.org, but it looks like their approach is to facilitate data sharing among many different sites and social networking tools rather than compete head to head with any of them.

There are already some Canadian listings that may have been scraped from other sites.

Harvard Business Publishing has several good RSS feeds that deliver thoughtful articles and working papers. In this one, Tony Tjan writes:

In both entrepreneurial and larger companies, we too often spend time focusing on the desired financial performance target, rather than the inputs that drive those numbers. Because boards, investors and management demand an objective way to measure performance, we often go right to the result without focusing on what caused those results.

Financial performance is a result, a by-product, a consequence of something else. The financial “numbers” ultimately represent the scorecard we care about, but they do not help us understand how to score. When we ask management teams what are the most important drivers (or what we call operating metrics) of their financial results, I usually see one of two reactions: a) a dog in front of the television blank stare or b) a further breakdown of financial results: “sales on the West Coast drove the results.” When pressed further, we may get even further sales breakdowns which tell us little. As my partner, Dick Harrington, says, “We end up slicing baloney with a scalpel” and are talking too much about the “what” without getting the “why.”

Operating metrics are the inputs that correlate or drive the desired results of a business. If you focus on the inputs, you need to worry less about the financial outputs. Examples of inputs include customer convenience, product quality, customer retention, or customer referral rate.

This is exactly the same issue with outcome metrics. Tjan’s recommendations below avoid the ‘attribution problem’ of outcome measures, assuming that the operational metrics are valid:

Businesses need to focus on the 3-5 metrics that represent the most important drivers of value creation. It helps align an organization towards doing the right thing in a repeatable and scalable manner. When you just ask a team to chase results on a plan, you may never be sure what drove that result even if you are successful. There is a difference between having a good year of numbers and a sustainable business model that allows for more predictable year-over-year results. From a managerial tool perspective, a weekly or monthly dashboard that highlights not just the financial results, but also the operating metrics is smarter and more actionable. A dashboard with operating metrics serves effectively as an exception-based report where you look for deviations from the norm of operating metric levels and then consider whether the issue is systemic or one-off.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google Translator Toolkit is a new tool being launched today to help translators organize their work and benefit from shared translations, glossaries and translation memories…

This service looks amazing; it incorporates google’s excellent translation engine with basic translation tools, including the ability to share vocabulary and suggested translations.

This week the FBI raided a datacentre in Dallas Texas and confiscated the web servers of nearly 50 businesses, including all of their email and data, for an unnamed investigation into one or more of them (the rumour on Slashdot  is that it’s about video piracy). The affected companies, most of which are not relevant to the investigation except for their misfortune in using the datacentre, include telephone services and other business-critical services.  Dallas is a major location for datacentres and many Canadian companies are reliant on servers there.

The owner of the datacentre stated, “If you run a datacenter, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason.”

FBI Agents Raid Dallas Computer Business – cbs11tv.com.

Be aware that any unencrypted data stored in US servers are vulnerable to search and seizure by US government bodies. And in any large datacentre, the chances that at least one company is doing something illegal (like downloading music) is extremely high. This is another reason for ensuring that all online data is encrypted.  

It’s unnerving for Canadians to think that their confidential data is subject to seizure by the US government. I used to host my data only on Canadian servers, and then found out that in many cases the data were being backed up to US servers. Even if you ensure that all of the servers are located in Canada when you first sign up, the datacentre may decide to transfer your data to a US server for any number of reasons, and not inform you. For example, your hosting company may be bought out by a US corporation, or it might simply be cheaper for them to use a US datacentre for offsite backup.

Online backup services like Mozy offer the option of using your own secret encryption key for your backups. Jungledisk, which also offers secret encryption keys that protect your data from seizures, is more flexible since it offers automatic backup as well as shared storage and archiving. In all cases, using secret encryption keys is a bit more difficult to set up and use, and if you lose your key you’ve lost your data. That’s why people don’t do it. However, it’s the only way to ensure that your data will stay private.

This is an amazing free software tool that could be adapated for all kinds of community telephone campaigns. It was designed for the Red Cross blood donor program and based on the Ribbit voice platform.

