In the last episode, i told you i was off for the holidays. Somehow, when i got to New York, i just managed to stay offline. And then when i got to Hawaii, it seemed foolish to open the computer. Damn that felt nice. Here’s a recap of the loveliness for those of you who get a kick out of me having a life in the physical world.

I landed in NY just in time to witness the transit strike. The kid sitting next to me was also from Cal and we got to talking. He was going home to see parents and he volunteered his parents to drive me home. I was a bit unsure about this, but when they arrived, they talked about how hard getting around was because of the transit strike and _of course_ they’d drive me even though i was going to the Lower East Side and they were going to the Upper West Side. I love New Yorkers in a crises. During the first two days, i never made it past the Village. It was neat to walk around but so very strange. People on bicycles biking across the Williamsburg Bridge. But of course, it was New York and everyone was just buckling down and dealing. It was great to see some community actually standing up against the disintegration of social support in society.

After chilling with a friend for a few days (including fun pub times), i was supposed to go to midtown to move into the Algonquin with another friend. I decided to grab a cab midday, hoping it wouldn’t be so bad. It took over 2.5 hours to get from Houston to Time Square. ::gulp:: But the Algonquin was wonderful and i felt like i was going back in history… Dorothy Parker… Harpo Marx… George Kaufman. Ahh. We went and saw a fantastic exhibit at the Met (Photography and the Occult) before doing lots and lots of Christmas shopping.

Off to Long Island for familia and then back to the city to whip through the Pixar exhibit at MOMA before seeing a *HYSTERICAL* Broadway musical called Avenue Q. OMG. I couldn’t stop laughing at the mockery of modern day PC-ness.

Next, i took a brutally long flight from JFK to Kauai (with a layover in Los Angeles) which i mostly spent playing Sudoku and reading about the history of Times Square (The Devil’s Playground). I actually did quite a bit of reading on vacation. I read A Million Little Pieces, Dharma Punx, Prep, and Teenage Wasteland. (Yeah, yeah… there’s a theme here.) The last one was based on Cameron’s recommendation and OMG, it was fantastic. It’s an ethnography of the burnouts in Bergenfield, New Jersey where four teenagers killed themselves in a suicide pact in 1987. The book does a brilliant job of covering class in America and the disappearance of notions of success for working class workers (death of unions, factory work). I will deal with it more specifically on alterity in a few days. But wow! Soooo good.

And then there was Hawaii…. Barb and i managed to get a Mustang convertible which made me think so much about Thelma and Louise (the friendship bonding part, not the suicide part). We drove all around the island, hiked the Waimea Canyon, saw pretty waterfalls, snorkeled, watched kite surfing in blissful obsession and flaked on the beach with joy. Soo good.

After Barb left for CES, both of my advisors arrived with their full families. Their friends arrived, my friends arrived and i realized at some point that i knew 16 people on the island who had nothing to do with the conference in addition to the 12 people i intended to see because of the conference. The workshop was a fascinating discussion of Pepys Diary and my talk went well (and Peter even came!). I ended up having brilliant conversations about social visualization while goofing around at beaches, hottubs and pools. I got to play with Mimi’s absolutely wonderful children (who i managed to get fascinated with hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, tsunamis and earthquakes in a strange twist of conversations). I also got to play with another wonderful kid (Mimi’s brother’s girlfriend’s friend’s daughter) who didn’t speak of lick of English but loved talking to me in Japanese. And then, when i would speak back to her in English she would just repeat whatever i would say. “How are you?” “How are you?” It was utterly beyond adorable.

So, that was my vacation… it was lovely… I’m relaxed and calm and ready to dive deeply into my qualifying exams (yelp).

Hope everyone out there is doing well! And i promise some more thought-provoking entries soon.

I’m still not a big fan of Christmas because as best as i can tell, it’s just an excuse for mass consumption and gluttony. But still, i enjoy the family time and thus i’m headed to the east coast to spend time with relatives. I don’t know how much Internet access i will have between now and January 9. After family time, i will be running off to Hawaii for a mix of vacation (aka: reading time) and “conference” “attendance” (aka academic family outting).

In any case, i wish everyone the best in their consumption and celebratory efforts!

