Anatomy of a tag-line

[So after Friday's teal deer of a post that I worked on and off for weeks, I feel like writing down something quickly. In my mind, I have some ideas that are folding together nicely, but until I get them down, I'm not sure whether I am going to end up with origami or a paper boulder.]

As I was editing my Friday talk on Wednesday (tl;dr version: I try and fail to summarise the last five years of work in a tagline in preparation for a sabbatical application), I checked in on my twitter stream to find this recommendation

Still the best thing on libraries I've read all year: Libraries as Software : instapaper.com/z6zz01t4x
— Matthew Reidsma (@mreidsma) April 11, 2012

Intrigued, I followed a link and found someone writing about libraries, cities as software and a connection to the open government movement... which was something I was just doing in my own talk/post!

[the so-called joy of serendipity that comes from browsing adjacent books on a library's bookshelf can't hold a candle to the blow torch that spot-welds us together on the Internet]

It felt good, as it always does, to find a fellow traveller. Even better, I found that another post from Hugh Rundle's ("Return to the Coffeehouse") connected nicely to something I was trying to get across and so I added a screenshot and linked to it to make evident the connection. In that post, Hugh applies possible lessons from  Steven Johnson’s Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation that libraries could do well to learn from.

I had also read and enjoyed Where good ideas come from and have been meaning to put some of Johnson's recommendations into personal practice. While I keep my own Commonplace book, as Johnson recommends, I had not yet made a habit of returning to my older notes to pick up the threads of thought that I had put down which Johnson believes is almost necessary for long hunches to be developed.

Or so I thought. But on Saturday, I received this email from myself - or more accurately, my one-year-ago-self:

I had completely forgotten that I had come up with that title for myself and I realized that this title was closer to a personal mission statement than my the current tag-line on my portfolio site, public spaces need public events - the one that I just spent on thinking about improving over the last few weeks.

But "changing the rules so more can play" wasn't quite right because I thought too many people would think I was just talking about games. So, yesterday, Saturday morning, I kept trying to swap out words to something better but couldn't come up with anything. So I asked Twitter:

Still thinking of new tag-lines. Working on variations of "Changing the rules so that more can..." participate? join in? play?
— Mita Williams (@copystar) April 14, 2012

And shortly, I got this response which - as soon as I read it - I knew it was the answer:

@copystar win.
— Vinay Gupta (@leashless) April 14, 2012

I had been introduced to Vinay through the game of Evoke which had set me on the path of developing a tag-line in the first place.

[aside: Vinay Gupta's work both inspires me and terrifies me]

So. "Changing the rules so more can win" is my new mantra, my new mission, and shortly, my new tagline. It captures the work that I want to pursue in the contexts of social justice, environmental justice, local governance, gaming, and even librarianship.

Which isn't really the point of this (another!) self-indulgent post.

My point is this (from Steven Johnson's "Anatomy of an idea"):

1. The discovery process is remarkably social, and the social interactions come in amazingly diverse forms. Sometimes it's overhearing a conversation on Twitter between two complete strangers; sometimes it's the virtual book club of something like Findings; sometimes it's going out to lunch with a friend and bouncing new ideas off them. It's the social life of information, in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's wonderful phrase -- we just have so many more ways of being social now.

2. I find it interesting that there are certain kinds of questions that I now send out by default to Twitter, not Google. The more subtle and complex the question, the more likely it'll go to Twitter. But if it's simply trying to find a citation or source, I'll use Google...

3. Priming is everything. All these new tools are incredible for making rapid-fire discoveries and associations, but you need a broad background of knowledge to prime you for those discoveries...

4. Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

5. It’s been said it a thousand times before, by me and many others, but it's worth repeating again: people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly.

6.  Finally, this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this--Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings--would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago.

If it isn't already clear, here's some evidence: By linking to his work into my post, I *may* have introduced Hugh to R. David Lankes. From this comment from Amy Buckland, I found another fellow traveller in Char Booth. All of the above have one degree of separation to Nate Hill whose LibraryLab is the setting the groundwork for the physical manifestation of Dan Chudnov's own personal mission "help people build their own libraries"  and it was his post - from 2006 - that set me on my own journey to find my own personal mission/tagline.

Which leads us to today.

Thank you all.

The library as interface to public space and public self

The following are the words and pictures that I presented yesterday as part of the University of Windsor's Librarian Research Series for a talk entitled, The library as interface to public space and public self.

This is the first time - ever - that I’m reading a presentation. There are several reasons why I’m reading this one today and, according to what I've written down already, I’ll be sharing one of those reasons.

This speaking series was designed to provide those at the Leddy Library with an opportunity to share our research work -- work that we’ve done and work that we hope to do in the future. My presentation today is more about the former than the latter. But it’s worse than that.

