A Matter Of Degree

Community forms around proposal submission for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2010, Boston

Snow Geese Flock Landing, originally uploaded by mstoy.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference has added a great feature around proposal submission this year (the Call for Papers deadline was December 18th), and I wanted to blog about it because it's such a good example of an enterprise walking it like they talk it.

For the 2009 E2.0 Conference in Boston last summer, registrants had the ability to create a profile and connect with each other online more than a month before the event. You could see who else was attending, create a personalized agenda, and have discussions.

This year they've started the party (ahem, the networking and collaboration) even earlier, at the proposal stage. After registering with some basic information, speaker hopefuls have the ability to view all submitted proposals (filterable by keyword, category, author, etc.), comment on them, and connect with the submitters.  (SpigIt is the partner providing this service.)

As a prospective speaker, it was hugely valuable for me to review the existing proposals, so that I wouldn't duplicate a topic already submitted. Once I submitted my paper, the experience became even richer. Within the hour I received a comment from another submittter, and we had a good dialogue around our differing perspectives on the issue. I learned some interesting information and made a contact I'll want to seek out at the conference and meet in person.

I'll also be able to see what stage of review my proposal is in during the process. Such a difference from the black hole I've experienced with some conference proposals.

Nicely played, Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

UNFRIEND is 2009 word of the year - NEXWORK for 2010?

How we learn ....... How we teach, originally uploaded by HORIZON.

Two days ago, the Oxford University Press announced that the word of the year for 2009 is UNFRIEND.

While I totally support the notion of keeping your friend list current by periodically shoveling out your stable of contacts, the fact that this represents a significant concept for 2009 is a little disheartening. This is the age of online community, social networking, joining, contributing, and linking, and the word of the year is "unfriend?"

For 2010 I'd like us all to think about how to turn this to the positive. As we continue to unfriend the contacts who don't give back, whose friend requests we accepted because we felt awkward declining, who we'd never pick up the phone and call, or who we wouldn't want to chat with in the grocery store, let's focus more sharply on filling out our networks with people we admire, those who have the potential of helping us get better at what we do.

As a personal example, I have built my Flickr contact base this way. The majority of my contacts aren't meatspace friends and family, but photographers whose work I admire. By using Flickr's search ranking, I find stellar photographs - the kind of work I wish I was doing - and then make those photographers my contacts. This subscribes me to their photostream, so that I see new work as they produce it, and I can comment on that work, ask questions, and build the relationship. The beautiful thing about it is that most of the people I've met this way are truly happy to share their knowledge and techniques, which helps me to improve. As I get better, I'm posting higher-quality photos and passing on my own techniques which on occasion have inspired others.  (I don't currently have a web tool for doing this in my workplace, but we plan to implement it next year.)

I want the word of 2010 to be NEXWORK - a word that describes my contact list not just as "the people I know" or "the people with whom I've worked" but a network of experts - "the people I admire, each of whom has a unique and valuable perspective that can challenge and improve me." Our networks can be so much more powerful than an aggregate of activity from a collection of meformers. What can you offer your network today? And what can they offer you?

 

SharePoint - The worm has turned! ("Just Make It Like Google" no longer!)

It's official - with SharePoint clients I am now hearing more "Just make it like Facebook!" and less "Just make it like Google!" 

A case in point - I have a client who's making really great use of a customized Task list to handle project requests that come to the IT Department.  Today my contact, the IT Director at this client site, was telling me that he wants the developers to be updating their projects "like Facebook" - not only changing the Status drop-down but adding versioned comments as well.

In an interesting governance twist, the developers asked him for a specification on when they should update.  (Welcome to the BizarroWorld of Enterprise 2.0!) 

Still, the upshot for me is that even conservative SharePoint users are starting to want the social-media look and feel from the tool.  A task list is not in the usual catalog of social networking tools within the enterprise, but this client has shown me how it can function that way.  I'm looking forward to learning more from my clients and colleagues about unexpected and/or underground ways they are trying to "make it like Facebook."

