Ross Mayfield's Weblog

SuiteTwo Launched: Enterprise 2.0 in a Box

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.

No Feed is an Island

Remember my lazyweb request for tastebuds to leverage reader tags instead of author categories for this blog?  Well, Feedburner has gone and done it, within the feed with FeedFlare.  Subscribers to this blog can see the result at the bottom of each post.

Hmm... now give us an API to create and share flare extensions... and some design-customizable javascript to display the very same information in the bottom of our posts.

Tastebuds

Here's an idea for the lazyweb to solve how writers are lazy at categorizing their posts.  We've had lots of attempts to make categorization easier, but readers in aggregate do a better job.  I'm looking for something to leverage del.icio.us enclosed in a single post, a widget called Tastebuds:

1. Looks up the URL of your post
2. Grabs the tags people have used on your post
3. Displays the top 5 at the bottom of your post
4. Each tag is a link to a list of your posts with that tag

Double bonus points for enriching the list of posts with conversational threads like on Memeorandum, pivoting on the tags through Technorati and making the list sortable.

UPDATE: Adam Kalsey sayz that Tagyu could auto-suggest tags based on post content before someone links to it.  For example, here would be the tags for this post: del.icio.us api reference firefox programming blog

MORE: Here's the bookmarks of this post, care of the Tasty? bookmarklet I use frequently.  In comments, there is a Wordpress plugin that does Tastebuds with a convenient bookmark this post link.  However, the tag links go to all links with a given tag, rather than BlogURL+tag which gets you reader tagged archives for a blog.

Email Privacy Hack

Since late 2002, I have used an email signature hack to explicitly tag the privacy of a thread:

this email is:   [ ] blogable    [ x ] ask first   [ ] private

Phil Wolff was the first to pick it up and by now it's likely you have seen it in email or on the web, even usenet.

It works because [ x ] ask first is the default. I've only had two cases where someone didn't respect the privacy tagging of the email and blogged something.

Now I've made it easier to change to [ x ] blogable (sometimes bloggable) or [ x ] private through three different email signatures. For Mac users, click on the images for a how to in Mail.app preferences.

It gives you the ability to select the requested privacy through a pull down bar. Just click, drag and cover your ass.  Or do the same to promote it.

UPDATE: What email hacks can you think of?  Merlin Mann gave me three off the cuff suggestions.  Let's collect a few on this wiki page and then contribute it to the 43 Folders wiki.

Vote by Tag

The Estonian Parliment approved internet voting, which led Peeter Marvet to prototype this example of using tags to collect a richer form of public opinion for decision makers.  This may remind you of Vote Links, but it is really a simpler way to coordinate feedback with practices.

Del.icio.us Goes Pro

Very noteworthy that Joshua Schacter has quit his very good job to go full time with del.icio.us, the social bookmarking network that all of us are so fond of.  Much of tagging originated with Josh and he deserves praise for taking this calculated risk.

[via Gen]

Tagging in the Enterprise

One of the most popular sessions at PC Forum was the Roundtable on User-generated Metadata. Moderated by David Weinberger and Esther Dyson, it engaged the former audience in a conversation.  Good thing too, as many of the experts were in the room.  You can see from my raw notes that it covered the topic widely. 

But the gem was from two comments by JP Rangaswami, CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.  Not just because he is one of my favorite customers, but its a rare insight into tagging in the enterprise:

Using Socialtext in my bank... Two dimensions that work: people tag things for themselves and whatever I am doing, can I do it in a way that makes collaboration easier. All it is doing is making things easier. The thing that got me on tagging was when I went to Ross and he said it was the simplest thing that could work. I will do things with tags to try to help people remember.  And I don't want to be committed into a structure.

Going to use tags to solve a problem in my organization. People label things differently in different cultures in the same organization. Today English might be the language, but there are perhaps 300 dialects and the labels are different. Tagging lets structure cross-reference, where patterns emerge. Important for me in a commercial context. To let people in different contexts collaborate, keeping it simple and gaining a high adoption rate. Not pushing or pulling, its a community, which is why I like social software.

