Why networks are important

Starting a High Tech Business: No Cold Hires:
[Via Phil Windley's Technometria]

Image via Wikipedia

I’m starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I’m planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the twenty-first installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way–if so, please let me know!

In the past two weeks Kynetx has doubled in size. There’s lots to do and the resources to make it happen, so getting more people became a priority. Getting the right people became the most important thing Steve and I could do for the long term health of the company.

I’ve been in lots of hiring situations before–at iMall we grew from three people to over 125 in a little over 16 months. I’ve learned a few things. The most important being that mistakes in hiring can cause untold grief later on down the road. You definitely want to get this right the first time–iterating to a solution is too expensive.

I’m in firm agreement with Joel Spolsky on what constitutes getting it right: hire people who are “smart and get things done”. That’s not easy; the good people aren’t usually out looking for jobs. They’ve already got jobs where they’re respected and well compensated because they’re “smart and get things done.”

One good rule of thumb for getting good employees is “no cold hires.” Four out of the five people we hired this past week are good friends who Steve and I have worked with in multiple ventures in the past. The fifth was someone who had worked closely with another key member of the team in mutliple ventures. We know these people well: we know their personality, we know their strengths, and we know their weaknesses. And…they know ours. Most importantly, we know they’re “smart and get things done.”

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This is one reason why answering ads and sending out resumes are only a small part of looking for a job. They are necessary because they can work but sometimes only indirectly.

My first job, at Immunex, started as just a resume I sent to them. But it came across the desk of someone I had shared a room with at a recent conference. He knew me and instituted the interview process.

The resume was cold but the interview was hot.

That is why networking needs to be a constant and continuing process. Luckily, many people want to help you find a job. Humans are pretty nice that way. You just have to give them a way and networking is one way.

The hires may not be hot but lukewarm can make a big difference in this economic climate.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Government

Changes in higher education

Draft report on openness in higher ed.:
[Via Open Access News]

The Committee for Economic Development, a longstanding American business-led think tank, has released a draft of its report, Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. See e.g. the table of contents for chapter 5, “Openness in Higher Education: Changes in Research”:

Resistance to Greater Openness
Openness and Open-Access Journals
Digital Repositories
Educating Faculty Members on Their Intellectual Property Rights
Openness and Commercial Support of Research
Access to Government-Funded Research Results
Openness and University Libraries
Openness and Academic Presses
Openness and Technology Transfer

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Increasing openness will be required for higher education institutions. Rapid and easy access to information will be a requirement for a successful university. Not only teaching will be changed.

How research is conducted will also change. Access to journals, access information and access to IP will all have to adapt. It looks to be pretty disruptive, at a time when colleges are under severe financial constraints.

How we educate ourselves will determine how well we manage to live. Just one of the many changes going on.

Technorati Tags: Education, Sustainability, Web 2.0

Another answer

Gen-F Scientists Ignoring Social Networking

[Via Sciencebase Science Blog]

A quick analysis of online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Xing would suggest that a mere 1 in 7 research scientists use such tools as part of their work. This contrasts starkly with the business world where uptake is up to 88%. In other words almost 9 out of every ten employees in the commercial world are using online networking.

This is an odd finding, according to Richard Lackes of the Department of Business Information Management at Technische Universitaet Dortmund, Germany. He points out that scientific research is essentially a communication-driven process and that most of its participants are young and part of what we might refer to as the Facebook generation (Gen-F, you might say). Members of the business world have a much more even spread of ages and differences in internet acceptance, and yet, it is business users who are much more committed to online social networking.

There are, of course, many networking sites around aimed specifically at scientists and have been since the heady days of ChemWeb.com and BioMedNet.com in the late 1990s (two organisations with whom I worked for many years). Today, there are dozens of general science networking sites, academic networking sites, and specialist, niche sites. However, if we are generous and suggest that the top ten of those have on average 50,000 members and that they overlap in membership to say 20%, then we are still left to account for millions of other researchers who are simply not using these services.

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This post provides a much more in depth discussion of specific online services for researchers. Some of the quotes say the same thing I wrote below – the sites have to provide a useful tool for scientists and the social aspects are secondary.

I don;t think it is simply a matter of waiting long enough. The sites have to provide something useful right off the bat in order to get busy researchers the reason for finding time to use the new tool.

Short answers to simple questions

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by Nima Badiey

NIH Funds a Social Network for Scientists — Is It Likely to Succeed?

[Via The Scholarly Kitchen]

The NIH spends $12.2 million funding a social network for scientists. Is this any more likely to succeed than all the other recent failures?

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Fuller discussion:

In order to find an approach that works, researchers often have to fail a lot. That is a good thing. The faster we fail, the faster we find what works. So I am glad the NIH is funding this. While it may have little to be excited about right now, it may get us to a tool that will be useful.

As David mentions, the people quoted in the article seem to have an unusual idea of how researchers find collaborators.

A careful review of the literature to find a collaborator who has a history of publishing quality results in a field is “haphazard”, whereas placing a want-ad, or collaborating with one’s online chat buddies, is systematic? Yikes.

We have PubMed, which allows us to rapidly identify others working on research areas important to us. In many cases, we can go to RePORT to find out what government grants they are receiving.

The NIH site, as described, also fails to recognize that researchers will only do this if it helps their workflow or provides them a tool that they have no other way to use. Facebook is really a place for people to make online connections with others, people one would have no other way to actually find.

But we can already find many of the people we would need to connect to. What will a scientific Facebook have that would make it worthwhile?

Most social networking tools initially provide something of great usefulness to the individual. Bookmarking services, like CiteULike, allow you to access/sync your references from any computer. Once someone begins using it for this purpose, the added uses from social networking (such as finding other sites using the bookmarks of others) becomes apparent.

For researchers to use such an online resource, it has to provide them new tools. Approaches, like the ones being used by Mendeley or Connotea, make managing references and papers easier. Dealing with papers and references can be a little tricky, making a good reference manager very useful.

Now, I use a specific application to accomplish this, which allows me to also insert references into papers, as well as keep track of new papers that are published. Having something similar online, allowing me access from any computer, might be useful, especially if it allowed access from anywhere, such as my iPhone while at a conference.

If enough people were using such an online application then there could be added Web 2.0 approaches that could then be used to enhance the tools. Perhaps this would supercharge the careful reviews that David mentions, allowing us to find things or people that we could not do otherwise.

There are still a lot of caveats in there, because I am not really convinced yet that having all my references online really helps me. So the Web 2.0 aspects do not really matter much.

People may have altruistic urges, the need to help the group. But researchers do not take up these tools because they want to help the scientific community. They take them up because they help the researcher get work done.

Nothing mentioned about the NIH site indicates that it has anything that I currently lack.

Show me how an online social networking tool will get my work done faster/better, in ways that I can not accomplish now. Those will be the sites that succeed.