Library clips

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).

Here’s an excerpt from a one page flyer I’m doing for Communities of Practice at our work:

“We like to think that people in our [firm] are more than their job title describes, we all have many talents, and we all have many needs to draw on each others talent. This is what we call ’social productivity.”

NOTE: I got the term “Social Productivity” from Sam Lawrence.

Basically, if I only had my team to rely on to get things done, I would not be as effective or be able to deliver things of optimum value. Why? Because my team doesn’t know everything. I need to be able to tap into people outside my team for advice and help. This is what we do everyday at work, we network with others to get our work done…without our informal network we would be at a loss.

Further to this, there are lots of people in other teams and offices that I don’t know who have great expertise; we need to explore and discover people, and tune our ambient awareness. We need some horizontal glasses to discover these people, and these glasses are social networks (and blogs). Mostly by the strength of weak ties and potential connections, in our ambient awareness.

And of course from this we are capitalising on opportunities, and there emerges an element of self organisation and autonomy. Basically we are making the most of what our collective organisation knows by tapping into it via a participation network structure. There’s lots more benefits like re-use (cost), innovation, opportunities, cooperation, communication, collaboration, awareness, adapt to change, knowledge transfer and retention, talent retention (feeling of belonging, heard, advancing career prospects), etc…

I read something related to this today by Paul Iske, head of KM for ABN Amro bank.

Here’s an excerpt:

“What proportion of your talent, ideas and experience are used in your job?
What percentage of your intellectual capital do you use?
The survey results came back with the response that 70 percent of staff felt that only 15 to 20 percent of their intellectual capital was being used. With 100,000 staff around the globe, this amounts to a significant amount of untapped potential for the organisation”

From this aspect talent and knowledge management is about opportunities and the way (method) to capitalise on them to benefit productivity, and effectiveness of workers, groups, and the organisation.

Is your Organization Talent Ready?

Margaret Schweer has an excellent post, Is your Organization Talent Ready?, referring to:

“…what are the most important competencies (skills, knowledge, experience, behaviors) for organizations today and tomorrow? That’s a very tricky question because creating capability is a continuous journey - there is no steady state for talent readiness, particularly given the current pace of change in technology, our workforce demographics, and in the global economy. “Forward looking” leaders are always in the hunt for talent with key capabilities in anticipation of the organization needs, especially in times of uncertainty. Newly developed, purchased, or even borrowed capabilities can become important inflection points for an organization . . . a way to seize unique opportunities ahead of competitors.”

This relates to a post of mine, Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0. In that post I link to and quote Jay Cross’s pithy explanation, here’s some of it again:

“The rear view mirror no longer reflects the future. Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions. That’s an entirely new learning agenda, for it means putting enough trust in workers to give them the wheel””

Margaret goes on to say:

“In our practice we are seeing the current economy accelerate profound changes in the fundamental structure and operating principles of organizations. These changes are challenging people to behave in different ways . . . requiring new capabilities.?”

Reading this; social computing, networks, and the whole social productivity movement is perhaps a response or a need to cope with our current fast-paced economy…effectiveness is the new efficiency (or the new ‘black’ as some would say).

Social computing is a coping mechanism and enterprise 2.0 is what one day may eventually result.

Some more brilliant gems from Margaret:

“Many of us are transitioning away from job to roles based on work for some portion of our organization. This is an important paradigm shift for leaders – ownership for talent is shared. Talent needs to be flexibly deployed against the areas of highest value for the organization.”

“The ability to structure work and talent in a flexible fashion increases the organization’s ability to rapidly and effectively respond to needs in times of crisis or opportunity.”

“…collaboration allows the organization to accomplish tasks or create new business offerings in ways that could not have anticipated or even attempted with traditional organizational structures.”

This rings a sympathetic vibration with the self organisation and autonomy that can result from a system where people are discovering, connecting, conversing, etc (a networked organisation). In this type of enterprise your profile page is like your living resume, you become your own person for hire, tasks/jobs you like will gravitate towards you, as you will be visible and known…just beware the numerati.

Simply said, we are too hidden in a hierarchy based organisation. As a result the organisation is not tapping into know-how. It just sounds silly that within your place you have ten experts for the job at hand, but you don’t even know of them, or of their talent (kick yourself).
By allowing workers to be visible and network online as we do offline, all these connections will percolate, and make visible everyone’s talent. This is not giving management some sort of x-ray vision, this happens in a distributed way, where everyone together as a result of their networking, will by default leave tracemarks of who know’s what? who’s connected to who?

Employee Engagement

Related to this topic is for employees to participate, and feel heard, for them to gravitate to work they like and enjoy, as the company equally wants something out of them…this mutual benefit brings more happiness, purpose, and increases career opportunities.

