I'm in London this weekend on business, so its a shame to miss RecentChangesCamp in Palo Alto. Hosted by Socialtext, the event is more than a Barcamp for wikis. It draws people from afar with in interest in wiki spirit.
If you are in town, definitely stop by.
I'm in London next Thursday and co-hosting a social software dinner with the good folks at Headshift. If you can join us, here's the details:
- Pre-dinner drink and gathering at All Bar One, Shad Thames waterfront, from 18:30.
- Followed by dinner at Cantina, also Shad Thames waterfront, at 20:00.
- Map
- Nearest tube stops: London Bridge, Tower Hill, Bermondsey
- RSVP the old fashioned way by calling Lars at 020 7357 7358
Hope to see you there!
RecentChangesCamp, the Barcamp for the wiki way, is May 9-11th in Palo Alto:
RecentChangesCamp was born from the intersection of wiki and OpenSpace - a very wiki-like way of organizing gatherings. A lot of cool people into wiki, community and collaboration will be there - what do you want to talk with them about? Every participant is invited to lead their own sessions; the guideline is to take responsibility for what you love. In addition to general and technical conversations about - and actual coding on - wikis and other software, session topics from past RCCs have covered subjects from art to social organizing to philanthropy, playing a creative conversation game, and individual & group coding practices. See the past conference wikis for more complete lists and session notes.
Anyone and everyone is invited to attend. You will especially enjoy Recent Changes Camp, if you happen to be any of the the following:
* Member of any open wiki community or someone who uses wikis at work, school or in any other context
* Interested in community, action, collaboration, creativity or any other activity in which the self-organizing power of wiki might be helpful
* Interested in the OpenCulture and/or OpenTechnology movements
* Interested in knowledge creation and sharing knowledge
* A generally curious and inquisitive person
Next Saturday at 3pm till bust is SuperHappyDevHouse 24.5 at the Socialtext Coworking space.
StartupHappyDevHouse is not a full on DevHouse, so we'll be providing snacks and drinks, but no dinner. We'll also be skipping the Lightning Talks, which leaves 100% of the time for hacking! Bring your laptop, your project, your startup and leave your shoes at the door (or not). As usual, admission is free and open to everyone.
RSVP @ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10749954249
RSVP @ Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/472612
Tomorrow I'm honored to keynote the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives' Business Applications for Social Networking half-day event at the Computer History Museum.
Social Networking can be a powerful ally to professionals and businesses. This conference will highlight the value of Social Networking in fostering meaningful business relationships that benefit individuals both personally and professionally. It will provide examples of specific applications where Social Networking can be used to communicate with personal networks AND to accelerate company visibility. After all, who isn’t interested in hearing about strategies that can maximize their growth and the growth of their business.
If you can't attend in person, it will be on Ustream beginning at 8:45am.
My presentation:
Below is a video of a panel I was on with Heather Champ from Flickr, Frederick Mendler from Rackspace, Pratap Penumalli from Google, and moderated by Marc Hedlund of Wesabe at Customer Service is the New Marketing.
After the event, Socialtext signed on to the Company Customer Pact.
I'm flying tonight to Italy to contribute to Paolo Valdemarin's State of the Net conference in Udine. There's a wiki, just in case. Euan Semple, Dave Sifry, Dave Winer and Anthony Mayfield and other usual suspects will be taken out of their element as well.
I'll also be in Milan and may get to see AC Milan play Siena on Sunday :-)
Oh, and a reminder for the locals to join me for lunch today.
I'm sitting in Customer Service is the New Marketing, an event hosted by Getsatisfaction. Robert Stephens, Founder and Chief Inspector of The Geek Squad is giving a talk on "Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable." This is a rough impressionic transcript.
Robert speaks of the origins of Geek Squad, the purposeful choice of a non-technical brand for a technology company. Companies want to spoon-feed the plot of the movie, and are afraid that you will think of them in ways that are off the plot. You have to dare your company to be authentic enough so you won't have to waste money on Superbowl ads. Its interesting how Robert made conscious detailed decisions such as what car to have for the business. The French believe that when all currencies and trademark laws in the EU, you loose differences, so they have a Ministry of Culture and perhaps wine and cheese are more important than competing in the auto market. It became a game, one guy with a car and a service showing up at places rich people hang out like the opera. Those rich people may not have a computer problem at the moment, but its a kind of time-released marketing. The faith you have in your brand and message to employees, that its okay to do the right thing, is extremely powerful.
Do a little weirdness. In business you have what you do and how you do it. And you have to continually do things that don't make sense so you can continually do new things and make it fun.
Picasso said great artists steal. But don't look in your industry. If you steal an idea from a different industry, the people in it will tell you at great length how they do it, because they aren't competitors. From watching Nick at Nite he got the idea to get his fashion sense from the government, a consistent branding to apply on all kinds of cars. Companies know what they want to do, but they reach for a cliche. Get the foundational stuff right. Instead of t-shirts and jeans, or a damn polo shirt, I saw Apollo 13 and found NASA images that were public domain -- the engineers didn't realize they were wearing a uniform, they were just geeks. NASA was an ultimate model to co-opt, but even more, beyond doing something weird, it was something no competitor would do. Yes I give them die-cast badges, but we show up in people's home and need to present identification. I want to get attention and stand out and not have to pay for advertising, but need other people to convey it -- the founder's dilemma.
Saddam Hussein was quite creative if you think about it. Had people dress like him with the same mustaches, so you couldn't tell if he was dead. Is the quiet leader that enables people to innovate and a company that could survive without him is perhaps better? You can control the employee experience, with the skills they bring to the company and the skills you add to them. Marc Andreessen says to hire curiosity, drive and ethics. Curiosity is that enthusiasm that gets people to solve problem, drive gets the company going and ethics are critical with all the transparency we have today.
So how do you keep the culture going? Your companies are closed social networks, not open to everybody. You don't friend everyone on Facebook. Part of it is who you allow in and who you don't. There should be a 2 year waiting list to get into your company. Like social networks, the more people that join, its possible to get stronger. Everyone has something to contribute to the culture, you have to set up rituals to get people talking to each other so in the future they will reach out to each other. In between LAN gaming, they are talking about the budget. Every intranet should be a damn wiki.
