Library clips

FeedVis - Still in private beta, with also an offer of the source code to run it on your server, FeedVis is a a tag cloud generator based on a bunch of feeds that you import via an OPML. The cloud is based on frequency and popularity. This should just be a feature of Google Reader, and probably is in Feedly (also see mini). I remember good old Feeds2.0 had a tag cluster. [via RWW]

embedit.in - embed doc and image files or URLs into your blog posts as flash boxes - doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp, png, jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, eps, ai, txt, rtf, csv, html. Limit is 20 meg. If you already have a web page with links to lots of documents, use embedit.in sitewide to convert them in one go. See their tips. I’d rather not embed it in this post, but here’s a URL to an example of embedding a URL. [via nw]

Webinmail - if all you have is an email connection, yet you want to surf the web, then email this service with the URL you want in the subject field, and they will email you back the page…you can even email a search query. [via DI]

Innercircle.cc - create an email distribution list. Also see posterous group blog/email lists

Smub.it - ever read a webpage on your phone and want to bookmark it in delicious, share it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, email it, etc… I do all the time, but my phone doesn’t have bookmarklets (do phones have these). Anyway, what you can do now is prepend the URL you want to bookmark/share with “smub.it/”. It’s kind of like ShareThis, but done manually by altering the URL.

eg.
- if you came across this URL on your phone
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- you go to the address bar, and prepend it with “smub.it/”
smub.it/http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- then it takes you to a page of icons for delicious, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, email, etc…click on one of these and your away.

Problem with my phone is I can’t choose an icon to click, darn….

Anyway, you can also manage your bookmarks at smub.it, and use a smub bookmarklet or toolbar

It’s also a URL shortener, where you can customise your URL’s
ie enter your ID and a keyword. For example the link in the example above could be
smub.it/johntropea/surfemail

[via BrightHub]

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!]

A while back I mentioned that I like the idea that after a conference, conference-call, presentation, meeting, workshop, etc…you can continue the conversations online.

For a big conference like the Web 2.0 Expo, they used CrowdVine as a social networking tool…I’ve posted about it before. And of course this same tool can be used to continue the conversation once the conference is over. Vyew is another tool that saves your conference in a book where you can continue to collaborate and discuss asynchronously, it also has a widget so this book can be embedded anywhere.
Stewart Mader suggests a wiki rather than a conference showbag.

What I found in my last conference call is that most of what we talked about in the call can also be done online, in our community page, when we are not present at the same time (asynchronous).

These are three types of things we did in the conference call, that cover blogs, forums, and wikis:

1. News, and status around the globe from each team member [BLOG]

Each team member had a turn to update the team on their status

- why do this in the conference call, when we can subscribe to the group status blog, or each others personal blogs
- any conversation can be carried out in the comments
- all can read and/or take part in conversations on their own time
- this saves time on the call to do other stuff
- to recall something just go to the blog archive

This is put nicely from the wiki perspective by the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein case study:

“The teleconference used to be one and a half hours long, with much time wasted on bringing people up to speed on the week’s events. Now team members update themselves on the wiki, and that part of the teleconference takes five to ten minutes.

The rest of the teleconference is used for ideas generation, being innovative, talking about problems and looking at solutions, which is what the meeting should be about. It shouldn’t be about updating people as to what’s happened, but thinking about our clients and how we can service them.”

2. Discussion about issues people had since the last call [FORUM]

The team was asked if there was anything to discuss.

This is what a conference call is all about…conversation.

But, we should not wait for a conference call to discuss things, why not use the community forums everyday.

3. Brainstormed an idea for better usability for one of our systems [WIKI]

What we basically did was come up with a list for things to appear in a drop down menu, that would cover all reasons when a user logs a support call.

It was good to do this synchronously as we could discuss whilst we made the list, nothing beats this.

But I’m sure we could of started this list in a wiki, and used the comments for discussion, and then perhaps join the conference call to finalise our list.

Summary

I realised in one meeting that we covered the use of 3 of the most important social tools.

Why do we need so many meetings, when we can be collaborating and conversing perpetually?

The more we use social tools, the shorter our meetings can be.

Nothing beats synchronous group chats to discuss out issues, but we can sometimes do most of this discussion, updates, and collaboration online, and call a short meeting to finalise and action our findings.

Next time I talk about social tools adoption, I can tell people you are doing it anyway, only this is doing the same thing when we are not all in the same room.

We can still collaborate, discuss, update when we are not in the same room.