Even more so for GenY; if you aren’t on Facebook, you just don’t exist. Online they have their profile real estate where they connect and are known. When they join the workforce this ethos is missing. It’s like watching DVD’s all your life, and now you have to start watching VHS…it’s going backwards…did I just say organisational structures are backwards and colleague student structures know where it’s at

I like this excerpt from the slidedeck below:

“An engaged person brings creativity, passion and energy to the job; they proactively drive change, deliver business results and infect others with their enthusisasm. They are achieving their full potential.”

Being social at work

Matthew Hodgson as always as a post on the behavioural side of things.

A high performance team requires knowledge sharing rather than hoarding, as high group performance depends on each individual performing well. The next step is to have a high performance organisation, where this happens between teams.

From Matthew’s post:

“Taylorist management practices in particular only focus on those things that are measurable and directly associated with the task rather than understanding whether or not social interaction is of benefit to the task at hand. The result is seen in many modern managers who believe that their employees need to be busy and not wasting time (where wasting time equals socialising).”

“MIT research shows that 40% of creative teams productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information. In other MIT studies, research shows that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues.”

“Since information does not diffuse randomly in organisations, but rather reflects the nature and structure of human relationships, providing the right tools that support human social relationships, communication and interaction, will provide a significant ROI to the enterprise.”

Jordan Frank also pitches in his thoughts…but more on an ROI roundup another day.

Something that also fits in here is Boyd’s Law (by Stowe Boyd):

“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…

On a work basis, businesses today want it (or think they want it) both ways. They want their employees to be personally productive, making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope.”

The other day I commented on a post that kind of sums this up, in that part of our job performance needs to be measured on the “value” of our social interactions (network/collaborative), in this way it will be motivating people to network, and share. Performance measures or employee worthiness based on this criteria would promote organisational effectiveness and adaptability. Along with social work as top-down strategy or mantra that is as serious as safety and quality. The business needs to walk the walk, and middle managers and senior managers need to be on the same page, otherwise knowledge workers are confused about the mixed message of how they should balance efficiency and effectiveness, and the conflict that may arise when they try to practice effectiveness.

Ross Dawson points to a recent study on the positive productivity results of organisational online networks, in his post Largest ever organizational network analysis shows how social networks drive performance. I’ll think I’ll blog about this in a future post on the ROI of organisational online networks.

Amplified network effects

Let’s top this blog post off with an excerpt from an article by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, called Introducing the Collaboration Curve. It’s about the concept of network effects which I’ve mentioned before in my post, Communities don’t rely on network effects to be successful. What is I like about it is the concept of value increases when there are more players, but when those players are people there is an additional amplifying effect.

An example used is the World of Warcraft as a knowledge economy.

Do you think these guys have even heard of knowledge management?

They probably haven’t; what some of us call KM or sense-making is what these participants have embedded in their way of being.

If it’s effortless and a way of being, is there such thing as KM?

Does KM only exist until it finally becomes absorbed into the psyche, and then vanishes into the fabric?

I posed some of this thought in my posts, Has KM died, and resurrected as social computing?, and Knowledge and its facilitators.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt:

“There’s a classic story in economics primers illustrating the power of network effects. It tells how the first fax machine gave little value to its owner–after all, there was no one else with whom to send and receive faxes. As time went by, however, the value of that first machine increased as other people bought fax machines, and soon its owner could send faxes to the far corners of the earth, and receive them in return.

Fax machines, of course, don’t perform better as you add more of them to a network. But people and institutions do. And that’s where the concept of network effects gets more interesting–when we apply it to how people might perform better.”

[ADDED 28/04/09 : Susan Boyle: A Lesson in Talent Management - “Good managers help their employees succeed in whatever role they happen to be in. Great managers see the unique talents of each employee, and then create the role that’s a perfect vehicle for those talents. Great managers remove the obstacles that prevent their employees from unleashing their talent. And they make sure each employee has the right opportunities, the right stage, the right audience, to be fully appreciated.”]

[ADDED 29/04/09 : 5 Predictions for the Future of Collaboration - “At Cisco, we believe that the rigidly structured silos that were traditionally put in place in most enterprises will give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities of experts. Increasingly, companies will rely on Collaboration Networks that bring together “clusters of experts” to get critical projects completed. These groups will form dynamically to achieve a shared outcome. This self-organizing cycle repeats itself on an ongoing basis, as the need arises. It’s both efficient and effective, in part because experts are drawn to projects and are thus motivated — rather than being “assigned” in a top-down fashion”]

[ADDED 06/05/09: Aggregative or emergent identity? Rethinking Communities - “In effect and individual was, within the team a collection of orientations that existing not in the individual in isolation, but in individuals as a result of their interaction with other members of the team, the history of that team and the context of their work. If one person left, you didn’t necessarily look at replacing that person, but you looked at the orientations, or balance of the team in consequence. If for example that individual was the only one with a primary completer-finisher orientation (one of the Belbin roles and the name speaks for itself), then it was likely that individuals with that as a secondary orientation would start to change their interactions with the team before you could achieve any replacement. In effect with were treating the team as a complex system, not as an aggregation of the qualities of the individuals.”

