NOTE: I’m not a futurist or organisational anthropologist, but it seems that my interest in knowledge and networks has led me into thinking about such matters as fundamental as the future of organisational structure.

A while ago I posted on how organisations can become more agile. People can connect horizontally…the silos blinders can be removed. What this means is talent is revealed and self-organisation (which we already do regardless) can really shine. Work groups can form that attract the right people in a decentralised way, and then disbanden. My past post I’m refering to is called, We are more than our job title describes, so let’s get social!…get into it, as this is a big aspect of the state of enterprise 2.0 that we will eventually reach.

As I mentioned in a few previous posts, it’s fine that we can use bottom-up tools to connect the enterprise in a network fashion, but this has to be accepted from top-down.

Jack Vinson says it pithy in a response to my post:

“…business doesn’t reward collaboration. It rewards individual action.”

And then Bertrand Duperrin equally said it simply and effective in another way in a tweet to me:

“Tell me how you’re measured & I’ll tell you how you work”

My posts in question I’m talking about are:

I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!

Sensemaking KM and CoPs (Just-in-time vs Just-in-case), engaging and embedded KM, and a competitive vs collaborative culture

This seems to be the meme of late, as I just read Venessa Miemis say:

“It’s becoming more accepted that collaboration, not competition, is a more effective avenue towards producing emergent, innovative results. Now that millions of people participate in online social networks, it seems high time to develop a system of matching people’s skill sets with common values and goals in order to bring about positive change.

Social networks have the advantage of being able to connect globally distributed individuals, who can then operate with flexibility within a bottom-up, non-hierarchical framework. But, just having access to each other is not always enough to make things serendipitously happen.”

She echos this in another post (which I just couldn’t help putting in bold):

“It’s becoming clear that to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn’t make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems.”

Here’s a link to that quote if you want to point someone directly to it, as I think it encapsulates enterprise 2.0 without having to talk about social computing.

And to re-quote from an earlier post, Margaret Schweer says:

“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.”

Venessa says above that access is not enough, and when I re-read Bertrand’s post he had something else to say which is an obstacle:

“Unlike the general public web, businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used. In brief, businesses don’t understand free across its departments. Rather, their internal policies don’t make that possible.”

This got me to reflect on my own organisation

We do not yet have a social network, but we have CoPs as a start which is good, because already we see people discovering others, connecting and collaborating…this is a distributed way to optimise talent and work.

Even without CoPs of course people are networked, but it’s harder…usually management are good at this as they know more people than the regular worker.

Anyway my point is that I agree with the points Bertrand and Venessa allude to in that; access, networking and connecting is only the first step.

At my work, our culture is OK with workers being borrowed by others to work in tasks where their talent is needed.

But we reach two obstacles.

I can only stretch so much of my time

I have my regular job, but then I’m in a handful of extra activities like voluntary work groups. And most of these are from my own doing as I’ve shown an interest and want to have some input (I really like how our organisation is open to this).

But like I said I don’t have enough hours in the day, and in the end I’m measured on my main job by the manager I work for. I don’t get measured on these other activities that I work on…in school you would get extra points for participating in extra activities

…anyway

The other thing is that I can’t charge my time to these extra activities, my boss is paying for my time spent elsewhere…but since this is our cultural attitude, in that it’s for the greater good, my boss is OK with it.

OK, so I’m not getting kudo’s for extra work, or it’s not part of performance measurement, which doesn’t personally worry me too much because I have passion for these work groups…but it would be good if it was measured, as it is work tasks, in contrast to sharing and learning in CoPs.

NOTE: CoPs are about sense-making and being better at your tasks, but they are not the task itself, which is more an attribute of a team (but I do understand that the world is not so black and white).

And as I said, I don’t have enough time to devote to these work groups.

Even if I could charge my time to these work groups and had to contribute to deliverables I still wouldn’t have time…actually this would make me very stressed.

So the question is…

How can I roam around the enterprise as a free agent, like a freelancer, getting my own tasks?

NOTE: a by product is that I become multi-skilled, exposed to diverse sides of the business, work with different people and operations.

I compare this to a cinematographer who gets their own gigs, jumping from one film to the next.

Only thing is I would still want security from the organisation, in that they will slot me somewhere if I don’t network well enough…or when there are down times they will find me something to do.

The enterprise would still have managers setting tasks, but the workers would gravitate to these tasks, or be invited…basically you have to find your own projects to work on.

Would this be hard? In a networked enterprise jobs would come to you, via your interest feeds, and those who you are connected to…and people who know about you would give you leads and offers.

So even though managers are setting tasks, they are not so much managing you, but more responsible for the coordination of the project.

You manage yourself, it’s in your own interest to do a good job otherwise people won’t want you on other tasks. This point kind of reminds me of the self regulated nature of eBay. Since buyers rate sellers, it’s in the sellers interest to be honest, which keeps eBay from falling over in a distributed way.

But an enterprise would not only rely on workers managing themselves as operational reliability…coupled with this managers would be 50% managing and 50% leading. Managers need to spend more time on mentoring human performance, bringing out the best in people, so workers can better manage themselves.

This kind of means you don’t have a boss? You only work for the manager of the task you are on, and when you disbanden your on your own again, looking for another task which will be managed by someone else.

I said there were two obstacles, the other one is…

Backing money vs level of effort

As I mentioned earlier it’s great my work has an open culture where people’s time can be lent out by a manager to work on extra activities.

When I say extra activities, I mean cross-functional work groups, or even improvement tasks within the one team.

Some examples of these are:

- I’m not on the Intranet team, but there is an Intranet redesign project that I’m happy and glad to participate in
- Within my own team I’m part of a focus group on “internal communication”.
etc…

So what’s the problem?

Because these work groups don’t have deliverables or timelines, they wane.

But even if they did have deliverables, and I could charge my time, us borrowed participants would not be able to spread our time, as we have our main jobs.

Again the solution to this seems to be a freelanced networked type of organisation I was pondering earlier…but what is the seriousness or repercussions of this…come on organisational theorists, cultural critics, futurists…let me know what you think!!

I don’t think this aspect of enterprise 2.0 is talked about enough, where do we see a networked enterprise heading to…

From what I remember in complexity theory, what manifests from the interactions can change the system itself, the very system that has been the platform for these interactions to happen.

So when we talk about enterprise 2.0 it’s been about how we do work and sensemake, and also transparency, crowdsourcing before making a decision…and we have tools and an approach to do this. This is where we are at now, but what’s the inevitable transformative result of this?

Will it be a blended enterprise of hierarchy and networks where talent roams around slotting into tasks?

I digressed a little, back to it…

I said if we could charge our time to the work group, but this isn’t so at the moment…why?

Because most of these special work groups are nice to have ideas, actually they have gone beyond ideas, they actually get started, but fizzle.

At our work if you can get sponsorship, and a level of effort from borrowed resources, which I have explained is the culture at my work, then we see these work groups take off.

But they get to a stage where they manifest into something but then need proper backing to keep going…ie they need funds.

It’s good in a way as we don’t need to show ROI, as it’s based on level of effort, but we do reach a wall.

It’s a real good approach, that enables us to experiment and fill needs, allowing self organising groups to form to serve the greater effectiveness of the organisation. So the ability to allow for this emergence is great, it’s an aspect of an agile organisation, but…once we can prove this momentum is worthwhile, then we need the funding for these work groups…and that’s the wall that causes them to wane over the long term.

If these work groups, or as Dave Snowden calls the “crews” were offered funding for their work, where would you find the people who have time…do you hire more people, that you only need for a short time…or does the organisation fully transform into a new enterprise where we move from CoPs and matrix organisations to social network stimulation and crews.

For more information on crews check out these posts

The Empire’s shadow

Are you on the Bully watch?

Aggregative or emergent identity? Rethinking Communities

Please don’t get workgroups and communities of practice confused. Workgroups are more like teams where deliverables need to be achieved.

Bertrand has more:

“Communities are places where practices, knowledge, informaiton are exchanged and has not to be confused with workgroups which are operational entities…Groups know that they have to do, to deliver, and that’s why they exist. Groups exist because they have operational purposes. Communities exchange to learn, groups exchange to execute (even if there a learning dimension in the background routine). The group is a manager’s reponsability, the manager being responsible for objective’s achievement. Communties can be handled by external people who is an expert, a skilled communicator while groups only react to hierarchical hierarchy (even if expertise matters in the background).”

At the end of my last post I mentioned that KM (even Talent Management) or social computing need a top-down approach, shift, or message when it comes to collaboration, sharing, and organisational effectiveness…or better put a balanced approach.

Why?

Sure you will get lots of success in sense-making and sharing by facilitating the use of grassroots tools that are bottom-up just like email (but better than email).

BUT, is the use of new tools enough to catapult into a new way of working…it will take a long time to hit that tipping point.

Even if we do all the right things like facilitate, understand human behaviour, create and nurture conditions for participation, have an enterprise-wide concept…I don’t think it’s enough.

We need a complementary top-down shift to a new culture of working, as I said in my last post, a move from a competitive to collaborative organisation.

NOTE: I’m referring to within the walls of an organisation. I’m yet to think about this concept industry-wide ie. companies collaborating, rather than competing…a new type of capitalism I guess…got many links on the natural enterprise, but no time to read them

What do I mean by top-down?

I mean how are we measured and rewarded for what we do…

If I’m rewarded just for my achieving my personal output, I don’t have an incentive to share as what I know gives me the edge, it’s not about the organisation, it’s all about me.

Workers are instilled to be efficient robots, which leads to…I don’t have time to help you out, or an interest, as that is less time that I spend on achieving my objectives, and helping you out doesn’t get me a reward anyway; my objectives are important as that’s what gets me a reward.

We are told to share, but how can we when the senior management strategy doesn’t walk the walk…yes they talk that it’s good to share, but then strategy goes against that ideal.

Can you believe a lot of organisations run this way…this is a strategy to amass an aggregate of personal efficiency ie an incentive to stack a pile of efficient people, at the expense of an effective organisation where the people share what they know with each other so the organisation can adapt, be resilient, innovate, etc…

Why would an organisation do this to itself?

ie. concentrate on cost reduction and efficiency alone by neglecting the big picture, and instead just focus on each worker by rewarding good outcomes. How are you gonna adapt to changes in the industry if you don’t have a connected organisation…sure, you can have lots of intelligent people, but if they are not connected, you will hear lots of “why didn’t we know about you, I didn’t know you were an expert in that, we could of used you to help with this issue”

Workers self organise their behaviour to sometimes ignore this strategy, as it’s being connected that helps you out. You don’t know everything, if you did, what’s the use of an organisation. We get by at work by give and take, you interrupt me today, I’ll interrupt you tomorrow…I’ll forgo some of my time to help you out, as I trust that this will be reciprocated. An organisation is a web of relationships, we all need contacts, to help us achieve our targets.

So yes it’s natural to share, as it’s a need, actually it’s survival…but this needs to be seriously recognised and harnessed as a strategy, and a smart strategy where it cooperates and is cohesive with other strategies. ie you can’t have a strategy about sharing is important, if you have another strategy that essentially says hoarding is important (this conflicting strategy I’m referring to is the essence of this post ie the strategy of what you know gets you ahead of others, it gives you the edge so sharing would be the wrong thing to do…and my objectives get me rewards, so why would I spend time with you).

Anyway, looking back at an old post of Rex Lee’s outstanding blog, I found something very relevant to this meme.

It’s on the negative impact that “well defined measurable objectives and tying them directly to compensation” has on knowledge sharing, and ultimately organisational effectiveness.

“It seems logical that if you do a good job, and it’s linked to your objectives then you should be compensated for this.

The difficulty lies in the individual nature. The first concern is around the competitive aspects of this kind of model. If your knowledge or expertise could really assist someone else but helping them had no relation to your objectives, would you help them? What if we took it one step further. What if your helping of someone else actually hurt your ability to meet your objectives? Perhaps it would take you away from completing your objectives or actually go counter to your objectives? What if the more important thing for the company was helping that other person?

Often a cascading objectives model (one in which, you get your objectives from your boss, and she gets them from her boss, etc..), leads to solio’d thinking. Opportunities that arise that cut across silo’s (and requiring collaboration) are simply never seen. It’s not that people want to be malicious, they simply don’t see the opportunity.

Is it possible to structure objectives, that allow for collaboration that still are well defined, measurable and linked to compensation? The answer depends in what “well defined” means. In theory, an objective about collaborating could resolve this. It’s worked for other organizations. If you go this route though, keep in mind the implications it has on organizational structure as well. Proceed with caution, you’re changing institutional models that may be as old as the organization itself.”

In the next post I want to look at the ROI of spending time helping others.

[ADDED 16/11/09 : Bertrand Duperrin]

“Unlike the general public web, businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used. In brief, businesses don’t understand free across its departments. Rather, their internal policies don’t make that possible.”

[ADDED 16/11/09 : Jack Vinson]

“the business doesn’t reward collaboration. It rewards individual action.”

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

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

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

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

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

KM as blood bank

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different ways of engaging knowledge

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

Embedded KM

Another related post is on Embedded KM by Andrew Gent.

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

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

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

Andrew says:

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

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

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

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

Competitive vs Collaborative culture

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really like how Stewart put it:

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

Betrand Duperrin also parallels these thoughts:

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

Learned behaviour

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

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

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

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

All three have bad consequences if ignored

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

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

Related
I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!

Not long ago I posted about how our Communities of Practice (CoP) are hitting a sweetspot…bottom-up and grass roots tools that provide more of a sense of place and better coordination over email, and are more enabling than the Intranet.

Great cross-functional CoPs are emerging like Bulk Materials Handling, Sustainable Development, Software Architecture and Approaches, 3D Visualisation and Animation, Bauxite and Alumina, etc..

But there is something else that’s emerging that we didn’t quite expect.

And we know why?

It’s because our CoPs are just online spaces with a bunch of tools (blogs, forums, wikis, docs, and a homepage).

This package doesn’t make them a CoP, it’s just what we called them, as that’s what the vendor calls them…nothing wrong with this…

Basically, these online tools don’t define the group or how it operates…their just tools. This also hooks into how the Socialtext staff differentiate them from past tools (transactional vs Interactive)

Anyway…

So the unexpected emergence is that CoPs are being used for lots of different things that are cutting into products we already use…why again…because people want to be empowered and engaged which distributed power (less control) enables.

What has emerged?

Let’s start with the answer and it’s effect: blogs, forums, wikis need to be features of existing products, and when they are how’s that gonna effect what has currently happened.

We don’t just have cross-functional CoPs ie. people distributed in the organisation in different teams, projects, business units, and levels of authority who come together in a space to support and learn about a common topic…which makes for a more agile organisation…it’s looking in your own backyard and connecting the talent dots.

Here are the main online groups that have surfaced.

Ad-hoc tasks

I’ve blogged about this before.

People want to do temporary tasks in an online space rather than hidden in email.

Our CoPs are more portal like with permissions and the rest, they are not one click set-up, they need a bit of upfront design.
- your CoP or mine for this task, but your not a member of my CoP…these task spaces end up buried in a CoP somewhere, they have no homepage of their own, the hosting CoP members may not like that their CoP has a unrelated parasite group

They are not the best spaces or timely and simple enough for an ad-hoc task.

For this we would need something like the new OpenText Social Media product, or Jive SBS (both of these also include a social network).

Or perhaps something more on-the-fly like Activities on Lotus Connections, or a future version of Google Wave…see more.

And Traction seems like the most flexible product around, I hear BlueKiwi is in this space as well…see more.

Initatives/Pilots/Crowdsourcing/Events

We are finding these a sweetspot, just like cross-functional CoPs.

We are starting a review of our project lifecycle process, which is to be coordinated in the CoP, basically where the organisation comes together in a communal space.

Support

I’ve blogged about this before.

It’s one thing to have a CoP to troubleshoot within a team, but it’s another thing when internal customers start asking questions for support through a CoP.

Personally I think it’s great, as people have an open place to search for past answers or even offer answers, and if you subscribe you can learn along the way.

BUT, this is cutting into the organisations official Support database. We still need this official and sophisticated tool for support management, but CoPs as a support tool are definitely cutting into their lunch.

Teams/Business Units/Office unit

These groups have a section in our corporate Document Management System (DMS)…it’s basically a set of folders.

Why are they using CoPs?

Because in the process of creating documents we have conversations about review.
Because we like to discuss issues.
Because we like to broadcast news.
Because we like to share experiences.
And email just doesn’t cut it.
And the DMS just doesn’t have these conversational tools, or a homepage that represents the group (well, they do, it’s the Intranet, but see the next point)

Intranet

I’ve blogged about this before.

Someone came up to me the other day and said, they love that CoPs are two-way, and that they can update their homepage (that acts like a portal) whenever they like.

As a result of this empowerment they mentioned that their intention is to no longer have any of their pages hosted on the Intranet, but instead, when people click on their business practice link on the Intranet, it will just take them straight to the CoP.

What’s the next natural step, that the global CoP hompage becomes the Intranet itself.

Client Projects

We have a DMS on another server with a different look and feel and processes that suit the context of projects.

But again, just like Teams/Business Units they lack a homepage and conversation tools.

Project teams want a homepage as a jump off point (a bunch of folders doesn’t cut it).

They also want this homepage to display conversations that are currently happening at the moment in email silos, this way the mechanical guys can eaves drop on piping conversations and vice versa, so we are more aware. A blog for project updates and broadcast news gets people on the same page.

Organisations are not (well maybe) Complex Adaptive Systems, so we need to make them open and transparent as much as we can, so people can be ambiently aware, and therefore better cooperate amongst the parts, and ultimately adapt to changes or even be preventative.

I have not created online CoP spaces for these projects as this is the turf of DMS, and having two spaces for the one thing seems odd, but people will self-organise their way around any design.

