Yankee In Canada

#sla2009 Social Network Graph

Using Processing and sample code from www.eskimoblood.de I have created a basic social network graph of replies sent during #sla2009.

The thicker the line the more times you sent an @reply to that person. The more lines you have, the more @replies to different people you sent. If you don't appear on the graph, but know that you sent out @replies, it's because the person you sent your @reply to never sent out an @reply and so that person won't appear on the graph and unfortunately, you can't either! Interestingly, a few people only sent replies to themselves, so they do appear on the graph as a line that goes back to themselves.

The sample code from eskimoblood required that my data be in the following format:

• One array of all the usernames in alphabetical order
• A second multi-dimensional array that links the users with each other (in this case based on @replies) using an ID number.  Like this:

@amalthea67
{70, 74}

In other words @amalthea67 sent @replies to the 69th and 73rd person in the list of usernames on the wheel.  The first person in the list is at number 0.

Here is an outline of what I did:

• Queried the #sla2009 re-tweeter database for all tweets with @replies as of June 19, 2009
• Using php, created an html table of this query that lists the ID of the tweet, the username of the person who sent the reply and the username(s) of the person(s) it was sent to.  Here is a screen shot of part of the HTML table that resulted.

• Imported the html table into an Inmagic database, which allows for multiple entries in the "Replies" field (separated by a space)
• Created a secondary Inmagic database for every username, plus a unique ID for each.
• Exported the data to a report that lists the username and the ID number of the person the reply was sent to.  Here is a screen shot:

• Using Excel again, this table was copied, pasted and transposed so the usernames ran along the the first row and the numeric ID of the target of the @reply ran along in the second row.  A little bit of find/replace to get the data in the exact format (as above) and voila!  My data is in the format that I need it in.
• I made a few changes to eskimoblood's code and ran the sketch in Processing, which resulted in the social network graph above.

My Signature Themes

This is fascinating and, I think, very accurate.  For those of you who know me well - What do you think?

From Strengthsfinder.com via "Now, discover your strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton.

"Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and behaviors. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.

A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a basic sense of your abilities, but an awareness and understanding of your natural talents will provide true insight into the core reasons behind your consistent successes.

Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of talent, in the rank order revealed by your responses to StrengthsFinder. Of the 34 themes measured, these are your "top five."

Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that lead to your successes. By focusing on your Signature Themes, separately and in combination, you can identify your talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance."

My Signature Themes are:

Responsibility

Your Responsibility theme forces you to take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. Your good name depends on it. If for some reason you cannot deliver, you automatically start to look for ways to make it up to the other person. Apologies are not enough. Excuses and rationalizations are totally unacceptable. You will not quite be able to live with yourself until you have made restitution. This conscientiousness, this near obsession for doing things right, and your impeccable ethics, combine to create your reputation: utterly dependable. When assigning new responsibilities, people will look to you first because they know it will get done. When people come to you for help—and they soon will—you must be selective. Your willingness to volunteer may sometimes lead you to take on more than you should.

Input

You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information—words, facts, books, and quotations—or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity. If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away. Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing it is often hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they might become useful? With all those possible uses in mind, you really don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your mind fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.

Learner

You love to learn. The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning. The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you. You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered—this is the process that entices you. Your excitement leads you to engage in adult learning experiences—yoga or piano lessons or graduate classes. It enables you to thrive in dynamic work environments where you are asked to take on short project assignments and are expected to learn a lot about the new subject matter in a short period of time and then move on to the next one. This Learner theme does not necessarily mean that you seek to become the subject matter expert, or that you are striving for the respect that accompanies a professional or academic credential. The outcome of the learning is less significant than the “getting there.”

