sacha chua living an awesome life

Both our internal Social Networks Analysis community and Colleen Haikes (IBM External Relations) tipped me off to some absolutely fascinating research on the quantitative correlation between social networks and performance based on an analysis of IBM consultants. You can read the research summary and view the presentation, or read the research paper for all the details. Highlights and what I think about them:

• Structurally diverse networks with abundance of structural holes are associated with higher performance. Having diverse friends helps. The presentation gives more detail – it’s not about having a diverse personal network, but it’s about connecting to people who also have diverse networks. I suspect this is related to having connectors in your network.

Look! Actual dollar values and significant differences! Wow. =)

Here’s another piece of research the totally awesome IBM researchers put together:

A separate IBM study, presented at the CHI conference in Boston this week, sheds light on why it’s easier said than done to add new, potentially valuable contacts to one’s social network in the workplace.  The study looked at several types of automated “friend-recommender” engines on social networking sites.  The recommender engines used algorithms that identified potential contacts based on common friends, common interests, and common hyperlinks listed on someone’s profile.

Although most people using social media for the workplace claimed to be open to finding previously unknown friends, they were most comfortable with the recommender engines that suggested  “friends’ friends” — generally, people whom they already knew of.  The friend-recommenders with the lowest acceptance rates were those that merely look at whether people have similar interests — although they were the most effective at identifying completely new, potentially valuable contacts.  Friend-recommenders that took the greatest factors into account were deemed the most useful.  (IBM’s Facebook-style social networking site, Beehive, uses this type of friend-recommender engine.)

Personally, I don’t use friend recommenders to connect to completely new people, but they’re great for reminding me about people I already know.

Check out the research – it’s good stuff. =)

(cross-posted from our external team blog, The Orange Chair)

Now that I’m reasonably happy with managing my calendar with a combination of virtual assistance and tools like TimeBridge, I’d like to improve my talk management system. I give lots of talks, and I’d love to scale up to do even more, and to do them even more effectively.

Here are the key tasks I might be able to outsource:

• Coordinate with the event organizer on
  • date and time of talk
  • location and directions (public transit and driving; call-in numbers and web conference details if virtual)
  • size and characteristics of audience
  • organizer’s objectives
  • context of talk (previous and next activities)
  • resources available (projector, whiteboard/blackboard, easel, microphone, video recording)
  • speaker’s fee / honorarium / time and materials?
• Add a calendar event with all the details
• Get the event organizer’s emergency contact information
• Send title, abstract, bio, and picture
• Take my outline and look for stories, examples, and statistics
• Take my outline and turn it into text slides
• Add links to my pre-talk blog post
• Add photography (stock photography or Creative Commons Attribution content), with proper citation
• Confirm the date, location, and title a few days before the event
• Verbally remind me the morning of the event and send me a summary e-mail with the event details, the event organizer’s emergency contact information, the talk information, and my outline (just in case slides fail)
• Thank the organizer
• Type in speaker evaluations and contact information
• Follow up with people who attended my talk
• Coordinate with any lucky winners of giveaways
• Put my slides and recordings together (I wish…)
• Update my talk ROI spreadsheet

If I can get parts or all of this process in place, the results will be:

• I’ll worry less about getting the dates wrong
• I’ll worry less about lacking important information before a talk
• The coordination process will be smoother
• I’ll go into the talk with more confidence
• I can spend less time thinking about the details of talks and more time thinking about the fun of it
• I may be able to scale up to more than one talk per week, someday
• I’ll be able to teach other people processes for preparing for talks =)

Squee! <bounce, bounce, bounce>

Democamp10: Back at Mars

Last, and certainly not least was Sacha Chua. If we could harness it I’m pretty sure we could power a few small cities of the energy that’s contained in this one, tiny person – especially when you get her talking about Emacs. Sacha’s demo, entitled, “Livin’ la vida Emacs” was hands down the most entertaining of the evening. Sacha has basically taken this simple, extendable text editor and pushed it about as far as it can go – at DemoCamp10 she pulled back the curtain and showed us all her little systems and apps she’s created in it. I like my GUI/Windows so the whole text-based thing isn’t for me but it certainly was interesting to see just how strung out she’s got that machine.