Save a Life creates contact-on-demand access to an entire social networking community. With Save a Life, a community member with an urgent need to reach the entire membership or a segment of the community by phone can eliminate the need to look up phone numbers. Mashing up Ribbit, Yahoo Maps, and Google Calendar, Save a Life can be used for such applications as an emergency donation campaign or an emergency dispatch service.

Ribbit Developer Platform – Blog – Ribbit Announces Killer App Challenge Winners!.

Article by Jakob Nielsen on how nonprofits could encourage more online giving –

Non-profits would collect much more from their websites if only they’d clearly state what they are about and how they use donations. Our new usability studies revealed considerable frustration as potential donors visited sites and tried to discern various organizations’ missions and goals — which are key factors in their decisions about whether to give money.

In 2008, non-profits got about 10% of their donations online, according to a survey by Target Analytics. Given the high growth rate for Internet donations, we estimate that they’ll constitute the majority of donations by 2020. If non-profit organizations get their sites into shape, that is.

Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Recent survey of potential donors using social media concluded:

Of all the forms of social media used by 30-49-year-olds, only social networks and blogs received greater than 40 percent rankings for “trust.” Specifically, 66 percent trust social networks and 50 trust blogs. In the over 50 bracket, 62 percent trust social networks and 42 percent trust blogs.

Perhaps one of the most interesting points that arose from this data was that both social media savvy groups prefer group social media, with the exception of blogs. Whether for personal use or trust in third party sites, blogs represent the second most viable source of information next to social networks (among both the digital rich and the traditional brackets). After blogs, message boards, forums, wikis and review sites were all deemed more credible than videos or podcasts (the terrain of traditional “personal” social media).

Social Media for Social Causes Study: The Results.

Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.

MIT to make all faculty publications open access – Ars Technica.

You can now add drawing objects like flowcharts, arrows, callouts, banners and even freehand scribbles to your documents in Google Docs using the new “Insert Drawing” command available from the menu bar.

Create Flowcharts & Diagrams in Google Docs.

Neal Stephenson, one of my favourite writers (Snow Crash, Cobweb, Cyptonomicon [I think you can read the entire book online here], the Baroque Cycle) released a new novel a few months ago. Anathem is a combination of a coming of age/adventure/love story following the usual conventions; a metaphysical/quantum physics thought experiment; and a description of a utopian society devoted to knowledge. It’s hard to summarize, slow-paced, and at 900+ pages it takes a while to read.

Maybe that’s why it’s not having more influence on technology journalism, or maybe it’s just that Twitter and Anathem appeal to different people. 

Stephenson’s utopian society is a network of secular monasteries devoted to collecting, creating and synthesizing knowledge. They are set in a world that is similar to ours but that has a civilization many thousands of years older, so that no one person can understand an entire tradition of, for example, literature, science or philosophy. Outside the monasteries, people are living in consumerist, rapidly changing societies much like today’s North America. The outside societies are distractable, frenetic and have no way of identifying and integrating relevant knowledge that may have been written down hundreds or thousands of years previously.

The monasteries address the problem of time scale this way: They recruit intelligent and academically-oriented young students to join the monasteries for a period of one, ten or one hundred years. (I am simplifying here.) The doors of the monasteries open once a year, and at that time new students can enter, and current one-year students can leave or take a brief holiday.  Information into the monasteries is strictly regulated. The 10–year residents can only have access to new information at 10–year periods. All of the ephemeral information is stripped out so that the 10–years only see what is still important after a 10 year period. The hundred-year residents only get updates every century. And the one-years, of course, get annual updates on the status and news of the world around them. That enables each group of residents to ignore the distracting minute-by-minute world changes that aren’t important if you are living on a knowledge scale of a civilization.

Anathem recognizes that politicians, business leaders and most humans need to live day-to-day and are necessarily exposed to trivia and ephemera. But there is a vital role for an institution that is protected from the necessity of rapid change and that can focus on longer term knowledge synthesis. The monasteries are a severe form of the university. (They are not based on any religious dogma, by the way, since they are focused on knowledge, not faith. Some of the residents have religious beliefs of one type or another, as they choose.)

The monasteries are protected by the outside world, and to some extent supported by them, because they act as think tanks and advisors when necessary. It’s an investment in knowledge management by the entire civilization.

