If you’ve seen the movie “Sneakers” you’ll recognize the title as one of the tipping points in that very good film. I was reminded of it over the weekend as I started to try and wrap my head around a relatively new app and social service called, Secret. A very peculiar app because the social service does what the others don’t do — it keeps your identity away from everything you share. All your posts, comments, and likes are completely anonymous. While other social networks (twitter, Facebook, google+ instagram, etc) work to build your online identity, Secret does not. From Boy Genius Report,

When first installed, the app digs into the contacts you already have in your iPhone’s phonebook and links you to each and every one that also has Secret installed. There are no accounts, profiles or contact lists and you cannot “friend” other Secret users from within the app. Messages and photos you share are visible to everyone you know who also has Secret installed. If they “like” a post, it spreads and becomes visible to all of their contacts. And so on.

There are so many things that fascinate me here. The primary reason is the idea that a percentage of us are beginning to be socially obsessed with being unrecognizable online. It might be the NSA, but the rise of disappearing snips of content being delivered by our devices is on the rise — just listen to anyone under 30 talk about Snapchat or Facebook’s Poke and you’ll see there is new value in secrecy … or in just perceived secrecy as the case may be. I suspect we will see a lot more of these apps that allow you send and receive, post and like, and just participate with people without the fear of discovery and reuse. That will be an interesting space to watch.

The app is quite simple. All you see is a scrolling list of secrets posted from people you are either directly or indirectly connected to. If you want to participate in a secret you give it a like or leave a comment. Once you do that you are connected to that secret and are following it. Will it succeed? I have no idea, but as a concept it is interesting.

I am always watching for new ways people publish online. I typically get an account with whatever the latest, potentially paradigm shifting, service hits the market to see if it is really all that different. I’ve seen a few recently that are proving interesting to me. I thought I’d share some quick thoughts and look for reactions.

Medium

This isn’t exactly new, but I am still working to wrap my head around the reasons I like it so much. The things I can understand are the elegance in the presentation, the focus on the story, and the inline commenting capabilities. Oh, and then there is the whole community curation thing that really peaks my interest. We are talking to our SB You platform provider, EduBlogs, about adding capabilities that allow people to dissect a post and add comments in-line … imagine how interesting that will be for collecting feedback or tearing apart drafts. I’ve written in Medium and I just like the overall simplicity.

Storify

This one isn’t new either, but I have really just started to wrap my head around how it works. To make it really simple, Storify allows you to create a “mashup” story from things happening across the web around a topic, person, hashtag, location, etc and put it into one shareable page. Once you start exploring various Storifies it becomes clear what it is all about … I think there are incredibly powerful opportunities in that simple idea for sharing personal content with that of the larger Internet. A great example is how this blog post holds both original content from the author and snipits gather from the social web to tell the story of a conference session.

Rookie

This one seems more new than the other two and is slightly different in that it is created by the staff at Rookie and not as a user created publications. Where it gets interesting is how it mashes together original content with curated reactions from across the web … what sets it apart is that the integrated social content feels like it is a part of the story. They even pitch each story with highlighted text exposing, “reactions from …” It is certainly better observed live than in words.

The WordPress Jetpack suite of services is now available on SB You. What that means is that with a single plugin your SB You site can do a whole bunch of new things. The one thing to keep in mind is that once you activate the plugin you have to connect it to a free wordpress.com account. Connecting it to wordpress.com allows you to take advantage of a whole host of new services like better image galleries, better site statistics, and connections to various social media services.

IT Principles can accelerate a University’s progress to a new model characterized by collaboration, trust, and a focus on enabling the effective utilization of technology. If a University is to realize a goal of viewing IT with a more global perspective, we require substantial trust and collaborative implementation efforts that transcend organizational units and stakeholder groups. New governance structures, metrics and transparency will continue to build a unifying culture for IT. This culture should be typified by a set of accepted IT principles. It is incumbent upon us, as leaders of IT at Stony Brook University, to care deeply about having an excellent set of principles. Having them allows us to operate under a shared set of values that guide decision making.

A principle is a rule or guideline that provides clear direction and expresses the values of an organization. A world-class IT principle connects to business success, is specific to the enterprise, is transparent to all, and is detailed enough to drive trade-offs. — via Gartner’s Guide to Creating World-Class IT Principles

A series of IT Principles must be developed. Below is a first cut of IT Principles to be shared more widely for comment, edit, and adoption from the community:

• We will align IT resources and plans with the University’s Strategic Plan.
• We are committed to responsible stewardship of human, financial, and environmental resources.
• We are committed to collaboration, communication, and sharing information across social platforms with a human voice.
• We will encourage innovation, even where concrete business benefit is not initially apparent.
• We will always consider open source, cloud-based, and vender hosted offerings in the selection of solutions.
• We will actively hire great people, develop the growth of our staff, promote a diversity of voices, and support our staff.
• We will maximize value and reduce cost through collective sourcing and campus-wide adoption of enterprise services that can be adopted and costumed regardless of platform or device.
• We will work to delight our customers in the delivery of our solutions.
• We will work collaboratively to provide a responsive IT environment that enriches and enhances teaching, learning, service, and research.
• We will identify risks, implement proactive security measures, and be consistent with policy and law.

Activity

It is critical to test principles against day-to-day routines and behaviors or we risk creating a well-crafted but empty set of statements that don’t change anything. Below are three steps we should do to test our principles prior to wide distribution:

1. Convene your leadership team — Review your newly minted principles with your leadership team, then ask everyone to take out their calendars and choose three different upcoming meetings. At least one should be a standing meeting.
2. For each meeting, imagine what will be talked about — In those conversations, what responses, decisions or processes have to be changed as a result of respecting the new principles? Perhaps, as a result of your principles, you should cancel an upcoming meeting, because holding it goes against a principle (such as, if you are holding a meeting on the design of a system without customer input and have a principle that states that all systems will be customer-driven). Or maybe you have to eliminate a series of steps in the development of a new project, because you have a principle that states that you will become more agile for certain projects — and you know that you cannot respond at speed unless you change the way projects are run.
3. Make, reverse or change decisions — Cancel unnecessary meetings, change the agenda of the meeting, change the processes, eliminate steps and undertake all necessary changes to ensure the principles are adhered to.

Communication of IT Principles

Effectively communicating our principles is the necessary next step in gaining adoption and participation. Our goal is to our decisions be guided by these principles so it is critical that our staff at all levels know them, respect them, and act with them as their guiding framework. We should take action to introduce them and make them part of the ongoing culture of the organization. Some ideas include:

• Blog posts from various staff members expressing “test cases” for or against select principles.
• New signage that clearly states the principles in all of our working environments.
• The use of individual principles during meetings that fall within a given context.
• When talking to people, use the principles as an example of how a decision was made.
• Constantly review the principles and make them a point of annual conversation.

Only a few weeks after opening the doors on SB You we’ve updated the platform to WordPress 3.8 and it is quite a nice change. I am writing this from my iPad right in my Dashboard — no custom app needed. This is honestly the first version of WordPress I’ve used that really feels like it was designed with a mobile evidence in mind and that makes me happy. On the go publishing with SB You is now a reality.

Even adding images is much improved!