Blogger's Block

Man, its easy to get blogger's block after a long weekend and with lots to do at work. Thank goodness I have a Typelist to help with my cop-out (look right).

I did write something today for public consumption, an abstract for an upcoming talk that might be of interest:

Enterprise software traditionally yields efficiencies by automating business processes within hierarchies to achieve economies scale and speed. However, in a services economy an increasing share of knowledge work is business practice supported by social networks. Environmental conditions are increasingly turbulent -- requiring greater lateral information flow, depreciating process and rewarding economies of span and scope.

To date, the majority of informal collaboration takes place with email and attachments. Email is no longer a productivity tool thanks to commercial and occupational spam. The latent value of communication is lost there is no institutional memory. Now software is returning to the collaborative roots of the Internet and the Democratic nature of the PC revolution.

Social Software adapts to its environment rather than requiring the environment to adapt to it. Entrusting users to make their own connections, share resources and design their own spaces while guided only by social convention surprisingly works. Relatively simple tools and rules reveal social networks and yield complex emergent behavior from the bottom-up. Perhaps there is greater value in augmenting our capabilities than automating them -- for organizations, emergent democracy and fostering social capital.