Let’s sum this up

CoPs are a sweetspot for great emerging unofficial groups, but they are also cutting into the following existing products:

• Email (this was the intention)
• Offical support database
• Corporate DMS
• Project DMS
• Intranet

And it seems we need a product to handle ad-hoc tasks.

Summary, future ponderings, and a suggestion

The original idea for CoPs was cross-functional practices eg Bulk Materials Handling

But as we can see because email, the DMS, and the Intranet are not as enabling, people are using CoPs as an alternative for everything.

In a way this CoP experiment has surfaced all sorts of needs, which is a good low cost experiment (naturally emerging needs analysis).

Who needs a survey, needs analysis, or just implement and hope it works as it was a good top-down idea…when the emergence that has surfaced from the existence from CoPs has given you the answer to all this pondering for free.

What it has surfaced is a need for our DMS and the Intranet to become socialised…and also a way to do ad-hoc tasks.

I’m seeing all this happening, and perhaps need to suggest a taskforce so us people running all these products can converge.

This convergence will be interesting. If these tools do get socialised, what will then happen?

Will teams decide to export their CoPs to their revamped DMS?

And if the Intranet offers the same tools as our CoPs, but with an Intranet backdrop, will some groups then export their CoPs to the revamped Intranet?

So maybe one day we will come full-circle, and CoPs will be just for cross-functional groups…as wiki, blogs, forums will be features of all products.

What’s the food for thought for people wanting to socialise their organisation online!

Perhaps firstly revamp your existing systems with social tools. ie. Work on your in-the-flow before, or perhaps in parallel with your above-the-flow.

• Intranet and business units/teams (Confluence or Thoughfarmer)
• Client Projects (Basecamp)
• Communities and Social network (Jive SBS)
• Ad-hoc tasks (OpenText Social Media)
• And what about micro-blogging (Socialtext signals)

See what’s happening here, a lot of the tools above do the same things eg. Socialtext has a social network and workspaces, OpenText has a social network, etc…

Also our projects need sophisticated document cycle functionality which Basecamp will not do, so in this case our existing DMS needs to be revamped.

I’m thinking perhaps an Intranet tool like Thoughtfarmer or Confluence could handle them all…except for client projects (requires document lifecycle processes)

Here’s a snapshot of different CoPs that are emerging:

More Than Cops

More than CoPs

By examining the CoPs, or better put, “online groups” at my work, they seem to be:

1. Teams/BU (execute work)
- which shouldn’t be called a CoP even though it is…who cares in the end, I’m happy people are using the tools

2. Teams/BU (learning/support spaces)
- this type of CoP is usually combined with the CoP above (point 1)

3. Cross-functional (traditional learning CoPs)
- a classic example is our Software Architecture and Approaches CoP where people from various units/teams come together to share, learn, help…and to bring that intelligence back to their tasks
- when we need help at work we often look to Google, Twitter, etc…why not create an environment where we can look to each other within the organisation

4. Internal user support spaces (customer service CoP)
- I run a Facilitators CoP where I communicate and troubleshoot with people that run their own CoPs
- These types of CoPs can be at the general user level, or for the support people themselves

5. Teams communicating to the business (customer CoP)
- using a CoP, rather/complementary to an email newsletter
- sometimes this type of CoP is combined with the CoP above (point 4)

6. Role-based
- people on different projects and teams, but share the same role…eg Project Managers, Project Systems Managers

7. We also have others like: interest groups, crowdsourcing, events, new initiatives, office happenings, specific tasks (although this last one suits a more simple application like ad-hoc groups…ie a bunch of people from different teams/units coming together temporarily to execute a task)

We don’t yet have any Client/Customer-based (support/crowdsource CoP, or a CoP with suppliers)

“…before you leap into reinventing your processes for transformative value, step back. You can’t collaborate with your customers before you learn to collaborate with your employees. In the spectrum of risk taking, its best to deploy from the inside-out.”

Just realised I posted something similar a while back, Internal community types that get you viral exposure.

Looks like I was prophetic when I posted What’s the difference between Intranet 2.0 and a social network with groups.

Why do I say this?

At work we have many active online Communities of Practice (CoPs), some are learning and sharing, and others are customer based information and support CoPs, or even both.

In my post Online Communities of Practice are a sweet spot! I highlighted how CoPs cut into email conversations and Intranet information.

That is, rather than using email for questions, communications, support, we use CoP tools.

Some CoPs also like the fact that the CoP can be responsive and agile compared to the Intranet. Some of our CoPs are going beyond conversations and using the CoP as a portal to profile all the information about the group and services the group offers, as you would do on an Intranet.

What they like about the CoP is that you can update it yourself daily, and you can get feedback and questions from internal customers, as well as communicate to them.

What happened the other day is a CoP facilitator mentioned that the CoP was quickly replacing their need for an Intranet page. They said soon, they wish to not host information on the Intranet, but instead just have a hyperlink for their practice that launches to the CoP.

Whoa…CoPs are cutting into the Intranet…it’s not gonna be pretty if people start ditching the Intranet.

See what’s happening, social tools are becoming a catalyst for change, but it’s not explicit, it’s just a by-product…you are not having a revolution, it’s just you start using the new thing, and the old thing becomes ignored.

What will happen if the Intranet loses control to CoPs…their worst case scenario to authoritativeness and all things official and vetted.

As global CoP facilitator I’m not being a traffic stealer, rather a few of my customers are choosing to do this themselves, and when they ditch the Intranet, people interested in their information will also be visiting the CoP, not the Intranet.

So not only are CoPs enablers for emerging groups that are not official or even mature enough to be on the Intranet, but they are starting to attract existing groups that live on the Intranet as perhaps a new place of residence.

What does this tell us? People want to be agile, they want to be more transparent and connect, they want to be close to real-time, they want to be empowered to sense-make and do it themselves…a distributed organisation…worker engagement.

The Intranet better notice this and do something about it?

If they do, where does that leave CoPs?

If the Intranet becomes a social network with group pages, will our CoPs then be absorbed into the Intranet?

This was my whole point of my past post.

You can have a “social network with groups” standalone internal website (which is promoted on the Intranet), or you can have the same thing designed as the Intranet itself.

It’s uncanny, I read a blog post yesterday by the inspiring Peter Bregman on focusing on one thing when you want to make a change or a difference…less is more. Just now, I realised that I practiced this very thing the other day.

Here are some excerpts from an email exchange I had with our global librarian at work.

LIBRARIAN: I’m really having difficulties finding the time to set up the Library CoP. Can you set it up?

ME: If you like I’d rather assist you guys rather than do it for you.
Do you have someone you can delegate to?
Would you like to start off with a telecon, as I need to know the purpose for your CoP, who the audience/s are

LIBRARIAN: Currently, we have no manpower to even start teleconferencing. But if you don’t have the time either, I understand.
Based on our list of projects, CoP is currently a nice to have tool.

ME: Why don’t you send me a blueprint for what you want to achieve, and someone in your team (preferable someone passionate) and I will do our best to help you out.

Why do you want a CoP?

1. A space to learn and share with your team?

2. A place to coordinate tasks and assist/support each other?

3. A place where general people from our work can visit and ask a question, and also subscribe to blogs about current awareness eg. new journals

It can be for all of these, if so, let’s just try one thing first, but we will keep future needs in mind when we design

Who will be the main facilitator?

- this is a person who has time and passion to drive this
- this is not you as you are too busy, but it could be you once it’s up and running

As you know a community is all about conversations in the open (rather than private in email)
- but it can also have a portal element or website feel where you list all your stuff and information
- but you seem to already have an Intranet page for this

If we slowly chip away at it we will get there.

Perhaps I’ll ask this question:

What’s your most pressing issue or process that the community can make better?

Is it 1. learning/sharing, or 2. coordinating/assisting each other, or 3. dealing with your customers

ME: I suggest using the CoP just for your team, so you guys get used to using it, but if your most pressing issue is to get info out to your customers then we can start with that

eg. If you send Journal Table of Contents emails you can publish that in a blog instead and then email the customers the link to the blog.

Even better is if people subscribe, then you don’t have to email some of those people the link to the blog post.

This way the blog will act as an archive, and people can visit it…email is just a private letter box, whereas a blog is an open house

Think of the different email exchanges you have with customers, and the ways you inform customers, and we can re-purpose that using CoP tools

I’m finding that some Communities of Practice (CoPs) at work are lacking leadership even though they have a community leader.

This is a broad statement, and there can be many reasons for this, but in this post I want to focus on one particular reason.

This has happened on several CoPs where the team leader has appointed their personal assistant or a nominated team member to set up a CoP…or the team leader has borrowed a person from another team leader as they like how they designed their CoP.
NOTE: Personally I would be inspired by CoPs with active and frequent conversation, over a well designed website.

The reason for their approach is that the community leader is technically proficient at designing and using the CoPs. The problem is that this person is not a Subject Matter Expert (SME), and does not have the interest, passion or time to facilitate the community in a non-technical way.

Facilitation is not just technical design/support, part of it is monitoring how people use the community and encouraging things, and re-purposing others…I briefly listed Facilitator’s duties at the end of my post, Community of Practice for Facilitators : pilot, adoption and participation.

My point here, is that CoPs need a breadth of facilitator’s, the head facilitator being the Community Leader.

It’s important to have the technical facilitator to cover the technical parts, but most important is the SME. Or rather whoever the community leader is must have a group of facilitators that handle different aspects of a CoP…technical, SME, etc…

Really, if it was an offline CoP then you would not need the technical facilitator at all.

Pause

I have realised for a while that this has been happening, and as the global facilitator I have picked up the pieces, but now that we have lots of CoPs, I’m finding I don’t have time, and I should be “training the trainer” anyway. That’s why I’m currently working on a facilitators workshop, which I’ve always intended to do, but never got the time. I communicate and support to facilitators in the Facilitators CoP, but I need a good real-time focused presentation and conversation to make this stick.

What tipped me over to blog these thoughts?

As a global facilitator I subscribe to all blogs and forums in all CoPs, and I stress that this is important for facilitators to do in their CoPs. This way you have total awareness of the activity, and you can encourage and re-purpose behaviours.

As global facilitator I eaves drop on the activity in all CoPs, but I never interfere, instead I congratulate/assist/recommend to the facilitator of that CoP with some action to take, as it’s not my place to talk to their members.

Anyway…

In one particular CoP we crowdsourced ideas into one forum, and from those 500 ideas we created 10 forums to house them all.

I don’t really agree with the next step, but it was decided that the heavy contributors on a topic were then nominated to be in charge of that forum.
- liase with the lead on bringing some of those ideas into fruition
- keep the forum going as general conversations about that topic

To my surprise they are doing OK, but could be going better if each forum had a person who volunteered themselves, something Samuel Driessen agreed with, but I can’t remember where he left that comment.

Anyway, I have noticed that in one of the forums called “Collaboration”, the person put in charge of that forum was also the project manager for our Office Communicator deployment (instant messaging/conferencing). He posted a new forum topic called “Office Communicator Tip of the week”…which yes, sounds like a blog post.
And in the last couple of months he has posted replies to that forum topic to publish new tips. In essence, he’s using one forum thread as a blog, where each new post is a reply to the forum topic.

I’m glad he’s participating, but his enthusiasm can be channeled to the right tool for the job. In the future that forum thread will be a needle in a haystack, it will be a thread with 50 replies. Instead he could have his own place using a blog, where the whole blog is about his topic, rather than be buried as one of many topics in a forum. The blog will have more presence, it can be furnished around his topic, and he will be more recognised…he and his know-how become a destination.

My point though is that there is no-one to notice and harness this, as that CoP only has a technical facilitator who is not looking out for this sort of thing. The CoP instead needs a SME or a leader who cares about the CoP and it’s members.

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that teams at my work don’t have web 2.0 type online team spaces, but Communities of Practice do. So what happens is that teams are using our CoP tools…and then of course these online team spaces are referred to as CoPs, which is a mistake, as the technology does not define the group dynamics (CoPs are usually naturally emerging groups about learning/sharing, whereas teams are managed groups that execute assigned outcomes).

Team working CoPs

Teams using CoPs to execute tasks, can carry on with their team dynamic of getting stuff done, manage and measure, produce outcomes/deliverables.

Team sharing/support CoPs

But more common are teams using CoPs for sharing/learning/communication/support (troubleshooting). And in this case it’s important that these team sharing type CoPs encourage facilitation rather than try run the community like a team.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the team lead and sub-team leads are too busy to run the CoP space, so a team member is given the task to run the CoP, which is sometimes like pushing up a hill, as they don’t have influence and feel they are bugging people who might not care about the CoP to start with, as they are automatically a member by default of being in the team, rather than accepting an invite. And if the lead and sub-leads are not role-model contributors then this makes it a real hard chore.

Regular sharing and learning cross-functional CoPs

For more on this point about group dynamics see my post, Team-based CoPs compared to cross-functional CoPs.

Ad-hoc groups

Then we have people coming together from different parts of the organisation who request to use a CoP space for their ad-hoc group, to work on a task like fixing a process, etc… These spaces are often more short-lived. Again this really isn’t a traditional CoP…again the technology (CoP tools) do no define the group dynamic.

Anyway, these ad-hoc groups should really be self-serve, I really feel like a bottleneck, and most of the time people don’t bother and use email because their synchronous to asynchronous flow ain’t smooth and effortless.

Sponsor vs Self-serve

Betrand Dupperin picked up on this notion of self-serve creation online group spaces, and from reading his post it seems he was more clear in his explanation.

For traditional CoPs we ask that the requestor has a community sponsor…this is important as online CoPs take time to run, and that is time the manager is allowing for, that could be spent on execution.
If there was a notice from the very top that people can spend time away from or related to tasks (like Google’s 20% time), then self-serve would be OK, but at the moment we need the requestor to note that her immediate boss is ok with this.
NOTE: we have a side issue that the CoP tools we are using are complicated to set up for a regular user, so self-serve might still be an issue from a design perspective.

Now, for ad-hoc group work, this really doesn’t require a sponsor, as the time you spend in the ad-hoc group space is time doing the task itself anyway.
So what we have to do, is work with the vendor to make simple versions of our CoP tools, where there is just one stream, and simple permissions…as stripped down as possible so it’s close to the ease of using email. This way these ad-hoc groups can be self-serve.

I see Jive SBS takes this approach where they have community spaces and group spaces, where the group spaces are self-serve and more basic.

Would people use these ad-hoc groups as traditional CoPs, probably, but they wouldn’t look like flashy websites like our regular CoPs.

I guess that’s where we are, the solution might actually create an issue…personally I would not see it as an issue but see it as emergence, and perhaps this momentum as a catalyst for the allowance of work time spent sharing and learning…not explicitly like 20% of your time, but just embedded into your day.

So what do you think?

1. Teams or departments manage their own communities
   - we refuse CoPs that tread on the turf of an existing team or department
2. CoPs require a sponsor
   - Bottom-up request, Top down creation
3. Ad-hoc groups self-serve

And what do you do if ad-hoc group spaces are used as CoPs?

Would it matter, as the ad-hoc group spaces would be so simple that the facilitator does not need to spend time managing permissions, and up keeping the space. But people may still be spending a portion of their time contributing.

A while ago I wrote a post called Enabling communities, and today I had exactly the same experience that inspired me to write that post.

Here are some points from our discussion.

• I am trying to set up a CoP for people with experience in 3D animation and visualisation.
• This is a specialist area with only a few of us officially doing this role.
• But recently I have noticed a lot of people with experience coming out of the woodwork ie. engineers and the like who have experience with some of the software…I know that around the globe there are several people with this expertise.
• I would like to set up a CoP for a couple of us, and then attract some of these people
  - the CoP as a way to amplify what’s already happening
• We have a lot of work, and it would be good if anyone could help us out, rather than sourcing outside help
  - why spend money externally, when we have the talent internally
  - this ties in with my post, We are more than our job title describes
• We also want to use the CoP to gather what our company needs are for 3D animation.
• Besides conversations, the CoP will also be a great “place” to showcase our gallery.
• We are inhouse specialists, and we want the word to get out that we exist

I really like this last point
- email is not a place
- the Intranet is not going to promote these guys (it’s not interactive anyway)

The online CoP is going to harness their talent, and offer a space where they can be known…then only after this grassroots effort, where they may one day prove themselves as a viable component of our workplace, will they get an official spot on the Intranet.

I mentioned similar CoPs eg. Software Development, Learning and Development…and that some people here in Perth are flash gurus.
He said, ohhh…we just required a flash guru for a job here in the Canada office, we couldn’t find one and had to source externally.

Need I say more, if we are visible and participate, we can then connect and converse, and ultimately collaborate…and generate work (connect the human resources so they are optimising the collective talent).

The theme of this post is do it yourself enabling tools, that allow grass roots efforts to emerge and be seen.

These new bottom-up social tools are surfacing opportunities that the top-end of the business are not thinking of, but are getting traction as knowledge workers now have a way to engage and propel.

KM or Enterprise 2.0 is not only about aligning to business strategy, but instead allowing workers to actively participate, creating their own value, where ultimately what they are doing can be noticed and officially be added as a strategy.

Top-down crowdsourcing is one thing, but bottom-up emergence of invention is another thing…we are not here to just give input to top-down ideas, but the top can notice what we are doing at the street level, and say “I like that, I’m glad we give you tools to demonstrate your talent.”

This is not a post about social computing deploying/piloting/adoption in general. All these are applicable on many levels eg. a person implementing across the whole organisation, within a department, across a couple of departments, within a group, etc…

Of late we have seen posts by folks at ThoughtFarmer and Socialtext on pilot/implementation methods. These are great posts and show the difference between focused phased piloting and no pilot at all. I may cover these posts at a later date, as my post today is more on adoption or participation at the group level.