You see, my intention is to apply for my first sabbatical -- filling in the paperwork this summer -- with the intention of starting it January 2014.  At this point, I know what ground I’m interested in exploring but not necessary the particular path that I want to take. In other words, using a more appropriate metaphor, I feel like I’m at the stage in which I feel I have found a piece of glass that fits nicely in my hand, but I still need to grind it down into a lens.  This presentation is my first grindstone.

Even without the external motivation of a deadline, I find that forcing yourself to articulate specifically what you really care about and what you want to learn more about is a very helpful exercise in the pursuit of meaningful work. I know this because in some ways I’ve gone through this process before. It happened almost two years ago now.

In 2010, I was paid to play a game. I was a game runner for a game called Evoke that was designed by Jane McGonigal and sponsored by the World Bank. Evoke was an alternative reality game designed to act as a curriculum for social entrepreneurism and during its 10 week run the game attracted almost 20,000 registered players from around the world and raised $30,000 for 25 projects developed by its players.

After the game was over, I was invited to go to Washington DC for a couple days to take part in was known as the Evoke Summit for the game’s winners and their mentors. One of the activities that occurred during the summit was dedicated to developing a short tagline to succinctly convey the essence of one’s project. Unlike the rest of participants in the room, I didn’t come to the summit  with a particular project, but I did the exercise and eventually I came up with this for myself: public spaces need public events.

It has become the tagline that I use on my personal portfolio site and I think it does a pretty good job of capturing some of the work I have been doing inside the library and outside of it. 

But, being just a tagline, “public spaces need public events” doesn’t explain *why* I think events are so important for libraries, library communities, and communities with and without libraries.  I will do that now and I will start with libraries. 

I believe that events held within libraries animate the space of the library and situates it as a place not just where knowledge is accessed but where it can be created, understood, and shared. Librarians are positioned as perfect hosts of events as we have access to cheap, accessible, and open public space and we are mandated to serve all sectors of our communities. Community events held within libraries embody the notion that libraries are a continual community-building exercise. Libraries, by their very nature, are a gathering of people and ideas mixed together.

These are some of the ideas that I shared last year in May when I was asked to give a talk at TEDxLibrariansTO. My address there was dedicated to libraries and community events and I entitled my talk Organizing is what librarians do.  I will not make you - or me - suffer through the video of my talk, but I will re-read one passage from that day. It’s the call to action part (the genre of the TED talk requires such a call).

I am standing here to extend an invitation to all of you. I believe that we - our profession, our community, our country, our planet - need more collaborative events to bring us together. We need more opportunities to host conversations. We need more opportunities to change the conversation. And so my invitation that I am extending is not to a particular event - but a personal invitation to all of you to organize an event for others.

Now, In that one paragraph I tried to allude to several personal convictions. Today, I would like to articulate the specifics of what I was referring to that day: I believe we are obligated to conserve as much natural habitat and wildlife as possible, that we must continually strive to alleviate human suffering around the globe, and to do so, we need to be engaged in politics and we need to change politics. 

To these ends, I’ve participated in a number of very different public events. I describe most of these events in detail in my TEDx talk, so I’ll give a quick summary here: in the last five years, I’ve helped form a neighbourhood residents association, hosted a Jane’s Walk, and organized an ChangeCamp unconference. I’ve also given a Talk20 pecca kucha presentation - which requires 20 slides at 20 seconds each. That presentation ended up being good practice for a later Ignite talk I gave last year which demands 20 slides at 15 seconds each. And then there’s the TEDx talk that I’ve already mentioned which strictly forbids a talk to go a second over 18 minutes. My enthusiasm for strange speaking formats is one of the reasons why I think it’s pretty funny that what I’ve never done until today is just read a presentation. (* makes checkmark*)

By the way, the theme of TEDxLibrariansTO was “Librarians as Thought Leaders” and that particular tagline was largely misunderstood. There were those when they first heard the theme, thought that the speakers that day were being put forward as “thought leaders”.  And while that would be a personally flattering interpretation, I know through conversations I have had with the organizers of the event, that this was not their intention. The phrase of “librarians as thought leaders” was designed to challenge our all too common practice of sublimating our work as librarians by constantly to referring ourselves and our work  -- in our professional literature, to our own institutions, and to outsiders - as “The Library”.  

Now, that being said, one could also make the case that we don’t refer to our work -- “librarian and librarian staff work” as “The Library” enough. I like to refer to this particular debate as “The library is the building where the books are” versus “The library is the building where the librarian is”.  

This conversation is just one of many that form the current re-negotiating and re-understanding of the relationships between librarians, the space the of the library, the collections that they hold and are connected to, and the communities that are served by these things. It might be too soon to say this, but I believe we are seeing a great change in librarianship and I want to speak briefly about this change because the work that I’ve done and that I want to do makes the most sense in this framework.