Dear Principal,

Please excuse danah from school and all activities for a few days. She seems to have contracted the deth flu and is working on building an intimate bond with the white porcelain bowl. Don’t worry – she has made the tub a cozy bed and is very thankful that her landlord put a heating vent in the bathroom. I am watching out for her, keeping her clean and cuddled. I will meow loudly if there are any problems. Please be patient with her as she’s a bit on the delusional end of things.

Sincerely,
Marbellio

(reposted from centrality)

Ever notice how many professional conferences tend to lack diversity (in ideas, methodologies, demographics)? Ah, homophily. Ever wonder why this might be problematic? Or why it might stifle innovation and creativity?

sitting in the boardroom / the i’m-so-bored room
listening to the suits / talk about their world
they can make straight lines / out of almost anything
except for the line / of my upper lip when it curls — Ani

Following from network analysis, we know that birds of a feather stick together and that they invite more like minded birds to join them. And we also know that networks play a key role in innovation and that disparate networks are critical to creativity. Let’s keep those two bits in mind when we think about conferences.

Professional conferences are fundamentally social networking events; don’t let anyone convince you that people are there to listen to lectures. We attend to connect with the people that we know and meet new people who might inspire us (or hire us). Professional conferences are also primarily word-of-mouth events, particularly the smaller ones. You go because your colleagues are going or because someone you know is going and you track their whereabouts. Additionally, speakers are frequently chosen by organizers who they know; they hope these speakers will attract a particular (paying) crowd. Well, by and large, we are friends with, listen to and know of with people like us, making conferences painfully homogeneous affairs.

Unfortunately, even the most conscientious organizers tend to have difficult diversifying their audience because they are under pressure to make certain (paying) audiences attend. Attendees also magnify the homophily problem by choosing events based on their friends. Likewise, companies attend if they’re guaranteed their target audience (for either marketing or hiring). If homophily works so well for these groups, why should we try to diversify?

While we go to conferences to see our friends, the opportunity to learn and really think from a new perspective is still there. We all learn from new people and yet we rarely leave a conference having met more than a handful of people. But try going to a different country – it’s a mind-opening experience. You see your own culture from a new lens. You come back to your home environment and you bring with you ideas based on observations abroad. There’s something very powerful about really moving oneself out of one’s comfort zone, out of the norms.

Well, the same thing can occur at conferences. The more diverse the audience, the more potential for really new ideas because you can engage with more disparate world views. People of different theoretical, methodological, ethnic, religious, political, cultural backgrounds, genders, races, socio-economic classes, lifestyles, perspectives… Diversity matters for more than some PC idea of what’s right. Diversity matters because it helps us see the world in new perspective and engage with development that supports a diverse world. It fundamentally helps innovation.

Those looking to hire at conferences should also care about diversity. If you meet someone at a conference who’s exactly like you, what do they bring to your company? Most companies want innovative minds. Well, you don’t innovate best when in a room full of people like you; you innovate best when you get to play with a lot of different people because you take their throw-away ideas, remix them with yours and voila, new idea!

Organizers want to have a diverse audience because their event will be remembered as the place where someone’s new idea came from, where the ideal employee was hired. Of course, it’s also tricky because over time, as excited attendees return, they too will end up being homogeneous, at least in ideas/perspective. This happens everywhere – events/companies/schools that were once a site of innovation become stale because it’s difficult to keep things fresh.

Of course, it’s also difficult for newcomers to attend a conference that is so solidified in its attendees. It makes it hard to penetrate, to be a newcomer. The amount of effort it requires to attend as a stranger, to learn the cultural values that bonds attendees… it is much higher. Yet, so are the potential rewards. But not if the attendees have so much centrality that they do not wish to meet newcomers.

So, what do we do about it? How do we support diversity in order to evolve? How do we help integrate new people to meet the consistent attendee? Conference organizers design programs; how can they design the event as a whole? There is an art to event organizing and it is not solely one of choosing good topics. But it is definitely a tricky social network problem. You want there to be just enough but not too much centrality. You also want to use the topics and common interests to bond people, not segregate them. You want to help people who will only really meet 2-3 people to meet people most unlike them but who they will still have enough in common to have reasons to engage. What else? What else can social network theory tell us about conference organizing to support innovation through diversity?