[ADDED 06/05/09: Video Conferencing Uptake Is Really About Changing Role of Organizations - “I believe we are nearing the time when entire organizations will make that same shift of perspective. Hierarchical command and control structures already have (mostly) given way to matrixed organizations. The next step in organizational evolution will be the formation of networks of individuals who work together to solve a specific business challenge, and then disband. The organization will support their endeavors by providing the assets and services listed above. Organizations will endure only as long as they can continue to form networks of knowledge workers and supply the assets and services those workers need.

How do I know this? I already work for such an organization!”]

Social search is resurfacing as a hot topic of late, due to how effective Twitter has become in helping you find information, and how it is close to how we source information in the offline world (via our network). Twitter is being differentiated by being called a “Help Engine“.

I think it’s getting us closer to the KM productivity (sense-making) aim that knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer has always aspired to, which is:

• finding the right information at the right time
• re-frame that information to be usable in your context and situation
• by connecting you to a social network of people you trust who will be willing to help out in a reciprocal relationship
  (which also helps out in the re-contextualising process as you share a common wavelength or level understanding with people in your network)
• learning organisation, information re-use, and corporate memory

From a particular perspective, the search experience is broken into three aspects:

• searching the web, searching within a website, and searching our network
• clarifying by reading and writing comments, and trackback/linkback blog posts
• asking a question within a website, within our network

Search for:

• facts/reference
• research a topic
• learning
• latest news about a topic
• looking for a particular thing
  - you may not know if it exists or not
  - you may have little information in hand to go by (exploratory search)
• ask a question
  - to find something
  - about stuff you have found to get more context

Socialness to findability list

Google’s PageRank is based on a referral model, so technically this is social search
- also comment/rank search results, also see Wikia
* based on whole web

Recommendations that are implicit based on your participation eg. Amazon recommendations
* based on content in a website

Google Blog Search (also Technorati, Backtype) is similar to PageRank
- but the point here is that the content is blogs which are a social ecosystem where you have distributed conversations (trackbacks/linkbacks), and leave comments
* based on whole web

Tag aggregators like Technorati Tags
- blog posts from the web filed by author generated tags
* based on whole web

Topic/blog aggregators
- a selection of curated sources
* based on another person’s selection

How-to sites like Instructables
* based on content in a website

Topic sites like Squidoo, and topic wikis
* based on another person’s selection
* based on content in a website

Review sites like Blippr
* based on your social network
* based on content in a website

Regular sites that have user reviews like TripAdvisor
* based on content in a website

Wikipedia is different to a regular topic site as the whole web can communally grow it
* based on the communal (people generated) web
* based on content in a website

Google Reader extends the concept of Google Blog Search in that I can create vertical people engines and subscribe to them.
- when I research a topic I search my Google Reader to see what the blogosphere has to say (often reading a blog post, links you to another, then another, and finally thanks to social linking you may just hop to the place you need…and lots of unexpected gems along the way…it’s about the journey as well
- if I need more I can leave a comment on a blog post
- you can now converse with your friends
* based on your selection
* based on your social network

Bookmarks like delicious (or even YouTube, etc) are a social search as you are searching in the human indexed web
- you can even add people to your network and search in the bookmarks of your social network
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Blog networks like Vox and LiveJournal
- contribute, network and search within the website, and also within your network
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Lifestreams like Friendfeed consolidate all the profiles you have on the web, and allow you to network with others
- this social search is more than just delicious (bookmarks) or Google Reader (blog feeds) alone, this is searching all these profiles in the one go (it searches a lot more information)
- you can even comment on these items and discuss with your network (rather than just discussing directly with the author)
- you can even create Friendfeed rooms (which as similarities to a forum)
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Facebook is similar to Friendfeed but all your profiles are inhouse
- a big difference here is that in order to add people to your network they have to add you back (so this is closer to the friends idea, and is a big factor in building trust, reciprocal help, and having a similar level of understanding which helps with knowledge transfer)
- an advantage over a community of practice is you have a connection to weak ties
* based on your social network

Lijit is similar to Friendfeed, with the addition of searching your friends friends
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network, and extended social network

The ChaCha search model routes you to the closest expert to guide you in your search
- this is not quite the social search we have in mind, it’s more like a reference librarian
* based on an authority/expert selection

Forums and Communities of Practice like Ning are conversational portals of information with people you often interact with and help out due to the reciprocal nature of a community
- there are strong ties here, so off-topic information will be hard to source from your community members
* based on your community
* based on content in a website

Micro-sharing sites like Twitter (Twitter Search)
- similar to blogging networks
- items in your stream are all at the same level it doesn’t distinguish between a blog-type post, comment type-post, conversation-type post, question-type post, answer-type post…see my post on Twitter compared to other tools like IM and blogs
- your stream will also include posts that your friends are having with others
- close to real-time information
- you don’t necessarily have to friend each other in order to follow a person’s content, but like Facebook it does have an element of social bonding, trust and willingness to help out one another
- probe, clarify, discuss to learn and re-frame, and also a better chance of transfer if you are familiar with each others ways…this is contrary to unhelpful scenarios
- not just searching but you are daily learning (also advantage of weak ties)
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network, and extended social network