My focus is not on the social computing practitioner, but rather on a regular person wanting to run an online Community of Practice (CoP). It’s more about the social computing practitioner helping a CoP Facilitator help themselves.

ie what are the conditions that a facilitator can create to get their CoP off the ground.

I can’t help myself, just quickly…the Socialtext post above refers to the interactive nature of social software (compared to transactional) where scale and network effects are essential to actually see the potential and emergence. And this is so true for enterprise wide tools such as social networks, microblogging, blogosphere, etc..

But this is not always the case with social computing islands such as CoPs. You don’t need network effects for a group space to work, you just need willing and interested members…and in regards to a team, you need a task or issue to tackle where social tools will replace current tools. I went in depth into this in my post, Do group tools get more traction due to not requiring network effects.

Just to mix it up, group spaces aren’t just about the talent of the group, the task/agenda, and how they work with social tools, which a pilot helps with…they are also about others roaming from CoP to CoP, and as a visitor being able to ask a CoP a question or perhaps answer something…this is serendipity and emergence that will only present itself with scale (it is less likely to happen in a pilot).

The two takeaways here are

1. social tools to help you do what you already do better

2. connecting the enterprise to increase cross-team awareness, cooperation, collaboration, ideas, sourcing information (who knows what), serendipity, opportunities, diversity of emergence…

Basically the more connected an organisation is, the more productive and effective they are. As I alluded to in my social PKM post, that a whole bunch of personally productive people does not make the organisation necessarily productive.

Oops, I wasn’t meant to get into this in this post!

What are the reasons for a pilot again?

• Helps to discover and squash tech issues before release

• Helps to discover and assist in user issues

- that’s why a cross-section of people is important in the pilot

• Deployment team can get an idea of early good practices, codes of conduct, showcase examples

- and will be prepared with the knowledge to help a greater number of people and issues when comes release time

- the more tech and usability issues found and documented in pilot stage the more room this makes to devote time to championing and facilitating

• Stewart Mader has similar thoughts…a good one is use cases in how you can use wikis, he says:

“The teams involved in the pilot would help define and model wiki uses that can then be shown as examples during the wiki rollout to the rest of the organization. This embeds the right kind of uses throughout the organization, and ensures sustained use of the tool.”

Many points in this post have been enrichened by a podcast with Stewart Mader, here’s some notes.

WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT A FACILITATOR CAN CREATE TO GET THEIR COP OFF THE GROUND?

Following on from my post on workshopping and piloting a new community are the adoption factors a facilitator can massage to get participation off the ground.

After creating a community that everyone wants (or if it’s a task space; finding an issue to solve/fix a process), and piloting it to test it’s use, you will have done all the right things to get started on the right foot, you will have hopefully circumvented any fundamental obstacles.

Next is to create conditions for people to use the community; you need interactions and conversation to grow the community. This requires facilitation, guidance and some tactics or notions to be aware of when dealing with getting a group of people to channel their time into a certain direction.

We all agree the community was a great idea, and here it is, but some people have cold feet, or find it’s unfamiliar. There is an unintentional resistance, and this can be facilitated or nurtured with some points about adoption.

“…people don’t resist change, they resist being changed”
- Peter Bregman

“…resistance is not so much about the change; it’s all about being changed”
- Peter Vajda

“Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group”
- Nancy Dixon

We have already asked the questions (needs analysis), workshopped and piloted, so what do we need to know for it to grow or start breathing, and sustain a heartbeat.

Design and Structure

• People need to be a click or two away from what they need to do

• If it’s too complex people won’t have the time to learn, they need to orient themselves with ease

• Create a guide on how, and when to use each tool (better still incorporate it into the design)

• Blank slates don’t help (people are used to structured tools that are designed for a specific purpose, and are not used to the idea of flexing unstructured tools to fit their needs)

- I like ThoughtFarmers idea of usage scenarios

• Create a stickiness factor so people return (frequent blog posts, a communal wikipedia)

- are you appealing to all members

Frequency

• Core group of bloggers to do weekly columns

• Whenever something happens, blog about it
eg. I uploaded a presentation into our library, go check it out…

Email Interaction

• If it’s not in your inbox it doesn’t exist

- people are more likely to react if it comes to them

• Also being able to publish via email is handy

Peer to Peer influence

• Sometimes people will only adopt if their close colleagues are participating

• Prior to this they have not dedicated the time to investigate, but if a close colleague finds it of value, then this will influence them to give it a try

• Again, we are influenced by people we trust, more than a training programme or by others we don’t know well. We take recommendations from people we value.

Eg. If someone recommends a movie I may not go, but if a friend does there is more chance I will go.
The same applies to participating in CoPs (if my trusted colleague or someone I respect is doing it, I may give it a go).

EXAMPLE

Peter and Joe are both Project Managers who attended a training session on communities. The online tool offers all the solutions to their needs about communication, awareness, sharing and learning.

When they got back to their desks Joe had a look at the communities and just didn’t have time to learn them…if the design was more appealing and intuitive, perhaps Joe would have delved further. A couple of months later Joe and Peter are chatting and Peter tells Joe of the brilliant transition his team has made to using online communities over emails and attachments. Peter told Joe it took a lot of getting used to, discipline and facilitating, but eventually it became part of their routines (it’s the way stuff is done around here now).

Joe really values Peter’s work ethic and they are mates and trust each other, help each other out…they have a history together. Due to this close relationship Joe has decided that if Peter thinks it’s good, then it must be, as past history shows that Joe trusts, respects and admires Peter and his endeavors. Indirectly Peter has influenced Joe to give it a try.

This example shows us that a training session is just one aspect to gaining adoption. We are more prone to take the time to try things out, based on recommendations by someone you trust over someone else that does not have as much influence on your decision-making.

What does this say…if you want to influence someone, influence their peers or people they respect and admire, and this will in turn make it more attractive or motivated for them to take up your offer.

I guess case studies are also influential as they can make known (to some degree) the worthiness, risk and return on trying something out…time or attention is also a factor.

People are like that; take up tends to increase when people can see others didn’t get hurt or they had a success, so it’s now safe to join…let others do the work first. I guess those who test the waters first, get to learn from their mistakes first hand (which is the best type of learning), and they are also perhaps the innovators or cutting edge people who reap the benefits or become known for their endeavors as the pioneers.

At my wife’s work there is a campaign to build a unique service centre for children who have been taken away from their families. A lot of high level people have been approached and have shown interest, but have not committed. But they noticed that when one person chose to commit, then this had a chain effect where those previous people that were approached also decided to commit.

This has an amazing snowball effect when people are visibly connected in online networks. Since we have more ambient awareness of each others actions, it doesn’t take long for people to see what their peers are doing and choose to follow…visibility and participation is the fundamental key.

There is more chance for peer to peer adoption for any old thing when people are connected in online networks; the irony of this post is we are trying to get them to be participants of online networks in the first place (actually this post is about communities, but you know what I mean).

Peter Bregman points to a study which illustrates our nature of peer influence:

“You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables. And reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help.

But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn’t like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea-hater was eating peas like the pea-lovers.

Peer pressure.

We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us. Which is what makes culture change particularly challenging because everyone is conforming to the current culture. Sometimes though, the problem contains the solution.”

Champions and role-models

• In team-based communities especially (as opposed to shared interest groups), if the leads are not role-models in active participation, then this sends a signal that the community is not important

• Facilitators must lead by example, and encourage senior/respected people to be role-models

- People will follow or respond to their lead and encouragement

Viral Approach

• Concentrate on training a core group

- they will set the good examples and be an influence on others

Push sharing in a pull system

• I had a scenario of a CoP facilitator emailing a link to a few people

- I suggested using the blog otherwise it sends the wrong signal (kind of like a parent telling their kids off for something they do themselves)

- if their intended audience aren’t subscribers of the blog, they can create the blog post, then send them the link

It’s about conversation

• It’s not all about the blog post itself

- it’s about the the conversations that the blog post triggers (this will build community spirit…like a thriving dinner party…you will go to the next one as you enjoyed the company and stimulation of the previous one)

- people are more prone to comment, rather than blog or write a forum topic

- don’t have to be provocative, but even when posting about a journal article, rather than just share the link, write an opinion based review…this will get people to react

Raids/Barnraising

• Similar to handholding and more popular with wikis is spending a session on using a wiki for a specific and real purpose

- this gives people real experience at using them, and using new tools for current needs

- the idea is that they will go back to their seats and continue using it, as they have overcome the technology barrier and the “what can I use this tool for” barrier

- it also builds working collaboratively

- as the ThoughFarmer post points out, it also gives people examples to learn from

- I have a Wiki CoP at work where we blog about wikis and ask questions in forums, it’s also where I list examples of wikis that people are creating (it gives others ideas of how they can use wikis)

- here are some links to barnraising wikis

Re-purposing email (It’s more about new behaviours)

• CoP tools replace the email distribution list

• If people continue using email out of habit, the facilitator must thank them for participating. And then mention that if you are going to email an announcement, news or sharing information, please use a blog. And if you are going to email a question or topic for discussion use a forum.

- then demonstrate by re-posting their email into the forum with your reply, then send them the link

- ask them to subscribe in case the conversation keeps going

• Answer questions promptly so people feel heard and benefit from participating

- this will influence return visits

Hand-holding

• This is about breaking old habits with new technologies, plus people are expected to publish in an open place, rather than the more confident private email channels

- plus they won’t spare the time for themselves to learn a new tool, but they perhaps will if you instigate it

• This may involve sitting down with a member once a week for a couple of months and guide them along in publishing a blog post, until they get used to it and build the confidence.

• Once people get comments and ratings on their blog posts, it gives them confidence and encouragement to continue posting.

- see Nancy Dixon’s post on a company commander who became an active participant after he found out that other people were getting valuable use from his AAR document

- being appreciated and feeling you have made a difference are good conditions for further participation

• After a while this system becomes self-rewarding as people may draw a reputation

For more on this, read the next section on “Feedback”

Feedback (Reputation/Recognition)

NOTE: I will state here that I lean more on the natural and sustainable method of the conversational element in self generating peer reputation to propel the community, rather than incentives.

• I’m finding that when people use CoPs well I am impressed and give them feedback

- this encourages more participation (see the end of the previous section on “Hand-holding”)
eg. good use of blogging

- one facilitator blogged to her members that she has email subscribed all members to the main blog, and took the courtesy to explain how to unsubscribe.

- Just today I emailed a picture of a gold star to a CoP facilitator for really using their blogs and forums well, they have a really active community…and he emailed me back saying “ha ha - I would rather have had a picture of a beer”

- and of course we hope a comments discussion self generates the motivation for more blog posts (HP’s study hold this as one of two highest factors to participation)

Nancy Dixon relates this to recognition:

“Recognition means the most to us when it comes from those who really know the subject – who know what they’re talking about. It’s great to have your boss think you’re a top performer, but chances are your boss doesn’t know enough about the technical part of your work to know how good you really are – but your peers do. For a peer to say, “The person that really understands that problem is Pete,” that comment Pete would regard as a sign of respect and one he would highly value.”

Group building

• Face-to-face interaction and connection, or online ways for members to connect in real-time

• These can be social gatherings, meetings, or workshops

The next section on “Confidence” extends on the impact that building rapport has for knowledge sharing/participation

Trust (Confidence/Comfort)

• Are people confident and comfortable enough to participate? ie. do they have a relationship with other members
eg. at a house party we are always more comfortable in sharing our lives after a lot of small talk where we build a rapport (a certain level of trust)…or after a few drinks

- Karen Stephenson’s article for more.

Relationships (Give and Take)

• Is there an equilibrium of give and take (both with members and non-members)

- do some members just ask questions and never help out with answers

- are members willing to research answers for questions from non-members
(this is an important point, and the reason why most CoPs are membership based, you are willing to take the time to help out others within the membership circle, as they will in turn help you out next time (like the reciprocal altruism of vampire bats)

- People you trust will give you confidence they will not misuse your knowledge sharing

- Are some members being burdened
(again membership is important, as you take the time to help out a handful of people)

Gia Lyons has a great post on this

“Because you are the one individual who knows this stuff, you are reluctant to advertise that fact, for fear of the avalanche of requests to collaborate. You need more emails, IMs, and phone calls like you need another orifice in your cranium. Plus, these people who would swarm you like flies on poo will not perhaps care too much if you are over-extended. But, you are more than happy to share what you know with one or two others, after you’ve discerned that they won’t abuse you, won’t stab you in the back, won’t take credit for your intellectual capital, and will perhaps return the favor. The people who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced point of view.”

More from Nancy Dixon:

“We do not give that knowledge away lightly. Before we take the time and trouble to share that knowledge, we need some assurance that our knowledge will be treated with the respect it deserves, given thoughtful consideration, and that the recipient actually knows enough to make use of it.”

In order to share knowledge, we need to build relationships, and we do this by informal conversations on sites such as online communities:

“The way a professional can know how someone will treat the precious commodity of her knowledge is to know that person well enough to make that judgment call.”

“…sharing knowledge is risky, the other person may make a cutting remark about it or indicate that it’s not worth listening to. And sharing knowledge is time consuming, because to really respond to another’s question or problem takes the time to understand the issue and to explain in sufficient depth. So we rightly place conditions around sharing our in-depth knowledge. The relationships we build with others provide a needed level of confidence that our knowledge will be treated with respect. Knowledge sharing and relationship are coupled.”

Personal relevancy

• Is the community personally relevant, or fulfilling needs at an individual level?

Dawn Foster lists some motivation factors

Portal

• In addition to being a conversational place, dress the homepage with common links so it becomes a pivot point for peripheral needs

In-the-flow

• Choose an activity or type of communication that is conducted in an email list and now do it in the CoP

eg. broadcast announcements are now done in the CoP blog, people have no choice but it visit the CoP
- while they are there they may look around and participate elsewhere

For more see the Transparent Office blog

Activities

• Offline

- choose something you do offline eg. a question time pre or post a conference/meeting…and complement this with using a forum for pre and post questions

• Member intros

- one of our CoPs makes it mandatory that new members fill in a forum topic where they can tell the group a little about themselves, experience, why they joined, aspirations

• Lounge forum

- some of our younger generation (graduate) CoPs have non-work forums as a way to build commonality, fun and relationships

- the more rapport we build the more we build opportunities to collaborate and help each other out

- Dawn Foster has more on the lounge concept

• Blog carnivals (thematic topic weeks)

• Polls

• Coffee corner/Fill in the gap

- fun quiz, riddle, story…

• Member of the month

- this showcases a member

- one of our graduate CoPs also asks questions to the community about a member
(this gets people talking to each other, and finding things out about each other)

• Showcase hot discussions (weekly roundup posts)

• Share personal stories

• Keep track of people traveling

• Guest posts from other CoPs

• Use engaging media (videos)

• Link to your CoP in your email signature

• Create your own newsletter to reach others

• Promote the CoP in other newsletters

• Write about stuff happening in other communities

• Build a relationship with sister CoPs (drive traffic to each other)

• Guest bloggers from other CoPs

• Rehash old content in other ways

• Events / guest speakers

• Blog columns (frequent posts)

General facilitator duties

The focus of this blog kind of bleeds into some of the duties of a Facilitator, so I’ve included a few below

• Gardening/Weeding (move topics, distill great posts on wikipages)

• Design

• Help and welcome new members

• Assist people in using CoP

• Answer questions promptly

• Make sure content is correct (re-edit old posts, leave a comment to correct/update)

• Help guides

• Remind people which tools to use

• Re-purpose email

• Off topic reminders

• Welcome suggestions and Feedback (via a forum)

• Barnraising

• Monitor/Listen in and always offer pointers or feedback or congratulate

• Understand member motivation

• Encourage members to specialise

• Promotion

Related

Preparing for community release
Self-serve create groups is essential to harness emergence and adapt
I don’t create communities, I create online spaces!
Enterprise social networks and ad-hoc groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing work/finding stuff

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

Company information, tools and news

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

Then various people use email to do their bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integration

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

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

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

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

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

More from Jon Mell:

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

Paula Thorton is a blogging canon of late, which is good to see as her twitter trigger fingers are always on fire, but don’t provide enough space for her to share her extended original thinking, so I’m happy she’s blog drunk again.

Anyway, a post of hers called Adoption can’t be driven, really rang true to me, it’s about design, adoption and adaptation…the basic premise is that without user centred design, you can forget even trying to faciliate adoption.

In the comments she says:

“Rather than drive, push, pull — movement occurs by mutual attraction: draw (this is a fundamental principle of complexity sciences ala. self organization — per Stuart Kauffman, it’s “energy for free”). But that’s the ‘lesser’ goal. The FIRST goal is to simply GO to where they are. Meet them. While that can be taken literally, it’s more figurative. It’s about figuring out what activity they’re doing and embed function.”

NOTE: I’m currently drafting a post on adoption that goes much further into this, so stay tuned.

I could really relate to Paula’s post to the context of my current experience in using a 90’s non-user centred application for Communities of Practice (CoPs), as I find I’m driving adoption in a “pushing” sense in a big way in relation to the technology/design aspect. User manuals is not a good start, as CoP tools are very simplistic, they are not sophisticated at all…but that’s what you get when the design is not user centred.

Then to really press the point I came across this tweet:

GIA LYONS
RT @cflanagan: Poll: Do you allow employees 2 (self-service) create groups in your intn’l e2.0 deplmnt? http://twtpoll.com/elm0uu #twtpoll

JOHNT
@gialyons after meeting i can go back 2 desk + coordinate by email in 1 click, groups should b same

There is some context missing here that’s make it a little hard for this survey to be totally effective.

And that is, different applications have different ways of setting up groups…some old school apps involve some work in setting up a group…but on second thought this poll alludes to web 2.0 type tools, so I guess that means group features that you can set up in a couple of clicks.

