You can mind everyone’s opinions or totally ignore them. Either way, opinions can’t validate you and your ideas — only time can.
Say someone endorses you but you turn out wrong. Time invalidates you both. Same if they disagree and you turn out to be right. Time validates you.
One trick is to become a voracious reader, a student of history — not just of your domain, but others that you could apply. Base your ideas on principles that time has validated. This helps you weather the storm of people’s opinions. Because like all storms, they must pass.
It’s also important to understand that hot takes, click bait, and blind endorsements (eg likes, retweets, etc) are the currencies of Web 2.0 — a phase of the internet that was designed with the express intent to prevent time from doing its validation work.
So what do we do as we’re working things out? A healthy social media diet must be balanced with safe spaces for half-baked ideas, because life has more than 280 characters or 640 pixels:
Web3 forerunners acknowledge its onboarding problem while pejoratively framing unsuccessful projects as scams or wastes of money. As a learning by doing economy, web3 onboarding should be as cheap as possible, making a steady supply of non-blue chip NFTs critical for adoption.
Web3 tuition is the total cost of participating in your first NFT minting process, your first wallet transfer, your first gas fees, the time spent in your first Discord. None of this should be ridiculed if we truly believe there is opportunity for all.
After years of hearing about it, my lightbulb moment wasn’t until I found a project I was personally interested in. For some it may be artwork, photography, music, or some other expression of their identity. Regardless, the knowledge gained is worth more than the money spent.
The same goes for creators. Most creators won’t have a success right out of the gate, and there has to be a culture where “failure” is accepted if the community will evolve in accordance with its first principles. Their learning curve can’t take place until they give it a try.
There are valuable lessons web3 can learn from the design thinking community — specifically how to appreciate and welcome failure, normalizing experimentation and lowering its cost, and encouraging everyone to have a bias towards action, because it won’t make sense until you try.
So far, web3 stakeholders (eg engineers, investors, enthusiasts) overlook and underestimate the role of libraries and archives — both their expertise in curating and preserving cultural assets, but also their mission of contributing to public good rather than commercial gain.
They are not entirely to blame however. The libraries and archives community has been victim of well-documented, predatory commercial behavior, producing a justified mistrust and skepticism towards emerging tech trends. But this shouldn’t be met with resistance or surprise, as many of those same problems were created by Web 1.0 and 2.0 — problems that should resolve themselves as technology advances.
It’s quite unfortunate because web3’s core principles of decentralization, democratic governance, privacy and anonymity, among others, are very much so in line with the code of ethics librarians and archivists are tasked with upholding since earning their credential.
In spite of the current chasm between these two highly educated and well-intentioned communities, I’m quite optimistic that we’re experiencing the perfect storm of societal events to bridge the gap. In theory, there’s a perfect marriage between a broad range of thorny problems the library community identifies (eg patron privacy, data ownership, predatory publishing) and solutions web3 creates (eg decentralization, wallets, DAOs, NFTs). The challenge is thoughtful execution.
Take for example patron privacy. It’s a tenet of librarianship to uphold a patron’s ability to pursue scholarship freely without fear of surveillance or retribution. But Web 2.0 platforms require username, pw, and other PII. In web3, no PII is required — just connect a wallet.
Consider data ownership. Universities have been ceding ownership over their data to commercial software vendors that require cloud hosting with problematic pricing and policies. In web3, infrastructure is open source by default, playing to the strength of @educause and others.
The most obvious opportunity for libraries and web3 is a viable solution to combat predatory publishing. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) present an upgrade to existing consortial governance models enabling a dramatic increase buying power and transparent governance. One example of the potential for collaboration is an overnight project for everyday people to purchase the U.S. Constitution called ConstitutionDAO. That inspired other projects like SwartzDAO to purchase scholarly journals and publishing houses.
web3 feed in Skilltype
There is admittedly a steep learning curve to web3 for libraries. With the rate of change in the space, the knowledge gap is only growing. Each library and professional association would benefit by assigning one or more people with researching the space against their strategic priorities. To aid in this effort, Skilltype has curated several learning feeds compromised of canonical videos, articles, and podcasts on web3 and over a dozen related topics such as decentralization, NFTs, DAOs, and more: https://app.skilltype.com/tag/2178.
It isn’t rocket science that if a service provider prioritizes personal agendas above user agendas, one that prioritizes the user’s will take their place.
Whether tech is used is irrelevant. The principle is maintaining relevance is determined by whose agenda gets the most attention.
If service providers using tech have more resources for user research and responsiveness, protesting tech is a waste of time, energy, and political capital that could be invested better understanding user needs. Plus, prioritizing user needs could lead to win/win partnerships.
Tech companies can’t do everything, and are even quite terrible at some things. The question service providers must ask is “if we’re honest and put personal agendas aside, what can tech do better than us, and what is our unique role in this new environment users expect?”
Much of this revolves around personal motivations for joining an organization. When storms come — whether economic, social or political — it becomes clear who joined because they are passionate about the org’s agenda, versus who joined as a last resort or to promote their own.
In the Information Age, few jobs would be possible without tech. There’s no shortage of examples of tech making lives and jobs easier, along with tech causing irreversible harm. Leadership is demonstrated by being inflexible on the org mission and active in shaping tech’s impact.
This could take place through participating in R&D initiatives, writing policy, governance and position statements to help educate constituents, becoming early adopters to develop use cases, and more. But it all begins with creating a constant feedback loop with users and fostering environments for honest dialog around alignment of mission and methods.
This decade, for the first time in history, talent management will replace resource management as the primary strategic focus for libraries.
Libraries no longer have the luxury of outsourcing talent management to HR departments.
Strategic initiatives in collections, space, services, etc are susceptible to failure and funding insecurity without having the right talent to manage it.
Patrons and researchers will resort to third-party tools and services in search of content and resources unless the library has the talent to engage with them on their terms.
Vendors, publishers, and service providers will win negotiations in the short and long-term against libraries without the talent to navigate an increasingly complex commercial landscape on behalf of the parent institution.
Staff retention and organizational culture will erode without the talent to navigate the imminent, multi-faceted demographic shifts facing libraries.
Funding and advancement dollars will go to research, facilities, athletics, and other areas without the talent to communicate the library’s impact on modern culture and society.
Each library needs a sustainable talent development strategy that is tailored to their local context, aligning training and recruitment dollars to strategic directions with measurable outcomes.
As collections continue inching towards ubiquity, there are only a few areas where a library can differentiate itself as unique. Of these, talent management is the one most in the library’s control.