All small companies want to be large, and large ones want to be nimble. Large companies are here to learn from the small ones. With Best Buy we can help people that can't access the internet in a different way than telling them to go to our website. You can grow a company by raising money, but they will want to sell it. But when you are talking about the intangibles that matter, that takes real bravado and you have to be careful about ownership. You can't franchise great customer service. There was a fourth way, with Best Buy we let them be differentiated. There is no accident that Dell is in Best Buy. Flat screen TVs you have to see to buy.
I started researching what happens to founders in acquisitions, they usually get kicked out or leave after 12 months. Are all corporations evil? It seems to be too obvious to be true. There is a lot to contribute if you are creative, especially in tech support. Nothing about this is being perfect, it is about letting your customers know you are human and trying. Try to train agents to never say I don't know, and to say, I'll find out. We aren't the same as we used to be, but it is getting better with Best Buy and I stay up later than my competition.
What has happened to our jocks in society? Its much better to be cool later in life. The metrosexual has given away to the technosexual. I try to fake my own death to ensure the survival of the company. An initiation ritual that emerged is agents getting their driver's license photos in uniform.
Question from the audience: what are you doing to engage with the blogosphere?
I'm here because a blogger invited me to participate in the conversation. Bloggers are great, but don't behold themselves to the same thing as journalists. I have 25 people who we call public defenders, who get emails and calls, sometimes they are negative. I'll scan podcasts and posts and give people who have bad experiences a call. They don't expect it. Respond to every single one. I've given my mobile number to most of the bloggers you are talking about. KNBC did another sting operation last week and we were the only ones without a problem and I'll be sending letters out to everyone in that store saying to keep up the vigilance. Companies are stronger when public on privacy, nobody sued YouTube until they were bought by Google. The media is predictable and we will pretend every computer that doesn't come in with a hard drive cable connected it came from Dateline.
Chris Miller: With the entrance into Social Networking with Connections, what will Lotus do as we get to 3.0?
MR: Challenges hierarchical systems, business systems could break down private information shared. dangers regulatory meltdowns on sharing regulated
upside is the transformaitonal power that could be pheonominal. seeing beginnings inside . global consulting business talent pool. find and leverage experiece is the competitive : The virtual worlds phenomenon is experimental but interesting. Innovate, a game on how to do IT training in a game mentality was cool. Get to certification by playing levels in the gaming, which appeals to the gaming generation. That' a close system, but with multiuser and immersive experiences it can get somewhere. Research that Tivoli did around virtual datacenter visualization was very interesting.
I asked what is the most disruptive thing he has seen that he needs to, perhaps through this audience, get you people to pay attention to?
Social Software (I'll link to someone else's notes)
IBM Research is a great place for me to go shopping. Bluehouse's live charting and Cattail file sharing came out of IBM Research quicker than before.
People are running from Domino and Exchange to Gmail, wdyt?
In September we announced hosted Notes. Logical thing. Domino access light is a good first step. From an SMB standpoint with Foundaiton, consistent UI, opaque if it is hosted or appliance to the user. More interest from different walks of business around Foundations today, a non-profit in Africa for example. We see it, recognize it, but we have a long way to go. Dont have to go on an 18 month lifecycle, doing it Agile with 4 week iterations. Symphony is on 6 week iterations. First question it the press conference was how did you get your team to do it so fast, a great start to talking about it.
Rob Novak: dependencies on Active X and others?
We'd love to work those out.
Rich Schwartz: Love the SMB initatives, they look real, but how can you solve the key problem -- every month in my mailbox I get flyers from local organizations offering MS and Cisco courses, but never from IBM. What is going to be done about certification for small to midsize markets?
Not going to pre-announce something, but certification should be very high on my priority list.
In my day job I work for a large company (Colgate) and working on winning over the Microsoft camp. How are you going to overcome the toolbar for Outlook that you see on every popular SNS?
Started working on it, needs to be done. When you have a new product like connections, they (YASNS) are trying to figure out if they are friend or foe, but we are working it through.
A Scot asks, Lotusphere always has somebody fameous speaking, what happened this year?
Room laughs. I thought Bob Costas was fantastic.
Microsoft?
The last thing Microsoft expected us to do is launch Symphony and at such a rapid release rate. Microsoft is still running around saying they've got blogs. Now they are renaming things. They can't compete with what we have got in social software. In addition to the client and catalog on Mashups is the app dev environment. 30% of Sametime deployments in Exchange shops.
Traditionally when they attack somebody they don't expect people to defend and fight back. It wasn't expected that we would have this level of investment in the brand. The development organization is the biggest its been, across 11 countries.
Bruce: Lets talk about the Notes franchise. Notes client has a lot of value, but how can we expand the out of the box value?
You saw the new templates in the Web 2.0 style.
Alexander Kluge: As a business partner, with Bluehouse, I am interested in what is in it for us.
Only started to show you the beginning of Bluehouse. Positioned with Foundations for a reason. Extensions to Foundations, taking content and putting it in a marketplace, but we haven't talked about how it is a loosely coupled environment to allow you to integrate what you are good at into the environment.
Don't know the business model and margins yet, will run experiments. What is right for clients, partners and ecosystems is unclear because of a radical shift in the value chain. All I know is the ad model eventually runs out of gas because there is a fixed amount of advertising in the world.
Warren Elsemore: Foundations seems to be competitive against Small Business Server, its a different bunch of people that who you are used to selling to.
When you open a new front in a battle you ensure your supplie lines and amunition are well stocked and you don't telegraph your locations. We see some interesting new channel models that we are doing through acquisitions. When you acquire companies that are serving SMBs you need to listen them and expand the role that their channel partners play. Also some non traditional ecosystem lays in surrounding areas. Playing to win, agressive on cost, reveal TCOs. Easy to give it away when you charge $400 per copy of Office.
Bright yellow hair: last year was wisdom of crowds, this year it is emergence, how do you see lotus leveraging the social aspect that surrounds you?
Remember when we had Connections up last year and took it down after the conference? Our business partner community went non-linear, but had some concerns. 24 people from Redmond here. But we put it back up. Encourage everyone to join the Greenhouse.