Anathem is fascinating because it explores the reality that it is not possible for humans to be deep experts on everything, especially in areas that take years of reflection to grasp. (Will Spinoza still be relevant five thousand years from now? Will anyone put enough time into understanding Spinoza to be able to answer that question?) The pressure of change pushes thinkers into new new thought fashions rather than promoting the continued development of old-fashioned but still relevant fields of enquiry.

There are few media more ephemeral than Twitter. It is not possible to write and read hundreds of tweets every day and also read hundreds of new academic journals every week, and also read thousands of new books on dozens of disciplines every year, and maintain a solid grounding in past knowledge, and still produce something of value. Twitter has a specific role in the knowledge system – rapid network mobilization – but it needs to be tied into media that has a longer shelf life.

Many Twitter-users seem to do that by linking to blogs and other ephemeral media (youtube) that might themselves link to longer-term media (books, journals). It will be interesting to see how useful Twitter is in various contexts, and how people with longer knowledge and reflection cycles can be tied into Twitter networks.

Should corporations invest in socially responsible activities? Does it benefit them financially? New research suggests that being seen as socially responsible may protect companies against public backlashes, and may be a useful form of risk management:

Professors Paul Godfrey, Craig Merrill, and Jared Hansen, from Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina, came up with a clever insight why the socially responsible types may be better off after all. They didn’t just look at the social and financial performance of all kinds of companies–they decided to specifically focus on companies that got into trouble because some negative event had happened to them. This could be the initiation of a lawsuit against the firm (e.g. by a customer), the announcement of regulatory action (e.g. fines, penalties) by a government entity, and so on. Then they measured what happened to the share price of the company as result of the event. Their finding? The degree to which you were punished by the stock market for the negative news depended on how much of a socially responsible company you were.

Firms that scored low on a social responsibility index saw their share price plummet if they had to announce a negative event. Firms with very good social track records did not see their share price go down that much. Paul, Craig, and Jared concluded that your socially responsible reputation acts as some sort of an insurance

Corporate Social Responsibility as Insurance – Freek Vermeulen – HarvardBusiness.org.

Here’s another article from my old web site, written about 1999 and still relevant:

The measurement of outcomes in the social services is an expensive and time consuming task. Done properly, it can easily cost over 10% of the agency’s total program budget. Before funders impose outcome measurements on funded agencies, they should ensure that this approach is an efficient use of resources. The following notes are addressed to funders, not to their funded agencies. 

Your organization should go through three stages in deciding how or whether to request outcome measurements from your funded agencies: 

1. Define what you are trying to achieve 

There are usually two elements to any major goal. The first describes your ultimate outcome. The second is often unstated, but is just as important, and reflects the primary values under which you operate. For example, your ultimate goal might be to improve the lives of people in your community, or to build community capacity, or to prevent teen pregnancies. Your primary values might be to use your resources and those of your agencies or partners as efficiently as possible to attain your goal, or to engage all stakeholders in an ongoing, consensual process, or to reflect the values of your founder in all of your operations. 

If you’re not careful, your values, if not clearly articulated and worked into the design of your funding process, will sabotage the outcomes, or vice versa. Consensus-building in particular often gets lip-service but, because it is a slow, expensive process, either ties up huge resources or gets quietly dumped in order to achieve specific outcomes. (A common way to make consensus-building cheaper is to involve only a small number of like-minded people and ignore the rest. This is annoying to those who are left out.) 

Clarify what you mean by ‘efficiency’, ’stakeholders’, ‘values’ and so on, or you will not be able to use your resources effectively. Your hands will be tied by implicit rules, and you’ll probably waste a lot of time before recognizing the brick wall you keep running into. 

2. Use cost benefit analysis on the use of outcome measurements

In this stage, your organization calculates the cost of implementing outcome measures and compares it against the benefits to your ultimate goal, and to your organization itself. There are four steps to the analysis: 

Estimate the cost of measuring outcomes across the system. What kinds of outcomes – real impact, or just number of people served? Six month outcomes, which may be irrelevant, or 20 year outcomes? How long would it take agencies to collect the data you are requesting, what expenses would they incur, and who would be willing to pay for it? How long does it take to fill out your data collection form? Multiply these expenses by the number of agencies you fund. 

