Where we’re headed, people who hedge their bets and seek optionality when the going gets rough won’t make it. Navigating uncharted territory requires an irrational pursuit of something beyond self-preservation.
In four short years, the ups and downs we’ve experienced writing our own startup blueprint have already proven a bit too rigorous for people merely interested in libraries or working for a startup.
While neither are as glamorous as you think, both are more rewarding than you could imagine. Understanding your why matters, not just what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.
Organizations that optimize against optionality outperform those who don’t. Mature industries contain a spectrum of workplace cultures to accommodate the variety of worker expectations. Given the difficulty of the task at hand for Skilltype in the library industry, we are developing an organizational culture structured to meet the vocational expectations of high performing professionals.
This is akin to the recreational to competitive spectrum within sports. While many organizations create work environments equivalent to the YMCA or local parks and recreation department, who are the NBA, PGA, or USTA equivalents in libraries — organizations consisting of professionals who find joy and reward in the pursuit of excellence and craftsmanship?
These are the types of organizations that must be created to make progress on the grand challenges facing the profession this decade.
The moment library leaders no longer say “wow that’s a pretty ambitious goal” is when we know Skilltype is successful. Sure we can quantify our impact today. But until the information profession embraces the optimism that anything’s possible, there’s work to be done.
I remember sitting in Susan & Ennio’s kitchen one morning when the first stream of possibilities hit me for the library profession. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll be talking about something seemingly unrelated. I have to be rude, take out my phone and capture the adjacencies.
In time, your vocation becomes a lens through which you see the world. Inspiration hits you at the most unsuspecting moments. You don’t expect everyone to relate — you appreciate them too for what they teach you. But when you find people who do, there’s no need to interview.
I view cynics as a key piece to this puzzle however. Firstly, growing up how I did, cynics are extremely motivating to me. I tend to play to the level of my competition. I will conserve energy and coast if until pressure comes. Procrastinate until the paper’s due. You get it.
The particularly vocal type of cynicism in libraries today can be overwhelming, discouraging, or downright debilitating. But it’s these environments where I operate at my best. And I now know what to look for in others who do too. We’re usually historically underrepresented.
It’s why a part of our interview process is understanding what a potential colleague has to prove. Not for the sake of asking what they have to prove, but because our goal is so ambitious that we will need them to find the inspiration to prove it in their work.
Cynics behave like hyenas. I remember encountering hyenas on a safari in Tanzania when I was younger. They present as friendly and will walk alongside you when alone. But can instantly become aggressive and find boldness in numbers and want to attack.
Me while in Tanzania during the 2007 great migration
Maximalists on the other hand behave like lions. They are confident unto themselves, able to peacefully coexist alongside cynics, and will only defend themselves when threatened. This lion playing and exploring the savannah is the perfect metaphor.
The beauty of the savannah as an ecosystem is that all of these interactions, no matter how tense and uncomfortable at times, are necessary for it to evolve over time. Things expectedly get a bit chippy when the water dries up.
The digital shift in libraries is a great migration of sorts. We should understand that not everyone will make it. But those of us who do have a responsibility to continue on in the things that sustain the profession, if for nothing else to ensure that others’ work isn’t in vain.
So while I can’t work with them, I appreciate our community’s cynics. I respect their role and value, and find motivation in how they challenge our status quo. But it takes maturity to keep the vision in mind and understand we’ll never be the same.
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.