So I'm in Orlando for Lotusphere. Took a crappy delayed red-eye, so I missed the very first part of the session, with Bob Costas talking about how good the Chinese are at controlling their people. Ed Brill is live blogging it. Alan has better notes on Mike Rhodin's opening Keynote.
Lotus and SAP announced project Atlantis, a joint effort around composite applications.
In Demo, Notes and Domino Web Access seems to provide a robust implementation of all Ajaxy web services that Zimbra has. But given that its 2008, there of course is an iPhone version. Demos Google Gadget and other widget type inclusion within Lotus Notes then letting you distribute the widget by email, so someone can drag and drop it from the email view to a My Widget sidebar.
Live TEXT lets you scan a Notes message for a pattern, like a stock symbol, and invoke a widget (similar to Zimbra). Addresses have Google map integration. Domino Designer demoed as a way to take a crappy old discussion web page and make it all Ajaxy and Web 2.0 pretty. Lotus Symphony, an open office distribution, gets a makeover and performance improvements too.
Lotus Sametime, the real-time collaboration offering, is ten years old, and had two new developments. Sametime Advanced lets you tap into "communities" to chat with strangers -- with broadcast chat, persistent chat rooms, chat room file sharing, screensharing with buddies. Sametime Unified Telephony which lets you click to call with multiple telephony systems. Some good instead some good cases of real time collaboration business value. Celina insurance group sells through 500 agents, service phone calls have been cut in half. At Carestream health, a richer and visual set of real time collaboration tools aid communications between doctors and radiologists.
Websphere Portal achieved #1 market share during the decade, but this year they added Accelerators to snap on functionality, some vertical specific. Sunguard, GoPro and NFL (apparently that's where broadcasters get their stats) Accelerator announcements. "Consumer" Google Gadgets and .Net and Federating other portals, plus new BI connectors. "More exploitation of Web 2.0 technologies? You bet."
Lotus Connections was the first integrated social software solution for businesss, and Lotus Quickr made it easier for groups to collaborate. In 2008, we have tens of thousand customers who have team rooms and quick places. With Quickr, it needed to be easy with immeadiate provisioning of everything you need. Quickr made easier, with integration with Filenet P8 ad IBM content manager. New filesharing features, file ratings and watchlisting. Fairly simple way to grab a file and kick off document management workflow and policies into FileNet, but still being able to see it in the context of Quickr's team space. Shows some pretty nice podcast/media management capability.
Lotus Connections changed the market naad how organizations viewed collaboration, they created new categories and metrics. Next release will take this nto new levels, embedding it in eveything we do, mobile to global. Arabic, Russian and many other languages. Embedding language translation into social networking services. Integrated with Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Socialtext and Atlassian. Changing the paradigm. Version 2 will have attention management to let you use widgets and mashup abbility to focus on what is important to you. Atlas for Lotus Connections lets you visualize your social network. Mobile version. Suzzane demos a new homepage based on a set of widgets you can drag and drop. Federated search with integrated results and people that relate to the query. Profiles now have attention info assigned to it. New in Communities, you have a discussion forum, and persistent chat. Also worked with leading industry players like Socialtext, so now Communities can now have their own dedicated wiki.
Launches Lotus Mashups, as a mashup catalog and platform, based upon an open stadard (OpenSocial?). Nice clean UI to let you overlay data and functionality and wire widgets together. The wiring reminds me of Yahoo Pipes.
Mike closes by saying they are putting Web 2.0 to Work, but not done yet. Historically they haven't been able to serve SMBs well. (suddenly the band starts doing the Olympics theme song) Lotus Foundations is a new line of servers -- collaboration server, communications server and other servers based on ISV solutions. Fast to deploy and configure. On Friday they acquired Net Integration Technologies. Last week Jobs took a laptop out of an envelope. In this server (that he pulls out), is an entire collaboration server you can plug in. The bulk of smaller companies need to work with others, launching Bluehouse, a SaaS extranet solution for companies with less than 500 employees.
Later, sitting in the press conference (I'm here on a Blogger Pass):
Giving a talk at Xerox Parc today at 4pm, as part of the Parc Forum series. Their Augmented Social Cognition group is doing some interesting things in social software, so it should be a great conversation.
Live blogged impressionistic transcript of a panel moderated by Jerry Michalski with JP Rangaswami, JB Holston and Joshua Schacter.
Joshua: there wasn't an a-ha moment for me, but i realized that aggregating opinion rather than people coming together to form an opinion was a decision making tool. In capital markets, even with bad actors and no ringleader, you get to converge on a true decision.
JP: the a-ha moment for me on social intelligence was dealing with the problem of multiple cultures and languages. When they transcended the you say tomato I say tomato barrier in tags. Anchors and frames were being broken. You just gave them the capacity to use the system, not telling them how to do it.
JB: understanding that people interact with computer systems in the same way and rules of engagement that they interact with each other.
Jerry: if you are in a culture of attaching powerpoints to emails tells you a lot. Clay suggested that some tools don't want their people cooperating and mechanisms that stop you.
JP: you don't prevent the gaming. you need the voting to be transparent, so people get used to gaming and there will be a consequence and the community will gang up on the gaming. if instead you try to prevent the collusion, you may prevent collaboration. in the natural world collusion happens so don't try to prevent it, just try to make it transparent.
Joshua: gaming comes from structural issues in the way these are built. Digg is designed to be maximally viral, low threshold, so there is no construction there of a people doing a thing. No identity, anonymous by default. In other systems, when you want to misbehave, you actually have to spend something (e.g. stock market). Over time with tools that have persistent reputation, in a richer system, more expensive to use, you can see what people have done and good ways to summarize someone. Some of these things we should make more explicit, some less. Because the systems are so small, it is the aggregate opinion of everybody, rather than a group you have chosen. Don't have tools for sense making of sense makers.
Jerry: older people in particularly are freaked out by the amount of transparency on the web, and in an older company they can say it is a fad and will go by. I'm thinking it is natural and this is a different way of being in the world.
JP: what we have been trying to do, and I've tried it in different directions, there cannot be anything more right than going outside-in with the customer view. One thing that bothers me, when someone shows you a presentation they are going to do the next day, and then adapt it before giving it as a result, in political environment. Instead someone should video what you are doing, put it on YouTube and use these tags so I an find it. The kids of today are more comfortable doing these things, in generating an idea, they don't need a crappy way of enshrining the idea.