Estimate the benefit of the intervention. What will be affected by the collection and analysis of outcome measurements? Start with your own organization: How much money would you be willing to shift as a result of the measures you collect? What decisions would be affected by the data? How would they be analysed and who would use the results? How much would your own funds increase (from your own donors or sponsors)?

Then estimate behaviour change in agencies as a result of outcome measurement that is imposed on them by your organization. (My own experience is that agencies don’t change based on forms that they’re forced to fill out unless there are clear and significant consequences. And then the changed behaviour might not be what you’re looking for. One famous evaluator, D.T. Campbell, claimed that the most predictable effect of external evaluators is that they turn well-intentioned hard-working human service directors into liars.) 

Calculate its cost effectiveness. In 1995 the Harvard School of Public Health* published a major study on 500 life-saving interventions and their cost effectiveness. They calculated the costs and benefits of various interventions, such as wearing seatbelts, to get a cost per life-year saved. So, for example, they found that childhood immunization actually earned money – all of the direct costs of administering immunizations cost less than the direct costs of not immunizing; cervical cancer screening cost about $12,000 per year of life saved, and pollution control at paper mills cost over $7.5 million per year of life saved. 

This is a powerful technique. One nonprofit agency analyzed the cost of supporting volunteers, including staffing, committee preparation, travel and other expenses, and found it cost them $40 for each and every hour of volunteer participation. They still use volunteers, but much more strategically and sparingly. 

Evaluate whether there are any other ways of achieving those benefits at a lower cost 

Go through each benefit and think about other ways of achieving it more efficiently. For example, if you want to increase your social impact, it’s probably better to fund a more effective service model than it is to marginally improve an ineffective service model. 

Outcome measurements will not, on their own, improve a service model or result in quantum shifts in performance. You need research on what interventions are most powerful, and you need to keep shifting your funding portfolio to include the most effective approaches. To improve your own fundraising efforts, or to protect the revenue you already have from, use social marketing techniques to communicate with key stakeholders and don’t assume that they understand outcome measurements. 

Information alone will not make your sponsors support your organization unless it’s in a form that is relevant to them. Move the ‘bell curve’ of impact by shifting dollars from the low tail-end of performance to the high tail-end. In other words, assign staff to identify the best agencies, and systematically give them more money. Negotiate with the poorest agencies, or those with the worst fit with your priorities, to reduce or eliminate funding. Set annual targets of the amount of funds to shift from the low end to the high end. Make sure that your definition of ‘excellence’ includes continuous learning and improvement, and help the agency leaders to support and train other service providers in their sectors. 

Restructure data collection to lessen the form-filling load on agencies while using the valuable information that is already available. For example, ask agencies to submit their most recent report to their Board on a program they evaluated and changed. If their last internal program evaluation was over two years ago, they have a problem. Make sure that you are able to understand and use any information you ask for. 

3. Assess your organization’s willingness to change based on information 

If you have gone through the previous two stages and decided that outcome measurements are still a promising approach, you need to ensure that your own organization is capable of using agency outcome measures appropriately. I often hear from funders that collecting outcome measures is not as hard as agencies make out – that any agency worth funding should and must be able to demonstrate its effectiveness. In that case, your own organization should be able to do it too. I believe that no funder should expect its agencies to collect outcome measures unless it is doing it itself. 

Here are some suggestions: Do a little pilot study of your organization’s willingness to change. Gather some easily available information that has implications for internal processes, and then try to implement change. Track the actual changes through the system. It’s much like checking for plumbing problems; where is the change blocked? It’s usually easy to find something that people have been complaining about for years, like how the phones are answered, or the invoicing system. Just ask your employees for ideas. 

Your organization may be incapable of responding to feedback! If so, don’t inflict expensive outcome measures on your agencies, because you won’t be able to respond appropriately to the information anyway. Try to develop your own management information system, and implement it in your own organization. Kaplan’s balanced scorecard is one good approach. Start with understanding what you currently fund, where your money is allocated, how happy you are with your portfolio, how you would want to change the portfolio, how donors or sponsors feel about what you currently fund, etc. 

You will find out several things – how hard it is to define meaningful success; how costly it is to measure; why no-one else can do it for you; and how to translate results into behaviour change. You will get an idea of what it’s like for your agencies. Do it at least one year before expecting any other agencies to do it, though you might want to do it in a group with other agencies who are committed for their own reasons. 

