Library clips

Thought I’d share a few slides from a presentation I’m giving at work on Communities of Practice (CoP) from a knowledge management perspective.

My aim was to contrast traditional KM of conscripting best practices, with a new approach based on sensemaking pkm and networks…more appropriate tools, design for emergence and ambient awareness, and amplifying how we get things done offline…basically a more cognitive science approach over management science.

A great deal of my visual concept is based on the work of Dave Snowden, who looks at KM from a more anthropological, human behaviour perspective…a lot of his work deals with the notion of “context”, and I guess this is coupled with “intrinsic” motivation or engagement.

I also borrowed from a model by Shell on the concept of a Global Network (CoP), shown to me by Mark Bennett from Learning Collaboration.

Basically, from another perspective, I’m trying to do in 2 slides what T Systems did in 26 out of the 51 slides of their brilliant slidedeck, The revolution of knowledge part1

KM as blood bank

I also really like Mark Bennett’s symbolic way of thinking about it like a blood bank (taking and giving blood)

• Sense-making and asking questions (taking blood)
• Blogging/Sharing/Peer Assist and reflective KM like AAR, Lessons (giving blood)

Sense-making KM and CoPs - Just-in-time vs Just-in-case

The following slides are a contrast to supply-side KM, or just-in-case KM.

Also note this is KM from a Community of Practice perspective, as that’s what’s relevant to my day job. I guess one day I can alter them to include other KM activities and a more network perspective.

Sensekmaking KM and CoPs - Just-in-time vs Just-in-case

Different ways of engaging knowledge

Related to this sense-making concept of people and context in the just-in-time KM model is Nancy Dixon’s model on the different types of knowledge needs or interactions, in relation to: the level of cognitive diversity required, the degree of relationship (tie/trust) with others to source that information, facilitation/support, and the social computing tools that can create conditions for sense-making.

Embedded KM

Another related post is on Embedded KM by Andrew Gent.

I think knowledge sharing can be done as it happens (blogs, wikis, etc..) but also as a reflection (anecdote circles, AAR, etc..), and it’s the latter that Andrew is thinking about…how best to share lessons and good practices from one project to the next. Since the project is over, people don’t put great emphasis or care on reviewing it, as they are busy moving on to the next project, so Andrew talks about embedding this so it doesn’t seem a chore.

But he also makes a very relevant point to the heart of KM and motivation. When capturing information it has to become usable, and this takes effort on the contributor to make it findable, otherwise it’s up to the user to find the content and make it relevant to them. To make it usable and relevant takes too much effort for return, it has low intrinsic motivation for the contributors.

The challenge is a sweetspot where it’s usable enough, and contributing is simple enough…and what do you know, this works best as conversation, as we get sharing and context. And Andrew has an embedded way to trigger this reflective conversation as a part of an organisational process.

Andrew says:

“Rather than trying to make all project knowledge available to anyone, what if we simply try to expand the current knowledge base incrementally over time? Rather than collecting the review documents, why not include at least one reviewer from an unrelated project to each review? This could be an architect, implementer, or project manager as long as that person can provide an objective, outside view of the project progress.”

“…the outside reviewer helps to keep the project team “honest”. It is easy for internal reviews to become formulaic rubber stamp events if those involved are all working on the project.They do not have enough distance to see hidden pitfalls and will resist calling foul on people they have to work with on a daily basis.”

“…including outsiders gives at least one person a much more indepth and personal knowledge than could ever be gained by reading a set of historical documents with no one to explain them. Another value from a KM perspective is the opportunity the reviewer and the project team have to exchange knowledge, hints, and tips on the fly and in context of the discussion.”

“…the program then becomes essentially self-managing from a KM perspective. The project management teams are responsible for ensuring outside reviewers are included and with each review, little by little, knowledge is shared across the organization.”

Competitive vs Collaborative culture

The micro intentions or local behaviour involved in the the Just-in-time vs Just-in-case concept actually emerge a macro picture…and that’s a change in the internal dynamics of an organisation from a competitive to collaborative organisation…perhaps from teams to crews.

Why?

We create the conditions for engagement, transparency, agility, trust and awareness…where knowledge sharing becomes a magical by-product….not creating a knowledge sharing culture, rather creating conditions for one to emerge.

I know it’s about the people, not the tools, but it’s important to understand the design thinking involved…these new tools are designed for the people, where we can now achieve the original aims of KM. The use of these tools can be a catalyst for change. For more on this see my posts, Has KM died, and resurrected as social computing?, Knowledge and its facilitators.

