Library clips

Bill Ives has a post examining the differences the dynamic and cultural differences between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0.

He points to one of his previous posts and also Kevin Mullens’s blog post that makes the point of “solutions”:

“Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions.”

Isn’t it all about social productivity and emergence, and what ever comes from that…maybe this is what solutions means.

If we go to an Anecdote paper on community, collaboration and networks, we see three different dynamics at play.

1. Communities of Interest - people coming together to share and learn
2. Teams/WorkGroups - people coming together to achieve a goal, this includes a lot of collaboration (working together on a task or paper)
3. Networks - individual centric (self interest), connecting profiles, and in aggregate we are able to get valuable data.

UPATE: I guess there is a 4th type, and that’s social tools mashed into existing applications.

All these 3 types can exist on the open web and in the enterprise.
A community leader or facilitator may moderate, garden, etc…and in a workgroup they may give directions.
Whereas with social networks/sites like Facebook, del.icious, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Twitter there is no leader, it’s individual centric. But if you put up a “bad” clip in YouTube, you will be dealt with (these are the rare occasions we hear from the overall owner), and the same in an enterprise social network.

I don’t see anything different here in dynamics, one difference is that in the enterprise the content must be about learning or work, not goofing off, and that there are policies to adhere to the usual expected conduct from employees (don’t talk about confidential stuff and, don’t jeopardize people).

Accountability

Bill Ives points out a difference within the enterprise and that’s “accountability” to a groups aims:

“In the consumer web you are only accountable to yourself. In enterprise 2.0 you are accountable to the group success of your team, your company.”

This is referring to group work where you may have a project space with blogs and wikis, etc… But what about an internal blogosphere like IBM or a shared interest CoP, this is more about general sharing, learning, and experience (not really accountability). This participation platform is emergent (we don’t know what we are gonna get, we just take part and see what happens). We become more capable and skilled as we are educating each other, and then we can bring that know-how back to our tasks.

So I do think there is a difference between using social tools for project work, and for purposed based sharing and learning. Again the Anecdote paper pointed to above explains the different dynamics between share interest groups, team/project groups, and networks.
At this stage there is no difference between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 in regards to communities (learning) and networks/blogospheres (self interest), but there is when it comes to work spaces set-up to actually do work.
You can have Workgroups on the open web, but you are still volunteering your time to take direction from the leader, if you don’t you may get kicked out of the group…in the enterprise you may lose your job.

One

So the first difference is content in the enterprise must be about work or learning.

Two

The second difference, as just mentioned, is being accountable, or else.

The third difference is that in web 2.0 I choose to participate, and no-one tries to get me to go to training or promote social tools. This may be the same in the enterprise eg. CoP or internal blogosphere or bookmarks, but when it comes to Workgroups then I have to use whatever work style or tools that have been set-up.
In relation to communities and networks/blogospheres, if you are not that passionate about your job or work related topics, you are not gonna blog about work things.

But not all participation is about volunteering know-how, as mentioned above using social tools in team spaces is about social productivity, so it may be mandated that we use blogs for broadcast announcements, news, task status, etc rather than email.
This is directed contributions, it is content you are already producing, only you are mandated to deliver it in blogs rather than email…and have conversations in forums rather than email…and collaborate in wikis rather than email/attachments. See more in Mike Gotta’s post with a great comments discussion (incl. me). I couldn’t believe some people think mandating their know-how (stuff you know that you never really write down) was OK…I bet David Vaine couldn’t believe his luck when he found the opportunity to spread the word about corporate flogging in this post.

Three

So to re-iterate the third difference is mandated to use certain tools over others for directed type of content.

Transparency, Network Effect, Facilitation and Egalitarianism

Bill Ives goes on to say that in social team spaces (Workgroups), managers need to act as coaches to help and sustain the participation and team work, capitialising the transparency to make correlations, connections, and evolve the input, and welcome their POV rather than being watchdogs.

This is about the need for facilitation, and the realisation of emergence rather than imposing or controlling. People in the enterprise need to learn and be encouraged and guided, using informal learning practices, as this may be new to some people. You just don’t need this on the web, as there is no agenda, if someone can’t get the hang of web 2.0, it just doesn’t matter or have impact on the residents of the webosphere, as there are so many people that do get it.

