Category: Personal

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Personal

Blockchain & Intellectual Property @ Internet Librarian 2016

Below are the slides from my presentation given at Internet Librarian 2016 concerning the blockchain and how it may change our perceptions about intellectual property. The blockchain provides for something unique in the history of our digital world, that of provable digital scarcity. The fact that we can have scarce digital objects for which ownership is publicly provable is a very odd concept, and is contrary to the last 20 years of thinking about digital objects. That concept, along with the peculiarities of data storage on the blockchain, should interest information professionals for its potential.

Alongside the general interest, blockchain driven tech stands to change the way the Internet and Web are structured and move power away from the center and towards the edges and the users of the systems. I’ve written about why this should be interesting to libraries, and I continue to believe that the next 5 years will see a slow motion movement towards these technologies.

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Personal

Video of Keynote from Colombia

Here is the keynote I delivered last month in Cali, Colombia (link to original post with slides and more). The topic is trends and the future of technology, with a focus on how that future should concern libraries. This is the first time I’ve done a dual-language presentation…my wonderful wife gave me the assist on the slideshow, and the conference provided real-time English-to-Spanish translation over radio for participants, and Spanish-to-English for me where necessary. It was a fascinating and wonderful experience, although exhausting.

There is a tiny bit of technical difficulty in the middle of the thing…had to do some fast editing just before giving the talk due to my laptop audio getting fried by a bad cable (Protip: don’t plug an electrically live cable into your computer’s minijack). Please excuse a bit of fumbling on my part. Otherwise, I hope this is useful!

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Library Issues Personal presentation

Tendencias y futuros en bibliotecas

UPDATE: here’s a link to a second post that includes video!

This morning I had the great honor of delivering the opening keynote for Los Profesionales en Gestión de la Información y la Documentación de América Latina and their 3rd Congreso International GID. In beautiful Cali, Colombia, a few hundred librarians and information professionals gathered from all across Latin America to talk about the future of libraries.

Here are the slides and a video of my slides, and there will be a video (I am promised) of the presentation later. I presented for the first time with a live translator, which was an amazing experience and I am in awe of her ability to do that so well. I took questions and answered via the same translator, and overall I think it went very well. Aside from a few technical difficulties, I’m very happy with the way this came together.

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Personal

This is What Great Customer Service Looks Like

I normally don’t post things like this here on the blog, but this was too good a story to pass up. Here’s what great customer service looks like.

Over a year ago, I was upgrading my luggage and travel kit, knowing that I was going to be doing a lot of it 2015-2016. I have a soft spot for really good bags, and one of the companies that I had been watching and reading reviews of was Tom Bihn. Years and years ago I had bought one of their Ristretto bags that I used for traveling with my iPad, and it had become one of my favorite things to carry. But I’d resisted buying more from them…I had gotten the Ristretto during a big sale, and the regular prices were a bit much for me to swallow.

But now that I was going to be traveling professionally, I wanted something that was going to be the perfect 3-5 day carry on. I went back to looking at Tom Bihn and decided to pull the trigger on a few accessories that would make packing easier. I bought a few of their Stuff Sacks to make wrangling cables and such easier, and decided to go with one of the Spiff Kits as a toiletry bag.

Bear with me. We’re getting to the customer service bit. 

Screen Shot 2016-08-16 at 8.25.46 PMThe one I bought has this little shelf at the bottom when you unfold it that is covered in the loop side of velcro, and small screw-top bottles that fit on the shelf came with hook-sided stickers that you affixed to the bottom of them. They stuck to the shelf and were thus able to be used for hair gel or medicine or whatever you needed. Clever and useful.

Except that…the stickers didn’t really stick. They didn’t adhere to the bottles very well, so over the course of using the Kit  I found that the bottles, one by one, lost their velcro. And while I kept using the Kit for all my travel, I found other solutions to using the bottles, and they went in a drawer at home.

Here’s the customer service bit.

Last week, I got an email from Tom Bihn telling me that they had gotten some customer service feedback that the velcro didn’t really work they way they wanted. And they had found a better solution, new stickers that really did work and that they had tested, and since I had ordered a Spiff Kit from them literally over a year ago, they were going to just send me the fix, free of charge and without me asking for it. The email thanked me for my business with them, and had a tracking number for me to use.

And then, sure enough, a few days later an envelope showed up, and it had not only the velcro button stickers for the bottles, but one of their Mini Organizer Pouches as a “sorry we messed up” present.

To review: I bought a thing I was perfectly happy with, and worked well. It didn’t work exactly like the manufacturer wanted, but the issue with it wasn’t one that bothered me. They were unhappy enough with the fact that it didn’t do what they wanted that they sent me a fix, without me even having to ask for it, as well as a token of their appreciation for being a customer.

That is amazing customer service. Making things right, not because they were asked or because they had to, but because they wanted their product to do what they expected of it.

Consider this a hearty endorsement of Tom Bihn. If you’re looking for a laptop bag, new luggage, or just a way to keep your knitting organized, they have you covered.

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Personal presentation

Fall 2016 Speaking & Travel

After spending much of 2015-2016 spread between home here in Sewanee and my residency as a Fellow at Harvard, this summer has been a much-needed break from work travel. That break is just about over, however, and I’ll be doing a few trips in the Fall that I thought might be of interest to some. If you’re going to be around at any of these, please say hello!

If you are someone who is currently looking for a speaker for an event or conference in 2017, now would be the time to take a look and see if I might be a good fit for your needs. I love speaking to groups about the future of libraries and information, innovation and how your organization can become more flexible and responsive, privacy and information security, and a lots of other topics. Please feel free to contact me and let’s see if I’m a good fit for your group.