You could say social computing is a bottom-up strategy (and is has total effect when enterprise-wide), but I think we can also have a top-down strategy, because no matter how enabled workers can be to express and converse in the open, they will be hesitant, feel unsafe, uncomfortable and not confident if this new type of enterprise interaction is not promoted or pushed from the top.

NOTE: social computing is not just bottom-up, managers can seed crowdsourcing/opinion/reviews

A while back I posted, Is knowledge sharing all about your pay cheque? (which was amplified by Stewart Mader).

In this post I contrasted a picture where people are influenced to share or hoard depending on how their performance is viewed from senior management.
If you are appraised on your personal output, then you will hoard and not collaborate as much as you have an incentive to own all the output, forgoing a more quality or optimum deliverable, than if you were to leverage the talent of the organisation.
On the other hand if you are appraised on a group output (how much you collaborate, your effectiveness in networking with the optimum people for your tasks) then this will instill a less competitive culture due to more knowledge sharing and collaboration. This is a cleverly designed strategy as the the workers themselves will be pushing quality from others as they all hold each other accountable…a culture of interdependency.

I really like how Stewart put it:

“People are used to thinking of their workday activities as indirectly affecting the bottom-line because the competition model essentially keeps the average employee in the dark about how things really work, or how healthy the organization is. The sharing model makes it much clearer, so the average employee can see the impact of her or his work.”

Betrand Duperrin also parallels these thoughts:

“They would be more efficient if they helped each other? But in order to get a good evaluation and the related rewards and bonuses they have, in the best case, to ignore each other, in the worse case to play the one against another.”

Learned behaviour

Beyond performance appraisals, what about a top-down message about the importance of connection and collaboration, just like the way organisations drill the message of quality and safety.

When I attended Mark Bennett’s masterclass on CoPs, he mentioned that safety is a learned behaviour (people are irrational and do unsafe things like drink driving, etc), and quality is a learned behaviour (people take shortcuts and ignore procedures and processes like emailing a document to a client for review, rather than sending through a formal transmittal via document control), and so to, collaboration can be a learned behaviour.

But I don’t think the result of this would be as effective in a fundamental way.

• If you are unsafe, you risk getting sued, bad accidents cause a bad reputation with clients, contractors and workers.
• If you are of low quality, you cut corners for short term gain, long term loss, and perhaps risk litigation.
• If you have low collaboration, you risk a less optimum job, low awareness and transparency and communication leads to low cooperation and cohesiveness, and you are less agile to adapt to change.

All three have bad consequences if ignored

• The first two is a risk in reputation, but also a benchmark risk, and more importantly the consequences are very meaty-litigation, death.
• The last one also is a risk in reputation (losing or not winning deals because of bad information flow does effect reputation/attractiveness), the industry benchmark is still a young thing in relation to collaboration, BUT unlike the others the consequences are not as meaty, no-one dies, we don’t get sued.

So I think because the consequences of not being collaborative don’t show explicitly like someone being hurt, and losing face (as this is seen as a quality process issue rather than collaboration/information flow), then we tend to be more reactive, or it takes a back seat in our attention. You still get work done not being collaborative (you do suffer later in frustration as you can’t find stuff or you aren’t aware of something you should be aware of), it’s just all these micro interactions, lead to a big picture of not being agile, and attractive to a client…if they can’t get their s*!t together, how are they gonna service us.

Getting an internal Facebook (social network and group feature) is a standalone tool, it has nothing to do with the Intranet, does it?

Unless you can structure it yourself like Nathan Wallace did with a Confluence wiki…not sure if SocialText can achieve a similar thing, but I believe OpenText Social Media, Lotus Connections, Jive, Awareness, Traction, Telligent, Connectbeam, and more suites made of components rather than designed as an Intranet.

Getting an internal Facebook that is designed as an Intranet replacement is more like Intranet 2.0, and seems to be what ThoughtFarmer are doing.

I suppose the third category would be to alter your existing Intranet by mashing in these types of features.

The latest Neilsen report on the social intranet says a few interesting things on this point:

“It’s important to integrate social features with the main intranet to avoid burdening users with double work.”

“That said, several of our case studies successfully implemented a staged approach, initially separating social features from the main intranet because of their different design and feel. Eventually, these features should be integrated, ideally as part of a bigger project to redesign the entire portal.”

I guess the difference I’m making here is that these new social network/group tools are mainly about connecting and collaborating, whereas Intranets are usually about profile information on each unit, heavily used tools and links, and news from teams to the rest of the organisation.