Recently on our internal communities someone left a comment on one of my blog posts about communities of interest. He said; the new technology, this way of coming together, having discourse and learning is something new, he felt like it was migrating to a new country. The dynamic and technology was foreign, and the current participants seemed intimidating (well not really, but the initial fear of wanting his content to be of the right calibre). But he went ahead and made that comment because he said the community participants were hospitable and welcoming, and it was this factor that gave him the confidence to participate.

Another example was a demo I was doing for a new internal community, the managers were excited (the possibilities), and at the same time it was very foreign to them (platform vs channels), they seem intimidated.
At this point I realised even though they see the benefits, they really have to experience them, and when this happens, they need to be guided. So I decided to make a Facilitators community (Train the trainers), I want each community facilitator to know as muchas they can about social technology, community dynamics and facilitation itself.

I made a comment in the post about some additional things I’ve posted about in the past, I’ll re-post it here. It’s mostly about a harder time generating a network effect in an enterprise 2.0 environment due to a smaller amount of participants.

It also harps back to transparency and the fact that the enterprise is not an egalitarian culture like the open web, instead we have managers and hierarchies.
The question is will transparency be accepted, as Bill alludes to in his post, the transparency of participation eventually leads to collaboration (KM 2.0 model).

These higher positioned people may not like the concept that the ideas of lesser positioned people are in a visible arena and may be seen by all to contribute or have an impact on decision making. They may feel this transparency lessens their role, or replaces their impact or exclusivity on what’s best for the company, as it may now be more openly influenced by the people…they might feel less in charge, and that all this transparency undermines their role.

When you think about it, it’s giving more power and autonomy to the people, where social productivity and connection brings the best minds together, in a more networked self organised kind of way that hierarchy just can’t do. Senior staff also have to accept that this greater organisational performance won’t happen unless participation and transparency is welcomed. Once you start censoring this type of ecosystem, it might just revolt on you. In the end they are still making ultimate decisions, but these are based on the conversations and content of the social enterprise, rather than just an exclusive meeting.

This is the real difference between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0, it’s about acceptance and a new model of management.
What was initially about sharing know-how and collaboration has turned into a new style of de-management, and decision making, where the networked enterprise approach is heading into a more adaptive, self-organising, and autonomous learning organisation.

This to me is a milestone in time, a change from scientific management and the industrial age to the networked knowledge age. Perhaps the more pressing topic is management 2.0.

Here’s my comment on Bill’s post:

“Bill,

In comparison to the enterprise, web 2.0 and the blogosphere is an egalitarian environment, there is no org chart, even if there was, no one cares, all people are treated equal.””

Four, Five, and Six

This makes facilitation, the critical mass of the network effect, and transparency the fourth, fifth, and sixth differences.

Social Productivity and ROI

The seventh difference is measuring social productivity, ie. how much you help others, and how you source the right connections to help you. Personally I thinking knowing the right person to help you out can make a massive impact on a project, compared to getting a lesser proficient person…”who you know” should be valued.

Another impact on whether people want to spend time in the social enterprise is whether they will be measured by their social productivity, that is, helping and spending time beyond their tasks for the greater good.

Gia Lyons was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says, “…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…”.

Seven

Gia sums up the seventh difference by saying, “…we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured.”

All this is highly related to Boyds Law:

“Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity…

Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behavior, where an obsession with personal productivity does not.”

Read more on the myth of interrupting, especially related to IM…Luis Suarez in his email detox diet often refers to the speed of IM in getting something done, and the visibility of social tools to help out future similar requests.

Conclusion

Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 environments may have their differences, but trying to veil transparency isn’t going to do any good. We also have to work at generating network effects, we need to encourage and facilitate participation, and lastly we need a way to measure or value an individuals social productivity. This can all be helped by reviewing job descriptions, corporate strategies, and job evaluations to include or encourage social participation.

Let’s finish with a quote by Larry Prusak:

“The modern organisation evolved in the 19th century to deal with land, labour and capital, not with knowledge, which was assumed to reside only in the heads of the owners and managers,” he says. “This led us to the modern organisation built on command and control mechanisms, run as hierarchical bureaucracies. This won’t do when knowledge is the major source of value, as it is for most large organisations today.”