Mahalo Answers is a Q&A site
- there is more trust here when someone in your network offers an answer…also more reciprocation
* based on content in a website
* based on your social network

Yedda is a Q&A site
- there is more trust here when someone in your network offers an answer…also more reciprocation
- the difference here is that the question is also emailed to registered users who are the most likely to offer an answer (based on some sort of data mining)
- and if I emailed to help someone out, do I really want to spend time doing this for someone I don’t know
- will I be burdened by my expertise
* based on content in a website
* based on data mining
* based on your social network

As you can see web 2.0 is the people generated web, and Google is no longer the first place we visit to search/find information. It’s now Google’s job to be aware of these sites, and lead people to them, as they are doing…you often now see Wikipedia and YouTube hits in Google results, and now Twitter hits.

Sure we can go to Google to get fast and ready results for quick facts
eg. today in a legal agreement I didn’t know what the term quite enjoyment meant.

But if I want to probe deeper I would perhaps have to search blogs and leave comments or search my Twitter network (people I trust and share) and get a more timely result, from hopefully my weak ties.

The blog post, 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search - Google Beware has some things to say:

“Twitter search is the ultimate social media platform and will enable people to get the opinions of others and add context to relevant information”

“Searchers don’t just want facts. They want to learn more about the experiences of real people they can relate to.”

“For example, rather than doing a search in Google for “best restaurants in new york” and getting a bunch of review sites, you can do a search on Twitter to see which restaurants people are talking about in New York. If you don’t like the results, you can easily ask your network and get personalized answers in real time - which will then show up in future searches on the same topic.

Compare that to Google. They’ve been unsuccessful thus far in implementing social factors into the search results via Search Wiki. If you do a search in Google and can’t find what you’re looking for, what are you going to do? Probably ask around on Twitter.”

The post also mentions your Twitter network as a solution to filter failure, close to real-time, localised around geographic location, information is representative of the masses, social network and trust “if you had a question about life in the NBA, would you rather ask Shaquille O’Neal on Twitter or type a question in Google?”. I would say this is more likely effective if this person is in your network. People do have an altruistic nature in Twitter, but it’s human nature that we will help out others that we know will help us out in the future…a lot of this has got to do with the limited time we have in a day…see the shadow of the future concept.

Help Engine

Danny Sullivan calls Twitter a Help Engine, which is obvious by the title of this blog post, How We Search With The Twitter “Help Engine”. His post is not about the Twitter Search site, but how the Twitter site itself is used as a help engine, rather than in the past using something like Google as your first step. He also makes clear that using it as a help engine is a by product, as it’s primary purpose is a micro-blogging network.

I know myself I’m lazy and just ask my Twitter network a question, but maybe it’s not laziness, may it’s effectiveness. And again I can clarify my answer.

Here’s an example I asked the other day, I didn’t even think to go to Google, I unconsciously went to Twitter, and got an answer 10 minutes later.

johnt: is there a URL shortner like bit.ly that allows you do right-click on a link and shorten it?

about 18 hours ago

Thu Mar 26 03:54:24 +0000 2009

JayDugger: Several FF add-ons add that to context menus. I use Hyperwords.

about 17 hours ago

Thu Mar 26 04:06:03 +0000 2009

In Danny’s survey the top answers in order were:

1. Trust
2. Expert answers
3. Real-time response and news (hash tag conference tweets as it happens)
4. Variety of opinion (of those you trust compared to Google results)

See the whole list below:

“* Fast answers, faster than searching and reading answers
* Easier to use when I’m mobile for answers than searching
* Too lazy to search
* Trust my friends and followers more than search results
* Want answer from particular person
* To get expert answers
* Because I couldn’t find an answer on a search engine
* To get answers to “real time” issues (is Gmail working? is Time Warner Cable broadband broken again? Was that an earthquake?)
* Because I can follow up easily with further questions
* To get a variety of opinions rather than a specific “correct” answer
* For help finding something (article, news, web site) heard about but can’t remember or locate”

Danny related Twitter to our information foraging before search engines came along:

“General search engines simply don’t allow you to ask questions of friends en masse, something that was a top search habit until search engines came along. Twitter uniquely does allow this.”

He also mentions that the effectiveness of Twitter as a help engine depends on your followers, so this makes a big difference in effort compared to Google. A comment from Danny’s survey:

“As I have a small number of followers, I just don’t have the base yet to expect to get a response to any question I might tweet. On the other hand, I have often done searches at search.twitter.com to gain insight into what the hive mind might be thinking on a particular topic or to get an answer that is timely that I would not be able to find on a search engine otherwise.”

“I like using twitter to ask questions that involve personal opinion rather than straight facts. Often I can then follow-up with people as to why they say what they say, rather than the website author who may or may not be available for comment.”