The change in question is just a change in perspective, but it’s a powerful one. Instead of the library bringing the world to the community, there are those who are already thinking and working towards how we can bring our communities to the world. The library becomes the community publisher and an incubator for writer and artists. The library recognizes other literacies and embraces the haptic by hosting hackerspaces where technology is taken apart and examined critically before re-purposed. The library recognizes that communities need to spend time together before it can work together. It provides game space where people can spend time instead of money as they play and learn together.  Like the Internet, the library is increasingly seen as a means to communicate and engage instead of just being a locked platform for entertainment and product delivery. 

I mentioned Jane McGonigal before. She is a proponent of using games to fix reality, because games make us happy while reality is broken.  I love this quote of hers from Twitter and I think that it dovetails what something we sometimes forget about libraries. While libraries are  associated with content, libraries were and are created with larger goals in mind: self-education and self-improvement, improving community capacity, and embodying and supporting scholarly communication. The content of libraries isn’t the exciting factor for us. We don’t just exist just to provide information. We strive for literacy, or more accurately in these times, literacies, including  information literacy and transliteracy.

The Research for Citizenship Project by Lisa Sloniowski and Patti Ryan of York University is a great example of this re-interpretation of the library’s potential. So far, this project has involved hosting library based teach-ins and developing research guides dedicated to the Occupy Movement and another surrounding the issue of violence against women in conjunction with campus-based Montreal Massacre commemorative events. Many of you know Lisa Sloniowski from her time here at Leddy Library as Information Literacy Coordinator, when she drafted our Senate-approved Information Literacy Policy and initiated the curriculum integration with History Department and course integration with the English Department’s Composition class.  This collaborative project of hers and Patti’s involves information literacy work *in the library* where it emphasizes the research needs of students beyond the classroom where they are not just students but citizens. In doing so, their work facilitates knowledge sharing between students from different disciplines and different communities while making visible the critical work of academic libraries. 

Now, this all being said -  I’m no longer completely satisfied with my tagline of “public spaces need public events”. I think it served its purpose by providing a conceptual space for what I’ve done but I now I find it too vague and that it doesn’t really capture the stand that I want to take. I want to articulate goals.

I spoke of lenses before. My husband Greg has recently got new glasses with “progressive lenses” - which is a more marketable and more forgiving term for bifocals. When he first got them, he found the two focal strengths terribly disorienting. And I have to admit, that at this particular moment, I’m feeling very disorientated myself, especially with my work. I’ve started to think it’s because I have gotten older, I have started to develop another focus. I’m interested in the same subjects, but I find that I’m interested in them at a different scale.

I’m still interested in the work of citizens who come together to improve their communities and their government, but I have found that I’ve been increasingly interested in those ways in which they are using the Internet to facilitate that work. While I have been thinking towards using the library a place for civic engagement and as a support system for democracy,  I have been extending that line of thought to consider the library moving from a place where citizens can get information about and from their government, to a place where they can understand, engage and challenge that information. 

I’ve realized - by preparing for this presentation - that in many ways, what I’m interested in is this interface between the digital and the analog; the bridge between the digital commons and the public common space.  As a User-Experience Librarian, I am acutely aware of how important the interface is to an application and how it both demonstrates, embeds, and constrains a value-system.

Just the act of presenting the same content with a new interface can be a political act.  For example in 2008, Peter Rukavina spidered the PEI’s Corporate Register and indexed it so that anyone could search the database by company shareholder. He did because he was concerned about a developer’s plan to build a tunnel in his neighbourhood and he wanted to learn more about other corporations that might be involved and there was no way to search the database this way, even though the information was available. The provincial government did not look kindly to this enhancement and quickly took steps to prevent Peter’s database to make regular updates, effectively ending the service.

Peter Rukavina’s work can be considered part of a larger movement usually called “Open Government”.  This movement captures the emergence of non-partisan citizens coming together both online and in person, to find ways to make government more effective and responsive to all of us. It also can describe the emergence of a whole new category of non-profit organizations - organizations that I think have very interesting taglines. Some examples:

Code for America’s tagline is “a new kind of public service”. The longer version is “helping governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web”

CrisisCommons’ is “we connect people to help those in need”. Longer version:  "connecting people, tools & resources to support crisis response"

Ushahidi: “we are a non-profit tech company that changes the way information flows in the world”.  Part of the longer version: “We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories."

Open government groups and organizations are dedicated to improving the wellbeing of all citizens, increasing community capacity, and reducing digital divides. Just like libraries.

And just as I’ve always been more inclined to host and participate in events rather than writing about how other people are hosting and participating in events, I find that I want to build up my computing skills so I can help code and connect the work of these organizations with that of libraries. In fact, I am beginning to think that I  would love to spend a year learning and doing just that.

Speaking of events, I very much appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today and want to thank Selinda Berg for taking the initiative and making this possible. And I thank you for attention. I hope not too much of what work I have described was new to you as I try to capture my ideas and my work in my blog New Jack Librarian as I go along.  If you have been reading my blog, you might be more aware of connections in my work and my interests that I’m not aware of. If so, I’d love to hear it because while this presentation has done much towards my goal of creating a new lens to see farther than I can today, the future is still a little blurry to me.