I had occasion a while ago to compliment the Talis folks on knowing how to come to a practitioner conference and, well, not act like the stereotyped sales-and-nothing-but-sales vendor.
Seems Talis has got into a bit of hot water on this point. Peter Murray has an evenhanded examination.
I wasn’t there—come on, if I tried to go to a code4lib conference they’d run my churlish miscreant self out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered and gzip -9ed—so I haven’t the least status to say whether Talis goofed or code4lib overreacted or some combination of the two.
But I can say that I walked into a conference consisting of people to whom what I do is alien, not to mention threatening, and I survived. Prospered, even; nothing I have ever done in my entire life has garnered such rave reviews, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if nothing ever does.
The group in question, of course, is STM publishers, to whom I motormouthed for an hour last December. Traditional STM publishers have no reason at all to like me or what I do. After all, I’m not overly fond of large swathes of them, either, and I’m trying my level best to push technology and social change and legislation that many of them are howling about.
Hell, when I was pitched for that talk, the guy who pitched me called it putting my head in the lion’s mouth! This is me, under no illusions whatever of facing a friendly crowd!
And that was the key, I think. No illusions.
I knew going in there that some of those people checked up on me, were expecting an open-access rant, and would hate me if I delivered one. Therefore, practically the first thing out of my mouth was “This is not an open-access rant.” And I held to that for the rest of the talk, too, even when it was highly tempting to get a few licks in. I talked about linkable content being an essential ingredient on the social ’net. I didn’t mention that OA content is linkable and firewalled content largely isn’t. Let ’em draw that conclusion themselves, they’re smart enough; that way they won’t lynch me for it.
I knew going in there that I was an outsider. I didn’t pretend to be anything else, and I didn’t use any “we’re all on the same side really” rhetoric, because in all honesty, that’s never sounded anything but skeevy to me, even when it’s true. In fact, I jumped up and down on the differences now and then, especially when I could point out where they were entirely legitimately in a better position to reach and serve people than I was. “Respectful outsider (and sometime adversary)” worked a lot better for me than any variant on “wanna-be buddy.”
I knew going in there that they didn’t care about me or about libraries, so I didn’t talk about me or about libraries. Again, it’s tempting as hell to serials-crisis-bash, but I’d have lost my audience that identical minute if I’d done so. It’s also tempting to say “look, y’all, we really can help each other given half a chance!” I didn’t. Wrong venue, wrong timing, just wrong; it would have been an unwelcome sales pitch under the circumstances. Instead, I bad-PR-bashed, but in doing so I explained as clearly as I could how certain thoughtless PR moves hurt publishers, not how they’re Wrong Bad Lies or like that (though they are, and the example I chose was an egregious thing of its type). I stayed in the publisher frame.
“Know your audience” is common glib advice, but I don’t think it quite elaborates the entire dance between you and a given audience. Just knowing that your audience is publishers or library coders or librarians isn’t enough—it’s knowing who you are in relation to them, how they regard you, and figuring out what rhetorical stance you can (ethically and honestly, I hope I need not say) adopt that will best allow you to communicate.
Working out those relationships and viewpoints can involve some rude and unpleasant shocks, as the Talis folks apparently found out. If your sense of the relationship doesn’t align with your audience’s—if you’re under an illusion of some sort about how they think of you—either side or both can unintentionally offend. I run into this particular peril a lot as a fairly-techie librarian. I want very badly to be just another librarian, but life isn’t like that. For reasons I don’t control, many librarians see me as a breed apart. If I don’t remain aware of that when talking to them, I’ll only make the division worse.
I still think of myself as just another librarian. It’s a title I am personally proud of, a community I care about belonging to. I don’t necessarily have to change how I think of myself because others don’t see me that way (although I obviously risk deluding myself if I don’t!). I do have to be aware of that other viewpoint, and work with or around it as needed.
Not having been a library vendor (well, okay, once, kind of indirectly, but a quickie freelance job isn’t the same thing at all), I can’t say exactly how to make this thought process work for Talis or OCLC or Evergreen/Equinox or other ILS vendors or anybody like that. I can say that it worked for me in an analogous situation, and offer it up as a suggestion. And I do.