To all this I would reprise what Danny said in that the Help engine aspect is a by product…Twitter is a tool where we can socially bond, perpetually learn, express ourselves, feel connected and recognised.

In another post by Danny Sullivan, The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark, he examines a study where we are returning to people we know and trust for opinions and context on subjective matters we are looking into. Here’s an excerpt:

“…search engines can fail when it comes to subjective questions. What type of computer should you buy, a Mac or a Windows PC? A search engine can point you at resources such as computer reviews, but none of these resources will know the correct answer for your personal situation. That will be down to you.

Well, there is. That’s the new revolution that’s going on, a new type of search engine that effectively indexes the knowledge of those you know, so that you can query and get quick answers back from those people…”

Enterprise

This is highly relevant for the enterprise with tools like Socialtext signals, Socialcast, Yammer, etc…

Not sure why we need an ROI when all we are doing is using a tool that builds on the phone and email to help us do our work more effectively - learn, find people/information, conversations. We are all knowledge workers which means we are no longer of the methodology of “robots in a factory line process”, we are moreso thinkers and have social interactions based on informal practice to get our work done…before a decision is made there are lots of converstions.

There are so many reports on people wasting time in looking for information (making sense of the workplace), and now we have tools that use people as a filter to better find information and people; and all the bonus learning, conversations, re-framing, adapting that happens along the way…federated search is good, but it won’t do all that.

Why spend an hour looking for something, and to perhaps find that it doesn’t even exist. A tool like Yammer can stream a question to the whole organisation (public timeline), and someone’s network (if they follow you). It won’t annoy them with an email, if they pay attention to the stream they may offer an answer…hopefully someone in your network is looking. If not, it was no harm trying, and it didn’t cost any time or money to write a 140 character long question, and it didn’t interrupt or bother people, it’s up to them to look at the stream (which can be an accessible desktop app).

So now in addition to your search strategy you can also pop a question in Yammer “does anyone know if we have an official travel expense form…my federated searches are not finding it”
Hopefully within a couple of minutes you can stop searching as the Yammer help engine is using people to help you out.

Boyd’s law describes this new paradigm (it’s how we work offline anyway, but it’s new to the online experience)

Aardvark

The whole reason for this post was to comment on a paper by the Aardvark team on social search, and it seems I have felt I needed to establish the landscape before reviewing their paper.

So both Yedda and Mahalo Answers seem to have most of the elements of a help engine (trust/reciprocation/context and clarity/high understanding of each other)…only Yedda layers something on top by also sending your question to the most likely person in the service based on data mining (the trust/reciprocation/understanding aspect is not as strong here).

But they do lack the close to real-time and mobile feel of the Twitter stream, and the fact that I can do many things on Twitter, one of them being asking a question. In the end no matter how good a service is, if it doesn’t have enough users or if it’s not where your network hangs out, then it’s not gonna be much help…Twitter has the advantage here, as they have “the” audience.

From what I can gather Aardvark is similar to Yedda in the way that it finds the most suitable person for your question.

BUT, the big difference is when you ask a question it will be ported to a possible expert that is within your network, or your extended network (friends of friends), and it will also offer you a person who can connect with you at the moment in real-time (IM or the phone I suppose), otherwise in email or Twitter.

Danny Sullivan explains how it works:

• when you join you tag yourself with expert tags
• the person that invites you also tags you (reminds me of Lotus Connections Profiles or fringe)
- set how often you want to be interrupted to answer questions (interrupted is not a good word, but anyway…)
• send a question by IM (or email which is less used, and SMS and a toolbar are in the works…but IM is better as it’s chatty…even snail mail)
• await an answer or a conversation with a friend, or friend of a friend (it can base this on your facebook friends that are also registered at Aardvark…Twitter and LinkedIn coming soon)

Let’s review how Aarvark achieves our sense-making KM aims.

• connecting you at the right time with some who may have the right information
• since you are connecting to a person you are able to re-contextualise and get lots of peripheral information which helps you relate their experience to your situation at hand
• this is even more effective when this person is someone you trust as they will take out the time to helps you (shadow of the future), and there is more chance their signal will be transferred to you as you understand their way and wavelength

Where it fails:

• the organisation by default or indirectly is happy because you are not duplicating, you are re-using information, and you are learning off one another and becoming more capable and adaptable (due to being able to tap into the organisation as a network vs a siloed hierarchy)
  BUT, this is just on a demand basis, others are not getting a piggyback benefit by seeing your transactions in the open
• The transaction is not a corporate memory as it will be happening in IM, or email…unless the receiver blogs about it

  What’s powerful about transactions in an open space like Twitter is that lots of people see it, and you aren’t really interrupting them, they can choose to not help you, it’s just another item in the stream

  But at least an open stream allows people to learn daily, and build relationships, and allows others to eavesdrop and gift an answer from an unexpected person

  Put simply it will miss out on answers by others that system didn’t recognise

  Why not have your question auto-tweeted as well, just in case?