In this sense it seems designed tools like Thoughfarmer are combing the best of both worlds:

Doing work/finding stuff

• individual connecting with the organisation
• individual sensemaking
• collaborate in groups

Company information, tools and news

• make a profile page for your team with links to lots of info and what you are about…and also news your team wants to share with the organisation
• find common tools and links (timesheets, repositories, etc…)
• a company homepage as the pivot point

This is taking us back to the true meaning of Intranet (via Matthew Hodgson), rather then the hijacked, vetted, static, one-to-many tool it became.

“Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information”

Matthew then explains it’s relationship with early KM efforts:

“…the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed”

“The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.”

Related

KM: Round 2.0
KM 2.0 is about “showing your workings out”
Is publish a dirty word in enterprise 2.0

The other day when I posted on social networks and ad-hoc groups, I mentioned these online tools need to mirror both our offline behaviour, and our online real-time behaviour.

I set the scenario that at work there may be a task or initiative which involves people from many departments.

What usually happens is everyone gets invited to a meeting: in a room, via a telecon, or something like webex (we now use MS Office Communicator).

After the meeting the coordinator will go back to their seat, document the minutes in MSword and send an email attachment.

Then various people use email to do their bit.

Then we reconvene in a new meeting to see where everyone is at.

This is hopeless; I say when we go back to our seats we can still assimilate the real-time room (meeting) environment in an asynchronous fashion.

This makes for better communication, coordination and awareness…and transparency by default.

After the meeting someone can create a group space and invite all members as quick as sending an email.

Here they will find the minutes in a wiki, each page has a comments stream.

Here they will find a question space (just like issues raised in the meeting)

Here they will find a blog to post updates about the part they are working on.

Well, look at that, we can do asynchronously, what we usually do when we are in the same room.

This online tool is a social network with ad-hoc groups, where you have your own “mypage” that lists all groups you are working in, even better if you can post to any of the groups from your page.

Integration

A good way for adopting new practices is in the design and integration with existing tools.

Just like Jon Mell describes less use of email by incorporating IM into email (placing it in the same spot where you create a new email)…what I would like to see at the end of an Office Communicator Live Meeting, is to be able to spin this real-time (synchronous) ad-hoc group into an asynchronous ad-hoc group using a social network and group tool. Somehow both tools would be integrated, making jumping from one to the other the obvious thing to do; rather than using email for asynchronous communication and coordination.

People often find email conversation frustrating so it’s decided we need another meeting…with the correct asynchronous tools you don’t need so many meetings as we can use blogs to communicate, forums to discuss and wikis to collaborate on a perpetual basis…I alluded to this use case for teams a while back.

BTW-Why is Outlook not an internal Facebook and MS Office Communicator an internal Twitter?

Like my last post, design is key to influencing new behaviours.

More from Jon Mell:

“…there is no reason why at the front end we cannot combine communication tools at the presentation layer so that people don’t have to think as much about how they are going to communicate and which tools they are going to use. There is a scale here in terms of how advanced people are in their adoption and usage of Enterprise 2.0. Once people are comfortable with the concept of Enterprise 2.0 then they will naturally and intuitively know which tools to use without thinking. At the initial adoption stage, however, putting guidance and pointers in the flow of existing tools can have a significant impact in terms of alleviating any fears of using a new system. Some users may always stay in this mode, where they need the system to do the thinking for them in terms of which tools to use, and others may move to a position where the thinking becomes more intuition.”

Nancy White has a post called Communities, networks and what sits in between, which links to a video with herself and the effervescent Robin Good…I am intrigued by the sweet spot between networks and communities.

I’m not too sure about this middle, or whether it’s to the side…or what…

Is it aggregation?

eg. twitter hash tag channels?

These are not communities, yet people in the network understand to tag their tweets with a conference name so we have a bucket…we are acting like a group, but we are really are not a group at all.

Same goes with a topic news page based on sources that often post about this topic

eg. Nancy and I are part of the Communities and Networks Connection website…our posts are aggregated on the same page, yet we are not a group.

What about “social groupings”?

People that bought this book also bought.
People that also read this book.
People that also use this tag
Even self-organising directories you see on Twitter like wefollow
People in your city that are also vegetarian

Imagine if you could search match the Facebook info page, and do things like “show me people in my network who are also born in 1972″

I made a stupidly long post on this 18 months ago, see Networks, Communities and aggregation

Ad-hoc groups

A wall we are hitting at work is the need for ad-hoc group spaces to work on something rather than using email.

