People everywhere are beginning to understand, and practice with, the utility of "watching" snippets and fragments of peoples’ thoughts (see Dave Snowden’s KMWorld article titled "Everything Is Fragmented") and being able to instantiate and jump into a possible conversation when something interesting to them flows by.

 It works … for example, late last night I twittered a response to one of Jeremiah Owyang’s tweets pointing to his recent blog post about "What’s After The Social Web?", and shortly thereafter I had a Twitter direct message from Jeremiah in my email inbox saying "sounds interesting, I think you’re on to something .. tell me more".  A professional, potentially knowledge-building, conversation is brewing.

Here’s a summary of Stuart Henshall’s reflections on working with and in knowledge flows with the nascent micro-blogging

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A Master Strategist’s Take on a (Possible) Future of Knowledge “Management”

From the keyboard of Stuart Henshall, one of the most advanced thinkers about the “flows” of information combined with usability and innovation.

Stuart helped out with the blogging at the just-ended KMWorld and also gave a presentation on the last day about how people are beginning to use Twitter to connect, stimulate, catalyze and coordinate flows of information.

I thought he did a great job of outlining interesting possibilities .. but it seems he made some people nervous and some people stretch their minds. That may be because he has been immersed in the world of constant micro-flows of information and mobility for the last half-year while many of those at KMWorld are just now beginning to come to terms with blogging, using wikis and social computing. There may be one of those classic mismatches, the kind that lead to phrases like “You can always recognize the pioneers, they’re the ones walking around with arrows sticking out of their backs“.

Here’s Stuart’s post:.

Social Media or KM / KM or Social Media

I sat in earlier on a session on the Future of KM. There are three very different people on the panel. I’ve been listening with half an ear. This means what I write may have nothing to do with the context of the session. However, part of the reason we come to events like this is to spark other thoughts and tangents.

So far today I’ve not heard the word “flows”, I don’t hear “lifestreaming” I still feel what I am hearing is that knowledge is to be managed, moved, manipulated. Plus I just heard Dave Pollard say that SARS, 9/11, Katrina etc were all failures of classic knowledge management. I can’t quite put my finger on why KM isn’t learning and moving forward more quickly. It suggests to me that there remains a bigger problem.

Individuals are increasingly using personal tools, blogs, wikis, social networks, mobile phone, etc. As they move into this realm publicly they create more information about themselves. I’m increasingly seeing these tools being put to use by marketing / PR. KM seems to be missing these social media implications. Thus adoption of these tools is not being driven by the need to manage knowledge. Rather it’s driven by responding faster, being more adaptive, building on what others do, opening up systems so they can find that they need just in time. It’s a learning centric approach. I see it when I go to blogging sessions and talk to people there. The difference is they are believers.

[ Snip ... ]

I’m thinking more and more that the social media experts are likely to usurp or overturn many KM practices in time. The fact that SAP, Oracle and IBM are today all working with Twitter like updates is at least encouraging.

Maybe they can still sell a knowledge platform?

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It’s interesting that Stuart pointed out the directions large collaboration platforms are taking; Hylton Jolliffe, who manages this blog, just sent me an email a few days ago pointing out that Oracle’s developments with BeeHive may be signalling a new phase, while this ZDNet article (Did Oracle Burst The Enterprise 2.0 Startup Bubble?) suggest something similar.

At this very same conference one year ago (KMWorld 2007) Stuart wrote a post with which I agree 100% (link in the paragraph below) … while people in companies and business everywhere are looking for business case or ROI justification for using social media tools (while understanding semi-consciously that of course useful knowledge gets built in social interaction) they have to work (and experiment) at overcoming a lifetime of working in environments that divide and separate problems, responsibilities and challenges into discrete and divided bundles of tasks that are supposed to fit together like an orderly paint-by-numbers-like template (by which I mean an organizational chart).

To understand how using social media to increase effectiveness, responsiveness and innovation in an environment characterized by constant flows of information, you have to Use the Tools First; Then Talk To Me.

Read the whole post on a possible future for KM here ..

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In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market.  The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study

David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.

It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.

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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence

Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.

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On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”

This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.

The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.

The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”

All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.

Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.

The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.

One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.

Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.

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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" – a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute.  I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.

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Tags: Collective intelligence, new business logic, new business models, ROII, Return On Investment in Interaction, cloud computing, co-creating value, decentralization, wirearchy, hierarchy

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“A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.” – David Weinberger

For those who attended FASTforward 2007, David will be familiar from an exceptional series of video interviews he conducted with keynoters like Chris Anderson, Tim O’Reilly, and Bill Inmon, practitioners like David Watson of Disney/ABC and Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones, industry analysts like Forrester’s Matt Brown and IDC’s Sue Feldman, and, of course blogging gurus like Euan Semple and Jim McGee.