  Aha, VentureBeat alludes to a public view soon:

  “Despite being quite powerful, the service still has its faults (after all, it is in beta testing). You can’t search and view other users’ questions/answers on Aardvark –but this is something that should be available when the site is public.”

One clever thing it does, is that it may recognise your weak ties to help out with an answer, which is what sometimes happens on Facebook and Twitter, only Aardvark makes sure this is more than a potential by actually hooking you up.

It also gets around the need of having a massive follower count before it becomes useful, more from VentureBeat:

“Fred has more than 7,000 users on Twitter, I have barely 200 followers — but with Aardvark it not only evens the playing field, but opens the possibility of much, much more because of the network effect: The more users on Aardvark (there are currently more than 1,500 testing the beta), the more knowledge is available, and the faster the response.

Aardvark brings that power to the masses, and it leverages the collective intelligence (like Yahoo Answers) in real-time (like Twitter) without restricting you to just your followers.”

I like this bit:

“You’ll see more about the people you’re interacting with, you’ll see how you’re connected socially. The routing algorithm will start favoring friends-of-friends, which is a very cool experience.”

That’s so true, your social graph is organic, sometimes your friends introduce you to a friend, and you end up becoming closer friends

Insight from their paper, What is Social Search?

We simply go to people to find answers, rather than a database, the better networked we are, the more we can tap into the right people.

“Most people rely on the human knowledge of those around them on a regular basis: when wandering over to a coworker, emailing a friend, or calling a family member, people are getting information that is personalized, timely, and trusted.”

I really like this point; organisational know-how issues are not always about knowledge sharing per se, but more on understanding the current knowledge we have…this is the transfer part. Sometime we don’t even realise the stuff we know ourselves, until it’s triggered in conversation or seems to come out of us when faced in a new context. So there it is again, that word “conversation”, the more we can converse the more the signal can be understood, and this has even more chance when your dialogue partner is someone you know well.

My KM 2.0 model also suggests that as long as we have participation and conversation, everything else follows. So the aim is not to manage knowledge, but to create conditions for conversation for knowledge to flow.

“Social Search extends this process in two crucial ways:

This second point, above, is again related to the burden of expertise.

“Social Search is great for subjective questions, and questions where context is important to getting the information you want. Social Search complements Web Search, which is great for finding objective facts and public information.

Social Search is the right solution when what you want is a quick conversation with a real person who can interpret your question and understand what you are looking for. While Web Search can instantly provide you with millions of documents potentially related to your query, it cannot tell you which one is relevant to your personal needs in a specific context: just try searching for a hotel in London, or a
restaurant for a date, or great new music.”

“…the vast majority of people do enjoy sharing their opinions and helping acquaintances in the real world. Most people have deep knowledge about a surprising variety of subjects. Finally, individuals generally are flattered to be asked for help; they enjoy having the chance to express their ideas; and they find it gratifying to be thanked for their assistance.”

Nancy Dixon has a great post on this called Thankyou for sharing your knowledge.

“Social Search thus addresses the unmet needs of both consumers and producers in the information
marketplace:

“Social search is:

The Aardvark blog post, Social search is the new search, has more:

“Consider this: I have about 200 friends on Facebook, and they each have about 200 friends. Altogether I have over 10,000 friends and friends-of-friends in my extended network. These 10,000 people have a lot in common with me: many share my school and work affiliations and my cultural reference points. I’m interested in the choices they make and the experiences they have — they are usually more relevant to me than the opinions expressed by anonymous strangers on the web.

That’s why Social Search is especially great for subjective questions, and questions where context is important to getting the information I want. We’ve noticed that Aardvark users find Social Search to be complementary to Web Search, which is still great for objective information that can be found on a specific web page.”

A while ago I posted on YackTrack, which is a solution to catching comments made about your blog posts that happen in other blogs and places.

Well now there is a new contender, BackType, which is the same comment network I posted on a while ago (once you register it finds comments you make without you having to submit them in Backtype, and you can also network with other profiles). It has now also added a comment link tracking feature called Connect, and they have also sliced part of this into and offshoot product called BackTweets.

What do we have so far?

It’s basically the Technorati link search of the conversational web.

If I want to see a list of blog posts that have linked to one of my blog posts, all I do is do a link search in Technorati

This is great as now I am aware of both people who comment directly on my blog post, and also people who talk about me (link to my blog posts) in their blog posts.

Here’s an example.

BONUS: You don’t have to visit Technorati to do this, you can use a browser bookmarklet, or even place a button on the footer of your blog posts.

Blogrovr, also does this but filtered to a set of blogs of your choice. Whenever you visit a webpage, Blogrovr will give you a list of blog posts from your blog set that link to this webpage you are on.

PostRank is also worth a mention. It’s less about conversations, but does measure the social activity metrics of your blog posts. Here’s my PostRank.