DemoCamp10: Congratulations

DemoCamp 10 was held last night, and three of the five presentations were from U of T. Sana Tapal (now at Jonah Group) and Andrey Petrov led off with the Online Marking tool; Jonathan Lung (who was part of the student team that presented at DemoCamp 5) showed us all how productive PHP procrastination can be; and Sacha Chua tried to convince us that Emacs isn’t actually bad for you. The other two demos were a social networking/quotes site called Quotiki.com, and Broken Tomb, which advertises itself as the world’s first commercial Smalltalk host. There wasn’t any new technology, but the presenters were entertaining, and it was fun to read the stuff that flashed by on the screen during their demo; the Smalltalk demo had a lot of technical and other difficulties.

Demo Camp Toronto 10 : The return to MARS

Sacha Chua showed off what can be done in the scriptable environment, in this case emacs, as she went from Text editor, to a.i. doctor, to game engine to task / email organizer and beyond. Sacha was six feet tall on that stage, even though she did not actual levitate at anytime (although she came close, as always). A Tour de force of the Emacs, a text editing tool built in a interpreted lisp language environment, bascially a personalized productivity platform which allows for massive customization. Sacha had the crowd entertained and enthralled. (Sacha blogged her own impressions and mentions that Emacs was speaking to her!)

What would you do with Sacha Chua?

Within Toronto’s Web community, Sacha Chua has become one of the leading “personalities”. Armed with infectious enthusiasm, charm and smarts, she would be an excellent person to hire once she graduates from UoT. The key question is how best to use her talents. It would probably be as a “super customer service rep, who can come into a bad situation and get everyone happy by the time she leaves. If I was an HR person from Microsoft, IBM,, etc. I’d be knocking on Sacha’s door ASAP.

On Technorati: :), goodkarma

You are really becoming an great speaker ;)
btw, I was hanging around the back and overheard people asking if you had
gone yet – apparently you were the only thing they were there for! awesome!

E-Mail from Mike Tsang

On Technorati: :), goodkarma

Random Emacs symbol: color-values – Function: Return a description of the color named COLOR on frame FRAME.

Since childhood, I have had a gift for working with computers. For a
while, this seemed like the perfect fit for my life. My grade school
teachers were not surprised to find me interested in computers in high
school. My high school teachers were not surprised that I took
computer science in university. One of my university teachers told me
I’d do well in “hard” computer science and encouraged me to go for a
master’s degree, maybe even a PhD.

But I am also awakening to a gift I have with people. I want to reach
millions and millions of people over generations and generations. I
want to lift them up, inspire them, share my experiences with them.
I want to tell their stories and help make their dreams come true.
This is what I want to do with my life.

I don’t want to wait until I’ve made my money before I do good. I want
to get out there and live and love and do and write and speak and
share. I will keep my needs simple, my schedule flexible, and my
overhead low so that I can spend as much time as possible developing
myself and other people.

I belong to the world not just as a mind, but also as a heart, and I
will make a life that allows me to express both.

So, concretely, how can we make this happen?

• I want to repay the trust the university has shown in me by finishing my master’s degree and doing well.
• I want to set up a newsletter and topic-focused blog that inspires people and shares tips with them.
• I want to write best-selling books. The second book will be easier than the first, so I should really just sit down, pull out material from my blog, do more research, and make this happen. Hey, maybe even before I’m 25. ;)
• I want to be a totally awesome professional speaker. That way, I can reach *lots* of people with not only my message but with my communication style. It’s also a good reason to meet people around the world.
• I want to set up an organization for generous connecting.
• Lots more!

How can I make this self-supporting? I want to get as quickly as
possible to the point where I don’t have to worry about my expenses so
that I can follow these crazy ideas for free. Then I can build up my
crazy idea capital, and then we’re off!

The best way for me to do that is not to plan for retirement at 60
with a slow-and-steady savings plan, but to take advantage of my crazy
ideas, train my intuition, and get better at going from crazy idea to
reality.

If I open my mind and look for ways I can create value for other
people (like my networking business cards that list my favorite
networking books!), then I’ll probably be able to create enough value
to make the kind of life I want.

(Crazy idea! Trust in coincidence by having business cards with random
stuff on the back. Moo cards does this with Flickr photos. Why not do
that with whatever you currently want/have? I think business cards
should be short-run and current. That way, they’re more than just a
static piece of contact information, and you’ll have reasons to keep
giving people your cards and for people to keep reading yours! Maybe I
should start date-stamping my business cards… Ah, now there’s a
great idea…)

Right. That’s the ticket. I should keep a notebook of all these crazy
ideas. Probably a blog page *and* a paper notebook. Probably part of
my Moleskine. And I should go and make those crazy ideas happen, like
advertising on my laptop or tweaking my business card, etc.