Jerry: the value is exposing the asset, not locking it away.
JP: Creating serendiptious moments that aren't structured meetings that don't mean anything.
Joshua: The value they get is higher than the marginal cost of the thing itself. Reduction of transaction and search costs is part of building collective intelligence apps.
JP: Some of these search and discovery costs were build by the structure, the silos of the firm. And now we are able to reduce these costs that are internal.
Joshua: people turn to the social knowledge in the system, that is not in the computer.
JB: It goes back to how you implement it. You have to follow the social rules when you implement or the transaction costs are very high.
Joshua: Down that road lies a danger. Individual and network utility are different. Virality has a cost.
Jerry: once the information can be easily shared outside the group, they do. Sometimes outside the firm. Private tags for public data is interesting.
Joshua: at Yahoo we actually have a big mailing list culture, similar to the investment bank I worked at before, actually a healthy thing. There are things lacking in delicious like group making that would be better for an internal organization.
JB: real trend towards, for sake of relevance and avoiding overload, towards shared attention. A new sales person starts with 60 preloaded feeds. Motivation isn't control per-say, but to cut through clutter. RSS is the protocol, but its just your stuff. Help individual, not system, overload.
Joshua: forwarding as a pattern is a powerful thing, a gift. In delicious we bring down the transaction costs, by just bookmarking it. Creates a way to get news from my friends. Important that it is time-oriented, new things at the top, instead of relevant things at the top. But when things fall off the top we are still sensitive to time organization, need more tools to go back in time, time-based sense making.
Jerry: We have a lot of tools for flow, not not many for stocks that we can dig back into. Part of it is our cultural heritage. We hate Tivo because it kills their business models of flow.
JB: the more limited the use case, the more obvious the application and the more rapid the uptake. Need a more thoughtful understanding when deploying broadly about the social patterns.
JP: my experience is that the peopel who are saying they are overloaded are actually overloaded. Don't filter on the way in, filter on the way out. If people are using Facebook as the way to filter, fine. I use my newsreader for 300 blogs, but I do know the top 20 can point to the 280, giving me an earlier cut. If you have the right community and openness they will mutate the tools at their disposal to get you connected to the information you need to see. Relish that we can do these things better than before. Stop worrying about the overload because the tools are getting better faster.
Joshua: personally I don't use a reader and instead go to the place I want to read. Subscribing for me becomes another thing to do. Forgetfulness actually has a value. Any social system with individual, social and accruing to the system utilities. Too many systems say everyone come and get it, but kickstarting needs to be based on a utility for a small group first.
Jerry: A lot of zen here, you have to let go. You have yin, after a yang overdose. But now with emergent patterns these things are easy for this audience, but is counterintuitive for others.
Andy Morgan: is there a challenge to adoption in the enterprise for tools of social intelligence?
A fair chunk of the behavior in large organizations is keyed off of tribal behavior. An interesting optimization problem which we won't be able to do, but can design around it.
JP: The enterprise you speak of is one of legacy, historical perspective. My dad had one job, I had 7, my son may have 7 at the same time. With this change, there is a new government in how they interact with each other. Moving from the noun to the verb. The link, hint of relationship, has more power than the core data.
Jerry: potential energy vs. expressed energy in the artifact.
JB: with one customer that has mostly contract employees now, they get the notion that they can't have the command and control relationship. We gave them a way empowering the mobile workforce without control. But you do have to offer an ROI before you get bought.
Chris Locke: some thoughts bouncing off of this whole idea. You say social intelligence is the theme, and it may be a good thing. But there is a tacit unacknowledged or unconscious set of assumptions here, that we will have consensus on what is intelligent or knowledge. Hard to have a community of discourse once you have a community of millions of people. Or six. Think about tag clouds, where what is missing is new ideas.
Joshua: Interesting observation, but not a fair one. redistribution of power which relys on information asymmetry, knowledge is the opposite of that.
JP: never seen the kind of group think people have supposed. The interest and passion brings them together and the passion makes things emerge. Things come out of the network that were formed by the collective, through conversation and contention, not blind agreement or poor attempts at consensus.
Jerry: group think is possible these days, we need to learn more about how to use these tools well.
JB: the more you interact, the more your individual value, is a new thing.
Impressionistic transcript of David Weinberger's opening Keynote at Defrag.
The implicit seems to refer to what we don't see or what we don't know, but I think the unspoken or the unsaid is more important. We focus on the explicit, but that has certain characteristics that mislead us, and we are doing the work of defragging, bringing the pieces back together. Because the old media required us to, and the new media let us pull these pieces together. Semantic web has value in stickin the explicit together, but this is different.
Five moments of the implicit.
Reads from the poem Blue Hydrangea and then discusses some implicit things made explicit: a washed out color as in children's clothes, which no longer worn, no more can happen to, how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity. You could express this in hex or bits in a computer, in which nothing is implicit. Computers in the 1950s and early incarnations were tools of reduction. The reduced us. Informationaliation happened to human experiences such as judgement, experience, perception and sense data. Now we believe that the brain is an information processor, and one day we might think our liver is too.
The web is different, it is about links. Links are the opposite of information. They enrich, add, open ended decentralized, in panguage, personal, messy and unrequited. They are a type of writing, so of course they are social. The web is the counter to the age of Informationaliation. A rabbi said, "dogs becomes en-soled by living with humans." We are en-soling computers. Hal grew up alone.
Second moment. I can't tell you all the implicit things I know about my children. If I could, something was wrong and they would only be stereotypes. We can't say everything about them, but on facebook I have to friend them and typify them. It gets worse, I have to fill out my profile. We are filling out forms again! Fold spindle mutilate. And yet, we en-sole Facebook.
Judath Donath talks about this in terms of signalling. What is being signaled is too rich to just be in signal. It is a gesture Raising a fist on an olymic medal stand is still being infused in our culture.
Third moment. We are walking down the street and we think we are giving off information. We used to view it more like a river, with characteristics and eddies. No public outcry about giving off information and having it recorded. We trust the government about what rights we have to pay information to.