Lots of people belong to CoPs, but when it comes to working on a task with diverse people we get stuck…we could choose to nominate a CoP, but we’d rather an on-the-fly room. I explained this scenario in this post, Communities of Practice and discussions with non-Members

Some questions that come up when thinking about using an existing CoP is:

- whose CoP should we use to do this task
- not sure if people in my CoP will like me inviting temp members
- only people interested in the CoP topic should be members
- the CoP should not be used for unrelated stuff
- this task space would be buried too deep in the CoP , it really deserves it’s own URL so it’s more findable

The issue is that our CoPs are empowering as we can work in a communal space…when we have work to do with another bunch of people we naturally want to use a communal space to do this work, so we resort to our CoP tools as they are our only choice…but as explained a CoP, just like a team, is a shared space for a group of people based around a topic/function…these spaces are not too be abused to do unrelated stuff.

We use OpenText for our CoPs (and for Document Management for that matter), and for the past 3 months have been piloting their new Social Media product (in the realm of Jive, Lotus Connections, SocialText). Similar to the concept of Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s a social network with a groups feature. Our position is that our CoPs tool is more long term, stable, portal like, learning and sharing (looks like a website, with lots of permissions control and unlimited wikis, blogs and forums). Whereas the groups application is more simple/generic, it will be more for ad-hoc tasks/collaboration.

eg. I need to do task A - I need input from someone in marketing, IT, engineering, HR to help me on this task.
In less then 30 seconds I create a group space and invite these members. Here we can talk in a forum, upload documents, and use a wiki. Perhaps after a couple of months the task is finished.

The key is I need to instantly set up a space and communicate and coordinate a task. It’s there to see forever (corporate memory). Managers can actually now see how people do work (which was formerly happening in closed email). Plus the rest of the company can have an ambient awareness of what everyone is doing, leading to more cooperation, and adaptiveness.

This couples with the concept of disintermediation, where senior managers can connect to the raw fragments and workings out of a solution. And of course being able to recombine these fragments in other contexts.

I alluded to this in Twitter the other day:

“In KM 1.0 all we had was the expert song (best practice), in KM 2.0 “we” have all the separate layers to remix the song into new contexts “

Sameer Patel, riffed on it:

“@johnt so true. i was going to use the ingredients vs a complete dish analogy in my last post about ECM & E20″

This is what he referred to:

“When you layer in social computing concepts at the early stages of content creation, you have the ability to encourage such uses of raw ingredients (or social objects). These social objects, previously hidden in an access controlled CMS environment are now unlocked via social computing concepts and tools. The beauty is that they can now be work in progress for some, finished product for others that participate or discover it, or can be interpreted in totally different ways, never intended by the original participants.”

Not to mention the social network part where we can discover (serendipity/opportunities), and connect with a diversity of people…much more alive than the Global Address List (GAL) in Outlook. We can discover each other on social networks, and these relationships can lead to us collaborating on stuff…it just makes sense having social networks and a group module in the same application.

See Cheryl McKinnon’s post, Making Enterprise 2.0 Real. My Story of the “No E-Mail Beta Program”.

This is why I see enterprise products like OpenText Social Media cutting into the use of Outlook. In Outlook we have a GAL and do our group work, however messy and cumbersome it is, now with new tools we can replace the GAL function and the group work function.

Email is private by default, and if all we use is email, then our organisational activity is private by default…same goes with meetings…so at the moment organisational communication and coordination is a slave to inferior technology (non-conducive to the knowledge age).

We have our business units (functional), our teams (execute), our communities of practice (learn)…but what has been lacking online is mirroring the behaviour in how we work offline ie. ad-hoc groups from diverse parts of the organisation assembling in meetings to achieve an objective…and then this is where the mirror should appear, in that we go back to our seats and rather than use email use social networks and group spaces.

Looking at the bigger picture Larry Hawes (riffs off Sameer Patel) posts on how ad-hoc conversational work fits into the ECM picture:

“…social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.”

[ADDED 12/08/09: “There is something simply wonderful about a directory of people. And then enabling people to make the directory social. You quickly find not only the people, but who they are, who knows who, and who is paying attention to who. You can surface what people are working on. Groups that exist are made visible, and new groups form easily.” - Ross Mayfield]

Related
Activity-Centric Collaboration: Google Wave and Activities in Lotus Connections

A little while ago I talked about not so much groupware, but a middle space, moreso activityware, where you create an object and invite people to add to it. I was looking for something where a conversation could revolve around a task object. You can do this on a wiki (with comments) or Google Docs (with comments), but the more robust tools I came across were Traction, Basecamp, and Activities on Lotus Connections.