Ask yourself some searching questions about your willingness to use agency performance criteria to shift funding between agencies. What factors actually decide what your agencies get? – historical funding levels, politics, or performance against criteria? How much can you actually shift given internal and external pressures? Most funders can’t shift very much. 

As for information, kill only what you can eat. Will you really be able to analyze agency information that comes every 6 months? How about every two years? Are you requesting detailed forms that get thrown out? Each question on each page of each form should be treated seriously as an additional cost for over-extended agencies. It must be worth asking, and must result in a significant behaviour change. For some types of information (e.g. for campaign or marketing materials) it may be more efficient to sample from a few agencies, or extrapolate from other research and jurisdictions. If you’re not going to use information, don’t collect it. 

*Tengs et al. (1995) Five-hundred life-saving interventions and their cost-effectiveness. Risk Analysis, 15(3), 369-390. 

I was cleaning up my old web sites (we’ve just moved to a Plone platform) and discovered these notes from a presentation I made to an Ontario Government conference on Change Management in 1999.

I still agree with all of these points….

• General issues
  o Change isn’t going away. Very few people here will have the same job in three years.
  o You can’t offer stability to your employees any more, but you can offer them the skills to become more employable.
  o All technology decisions are wrong – all you can do is minimize risk and maximize flexibility.
  o The status quo is always an option, at least for analysis. Emphasize the choices implicit in staying the same.

• Diversity in teams
  o Innovators undervalue stability (if it’s new, it’s probably better), and conservators undervalue change (if it’s new, it’s probably worse). You need both of them.
  o Assign roles and value to take advantage of their inclinations.
  o Don’t permit them to get locked into their roles.

• Practical suggestions
  o Allow conservators to influence the pace of change, or they will sabotage. (And recognize their heroism)
  o Don’t frustrate the innovators too much or they will leave. (And give them cool technology)
  o Tie team performance to measures that are clear, related to external goals, and that you can’t be blamed for.

• Roles for conservative members of the team
  o Take advantage of their precision and ability to spot the problems
   down the road.
  o Keep reminding them that the choice is not between the status quo and newness, but between different kinds of newness.
  o Allow them to ‘role play’ the customer, and remind the innovators that useability is a design principle.

• Roles for innovators
  o Innovators love to play and feel rewarded by new toys.
  o Take advantage of their willingness to fool around with possibilities and test approaches.
  o Help them work with conservators as ‘testers’, and challenge them to make changes more acceptable to humans.

• Using peer networks
  o Gossip
  o Information hubs
  o Support natural vehicles of communication

• Conclusion
  o All the research on diffusion of innovation talks about the importance of training and communication.
  o Great tools aren’t used if you don’t change the culture.
  o People need to change the way they work together.
  o Technology is a waste of time if you don’t consider human factors.

Scheduling meetings is a time drain, and there are plenty of online services that claim to make the process less onerous.

I tested the following services very quickly for use in setting up a series of focus groups. I’m thinking about WhenisGood for this situation, but plan to experiment with Timedriver for scheduling individual interviews.

All of these services are free for a basic subscription unless stated otherwise. Each of them take some time to figure out, and each has some irritating usability glitches. And each of them offers a different combination of functionality and complexity. You will have to try them out yourself to see which one works best for your needs and environment. Also, you should test out the entire process of setting up a meeting, sending invitees, responding and managing changes. You will find that your test users will have strong opinions about ease of use.

Many of the services are being updated frequently, so any comparison of features will be quickly obsolete.

Most of them are available only in English, with the exception of Doodle (28 languages).

Some of the things to look for when you compare services:

– Do you need integration or automatic syncing with your own calendar? If you use the service often, integration will make it much easier to use.

– Do you need integration or automatic syncing with other peoples’ calendars? If you often set meetings with the same group of people, integration will make meetings easier for everyone, and the group may have more tolerance for the complexity of setting up their own accounts and syncing the service with their calendars.

– Do you need a very simple interface, or are you and your users comfortable with some complexity? For occasional users, you need to make it extremely simple or they will just get annoyed with you.

– Do you need to offer multiple times that can be selected by invitees? And how easy is it to offer, accept and manage multiple times? Some of the services allow you to edit the allowable times or other information after sending out the original invitation, and others are not that flexible.

