Similarly the organizers of a traditional curated event will benefit from criticism. By now the organizers of the recent TAM8 skeptic conference event in Vegas know well of the problems with the reception of July 8th. (The music was too loud, e.g., driving most attendees from the room prematurely.)

But when it comes to open ‘unconferences’ like SkeptiCamp, your suggestions and criticisms (however well-intentioned and thoughtful) may not be effective in the ways you have come to expect of traditional events.

Let’s say you attend an open event for the first time. While you found great value in the effort you nevertheless found certain aspects of it falling short. Examples might include: “breaks should be longer” or that “there were not enough women speakers” or “speakers should be kept on time.”

Because SkeptiCamp is a young event model intended to be accessible to inexperienced amateurs, you should expect a few rough spots with events, especially as they are getting established.

You might have great ideas to improve upon the effort and remedy the problems. Your suggestions may be met with appreciation and thanks, but don’t count on them influencing future events. Reasons will vary: organizers are aware of the problems and choose to solve them in other ways. Or, they don’t consider the problems to be serious. Or, they may not even be the ones organizing the next event (where you are addressing the wrong people.)

You might get frustrated at such a pathetic non-response and end up dismissing open events as a pointless exercise. However, you might benefit by considering that you failed to understand how open events are different from our traditional events.

In short, words are cheap. You improve open events in two key ways: through involvement and sharing your experience as an organizer.

First, you improve open events not by complaining to others (even in nice ways) but rather by taking advantage of the ‘open’ organization of the event and getting involved as an organizer. If ‘breaks should be longer’ attend the organizer meetings to argue for the scheduling policy. If you think there should be more women speakers then lead the ‘speaker wrangling’ effort.

Second, you improve open events by sharing your experience as an organizer in the SkeptiCamp wiki where pages exist to express “What Went Wrong” as well as “What Went Right“. This enables our growing throng of part-time amateur organizers to learn from each other, to develop and refine a set of practices that can be employed by all, including many future first-time organizers.

To speak mere lip-service to openness and collaboration will consign SkeptiCamp to the dustbin, depriving us of its potential to create substantive events anywhere around the world. But to take openness seriously, to organize events with transparency, to put action to one’s ideas, and by using the wiki to learn from our mistakes and build upon our successes, we have a shot at making this work in a big way.

Half in jest, but with an intent to shock those who tend to think in the limited terms of the present and past, I wrote:

My Shirkyesque take on the topic may be a bit much for your panel: I’d offer that the most valuable bottom-up efforts of our skeptical future will bypass (rather than engage) our conservative and slow-to-act organizations. Instead they will employ tools only now in their infancy to harness large numbers of individuals collectively to meet needs that few (if any) of us can now anticipate.

To Daniel Loxton (@daniel_loxton) who has accused me (me!) of being a utopian (ha!) I’ll dare to up the ante:

Those who spawn and participate in these efforts will by and large not identify as skeptics or be aware of the fixtures of organized skepticism.

Daniel had wrote:

Whatever the role of the orgs, a lot of grassroots efforts run aground over these scope and tone arguments. Navigating those seems to be a central challenge.

I’d agree and would add that these are challenges faced by skepticism in general, as it should be evident that our pros and even our orgs aren’t above making rookie mistakes. (Examples: Randi’s initial support for the Petition Project, PZ’s reputed excesses, or the public sniping surrounding Kurtz’ departure from CFI.)

As far as how these bottom-up efforts can strike the right tone and find the right focus, that’s a complex and interesting question. Generally speaking, I’d think the crowd will tend to gravitate towards its own focus and set its own path for the future of skepticism. The most the pros (and orgs) can do is to nudge the crowd—to inspire its members to uphold certain principles and oppose that which is destructive to our traditional goals.

As I suggest in a comment, many organizers of conferences (especially skeptical ones) don’t yet understand the benefits that social media can bring their events. The biggest mistakes I’ve seen, both at big conferences and small:

• No decent connectivity at the venue stifles what could be a rich ‘backchannel’ conversation among attendees. This is of particular value to lecture-oriented events where attendees have few options to interact. (Interactive events mostly benefit from connectivity in allowing participants to fact-check questionable claims on the spot.)
• Hiding one’s list of participants. A visible and public list of participants can be a big driver of turnout.
• Sporadic updates on the event’s social media accounts. Lack of updates suggest the event’s organization is suffering, or that promotion is a low priority. Better to keep one’s participants in the loop to build excitement and set expectations.