Relator

Relator describes your attitude toward your relationships. In simple terms, the Relator theme pulls you toward people you already know. You do not necessarily shy away from meeting new people—in fact, you may have other themes that cause you to enjoy the thrill of turning strangers into friends—but you do derive a great deal of pleasure and strength from being around your close friends. You are comfortable with intimacy. Once the initial connection has been made, you deliberately encourage a deepening of the relationship. You want to understand their feelings, their goals, their fears, and their dreams; and you want them to understand yours. You know that this kind of closeness implies a certain amount of risk—you might be taken advantage of—but you are willing to accept that risk. For you a relationship has value only if it is genuine. And the only way to know that is to entrust yourself to the other person. The more you share with each other, the more you risk together. The more you risk together, the more each of you proves your caring is genuine. These are your steps toward real friendship, and you take them willingly.

Arranger

You are a conductor. When faced with a complex situation involving many factors, you enjoy managing all of the variables, aligning and realigning them until you are sure you have arranged them in the most productive configuration possible. In your mind there is nothing special about what you are doing. You are simply trying to figure out the best way to get things done. But others, lacking this theme, will be in awe of your ability. “How can you keep so many things in your head at once?” they will ask. “How can you stay so flexible, so willing to shelve well-laid plans in favor of some brand-new configuration that has just occurred to you?” But you cannot imagine behaving in any other way. You are a shining example of effective flexibility, whether you are changing travel schedules at the last minute because a better fare has popped up or mulling over just the right combination of people and resources to accomplish a new project. From the mundane to the complex, you are always looking for the perfect configuration. Of course, you are at your best in dynamic situations. Confronted with the unexpected, some complain that plans devised with such care cannot be changed, while others take refuge in the existing rules or procedures. You don’t do either. Instead, you jump into the confusion, devising new options, hunting for new paths of least resistance, and figuring out new partnerships—because, after all, there might just be a better way.

sla2009 tweet cloud

As with #sla2008, and again with thanks to the folks at Wordle (still a great tool!), I present you with a cloud based on the tweets from #sla2009.  Click the thumbnail to view the larger image.

Compare this year's cloud with 2008 and you may notice a few things:

• "SLA", "session", "conference"and "great" are again the more popular words used
• The divisions, especially IT, PAM, KM, and LMD were actively tweeting this year
• The concept of a re-tweet (using RT) didn't exist in 2008

SLA2009 Schedule

Here is my preliminary schedule for SLA2009 in Washington, DC.  I will also be at plenty of Open Houses and sessions.

The best way to contact me while I am in DC would be a direct message on Twitter - yankeeincanada.

Fri Jun 12, 2009

• 9am SLA Board of Directors Executive Session
• 1pm SLA Board of Directors Open Session

Sat Jun 13, 2009

• 9am SLA Board of Directors Open Session

Sun Jun 14, 2009

• 7:30am SLA Leadership Development Institute
• 1pm Idea Showcase: SLA Chapters, Divisions, and Caucuses in Action
• 1:30pm SLA First-Timers and Fellows Connect
• 3pm Meet the President Elect Candidates
• 4pm Meet the Treasurer Candidates
• 5:15pm SLA Opening General Session and Awards Presentation
• 7:30pm International Spy Museum Tour /SLA Centennial Reception

Mon Jun 15, 2009

• 1:30pm Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives: Knowledge Management Division Business Meeting /SLA Unconference Session No. 2 - TWEET UP!
• 3:30pm Advertising & Marketing Division Roundtable / The New Face of the Special Librarian: Embedded Librarians
• 5:30pm Canadian Reception
• 6pm International Reception / SLA Alumni & Student Connect
• 9pm Legal Division Open House

Tue Jun 16, 2009

• 7am Annual Diversity Leadership Development Breakfast
• 9:30am Finance Committee
• 11:30am Information Technology Division Business Meeting and Awards Ceremony
• 1:30pm Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Issues Caucus Business Meeting
• 5pm SLA Chapter Cabinet Meeting /SLA Division Cabinet Meeting
• 6:30pm SLA Joint Cabinet Meeting
• 7:30pm SLA Salutes! Awards and Leadership Reception [Ticket 830]

Wed Jun 17, 2009

• 8:30am Mashups: Future of Changing Content
• 12 pm Homeward Bound!