[ADDED 30/07/08: Eight - How the 90-9-1 participation ratio changes inside organisations]

[ADDED 04/08/08: Nine - Permissions]

[ADDED 12/08/08: Ten - Policies (an overseer can constrain the internal blogosphere so it doesn’t self-organise into a negative direction, and we have to adhere to participation policies)]

[ADDED 14/08/08: Eleven - Light Constraints (whereas the blogosphere will self organise into whatever direction)]

[ADDED 14/08/08: Twelve - No anonymous contributors]

[ADDED 28/08/08: Tale of Two Tunnels: Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Tools: Components for Success]

[ADDED 24/10/08: Thirteen - Web 2.0 and the Lack of Process]

Tweetshots - use a bookmarklet to take a screenshot of a tweet page, and it will generate the embed code, also see TwitterBash.

TweetPaste - get some embed code for a tweet, so you can paste it in your blog post…I find this the easiest so far.

Matt (Multiple Account Twitter Tweeter) - post to multiple Twitter accounts

Chirrup - if you re-syndicate your blog posts to Twitter, any replies made to those tweets can be channeled back to your blog via a widget…people can even tweet directly in the widget. [via RWW]

Twebinar - Twitter mashup with the conference video display…enables tweets before, during, and after a webinar by following twebinar [via /message]

BONUS LINK
Twitter updates from Mars

Stewart Mader from Grow Your Wiki is guest posting on Wikinomics and his lastest post is on the effectiveness of wikis enabling tacit sharing.

Documents that are open and dynamic allow people to evolve the documents by direct editing or leaving comments…ie. people are sharing their experience and what they know can add to the richness of the document.

Right away I thought of the How-To Guides I’m writing for our Communities of Practice (CoP) at work.

If my guides are on a wiki rather than PDF, people who use the guides can leave comments, or people with permissions can edit the page itself or a new page to add what they know.

This way they can help me evolve the document, even though it’s finished. Well, that’s the idea, it’s never finished…I may miss a feature, and I can’t experience every context, so there’s stuff that happens when people use Communities that I may not know up front. eg. a new way to use blogs, a workaround (exception to procedure) page for Document Control as each client has different needs.

They may leave a comment about a feature of our CoPs where they have a workaround, or a use case.
eg. someone might say everyone in our team has a status blog, so when we go to a meeting we already know what everyone has been up to, our meetings are more about action.
Another person visiting the guide may see this and use this idea.
A simple comment box on a wiki has enabled the sharing and receiving of know-how by two people that don’t even know each other, plus this is perpetual as another person may come along and get value or an idea from reading the same comment. In fact another person may leave a comment back and say that they found it more manageable having one group blog for status. The original person my see this and comment back saying, that is a great idea, I didn’t know that was possible. Oops, that’s because I may have not put that fact in the guide, lucky that comments allow for others to help where the guide fails.
And as Stewart mentions I can go and refine the guide and leave a comment saying thanks.

In the end we have this explicit type deliverable that has to be formal and succinct as it has to cater to many audiences, and can’t be too explanatory (long), and try to cover every context possible, as people won’t bother reading it. But on top of this we have a layer of collective know-how and feedback via the comments which inturn we feed back into the document (via edit) some tacit know-how.

The point is having perpetually live documents (editing and comments) harnesses the collective wisdom, where people can share their know-how, and benefit the user experience as a whole. It’s a win win situation.

Moopz comes to the rescue for a concern I too have had about Friendfeed, and that is, fragmented conversations within Friendfeed itself.
The issue is that there may be conversations around multiples of the same item:

- just say my blog feed posts my latest item to Friendfeed (it’s a post about something I have on Slideshare)
- my latest Slideshare activity will post an item to Friendfeed as well
- and someone bookmarks that blog post or slidedeck URL on del.icio.us which then shows up on Friendfeed
- someone tweets about it, and that shows up on Friendfeed
- someone may even post directly into Friendfeed about the slidedeck

As you can see above there are 5 opportunities to initiate the same conversation about the same thing within Friendfeed, and the most thriving conversation may be around someone’s bookmarked item of your post, rather than around the feed item of your own post.