Forth, potentialities. Statistically most acorns rot in the ground, but we know more. "If you can dream it, you can be it." There has got to be a better way to give your children hope without lying to them! To help them understand potential. We morn lost potential in the (above) poem. Potential is so valuable to us, even if fulfilled. Amazon recommends is one way of defragging, but it is not the most important and deepest way of doing it. We can teach computers about potential, but you have to teach them about all the potentials we understand. Impossible to utter everything you know. Syche (sp?) could pass the turing test on children's clothings, but we know it would miss the lumpiness of possibility and why mere probabilities lump up. The _why_ of lumpiness.
Fifth, in the poem the piece made explicit is the least important. What matters is that they make a connection, which is not made explicit. The decomposition can reveal the truth of what is there. What we care about is what divides possibility and potential. What is between us is what we don't speak, and I mean this literally.
It is language that is between us fundamentally, we have all of that, even in translation we have it. And now we have links, which are guestures, which point beyond themselves. We have links that have persistence and are permanent, which is incredibly important. Being able to make content permanent is a foundning event of our culture, and now we can make the relationships between content permanent. They are not mere connections, they are the rejoining of the world. Giving these relationships permanence has incredible value.
Our brains discriminate edges, but we are fascinated by the transcendence of edges. They are splits and where we join. The edge may be precise, and thus simple. But the value of the edge is to see the complex, the loose edge, the potential. That is the unspoken in the edge. Defrag, both the conference and the generational effort, is finding the ways in which the world matters together.
Chris Anderson gave perhaps the only bloggable talk at the Microsoft Global CIO Summit. He gave a preview on his upcoming book before 200 Global 1000 CIOs. This is posted with permission.
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy electrical energy in their homes is too cheap to meter." -- Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, then Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954
Imagine if he was right. What if we could desalinate water at a low cost. When an underlying resource that touches everything becomes free, then the transformative effect is amazing. Carver Mead in the 1970s was really the first one to understand the social and economic impact of Moore's Law. He taught his students that "Waste is Good." Waste transistors because they are becoming free. Alan Kay considered the interface, the command line at the time. IT's job used to be to protect the Mainframe as the resource, they judged what was worthy. Their priorities mean not wasting cycles on silly stuff like I/O. Kay said it was worth wasting transistors to make them easy to use, even fun, and available to a broader s Innovation happens when you take technology and put it in unexpected places. The democratization of technology is how innovation happens, not the technology itself. The Graphic UI changed the world.
"Waste Storage." We live in a world where we otherwise conserve storage, but on a MB basis it is asymptotically approaching free. If something is going to be zero soon, get ahead of it. Look at Webmail with Gmail and Yahoo. They made money from their use faster than the cost of their use. Free is a powerful word. If you tell someone you never have to delete your email, it changes their behavior. Remember "Your mailbox is full," what was that about? My new Cisco VoIP phone tells me my voicemail is full, corporate email too, why? How can deleting emails be part of my job. Somewhere someone got stuck in a scarcity mindset and now we are creating a productivity drain.
"Waste Bandwidth." The old model was that the only way to get content to people was broadcast, and singlecast was costly. YouTube looked at changing economics and revolutionized television by giving away storage, video and most importantly opening up to everybody. Long Tail video, if you will indulge me. Out of those niches can have surprise hits for the masses.
For the first time in history, complexity is free. 3D printers mean the fiddlyness of an object doesn't cost much any more. 3k gears costs the same as 1 gear, you can print a watch for the cost of printing a ball. Zero machining cost means a new kind of object will be created.
Scarcity economy only fits mass market goods. Online, with the Abundance economy, you have infinite choices. When we guess what people want, we often we get it wrong. When we give them choice, we are measuring, not guessing. Only so much shelf space at Blockbuster, infinite shelf space at Netflix with whole categories that have suddenly proven to be popular. A richening of the American culture that is more diverse. Tap into the latent demand for diversity.
What killed Tower Records wasn’t the decline of the CD or Napster, it was the iPod. You might think of design or ease of use, I think it is abundance embodied. Hitachi invented a better 5Gb micro drive, but not the use. Engineers told Steve Jobs that we have this gift from technology, and realized that we want our entire music library in my pocket. Given the opportunity to have infinite choice, people will take it.
Raymond as the embodiment of the broadcast model. Reaching everyone simultaneously means you have to satisfy common needs, the lowest denominator. But where are taste diverges is where we go deeper. Nobody loves Raymond, everybody likes Raymond, somebody loves LonleyGirl15. She had an audience just as large as Raymond, reinvents our concept of what TV is. She is a creature of abundance, he is in a world where you have to be mass to be broadcast.
In the enterprise, the corporation is about shared purpose and a logical and prudent allocation of resources. The ROI Memo is scarcity thinking, in Abundance, its fail fast. Of course we would like to succeed fast, but not possible to predict. We don’t bother with ROI models, we ensure the experiments are cheap. Great thing about innovating at the edge is you can minimize the cost of doing it. Don’t make people jump through a lot of hoops, the cost of experimentation is free. "Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted" vs. "Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden." In the magazine I live in the former, on the web I live in the latter. The social model is Paternalism in Scarcity -- "we know what's bet." Egalitarianism, "you know what's best," In the old world we decide the heirarchy of the page, on the web we have Reditt where they tell us what they want. The NYTimes front page and emailed page almost have no correlation. For the first time in history we can measure demand and not guess. The decision process is top down in Scarcity vs. bottoms-up. Let the interns run riot. They become a source if ideas an innovation at low cost, we identify talent beause we can empower the edge. Command and control -- the soviet system is the corporate system. Or with Abundance, we have Out of Control. A scary proposition, for brand centric companies like mine. I'm evangelizing that we experiment in our web properities, but it might take a generation to wrap our heads around two kinds of brands.
For the CIO perspective...from a MIT study of student needs:
• Mailing list management(google groups)
• Seeing whats coming up at events.mit.edu (upcoming)
• Access to the online library (university does this best)
• Command line acess to shared programs like mathematica and to general lunux account stuff (university does this well)
• File storage (university price is hard to beat)
• Printing
When they come to the corporation, they are disappointed.