Social Networking - can we move beyond the buzz? (and should we?)

Dominguez Canyon Public Message Board, originally uploaded by rovingmagpie.

On Tuesday, 3/31/09, I participated in an all-day event at the Boston Knowledge Management Forum: "Leveraging Virtual Teams and Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter, et al." I heard great presentations by Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps of NetAge, Ken George of WBUR, Suzanne Minassian of IBM, and David Wallace of Gamechange LLC. I don't have the compelling research results, business challenges, or large-scale organization experience of those presenters, but I was there to speak about my own professional use of social networking tools. I have a lot of enthusiasm about web 2.0 technologies and I really enjoyed the conversations that ensued during all the presentations.

After the event, the buzz and increased activity within my network (lots of new followers on Twitter, mostly strangers to me, whose profiles typically indicate an interest in the social media) has gotten me thinking:

Did the cave dwellers back in 1000 AD have these kinds of conversations with each other -

"Have you noticed all the carving on rocks that is happening lately? It seems like everybody is doing it!"
"I don't understand why these young folks are carving the rocks all the time."
"How can I find the carvings I need to know about?"
"Do these carvings threaten us by leading the predators right to us?"
"If I want to start carving on rocks, what do I need to know?"
"How can I attract the widest possible audience to my carvings?"

I'm thinking probably they didn't. We're having all these meta-conversations now because we want to understand, and we want to help others understand. But the tools themselves are easy to use and don't require much explanation.

I love talking and thinking about these technologies as much as anyone, but I also believe what Edward Tufte says: "The interface should not attract attention to itself."

Should we be spending less energy on analyzing and discussing social media trends and technologies, and more time on our work, our relationships, and our interests, with the tools in a mere supporting role? (and what happens when the tools ARE our work, our relationships, and our interests?)

I'd love to hear others' opinions on this.

Microplaza - a tool to filter your consumption of Twitter content

I've been trying out Microplaza - a site that displays links from Twitter.  My contacts tweet a lot of URLs to good content, and now I can see just these link-tweets, sortable by time and popularity.  The neat thing is that when one of my contacts posts a link, I get to see all the other folks who posted it too, which gives a larger sense of who's thinking about what.

At this point you need an invitation to try the service.  To get one, follow microplaza on Twitter, or ask me - I have 5 invites to give out. 

See the TechCrunch article that turned me on to the product here.

Social Media Presentations sponsored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council

This morning I attended a session entitled "Social Media: Intranets 2.0 - Internal Social Networks Catch Fire" sponsored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council.  The speakers were Joan DiMicco, Research Scientist, Center for Social Software at IBM Research, and Donna Cuomo, PhD, Chief Information Architect at The MITRE Corporation.  It was inspiring to see what these forward-thinking organizations are doing with social media in the enterprise, and some common themes emerged:

1. Social media activity is already happening within the enterprise.
2. There's mutual gain for the employee and the organization.
3. It's important to have policies around the content.
4. It's necesary to manage the lifecycle.
5. Get started.

1. It's already happening - people are sharing anyway (they're emailing links and files around, trying to find people / meet colleagues); and it's only going to increase.  Joan DiMicco cited that 95% of college students use Facebook.com - we all know that the next generation of workers will not only be comfortable with web 2.0 technologies but will expect them in the enterprise.  How can you enable them and leverage them to improve productivity and collaboration?

2. There's mutual gain - both the employee and the enterprise will benefit from the implementation of social networking tools.  Joan DiMicco shared the value of social networking within IBM, as follows:

for employees:
- stronger bonds w/network
- form new relationships
- caring - a notion of humanizing the workplace
- climbing - a means to advance in career
- campagning - an ability to build build support for projects

for IBM:
- up-to-date, detailed employee profiles
- tacit knowledge & relationships made explicit
- intranet data repository vs. outside (kept even after employee leaves the company)
- increased social capital:  loyalty, communication

3. Implement policies - employees want to share their knowledge and personal details, and they will do it responsibly if it is clear that they are accountable.  At IBM, the governance around social networking includes a combination of policies/terms of use accepted by the end user, a form for users to report offensive content, and the fact that all activity is linked to a user, i.e. that there is no anonymous activity, which makes everyone accountable for their own posts.