I helped provide an intro to tagging alongside Caterina Fake from Flickr and Dave Sifry from Technorati -- making points on relative cost, potential scale and social incentives that drive adoption.  But after JP's comments, I knew to shut up and let the customer do the talking.

The other enterprise social software highlight from the show was John Seely Brown and John Hagel finally talking about their forthcoming book:

The notion of productive friction has major implications for IT across multi-tiered process networks. Hagel said the combination of service-oriented architecture (loosely coupled), virtualization and social software (a shared collaborative workspaces like Wikis) is key to developing a work culture that can support productive friction and facilitate conflict resolution, allowing the stakeholders to browse the context to figure out how to "unstuck" an exception (problem).

See Dan Farber's post and the session page on the wiki.

Socialtext Did Not Invent Tagging

Good article in the Guardian about Tagging.  Except this statement:

But, extending an idea developed by SocialText for its wikis, del.icio.us also encourages users to "tag" bookmarks...

This implies that Socialtext invented tagging, which is, uh, categorically false.

Socialtext Categories share similar properties to tags, and was implemented two years ago, but takes a different approach.  Its a flat namespace, anyone can add/delete/modify a category with a simple interface, very wiki-like.  We also added rel tags to Categories to support Technorati's tag search.  You can play with it here.

On the other hand, we did invent metadata ;-)

Cornucopia of Cooperation and Social Spillover

This is a lengthy rant, cross-posted on M2M (comment there), where I suggest that Cornucopia production can be realized not just through cooperation in developing a resource, but building upon success in governing each other as peers while in the act.

Tagging Napster

What do Napster and Wikipedia have in common?  Both had or have rapid growth with value created by users.  But what's fascinating is how this value was generated from personal and social incentives.

Dan Bricklin's classic 2000 essay (yes, anything written in 2000 that stands the test of time to 2004 can be deemed a classic), Cornucopia of the Commons, provided a framework with three ways of building a valuable database: Organized Manual (e.g. Yahoo), Organized Mechanical (e.g. Altavista) and Volunteer Manual (e.g. Slashdot)

Napster provided incentives for users to contribute organized content and a simplified UI where creating the copy in the shared music directory can be a natural by-product of their normal working with the songs. Bricklin defined this as a Cornucopia of the Commons, where Use brings overflowing abundance.

This is in contrast to Garrett Hardin's 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Back in 2000, around when Ev wrote his 2000th post, he pointed out: There should be a payoff to the user for entering accurate information.  Specifically he noted that HotorNot's ratings didn't provide any incentive for accurate photo data. 

By now you can probably guess that tagging is a Volunteer Manual construct that leverages Commons-Based Peer Production with incentives for accurate information. Creating bad labels hurts your own organization and lessens your group benefit when you want to pivot on the global view of the tag.  What Flickr demonstrates is not only adoption growth, but the creation of a database that scales socially.

Orders of Cooperation

This week Paul Hartzog provided a lecture on Creating Institutions for Collective Action for Howard Rheingold's Towards a Literacy of Cooperation class at Stanford.  Paul distinguished between two orders of dilemmas in cooperation:

First order dilemmas: how do we the users appropriately manage the resource?
Second order dilemmas: if I have to cooperate with you, how do I manage you?

Paul suggested that managing the commons was a function of rules, norms and strategies to address common problems identified by Elinor Ostrom: "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules."  He highlighted Elinor Ostrom's findings that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs (Common Pool Resources) that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Cornucopia of the Commons provides an example of how Napster managed the first order with simple rules that led value to accrete to the database.  But Napster wasn't Social Software and did not have to address the second order.  Is there a Cornucopia phenomenon that relates not to a resource, but between people?

I would suggest yes, that value accretes to social fabric as much as an information resource.  When groups achieve something together, there is a natural inclination to cooperate further.  In Political Science, this pattern is found in Neo-functionalism:

One theory of political integration, a study of how groups converge and new organizational forms emerge, is neofunctionalism. It suggests that all political integration begins with technocrats working together on non-political issues. As technocrats work with each other and achieve successful cooperation, the technocrats desire higher-order cooperation. Functional spillover occurs from technocratic to economic to political and even security domains.