NOTE: In this post I refer to CoPs and groups interchangeably, but as you know a CoP is a type of group.

In a previous post I have explained our CoPs are portal type websites that need to be designed, which means they take a while to set up, and they have lots of permissions functionality, you can add many blogs, forums, wikis, etc…they certainly don’t suit a quick set-up, and aren’t the easiest things to run.

This does not change our belief in emergent communities, but because of design sophistication and the design not being user-centric we have taken a bottom-up request, top-down creation, which is unfortunately a necessary obstacle to emergence.

This means I create the CoPs, and use my HTML skills to design the CoP as user friendly as possible to the needs of the requestors. I do this as they may not have skills or time to design their CoP…I want to limit the design adoption barrier as much as possible.

I really understand Paula’s point, because I believe we would have lots more adoption if the CoPs were designed intuitively, and we allowed self-serve creation.
People want to visit, orient themselves (ie. without thinking, understand what they can and can’t do), and be one-click away from an action.

Self serve creation is key!

The creation of the actual space is really important for emergence and empowerment, and this is what I like about new social computing tools like Lotus Connections, Jive, Open Text Social Media, etc… As a result this is a plus for adoption.

Think about it, a couple of us are interested in a topic or have a task to do…we create a group space in under a minute, and start participating.

The minute people need permissions, is a minute too long; they don’t bother and will use email. And if the design is not user-centric, they may eventually give up leaving a ghost town for email.

What self creation means is you are gonna get less of the prescribed scenario where the boss requests the creation of a CoP and appoints people to be members and lead; as people have the power to self-serve and naturally coalesce around a topic.

I bet that before the boss can even order a CoP, there would be people already creating their own…this is great, as the boss can concentrate on leadership.

Self-serve creation is where it’s at! as the very essence of it is not encouraging a culture of orders and outcome, but instead a culture of, “if it has value it will surface” (emergence and adapting)…plus the bonus of a transparent workplace (kind of like an emergence on top of the emergence)

User-centric design is where it’s at! as people just don’t have time to read a manual, or no longer read manuals anyway…or click around for an hour working it out, and even if they do, it doesn’t make using a non-intuitive tool less frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong, our current CoPs are great as conversational portal like websites, your HTML skills are your only barrier to creating a flashy site. Because of this design, they are prone to be used for more long-term uses.

In contrast, the enterprise version of anyone being able to set up a Facebook or LinkedIn type group in a few easy clicks is marvellous and simple to use…what people think in the organisation is actually making itself present as the frontline workers actually get to create the brains (groups) where this thinking (conversations) happens.
But your group may want more than a glorified forum and activity stream. They may want various forums on the same page, perhaps some permissions control, and a way to flash up the site. I guess the answer to this using 2.0 type groups is create as many groups as you like, and then use a wiki as your website to list them all, and perhaps also re-syndicate the content.

Since our current CoPs allow each CoP to house unlimited forums, blogs and wikis; this means topics may become buried in the CoP as it tries to cater too much. Seeing a CoP name in our directory is certainly not going to be able to describe all the content sources in the CoP. Plus you may have people that hang around a particular forum in the CoP and not the others, and they may want some more ownership and visibility by having their own space.
In contrast some of our existing CoPs would not suit new web 2.0 stream like group spaces (as they seem too simple), they would instead like to provide multiple blogs and forums in the one page, and to create free-form HTML content, this is especially true with some of our CoPs being used as support spaces, as they serve as a conversational portal/knowledge base.

I’ll just add a final comment on behavioural design…I’ve noticed that some of these new group sites don’t use terms like blogs, forums, and wikis, but instead call them messages, questions, documents. Even contextual names for blogs like project diaries, etc… I think using a familiar word like “messages, questions” lessens the unfamiliarity and even the stereotype you may have of the tool, and in all lessens the barrier to take part as it’s nothing too different.

Just like matter warps gravity, design can warp culture.

NOTE: My use of the word “warp” is not referring to the result of good or bad, but instead the intervening cause.

Matt Simpson has a kicker of a post in regards to a scenario that happens to me all the time…which you would expect from someone who deals with enterprise online communities on a daily basis.

The post title says it all, The Manager Who Thought He Could Create a Community.

“I had a meeting today with a manager who thought he could create a community. He was troubled that the community didn’t really work well. It really made him angry.”

“Now, you might ask yourself, how in the world can a man create a community? Aren’t communities made of people? Aren’t they voluntary? Don’t they form when people gather together and interact with one another voluntarily based on something they have in common and actually recognize themselves as members of a persistent group? Yes, of course.

So, I asked the man, how did he do it? He showed me.”

The Manager progressed to create an online space and filled it with member ID’s and appointed someone to facilitate it.

“His major frustration was that the assigned community manager hadn’t taken his role seriously.”

“…we talked a bit about the concept of communities… about voluntary membership and participation… about the self-selecting nature of the membership itself… about the need for leaders to self-select from within the membership and identify their own topics. This is a typical flow of discussion, which, when given enough time and insight, eventually changes a person’s entire outlook… from manager to gardener. Communities form and emerge naturally. They can be encouraged and facilitated; But they can’t be engineered and determined.“

And a magical summary if I’ve ever heard one:

“A man can no more create a community by filling out a form on a webpage than he can make a fruit tree by taping fruit to twigs and twigs to a stump.”

My post, Online communities : Bottom-up requests very much reflects this experience.

Here are some excerpts:

“IF THERE IS a Top-Down *request*, usually by a boss, we inform them that willing a community this way is not effective. Instead you have to workshop with your potential members and from this conversation an appropriate community/s will manifest.”

“Each CoP needs in this order:

1. a substantial enough topic to warrant it’s own space
2. someone who is passionate and has the time to lead it
3. a bunch of members who also have an interest in the topic and will contribute”

“If you have all of these then we will create a CoP as specific as you can (by that I mean a space where people have a shared identity about a topic)
- but I expect each person who wants to lead these CoPs to approach me”

“I noticed some communities in the directory that were created before I was the global lead for the company.
- there was a general community and then another 4 specific communities”

“I rang up the Facilitator of the general community and he told me that he got those 4 specific communities created in the hope to get some people to run them. But it just didn’t happen.”

I also reinforce this point in teams wanting to use CoP tools.

“It’s usually the team lead who wants the community
- so right off the bat we need to know if it’s what the workers want
- and we need to know how to best structure it so the workers naturally participate”

“An idea here for the lead is to put aside control, prescribed structure and convenience of one space, and let the workers suggest community structure/number of communities
- a bottom-up way to structure a top-down request”

“In this approach we get to see if the workers are excited or not (also a good way to surface champions), and they will come up with more natural and usable structures ie. communities designed in a way that will actually be used, as the people on “ground zero” actually designed it to flow with their way of working.”

“Another thing is that if the team lead has appointed a champion, or one has volunteered to facilitate, it’s a very hard job to have influence in a team dynamic.”

Read on for my elaboration on this point.

Something I recommend is to Crowdsource as a way to create a community, and also workshop needs and wants.

My post on spidergrams also lists some questions to address when wanting to create an online space for your community:

“1. Do you have a substantial enough topic that warrants it’s own community?
2. Do you have a community leader with passion and time?
3. Do you have passionate key members?
4. Do you have a shared identity on what you want out of the community? eg. topic, learning
5. Have you workshopped your design, topics, tools, etc…
6. Is it about learning and sharing?
7. Is it about coordinating tasks?
8. Is it about communicating to a general visitor audience? More a communication, and crowdsource tool, than a community?”

My post Social computing is messy and so it should be!, attacks the management approach of prescribed places to participate in.
Often management want all conversations on a topic to be in the one space, but this is unnatural, people will participate where they like to hang out, they don’t want to have to go where they are told to speak about that topic. In the end overlapping conversations happening in different areas is better than forcing and motivating it to happen in one area, and often ending up with no-participation at all.

I said something related to this in my post, More thoughts on community structure and creation:

“It’s not about the topic of the community, it’s about the people.”

Lastly, I mention to managers who want to use our CoP tools for their teams or just regular CoPs that, Communities don’t rely on network effects to be successful

Here are some excerpts from some of our help guides:

“Having an online community website doesn’t make a community, it just enhances the community you already have that you may be administering through email, telecons, face to face.”

If you know of others who are interested in the same topic, but you don’t yet communicate as a community, then workshop with these people to see if they all agree to create an online community space to beget the community.”

“An online space is not enough alone, a community needs members and conversations, otherwise it’s a website, rather than a community.
As a result, someone is required to run the community and encourage participation.”

Something that Matt has bought to my attention that I haven’t made clear is as well as communities (topic and members) naturally emerging, so will the leaders who facilitate the community (self-selecting approach).

[ADDED 18/08/09 Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto:

“A small community can only absorb a small number of new members at a time. Once it is bigger and there are more people that can welcome and absorb new members in a way that acclimates them, recruitment can ramp up. However, if you overwhelm an emergent community you are very likely to have the activity of the community stall out and it will be much harder to get it going again.”

]

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

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

Is it aggregation?

eg. twitter hash tag channels?

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

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

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

What about “social groupings”?

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

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

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

Ad-hoc groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I alluded to this in Twitter the other day:

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

Sameer Patel, riffed on it:

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

This is what he referred to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve written in the past of a support team using CoP tools to ask questions (forums), share tips (blogs), list workarounds to processes (wikis)…in all everyone can learn off each other.

Now what about the customer?

Traditional designed Support Database

1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would log a call to the support database.

2. A support person takes the call.

3. All discussion and questions (trouble shooting, investigation) are done via email
- with other support people
- with the customer

4. Other support people don’t go along for the ride in other people’s calls

5. Call is closed and customer problem is solved.

6. Other support people do not benefit from this (as it’s not documented in a public online space)

7. Other customers do not benefit from this (as it’s not documented in a public online space)

Combination of Support Database and an Online space (CoP)

1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would log a call to the support database.

2. A support person takes the call.

3. The discussion happens in the CoP forums where it passes everyone’s radar (as our support database doesn’t have conversations around an item, so we jump to another application and use our CoP forums)

4. Therefore everyone is along for the ride (learning as part of work at no extra effort at all)

5. Call is closed

6. Other support people do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)

7. Other customers do not benefit from this

Crowdsource the helpdesk

Samuel Driessen has a post called, Crowdsourcing the IT desk, which takes this one step further so both parties can share and learn.

We are web friends and I know he won’t mind so I’ll re-post most of it here:

“What I was wondering is: How many companies are crowdsourcing their IT helpdesks? I see most companies still maintaining traditional helpdesks. So, every employees knows the numbers he/she should call, you call the helpdesk and they try to help you. Usually there’s also a system to support that process. This tool supports the helpdesk to manage calls and their solutions. And employees can check the progress of their incident/question.

However, we all know lots of stuff that is IT helpdesk-ish is solved by asking colleagues for help or Googling the solution. And the solutions the helpdesk provides to one colleagues is shared among the helpdesk people, but is not shared with all employees.

Would it be nice and wise to crowdsource the IT helpdesk. I’m not saying the helpdesk employees should move over. We still need them. But their knowledge and that of all the employees can be used to quickly find who else has a certain problem, to solve issues the IT helpdesk can’t solve, etc.

I’m wondering: does your corporate IT helpdesk work in this way? Or do you know of companies that have this in place? And is this working for them?”

This is how the scenario would work

1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would visit our online support CoP and post a forum topic

2. Anyone in the organisation can visit the forum and see this call (this type of community wouldn’t require members)
- anyone in the organisation can get an RSS or email subscription to this forum

3. The discussion happens in the CoP forums where it passes everyone’s radar (by everyone we don’t just mean the support team, we mean the whole organisation)

4. Therefore everyone (the whole organisation) can choose to go along for the ride (learning as part of work at no extra effort at all)

5. Call may be solved by a non-support person, but it has to be officially closed by a support person.

6. Other support people do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)

7. Other customers do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)

Problem now is we have replaced all the sophistication of managing support calls using a designed support database, with a simple forum in a CoP. Now we can crowdsource and re-use information, but we lack workflow tools to manage and report calls.

This is the problem I had with a facilitator with one of our internal CoPs he’s using for support.
I told him these free-form tools are great as they allow you to bend them to do what you want, but you eventually hit a wall as they are not designed to do exactly what you want. You can’t have your cake an eat it to. On the other hand a specifically designed tool will be rigid and only do one thing.

An ideal situation is to go with the crowdsourcing forum concept, where it’s a little more designed towards support flows.

eg. Get Satisfaction, UserVoice and others

I mentioned the business could buy a similar enterprise tool to those above, or they may say we have generic CoPs, please bend them as much as possible to suit your needs, as we can’t buy specific tools for 100’s of departments.

But there’s more…

Another aspect is that there may need to be parallel support spaces.

At work I run Communities of Practice (CoPs) and have a support CoP for Facilitators that run their own CoPs.

When they have an issue they raise a forum topic, if they (or myself) have something to share we use a group blog.

Sometimes a facilitator of a CoP will answer the forum question…yeah, they do my support responsibility for free.

But sometimes we will go back and forth in the forums to clarify the question, and it may get too irrelevant (noisy) for others on the forum.

So we start emailing
- I’d rather another solution where you can splinter off the forum into a private customer side discussion
- this way it’s documented, and I can point other support people to this side discussion, rather than send them a load of emails of my current discussion with the customer

Also, I may need to talk to some other support people in private away from the customer
- rather than email we do this in a private support forum in our Administration CoP
- but again, what would be ideal is to splinter off the forum into a private discussion with my other support people (rather than the two parallel CoP approach)

I just read over on mashable about the various ways to filter tweets; by keywords, by groups, by links, etc…

Under the keyword section they list filttr, but I got to tell you filttr does it all, not as sophisticated as peoplebrowsr, but it has the essential features. It’s oAuth enabled, post select updates to Facebook, Twitpic, file attachments, shortcuts, threaded replies, and has a mobile version. Below I have focused on the filtering features.

Features

• Filters tweets based on your past reading behaviour
• Manually black list and white list keywords
• Slider to curb noisy tweeps

eg. if a tweep is conference tweeting too much you can slide to receive less noise

• Link only tweets from your stream
• Create many keyword streams
• Create many group streams

But can’t share these as Sameer Patel would like, and which some others can do

• Create a combination of a keyword stream within a group, and also, that shows only tweets with links in them

eg. show me tweets with just links in them with the hashtag #e2conf within my group of people I follow called “enterprise”

• Automatically creates a group of tweeps that aren’t in a group

I’ve been using Filttr for most of this year, and I tell ya it helps me deal with my Twitter stream firehose, plus these guys are really responsive with implementing suggested features, either via Twitter, email or Uservoice.

If you have time you can read the regular stream, or perhaps just read link only tweets in the regular stream, but let’s face it I never, ever, ever have time to do this…

I don’t really create keyword search streams unless I’m researching or there is an event, and I haven’t used the sliders or black/white listing features yet.

But what I do use is the grouping feature (alias), and link-only tweets feature.

Just like an RSS Reader I have folder type streams.

These folders are groups that I organise my tweeps in…you can do a keyword search across a group if you like.

eg. I have a group called “enterprise2.0″
- this displays tweets from about 100 people I follow
- if I wanted I could overlay this with a keyword search eg “wiki”
- then later on I can take off the keyword search if I like

For every group, I have a link only group as well.

For example, if I don’t have time to read all tweets in my “enterprise2.0″ group, I’ll read the “enterprise2.0-linkonly” stream instead…this way I can just read tweets that have links in them.

The main groups I have are:

Regular stream-linkonly
Enterprise2.0
Enterprise2.0-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly
Networks
Networks-linkonly
Communities
Communities-linkonly
Learning
Learning-linkonly
KM
KM-linkonly
Local
Local-linkonly
LocalEsssentials
LocalEssentials-linkonly
Vendor
Vendor-linkonly

Today I may only have 20 minutes to catch up on Twitter on my mobile on the train, so I may read:

Communities-linkonly
KM-linkonly
Networks-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly

I really like that I’m empowered to be able to do this. With the regular Twitter interface, my 20 minutes would not get me far, or satisfy me…

Twitterslurp - a drop.io API app that creates a keyword Twitter stream, with a list of users and stats for your website, see an example at the Personal Democracy Forum created by the Bivings group.
[ADDED 4/07/09 - Please ignore the Drop.io reference as Twitterslurp by the Bivings Group is based on this googlecode]

Tweetboard - showcase a Twitter stream in your blog. The owner and visitors to your site populate this stream by tweeting in the text box. All replies are threaded. View a history of all tweets or the lastest ones.

Rather than embed this app in your blog, it acts as a tab on the side of the browser window, which you click and a window expands. If this tab is red it means there are new tweets (from the owner and visitors) since your last visit; if it’s green means otherwise.

When someone tweets in the text box provided, the tweet appears at Twitter with a special link called “posted.at” at the end of the tweet. This is a unique link that points back to the site, and opens up that thread…this brings traffic back to your site where the visitors can participate in the thread discussion.
When browsing a sites Tweetboard you can click the permalink of a tweet and it launches a text box where you can copy the permalink of that tweet. You could paste this link into a blog post or a tweet, whatever…I guess this pop-up box spoonfeeds you rather than having to right-click, then copy shortcut.

Further to this, each reply in a tweetboard thread also has a special link called “inreply.to”. When someone clicks the permalink of a reply, a box pops up with the link to that spot in the thread on the tweetboard of that site. If you are reading a reply in the thread and click reply, and enter a tweet, that tweet will appear in twitter with a link back to that exact spot in the thread.

Twitlogo - create and download your own Twitter logo, here’s me.

Dial2Do - a speech to text way to tweet and more, see the others

Tweexchange - see if a user name is available

BONUS
twictionary
My Tweet 16 - view a users first 16 tweets…oh, this doesn’t work as “Twitter only makes a user’s last 3200 tweets available.”