4. Manage the lifecycle - have a plan for what happens to the information after a user leaves the company.  At MITRE, when employee leaves, private bookmarks are deleted, and the public bookmarks go into an expiration account.  The user's profile photos is replaced with a ticking clock icon.  Bookmarks are available for 90 days so colleagues can go in and grab valuable information.  For collaborative sites, there must be 2 owners for every site.  When someone leaves they have to assign a new primary owner.  When a site becomes less active it is moved to a different area, indexed less frequently, etc.  
What about the ever-present issue of rapid and uncontrolled proliferation of content? As one audience member quipped, "First it's too soon to tell, then it's too late to stop."  Both speakers acknowledged that content proliferates rapidly, but the implication was that the benefit outweighs this potential downside.  MITRE's future development efforts will include a tool to aid navigation among their wiki pages to mitigate the proliferation issue.

5. Get started - find something that people already find useful - phone directory, organizational chart, listing of new project codes - and then start hanging additional functionality off it (like an availability indicator, profile information linked to the org chart, etc.).  The greater amount of activity around the tool will lead to a greater amount of social capital within the organization.

20080801 - LinkedIn for Superheroes

20080801 - LinkedIn for Superheroes, originally uploaded by sadalit.

When are we mere mortals going to have access to a graphical display of commonly-used social networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc.?

xobni - five minutes and I was hooked

I learned about xobni from a colleague last week, and downloaded it today.  Xobni ('inbox" backwards) bills itself as "the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments" and / or "a more socially aware email environment."  I would prefer to describe it as "the free Outlook tool with addictive metrics."  Once it started analyzing, showing me, for example, who among my contacts is quickest to respond to me, I was fascinated.  Then when it gave me the option to send said contacts their stats, I was hooked. 

The design is bright and appealing (maybe a little too appealing - compared to the bland light-blue-and-white Outlook color scheme its orange, black and purple tones make it difficult to look away or ignore the pane) and I found it user-friendly and intuitive.  After eight hours I'm thinking of my correspondents in terms of their xobni rank ("Yeah, he's my number three") and trying to figure out imbalances ("Why am I sending her two emails for every one she sends me?").  It interfaces with LinkedIn.  It bubbles-up attachments.  It threads conversations.  It hasn't broken anything on my pc, although the comments on this post about xobni's business model indicate that it may cause problems with FireFox.  For my setup, there is no downside and a tremendous upside.

I would rave more, but I've got to go reply to an email from my #1.

Social Networks and Smoking Cessation - what it might mean for your organization

I heard a great article on NPR this morning about a study which shows that when an individual quits smoking, this has a ripple effect on family members and friends, with the result that those in the social network are more likely to quit as well. 

"There's no doubt that people are influenced by the behaviors of individuals that are not just one degree of separation from them, but two and three degrees of separation. There's a kind of cascading influence," says Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study, which appears in Thursday's edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

This story was an inspiration, as I see so many companies struggling with behavioral and cultural issues that affect productivity and delivery.  If the clustering / hive intelligence effect that the article describes can work the same way within the social network of an organization, then there's hope for cultural change if a few key individuals will adopt the desired behavior, and spread this to their colleagues.

What issues is your company struggling with, that technology alone can't solve?  Here are a few that I see all the time:

• adopting a new tool, application, or platform
• using a naming or filing convention
• allotting time to non-billable activities that are critical to improving the practice or organization

In most cases there are at least a few people in any company who are doing the "right thing" already.  What will encourage them to spread their behavior to their network, and beyond?  How can the social network be strengthened so that desired behaviors might spread more rapidly?  And how can you start tracking this spread, to be able to show that positive change is happening?

Update - my colleague Marcel pointed me to a similar NPR article about social networks and weight gain / weight loss.