Tag: GeekDad

Occupy LEGO Land

As the #OccupyWallStreet protests grew, it was inevitable that the movement would spread in unusual ways. That includes plastic toys.

“We must not be LEGO ‘lands’
— We must be a LEGO NATION.”

#OccupyLegoLand is a Facebook Fan Page that gives voice to LEGO minifigures. Like Occupy Wall Street, they are battling on many fronts: working in horribly exploitative conditions, war, bankers, and the release of the new iPhone.

#OccupyLegoLand aims to rebuild the world, brick by brick.


Sources:

You Are Here: From the FTC for Your Kids

You Are Here

We’re from the government. We’re here to help.

The Federal Trade Commission has launched a new site designed to help kids learn to protect their privacy, spot frauds and scams, and avoid identity theft.

You Are Here is set up as a virtual mall.

  • Visit the West Terrace to learn about advertising techniques, target marketing, and suspicious claims.
  • Visit the Food Court to learn about business competition, supply and demand, the history of the FTC, and mergers and monopolies.
  • Visit the Security Plaza to learn about protecting your privacy (online and off), and protect the citizens of Earth against identity-stealing invaders.
  • Visit the East Terrace to learn about bogus modeling offers, “free” vacations, “miracle” products, and tip-offs to rip-offs.

You can read more about You Are Here in a story on GeekDad: You Are Here: From the FTC for Your Kids.

PBWorks and Real Time Collaboration

PBworks_LogoPBWorks has announced a “Real-time Collaboration Update”  which brings integrated Instant Messaging collaboration, Live Notifications (activity streams), Live Editing (rather than standard wiki asynchronous editing) and integrated Voice Collaboration with on-demand voice conferencing.

This is a big step up. Instead of being a  mere wiki, the platform now offers different ways to collaborate, but still captures the information in the platform. I assume that is one of the reasons they changed their name from PB Wiki to PB Works.

PB Wiki was the first wiki I ever used. A group used it to plan an international meeting of law firm knowledge management leaders. Now I regularly use the PB Works tools as part of GeekDad information management process.

While I was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I spent a few minutes with a bunch of people from PB Works: Jim Groff, the CEO;  Chris Yeh, Vice President, Marketing ; Glen Hoffman, Sales Engineer; Greg lelli, Legal Sales Specialist; and Kristine Molnar, Community Evangelist.

One of the drawbacks of a wiki was the check-in/check-out process. Only one person could edit a wiki page at a time. Google Docs (and to a lesser extent Google Wave) showed us that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and speed up the collaboration process even more.

The PB Works team gave me a demo of the new tools and it was pretty cool. If you are editing a page and realize that you need input of other team members, you can summon them to the page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call. You can do this all in a fraction of the time it would take to set up a web conference, the call line, and communicate the details to everyone.

Since PBworks hosts the  information, you can be up and running in a few minutes.

What Can We Learn About Compliance Programs From a Robot

tweenbot

We all need some help if we want to get to our destination. I was struck by Kacie Kinzer’s experiment using this “tweenbot” in New York City. “Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.”

This simple little robot, that can only roll in a straight direction at a constant speed, made it from Northeast Corner of Washington Park in NYC to the Southwest Corner of the park. It took 29 people to intervene: pushing the little robot in the right direction, pulling it out form under park benches, and redirecting it away from the curb.

I think there are some lessons that a compliance professional can learn from this experiment:

  • Simplicity works
  • Put on a human face
  • Have a clear goal
  • Allow others to help you

Are there any other lessons that you saw?

Here is a video showing parts of the Tweenbot’s journey through Washington Park:

Thanks to Jenny Williams from GeekDad for this story: Tweenbots: Help a Lost Robot Find Its Way.