I got a follow-up email the other day from our vendor to see if I have used a new reporting package, and for some feedback. I really don’t have time now as I’m facilitating at the moment, but I will get round to metrics at some stage.

To tell you the truth, this reporting thing is going to be a whole new component to our CoPs, which means I will have to dedicate some good time to learning about it, practicing, and then putting some stuff together to inform CoP facilitators, and then to support them.

I’m so busy at the moment that I keep putting it off. I would be prepared to spend 15 minutes a day on it, but I’m one of those people who once they start, really dive into something; the momentum, continuity and freshness helps me retain and not forget where I’m up to, or how things work again.

Then I thought, blog fragments.

I asked the vendor if she could possibly use her blog to do a weekly post on reporting. Maybe what’s already available, and what’s involved. And then start getting into the new package…perhaps posting once a week to showcase a report and what questions it answers

eg. If your boss is asking for numbers, but you don’t have the time for this stuff just try this quick and easy report on distinct logins, that will buy you time for now.

eg. The boss may ask for penetration metrics eg. The difference in number between members of CoPs and all employess

eg. If your boss wants a more explicit step up, try this report that tells him how many subscribers there are across all blogs and forums

eg. The boss may want some activity metrics eg. the number of blog and forum posts

eg. What about some engagement, try this report on the number of blog/forum posts a month compared to comments/replies. What about the difference between members and contributors, or compare the number of contributors to previous months.

This would really spoon feed me, and help workaround my attitude, and attention scarcity.

There’s no way I’m going to read a paper or dive into a whole new area right now as I’m too busy, but if someone feeds me little fragments where I can learn in bits and pieces, well then I will pay some attention.

Plus I can always comment on the blog posts to get some clarification and context.

Since we are talking about metrics, here’s what Agnes Kolkiewicz emailed me back, I thought it was interesting:

“As I’m sure you know, adoption and success go hand in hand…so I usually encourage the use of metrics not just to measure ROI, but also to measure progress along the way, as then you have data to fall back on at a later date to say this is how the system improved over time. Measuring things along also helps identify “peak times” in participation so that community facilitators can try and perhaps recreate the event that caused the peak at a later date.”

“I’ll post something tomorrow and will aim at a minimum of one post a week.. your email was a good motivation!”

I replied:

“thx Agnes…you are right…kind of like measuring the heartbeat, the rhythm”

Let’s finish off with a quote by Dave Snowden on the theme of this post:

“The basic idea is simple: Small things are more adaptable than big things, and they are frequently more interesting and more able to gain our attention. People will spend more time surfing the Web and using the fragmented material of an RSS feed than reading documents. It’s easier to write a blog than a book. Fine granularity material can combine in novel and different ways more easily than formal documents.”

TweetTabs - multiple Twitter streams on a page, also see ConvoMonitor, TweetGrid, peoplebrowsr, Monittor [via TC]

Twicsy - there are many ways to share images on Twitter, but if you share them using yfog or Twitpic, these are harvested and shown at Twicsy, here are some from the Iranian protests. Twitmatic does the same for video. [via TC]

Twitcaps - same as Twicsy above, it harvests the latest images shared on Twitter

Tweetmic - speech to text tweets for the iPhone, also see vlingo, Twitwoop, TwitterFone, Twitsay, Jott, Spinvox

Tweetree - the alternate interface for Twitter has added a new feature where you can click on links in tweets and view the actual webpage within Tweetree, without opening a new tab or window.

BONUS
SpyMaster
How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems)

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]

Trackle - when a visitor clicks the Tracklet button on your blog they can enter keywords and choose to get latest content delivered by email, SMS, or login to their Trackle inbox.
The RSS feed Trackle is only one of many, there’s loads of them, and you can manage all of them in Trackle. See Notify.Me and others to DIY.

Liveflows - offers related posts from your blog, similar to Outbrain and Zementa, only this one is a distributed network, and lives in the footer of your blog (it actually feels like part of the browser). See related posts from your blog, popular posts in my network, blogs I follow, blogs that follow me. I get the feeling that it’s something MyBlogLog could have done, and something Google Friend Connect (GFC) is doing. Only in GFC you only need a profile to follow people, whereas in LiveFlows you need to be a blogger (which is essential so it can show popular posts from your network). GFC can be seen more of a fans type tool …I do like that the social bar gadget has commenting and site activity, and other features like ratings. Most of these relate to the homepage, unless you embed a gadget in a post.
I wrote about the blogosphere as a distributed social network a while back. [via LG]

Google News Timeline - When you visit the site delete the saved queries. Then from the drop down menu choose blogs, and enter the name of your blog. Voila, now you have a visual date based archive of your blog. Sort by day, week, month, year and drag to sift through the archives.
Here’s a link to my blog starting from Jan 2009.
Of course you can add lots of blogs and other news sources, or even keywords…perhaps a liteweight alternative to Google Reader.
It’s all based on Google Reader, so the archives only go back to its inception in 2005. Also see 30boxes blog timeline. [via DI]

Evernote - How did I miss this one. I’ve been using Webnote for so long, but I’m now testing to switch over to Evernote.
Basically via the web, mobile web, email, SMS/MMS, blog post footer button, Twitter, download version (even for mobiles) or bookmarklet I can add a note, clip a webpage, add an attachment (audio/video/etc) into any of my Evernote notebooks. Also tag all my notes, search (even text in images, limit to title field and tag, limited to one or multiple notebooks), synch files, make public notebooks, to-do list boxes, saved searches…and heaps more. Check out their blog, and tips.

Tinychat - create an on-the-fly chat room, even embed it in your blog

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:

“…is not to provide yet another collaboration tool. It is to provide a technology that can organize collaboration so that it reflects the work being done, rather than the tools that support the work.”

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).

vlingo - speech to text. Not sure if you have to ring a number, it seems more like, hold the key, speak, and then send…also updates Facebook Status. Also see Twitwoop, TwitterFone, Twitsay, Jott, Spinvox [via m]

Poll Everywhere + Twitter - A polling form where the audience can tweet their answer, and the widget embedded into your blog, website or online doc will display the current progress…great for live audience presentations (using Twitter in PowerPoint)

TwitVid - just like Twitpic share’s a link to a photo in your tweet and hosts it at their site, TwitVid does the same for video, also see Tweetube…and Twitmatic will serve you up the latest.

TwitDoc - upload a file to Twitter, also see Tweetafile…I’m thinking like Twitpic and TwitVid, these should be hosted at a Scribd like service.

Mixero - A client that has some great features - create groups, channels, and filtering. If you ask me Filttr already does all this - filter slide for tweeps, black/white list words, create groups, create keyword streams, it also has automatic filtering based on your past behaviour, and a mobile version. My favourite filter is creating a group, then filtering that with a a few keywords, and then filtering that again to just show me tweets that have links in them.
For other filtering sites see peoplebrowsr, TweetGrid, Monittor, ConvoMonitor, JustSignal, Twalala, microplaza, and Ginx. [via RWW]

BONUS
Union Organizers Twitter Bombing Starbucks #top3percent Campaign
HappyTweets

Repeets - yet another hot tweet site based on retweets, also see Retweet Rank, Retweetist, Re-tweetradar, re-twit’d

twtbizcard - from the folks at twtapps…you can now create a virtual business card, and send it to someone eg @elusa here’s one of my cards to keep in touch #twtbizcard
It also keeps track of sent and received cards, and tweets and retweets…only the people you send it to can read the details

twitmatic - search and watch video’s being linked to in Twitter.

hoodlenow - yet another site which displays tweets by location, so you can know what’s happening around town, see more under the groupings section in this post.

tagth.is - tweet @tagthis with a link and keywords, and that link will be bookmarked in delicious. I prefer this to Tweecious which automatically bookmarks every tweet that has a link. But what I really want is a button in my favourite Twitter sites like dabr and filttr to send a tweet to delicious

BONUS
Twitter Reaches New Heights As Climber Tweets From Everest

TwitterCompressor - compress your tweets, also see Twi8r, 140it

twitwoop - speech to text tweets…maybe now we can tweet while we drive

Twitoaster - threads reply tweets to your tweet. This is what I referred to in my post the other day. On our reply tweets we have a link to the tweet we are replying to, but on the original tweet we don’t have a list of replies (similar to comments on a blog). But this is even better, for each tweet you have the replies, just like blog post comments, but if one of those replies has replies of it’s own, then they too will have those tweets threaded…so it becomes a tree like conversation. Here’s an example.
You will also notice each tweet has its own RSS feed (at the moment it’s not promoted as it’s an experimental feature, but you will find it by the browsers auto-discovery feature), here’s my RSS feed for the example above (basically, just add “/feed” at the end of the URL.) This means you can subscribe to the feed of a conversation. Twitoaster has more features, go check it out.

Twonvo - similar to Twitoaster, enter a Tweet URL and view all the replies, similar to viewing comments on a blog

Twitterel - find Twitter users with related interests

BONUS
The city where every arrest gets Twittered

It’s sometimes such a drag being an early adopter because you are ready for features years ahead of when regular users will ask for them…you just have to be patient.

But the day has come, Google Reader has turned into a simple newsmastering service.

Over two years ago I was whining (point 5 in this post) that Google Reader lacked an OPML file for each tag/folder, which it still does, but it has gone one better anyway, well kind of…

I was also whining and still will that the OPML of my subscriptions is a file and not a dynamic URL. Use case is if I import my OPML into a Google CSE, and then add/delete a feed from Google Reader, my Google CSE will not know about it, which is a pity because it means I can’t use Google Reader as a master control for people to use a public search engine across my current Google Reader subscriptions.

OK, the new feature…a while back during the American elections you may remember that Google Reader was showcasing shared item lists based on a curated selection of feeds.

Well now we can do the same with the new bundles feature. That is, grab a selection of feeds and stream the latest posts on a page.

It’s just like our Shared Items page, but now we can select the feeds, and you can make as many of these newsmastering pages as you like, basically an auto-blog based on some source feeds.

Yeah! and each has an OPML file.

Here’s my auto-blog page on mobile culture, access the OPML file of the source feeds, or subscribe to the feed.

If you click the “subscribe” button you will batch subscribe to multiple feeds right into Google Reader, and they will be auto filed in the folder/tag with the name of the bundle page.

If you decide you don’t want the bundle anymore, unfortunately Google Reader doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe all feeds in a folder, so you have to manually unsubscribe from each feed…yikes!

What about subscribing to an OPML?

Now what would truly make this awesome and catch up with what Blogbridge did, in my own words is:

“When you import an OPML file into BlogBridge can you choose it to be a static list or a dynamic list…”

“Basically a reading list means you can subscribe to the URL of an OPML file, but instead of importing all the feeds in one batch, they kind of virtually exist in your RSS reader…if a feed is added or deleted to the OPML file, then this will reflect in your RSS reader…dynamic!”

What I’m saying here, is that in addition to batch subscribing to multiple feeds one go, I would also like the option to not subscribe to the feeds at all, but instead subscribe to the OPML URL.

Just say you subscribe to the actual OPML URL of my bundle above (you virtually/remote subscribe), and then I remove a few feeds and add some new ones. Then this will reflect in your remote subscription of my OPML bundle. I hold the master, and whatever I do in it, will reflect in whoever has subscribed to it.

As I said this would be good as an option, to import a static or dynamic OPML…here’s a post I made on this over 3 years ago, Dynamic newsmastering with OPML.

I guess if this was the case, then in your “manage subscriptions” page you could have a section for OPML’s you are remotely subscribed to.

So what’s next?

It needs:

• an OPML exchange - a place to swap bundles
• a newsmaster exchange - same as above, a place to find Shared Item blogs
• a search box
• tag cloud
• curating, like mysyndicaat

This last one is especially interesting, as it’s not only a topic auto-blog, but you could have the option to remove posts before they appear in your bundle (kind of like moderating), and also adding in posts that come from other sources (kind of like what we do with our public tag/folder shared pages).

And even do this by setting up keywords to filter in and out, the latest tool is MoreOver, and the most common is Dapper and Feed Informer…and of course MySyndicaat.

You know what’s coming next, and that’s to add a group feature where members could:

• comment on items
• write their own posts

Is this sounding like a Friendfeed Room!

Related features from Google Reader:

Google Reader is your new watercooler
Meeting friends of friends

[ADDED 24/05/09: Of course now I can put a bundle OPML into Google CSE, and when I update that OPML (add/remove feeds), my Google CSE will magically be updated]

A while ago I posted that size doesn’t matter when it comes to effective communities. You don’t need a lot of members to make a community of practice successful, you just need quality participation.

Whereas in a blog/micro blog social network you need lots of people in order to gain the network effect. That is, a network (individual centric) system like a blogosphere becomes more valuable as the number of players increases. The more bloggers there are, the more we have to read and learn, the more comments and linking result, and as a whole we have a richer distributed conversation. If there were only 5 bloggers in the world I would have not much to read, comment and link to…5 million diverse opinions are going to generate more material, discussion, points of view.

To re-iterate a community of practice does not necessarily become more valuable when the number of people increases…see fictional example:

“Our community was great, there were originally 10 of us that were of the same calibre, we had lots in common, we all trusted and relied on each other…now the community has 40 people, and it’s lost is attraction for me, there’s too much off topic content, and the conversations are too noisy and of lower quality, I really don’t know all these people…I liked the dynamic I had before with our original group, I was more prone to participate and felt much more comfortable among peers I trusted and had confidence in, we are thinking of branching off”

The thing about groups is that it’s a shared choice as it’s a shared space, whereas in a network it’s your own space, you just choose to ignore people, you only add friends to your contact list that you like or trust. Therefore you always keep the quality, at any time you can drop someone you lose interest in.

NOTE: Communities and networks are not substitutes, they both have unique purposes.

Why wikis have more adoption?

What sparked today’s post is a post from Sameer, 2009 is the year of Enterprise 2.0? Hold your horses….

In his post we see that Wikis are gaining more traction. I think this is because they are more:

• group based tools
• based around a task (an environment of certainty)
• help with process failure, and
• don’t require network effects like blogs and social networks
  …ie. wikis and forums don’t need lots of people to take off, all they require is a small group of people.

“To get maximum potential is so much easier when you don’t need lots of players, and so much easier when the returns/benefits don’t take long to come.”

I recently left a comment on Stewart Mader’s blog about how my boss and I (and a couple of others) are using a wiki for everything lately…it’s so much easier and less messy pointing to a URL than emailing an attachment.
This is a social tool we are getting great value from, and all it took was a group of under five people.

Another reason wikis are taking off is that so many people at work want to make topic, workaround, best of, to-do pages. The nature of knowledge work is that we deal with uncertainty and unique situations, we can only document so many official processes/procedures; often we need to bend these processes and use our thinking and conversation to respond or get things done on the fly. This is why we are the people for the job as we use our minds to get things done, we are not programmed robots in a factory, work these days cannot be programmed by management, we need to respond and act to all the different situations that face us.
OK, so after that long speel, I guess I wanted to say that sometimes we may like to communally create our own informal procedures or workaround lists that contain the ways we responded to situations. Or a list that contains the best documents on a topic; these documents may be scattered in different repositories, and a wiki can bring them together in a topic page…and of course everyone wants to make a wikipedia, or use it as a simple CRM type tool.

What’s happening is that wikis are actually replacing a process, they are becoming a new way to do group work. Just the same forums, as Sameer mentions have been round a long time, and are useful for discussions that would normally be done in email…we can often use a forum to discuss a task.

Both these group tools are about the nitty gritty work tasks that we do in email, whereas blogs and networks may not be seen as task oriented, they are more about learning, sharing, opportunities…something nice to have…and of course require network effects…and the returns of effectiveness, efficiency, productivity may take longer to reveal…in this light they may be considered an R&D thing, not something for Joe Bloggs (pardon the pun).

In saying this, our community/team blogs are also taking off because they are in a group space, and the postings are about a task, status, progress, tips (we also see posts about sharing links, and theory). But, if we were to have blogs out of a context, that is, social network profile blogs, then I think adoption would take much longer, people would feel more like they have their own publishing house (feels more serious and onus to regularly post compared to a group space like a forum), and the postings would not necessarily be in the context of a task. People would be free to publish what they know from their own individual context. Managers may see this as not contributing their time to achieving a deliverable, the question would be asked, what returns are you getting from this that you can feedback into your job.

Social tools can be used multiple ways

This comes to a fundamental question. New social tools can be used to achieve tasks, but they can also be used to be more effective, connected, tuned in, so your tasks can be more optimal, of better quality, quickly executed, of reduced cost… So if you want your tasks to be more effective, rather if you want your workers to be more effective and deliver quality and innovation, then workers need time away from their tasks to devote to informal learning. Actually, it’s not even necessarily time away from tasks, rather we need time to tap into co-workers in researching, finding, conversing, and learning. Some of this may be seeking stuff from people, some of this may be general talking about what we know so we become smarter people.

Either way social tools are here to stay, we can use them for tasks, and if allowed time, we can use them to become more effective and tuned in, which in turn make us more efficient and deliver quality tasks.

If the company devotes the time, social tools can be used in two ways, if they don’t allow the time, they can still be used to achieve tasks (what you are already doing with email and attachments and rigid process systems)

Jordan Frank says in the comments of Sameer’s post, that when the tools are more process centric they don’t seem so standalone, they are more in the flow of doing work, eg. beta bloggers vs alpha bloggers, and Directed/Volunteered.

I mentioned in my post, Conversations that revolve around task objects, certain social tools will get more adoption and credibility (acceptance) when they contribute in the flow of getting work done (more process-centric). Then later on when they become indispensable, there will be more acceptance in dedicating time to using these tools to become a learning organisation, ie. connecting and sharing what we know, more above-the-flow. James Dellow is also on this meme of social features to existing tools, rather than just having a blog or wiki, we can have blog-like and wiki-like features on existing products.