The latter is a little different as it’s an on-the-fly tool to perform and coordinate tasks/conversations similar to email, but with less annoyance…sometimes called Activity-Centric Collaboration. From the screencast I find IBM’s Activities in tune with human behaviour. I have a task to do, I create a space, and interactions with people who help me, take place in a open task thread. But the beauty is they can add to the thread with a multitude of objects, they can answer a screenshot with an email, answer an email with a doc, answer a doc with an IM…it’s a thread made up of different objects.

Finally a task/conversation lives at a URL…but it’s not a blog, wiki, forum, online doc, but instead a task/conversation thread that can be made up of elements from different object types.

In email you have to reply with an email, you have to reply to an IM with an IM, you have to reply to a blog post with a comment, etc… Things are changing, now we can have a generic thread where the conversation elements can be made up of various formats.

This is important as we are not tied to one technology when contributing to the space. Currently if I’m in an email thread, but need immediacy for the next reply I will IM…and there you have it, I have just broken the conversation into scattered pieces. And the conversation doesn’t live at an open URL anyway.

I’m finding tools like IBM’s Activites and Google Wave as the new email/IM/attachments space…where conversations take place using a multitude of tools, are threaded in an open place, and don’t have to take place in an existing group space, but instead can be created on-the-fly when the activity arises. This is totally in tune with how we behave as it has very low barriers to start something, and to contribute, in fact it has the ease of email, but is less frustrating in coordinating…which means these spaces may just be the next killer app to solve our annoyance with current tools like email when trying to do tasks/collaborate.

As you can see, you don’t have to prior belong to a team or group, it’s on-the-fly creation of a collaboration space, which is increasingly important in the more role based networked organisation that we are moving towards. It’s more about interactions revolving around an activity, rather than general sharing or that activity having to take place in a best fit prescribed place eg. an existing CoP or team space (which is dire when the people you want to collaborate with aren’t on your team or CoP).
We need more process centric methods in enterprise social computing to make way for the acceptance of more opportunistic tools such as social networks. And for ease of use, we want to contribute via lots of tools eg. a bookmarklet, and as Jon Mell says (in reference to sending an IM via email), don’t make me think…and we want updates delivered any which way.

Basically what is happening is the technology, and what and how we want to achieve our aims, has become a tool designed for human behaviour. I have a task or start a conversation, I can do this from any app I’m in, others can reply from any app they are in, we are updated from the app of our choosing, the thread lives at a central open place…again “we don’t have to think, we just act”.

As Dave Snowden says:

“Technology is a tool and like all tools it should fit your hand when you pick it up, you shouldn’t have to bio-re-engineer your hand to fit the tool”

We find we need an activityware tool at work, as our online communities are not so much for specific tasks, you need to be a member of the community, and you can’t really create them at your disposable for a small task. What we do use is email, or a forum, or a wiki, but an activity space brings the thread together, accepts various object types in the thread, and membership is not based on requirements outside of the task.

Google Wave

I haven’t seen the Google Wave videos, but from reading blog posts and screenshots I get the idea, here are some posts.

Wave is the future of the Enterprise
Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?
Google Wave: A Complete Guide
The Top 6 Game-Changing Features of Google Wave
Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email
Twave: Google Wave + Twitter
Sergey Brin: Google Wave Will Set A New Benchmark For Interactivity
Live With The Google Wave Creators
Exclusive: Video Interview With The Google Wave Founders
Google Wave: The Full Video From Google IO
Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Lotus Connections Activities

NOTE: this is part of a blog post I drafted 2 years ago but never got round to posting.

The paper Activity management as a Web service is focused on integration of various clients and using various clients to action things, and having it all managed in the Wax collaborative activity web service. The beauty of it is that when starting an activity you can go look for content where ever it lies and bring it into the system, like an activity gateway or portal page…this again reminds me of widgets of information from elsewhere, and the widget is dynamically updated at the same time as the original. Read the rest about the task flow features.

The above paper is related to another article, Beyond predictable workflows: Enhancing productivity in artful business processes, which also explains the two ends of the specturum, using email for collaborative activities is clunky and not contextual, and using a centralised workflow system is to rigid and is not flexible to encompass the intricate flavours of all situations, there is calling to allow room for “artful processes” and a requirement is the “democratization of process”. Moving from here are more people focused, community or group based systems that have a more flexible bottom up approach (this also has the bonus of allowing innovation to sprout).

