Shaping Thoughts

Love this presentation of Clay Shirky

Lots of humor and great thinking about underlying trends and promises for the future!

For a transcript please click here.

For some other stories about this presentation click here.

Technorati tags: Clay Shirky, Web 2.0

Comment | posted 11 days ago on May 02, 2008 | category: Web2.0

Bottom-up Enterprise 2.0 only goes so far

It’s often advised that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have more chance when coming from the bottom of organisations. For good reasons too: Enterprise 2.0 is all about empowering people, but often requiring radical changes in the way they work and relate together, both with their peers and with management. In terms of both testing what works and getting the tools accepted in the workplace the best way could then very well be to start low, small and with a few frontrunners or potential evangelists.

However, after a couple of experiments at work I now have a feeling that bottom-up Enterprise 2.0 has its own limitations, especially when critical mass is important to show the potential benefits (to employees and management) and tools don’t readily overflow with personal value (it’s not all Del.icio.us!) and when people are in the pursuit of busyness.

Or did we do our experiments wrong, actually violating the rules stipulated above (with the obvious benefit of hindsight)? Maybe more called for, to get some participation?

Writing this, I was remembered by a quote of Andrew McAfee:

Enterprise 2.0 is not a hype, but it is also not easy, and will serve to separate the winners from the loser” (link)

And:

I predict that the diffusion of these tools is going to sharpen differences among companies as some work to foster the new styles, modes, and practices of collaboration and others work (subtly or overtly) to squelch them. (link)

What are your experiences?

Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles

Technorati tags: Andrew McAfee, Social Software, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Intranet, Participation

Comment [4] | posted 27 days ago on Apr 16, 2008 | category: Enterprise 2.0 / Social software

Question: the killer feature for employee social networks?

Asked the question on Twitter tonight but no response yet:

What would the most attractive feature on an employee social network that really draws people in (providing individual value)?

At the end of last year I created a list of 20 things to do on a social network in the office. The piece was the result of a personal brainstorm. But, as you might understand a lot of “utopia” ended up there. At least from the perspective of a employee in a company that never even though about social networks, let alone done some stuff on them. So let’s get down to earth…

To repeat: What would the most attractive feature on an employee social network that really draws people in? In my opinion for, in my case “busy bankers” but it might be for anyone else new to this stuff: personal value first should be the motto

So what’s personal value on a social network? Let me think again:

• seeing photo’s behind those long-known names?
• keep one’s resume (for the new potential boss to see)?
• learning about the interest, hobbies, careers of colleagues?
• seeing what you network is doing (= writing on the personal blogs in the network)?
• finding people in the same specialism, related projects etc?
• seeing what is written on specific tags (this is obviously 2nd or 3rd phase stuff….)

The trouble is that considerable critical mass is required to at least get some of the personal value from the activities mentioned above, although not to the same degree.

Let me refrase my question: What are the first things to focus on when building a social network behind the firewall in terms of features (next to usability)?

Anyone? Please think with me!

Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles

Technorati tags: Social Network, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Internal Blogging

Comment [5] | posted 33 days ago on Apr 10, 2008 | category: Enterprise 2.0 / Social software

Wiki markup no good

What James Robertson posted yesterday could be very true: Wiki markup has no future.

To quote James:

“It was never about the markup anyway. Wikis are about making creating and editing content trivial, about creating structure as you go, about tracking changes and activity (plus more). The “wiki way” never demanded the use of strangle little text commands.”

“It could even be argued that the wiki way is all about usability, so wiki markup is actually opposed to the core principles being pursued. What could be easier than just typing straight into the wiki, with buttons for formatting?”

and

“I would go one step further: don’t deploy a wiki for a broad audience (or within the enterprise) if it doesn’t have WYSIWYG editing. That will start to put some pressure on the developers, and should help to speed the permanent death of wiki markup. RIP and long live wikis.”

I fully agree with James here, although I must admit I have developed some kind of blindness: the longer you are working with wiki markup the easier it is to forget this big usability and adoption issue.

So, although my colleagues in the department have finally begun to do their stuff on our wiki (MediaWiki), I am sure adoption would have been much quicker had WYSIWYG editing been in place.

Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles

Technorati tags: , Wiki, Social Software, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0

Comment [7] | posted 83 days ago on Feb 20, 2008 | category: Wiki / Enterprise 2.0

A bit quiet out here?

True, it has been somewhat quiet out here. With a reason!

I am currently spending all my free time on researching and building an simple local voting website. Being no hard core programmer, I have been searching the Net for stuff like PHP, Javascript, MySQL etc. A lot is out there and all you got to do is get some understanding and link it all together. Tons of fun learning about all this stuff though!