Do we face a catch 22?

I say we need to first use these tools in group spaces like communities or teams of practice, as you don’t need network effects, and they are based around doing existing work…the returns and usefulness are seen quicker.

Once people see the benefit and find the group spaces indispensable (eg. this is already happening at my work), then management may see the value in people having their own individual spaces in a profile based network.
Further to this I think a microblog profile network (like Socialcast) may get more traction than a regular blog profile network, as more people ask questions and have conversation, than having a publishing bent…lot’s of bloggers are also on Twitter, but lots of people on Twitter do not blog.

Now this is all OK when you have existing groups that want to use an online social space to work in, but what about when you want to find people with like interests in order to build a group.

There are two things happening, one is existing groups can work better in their online social space, but we also want to capitalise on unknown scattered experts…who are our people? what are they good at? let’s self organise to find this out! We need to capitalise on what we don’t know, we need to seize opportunities from our pool of talent. In this case it seems we need a social network in order to find each other, and then come together in a group.

I guess this is why most new social platforms (like Clearspace) have the social network and the group component.

Collaboration vs Participation

Olivier Amprimo has a really good point here, in relation to what I’ve mentioned above, organisations see more immediate value in collaboration spaces rather than participation systems.

“Collaborative tools are made to have people work together on common tasks. It is about team work. They are principally organized around emails and documents, detailed profiling, structured workflows (document approval or task management).”

“Participative tools are made to have people socialize their ideas and activity. It is about Flow and Networked Individualism (as Lee says). They are principally organized around blogs, social networks, social bookmarks…”

He also relates this to adoption:

“The adoption of a collaborative tool focuses on deployment. It is mostly technical, the rest is the job of the boss who will enforce its use and agree training sessions.”

“The adoption of a participative tool focuses on great user interfaces, quality people and quality content in the early days in order to create exemplary behaviors and interactions that will influence new joiners. No matter Free Will, Humans are rational herds : they copy early-adopters behaviors and reproduce it or modify it only on the fringe. It is mostly sociological, no one can be bossy to make that work. That’s OD work.”

From this we can see that participative networks are more bottom-up and don’t revolve around a task or a thing, they are instead nodes that collide together. This is more about a learning organisation, it’s related to know-how and work, but not directly (a deliverable)…it could be seen as replacing some training with informal learning.

Olivier Amprimo has another post related to this topic. In it he brings up a point related more to communities of practice rather than team spaces. He mentions that learning communities require dedication and work on borrowed/allowed time (our communities of practice at work have sponsors, which means they agree that’s is OK for these people to spend time in the community).

“Most people see online communities as communities of practices, which are known to be hard to implement because they require engagement of of members and managers. Immediately people associate engagement as costly (time consumption from the financial angle) if not dangerous for the corporate reputation (B2C). Communities of practices also have the reputation of being not successful, because most of them have low activity.”

Olivier compares these group spaces to participation networks which may generate value without needing to build group engagement.

“…my stake is that we can take advantage of the “crowd” without demanding any engagement from any of its members.
This is what I call a socialized service. A socialized service is a service where the activity of an individual is made visible to others, so that it creates awareness among service users.
It relates to concepts such as “social translucence” and “ambient awareness”. The concept of “social translucence (of technology)” is almost ten years old now. It suggests that communication systems can be designed in such a way that they support social processes. Social translucence proposes that three factors support social processes in computer-mediated work environments. Those factors are: visibility, awareness and accountability. “Ambient awareness” is similar, it actually surfaced in a NY times paper later.”

Activities and numbers

Which brings me round to Betrand Duperrin’s post, like me he see’s that numbers are essential in networks, but not for collaboration. Which means some tools are taken up much easier over others. He also relates this to activities; those that are more certain, target oriented and focused tend not to need critical mass to achieve success.

I’d like to simply say this the other way around: those activities or systems that are set up to tease out weak signals, deal with uncertainty, surface opportunities, find and learn; don’t have a focused purpose, rather they are a framework to naturally manifest into something, based on the level (critical mass) and quality of participation.

We know the aim is all the things I mentioned directly above, but we don’t explicitly work towards that aim, rather we just participate and value emerges that achieves these aims. ie we have a framework to surface innovation, but we aren’t trying to specifically innovate, it will just happen by default…the system creates the conditions for participation, and from there everything else may eventuate…we don’t directly knowledge share, it’s just a by product of participating.

Bertrand says:

“In the beginning, my idea was that is was depending on the kind of tool. It’s easy to understand that a 5 people team is enough to demonstrate the value of a wiki and that a social network, on the other hand, needs a critical mass of users. With hindsight I’s rather say that it depends on activities.”

Personally, I think the numbers and the activity goes hand in hand. If you want to tap into enterprise-wide diverse ideas and opportunities (which is not a focused task to achieve, like collaborating on an end product), you simply need critical mass.

“…social networks, being more flexibility-oriented and aiming at mobilizing expertises inside adhoc groups, need to be used by a lot of people to make sure the relevant resources (people and information) will be there when they’ll be needed.”

“That’s why wikis is often mentioned as the example of a tool that was easily adopter : defined human and functional scopes, defined goal. A contrario, tools which have a larger spectrum, more protean uses, such as blogs or social networks, need a deeper work to be a part of people’s day to day job.”

And this brilliant way of putting it:

“If we try to generalize, a small team is enough if there’s an identified purpose and that a larger populaton is needed if the tool’s purpose is rather to make things possible while these “things” are not predictable”

Again, some great insight:

“So it seems that the more certainties we have on what has to be delivered, who have to work on that, and the more mandatory the goal is, the less size is critical“

I can’t help these excerpts, I’ve nearly re-published Bertrand’s post here:

Size is not critical when a clear need exists about what people have to deliver so that people immediately understand what benefits they will get from using such or such tools. Here, the goal, what has to be delivered, who has to participate are known from the beginning. Use is led by work organization“.

I really like that Bertrand has included this middle space below eg. a team using a wiki to list workarounds, and using a blog for tips and tricks

“Size may be critical when social software is to overcome dysfunctions in the way the work is organized. Here the goal is defined, but the people who have to participate and the functional spectrum can’t be anticipated, nor when the software will be used. Use is led by circumstances“.

“Size is critical when social software is expected to help people to deliver their full potential. Which, said in other words, mean to allow their to use all their skills to make things the company may have never thought about. It’s typically the case in “innovation” projects, where it’s impossible to know who wll have ideas, who’ll be interested in joining the discussion to improve things….and what the idea will be used for. Use is lead by the will to participate“.

TweetBios - extend your Twitter profile…more info about yourself, links to all your profiles, etc…

TweetEffect - find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you.

Tweeterate - an alternative interface where you can rate tweets

TweetIE - a plugin for Internet Explorer…these are far and few between

TwittBot - allows multiple people to publish to a single Twitter account, and for a single person to post to multiple Twitter accounts.

BONUS
3rd Party Twitter Application List

In a past post I elaborated on social networks like Twitter as being a Help engine; an alternative to a search engine in some cases in finding answers and making decisions.

I also paralleled this concept to the aims of KM, productivity, performance, sense-making, decision-making, etc:

“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”

And one thing I missed out is “adapting”.

This is how it goes:

I’m after some information and people to help me out on an issue or some research

I perhaps search my network (strong and weak ties), or I may search the entire network (potential ties)

If no go, I then post a question to my network

A response may point me to someone or a piece of work, or the response may be from the person I need to talk to

If I have a strong tie, this is good, as we already know about each other and share some context

Through conversation in real-time or via the online network/blog we are able to probe, clarify, re-frame the information that is usable for my context. The conversation and perhaps related blog entries may reveal lots more peripheral information than what’s included in a report. The blog entries will have the work in progress, thinking out loud, workings out of the report, that may include, approaches, styles, and bits and pieces that trigger thoughts for my situation.

From this interaction we have information/knowledge transfer.

When I act upon this information we have knowledge creation.

The results of this interaction remains for the process to repeat itself.

In this way the same content is able to be mutated or re-contextualised, on a perpetual basis.

We are not precisely re-using a piece of information, instead we are re-blending existing knowledge by connecting and conversing. It’s not about re-inventing the wheel, it’s about making a new wheel using some of the concepts of the other wheel.

Rather than “best practices”:

• codifying
• storing solutions
• wiped of context in order to be applicable to many situations
• getting people motivated to do this after the fact
• hoping it’s worthwhile in people one day seeking this information
• hoping it doesn’t expire
• less adaptable and less chance of innovation as the best way is already prescribed
• not really a method to elicit and create new knowledge

We instead turn to our “network”:

• timely information
• probe/clarify
• re-contextualise
• trust the messenger as you have a history
• willingness to help as you have a reciprocated relationship
• peripheral information (not apparent or shared in a report)
• tapping into tacit knowledge to understand what’s behind the approach or how it comes together
• adapt to our situation
• creating new knowledge
• interactions that blend into new knowledge may lead to innovation
• build a relationship/contact for ambient awareness and future help
• each interaction makes your network richer and feeds the core network

What does all this mean?

It means I’m not lost, it means I have a framework in which to makes sense of my situation.

It means thoughts and concepts have a chance to emerge, it’s means being adaptable.

This type of knowledge flow and creation is more close to the aims of KM rather than a storage approach.

My approach to social productivity on the web needs to also happen in the same way in the workplace.

Enterprise federated search is a good step to search across silos, and personalised/customised pages is a good way to create your own dashboard, but it’s not enough…

When I research material for a blog post, most of the time I know where to look as I recall information passing my radar. I have ambient awareness of what’s happening…that piece of information when I saw it meant nothing, but now it has value as I have a need for it.

I can search my Google Reader, browse my delicious/slideshare bookmarks, check out my previous blog/tumblr posts and perhaps ask my Twitter network for help.

This is my personal information/knowledge management (PKM) environment and this personal and social productivity orientation helps me work more efficiently and effectively.

This online participation model is not enterprise 2.0, it’s social computing, but it may one day be the catalyst for enterprise 2.0.

We can never have complete KM, instead we have PKM nodes that are connected in a network.

I came across Nick Milton’s blog the other day, and one of his posts that speaks a lot of truth, says something I don’t agree with:

“So for me, PKM is a sign of failure of corporate KM. If you get corporate KM correct, you don’t need personal knowledge management, as all knowledge management will be collective, giving the individual access to far far more than their personal store.”

To say you no longer need PKM is to say you never need to create new knowledge or learn…it’s like saying you have traveled every path, and moved every move possible to encounter anything new.

The issue is that what’s happen in the network (PKM nodes) is not feeding back into the procedures. The PKM is the spring, KM the bottle…without spring you have nothing.

“It’s easier to reorganise your personal information habits, than it is to change the culture of a company. It’s easier to be personal, than it is to work in community. But for me, working KM as a personal issue just does not deliver the value. It may give the individual more efficient access to information and documents, but it does not give access to better knowledge.”

This above paragraph is true if you treat PKM as nodes on their own, but if you connect these nodes into an open network, then you don’t just have access to people and then knowledge, in your interactions you are creating new knowledge. This is doing KM bottom-up, empowering people to do KM without even realising it.

I’d also add that you don’t change the culture of the company, you create conditions to make a difference in an individuals experience. You give them an environment where they can more easily sensemake, and eventually this node connected environment will bring about a culture change without realising it…we hope…but it has to be a naturalistic approach.

“Now I know that many people develop PKM habits out of frustration. The information they need is not readily available through the company, or through the community, so they build their own stores. But as soon as the content of those personal knowledge stores starts to drift away from community knowledge, then all you are doing is introducing information and knowledge silos at the level of the individual.”

Again this is a true observation, but the problem is not PKM, the problem is not being connected.

At work we use a blog for our support team to post about tips, tricks, error solutions we encounter. I post in this blog for memory management (yes on many occasions, I have encountered the same problem 3 months later and forgot what to do, and consulted the blog…booyah.), and for others to also benefit. This is a reciprocated relationship, so we all gain from each other. If we don’t know answers we ask in the forums.
My next goal is to refine the process, by perhaps having a few people mine the blog and forum for a solutions wiki. The blog and forum are as it happens, and the wiki can contain the cream the floats to the top. The wiki will bring things together on topic pages.

Anyway, what we are doing here is leveraging on each others PKM, and we have created conditions for people to do some of the PKM in an open and shared place. Not only that but as a result we have interactions eg. comments, etc… that make it even more valuable.

We needn’t go on, but this ecoysystem has not only sensemaking benefits for the individual, but has self regulation and recognition (incentive) built in.

In all it’s not that I don’t agree with all of Nick Milton’s post, it’s more that the solution is a bottom-up connected network, rather than PKM not existing at all.

Nick adds a good comment:

“There’s a great methodology that Shell Drilling use, called Drilling the Limit, where Drilling teams seek out all existing knowledge of drilling a well in a particular basin, and challenge themselves to step out beyond the performance benchmark. This is a very powerful process, all the more powerful by being worked collectively as a team, and being based on a full knowledge of what’s been done in the past. That way the tensions are resolved.”

All that “existing knowledge” came from recognised PKM, ie. actioning PKM. This is why social computing is not just about bottom-up, there is also a facilitating factor of taking the good stuff and feeding it back into processes and procedures.

So yes, it’s essential to look at past methods, but it’s also essential to ask people for timely information, where you can re-frame the context.

And what if you are drilling a new basin, then a PKM network enables you to adapt to uncertainty and new situations. You ask people before taking on the exercise. You then use forums and blogs during the exercise to capture and mull over as it happens, and then perhaps if this will be a repeatable endeavor a good practice is drawn up.

Steve Barth also has his thoughts in his post, Does Corporate Failure = PKM?. I personally like one of his past posts on PKM.

“Personal KM explores how expertise and effectiveness scale up to organizational value with a focus on the capabilities and contributions of each and every knowledge worker. PKM starts with individual priorities and processes that lead to self-organization in the workplace with values, skills and tools to build stronger teams and networks from the ground up.”

“Successful companies know they have to evolve. Executives consider knowledge worker productivity to be a priority for bottom-line results. Knowledge workers need to make informed decisions, but then they need to translate decisions into successful actions.”

Here’s some Twitter conversation on PKM networks or click here:

An example of a help network

I’m finishing off by coming back to the start of this post about a help network and making sense of things by accessing people in your network.

This simple Facebook status update is just a natural use of the system, the person asking the question (Chris Saad), does not consciously think he is doing KM, it’s just embedded into being a participant…something I pondered at the end of this post.

This example would be even more poignant if the Chris was clarifying and contextualising by having a comments conversation, and something else it doesn’t reveal is that personally this conversation is of interest to me as I will soon need to draw on this information (I’m getting the benefit for free).

Anyway, this simple open conversation with people you trust in your network is on par with the aims of KM suggested in the beginning of this post.

SOURCE - Click image for larger size

[ADDED 31/05/09: Sense-making with PKM, see my comment…

“Defintely agree. PKM is like sensemaking and everyone does it. But now we can do it in the open, and not only that but we can do it in a connected and networked way.

aggregated PKM is not the same as social PKM.

This section of Boyd’s law fits perfectly here:

http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/41954985/connected-people-will-naturally-gravitate-toward

‘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’”]

This week Twitter decided to not allow you to see tweets people you are following are having with people you are not folllowing.

Previous to this it was an option in the settings, but it turns out this option slows down the servers, and since it is only known or used by 3% of users they decided to remove it. This horrified power Twitter users, see #fixreplies.

Why?

Because eaves dropping on conversations people you follow are having with people you don’t follow is a great way to discover new people. Actually this is the most common, if not only way, that I personally discover new people…it’s recommendations without trying to be recommendations…I trust who people I follow converse with, so there’s a good chance I will want to follow them. I’m not about to go through every person I follow’s contact list and look through these lists for new people…I don’t have the time…so I get more suitable value eavesdropping on conversations…I’ve only used Mr Tweet once, it was handy, but I’d rather find new people in my flow as part of using the system.

Anyway, now Twitter promise new things, so we will see, but at the moment they have kind of come half way.:

“…any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.”

Meaning…if someone I follow replies to someone I don’t follow using a reply button (which threads the reply to the tweet ID), then I won’t see it. But I will see it if they type the word @user in the text box (rather than using the reply button).

What they are basically saying here, is that when you click the reply button, you are explicitly having a conversation, as the tweet you are replying to becomes a link at the end of your tweet. (You will see this at the end of some tweets, where it will say “inreply to johnt”). Whereas when you type in the reply in the text box this does not link the tweets so can be taken as a shoutout or a mention, which apparently is more appropriate for you to see, rather than a conversation from which you are not in the loop.

Personally I think the option in the settings was the way to go, but since this option could no longer scale, they had to take it away, I’m sure if it did scale there would be no problem with keeping it.

NOTE: what I’m not sure of is if I click the reply button using an alternate interface like peoplebrowsr, filttr, dabr, tweetdeck will the same function apply, or does it only apply when I use the reply button on Twitter itself. My hunch is it will make no difference, as it’s a linked reply and will be treated as such.

Facebook/Friendfeed comparison

It has taken a step backwards in regards to “serendipity”, but it’s no way going to be restricted like Facebook.

I like that Facebook is restricted and private as I use it as a more personal thing, I don’t want the world to know when I’m not home, or personal family happenings. I think this is Facebook’s strength, and they should see this unique feature as something that differentiates them from Twitter and Friendfeed, some don’t think so.

Let’s face it Facebook competes more with Twitter than Friendfeed.

NOTE: Of course they (Facebook and Twitter) are in competition to be the social network you most visit, but in regards to functionality they are different.

Friendfeed is a lifestream and a social network, just like Facebook, only Facebook has all features inhouse, whereas Friendfeed consolidates all your scattered profiles that you have at different services…basically Friendfeed mostly aggregates your stuff, where Facebook does it all. And of course you are free to browse profiles on Friendfeed, where this is restricted on Facebook as they allow people to set privacy settings.