As Read Write Web point out, at the moment your re-syndicated blog post may not have any discussion in Friendfeed, but an A-lister who bookmarks your blog post will have lots of discussion around that item in Friendfeed.
This is a new dynamic as now people are becoming a hot spot, a community onto themselves, for not only their own content, but content of others.

Moopz plans to prevent this fragmentation from happening.

For starters it only displays content that has links, so you won’t see tweets saying “Good morning Twitter!”

If a new link that appears is already linked to in another Friendfeed item, then they will be merged (clustered together) preventing fragmented conversation from even happening.

Another good thing about this is that we don’t have to see duplicate items.

And each item is auto-tagged meaning you can browse conversations on a topic

I guess this is a memetracker of sorts based on clusterings, and what gets on the frontpage is decided as a result of people using the system. This makes it a more self organising version of Techmeme and Megite…and a more limited version as it’s only based on content that comes from the aggregate of user profiles.

Megite allows you to enter your OPML, and displays most popular and recommended posts from people you care about (rather than all items ranked), but it’s not a conversation platform. It also displays memes by topic.

At the moment Moopz only has a public timeline, hopefully soon it can be personalised to have a friends timeline.

Like Megite and Techmeme, Moopz will display popular memes based on links, but it doesn’t scour the web for these links and cluster them, instead it scours content people have re-syndicate into it’s own system…the former Memetrackers also use other methods like concept analysis (as two items may be about the same exact thing yet they both don’t point to a common link).
Moopz also has another aspect to popular memes, and that’s based on the amount of conversation that happens within Moopz (Friendfeed) itself.

More

Also checkout how Read Write Web and Louis Gray are incorporating Friendfeed comments back to their blog (the original source)…Read Write Web also allow posting to Friendfeed from within their blog.

Louis Gray has some great Friendfeed tips every Friday, the first one on the hide funtion is a great way to reduce the noise, and same with advanced search.

NoiseRiver (via LG)

Another way to filter the flow by a feature called “My Interests”, enabling you to use a drop down menu to filter in or out items containing a certain keyword, the filter choices are:
I love it so much!, I love it, I like it, This is nice, It’s OK, I don’t care, It stinks, This is bad, I don’t like it, I hate it, I hate it so much
There’s also a feature called “My Neighbourhood” to filter items from people on a similar filtering menu.
I also noticed:
- you can re-share an item (this posts it as a FF post)
- there is a reply icon next to each item and comment so your comment is pre-pended with that person name eg. @louis
- each item has auto-keywords (not sure why you can add/delete them, you can also filter rate these keywords as explained above)
- “hide all entries with this URL” is a manual way of doing what Moopz already does.

FeedMachine (via LG)

This brings an element of an RSS reader because you can mark read/unread

Friends view - contact list where you can choose a contact and click on a source icon and a box displays latest content from that source…it lacks latest content from all a person’s sources

Good Friends View - When you click on a profile it allows you to tick that person as a good friend, this will add them to your Good Friends section

Stream View - latest items from all friends
When you click on the info icon it loads the original item on the right and the FF comments on the left, where you can post a comment
- sort by: newsest, oldest, unread, user, service, item text, comments, most liked, least liked
- hide duplicates

Just like NoiseRiver and Moopz you filter out entries by keyword, as well as user, service, hide read items, and hide “@” items

Mio News (via LG)

This turns Friendfeed into an RSS Reader, kind of reminds me of Spokeo.

On your subscription pane you have an icon to see your FF stream (mark as read).
You also have an icon for each friend, clicking this will stream the latest from a friend (mark as read).
You can group friends into folders, click on a folder will show you the latest from just those friends in that folder (mark as read).

But, you can’t filter your whole stream, a folder stream, or one friend by service.

This has an MS Outlook feel, as when you click on an item you see the full-text on the 3rd pane, from here you can:
- mark as read, share on FF (also share to your blog, twitter, and email), comment, like, hate, goto native item

There also a bookmarklet and blog and Twitter integration.

Lastly there is a “Topics” feature where you list keywords (also organise in folders)
- clicking on a keyword will display all items from your friends about that keyword (not sure if it’s “about” or just the appearance of the keyword)

At the moment you can’t view rooms, or share an item to a room.

