Let's Date!

On your first date, you wouldn't plan your wedding. Or sign a prenup. Or name your baby.

So why do so many collaborations start that way?

Companies and organizations clearly need to learn how to date. See if you click. Get to know each other. Play.

Prototype, really.

Recent discussions I've had with a large company about collaborating quickly turned to who was going to walk the unborn child to preschool and pay for her clothes. It reminded me that people and organizations almost compulsively skip the playful exploring time. And the fun.

So let's take lessons from the millions of partnership prototypes that happen over dinner every Friday night:

Start with dinner. Get together. Talk. Dream. Learn. Over food, of course.

Don't be self-centered. You'll kill a relationship quickly if you spend all evening talking about yourself, your needs, your wants. Instead, find out about your potential partner. Learn about their hopes and dreams. Think about how they may enhance or build on yours.

Don't name the baby. Put off the discussion of branding, naming the project, how credit is bestowed. This gets emotional fast, and quickly moves you out of the realm of low-risk prototyping.

Put off the prenup. In fact, I'd avoid writing anything down at first -- especially anything regarding goals, directions, duties, etc. This starts to define the relationship from the outset instead of allowing for open innovation and low-risk experimentation.

Respect each other. Be nice. Be giving. Be open. And if that costs a little, consider it an investment in the potential of the partnership. Pick up the check here and there.

Meet up again. And again. Make a plan -- and put it in your calendar -- for the key people to meet regularly, preferably over a meal, to check in on how everyone's doing. That's the time to make sure nobody feels disrespected, over-committed, or unhappy. Then adjust accordingly.

Break up gracefully. If the partnership just doesn't click, part ways, remain friends, and be sure your team gets together to learn from, and record, what parts worked.

I won't kiss-and-tell about our newest collaboration, but I will say this is the approach WNYC took when we approached Iowa Public Radio back before the Iowa caucuses. We made a concerted effort to learn about them and focus on their needs. We talked a lot. We shared info and a common effort. And we didn't name the baby. The result was an amazing night of radio, and smiles all around (scroll to the bottom). It's also how we've approached a lasting relationship with the wonderful folks over at the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network, where we first prototyped this kind of coverage.

Happy dating!

[Photo by hypertypos]

Passive, Aggressive Crowdsourcing

I've been awed by the power of passive crowdsourcing -- harnessing the power of crowds without the crowd realizing it.

Here are three examples, all by Google (natch):

Free 411. Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 and you get directory assistance from Google for free. No ads, no charges. Why would that be? As Wired pointed out, when you request the number for your favorite pizza place, Google captures your voice and actions to build and refine a voice-recognition system. You provide the error correction by picking from a list of its guesses, or even spelling out the request. Once a match is made, you get the phone number and Google's software gets a tiny bit smarter. The result? Today, Google added voice-recognition to its popular iPhone application.

Flu Tracker. Google has been able to track the severity and geography of the flu by watching the frequency and location of people searching for "flu symptoms" and other telltale keywords. Google's results closely match the CDC's national tracking data, which are based on reports from health care providers nationwide.

Location, location, location. When I got my new GPS-enabled phone home, I did what any self-respecting geek would do: use Google Maps to pinpoint my apartment to a silly degree of accuracy. For comparison, I then did the same thing on my wife's phone -- which also has Google Maps, but no GPS. To my surprise, it pinpointed exactly where I was! After a while, I figured out what had happened: With the search on the first phone, I had "taught" Google's systems the exact location of our particular combination of nearby cell phone towers, wireless networks, maybe even a bluetooth signal from the guy next door. When it saw the combination again, even without the GPS signal, it knew where it was.

So is there a role for passive crowdsourcing in journalism? I think so, but still thinking.

The driving force in each of these examples is that participation by the crowd is driven by utility: getting a phone number, searching for flu information, finding one's location. Hard to imagine a utility that a newspaper or radio station might provide to attract a large enough data set for a particular purpose.

However, I do know that people respond to direct requests by radio personalities and newspaper columnists to participate in crowdsourcing projects. Might such a request lead people to actively participate in a passive collection of data?

My friend Daniel Liss and I have brainstormed some nifty ideas we hope to try out.

Do you have any?

Election Night Design: Post-Vote Post

Prototype. Prototype. Prototype.

It really saved us. Monday we had everyone sit in place for a talk-through drill and discovered issues that would have been problematic on election night. The only thing that didn't work (once) was a wireless microphone setup in the newsroom which, ahem, we hadn't tried before.

One interesting tidbit: Virginia didn't prove to be the early key we thought it might be. In fact, with the earlier-than-expected call of Ohio for Obama, we knew he had won even before Virginia went his way.

And in a departure from many networks, we actually took our newsroom conversation to the air as early as 10:20 p.m.: Our host was honest about how we expected Obama to be called as President at 11 p.m., straight up, when the California, Washington and Oregon were declared his. As it then happened.

We're conducting a full internal critique Monday at Noon -- using the d.school's "I Wish, I Liked, How To" format.

Details to follow.

Election Night Design: Gaming and Planning

ITEM 1: There's a solid writeup of electoral vote scenarios at FiveThirtyEight.com expressing much of what we've been gaming out in our newsroom.

ITEM 2: Several weeks ago we worked to select a few Counties That Count, half-remembering* a prescient article that suggested a few Florida counties could decide the 2000 election.

Andrea Bernstein has counted our counties among her stops for The Takeaway, and points out that in the last few days Barack Obama has been doing the same -- visiting Clark County, Nevada; Pueblo County, Colorado; Prince William County, Virginia; and Palm Beach County, Florida.

This weekend, the journo-programmers at The Takeaway are working to make sure you can track the real-time election results from our Counties That Count on the show's website.

ITEM 3: To get more info in our face, I set an overhead monitor to flip through several websites automatically, for free. Here's how:

-- I put the Firefox 3 browser on a computer attached to the monitor
-- Next I installed the ReloadEvery Firefox add-on, which auto-reloads websites
-- Installed the Tab Slideshow add-on, which cycles through tabs at a set interval
-- Installed the Full Fullscreen add-on, which hides the Firefox toolbars
-- Pulled up several sites in separate tabs
-- Set ReloadEvery to 1 minute, and Tab Slideshow to 5 seconds
-- Turned on the Full Fullscreen feature to hide the toolbars
-- ... and voila!

* Anyone who remembers the specific article, please let me know!