August 2016

The most exciting trip this Fall is undoubtedly going to be doing the Opening Keynote at the 3rd International Congress for Information Management (Congreso International GID) in Cali, Colombia. It’s a rare opportunity to meet and learn from international librarians from all over Latin America, and I’m so very excited that I have the opportunity to work with Los Profesionales en Gestión de la Información y la Documentación de América Latina to make it happen.

September 2016

I’ll be traveling a lot in September for Measure the Future, working to make sure that our first three installations are going well and answering the questions that people want answered. And I can’t say much more than that until I get to that point, but keep your fingers crossed for us.

October 2016

For the first time in a few years, I’m attending Internet Librarian! It’s the 25th anniversary of the conference, and early in my career it was really important to me. IL helped me in so many ways, from getting early presentations under my belt to meeting people that would turn out to be lifelong friends and vital colleagues and collaborators. I’m doing two different presentations there: one on Blockchain and what it might mean for digital information, and the other on Measure the Future and what room-use analytics can do to improve your services to your patrons.

November & December 2016

If everything goes according to plan, these will be the months where Measure the Future is being evaluated and polished for launch at ALA Midwinter 2017, because oddly I don’t have any speaking engagements for these months yet. If you’d like to talk to me about a workshop or presentation for your library or library system, get in touch! I’d love to work with you.

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LibraryBox Personal Privacy

LibraryBox mentioned on TWiT’s Triangulation

My friend Nathan Freitas was a guest on TWiT‘s Triangulation this week, and was kind enough to give a little mention to both myself and The LibraryBox Project in his intro of The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. To be mentioned in the same breath as his Guardian Project and Amanda Palmer (not to mention Zittrain and Benkler and Tufekci and the rest) is quite an honor. Thanks, Nathan!

I’ve queued the video below to the beginning of his discussion of Berkman Klein, but obviously the entire discussion is worth watching.

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Berkman Personal

Anniversaries and New Roles

This morning I woke to a few “remember the day” emails that I thought were worth marking here on the blog for future reference. The first was that it was almost exactly 2 years ago that I officially left my position at UT-Chattanooga, walked away from an associate professorship and tenure, and went out on my own to try to start an independent business. So far, I’ve been very lucky and able to continue in this self-employed mode, although the downside is that it means I’m always looking for a job. 🙂 If you have a consulting need, workshop or training need, or are organizing a conference and want a great keynote….feel free to contact me. I’d love to work with you.

The second is that one year ago I became a Fellow at the Berkman Center, and spent the academic year 2015-2016 mostly living in Cambridge and enjoying the intellectual fruits of Harvard and MIT. I cannot speak highly enough of the amazing group that I was a part of…I learned so much from everyone there, and they are the most caring, careful, and thoughtful group of academics and scholars that I’ve ever been affiliated with.

And now, today, I can say that I am overwhelmingly pleased to be included in the 2016-2017 Berkman Klein community as an Affiliate. This means I get to continue my association with this amazing, wonderful community of learning…although from a distance, as I’ll not be in residence in Cambridge. I am going to be visiting as much as I can manage, though, because I have to get my 23 Everett Street fix occasionally. I’m also really pleased to be in the “transitional” class, the last to be Berkman Fellows and the first to be Berkman Klein, and to see how the Center evolves under the new nom de guerre .

To those in the incoming class at Berkman Klein: buckle up, you’re in for an amazing trip. I hope to meet all of you in September at the opening of the Center for the year.

And to everyone in the library community: I’ve got big things brewing this year. This Fall will see (finally) the launch of Measure the Future, and while I still can’t share all of my news about the project….it’s gonna be big. I’ll be doing some announcements about that over the next couple of months, including information about how your library can get involved. Soon!

 

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Maker Personal Video

SXSW 2016

I attended my first SXSW conference this past week, and have been struggling about how to describe it. On one hand, I was able to find interesting things and have a great time. On the other, the conference felt so very desperate, like a marketing team and a brogrammer had a kid. It was a non-stop barrage of things that were really-well-known being well-known (Game of Thrones, Mr. Robot) and things that weren’t well-known trying desperately to be so.

Libraries and librarians were, as always, the saving grace in the midst of the chaos. I spent time with the Library IdeaDrop house this year, and all I can say is that they run a tight ship, full of interesting people and awesome events. I would be a part of it again in a heartbeat.

I wrote up my experiences for American Libraries, here’s the three-part story:

And here are all the interviews that I did with IdeaDrop this year:

SESSION 6 from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Jason Griffey @ #IdeaDrop from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Knight News Challenge from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

SESSION 8 from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Copyright and Creators: 2026 @ #IdeaDrop from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

Digital Content and the Legality of Web Scraping from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.

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Personal

LibraryBox & Google Summer of Code

I am thrilled to be able to announce that The LibraryBox Project has been invited to be one of the projects included in the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Google Summer of Code.

If you aren’t familiar with the Google Summer of Code, it is a program that gets undergraduates connected to open source projects via mentor organizations. The goal is to give the students experience working on useful open code, while projects benefit from their skills to set and meet development goals. Google pays the students a stipend, and the whole open source community wins.

The LibraryBox Project has a few different goals in mind for the summer, and is looking for awesome students who want to make a difference in the world. If you’re a student that is interested in working on an international open source project that is being used in more than 40 countries and on all 7 continents, one that makes a difference in education in developing nations and acts as a tool for activism and social change in repressive countries, come join us.

Applications open March 14th, and close March 25th.

If you know anyone that’s applying, send them our way.

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Personal

State of the Union 2016 Tag Cloud

Every year since 2007, I’ve done a weighted word cloud as a visualization of the State of the Union address by the President of the United States. Here’s the 2016 version, with all of the previous versions linked for comparison. Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for a decade at this point!

State of the Union 2016
State of the Union 2016