Will report back once I got something running.

Comment | posted 84 days ago on Feb 20, 2008 | category: Local web / Web2.0

First meeting on a possible LocalWeb

So we recently had our first face-to-face meeting on a potential LocalWeb initiative. First of all, I loved to (finally) be able to talk about my passion: Internet, web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. It has not occurred often, that I could spend 3 hours focusing on those topics.

Purpose of our community LocalWeb:

• Improve well being (relevant info in nice things in town)
• Social cohesion (people that know and understand each other will be more caring and co-operative towards another)

From the obligatory introduction round it appeared three out of the four participants have an IT background and employment. Among the four of us there is also a considerable amount of experience with previous local web experiments and knowledge of local community. This will come in handy!

We discussed a couple of former initiatives like:

• a link portal with a commercial drive (get traffic; sell advertisements): unsuccessful because too little traffic; maybe because Google helps people out these days and lot of people/company’s/clubs websites are found that way.
• a site linked to a “web ring” of community guides (paper version) providing local content and links. Issue: “Google effect” and nobody willing to provide content.

It’s all about getting people to participate!
The main topic of the night was “participation”: will we be able to generate enough participation because it should be an easy exercise for the four of us (self sustainable; with minimum moderation and content generation; other people taking over some jobs). So far only around 100 unique people turn up on local offline town events, although the content of those meetings are quite compelling. Is the hurdle for participating offline too high? Would it be lower via an online channel?

Some tips and guidance:
What’s resonated from the comments on my first post on the topic:

• Make sure you satisfy a real need of people.
• You must solve a real problem for them (like in ability to find like-minded people). Something that they will be willing to participate for (create content).
• Engage people on things that are important to them (school issues, local event calendars, fun stuff!)
• Make sure the community has a clear purpose and make sure people know that purpose

Using local events and low hurdles:
Another important help for attracting participation is focussing on local issues or events that people might want to react to. Well, there are some we examples we could use, like:

• The upcoming merger between three towns
• Sinterklaas celebration
• A Skating track made of plastic (!)
• The grand local theatre play last summer about an important historical event (1953)
• The upcoming new cultural festival this summer

Next to that, content creation should be have very low hurdles:

• easy: like Twitter or in a discussion forum
• medium: photo sharing
• hard: editing a wiki or creating a blog post

In terms of applications…
Some applications that crossed our minds:

• A discussion forum supporting people:
  • like for citizens initiatives
  • just people looking for other people (for running with; for playing chess with)
  • people looking for information (good school?; how does swim lessons work around here?
  • issue: needs eyeballs to questions/topics to attract people that will answer questions!
• A wiki for:
  • having people willing to write about past events
  • history of the town
  • famous people
  • presentation of their club (link; feeds)
  • issue: learning curve for using a wiki!
• A social network:
  • people and their profile (interests; skills etc)
• A portal to act as front page surfacing all things produced in other components via feeds:
  • and combined feeds from sites providing news about the town
  • featuring photo’s tagged with local tags (from Flickr or anywhere)

Next steps:

• Set up a wiki to get the three others involved used to such a too and evaluate it for local implementation. (Done)
• Use the wiki for working out our case for an interactive LocalWeb.
• Everybody starts looking for good examples around the world of experiments that worked and that not worked.
• Precisely describe the past experiments and the reasons of their failure.
• Brainstorm on what people would be looking for.
• Put up some feeds already on the wiki (using e.g. Yahoo pipes)

Technorati tags: Citizen journalism, Local web, Web 2.0, Community, Hyperlocal, Local

Comment | posted 97 days ago on Feb 06, 2008 | category: Local web / Web2.0

Thoughts on the lack of Intranet participation

I have been trying to list some of the issues around the subject of participation on the Intranet. Here is my draft outline of symptoms, backgrounds and possible solutions. Have anything to add or restructure? Please comment.

Some symptoms:

• Let’s do some real work ok?
• I am too busy for “that”!
• I do not feel confident enough to participate.
• I have enough information coming towards me already.

What’s behind these reactions:

• Knowledge is power: a knowledge transfer makes me end up in a worse situation than before. I will not share anything if I am not obliged to do so by my superior or/and recognized in my annual review and compensation. Related: What does my boss think of me spending time on “that”?
• What do I have to contribute to such a tool? What would be the value? I do not see that (not understanding the concept; needs training).
• Technical barriers for contributing: needs training on working with the tools
• Some people are just not interested in working on the Intranet. They come to do the work they are supposed to and that’s it.
• People do not like the thought of their input being read and commented upon by anyone. Feel their thoughts are private and not for everybody to read. Who knows what will be the result in future?