This could be a replacement for Google Reader, it would be good if you could manually adds feeds from non-FF people so I don’t need two RSS Readers.

Related:
FriendFeed Rooms : Interactive topic streams
Friendfeed : social filter conversations

The May/June issue of Melcrum’s KM Review (subscription required) has an article by Raj Datta on the addiction to supply side KM.

Organisations that run on predictability encourage supply side KM, ie. KM practice that is focused on explicit knowledge (information) like best practices, lessons learnt, etc…personally I think this is information management. The idea is that capturing and documenting this information can be used for similar situations that arise in the future.

Raj mentions that this concept is focused on learning from the past, he says, “Demand, it’s assumed, is automatically created.”

He alludes to this being more a process of content management or information management, rather than KM.

This article isn’t focused on whether people actually visit these databases, but his tone assumes that people rather be connected to other people, having information coming to them, rather than search a database…shared context, peripheral knowledge, high abstraction, trust all come into that equation.

The focus of the article is on how we learn and innovate by generating a culture of knowledge creation.

An organisation run on predictability already has all the answers from the past, which is OK in a predictable and static market, and you are happy to not keep up with the cutting edge. But, he says:

“We may get so focused on analyzing the past and documenting every possible learning or best practice, that we may not foster creative design and focus on the future.”

The more likely scenario is that we live in a fast paced world, where we have to adapt with new and changing demands, and this requires a need to continually create new knowledge to add to the supply.

Common sense

This is common sense:

1. keep your solutions in a database that you can dip into in the future

2. we need to be agile and adapt to the market and respond by creating new solutions and capabilities which are in turn added to the database (responding to the market may involve using past information as well as creating new information).

The reason I say this is common sense is that we don’t live in a static world, no matter how much we try to control circumstances, life has plans of her own for us. So we need to adapt to this realisation, and respond.

Personally I don’t think the supply side view is seen as or considered to be a one-time program, but rather an ongoing process, so there is nothing really new here.
I mean there is no stage where you stop learning lessons, or refine your best practices (keep current and new contexts), so it seems normal you would collect this information and keep creating it, and keep collecting it.
Basically all the answers are not in our best practices database, we need to create new knowledge/information just as much as we store it.

But isn’t this natural, if you don’t have a stored answer, you have to create one…usually the problem is in knowing you already have an answer to prevent re-inventing the wheel.

The question is how do you make sure new knowledge is always being created?

How do you make sure you have an adaptive environment where you swim and don’t sink?

Not only that, but how well you swim?

That is, how do you go about effectively creating new knowledge?

Where do you focus your energy?

OK so now I get it.

The article is about how much time and energy we devote to:

Capturing and storing vs Knowledge flow

Hoping people will refer to it for future use vs Adapting, being aware and in the loop, and learning off each other (participation)

I think there is room for both.

I don’t really think this is Supply side store approach vs Demand side creation approach

I think the learning approach is balanced in itself, for example, a blogosphere, community of practice, social network are all examples of learning off each other and being aware, and creating knowledge, but at the same time you are sharing knowledge.

Perhaps we might say, is there a need to store and capture as much, as this happens by default anyway when you take a creative learning approach.

Even better, in a learning organisation you are aware of solutions as they happen, even if you have no use for them at the time. You can connect to people involved in the solutions, and you are connected to people in general. The act of participating gives more chance of solutions coming to you more easily…and as we mentioned earlier you have more of a chance of shared context and the peripheral information around a solution.

We don’t need to mention that by participating we have conversations and create and evolve ideas, become aware of ideas.

We can be pro-active and innovative.

I think this is what the article is all about; as well as adapting and storing information, we need a practice or ecosystem, like a university, where we perpetually learn and develop capabilities that can help us be more prepared when a problem arises. The more aware we are, and the more we know, the more chance we will have the skill or know-how in dealing with a situation or issue that comes to our plate.

Raj says:

“Companies that are able to foster knowledge creation, alongside the more traditional view of KM, are able to strike a balance between effectiveness and efficiency and between innovation and productivity. This is a necessary condition for longevity in a global knowledge economy.” This can all happen with participation enabling tools.

It is mentioned that a good indicator for focus on innovation is to see how ideas generate, evolve and eventuate in an organisation…R&D shouldn’t be the only department that is innovative.