The fact is people are fine to physically participate in informing their status and what they’ve been up to, discuss issues, and collaborate…but when it comes to doing this online they feel weird being social (open and visibility). Instead they use email as it’s more closed and private, and they do all three things with email (status, discuss, collaborate) that they do in person at a meeting, it’s like email is their asynchronous voice.

Part of the adoption process is to help people get over the awkwardness of being social online, we have to guide them by informing them social tools are not extra work, it’s what you are doing anyway.

Rough Example 1

“In a meeting you share your status, well here is a blog to do the exact same thing…you can even share any experiences, or whatever you like here.” (Above-the-Flow)

“In a meeting you take part in discussions, well here is a forum to do the exact same thing.”

“In a meeting we collaborate and brainstorm, well here is a wiki to do the exact same thing.”

“Email is for private correspondence, whereas these three tools above are the online version for what we do in meetings.”

“An easy way to think about it, is if it’s not private information, then a community tool can be used. The next step is to work out whether you need a blog, forum or wiki.”

“Please use these three tools when the context of what you want to do is about, status/experience, discussion, or collaboration.”

“These social tools will live in a community website, which assimilates our meeting room, this allows us to still communicate and work together when we are not in meetings.”

Using the approach above we are introducing social tools not for the heck of it, or as a knowledge sharing drive, etc…
We are introducing them to solve issues specific issues, that way people will be more serious about them, and these are issues that effect the whole enterprise.

If the reason of introducing social tools was-we need to collaborate more, and share knowledge-people are going to say “yeah, I’ve heard that before”, “I’m not sharing what I know” (power/trust), and “I haven’t got time”.

Instead if we put it across as solving particular issues, it is received in a more welcoming way, as it’s like we are going to deploy tools that we help them with their problems…it doesn’t come across like we want something out of them as much.

Rough Example 2

“The company is experiencing email stress, as part of this company-wide problem we are introducing communities and social tools in order to relieve this email overload.”

“Our introduction of communities are intended to help tackle two serious issues in our enterprise that effect everyone: email and meeting overload. Please use communities for any of these three types of action, rather than email or having yet another meeting.”

“These are two serious issues affecting everyone in the company, and if we don’t all do the right thing, we won’t be able to overcome our issues. The company is one big group, and if a few seeds ignore this message, it will spoil the intentions and dynamics of the group. So remember your behaviour is going to affect the whole.”

“As part of this initiative we will be looking at recognising people and groups that use communities, we feel there will be self recognition anyway. We will also look into this as being incorporated into our company aims, and job performance reviews.”

“To kick all this off I introduce the whole office to the “Office community”, the only communication via email will be a notification to visit an entry at the “Office community”.”

“Business units, interest groups, and task rooms will be set up on request in order to use community tools to get your work done.”

I’m more for a viral bottom-up approach, but even so at some stage you may want to get the message out to the whole company. Perhaps have it in your back pocket in case the bottom-up approach isn’t quite working as expected.

This office-wide approach has to be repeated to staff within their own teams, community leaders will be champions, facilitators, role models…

From the above example I did not once mention: social, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, knowledge sharing, collaboration (oops, I did mention this), we need to capitialise on opportunities for competitive advantage, getting stuff out of people’s heads, blogs, wikis…
Instead I raised issues like email overload and shorter/less meetings (time) that can be alleviated using social tools.

The sell is about not doing anything extra, it’s only offering substitute tools, it’s focused on specific problems, and it hopes to come across as doing people a favour to help them work less frustrated.

To finish up here’s an excerpt by JP Rangaswami in relation to Facebook, but to me it covers what social tools and the use of communities are all about, this is the engagement we are trying to achieve…social productivity by leveraging the social capital:

“…you’ve taken what happened at the water cooler or at the coffee shop and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it learnable […] Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people really work, and what people do as part of that work […] to look at the flows that matter rather than the flows of the politics”

We are piloting communities at work, the gist of it is:

Blog - broadcast, experience, ideas, feedback, status
Forum - discussion
Wiki- collaborate, document, website

Step 1

The concept is, it’s much easier to do work using these new tools rather than using email to do all three of these things (broadcast, discuss, collaborate).

Let’s not mention that content is open and centralised for others to see, all have a voice, conversation can evolve into new knowledge, tune into your social filter to ask questions and finds things…pretty much a way to get things done.

Plus all your interactions, contributions, and readings happen in a contextual place. If I want to see the forum contributions I have made on the KM forum, I just go to the KM CoP, or goto my personal dashboard.

For me this beats trying to find this stuff in my email. I like my content to live in context eg. comments about a wiki to be in the wiki itself rather than be separated (disconnected) in my email client.