Eventually I think that organizers will figure this stuff out, but it’ll probably start with our SkeptiCamp events and percolate upwards.

As an example, FUD has long been a staple of political campaigns as it has proven to be highly effective in tearing down one’s opposition. In a close race opposing candidates will often pull out all stops in ‘going negative,’ even if it means dragging each other into the mud. Come election day we voters must hold our nose in disgust to cast our vote for the lesser of two evils.

We can see FUD employed liberally by anti-vaccination activists: “Vaccines contain the poison mercury. Why would you poison your child through vaccination? How would you feel if your child becomes autistic? We don’t know the risks.”  Those advocating vaccination will often respond with a similar FUD-based tactic: “By not vaccinating your child, you risk her getting measles and dying.” Such an approach is ill-advised.

“Never, ever, ever, resort to FUD” says technology evangelist Terrence Ryan in his new book Driving Technical Change. Why? When you are playing a long game of building up a reputation of trust, employing FUD risks eroding your credibility.

Building a good reputation is of keen interest to me as a technology professional, not only in my attempts to persuade others, but also in countering the occasional bit of FUD. Understanding FUD is highly relevant to me as a skeptic as well, as I’m constantly wondering how to navigate a world awash in dangerous nonsense.

In a chapter titled “Create Trust“ (free pdf) Ryan makes several good points essential in building trust with others: don’t lie by commission or omission. Own up to your mistakes, but do your homework to keep them infrequent — too many mistakes and your credibility is shot.

From skepticism I’d add other good tips I’ve encountered that appear to be essential for building a good reputation:

• Be open to change, such as in reevaluating your position in light of new evidence or better reasoning.
• Recognize and avoid logical fallacies. Be aware of and compensate for your cognitive biases.
• Avoid weasel words and state your points clearly.
• When reaching the limits of your knowledge be prepared to say with confidence “I don’t know, but I will find out.”

Ryan makes a strong case that FUD tactics should be avoided. To manipulate others through fear might be effective in the short term, but it comes at great risk to your reputation:

• If you’re loose with the facts (and called on it) you risk burning your credibility forever.
• Even if you’re tight on the facts, those you’re trying to persuade will eventually realize that you’re trying to manipulate them through fear.
• Most in your audience will not normally experience the worst-case scenario. So by using fear to motivate, you risk being seen as the ‘boy who cries wolf.’

Rather than risk damaging your credibility, Ryan says, play the long game of carefully building your reputation as a trustful person. More simply, I’d say don’t be a weasel. Be the ‘good guy.’

However, because you must inevitably deal with those using FUD tactics, you need a strategy of countering them without dragging yourself and your reputation into the mud.

From various sources, tips in countering FUD:

• Focus on the benefits of the ideas you’re trying to promote. Cast your points in positive language. On vaccination for example, point out that the legitimate studies show that vaccinating your child is a safe and effective path towards keeping your kid healthy.
• Recognize FUD in its various forms, such as those who disingenuously say “we don’t know” or “we’re just asking questions” couched with an agenda and intent to manipulate through fear.
• Don’t bring up the shortcomings of your opponent’s position unless asked to do so by a recognized neutral third-party. As Terrence Ryan suggests, “speak plainly, unemotionally and without exaggeration” and be prepared to cite your sources for those shortcomings.
• Call out factual inaccuracies that you can back up by citing reliable sources. Similarly, call out fallacious reasoning, but only where you can state clearly why it’s faulty.
• Let the audience realize for themselves that your opponent is manipulating them through fear. Many may not realize what’s going on, but your pointing it out isn’t likely to help.
• You may need to carefully distance yourself from allies trying to manipulate your audience through fear.
• If asked to acknowledge a shortcoming of your side, be open about it. You may need to place the criticism in context, but don’t whitewash.
• Finally, resist calls to fight ‘fire with fire.’ Your opponent may be prepared to sacrifice his reputation to bring yours down with him.

As Ryan points out, building a reputation of trust can be a great asset in one’s professional life. However, if one isn’t careful, that trust can be quickly squandered through the use of FUD — manipulating others through fear should be avoided.

And don’t be a weasel.

Thanks to Terrence Ryan for cautioning against the dangers of using FUD.

Unknown to many Mac OS X users is a capable text-to-speech engine that can be put to good use. I especially like to use it to read me articles or blog posts while I engage in work that occupies other parts of my brain. They’re akin to ad hoc podcasts or audio books.