– Do you mainly want to schedule group meetings or individual appointments, or both?  

Timebridge – Flashy, complex, and good for groups who want to use it a lot. It integrates closely into Outlook and Google Calendar, and isn’t so good for the casual online user. It enables groups to see one another’s schedule availability in real-time so that meetings can be set instantly instead of waiting for members to respond. Users are not forced to connect their personal calendars to Timebridge, but it works best if they do. You can only offer up to 5 time slots per meeting.

Tungle – The only service that allowed me to offer blocks of time that invitees could choose from as opposed to a bunch of individual time slots. I found the multiple emails a bit confusing, but will continue to try it out. I wish it would allow users to designate preferred times and ‘okay’ times. I liked the fact that it integrated with my Google Calendar so that I could select free times without toggling back and forth to another browser window (it also integrates with Outlook). I don’t like the way that non-registered users keep being asked to sign up (although Mark MacLeod of Tungle has informed me that’s a bug, which they are in the process of fixing). And it doesn’t seem to work in situations where not everyone can attend, and you want to select times that most (not all) people can participate – if there is no timeslot where all of the invitees are available, the entire meeting is cancelled. As Mark points out, Tungle is designed for small groups of people when you want everyone to attend, and it’s great for that. He adds that they are planning to improve functionality for larger groups over the next few months.

Jiffle – Good for setting individual meetings, not useful for groups. Integrated with Google Calendar and Outlook. You can give people access to selected timeslots on your calendar and invite them to set up appointments online. As people select timeslots, your calendar is automatically updated. The free version offers 10 meeting confirmations per month.

Doodle – It’s a bit unwieldy to select timeslots; you need to enter days, then for each day enter specific times. However, Doodle is now testing an Outlook plugin, it’s being updated frequently with new functionality, and you can subscribe to chosen meetings using RSS feeds and Facebook.  Available in 28 languages, including French. If you offer a lot of choices, it becomes timeconsuming for the invitees to fill out each option. The advanced options allow invitees to select preferences and ‘okay but not great’ timeslots.

Timedriver – Excellent for allowing people to book individual meetings online, such as interviews or appointments. Costs $30/year, with a 90 day free trial

ScheduleOnce –  Simple, nice interface, allows invitees to designate preferred and okay times, but only offers specific time slots to approve or reject instead of blocks of time within which you can select smaller blocks. It handles different time zones very well.

WhenisGood – Very simple to use for both sender and recipient; it allows users to select blocks of time. It does not integrate with other calendars (e.g., Outlook or Google Calendar) though there is syncing through iCal URLs, and it offers limited privacy protections, but its simplicity is really attractive. The meeting organizer can select the times that are best for everyone, and quickly find out which times any particular individual is available. WhenisGood is in the process of making its service fully multi-lingual (it already offers the days and months in dozens of languages through a drop-down menu). It plans to offer paid options that include selecting preferred and okay times.

Timetomeet – Free for basic services, charges $10/year for synchronizing Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple iCal, and for a ‘digital receptionist’ that allows people to request appointments on the web. It doesn’t look as though the software has been updated in the last couple of years.

Meetingwizard – Selecting meeting choices is clunky, and I ran out of energy to test it. I get the impression though that lots of users like this service.

SMEScheduler  – It requires the scheduler to select days first, then add specific time periods into each day, which is clunky. Integration with Twitter, Google Maps and Google Calendar, iPhone.

GatherGrid – Allows users to click the hours that they are available – hourly blocks of time only, so you can’t select, say, 9:30am to 10:30am. Very simple to use, not much privacy.

If you are stuck with Outlook:

If you use Microsoft Outlook there are dozens of programs that try to make it easier to share calendar information. Some of them rely on connecting with other Outlook-users, and others provide an online service that enables you to schedule meetings with people who do not use Outlook.

For Exchange- and Outlook-based calendar solutions, see this list at slipstick.com. I’ve tried several and couldn’t stand them.

biz-e.com is an example of an online service that mainly offers integration with Outlook. It doesn’t appear to relate to any other calendar services, provides only email contact forms for support, feedback and ‘contact us’, and offers no information on when the software was last updated. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to use them in preference to the services listed above.