The most relevant paper would be, Activity Explorer: Activity-centric collaboration from research to product. The Activity-centric collaboration style:

It delves into the Activity Explorer client based on activity being a thread of objects.
An activity thread can start with any object (file, chat, screenshot, etc…), someone may be notified by their prefered alert mechanism (also a current area of study about attention delivery, alert, urgency, etc…), this person will reply to the thread with any object, automatically notifying the original person and so on.

The power is that you can collaborate in real-time or asynchronously within the activity, it becomes a shared thread that harnesses different object types, all without needing a meeting or entering a dedicated group share tool.

Their example, just shows how simple it can be to initiate and action an activity (task) in one simple thread with multiple people without even having to be f2f, and by using a combination of external tools integrated into the one simple display screen.

Here’s the brief on the scenario:

NOTE: to create a new object in the thread, you just right click on the previous object

1. Celine starts a new activity by dragging a file into Susan’s name
2. Celine adds a 2nd object (via a right-click on the 1st object); this 2nd object is a message note asking for Susan’s comments
3. Susan is alerted via her systems tray, clicking it takes her to the thread
4. Celine sees Susan is reading the message via an online presence indicator on that object
5. Celine clicks on the message object and initiates a 3rd object being a chat (popping up a box on Susan’s screen)
“Celine wants to clarify about an image detail in the file”
6. Celine creates a a 4th object being a shared snapshot (popping up a snapshot on Susan’s screen)
7. They annotate the image in real-time (like a whiteboard)
8. They invite their boss, Ming, into the chat (popping up a box on Ming’s screen)
- Ming has only got access to the chat object and the shared snapshot object
and so on…

As you can see this diverts or the lessens cognitive stress of deciding which tool to use to start and action a task. A discussion may start on chat, and then be moved to email, and then to some kind of groupware…and it’s not always easy to move information from system to system. Another benefit is information pertaining to the activity is already organised into one thread or view as a result of the process.

From the paper:

“…a single collaborative activity is often managed with multiple collaboration tools and technologies at different levels of formality. These can include e-mail, chat, wikis […] This diversity means that people must monitor and participate in multiple shared venues, spreading their attention and their effort across multiple media. Even if they succeed at this context management task, they still face the difficulty of having to determine the scale of any new collaborative activity in order to select the best medium.”

“The technical goal of activity-centric collaboration is to bridge these gaps of rigidity and tool boundaries by horizontally integrating different collaboration tools and technologies through the concept of a work activity.”

The Activity Explorer is further referred to in the paper, Business activity patterns: A new model for collaborative business applications.

Another great paper about creating more flexible processes is, Ethnographic study of collaborative knowledge work.

As you can see IBM are right into communication and collaboration processes based around people and tool flexibility and bringing all this together in one interface full of connected components, instead of a centralised top down system.

The Clipper Group has a review on the whole Lotus Connections Suite.

Last year, The Connections Blog posted about one of Luis Suarez’s email detox posts, which references my post on re-purposing email.

Related posts:

Activity-Based Computing
Activity-Based Computing
Lotus Connections Activities Demo Video
Activity-based Computing Moves Forward at Lotus Connections
Comprehensive Tour of Lotus Connections
Activities in Connections 2.0
When disaster strikes, create an Activity!
Using Activities to plan your Lotusphere Session

Complements social networks

What I like about all this, is that it complements social networks. I use the network to find profiles (beehive) and read up on people (their microblog, blog, bookmarks, CoPs, etc.), or maybe they are already a contact, then I invite them into my activity. I wonder what move Google will take towards networks, maybe Google Profiles, I do have my Gmail contacts, but I need to go to their space and see what their all about, at the moment this is ruled by Friendfeed, Facebook, LinkedIn.

I guess why I call this middlespace/ware is that you have groupware like Communities of Practice, then you have social networks, and I find ad-hoc activity spaces somewhere in the middle. So I guess this is related to my post, How relevant are communities of practice in a network age?.

As I mentioned earlier this middlespace or activity collaboration is paralleling with the move to a role based organisation where we are connected in social networks and assemble together for activities and disband.

Where does workstreamr come into all this.

NOTE: to clear something up with another way the term “activity” is being used of late. The Facebook newsfeed has been dubbed an “activity feed” as it feeds you the latest on what people you are following have published on their profiles and elsewhere, and what other actions they have been doing in the network, what their friends have been commenting on their profiles, as well as stuff done to you (notifications).