But of course Weinberger has long been a highly respected industry commentator in his own right. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, writes a popular blog, and is often heard on such forums as National Public Radio in the US and seen presenting keynotes at Internet-related conferences.

Many are not aware that he was once a Vice President of an Internet search engine firm, and that background helps shed light on some of the core insights to be found in his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David’s third book (following Cluetrain Manifesto, 2002, and Small Things Loosely Joined, 2003), he once again takes up the challenge of interpreting the changes that the Internet is bringing to our personal lives, to our social lives, and to the core assumptions that have anchored many businesses. Six years on from the publication of Cluetrain Manifesto, this is the clearest account yet of the fundamentals behind the “webiness” of the web, and how what’s different about information on the Internet is turning many operating assumptions about knowledge and about business on their heads.

At FASTforward 2008, David will be sharing his views on the 2.0 transformation and some specific ways in which 2.0 user behaviors spawn new business opportunities in places you’d probably not expect. Don’t miss the chance to catch a deep and deeply funny mind at work.

For those who attended FASTforward 2007 in San Diego and for most readers here, Andy McAfee needs no introduction. He has simply become the leading business academic generating thought leadership around the concepts and practices of Enterprise 2.0 (E20 here).

Of course coining the phrase itself earned him some credit, but his Spring, 2006 Sloan Management Review article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration did more than introduce a new buzz term. In the piece, he clearly laid out a set of business considerations that continue to inform the developing thinking that we see here at the fastforward blog and elsewhere.

Andy’s SLATES model (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals), for example, remains a source of core insight into the nexus of technology and interaction patterns that trigger when any thoughtful E20 practice gets under way. (For some recent extension suggestions from Hinchliffe check here.)
This past February at FASTforward in San Diego, Andy’s keynote session, in addition to articulating his take on the meaning and the progress of the E20 phenomenon, offered commentary on the special 2.0 research project that FAST and the Economist Intelligence Unit released at FASTforward: Serious Business: Web 2.0 Goes Corporate. And the breakout sessions he engaged in offered plenty of food for thought not just for the participants, but for all the readers of Andy’s widely-quoted blog, through his subsequent 3 posts on considerations from the conference.

For example, Andy blogged about the counterpoint between his definition of Enterprise 2.0 and Tim O’Reilly’s phase 2 definition of Web 2.0, and the exchange they had at the event that highlighted each other’s thinking.

O’Reilly:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

McAfee:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Give Andy credit for immediately turning to the hard questions. As he asked in the blog:
“Tim is entirely correct about the importance of network effects and collective intelligence within Web 2.0, and therefore also within Enterprise 2.0. Every Web and Enterprise 2.0 application I can think of gets better as more people use it. So is my definition above at best incomplete and at worst inaccurate?”

Andy gets on with his business this way:
“…my definition instead emphasizes another ‘rule for success:’ the use of technology platforms that are initially freeform (meaning that they don’t specify up front roles, identities, workflows, or interdependencies) and eventually emergent (meaning that they come over time to contain patterns and structure that can be exploited by their members). I continue to see these as the key points of differentiation between E20 technologies and previous corporate collaboration and communication tools.”

At FASTforward 2008, Andy kicks off the conference with a keynote at 5:15 pm Monday afternoon. Much has happened in the last year to move E20 to a whole new level. Andy will be helping set the stage for what happens next. Be sure to be there. Guaranteed to be worth the trip. And bring your thinking cap.

To find out more and receive a $300 blogger discount, click here.

What would be an ideal approach?

Stuart Henshall has given this a lot of thought

“I’ve been meaning to write a post about conferences, conference organizers and how they prepare for a social media world. I attended two conferences in the last week KMWorld and FutureVision. Both were inadequately prepared for social media. I use them only as an example, both were excellent events in their way and yet they were missed opportunities. Still rather than address the organizers I thought I’d address the presenters. There are lessons listed for Organizers and PR firms too.

Presenters generally came unprepared for a social media world. Unless we are talking an O’Reilly conference, Supernova, Barcamp or a Blogging convention you as a presenter may not have been confronted with the “problem” … or is that “opportunity” before. Each time I’ve gone to a non-tech / non geeky conference in the last few years outside of communications I’ve felt lost and unsupported. I’ve also learned “bloggers” just aren’t understood. So take a moment and just consider, if you are a presenter and your presentation is being live blogged… What do you do?

His answer to this question is here.