Brian – Page 12 – Brian Shaler

October 25, 2009October 25, 2009

Phoenix BIL Conference: SustainaBIL

SustainaBIL: November 8, 2009 11am-7pm

For some background on this most excellent adventure..

First there was TED. It’s an expensive and exclusive (invite-only) conference that brings together some of the most amazing people with some of the most spectacular stories. While initially TED was about [T]echnology, [E]ntertainment, and [D]esign, it grew to become an event all about Ideas Worth Spreading.

Enter BIL. A group of people around the country (maybe even around the world), made the observation that anyone can have and share big ideas. You don’t NEED a speaker line-up of best-selling authors, world-renowned performers, and the like to have ideas worth spreading. Also, anyone who wants to learn and share should be able to become involved. For people who know the history of BarCamp, BIL is to TED as BarCamp is to Foo Camp. (Also, ~~Keanu Reeves Fans~~ people who have seen Keanu Reeves’ movies might notice another layer of meta humor)

Hit the road, Jack. TED moved and BIL moved with it. But why stop there? Why only have BILs where there are TEDs? Don’t people everywhere have ideas worth spreading? BIL began to spread to the UK, to Santa Cruz (CA), and to San Diego. “Why not have one in Phoenix?” I thought. Turns out, one of the people behind the formation of BIL, Todd Huffman, was based in Phoenix!

Pick a flavor. With TEDMED and BIL:PIL taking on a single theme, healthcare, Todd suggested the Phoenix BIL conference take on a theme. With the amount of alternative energy, biofuel, and sustainable technology around Arizona, we decided on having a sustainability-themed BIL.

And finally, the announcement of SustainaBIL! SustainaBIL is bringing together people who are doing interesting things in the sustainability world to share their big ideas. The event will be a broad stroke at sustainability: energy, recycling, green tech, etc. Ideas will be around what individuals can do as well as small businesses or institutions.

I encourage you to check it out. The event is free (but donations are encouraged) and you can find sign up links at SustainaBIL.com.

October 17, 2009

Scaling Your Impact on the World

Life is short, so you want to get a lot of bang for your buck. Whether you want to help people in poverty, find a cure for cancer, bring new technology into the world, build a business that effects the lives of many people, or make any other mark on society, the scalability is one of the most important ways to make the biggest impact possible within a finite lifespan.

Even if you could live forever, it would take a vast amount of resources to do everything directly and personally.

You can use scalability to increase the speed and reach of your impact. You can also use it to reduce the cost.

In terms of world hunger, the direct and unscalable approach would be to feed everyone individually using your own food and money. The ultimate scalable approach would be to come up with an innovative method to feed people that is free to distribute, such as a technology or technique that only requires word-of-mouth to spread.

I was thinking about this when I read an article recently about Bill Gates, entitled Can the world’s richest man feed the planet? Even if he had enough money to buy everyone on the planet a meal, is that the most optimal way for him to feed them? Of course not. He would exhaust his capital in one fell swoop and in a matter of days, people would be starving again. Instead, he said this: “Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land. So if we can make smallholder farming more productive and more profitable, we can have a massive impact on hunger and nutrition and poverty.”

It’s like the adage, “Give a man a fish feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” In this case, Gates could either give people food to feed them for a day, or he can find innovative ways to help people feed themselves for a lifetime.

I like to extract principles from things so I can apply the same ideology to other aspects of my life and my work. In software development, creating platforms does just this. You create the foundation that allows other people to build upon it. Cumulatively, you’ll have the potential for great things that would simply be beyond anything you could come up with if you typed code into a keyboard for the rest of your life. Creating an innovative new IDE or a language can accomplish the same thing, but in a different way.

In the last few decades, the power of peer-to-peer and/or crowdsourcing technology has brought the world some amazing things, such as the Internet and Wikipedia. You don’t have to type out the greatest encyclopedia of all time, because you can instead create a simple mechanism for the world to contribute to one.

July 26, 2009

Utility + Aesthetics

At work, I’ve been brainstorming some data visualization techniques to help live video producers understand their audiences. Fortunately, my company understands the importance of having a Wow Factor. The challenge is to come up with “eye candy” that is both aesthetic and useful.

Some of the most fun data visualization applications are abstract. More art than anything else. This won’t suffice for an analytics dashboard. Customers need to get in and make sense of what’s going on right away.

There are common, traditional techniques that generally do a good job of this, but there is definitely room for improvement — out of the box thinking. The graph and chart “usual suspects” are best suited for structured, statistical data. For understanding trends and relationships, they are usually pretty weak.

For trends and multi-dimensional relationships over large sets of data, one must employ techniques that take advantage of the human mind’s ability to understand shapes, colors, and patterns.

A heat map is an excellent example of a visualization technique that can quickly go from informative but dull to beautiful but data-less.

The goal is not only to overwhelm the user with beauty, but also overwhelm them with knowledge and understanding of the data set they’re viewing.

July 20, 2009

Activating Advocates

This is a topic that has been seeming more and more important to me, on a personal level. Everyone knows bad news travels far and fast while “good job” remarks are never heard ’round the world. The same goes with reputation and your (or your company’s) brand.

Relying on word-of-mouth, with this fact in mind, seems to be a risky proposition with limited ROI. Some people and companies seem to be able to pull it off wonderfully, though.

Part of what got me thinking about this was noticing how I sometimes become an advocate for companies or products I like. The best examples are for some of my favorite restaurants:

Four Peaks Brewery: I regularly tell people their Arizona Chicken Rolls are the best on the planet.
Chino Bandido: While hearing “Mexican/Asian Fusion” makes some people uneasy, their food is ridiculously flavorful — especially the carnitas and Jad Red chicken.
Firehouse Subs: It’s all in how they make it. When I start going on and on about toasted bread and steamed meat, people assume I’m a Firehouse Subs salesman. Try the Club on a Sub!

In these cases, the companies did nothing to provoke my advocacy for their products. All they did was have a spectacular product and be virtually unknown (in Four Peaks’ case, they’re not unknown, but that appetizer is). If everyone knew how great their food was, I wouldn’t be such a strong supporter. My reward for evangelizing their food is building a relationship with whomever I can convince to go. They try the food, like it, and recognize me as the person who told them about it.

Extracting the principles from that (extracting principles and over-analyzing things seems to be a hobby) and I see a huge problem for me trying to get my name out. Somehow, people got the impression I’m more well-known than I am. Perhaps it was James Archer’s “THE Brian Shaler” meme, or maybe people wrongly assumed that having a lot of Twitter followers means something.

I have actually heard people STOP themselves from spreading the word about something because I tweeted it. They somehow thought that when I spoke, *everyone* listened, and there was no need to say anything after that.

So, I appear to have two shortcomings: not enough reach, and overestimated reach. Together, they can be an impediment of my ambitions to reach many people with my work.

The title of this post probably implied I would talk about how to activate advocates. Instead, it’s merely a topic I have been pondering and a problem I have yet to find solutions to.