But I will say that Twitter competes more with Friendfeed than Facebook. The reason is that a lot of people use Twitterfeed to auto-tweet their blog posts, bookmarks, photo’s videos, etc…Meaning not every tweet is manually typed, some of them are auto-posts from your happenings elsewhere, which kind of turns Twitter into a lifestream service, if you want to use it that way. It’s not designed for this, as is Friendfeed, but it is done.

As I mentioned before, they are all indirectly in competition because they run on the “social network” model. There is only so many places you can spend time, and you usually will hang out in the service where your buddies are hanging out…whether this service has crap features or not doesn’t matter in the end, what matters is that you can connect with them all in one place.

For me it’s Twitter, if all my Twitter buddies hung out at Friendfeed, then I may give it a try (NOTE: I do use Friendfeed for my lifestream, but I don’t network). And I do use Facebook for family and close friends, but this is more minimal use. I use LinkedIn as well, but it’s not really a place to hang out in. Basically, if juicy stuff happens in Friendfeed, Facebook or LinkedIn, it gets posted to Twitter, ie. Twitter has become the pulse.

Symmetric

Facebook is more about friendship. I can only follow you, if you follow me back (accept my request for friendship)…it’s more about strong tie relationships.

Asymmetric

Friendfeed and Twitter are less about friendship, as I can follow someone, who doesn’t follow me back…giving it a strength of weak ties scenario. This is great for serendipity, discovery, exploration, research…

As I said each service has it’s strength in the relationship dynamic it offers, at least for me anyway.

Status Updates comparison

To finish let’s compare the experience of Facebook status updates to Twitter. I thought I would cover this as lots of people say, “this feature is on Facebook, so I have no reason to use Twitter”, but they are mistaken…

The only thing Twitter and Facebook have in common is “status updates”, which is just one feature of Facebook, whereas this is the whole concept of Twitter. Due to the differing relationship dynamic they work quite different.

FB - I can only see status updates of people I follow (in order to follow them, they have to follow me back, which means we are friends)
TW - I can visit any profile and see their updates, I can also follow them and see their updates in my homepage (they don’t have to follow me back)

FB - I can see replies from people that are also my friends to status updates on my friends profile
TW - ditto

FB - I can see replies from strangers to status updates on my friends profile
TW - This is no longer a 100% truth, see start of this post for explanation

FB - I cannot see replies my friends make on a status update on a strangers profile
TW - This is no longer a 100% truth, see start of this post for explanation

FB - replies are threaded under an update
TW - replies are at the same level as an update (any update is considered an update regardless if it has the word “reply”)
If you click the reply icon it will publish a link to the tweet you are replying to under your reply. But the tweet you are replying to will not list the tweets that has replied to it

[ADDED 19/05/09 : see Twitoaster and Twonvo for all replies to a tweet]

FB - replies alert you via notifications
TW - replies don’t have notification, they are just another tweet in the stream
But replies to you, are accessed via your reply stream

As we can see here Facebook takes a more blog and comment approach, and Twitter has a full stream approach.

Eg. in Facebook a status update is like a micro-blog post, and comments are threaded (of which you are notified). Whereas in Twitter everything is a same level item in the stream…posts start at the top of the page, and roll off the bottom.

The other thing is that in Twitter you can discover more people through posts (eg. conversations your friends are having with strangers) and visiting profiles, whereas this is restricted in Facebook.

The advantage of Facebook is that after the fact conversations are more distilled, whereas in Twitter if you were not there while it was happening, you have to piece it together, although Twitter Search does have a nifty view called “Show Conversations“, and the use of hashtag channels for tweets on a topic.

ConvoMonitor - multiple keyword searches side by side, for more power check out monittor, peoplebrowsr, or TweetGrid

pagetweet - a URL shorterner that displays your tweet at the top of the page

TweetALink - a URL shorterner that displays your tweet at the top of the page, only this one has a bookmarklet

SayTweet - create a Twitter widget that shows your updates on a picture

Tweecious - finds links in your tweets and posts them to delicious…I’d rather something where I could manually do this

BONUS
Tweetfan

MyCleenr - remove people you follow based on their last tweets

Tinker - turns a keyword or hashtag search into a nice stream that resembles a profile page rather than search results. When you create an event stream you can filter out keywords (even keywords by specific users) and even limit the whole stream to particular tweeps (so basically you can make a public group stream). Each event page has takeaways like an embed code and an RSS feed. If you register you can follow an event (just like following a tweep). You also get a profile page. Here’s an enterprise 2.0 event.

Add Tweets - add a javascript box to your site

BigTweet - a bookmarklet, also see TwitSnip, TweetMyPage, TwitThis

Twitlet - yet another bookmarklet

BONUS
Good To The Last Tweet: Coffee Machine Drips Updates To Twitter

Not long ago I posted on how broad communities can be a fertile ground to sprout new communities, and I also posted about a crowdsourcing exercise to create a community/s.

SIDENOTE - after this crowdsourcing exercise the next step it to organise the ideas into categories. Each category will be a new forum, our job is to move ideas into the correct forum. It’s great we are coming up with these forums after the fact rather than the prescriptive approach, but there sure is a lot of organising to do after an “idea’s” month containing 400 ideas and their replies. If only our forum had tagging. One forum stream with tags is the way to go.
We will be looking at who can lead each forum, by possibly looking at who posted about each category the most, and if they are passionate. From then on our idea jam will turn into a perpetual idea’s community, not quite the sophistication of Spigit, but at least we have momentum.

Anyway the other day I got a request for a real classic CoP, in that it is about a subject matter many cross-functional people have experience in, but we don’t have a practice or business unit.

A push for it was when the company assembled a team for a project but failed to have the most optimal people in that project, as we didn’t know they existed, and most would not be aware of the talent of these people as their job title does not give it away.

The idea is to link all these people into a common place, so this does not happen again, and so a subject matter space of conversations and documents can be built.

This was not a mandate by management, instead a guy passionate about the subject requested a grass roots way using a CoP to get this off the ground.

I can’t wait to see this CoP a year from now. A senior manager may come across it and think, wow, I didn’t know we knew so much about this topic. This looks like a real viable venture, perhaps we should graduate this to an official business unit ie. a core service offering.

When we look at it like this, online tools like CoPs are very empowering, and can do something for you and the groups career, as well as feed your passion, and be able to help the company be more effective and locate talent.

What was available before our online CoPs…email and the intranet.

Who’s going to know about an email list, it’s not really a place you stumble across, and it’s not an organised portal.

Obviously this group cannot have an intranet page, as they are not official, and if they did they cannot use the intranet page on a daily basis (an intranet page is not a conversation space).

The fact that we now have online social tools that allow bottom-up grass roots effort to emerge is very enabling. These guys can now create a space and say look at us, come join us. If you create conditions by giving people the tools, the talent will surface, people will do the main aims of KM without you asking them.

Without our online communities:

- the findability of these experts would be ad-hoc or non-existent
- the company would not being leveraging the talent pool
- these guys would be frustrated that they can’t engage, consolidate, and be known so they can work in this role in good projects
- we may miss opportunity to create a possible new venture

…all because the common knowledgeworker doesn’t have the power tools, and are not given the time to create portals that may prove popular, and even the next business success.

I think it’s important to listen to knowledge workers and give them tools, as they deal with the business at ground zero daily, and may have an idea to revolutionise what can be done.

It’s a win-win really.

A middle manager may say they don’t want their people wasting time on other things, but allowing this may just help the business be more progressive and adaptive. I think senior managers and middle managers need to be on par that it’s OK for people to spend some time on stuff that is non team related or better still even complementary to team work.

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things”- Peter Drucker

Twubs - aggregates various types of hash tags.

Unclutterer - pesky follower management

Twollo - find and follow tweeps with similar interests, also see Mr Tweet

Mutuality - make some batch decisions…Unfollow all who do not follow you back, Unfollow all, Follow all who follows you

Your Twitter Karma - better way to organise your followers, following, mutuals, also see Tweepler

BONUS
Twtrcon

It’s funny, I just finished reading a book that has nothing to do with my usual interests, but yet it relates so much. This put a smile on my face as what I’m learning is not confined to a bubble, I’m learning the essence of things that transfer, relate and apply to anything in life. Which suits me fine as parenting is just around the corner

Men at Birth, Edited by David Vernon

“I read the standard birth texts…they told me about the physiology of birth. They told me how things should work and a bit of why things worked they way they did. They told me about ‘normal’ labours, ‘normal’ pelvis sizes, normal ‘contractions’ and ‘normal’ women. Unfortunately the texts use the term ‘normal’, when they mean the mathematical term ‘mean’, ‘median’ or even ‘mode’. But I found all the talk about ‘average’ births to be unhelpful because I knew from friends and family that every birth is an individual experience.”

“Interestingly, I found it was the birth stories that really gave me a handle on birth. They told me the practical things from an individual’s point of view and they told me how it felt for a woman to give birth. They told me about real experiences. There were no ‘normals’ here. Amd the stories told me how things did work, and sometimes differed from the textbook statement on how things should work.”

“These stories were not attempting to meet the rigours required of a textbook. The stories left it up to the reader to decide what the ‘take home message’ was from each story. For me, the stories made our upcoming birth all the more real, all the more exciting and something that we really looked forward to.”

What I got out of it is that midwifes are facilitators in uncertain situations.

No two births are alike, and nearly all births don’t fall on the planned date.

Every “mother to be” is different and the midwives both have to deal with people and their situation. They don’t know what to expect as they have not seen the “mother to be” going through a birth, either has the “mother to be” if it’s their first (even if it was the second or third baby, not every birth is the same anyway, so not even the “mother to be” knows how she will react to new circumstances, especially in different environments).

The “mother to be” can tell them their plan, but they don’t even know themselves what’s coming.
The midwife also has to deal with the surrounding environment, and the actual birth itself. When all this comes together, it’s a very unique situation, so the job of the midwife is to go with the flow and facilitate.

No best practice method or text book is going to teach a midwife these subtleties, but the multitude of stories and of course actual experience are, as they deliver the uniqueness of experiences.

Reading a hundred stories, and attending a hundred births is going to do wonders to their ability.

Not only because these stories are the antithesis to “normal” or “average” or “best”, in that they cover so many different contexts and situations, but also because stories leave more of a memorable imprint in our minds (something to do with visual, narrative and emotion).

This post is about facilitation, pattern-recognition, decision-making, sense-making, context, uncertainty, narrative, adaptive behaviours in relation to birthing and midwives.

They learn to respond and adapt to uncertainty and rapidly changing situation (real rapid, by the minute).

These stories and experiences imprint a pattern in their mind and attach an emotion which has great impact for recall, and to also be able to take fragments from different stories and blend them to the situation at hand.

Stories have know-how woven in pattern form which is in tune with how our brain best functions.

They are more aware of the thousands of different things that may happen at a birth - what fails, what surprises, what’s available at hand (eg having to think on the spot to facilitate a birth in a toilet) - a text book ain’t gonna cover this.

David Snowden refers to this, and I have posted about this concept:

“…we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness.”

David Snowden from the same article:

“…we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking.”

This applies to Gary Klein’s work on decision-making via Erich Nehrlich:

“The situation is evolving constantly, and an expert will know which elements are important to follow, and which are not. The expert has been in a situation enough times before that they can mentally simulate what should be happening, and recognize when things are deviating from their expectancies, which is a sign of danger. Another good example: a fire commander goes into a building for what he thinks is a regular kitchen fire. As he’s scouting around, he realizes that it’s not behaving like a normal fire. It’s too quiet, and too hot. He doesn’t like it, and pulls his team out of the house. A few moments later, the floor of the house collapses - the fire was actually in the basement. He had no idea that there was even a basement, but his experience let him know that something was wrong, and that he needed to figure out why the situation diverged from his expectations before he continued.”

“…how experts “see the invisible” (because they know what signs to look for), generate a course of action, mentally simulate the results of that action, and then carry it out”

Mark Gould has more on decision making and how it relates to KM:

“…what impact does KM have on people? Exactly how will they be better at decision-making as a result of our work?

My instinctive answer is that I want them to become experts (and therefore able to act swiftly and correctly in an emergency) in whatever field they work in. That means that we should always return our focus to the people in our organisations, and respond to their needs (taking into account the organisation’s direction and focus), rather than thinking solely about building organisational edifices. The more time that is spent on repositories, processes, structures, or documentation, the less is available for working with people. In becoming experts in our own field, we also need to be more instinctive.”

Brad Hinton on Dave Snowden’s pattern recognition:

“Snowden explained how human decision-making is based on pattern recognition. Our brain sees multiple fragmented patterns assembled to fit our needs in particular contexts. In decison-making, our brain makes a first-fit pattern from which we act.”

Steve Barth on decision-making and intuition:

“Even at the level of the expert or the executive, the human brain is capable of reaching conclusions and finding solutions to difficult problems by using and trusting “gut” feelings. When these decisions are based on deep background knowledge and experience, intuition can be just as effective a tool as analysis—and considerably faster.”

Erich Nehrlich on stories and memories:

“Stories are how we structure our memories. If you ask me about what I was doing on June 25, 1994, I’d say, “Um, what?” But, when you prompt me that that was the day that my friends Brian and Jen got married, I’d be able to tell you all sorts of details about that day. Our memories are not filed like a computer’s, with dates and times. Our memories are filed like del.icio.us, with tags on various memories that are associatively linked in a spaghetti-like fashion.”

David Weinberger on the knowledge creative:

“Implicit knowledge isn’t explicit knowledge that we’re not currently thinking about. Implicit knowledge isn’t there the way ore is buried. It’s “there” only in the sense that we can generate it when required. Most simply: That we can come up with an answer doesn’t mean that the answer was lying dormant in us all along. Answering questions is a creative act.”

David Snowden also refers to this:

“Critically fragmented material can combine and recombine in novel and different ways, a form of conceptual blending”

Text books will have a plan and the writing will be focused on achieving that goal. But stories don’t have an outcome to achieve, rather they are in the moment, they are raw, you hear lots of peripheral information and many other things that would not be included in a text book as those things may seem unnecessary or excluded as they are tangents or just the fact that they don’t belong in the narrow focus of the outcome. But it is infact these nuances that all come together to paint the holistic picture…just ask a detective

In contrast

What did I learn from the stories about hospitals and obstetricians?

They abide by procedures and processes that do not cater for the individual person. The “mother to be” is just a number, she is the average person, she is homogeneous. The system runs like a factory, it runs on control and risk management.

They are certainly not a facilitator, they are dominantly in control. They treat the mother as if she were the “fictional average person”, use medical interventions where not necessary, and need her out of the baby factory as quick as possible eg. inducing, episiotomy, epidural, vacuum, forceps, caesarian…

There is also something called the “cascade of interventions”, which refers to an intervention to fix a problem the previous intervention caused, and so on.

Whereas the midwife has continuity of care - she has a relationship with the “mother to be” from start to even after the baby is born. The midwife facilitates the situation, she interferes as least as possible, it’s seen best to let a natural approach arise as much as possible. This approach is more in tune with human behaviour and the natural dealings of the world, they are there to re-tune the situation where needed so it realigns itself and does it’s thing naturally, rather than take the force of control, overriding nature.

I guess they surf the biodiversity of the situation rather than try control the biodiversity itself, which is an oxymoron.

When you think of it, this approach is empowering for the “mother to be” as the midwife is facilitating her to reach her human potential, rather than taking over.

Of course all this translates into the workplace with leadership and a more self organising role based organisation.

Listening, respect, trust and sharing

This leadership role and knowledge worker empowerment are great conditions for knowledge sharing and transfer…especially listening skills.

Years ago, part of my wife’s Counseling diploma included some work experience, so I decided to tag along with her and did telephone counseling for 6 months (every Saturday). Our role was to tie people over and support them till they could get their usual help. The first thing we learnt is that we don’t give advice, instead we listen and support, just being there spoke volumes.

Of course lots of people wanted advice and solutions to their issues, but we were there to support them, trying to create an environment so they could see their issue and solve it with some guidance (like probing, triggers, re-framing questions, seeing same issue from someone else’s perspective)…much more empowering, much more personal ownership.

And of course lots of people just like talking, it’s like I wasn’t even there, then at the end of the call they would thank me. I think “listening” is the greatest thing we can do (for me it’s sometimes hard to sit back and not offer advice), but offering little building blocks so people create their own answer (or co-create) is much more effective. They now have a skill and may use it to adapt to new situations, or riff off that skill.

The more you listen, the more you are respected as people like to feel heard. Further to this their transactions with you lead to them being empowered, so there is something about you that is improving their life. And I think this type of transaction or relationship leads to trust. When we trust and respect people we want to do things for them. Ultimately this leads to sharing, and a high chance of transfer in what is being shared since we have come to know each others way.

And then there were the suicide callers. Having a framework is helpful with these calls, it keeps you grounded, but you still freeze, and the only way you can best deal with them is hearing stories and experiencing them. There is no time to search for a best practice when the person on the other end of the line is fading away. You have to immediately react, and somehow fragments of memories all come together into a decision.

Why am I writing about this?

My wife is expecting our first child in a couple of months and we plan to have a home water birth. We believe hospitals are only for sick and injured people, and this my wife is not.
But, if during the birth my wife displays signs of risk to her health and the baby, that the midwife cannot deal with, then we will transfer to a hospital.

For some interesting points of view on “birthing” in Australia, here’s a link to an episode of an audience based TV program called Insight. You can watch the episode online, get a transcript, see the comments, and also view the Cover It Live post program chat. Or download it. They are also on Twitter.

Twanalyst - here’s what the Twitter analyst thinks of my Twitter addiction http://twanalyst.com/johnt

Morsetweet - here’s a morsetweet.