SLA2009 Dashboard

SLA 2009 is almost here!  Since May 2, 2009 the #sla2009 re-tweeter has been busily sending around tweets as people prepare for conference.  Undoubtedly, the volume of tweets will increase as we get closer to conference and will balloon from June 14-17, 2009.

With a bit of help, I have designed a dashboard for the re-tweeter as a "one-stop shop" if you're interested in getting a bird's eye view of the re-tweeter's data stream.

The dashboard consists of two pages: home and analytics.

Home

The home page has two elements:

1. A continuously updated feed of the latest Tweets in the re-tweeter data stream.  As new tweets are sent, a link will appear with the number of new tweets, so you can refresh the page and view them.
2. A Live Cloud of words that are most popular in the re-tweeter's data stream at that moment.  The more popular the word, the larger the font.  Each word in the cloud is linked to a Twitter search for that word in the stream - very handy if you want to see why people are tweeting about that particular word.  Stop words have been stripped from the cloud to keep it as clean as possible.

Analytics

The analytics page has seven charts showing:

1. Daily tweet activity since May 2, 2009 when the re-tweeter was launched
2. Who is tweeting the most (Top Tweeps)
3. Who is receiving the most @replies
4. Who is sending the most @replies
5. What other hashtags are popular
6. What types of tweets are being sent
7. What links being sent around are most popular

There is also a handy set of links across the top of all pages to:

• @SLA2009 on Twitter
• The SLA2009 Homepage
• The SLA2009 Personal Planner
• The Virtual INFO-EXPO
• The SLA2009 Blog
• The SLA2009 Hospitality Wiki
• The SLA Innovation Laboratory

The dashboard is based on live data from the re-tweeter's database, so check back often to see how the data stream is changing over time.  I hope you find it useful, interesting and thought provoking - most importantly, I hope you find it inspiring!

Twitter at SLA2009

Once again, a re-tweeter for has been developed for this year's SLA conference based on the Twitter API and John Eckman's code.  Many thanks to John and our own Karen Huffman for improving on last year's code!

Starting on Saturday May 2, 2009, the sla2009 Twitter account will become a re-tweeter.  What's a re-tweeter you ask?  It's simple.  When a follower of sla2009 posts a tweet with the hashtag #sla2009 in their tweet (probably best at the end of the tweet) that tweet will be posted to the sla2009 account.  The username of the person who sent the original tweet will appear at the start of the message followed by a ":".

At conference, there will be a 3 minute delay before tweets are re-tweeted.  Leading up to conference the delay will begin at 30 minutes and decrease as we get closer.  If you are following sla2009, you will see all of the tweets that are being re-tweeted.

Re-tweeting is helpful for:

• separating out your sla2009 related tweets from your other tweets
• sending broadcast messages (3 minute delay at conference) to all sla2009 followers
• seeing what sla2009 followers are tweeting about without necessarily having to go to the sla2009 page
• creating an archive of tweets on the sla2009 page for future or live analysis

This is an opt-in service.  Only your tweets with the hashtag (#sla2009) will be re-tweeted and you must be following sla2009 for it to work.  Tweets from protected accounts won't be re-tweeted.

Using a number of tools out there, you can also follow the #sla2009 hashtag:

• Twitter (RSS)
• search.twitter.com
• TweetDeck
• Many others

The re-tweeter is brought to you by the SLA Innovation Laboratory!

SLA Twitter hashtags

I have seen a lot of discussion on various blogs about establishing hashtags on Twitter for the various groups in SLA. I don't know if this list exists yet, so I am going to start one. What hashtags are out there? Add a comment with known hashtags and I will compile the list.

• #sla2008 (Annual conference in Seattle - no longer used)
• #sla2009 (Annual conference in Washington)
• #slaleads (Leadership Summit)
• #dsoc (Social Science Division)
• #slait (Information Technology Division)
• #slakm (Knowledge Management Division)
• #slator (Toronto Chapter)
• #dsol (Solo Division)

SLA eVoting for the 2009 Board of Directors Election

SLA eVoting for the 2009 Board of Directors Election will begin on 10 September 2008 at 12:01 a.m. EDT.