With Conde Nast, Skype and Second Life are blocked, the iPhone problem, email retention policies and spam whitelists. Probably happened for good reasons at the time. Every one of these annoys employees and creates a bad environment. We use Skype because it is easier and works. The White Wire and the Black Wire. A single DSL under white, internal bandwidth on the black. The only time I use the black wire is to print. If the IT department wants to packet sniff, all the more reason to use the white wire. A bank is functionally prohibited from experimenting with social networking because they blocked every single one. The old idea of IT determining what is appropriate prevents experimentation at the edges. There are some things that are bad about this, a virus that comes in from the white wire, but that’s like going to starbucks. I recommend trying the two wire.
Wrote a controversial blog post on who needs a CIO? The answer is they are necessary, but only if they can adapt to consumer technology and behavior.
The terrifying conclusion to all this is that we may have to trust our employees.
The Q&A was off the record.
Here is my rough impressionistic transcript of a talk by John Seely Brown on Change, Organizations and Gaming. It is from Don Tapscott's New Paradigm conference on Enterprise 2.0. I am bandwidth constrained, so pardon the lack of links and supporting materials.
Shift happens. Video by a high school teacher in the middle of Colorado to make the argument to a school board that change has to happen. JSB says this is a better video for corporate america.
Technology is doubling (every 18 months for computing, 12 months for communication, 12 months for storage). But becoming invisible. Problem isn’t building skyscrapers, it is a new infrastructure of electricity that powered elevators. Every infrastructure has an interesting property to it, an S-curve. Autos haven’t changed much in 70 years. Today we have the first infrastructure that doesn’t seem to be leveling out, at least 20-40 years left in the growth in infrastructure. Imagine if transportation advances were so exponential?
Do we really understand exponentials? In 1626 Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 of trinkets. Who got the better deal, Peter or the Indians? If you invested in 7.5% interest it would be worth a hell of a lot more than all of Manhattan today. Approximation 101: almost flat for the first 23 years then an almost 45 degree take off followed by a vertical line.
With Enterprise 2.0, the kind of changes around us will be dramatic and there is virtually no way we can structure the organization in time. There is an exponential change for infrastructure, people can change less fast, but organizational and institutional change can fundamentally not occur fast enough.
Wants to cast this as a culture of participation. Where these kids are constantly building, tinkering, remixing and sharing. But only when someone picks up what they have done and acknowledges it or remixes that these kids feel they are rewarded. A lot of people in this room were tinkerers, but the tinkering stayed with us. They are creating meaning and identity by what they produce and others can build on – a remix, open source culture.
Studying Anime with Mimi Ito, a new way to read. Remixes of Anime is creative tinkering and the play of imagination – but it is also creative reading like in fandom – fans filling in the backstory in highly imaginative ways. Creating meaning by integrating their imagination with that of the author in remix.
Shows the Matrix Reloaded trailer, and then a remix of it The Narutrix Re-ninja’d to tell a story that makes sense in the Naruto world made by an 18 year old kid.
From mass media to participatory media, with a feedback loop between producing and consuming. Amateur used to have a pajorative meaning in this county, comes from latin, amator, meaning to love. He tells his MBA students to go and post something to Youtube as a way to carry a message.
Web 2.0 – “an emerging network centric platform to support distributed, collaborate and cumulative creation by its users”
Spirit of Web 2.0 – “to enable many people to participate in making small contributions that become culturally significant”
Google map mashup from citizens on the ground during Katrina. Each contribution took only one minute. Was not planned, a key part.
Who is Sick? Anyone in SF can share where they are and how they are feeling, plots it on a map. Voluntary contribution that would be impossible because of privacy of data. (/me wonders what happens when people can contribute when they think their friends are sick)
Game plan, introduces a new critical disposition: no learning, no fun. I want to be measured and if I ain’t learning this isn’t fun.
* Pattern recognition and sense making
* Continuous decision making
* Conquering immense complexity
* Immeadiate feedback
* Constant change – constant challenges
* Joy from mastery of skills
* Bottom line oriented – scores matter! (bragging rights)
Economist, August 4, 2005 on gaming
Takes us on a quest in World of Warcraft. Shows a slide on the exponential growth of WoW compared to other MMOGs. Lineage in Korea also has significant growth.
To see the value of games don’t just look at the core of the game, but pay close attention to the ‘social life’ on the edge of the game. The edge is often referred to as the knowledge economy. I got into this by taking the position “games are a waste of time” and one of the Mage developers said, “you are kind of smart, but you don’t understand my world.” Did a reverse mentorship. Also helped that this was outside his PARC non-compete clause.
Skills of a Guild Master – are actually the fundamentals of leadership
* Creates a vision and a set of values that attracts…
* Finds, evaluates and then recruits players that have a set of diverse skills and with fit with your norms
* Creates a platform for apprenticeship – newbies
* Orchestrates group strategy and governance
* Creates, sells and adheres to the governance principles for the guild and adjudicates disputes.
(/me realizes what’s different is putting people together in scenarios of constraints and abundance)
Steven Gillett, CIO Corbis, as a guild master, see the Wired Magazine article from 2006. At Yahoo, he got an assignment for a big project and didn’t ask for resources, he thought that doing the job was finding the resources, a natural thing in WoW. Corbis to most of us is a conservative company, and being the CIO reporting to Bill Gates is not an easy job. Took the job, and in the first meeting he had to present to Bill and was over-prepared by others. JSB said to take a risk and explain that you are a gamer. Bill lept up and dashed up to the whiteboard, and said, my god, I’ve heared about gamers and I’ve never met one! Rest of the meeting was spent drawing architecture on the whiteboard. Two weeks ago they launched Corbis in Second Life, btw, and he just did it on his own and it transformed both internal and external perception.
An organizational perspective on guilds – where agility and fluidity reign supreme. What you do changes the game. Guilds are themselves extremely flexible, hyper-responsive modern organizations, which change and shift dramatically in response to player and game-driven needs. They provide a model not only for management, but for understanding how players continually position themselves in terms of the needs and goals of the greater organization. Describes tanking and healing in WoW raids. Tanks are often the most respected people in guilds.
What gamers want at work and how they expect to be treated.
* Be given clear top level direction/problem – then permitted to explore and discovery how to proceed
* Want metrics for measuring success – and recognized when they are met or exceeded
* Balanced decision making
* Believe without learning there is no fun
* Capable of intense concentration
* Interface with peers, build bridges
WoW is way to complicated to play without complex analysis tools and dashboards. Guilds also do after action reviews. Shows some mod Uis.