Possible solutions:

• Management should start signaling that it is generally accepted to spend time providing relevant and constructive input in the social software systems.
• Acknowledgment of management of the value of the new tools to the company (e.g. actually using all collective intelligence; reducing search time for information / people; more engagement; flow of idea’s/innovation).
• The company should make sure that sharing of information or participating in social network environments is part of KPI’s and the reward system. Some S.M.A.R.T. measures should be developed for that, but I am sure that is not the real problem.
• Increase the weight on team results in reward systems relative to the individual result if you want people to share more and collaborate better.
• Employees should be made aware of the value of the new tools and of their particular contributions.
• Employees should be supported in working with the tools (how to do “this”?).
• Employees should be provided with suitable equipment (e.g. RSS readers) .

What’s behind all of this? Just me “shaping my thoughts”!

Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles

Technorati tags: Social Software, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Intranet, Participation

Comment [2] | posted 97 days ago on Feb 06, 2008 | category: Enterprise 2.0 / Intranet

IBM on Enterprise 2.0

Via Luis Suarez:

Boy, would I have loved to see that whole session… You can check out some notes Luis made via Twitter during the session (starting at this tweed).

Related: my other Enterprise 2.0 articles

Technorati tags: IBM, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0

Comment [2] | posted 105 days ago on Jan 30, 2008 | category: Enterprise 2.0

ING stops activities in Second Life

See OurVirtualHolland.com

Maybe some more thoughts later…

Technorati tag(s): Second Life, ING

Comment [1] | posted 105 days ago on Jan 30, 2008 | category: Second Life

Seven things you didn't know about me

Don’t know if I need to feel “scared” or happy about this one. A few weeks ago my German blogger-colleague Frank Hamm tagged me for the current meme “Seven things you didn’t know about me” going around the blogosphere (wasn’t it eight?). Frank’s list is here.

Actually, deep down inside, I had a good time writing down these things. I think this post is even going to make the private family weblog (so they can learn as well ;-) )

So here I go:

1. Fly-fishing
When I still had time I used to be quite involved with fly-fishing. Not only on the waterside, but also reading books or magazines and tying my own flies! I even wrote an article about some fly-fishing I did while on holiday in New Zealand. By the way, the last time I dropped a fly in the water, was on holiday in France last year.

2. A passion for streams and rivers
Something much connected to my fly-fishing hobby, is the passion I have for streams and rivers (so, “crystal clear water that moves”!). Maybe it is because of me living in the flatland of the Netherlands, with almost no streams, but I just like the tranquility of rivers and small streams and all the life in there (especially big trouts and grayling of course!).
This passion has even made me contemplate creating a business plan for an artifical 300 meter trout river connected to a nice lake nearby. Big pumps energized by the wind would be doing the job. Never got to finish that.

3. Still living quite near where I was born
Ok, maybe not that interesting but I just realized that, being born in Rotterdam, I have actually never lived farther than 25 km away from that place all my live.

4. Farthest holiday destination: NZ
So although I appear not that much mobile, I have been on holiday to the farthest place you could go to from my location: New Zealand.
I visited the place in 2000 for 5 weeks driving around in a campervan, after which we relaxed a bit for one week on the beautiful Cook Island Rarotonga. It was a terrific holiday, apart from the long travel.

5. Battlestar Galactica
As a kid I really loved the Sci-Fi series Battlestar Galactica and you might think that it wears off. However, it didn’t. I still like it very much and I even collected (via Ebay, from all over the world) the original paperback series a few years ago. I think I will stay away from the new Battlestar Galactica series by the way, not wanting to spoil my memory and fantasy.
Buck Rogers was also great!

6. I envy those web 2.0 programmers
Really like programming, but I have no time for it and that’s a pity. However I do have two small PHP programming projects underway. One related to my blog and one related to some hard core Enterprise 2.0 stuff for at work. I will certainly tell you all about it once the projects are finished (could take a while).

7. The career change of my live in 2008?
Last year, after working as an economist and credit risk analyst for more than 14 years, I started to wonder what it would mean if I could turn my passion for social software into a real job. I surely intend to do some more exploration on this issue in 2008. Let’s see what happens.

So there you have it: my seven things!

As Frank Hamm and all people that went before him, I’m a curious person and would love to learn things about people I connect with online. So I would be pleased if you would tell me some things about you, but I can understand if you don’t feel like doing that.

Like to tag some of my Enterprise 2.0 friends:

• Martin Kloos
• Daniel Siddle
• Scott Gavin
• Simon Revell
• Bart Wessels

Comment [5] | posted 114 days ago on Jan 20, 2008 | category: Me