Jack Vinson talks about context as providing you with a “frame of reference”, he says:

“The better I understand the particular frame of reference (context), the better I can understand what this information or knowledge means.”

This is kind of different to the context I’m talking about. I’m talking about the context of a place, he is talking about seeing data in a context setting (even better if it’s a familiar setting) to help you use your current knowledge to create new information…I guess metaphor is another way.

In a way it does relate to what I’m talking about as reading a forum reply you found in your email, makes much more sense when you see it in the bigger picture of the actual forum.

Anyway so I call the use of our communities as Step 1.

We can now learn to use social tools to get work done with much less confusion, and of course this creates a perpetual open dialogue where knowledge is continuously created and re-used in the open.

Another benefit is that you end up with less email to deal with, as now what would of been email lives at the context of the place (as a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply, wiki contribution/comment).

Although, without an inbox for each community (private messages), one-to-one messages are done in email. I’d rather these emails as private or public messages that live in context, ie. at the community…see more.

Step 2

Does this really give you less email to deal with…I don’t think so.

It’s great we are attempting to no longer just rely on the intelligence of the email system to do our work, these social tools enable us to work easier and content is no longer siloed (a centralised and flowing corporate memory). But we are still using email.

How? Notifications, that’s how.

In our communities we currently have RSS disabled for some reason, maybe it’s a good thing for now, to prevent scaring people with too much new stuff to absorb.

For each blog and forum you can get new content delivered as a new email, and this is not just a notification, it’s the full-text of the blog post or forum topic.
When you subscribe to a blog or forum you are also subscribed to blog comments and forum replies (personally I’d like a choice).

Also, each blog post and each forum topic has an email address.
This means when you get an email for a new blog post, you can hit reply and it will post your comment to the blog…nice one.

You can also publish a new blog post by writing a new email and sending it to the blog email address (you can include non-subscribers to your blog in the to: or cc: field, that way they will get the content even though they don’t subscribe to your blog…nifty!)

OK, first thing.

I really like this email interoperability, it’s bringing the use of new tools to people’s comfort zone. But at the same time I would also like people to visit the actual community to experience the whole realm. There’s more chance you are going to read something else or contribute, if you are at the community itself.

So right now, this email interoperability is both good and bad.

The more concerning issue that some people have been talking about in the forums is since the introduction of communities they are getting just as much email.

They allude to “what’s the difference to my inbox overload if someone writes an email or publishes a blog post which I get in email anyway…isn’t communities meant to help with the inbox firehose.”
They also mention that community content gets lost in their inbox amongst all other types of emails.

This just screams RSS Reader.

But it also may scream our community Watchlist page.

The Watchlist page is a stream of the lastest stuff you are subscribed to, so throughout the day you can go to this page to see what’s new in the stream. The saves you visiting every blog and forum that you like from every community you like…instead it’s in one personalised page.
But I think I have to have an email subscription in order for this stuff to be on my Watchlist…darn (gotta look into this).

Whether it’s a Watchlist or an RSS Reader, it becomes a second dashboard.
You have your email dashboard and your what’s happening dashboard.

You can read RSS feeds within your email, but the idea is that email is a tool for personal correspondence, and that’s it, and an RSS Reader is a tool for the latest updates.

Perhaps a startpage could combine both into one dashboard, or Outlook could have an RSS Reader module that is just as important as the email inbox…in fact Outlook would no longer be an email client, it would be a personal productivity dashboard.

Conclusion

At the moment we are in the pre-introductory stage of Step 1. - a social way of doing work
(lots of learning, and culture change issues to go with this)

We also need to be prepared for Step 2.

And it’s Step 2. that may win the KM team acclaim in reducing the common email overload problem.

Any department that can reduce the email overload problem is going to get kudo’s, will it be the KM team.

Luis Suarez is creating a wave of interest in his self administered email detox rehab program

He links to one of my posts on examples of re-purposing email, in this post I want to talk about more tricky situations.

Invites

Blogs, wikis, and forums enable us to work socially and keep up to date using RSS Readers.

But email still has to be used to invite people to a new forum, a new blogger on the block, a new wiki set-up for an event, etc…

Luis talks about email just being for one-to-one sensitive correspondence…well invites are not sensitive and you’d want to broadcast an invite to a lot of people. So what to do?

Email is not alone here, blasting a private message to a list in your Facebook private messages is no different.

Although it is slightly different if you blast a private message within a topic community, this is like having numerous email inboxes, one for each community, and they each live at the community site.
But still with lots of inboxes you need some sort of dashboard to be notified on what’s going on, is email this dashboard, most of the time yes.