JSB concludes with a list of dispositions that gamers has, and says, "it is not the skills, but the dispositions of people that matter in a changing world."
NB!: Even if you are registered for Office 2.0, you have to separately register for the un-conference.
Next Wednesday I'm co-hosting an open event as part of the Office 2.0 conference. Ismael Ghalimi:
The Office 2.0 Conference will be preceded by an Unconference (aka Open Space) kindly organized by Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman, and Ross Mayfied, Socialtext CEO. The unconference is open to all conference attendees, as well as the general public. It will take place on September 5th, 2007, from 9:00AM to 5:00PM in the Impressionist room at the St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco, CA. Registration is now open.
A $20 registration fee will be collected at the entrance (payment by cash or check). Coffee and snacks will be served during the event, but plans for lunch will be made on the fly by attendees, in pure unconference style. The hotel can only accommodate about 75 people, therefore registrations should be made as soon as possible.
While we don't know what will happen, the topical focus of Office 2.0 could lead to some very interesting topics.
I'm told the video of the above presentation will be posted and I will share it here.
This week I'm headed to Copenhagen, Land of existentialism, bikes and much more (we have all that here, but cars instead of bikes and not enough existentialism).
Yes, I am finally finding my way to Reboot, to give a talk called Social. What is astounding is how many blog friends I've known for years I will finally meet face-to-face.
Here's the closest thing to an abstract for my talk:
We evolved to work well in small groups. Within our natural structures we were never able to scale communication or memory. During the industrial era we developed tools and processes that scaled collaboration well in a static context, and when creativity was only required by a few. A market economy of negative reciprocity held that profits are taken out of transactions for re-investment, but it doesn't foster trust. Trust, of course, happens, despite our structures, because we have abundant desire to share. With gifts we add value in the act of giving beyond the good to the good itself, yielding positive reciprocity. In sharing, we find new structures that meet the needs of an information era. We find new tools that help us share control to create value, scale communication and memory.
Part of this is a new design. When you look at an enterprise as a large complex adaptive system, it is all too tempting to over-design it. The complexity has always resided in the social network, not in the assets of the firm. Traditional enterprise software tries to solve for complexity by taking it out of the social network and putting it into the software. Social software, however, keeps the complexity in the social network, and attempts to augment it with very simple rules to foster emergent behavior.
After a bunch of big vendor stuff, we finally got to the keynote panel of CIOs at Software 2007. In an earlier session, a WebEx executive pointed out that 80% of some IT budgets is people. That's my part of it, if I was to plug. But instead, sat and listened to take impressionistic notes:
Moderated by Ernest von Simson, Senior Partner, Ostriker von Simson
Panelists: Neil Cameron, CIO, Unilever; Rob Carter, CIO, FedEx; Patricia Morrison, CIO, Motorola; Tony Scott, CIO, The Walt Disney Company
What are the most innovative things you done lately?
FedEx: The wave of RFID that came and went was passive, now we are using active RFID. A smart sensor you install into the package: location, temperature, vibration, light (if detected the package might be open). Interfaces with broadly available services like Google Earth, or Geofencing for when something moves in and out of a perimeter and notifys you. Lots of innovation, most coming out of the Valley, at a price point that ultimately will be broadly distributed (today the financial vertical with high value data tapes {sneakernet} is the main use case).
Motorola: Speed in which we can repeatably deploy allocations, like in the Supply Chain. We have lots of partners and suppliers to orchestrate. Built an application library for each partner to reduce their integration from 4-6 months to 4-6 weeks. Worked hard on these integration platforms. Vendors we work with are incorporating this capability into their packages. The flexibility to change your sourcing models in our industry where manufacturing costs and other things are variable is needed to constantly evolve your business. Otherwise, lot of the changes are IT-related lead times.
Unilever: I'm a bit of a rose among thorns here. We we are bifurcated, have the traditional side which is relevation, not innovation, where we want to simplify and standardize. The other space, how we collaborate, is where we see innovation within our business. The Hot Chili program (named by one of our marketeers, we have lots of them), where we take all the new technologies, social or enabling, to change how we work and make decisions. Had to pay less attention to standards, longevity. Not looking at the unit costs that much as they don't matter for return. To get different Asian cultures to talk over a service in English isn't easy because they are very careful about how they are presented (how to be less formally). Challenges cross culturally, cross language and timezones.
Disney: Digitization of our business process. Across all of our businesses. In our media business putting TV shows on the web for free the day after the broadcast is a new business model, digitizing something previously well known. On Internet TV, we now say how long a commercial is and when it is coming, but the commercial is longer and more people actually watch it. People remember the commercials more than on TV, but ad willingness to pay is catching up. The next Pirates is coming out with live action and motion capture technology that is more than visually interesting, it changes how we make movies.
You haven't talked about traditional applications yet. How are your roles changing?
FedEx: Nothing happens in isolation, has to be integrated with the traditional apps. Looking for the next wave or layer but it isn't a complete departure from the core systems.
Motorola: How do you think about how your customers want. Living our own brand of seamless mobility. We have a major role in the expectation and understanding about how we can impact customers.
Disney: SarBox and how we are embedding so much technology in our processes -- we have the need for creativity but also protecting the brand from harm. One of my roles is adjudicating this battle. In our customer base, with children, we need to be extra-sensitive, a tension that gets harder all the time.
Unilever: All the traditional activities you had to do, but now I have to look at new territories like digital marketing. We missed it the first time around, but this time we shouldn't. HR is now about what role they will have, efficiency and working differently. Trying to help the rest of the organization think about how to move into new spaces without abandoning the good old things.
Disney: We did an infrastructure outsouring move two years ago, but it really is collaborating with more people, dependent upon non-Disney folks, collaborating across boundaries. Challenging with issues of IP.
FedEx: What we have to deal with internally is so different than the outside world which is so much more interconnected. Silos inside that competes with outside that moves across boundaries so quickly. I find my organization is challenged with making that transaction although we are a company that has been working with connected networks for some time.