[ADDED 18/03/09: Bit.ly, and wwwitter show the tweet conversation for the page you are on]

[ADDED 20/03/09: TweetBeep do domain search alerts on Twitter…but I don’t think they cover all the URL shortners…or do they…]

So where does BackType Connect fit in?

Nowadays there is conversation about your blog posts that is happening aside from your blog comments form and links from the blogosphere.

• People may be linking to you blog posts when commenting in another blog’s comment form
• People may be linking to your blog posts in Twitter
• People may be posting and commenting about your blog posts in Friendfeed
• People may be commenting about your blog posts in Digg

BackType Connect is catching the commentsphere or the conversational web; basically it extends to the nooks and crannies that Technorati doesn’t include in its service.

If someone links to my blog in another blog, Technorati will catch it, and now if someone links to my blog in Friendfeed, Twitter, Digg, blog comments, etc…BackType will catch it.

This allows people on the web to behave naturally, people aren’t forced to comment on your blog post, they can do it anywhere. As long as they use the mighty hyperlink, we can catch these conversations and re-assemble them.

What do I mean by re-assemble?

Well on each blog post I have a stream of comments…sometimes ;( …but I also have a link to Technorati to catch others who are talking about my blog post. And now I can also catch others who are tweeting, friendfeeding, digging…my blog post. So no mattter where they do it I can keep the conversation intact.

For the conversational web I’m still using YackTrack, and wondering if BackType also offer a blog post footer button…then I can choose the service that works best.

Here’s a quick test for my post:

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/03/15/crowdsource-as-a-way-to-create-a-community/

Here are the results in Yacktrack.

Here are the results in BackType Connect.

YackTrack caught one Tweet linking to my blog post, and one Delicious comments field which came across in Friendfeed

NOTE: I don’t think it tracks Delicious, it only found this because it ended up in Friendfeed (the reason I say this is another comment in Delicious did not turn up)

BackType Connect caught 9 tweets

The success of these services is that they must keep a collection of all the URL shortener’s, and then catch our posts that have been link shortened.

NOTE: BackType Connect doesn’t offer a feed, but you can grab one by placing feeds.backtype.com in the URL

Backtweets is an off shoot product that just displays the tweets that BackType Connect catches. It also has a bookmarklet.

Here’s an example of the same blog post as demonstrated above.

What’s really great about this is, is that at time of posting I only knew about 2 of the 9 results. This means I was only aware of 20% of tweets that are talking about the blog post in question, and those are the one’s that included “@johnt” or “johnt” in the tweet.

But I didn’t know the other 7.

What happened is that bhc3 (Hutch Carpenter) tweeted about it, and then 5 other’s re-tweeted him…since “@johnt” or “johnt” was not in these tweets, I did not know about them.

The other 2 tweets simply linked to my blog post…again since “@johnt” or “johnt” was not in these tweets, I did not know about them.

This is an important tool for people monitoring their brand. Tweetback to the rescue!

Anyway, what I did was entered my blog homepage into Tweetback and grabbed the feed, and put it in my Google Reader.

Now, whenever someone links to my blog posts in Twitter I will know.

NOTE: Also wondering if Tweetback has embed code to use as a blog footer button on each of my posts

[ADDED 18/04/09: ConvoTrack]

In my last post I pointed out the difference in the dynamics between Teams and CoPs.

The main defining aspect is that teams exist to do tasks.

I’m finding lots of teams want to use social tools as a space to coordinate and communicate, and at the moment all we (my work) have to offer are our CoP tools. Our CoP spaces are more designed for learning and sharing, whereas team spaces need conversations to revolve around task objects. So although our CoP space offers the tools teams are asking for like blogs, forums, and wikis, these tools are not packaged in a design for the way teams do work.

NOTE: Teams may also be interested in using a CoP space for general learning, sharing and communicating, but parallel to this they need a space to do actual work (and vice versa CoPs may sometimes want to do tasks)

Nonetheless we don’t have social team tools, so the CoP tools will have to do; in a past post I suggested some social tools designed where each task object has a conversation stream. The task object itself can have comments, but also a forum or blog post may be tagged with the object ID, so when you look at the object, not only do you see it’s own comment stream, you also see blog and forum posts that refer to it (kind of like a trackback). I believe both Traction and Basecamp do something similar to what I just explained. Lotus Connections Activities is in a similar camp, only I gather you do not so much create a space up front, instead you create a thread as you work which becomes your space. An even more liteweight than this are 9cays, and ActionThis.

It’s great that we have enterprise social computing tools like Awareness, telligent, Tomoye, ThoughtFarmer, Clearspace, Cyn.in, GroupSwim, Alfresco, HiveLive, Knowledge Plaza, Socialtext, and the rest, but we also need some tools that explicitly revolve around tasks. We need Teams of Practice tools like Basecamp and Lotus Connections Activities.

To make myself clear I’m not talking about general knowledge sharing tools like the one’s listed directly above, I’m not talking about document collaboration, and I’m not talking about my personal task management list. I’m refering to an open space where a task has a URL, and a comment stream, and other objects like documents, forum and blog posts, IM’s and emails can be associated with the task. In essence when you look at the task URL, you will see all conversations about that task no matter the format.