I don’t mind giving the ideas away. I get terrific feedback. In fact,
if other people pick up the idea and run with it, that means I get to
train my crazy-idea sense for free!

Remember the movie Phenomenon? I want to be that guy, overflowing with
lots of ideas and improvements! I want to be someone you tell about
the cool stuff you’re working on because I’ll be enthusiastic about it
too, and I *might* just go “Hey, what do you think about trying out
…?”

Simon’s fantastic at designing systems from scratch. I’m good at
thinking about how to improve something that’s already there, finding
things to smoothen, noticing things that are missing… Come to think
of it, even my computing background points to this. Why do I love open
source development? Because I can build on what’s there! Why am I
totally addicted to Emacs? Because it indulges my crazy-idea thing!
Whee!

So I want the ability to explore all these crazy ideas even when I’m
working. I have lots of options in terms of the type of job, too.

• A high-margin job that will train me up and take advantage of what I can do well and the crazy ideas I can come up with – marketing and sales, maybe?
• A job that develops my skills even though it requires more work and concentration, such as writing. But not for long.
• Something that pays for my expenses without demanding any mindshare, such as waiting tables ;) (Can’t do that on my work permit, though!)

Right. Getting a better sense of what I want in life. There we go. Does that sound like a plan? Let’s make it happen. =)

On Technorati: purpose, life, :)

When Simon called me up to say that he was really excited about
working with QSR because of their interest
in Asterisk but that they hadn’t gotten in touch with him yet, I said,
“Really? That’s it, I’m going to make something happen.”

So I did. I didn’t have anyone from QSR online in my buddy list, but I
knew that if anyone could find people, it would be
Clair Ching. (Tip: If you ever need any kind
of information, no matter how obscure, ask a librarian!) She gave me
Ian’s cellphone number. I tried calling it up, but my cellphone seems
to be blocked for international calls. She called it up, but Ian
didn’t answer. I sent a text message to Ian asking him to go online.

Clair also pointed me to other QSR people like
Marvin Pascual. Marvin told me that Ian was
probably out to lunch or en route to dotPH because it was Friday. He
gave me Ian’s Yahoo Messenger ID and dug up Myna’s cellphone number. I
remembered that Ian told me I should talk to Myna about business
development opportunities, so it was terrific that they were traveling
together.

I noticed that I had a Google chat message from
J. Angelo Racoma. I remembered that
Angelo’s associated with dotPH, so I asked him to track Ian down,
possibly by calling the dotPH folks. Angelo set that in motion, too.

… and when I saw Ian’s Yahoo Messenger status change, I was, like,
“w00t!” I messaged, “Thank you for letting me assert my SUPER GEEK
GIRL POWER and renicing myself to -20!”

Big, big, big kudos to Clair Ching, J. Angelo Racoma, and Marvin Pascual for helping me track Ian down and get him online right then and there. I owe homemade cookies and lasagna all around. You rock.

Simon and Ian had a great conversation threshing out the technical
aspects of the project. I think they were basically establishing that
they knew what they were talking about and that the other person did,
too. While they were doing this, Myna and I chatted about the business
side of things.

Good stuff. I think it’ll be a terrific fit, and I look forward to
seeing what’ll come of it. I’m glad I helped make that phone
conversation happen, if only because I exerted enough will for them to
get around to talking. I knew they’d have a good conversation, but
it’s sometimes hard to get around to it what with everything else
going on.

Sometimes you just have to make things happen.

On Technorati: business, networking, goodkarma, :)

Photo by Rob Dudley. License: Creative Commons Attribution.

Wow.

Just wow.

Whenever I falter and lose sight of my way, other people lift me up,
set me on my feet, and point me back in the right direction.

Where would I be without my family and my friends and those random
strangers and acquaintances who take a moment out of their busy days
to reach out to me in all their generous humanity?

I am thankful for these moments of sadness and confusion, however
brief they are, because they give me an opportunity to appreciate and
deepen my respect for the wonderful, wonderful people in my life.

From friends who called and messaged and e-mailed as soon as they read
my doubts, to my mom whose encouragement addressed my fears and
strengthened my resolve, to coworkers who not only told me of
interesting opportunities but also expressed their concern

I am loved beyond my ability to comprehend, and if I can spend the
rest of my life sharing that experience of love with other people…
wow!

It’s been said that it takes a village to raise a child. I am being
raised by the world.

On Technorati: goodkarma, love, :)