Motorola: How you partner in your business, where you are engaged in problem solving. Need to shift from order taking sequential requirements gathering, to a highly interactive process with accountability in creating the solution before there is a problem to solve.
Audience question from an IBM guy: SaaS as disintermediating as the PC was?
Disney: Embracing it. Using Salesforce and AppExchange. We have transitions of our people inside and we have to ask if we want to be stuck maintaining things. Might be willing to pay more on this than if we were maintaining it internally because I want to focus on things that are more strategic. There are lots of things we are not going to be good at and the SaaS ideas will help us get to market faster with what we want to do.
Motorola: We are an advocate, but it is good for some things and not others. The flexibility to move back and forth across different models is a real value. The ability to scale, the speed of scale when you can't predict demand.
FedEx: We haven't embraced services as much as we have provided them. The fastest growing segment of software customers that we support are people who are shifting from FedEx.com to connections with us that need to be built into their processes and workflows. Today, in the shipment world alone is 3/4 of the total volume of all web s
Unilever: It's here and we need to embrace it, but it isn't a panacea. There are opportunities in entry level activities. Deployments in Africa and other far flung locations. Scaling matters, but not my challenge right now. The question is if we will run a hybrid, Hasso from SAP was talking about hybrids this morning, we will have to see.
How are you organizing for these changes?
Motorola: We use core groups to work though decisions. Small groups of 10 with deep expertise that I protect in almost an R&D-like environment and need shielding from some financial pressure. Our blogs and wikis are exciting. Get it architectures in the center, but then you need to train in the periphery. What does this new portal environment mean to me? Starting to build business case examples and then getting into an evangelical mode across the organization.
Unilever: Don't have an answer, we are challenged by this. We change the nature of career structure within our business, how do we recruit and train. Some say do the old way in house. Some say employ the least as we can so we don't employ the wrong skills if things change quickly.
Disney: I have the opposite problem as people in Burbank are unsuccessful screenwriters and actors that like to keep up to date with the latest stuff.
Advice to vendors?
Disney: Drop this "we are the greatest in the world" thing and give me an implementation strategy so I can bring this across my company.
Motorola: 12k engineers and we have tons of software that isn't warrantied and indemnified. My plea to the industry is quality. The amount of time we put down bugs.
Unilever: Fantastic. Absolutely.
FedEx: Every time we add something new, we get more cost an complexity. This is a relationship oriented business and you have to cut through the noise, provide technology migration strategies. We just don't have time for all the opportunities that come at us.
Just got back from Le Web 3. Of course, a pan-European pile on happened, with people upset that the second day of the conference was overrun by politicians. While the content could have been structured better, consider the greater context. France's presidential election is this spring, they only happen every five years, and this is the first to be impacted by social media. During the last US presidential election, had one of the candidates speak at one of the usual conferences, we would be ape-shit with glee. Even if he spoke in French.
But perhaps because the politicians were speaking in French, and less to the former audience than the current one through TV cameras, bloggers from other European countries were offended. Upstaging other good content with an already overbooked schedule was a real tradeoff. But again, I stand by my friend Loic's decision to break the mold of the event.
Personally, my panel was the worst moderated experience I've ever had. Frustrating given the amount of travel time to have someone added to the panel during the panel, have someone moderating that didn't know the topic and have it steered to events in general and social marketing. There were good themes to explore in Reid Hoffman's talk, so much to explore with the enterprise topic, and I think we got in some valuable comments regardless. I noticed my panel was an exception.
I'm sure few can complain about the value of the hallway conversations. And for folks coming from afar, Paris is always a wonderful experience. I'm pleased with the Socialtext Unplugged feedback, met some good people and spent some great time with the usual suspects in unusual places.
Somewhere along the way with Socialtext, I found myself partially in the events business. We developed a service called Eventspace to provide wikis for events. By now we have facilitated over 150 conferences, tradeshows, workshops, seminars and camps. The upside is this how many influential users first gained exposure to wikis and now using a wiki to augment an event is common practice. The downside is I go to way too many conference. Part of this is my job, the other part is not complaining.
So I have significant interest in my colleagues Salim Ismail and Cameron Barrett's new venture Confabb, a site for conferences. I have to wonder if the brand stems from Confabulation (Verbalizations about people, places, and events with no basis in reality) or Confab (chew the fat: talk socially without exchanging too much information). Both make sense, the former does more for me.
There is a decent degree of overlap with the broader visions of Eventful (disclaimer, I'm an advisor) and Upcoming. Some features are lacking (the search feature needs work based on ego tests), but Confabb is off to a good start. It could be useful, but I won't know until I have tried it through the lifecycle of an event. The upside is the events business is ripe for high margin advertising, the downside is, as anyone in the business will tell you, it is a hard business. But maybe they can help fix that.
A small dream of mine came true today. We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now. We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways. In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future. Well, future happens fast.
Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:
I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney. You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.
That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.
Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel. Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.
This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0. In a box. Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises. Extensible because we've all supported open APIs. Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations. SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:
SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals
In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:
As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:
• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.
• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.
• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use....Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”
Lead users and enterprises already work this way today. Only they do so without usable efficiency. Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning. One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken). Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results.
Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant. Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge. She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts. They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction. They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki. They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.
This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.
Saturday I bummed around Palo Alto with Loic Le Meur. A good friend and angel investor in Socialtext, we talked tech and politics over sushi and Peet's coffee. He made a videoblog with his mobile phone, revealing my outer dork.
Loic is getting ready to host LeWeb3 in Paris on December 11th and 12th. Since the first Les Blogs, it has grown into perhaps the leading social software event in Europe. Loic expects 1,000 bloggers from 25 countries and has made it affordable.
I'm planning on presenting this year. If you want to provide feedback on the agenda or suggest your startup for a speaking slot, the event wiki is here.
Maybe I'll see you tomorrow night at the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab's Enterprise 2.0 event. I'll be speaking with:
Should be a fun debate.
Stopped by Office 2.0 today.
Whereas Barcamp is a face-to-face wiki, Office 2.0 is a face-to-face blog.
That is, it started as a blog that expanded into a conference. Four launches happened today, if you include the Google Docs timing. But mostly it is a cacophony of upstarts, lots of parroting of things others said years ago. And behind all the noise some good relationships.