However, text-to-speech does not alway prove convenient to use, often requiring you to manually select a portion of the page text to read — typically the article body. On complex pages this can be a hassle, especially those (like snopes) which disable selection.

To the rescue comes Readability, a talented Javascript program you can drag to your Bookmarks Bar to quickly isolate the body of the article or blog text. It’s great for reading (hence its apt name) and also proves ideal for text-to-speech.

To set up Readability, simply go to the site and drag the button to your Bookmarks Bar. (Note that you can tweak the text settings if you so choose.)

At this point, you can go to your article and click the ‘single page’ link. Once loaded, click ‘Readability’ on your Bookmarks Bar.

The article body text should format nicely in your browser.

To have your Mac read the article text, press command-A to select all text, then right-click > Speech > Start Speaking. Then you can go do other work while you listen to a text-to-speech rendering of the article with the Mac’s default settings

That’s all there is! But you can tweak things further. There are many voices available on the Mac, though ‘Alex’ appears to be the richest of all. (Read what Roger Ebert has said about Alex and the other voices.) You can configure them via ‘Speech’ preferences.

To avoid having to bring up the the context menu (via right click) you may wish to configure a key to start/stop reading the selected text. Here I configure Command-Option-S as my ‘speech key’.

Then to have my Mac read me an article is often as simple as clicking “Single Page” (where necessary), clicking “Readability” in the Bookmark Bar, pressing Command-A (to select all text) and then Command-Option-S (to start it reading)

If you’ve got any tips on this topic, I’m keen to hear them. Please add them to the comments.

Modified from a picture posted by ‘klaus’ on [this might be offensive], a picture sharing site.

Organizers expect a strong turnout of 80 with a diverse roster of 20+ speakers for the day. They did gangbusters in raising money for the event — the first such fundraiser held to keep the event free to participants.

They’ve nailed collaboration in their organizing efforts, keeping their efforts visible to all through their website, Twitter and facebook feeds. This sets a standard for other SkeptiCamp organizers to emulate.

Even more worthy of note, they are innovating in a way that promises to overcome a key challenge facing SkeptiCamp.

As far as conference models go, SkeptiCamp (based on the tech-oriented BarCamp) is among the most lightweight. It does have its rules and practices to make for substantive, fun and engaging events, but these are few in number and flexible, allowing for organizers to tailor an event as needed.

One such practice encourages first-time speakers, which keeps the event fresh and provides ready opportunities for new people to get involved. Another key practice asks that attendees interact with the speakers during their talks. This stands to engage the attendee at a level not seen at a traditional lecture-oriented event. It also provides for some level of crowdsourced quality control.

Open events have their challenges, however. Left to themselves the speaker roster will favor the assertive, competitive and vain personality types (of mostly white guys, but there are of course exceptions.) As a result those of us reluctant to deal with such types will often decline to participate. This is poison to open events and a symptom of failure.

The naive remedy is to program the event and take away the openness. This requires recruiting someone to act in the role of gatekeeper — a conference programmer who decides which talks and speakers are worthy of the event.

That too is a failure. Requiring a programmer will make these events more difficult to organize. Having a programmer will produce a conference whose ‘balance’ risks reflecting the biases and social circle of the programmer.

That is not the SkeptiCamp way. SkeptiCamp asks that we retain openness while developing practices which overcome the challenges of open events.

Whether they realize it or not, the organizers of Skepchicamp have innovated in an important way that stands to address this problem, very simply by encouraging the participation of women in much the same way that BarCamp asks us to encourage first-time speakers.

In practical terms, those acting in the role of “Speaker Wrangler” for the event will prevail upon both men and women to give talks. However, in being aware of the personality types who might otherwise dominate an event, they can tailor their search as well as to set an expectation that the tone will be welcoming of all.

Those lucky enough to live in the Chicago area can view the result firsthand on Saturday. The rest of us will have to watch the Skepchicamp Twitter feed and read of the accounts on participant blogs.

See also BarCamp to Meet the Paranormal at WF?Fest

Now concentrating on getting my training program going for a marathon this summer.

I’m scheduled to appear on Skeptically Speaking out of Edmonton, Alberta on Friday night.

Graphic by Dan Adams

I’m a proponent of scratching one’s itches. If you’re like me you might occasionally stumble upon an idea that you find compelling. It might be a story, a computer program, a melody or whatever. Rather than ignoring it, you give the idea a small chance by taking it through its first steps — to write those first few lines of prose or code and see where it goes. There may be nothing there, allowing you to go on your way. But there exists a small chance you’ve stumbled upon something which can grow to be of great value.