Tweba - a twitter style ebay

TweetTrail - finds the Top 20 people who tweet about a Topic, here’s complexity…hmmm, let’s check out one of the Top 20, Dr.Complexity seems bizarre alright.

Twitt3D - see your Twitter friends in 3D.

BONUS
140 characters conference

Sat Twitter - enables users of satellite devices to update their positions

Mailana - Twitter social network analysis that graphs you amongst the tweeps you most often have contact with. It ignores direct messages and ignores transactions where you were sent a reply but you never replied back as it makes an assumption that you don’t know them.

It lists who you should follow, friends in your location you have talked to before, friends in your location who have talked to other people in your location, local people you follow, local people who follow you, who of my friends talk about a certain topic.

Also see Tweet Wheel.

Hey, I posted about this already, Top Twitter Friends.

Favrd - a stream of highly favourited tweets. Not sure if this is a total popularity measure, as I use the favourite function for stuff to read later.

Tweeter tags - yet another directory, but this one is more like an expert locator.

When did you join twitter - it tells you when a user joined Twitter…it was October 2006 for me. Here’s my first blog post about Twitter.

BONUS
Scientists Break Brain/Twitter Barrier

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…

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

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.

The point of the story is how the value of a node in a network rises exponentially as more nodes are added to it. These are called network effects.

Now let’s add a twist to the story. What would happen if, at the same time more fax machines joined the network, each machine rapidly improved its performance? The result would be an amplifying effect on the first level of exponential performance. One exponential effect occurs from growth in the number of nodes. A second amplifying effect arises from the improving performance of the machines themselves.

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.”

Hover - We know services like bit.ly allow you to personalise a shortened URL with an optional custom name eg. http://bit.ly/abouthover. Hover goes a step further by allowing you to customise the whole URL. Which is pretty handy as all your shortened links could begin with your Twitter or blog domain URL. It also can custom redirect email addresses. For an installed version on your server see Shorty.

“For example, rather than sending someone a URL that looks like this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kksy5dDKOzQ

You can use Hover to create “shortcuts” that look like this:
http://awesomelawncare.com/tips”

DoingText - there are lots of ways to collaborate on a document eg. Google Docs, Wikis, and more. But sometimes you just want a real quick and easy way like Writeboard, skrbl, doodleboard, Twiddla, and cl1p to some extent.
DoingText is one of these quick and easy ways, here’s how to get started. You get an RSS feed, download to PDF, create a presentation, share embed code, send direct message, version history, Activity/News feed, etc…

DocSyncer - will automatically synch changes in your MS Office documents to Google Docs. Also see Syncplicity

Notify.me - filter RSS feeds and get them delivered as SMS, IM, email, desktop app. FeedMyInbox does just email, Web-Alerts will SMS you updates about a URL, and there are some more here, like Pingie and an old favourite, ZapTxt.

Delivr - makes web content mobile friendly, also see the Google mobile friendly option.

A while back I posted about knowledge sharing in your flow of work, and in between your tasks, here are those posts: 7 seconds to knowledge share, 140 characters to knowledge share.

At work I’m finding our support team often don’t have time to blog about their experiences/solutions, and they don’t seem to be using the forums to ask questions that often. But what I do see is a lot of Instant Messaging (IM) going on.

Why IM is popular?

There is an immediacy, it’s a conversation, it’s real-time and responsive…these fragmented conversations mimic how we behave face to face (accept for the visual gestures).
You don’t bug a lot of people, ie. some people may feel uncomfortable that their forum question has popped a new email in 100 inboxes.

The only thing lacking with IM is that you are pushing a message, similar to email (point to point), and if the receiver can’t help then you have to IM someone else.

Why microblogging is unique?

That’s why I’m thinking that micro-sharing is the perfect tool for opening up the conversation. Why not have that conversation in the open, where there is a chance for more input, and others benefiting, and more awareness.

You may say that enterprise IM has more take up as you have more confidence speaking in private.
But what we can say about microblogging is that speaking in public opens up more answers to your query, more connections, more discovery…it becomes a perpetual path.

The other thing is that you don’t really have to bug people in microblogging, ie you don’t have to use the @reply feature. You can also just blog a micro-post, which will not end up in an inbox, or RSS reader. It will stream past; if your network don’t see it in the stream in time, and they don’t back read items, then that’s cool, but someone may see it.

So in this respect microblogging is like SMS/IM, but also like blogging, as your posts don’t have to be aimed at someone, and they reach a network of ears. And the fact that I can overhear conversations people in my network are having with others in my network or others not in my network makes for great awareness, serendipity, discovery…

IM may fulfil an immediate need; and micro blogging can also do this, but being part of a microblogging network offers lots more beyond this immediate need.
Both IM and microblogging have their unique purposes, but I must say microblogging is like walking in the world: serendipity, discovery, learning, connection, etc…

Example

Just like IM, you can aim a post at people, but it also appears in the regular stream eg. @jeff when are we updating our server?

Jeff, may answer me, but Brad saw it in the stream and gives a more clear answer…and a discussion ensues…and others benefit from listening (this may be people in different teams, infact case studies show that microblogging is effective in cross-functional effectiveness…all the benefits of quicker and richer answers, re-use, awareness, cooperation, and of course innovation)

This example is more beneficial than IM, as it gets sorted quicker in the open. With IM, Jeff would go and IM Brad, and then IM me back, and other listeners miss out. Whereas with microblogging it happened once, for all to see.

This type of transaction is not suited to blogs, and people may not ask in a forum as it will send people another email in their inbox, whereas with microblogging it streams past with less interruption. That is, a @reply post may deposit in one person’s profile, but it will also stream past other people with less interruption…it’s like having a private conversation out loud.
It’s like talking to someone on the train, and others can’t help but overhear and join in…online this goes a step further where someone in another carriage can also overhear and join in.

You can’t do this with IM, as when you send an IM you are not publishing, it’s more of a personal and private point to point communication, where you expect a response. With microblogging you can also simply share what you are doing without really requiring someone to answer, all you are doing is blogging.

So microblogging achieves a few things through the same channel, and the mobile factor makes it more pervasive, and an ingrained communication like SMS.

I’m thinking tools like Yammer and the like are going to be bigger than blogging, especially groups where you can limit the chatter to your team…but I will stress these are complementary mediums.

Microblogging is less about publishing

I see more people using enterprise microblogging than blogging? Because microblogging is not as committed, you don’t need a publishing bent, and you use it to converse and ask for help which people do using IM and email. Plus there is something fulfilling about being social connected, belonging, and noticed.

Microblogging wraps up many types of communications in the one network, and can be used as a pivot to point to other places.

Drawing on your team

John Bordeaux has an excellent post on the different team dynamics and value generation between IM and microblogging.

“When I had a question to pose, I selected from among my list and began chatting. As I did, I learned which people were available and responsive and began to - unconsciously and unfortunately - call upon them more often. The people who were perhaps not as attentive to my insistent IMs were not called on as much as others.”

“I fell back on the natural tendency towards hierarchy and power laws within social networks and unwittingly began to alienate the people I was treating as “lesser” members. In doing this, I missed out on business value and the opportunity to enable contributions from across my team on an equal basis.”

This next part is not really crowdsourcing, but a similar effect that is embedded as a by product of participating:

“Using micro-blogging, I am learning to appreciate fragments and ideas from across thousands of voices. If I had micro-blogging for my team back then, I may have posed questions and listened to the “small cloud” rather than calling on the “best and brightest.” In doing so, I may have led an even more successful team as we would have been able to make use of all the voices to address the team’s challenges and opportunities.”

And the juicy bonus part that has all the enterprise 2.0 goodness of more awareness and innovation:

“…I can hear people who are simply talking about things about which I care who are not remotely in my network/culture/continent.”

“…point-to-point communications, which…presupposes you know who has “the answer,” to discovery. In fact, presuming you know who has your answer can be very limiting. Likewise, presuming you know precisely the right question to ask in all circumstances helps you to thwart serendipity.”

NOTE: Hope John doesn’t mind me quoting so much from his post, too much good stuff.

Why microblogging will have quicker adoption?

The post, The psychology of Twitter, sums up from an adoption point of view:

“This is a key point, because humans are inherently social creatures who engage primarily in conversational talking. Most of us aren’t authors and don’t write books, articles, or even blogs. We simply know how to talk, and Twitter is the first text service to adequately mimic this behavior in an online medium.”

More

In the post, Social search, Help engines, and Sense-making, I explained how microblogging helps with findability and achieves many of the aims of KM.

In the post, Twitter 3 years on, and why it’s the killer app!, I elaborated how it’s different, unique and can combine the power of: IM, forums, RSS Readers, blogs, links blogs, etc…in one tool/network.

Added

Spreadtweets - an alternative web based interface to Twitter as a Spreadsheet, also has a desktop version.

Twitzap - yet another alternative interface for Twitter. This one has real-time tweets and saved searches which the regular Twitter now also has.

Tweefind - a Twitter search engine based on relevance ranking. Basically a Google-type Twitter search engine.

Rank based on:

# followers
# following
# of tweets
# of RT he/she receives
# of replies
# of distinct users who reply
# of distinct users who retweet
# of RT he/she makes
# of links the user shares

See mashable for more.

Plodt - this does for Twitter what datablogging does for blogs.

Once you join, you can use a type of tag in your tweet with a number value next to it
eg The Shake Shack burger was worth the 83 minute wait. *food 9*

This gets plotted on a graph, here’s an example user.

LoadedWeb - how many of these Twitter whitepage directories can there be, this one is a local/geo one similar to Localtweeps.

BONUS
ExecTweets

Buzzable - a neat interactive newsmastering tool, perhaps similar to a Friendfeed Room.
Create a topic page and invite people to your group (public or private). These people have 140 characters when posting content. If group members use the “@” symbol they can reference posts to one another (ie. conversational chatting). Again this is what I like about microblogging, in the very same stream I am posting a blog-like post, but then a minute later I’m chatting with someone in the same stream…then a second later I’m reading some links someone has posted (read, chat, post, share links within the same stream and network)

Also posts you make in Buzzable can be auto-tweeted to a communal Twitter account. If you need some help populating your stream, you don’t have to rely on your group, you can import feeds to re-syndicate content, and filter those feeds by keyword.

An idea would be to associate a hashtag with a buzzable group. When I use that hashtag in Twitter, it will re-post it to the buzzable group, and it will only do this if I’m a member of that group. If someone replies to that tweet from Buzzable it currently re-posts to a communal Twitter account, which is OK because I will still see that tweet in my reply stream.
I guess this would be like member-based hashtag pages.

Use Google Reader from within Outlook - replace the Outlook RSS feeds folder with Google Reader. This comment suggests you can do the same thing in Outlook 2003.

Google Reader offline - RSS Bandit and Scoop. If you are after an alternative web version, check out Feedly.

Storytlr - We all know Friendfeed has won the lifestream battle, but I thought I’d mention this one as it’s a your very own lifestream page without having to be part of a network, ala the old skool Suprglu. Storytlr has a bonus feature of grabbing items by date range and creating a story. They offer a widget to integrate into your blog, but if you want to go even further try a service called iBegin which is a plugin to create a lifestream page on your blog, check out Elsua’s. [via lifestream blog]

Tablefy - Lots of people may use Google Docs to display comparsion tables, well now there is a service that is made specifically for this use. Robin Good has an example, you can track this table, or even embed it in your blog post. Now we can make our own comparison sites like wiki-matrix, well not quite, this goes one further by allowing you to choose only the products you want to compare.

Last month I posted about some high-level questions about introducing Community of Practice (CoPs) to a team, see Team-based communities are about change, commitment and tasks. The crux of that post is that communities need work, leaders need to understand it’s about creating conditions for behaviours to adapt to a new way. Even if everyone loves the benefits, it doesn’t mean it will be used, it requires dedicated facilitating till people get used to using a community like it’s second nature…habits take time to be re-channeled, and this will be reinforced with guidance…and hopefully design is on your side by lowering the barrier to entry.

So when you are creating a CoP for your team, you are doing more than creating a website to share know-how, you are actually starting a new routine and behaviours…this is more psychology/sociology/cognitive sciences rather than technology.

In a later post, Online communities : Bottom-up requests, I delved into some golden start-up rules that people need to be aware of right from the word go, to prevent starting off on the wrong foot.

Following on from that, in this post I’ll share some more points about things to consider when creating a CoP.

WORKSHOP NEEDS AND WANTS

Prior to requesting a community, it’s a good idea to do a workshop with your team or group of people to understand their needs, wants and how they work. I mentioned some of the needs analysis questions in this post, and also a visual way.

Bottom-up

If a potential community/s has value it will emerge from these bottom-up discussions.
This is in contrast to a top-down approach where a structure and community is created for a set of people in advance. This method is unnatural as it attempts to force a community into existence.

Ownership and Relevancy

The community members are more likely to participate if they feel strong about the topic, and have some sense of ownership of the community.
In regards to team-based communities (as opposed to shared interest groups), what happens quite often is that, for bigger teams, the community is too general, and not all members identify with it, or feel a sense of ownership.
They may also feel that when they visit the homepage it’s not 100% relevant to them.
A way to test this is whether all members identify with the community name, if it is too broad or vague, then people won’t feel a sense of place. The more specific a place is the more people can identify with it.
A good solution is to have multiple communities for each sub-team, this way each sub-team feels like they really own the community, and they are in a space with their closest colleagues.
A general and more simple community can be created for cross communications.

NOTE: all this is ideal, so long as we have leaders to lead each community

Confidence and Trust

People participate more frequently when they are in an environment they feel comfortable in, and this is more likely to happen amongst a smaller number of people you trust.

Interaction will be done in public rather than private email, and this fact makes a big difference in someone’s confidence, as they no longer control the audience, and the content is there to stay.

Passionate Leader/Facilitator and Role-Model

What is most essential is that a passionate and dedicated person is willing to run each community. And with team-based communities, this usually means the leads. For if the lead isn’t a role-model in active participation, then this sends a signal that the community is not important.
If the team-lead chooses a worker to lead the community, they sometimes find it hard to influence members to participate, as unlike cross-functional interest group type communities, members in some team communities may have had no choice in being members, and may only respond to higher authority.

RUNNING A PILOT

It’s paramount that community Facilitators and it’s key members pilot a new community before opening it up to more potential members.

Proficiency

The reason for this is that the Facilitator will need to be equipped to answer lots of beginner questions, the more proficient and experienced they are, the more they can guide members in the right direction.

Structure

A pilot run gives the key members a chance to use the community and get a feel if the structure is fluid enough, moving it around to accommodate the way it’s practically used. E.g. it may be decided that a particular forum is too general and it’s needs to be splintered into new forums.

Populate Content

Another aspect is that a blank community is not very forthcoming and exciting. New members want to see examples of the type of content added and where it’s added, so they can learn where things fit, and what type of content will now be handled by the community over other formats such as email. The more content there is to start with, and the more regular it’s added, the more you create a “stickiness” value, where you get people frequently visiting and contributing to be informed and socially interact.

Guides

A community specific help guide, and instruction are essential points of reference that the Facilitator may want to create, so members know how to use the community correctly.

In the next post I’ll point out some adoption factors.

Twazzup - a Twitter search engine that is getting some buzz…it also searches Facebook and Friendfeed (these are becoming the new big 3 aren’t they, in terms of popularity at least) [via b]

Twitr - yet another directory, similar to WeFollow

Twitoria - finds your friends that haven’t tweeted in a long time (week, 2 weeks, month, 2 months, 6 months, a year)…maybe do some housekeeping and drop ‘em

TweetReach - calculate how many people have seen something you tweeted beyond your network. It will list the tweets that passed your tweet around eg. retweets. Here’s an example of a URL in one of my tweets

Tweepz - a real robust way to find people on Twitter. Search by bio, location, name…sort by followers, following, relevancy. Twitter have it so easy, they can acquire these fan start-ups that have done all the ground work. [via nw]

BONUS
Twittering Cat Flap. So you know whether your pet is in or out.

FeedNest - Auto-tweets blog posts from your RSS feed…doesn’t everyone already use Twitterfeed.

Localtweeps - it’s like a Twitter whitepages. I hope spammers don’t get a hold of Twitter, otherwise they could spam a whole city in one go.

TweepDiff - Enter two or more Twitter users to compare their friends and/or followers

Tweepular - a comprehensive follower management tool for Twitter

TweetBrain - ask a question crowdsourcing tool, that beams a question to your network and is listed on the TwitterBrain website where people can answer the question, and vote…it will also auto-tweet your contribution.

TweetBrain will auto-tweet the original question, so I wonder if I reply to the original tweet if that will be auto-posted on TweetBrain site as an answer.

The other day I asked a question on Twitter, and if I used a hashtag, this would be a way for anybody to see a list of answers. But since I didn’t use a hashtag there isn’t a way for people to see the reponses, since tweets don’t have inline comments. I was hoping something like TweetBrain could solve this, ie. any replies to my tweet made on Twitter would be threaded under the original tweet on TweetBrain.

BONUS
Bakertweet

Flaptor - like Tweetzi this is an alternative Twitter search

TwitterSplit - when you link to a site in a tweet, and people click on that link, the URL will be a domain of your choice (eg your blog), then a ?, and then the domain you are linking to http://yourdomain.com/anydirectory/anypage.html?http://www.external.com

Twi8r - in the spirit of 140it, you type in a tweet in regular english, and it will translate it into text message shorthand…it doesn’t really do a good job if you ask me.

Less Friends - do the people you follow on Twitter follow you…also see FriendorFollow.

Twittley - a memedigger for Twitter. If you vote a link it will auto-tweet it on your profile. For similar memetrackers, see my post on microplaza.

BONUS
Birdsall’s Massive Twitter Sites & Tools Directory