Neofunctionalism can be used to describe the political unification of Europe. It begins with the Marshall Plan, with technocrats from different nations working together to distribute aid and rebuild. This cooperation and dense network of international relationships led to the formation of the economic structures such as the European Monetary Union to the European Union to the Euro. Functional spillover occurred into inter-governmental EU political structures. If NATO did not expand its alliance for ascension of Eastern European nations the same would have occurred for defense.

While Neo-functionalism does not account for all the factors that led to the creation of the EU, it provides a pattern of accretive cooperation at significant scale within institutional constructs.  When I asked Paul about this in class, he pointed out a fascinating example on the rise.  China's adoption of open source is a marked departure from totalitarian organization (Organized Manual) -- will functional spillover occur from open source to civic space?

Cornucopia of Cooperation

This is a very big question.  But open source organization is often marked by benevolent dictators.   While the right to fork counters abuses in power and encourages flatter organization and emergent leadership -- the complexity of developing software demands hierarchy at certain scales.  Paul suggested, as others have, that explicit reputation could enable open source projects to scale as heterarchy rather than heirarchy. 

Most open source projects, the ones you rarely hear about, have a flat structures without benevolent dictators.  Cooperation at scales below is not only easier, but an inherent value of the small:

In the 1950s, an economist, Mancur L. Olson, found that small groups are more likely to exhibit voluntary cooperation in these experimental games than larger groups, and that cooperative behaviors increase when the games are repeated over and over with the same groups and when communication is permitted among the participants.

Its worth noting that the risk of fork is greater at small groups (of course, there is less to fork over). But as they scale beyond 12 to 150 and more, the coordination risks increase substantially, especially in software production which is marked by a high level of interdependency between contributions.

Writing code is an act of vertical information assembly (e.g. Apache), marked by the dependencies between contributions made by team members.  By contrast, production of content (e.g. Wikipedia) is an act of horizontal information assembly without dependencies.  This perhaps explains the heterarchical governance of Wikipedia that continues to function at significant scale.  Perhaps explicit reputation could aid decentralization at scale for open source projects and address coordination risks.  But beyond Slashdot, making reputation explicit in the open source community may do more harm than good for factors of production.

Any good leader knows that success is an opportunity to build upon.  Volunteer Manual demonstrates a model of production where a resource of value with the right interface naturally accretes greater value.  Peer Production can be applied to creating a resource with additional social incentives, as in the case of tagging. 

But something altogether more powerful happens when you leverage both first and second order effects.  In Wikipedia, users govern each other through shared control and produce as peers.    Tagging in its present form is only additive, although nofollow/anti-links/vote links are harbingers of what's to come.  With blogging itself, users govern each other with their words, silence and the act of not linking.  Not only do wikis accrete value to the resource in first order cornucopia -- but strangers trust one another with social spillover for a second order cornucopia.

Emergent Intelligence

This post is an excerpt from a longer one on M2M about Technorati Tags, to highlight how thinking is overrated...

There are strong similarities to how wikis and tagging works.  Tagging lowers transaction costs for contributions and fixing mistakes.  This increases participation and the probability of the right data actually existing in the first place.  It also enables a dedicated community to self-govern (and note that as in the case of Wikipedia, the enthusiasm hasn't worn off)

A single tag can be applied in error, and be fixed locally, but that matters less when viewed in the aggregate.  Larger patterns arise that are statistically significant.

The other day I was listening to an interview with Malcom Gladwell about his book Blink, which posits that snap decisions are better than carefully considered judgements.  Especially when made by experts who have developed a muscle memory of the brain.  One of the callers pointed out (at 9:00/30:15) we are better than making snap decisions work better at discrimination (does it belong in the good category or the bad category) between things than characterization (determining the nature of things).  Fine, I thought, that's tagging.

Gladwell's theories seemed to run counter to those of another popular book these days, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which holds that group decisions are better than those of individual experts.  But not only are these two views complimentary, Surowiecki and Gladwell are having an open conversation about it this week.

So just think about the emergent intelligence mechanism we are creating with a neural network overlaid on the net.  Considered blog posts gain authority through link attention.  Consensual wiki pages gain authority over time.  Links and snapshots bridge across places, physical and virtual. Tags are applied in the blink of an eye and patterns emerge from the crowd.