Fifteen years ago I scratched such an itch, starting a quirky project on nothing more than a lark; a project that evolved in ways I’d never anticipated; a project that may ultimately have helped a staggering number of people.

The Celebrity Atheist List is born

My admittedly quirky project started with the posting of a list of famous atheists to the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism back in 1995. I might have posted the list to a website, but the web was still in its infancy and nowhere near as dominant or accessible as it is now.

I solicited contributions, asking for names initially, and later for citations with good quotes to back them up. It was an early form of collaborative development that worked well. I collected the cites and edited them for inclusion in the list.

The project quickly found a home on the web. A noted secular and skeptical activist, Jim Lippard, offered to host the site where I’d be responsible for creating the content. It may have been around this time that the project acquired the name of the “Celebrity Atheist List” (CAL). I billed it simply as “An offbeat collection of notable individuals who have been public about their lack of belief in deities.” The CAL listed only the living, in part to reduce my editing effort. The deceased ended up in a site created by my friend Mark Gilbert who created a sister project called “Famous Dead Non-theists.”

Thanks to the “Way Back Machine” of archive.org you can see how the CAL appeared in these early days: here. Note that the site featured over 200 names listed in the atheist category at this early point.

Sometime around the year 2000 I moved the CAL to its own domain name, celebatheists.com. System administrators for the Secular Web graciously provided hosting space (though the CAL was never officially affiliated with the organization.)

The list grew steadily over the years following that very basic model of names with cited quotes. Traffic also increased, driven initially by directories like Yahoo and eventually by search engines like Google. Today the search engines drive daily visitors to the site in the thousands.

In spite of my efforts to reduce the maintenance effort, I eventually burned-out on the project and gave the CAL away a few years back. These days it’s in the hands of Brian Sapient of Rational Response Squad fame. Apart from his addition of advertising, the site remains pretty much the same and continues to grow.

The rationale shifts

Simple, open-ended ideas are powerful in that they can evolve in ways that their creators never anticipated. The CAL, or rather its rationale, evolved in ways that I never anticipated.

This project started largely out of fun, with a secondary attempt to demonstrate the diversity of atheists. Reading the blasphemous quotes of people you recognize and admire can be an entertaining diversion. Why is magician Penn Jillette an atheist? To answer you have to look no further than his entry in the CAL which excerpts a few of his quotes from published sources. (Of course today you wouldn’t have to look far to find other evidence of Jillette’s atheism.)

Fun sites can be a value in themselves. But the rationale for the CAL didn’t need to stop there.

The CAL could serve to put a human face on atheism. Back in the days when very few people were public about their godlessness, the site brought together a diverse group of recognizable and respected people (as well as a few nuts) speaking frankly about their lack of faith. It provided solid ammunition against those who sought to dehumanize atheists.

The other reason is psychological. A caveat: because I’m not a psychologist, you should take this with a grain of salt, but I’ll try to state the reason as clearly as possible.

In making a decision, rational argument isn’t sufficient for many of us. We need an emotional component to support the decision. For example, you may veto the purchase of a new car unless it’s available in a specific color you want. Your need for the emotionally satisfying color is at least as important as your meticulous research into pricing and features.

For those of us atheists considering stepping from the closet, rational argument similarly may be insufficient. An emotional component may be necessary. So where does the CAL come in?

Where we have established an emotional connection to another person, it might be enough to get us over the hump. It could be a recording artist whose music moves us. An actor who skillfully drew us into a role. An author whose work we admire, or possibly a comedian whose wit speaks to us. If they can step from the closet and survive intact, then maybe we can too.

No longer was the CAL merely a ‘fun’ project, but it had grown and could stand to help people in novel and unplanned ways.

The influence of search

The atheist bus ads and billboard campaigns of recent years are a good example of outreach to a broader audience who would not otherwise be aware of an atheist movement. The ads can be seen by millions, a few of whom will be intrigued and follow up.

Initially the CAL was visible only to those seeking atheist content. You’d find it listed prominently in the Yahoo Directory which drove much of its early traffic. However the net was about to change in a big way with the rise of the search engine.

The CAL was in the right place at the right time. When the search engines rendered web directories like Yahoo’s obsolete, the CAL was no longer merely frequented by atheists, but rather it was visited by a broader audience of web surfers. Celebrity names, it seems, are like honey to search rank algorithms, especially for websites with good reputations.