All members* eligible to vote and in good standing as of 25 August 2008 may participate in the election. Polls will close on 1 October at 5:00 p.m. EDT.

Members with a current e-mail address in the SLA database will receive an e-notification when the polls open. Members without an e-mail address on file may still login to vote using their SLA Web UserId and Password, or they can e-mail evote@sla.org to request a paper ballot. Requests for a paper ballot must be received by 10 September.

Questions? E-mail evote@sla.org or call +1.703.647.4950

The candidates for the 2009 SLA Board of Directors are:

• President-Elect: Janice C. Anderson and Anne Caputo
• Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect: Cynthia Barrancotto and Ruth Wolfish
• Division Cabinet Chair-Elect: Holly Chong-Williams and Ann Sweeney
• Director (vote for two candidates): Jessica Baumgart, Michael Kim, Daniel Lee, Nettie Seaberry

Visit the 2009 Board Candidates page to see candidates' bios and speeches delivered at the SLA 2008 Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO in Seattle, WA USA.

*Excludes organizational, honorary and virtual members of SLA.

SLA Candidate Clip on YouTube

SLA Candidate Speech

Candidate Speech (Video)

I want to talk with you today about three things: Leadership, Volunteers and Technology.

While we can’t predict what the priorities of the incoming Board will be, based on my years of experience with SLA: Leadership, Volunteers, and Technology will be areas of focus for me, if I am elected.

SLA is not only a professional association, it’s also a volunteer association.  We depend on thousands of volunteer-hours per year to operate and it’s our responsibility to support those efforts. We must provide an environment that allows our volunteers to experiment with and explore the various dimensions of leadership: vision, originality, style, risk, creativity, voice, and perspective, to name a few. We must also continue to dissolve obstacles and provide a rewarding volunteer experience.

Part of that experience is the technology we provide. The road has been rocky lately technologically speaking, but in the last year, we have seen tremendous examples of how we can provide our volunteers with the tools they need – and in some cases at little or no cost to the association.

The exponential growth of the recently launched wiki spaces is a clear indication our volunteer leaders and members are eager to use these tools.  Over 30 wiki spaces with hundreds of pages of content have been created and more than 750 users have been setup to contribute to and improve this content.

The Chapter Cabinet has established the Chapter Idea Bank for the exchange of ideas and best practices between Chapters. Just think how our Chapters would have benefited from this cross-pollination of ideas had that space been available three, even two years ago!

Chapters, divisions, committees and caucuses themselves have started to use wiki spaces to document their own best practices and manage projects.  SLA Toronto started this process in 2005 and I can tell you from personal experience that we have had tremendous success in our ability to transition our volunteers year-over-year.

And here in Seattle we are launching the SLA Innovation Laboratory, where you can experiment with emerging technologies on your own terms and where you can learn from other SLA members how they have used various tools to deliver products and services to their clients.

SLA needs to continue to invest, be it time, talent, ideas or money, into technologies that support the valuable contribution of our volunteer workforce and the continuous learning and skills development of our members.  As a member of the Board I would continue to advocate for these investments.

Since I first joined SLA, I have worn many hats: Programmer, Director, Public Relations Chair, Fundraiser, President, Writer, Editor, Webmaster, and probably most famously as the pleasantly irritating technology guy from SLA Toronto.

And as an information professional, I have successfully built my own information service from scratch in a small, yet information intensive and research-based communications consulting firm. Over the years I have been forced me to constantly diversify my skills, and this will make me a true asset to SLA’s Board.

Five minutes isn’t much time to share with you all of my ideas, so I hope we will have a chance to chat here at conference while in line for coffee, wandering the Exhibit Hall or at the Open Houses.  And for those of you out there watching this video, you can easily find me in cyberspace.  My contact information can be found on the SLA Toronto website: www.sla.org/toronto.

Like you, I am a volunteer.  I am involved with SLA because I genuinely enjoy the work and the people who make this association great. And like you I want to see our profession continue to succeed as we start our second century as an association.

Thank you.