What I can think of is for each community or business unit to have a news blog, this blog can announce an invite to a new blog, wiki event, etc… This is the only way I see of bypassing email.

But what if that invite to a new wiki event is only intended for a few people in the community, the rest of the members have to put up with seeing the blog post even though is doesn’t really concern them.
You wouldn’t have got this occupational spam using email as it wouldn’t of been sent to non-relevant people, in this case a blog is causing more occupational spam in your RSS Reader, than spam in your email inbox.
This is the whole reason for my post on mesh blogs.

Tasks

My idea of mesh blogs also applied to tasks. Since a mesh blog is a specific blog set up for a two way audience, a member of one sub-team can post tasks to this blog without feeling they are spamming other sub-teams. The recipient can leave comments or create new posts to the sender as clarification, status, etc…

But what happens when the task is only for one or two people?

If a task was posted in a mesh blog for the support and tech team to communicate, then the one member of the tech team (sender) and the one or two members (recipients) of the support team are not going to be the only people who get this post. All members of both these sub-teams will get this post plus subsequent posts.

The only answer I can see is setting up a blog for each task, this way you don’t need to spam anyone.

Like Luis says, you could use a wiki, forum, or a blog for tasks. If it was a bigger task you could have a community or room so you can use all these tools.

In the end these are better than email as you can collaborate easier and it’s centralised in an open archive, rather than email siloes. This documented trail is knowledge sharing by doing work, there is no extra effort in having to think and share your knowledge for the greater good…and hopefully others can see your documented activity and re-use it, rather than re-inventing the wheel.

But why not use a task management tool to do the job, such as Lotus Connections (Activities)…I’d like to hear Luis’s progress on this addition to his program.

Anyway, whatever system is used, the idea is to use an RSS Reader for progress updates, or the dashboard widget itself.

On-the-fly conversation

The idea of a task is a unique communication between two or more parties to get a job done. An existing channel like a blog or wiki may not exist for this task, so a new one may need to be created, no matter how small or temporarily.

I find on-the-fly conversations in a very similar area.
In a past post I explained the difficulty in using existing blogs or forums to have a discussion that may only last 2 or 3 back and forth communications.
Basically you only want specific people to be in the discussion (perhaps privacy or simply courtesy of not spamming them), and setting up a forum for a very brief discussion can seem too much compared to sending an email.

But as mentioned earlier, at least the discussion can be re-used by others as it is visible.

I think in this situation email could be used if setting up a forum is too much work, unless the first email you send automatically sets up the forum. And subsequent back and forth emails are threaded into the open forum. With this system you can still use email for the discussion as it’s posted to a public space at the same time, or you could just go to that public space and post there, and subscribe to the feed for updates.

I covered this in a blog post a long time ago, once of the tools that seems to fit the bill is 9cays.

Basically you email people and 9cays…9cays will send people an email invite. When the reply to emails it will also appear at an public or private space, and this space is pretty much one blog post and comments.

Hmm, 9cays could be used for tasks.

Email the task to a worker and 9cays, and then just back and forth discuss via email or at the blog post comments, in the end you have a central place to house this (yeah for no email silos).

Rooms

Either a task or an on-the-fly forum, I think, is seen as it’s own thing. It may not be related to a community, but you still need to be able to use social community tools.
I feel that templates that are used to set up a community can be stripped down to a basic template to serve task requirements. And unlike a community, you would not need to request a task (room) space, any user can just set one up in one click.
Setting up a task room needs to be as accessible and easy as sending an email, otherwise people won’t use them.

So next time a few others and yourself have a task, don’t use email, instead set up a room in one click. You will have an instant blog, forum, wiki and document folder to do your work.
Others can eavesdrop, subscribe to or visit your room to keep in the loop.

Next time someone needs to do a similar task (perhaps the person who did the original task has left the company), they can re-use the knowledge that lives in the task room.

Next time you come off a cross business unit conference call and want to keep the discussion going online for about 2 weeks, don’t worry about trying to find the right CoP to use, just set up a room.

Yeah, no email siloes.

Plus the task information you are going to re-use isn’t just a deliverable, it includes all the workings out from blog posts, forum discussions, and wiki collaborations…now that’s tacitastic!

The reason I’m harping on about tasks is that sure you can get people using communities to do work rather than email silos, but quite often work is done as a task by just a few people…and your communications and collaborations in a community may feel like you are spamming these people.

At our work we are starting to use communities to leverage the social captial and get away from email, but I’m finding task work is still done in email, that’s why I see “rooms” (with social tools) as another way to use tools that are more appropriate than email.

For those of you who love email, please adhere to two.sentenc.es