Though these algorithms are forever evolving in an attempt to stay a step ahead of the spammers, it’s not uncommon for someone to be searching on a celebrity name and find the celebrity’s page in the CAL listed at a respectable position in the results. (For a term like ‘atheist‘ the CAL often shows up high on the first page of results, a position that is enormously difficult to attain.)

The only concrete metric I’ve tracked over the years are page load counts. In the past year the CAL looks to have averaged 5,432 page loads a day. It’s not clear what that translates to in terms of visitors, or much less in providing value to those who visit. Complicating the picture are caching (artificially depressing the numbers) and web-crawling bots (raising the numbers.)

Nonetheless 5,432 page loads/day translates to nearly two million page loads a year. Of course the numbers weren’t always that high, but they’ve been at roughly this level for several years. That amounts to a staggering number of eyeballs over a 15 year period, many of which are encountering not a dry intellectual atheism but rather one to which their owners can make a human connection.

The CAL hasn’t been alone in trying to attract those eyeballs, however.

Others stepping into the space

Creating a list of famous atheists on the Internet is not an idea that would have escaped others. However, being first to the field conferred the CAL an authoritative position in this quirky niche. That lead could be easily maintained so long as I kept the content fairly fresh.

For example, there has been no shortage of ‘atheist quote’ sites which trod the same ground. However, I made an effort to keep the CAL a couple steps ahead and position it not as a quote site, but rather as a tool to measure the willingness of notable living people to be open about their godlessness.

In the end, Wikipedia was the only serious contender. Backed by a collaborative group of users whose numbers dwarfed my own, they quickly built up an impressive ‘List of Atheists’ page. However it failed in a fundamental way in bypassing the central value of the CAL. For each entry on their list they included references but notably omitted the salient quotes that provide so much value to the CAL. References are essential but are far more likely to be ignored rather than pursued. For all their effort and capability they constructed another threadbare list of atheists. In any case, they consigned their project to the search-engine sidelines in renaming it to the dry “List of Non-theists.” The threat was gone and the CAL would prevail!

A series of other projects arose that weren’t so much competitors but rather children or siblings to the CAL.

Warren Allen Smith drew upon the CAL to build his “Who’s Who in Hell” book, bringing at least a portion of the CAL into print form. (I incidentally merited a complimentary entry.) It’s pricey at $73.56 for a used copy.

In 2007 Richard Dawkins launched his OUT Campaign, a complementary effort inspired by the gay rights movement that encourages atheists to be more open about their unbelief.

More recently, Russell Blackford’s new book 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists with essays by prominent people talking about their unbelief. Very much like the CAL, but in long form.

You can find the ‘50 Most Brilliant Atheists of all Time‘ which filters the CAL (or the Wikipedia list) for its smarter members.

Most recently, with Ireland’s new anti-blasphemy law coming into effect, an Irish atheist organization published a list of “25 Blasphemous Quotes” for which they gained heavy international news coverage. A few of the quotes look to be sourced from my own edits to the CAL, such as that of Björk.

In closing

In spite of the page counts and anti-blasphemy publicity, it’s enormously difficult to quantify the value of the CAL. As a fun project it was worth giving it a start. Later it proved its ongoing value for its ability to put a human face on a difficult issue for many.

Over the years I’ve received a couple dozen emails from people thanking me for the CAL, but that may be all the concrete evidence I’ll ever have of it helping people. The actual numbers could be considerably larger, staggeringly so. But I can live with that uncertainty as the project didn’t start with a grand plan, but rather to scratch an itch.

The CAL’s days may be numbered even as it continues to prove its value as an aging workhorse in pulling the load of search-based outreach. With the rise of social media and new tools for collaboration, the next generation of outreach projects are likely to provide that human connection as a core feature.

However it won’t be me doing this. The CAL did give me a taste for ideas that can grow, but I’m most likely to be pursuing them in other domains. Nevertheless I am glad to have had an opportunity to contribute.

UPDATE: I should add Mark Gilbert’s rationale for his aforementioned Famous Dead Non-theists list, which applies to the CAL as well:

The purposes of this list are to combat the pervasive myth that atheists are terrible, immoral people and to convince the undecided that it is OK to be an atheist. Just like any other large group of people, some of these people lived exemplary lives and others did not.  The point is not that these people are all heroes, but simply to notice that there are more nontheists out there than most people realize.

UPDATE: At the Grassroots Skeptics site, Part I, Part II and Part III.