As at the moment the conversations of the work we actually do are in email.

You have a task, you action it by:

• emailing back and forth with your boss, then you email a team member to help you out, then another…
  - all this work is distributed in a closed and distributed email system
• even the person driving the task finds it hard to keep track of all the emails (let’s not forget, this is not the only task you are doing)
• and it’s not only email, you also have to keep track of all the IM chats, files, etc…
• new people helping out on the task have a hard time knowing the history (as it’s in email silos), and you find you have to repeat yourself

One day someone else comes along to extend on this task:

• they wouldn’t have a clue where to find all the past history of that task, or that there even is a past history
• instead if you have a public task list with all the conversation around each task, then you have a corporate memory (in a linear format the makes sense)
• and the other thing is people can be aware while you are doing your task, and chime in
• also when you need help from someone half way through your task, you just point them to the space where they can catch up on the history of it

We do have task lists at work that show assigned person, status, etc…but that’s all it is, a list. It’s what you edit once in a while, once you have had lots of emails and meetings. You can generate reports from it, and it gives you a picture of progress.

The task list is great, but what is doesn’t show you is how you got to each status (all those conversations), and the latest conversation (on the pulse)…these are valuable for the task participants, general awareness for other parties, a corporate memory, and lessons for the future. It also means less meetings or asking progress, as people can find out for themselves.

At the moment I often find myself completing a task via email interactions, and then two weeks later remember to update the status for that task in the task list. The reason this happens is that the task list and doing the actual task are not integrated. We all know by email the task is finished, but someone visiting the task list wouldn’t know that (as I forgot to update it).

NOTE: I’m mostly referring to re-purposing email for transactions between task members (mostly by task object comment streams), but there will always be transactions where you have to meet, phone, IM, email with people not involved in the task, and at this stage it’s up to you to use the task space to update others about what eventuated via a blog post or a comment on the task object, etc…

This becomes the transparency of knowledgework. Knowledgeworkers are unique and know their job better than anyone else. Someone else filling their shoes don’t really know how to do the job, as there is no explicit process, it’s all about conversations. But hopefully we are coming to a place that the informalness of knowledgework can be documented as it happens, so we can get a picture of how knowledgework is actually performed, be more aware and cooperative…we are not about to video record everyone sitting at their desks, and then watch it.

It seems the lastest McKinsey Report, 6 ways to make web2.0 work, has a lot of people saying “What’s in the workflow is what gets used.”…check out all the tweets. Bill Ives has also posted on these social tools being integrated into processes, he compares it to process centric KM and library centric KM.
Of course this is all about balance, if all our social tools were strictly about tasks (processes) then we’d miss out on the, social productivity, self-organisation and emergence that comes from general networking. It’s equally important that knowledgeworkers can brand themselves beyond their job description, and for them to discover, connect and help/learn from each other. And not only that but perhaps these interactions may add to new strategies. For if it’s all about aligning to strategy, then how do we cross-pollinate and innovate.

NOTE: We innovate diffusely, rather than focused…we create the conditions, such as an open social network ecosystem, and through participation and interactions, innovation may slap us in the face.

The lastest McKinsey Report is well timed with this post as up until now enterprise social computing has been perhaps vague or seems like a great idea, but extra work to knowledgeworkers; so it’s time we design these tools to do in-the-flow work, ie. revolve them around tasks. I think this will be a great boost for adoption, getting people used to working collaboratively, openly and transparently, which will then hopefully drive more above-the-flow participation. Social task tools are perhaps a better introduction to enterprise social computing as you don’t strictly require the sharing type culture, as much as you do with general knowledge sharing tools, as you are actually re-purposing what you already do in email.

Here are some links: In-the-flow/Above-the-flow, Directed/Volunteered, Alpha/Beta

Here’s a list of other tools that I have collected, but not looked at (this list excludes tools I have listed above)

Socialcast
Workstreamer
Staction
Confluence
mindtouch
CentralDesktop
ActionBase
Clarizen
5pm
Daptiv
Lighthouse
ProjectPier
Collabtive
Viewpath
Wrike
LiquidPlanner
Copper
DreamFactory
@task
Project Spaces
Vignette Project Delivery (also collaboration)
ProjectSpaces
huddle
eloops
Teamspinner
wild apricot
devshop
activecollab (collab.ws)
BrainKeeper
Collanos
Egnyte
GoPlan
MyQuire
8apps
Burden Butcher
Task2Gather
WhoDoes2.0
Solodox
Planzone
Qtask
Projexx
Project.net
DeskAway
actionize
TaskAnyone
SmartSheet
Same-page
ActionItem

[ADDED 18/03/09: Kuka Systems - Traction]

[ADDED 3/04/09: blueKiwi]

[ADDED 17/04/09: Enterprise 2.0 and the importance of Silo Smashing!]