Archive for FASTforward'09
by Rob Paterson
August 20, 2011 at 5:10 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
In my first post in July of 2007, I asked myself - What were all these new tools going to be about?. For when the steam engine arrived, I am sure the Steam Geeks, all talked about pressure, bearings etc. But steam changed the world. It forced us to use the clock. It meant that food could move long distance and so enabled vast cities pulling us from the country where we had lived for millenia.It changed war and enabled millions to be supplied and to move.
So back in July of 2007, that is the context that I asked the question “What’s it all about?”
I feel good and bad about how my question got answered by life. What we have seen is an acceptance of the new tools in many cases. I wrote the Twitter Guide for FF in December of 2008. Then most could not spell Twitter let alone imagine how it would change media and how we get our news. While Facebook can be seen as silly with all its games and pictures that we might regret, Twitter and Facebook have made a difference in the emerging freedom movements in the world. Social Media, especially in the video context, has enabled new ideas to get traction way earlier than before. Web Based Video is surely the Gutenberg Press of our time?
Most people have made the new media part of their lives. Skype is how we old farts communicate with our kids and grand kids. Who does not have a Android or iPhone that enables us to navigate, read books, stay in touch in a way that was impossible to imagine back in 2007.
The area that I am sad about is business. Yes in some cases the tools have been adopted but not the culture that is the game changer. So most large enterprise is really no different than it was back in 2007. Less than half of small business has ven taken the first step! Government also keeps the lid on. Politicians have their twitter handle. Departments have a facebook account. But the need to control everything from the top remains the dominating pressure.
So for me there is this disconnect between the people – who are all of us – and when we get inside a traditional organization.
As the people, we are being empowered and liberated by this new technology. Like Steam in its day, it is starting to change everything. People now can work where they live and chose where they live based on what they want and not have to fit into an office and one place. Very small business now has access to a global market and has tools that are often better than those used by large firms. New food systems are emerging. You can buy Bison meat online. A new education system is emerging. You can participate in some of the best lectures given by the best people at the best universities. New approaches to health are emerging – witness the take off of Paleo and Ancestral Health.
But the establishment is entrenching. Newspapers are putting up paywalls. Politicians praise the use of social media in the Middle East, but want to halt its use at home. Business leaders talk about innovation but do all they can to prevent it.
I think we close the Fast Forward Blog at an important juncture. I and my colleagues have done our best to show you what is coming in a timely and thoughtful way. We have stressed adoption. But now I think a line has been drawn in the sand. It is clear to all that just as Henry Ford invented a model for the enterprise in 1905 that overwhelmed all the artisans, so all the artisans connected in a global network, will overwhelm the Ford model. There is nothing moral about this. It is Darwin. In 1905 the better model won. So it will be again today.
So here is my last exhortation to any of you who push back at the cultural work that comes with using social media to its potential, do you want to be on the right side of history or not?
I know I ask no small thing. For when we change ur core culture, a large art of us has to die and who can face that easily?
So in all humility, thank you for reading us here. Thank you Fast and Microsoft for being so generous as owners. I have never been told to toe a party line. Thank you my dear fellow FF writers. We have known each other for many years now. I will miss interacting with you so much.
by Francois Gossieaux
August 19, 2011 at 3:05 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09, Microsoft
Three years ago we embarked on a journey of hosting an Enterprise 2.0 discussion through the FASTForward Blog. The aim of this blog was to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to put users in control of information. It was home to the ongoing discussion about Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges.
The FASTForward Blog like the Enterprise 2.0 discussion has had many ebbs and flows. When we started the discussions were focused on Enterprise 2.0 adoption and today we are moving towards convergence.
The conversation has shifted and the focus we had at the beginning has changed. Just look at Rob Patterson’s post “Is Shutting Down Social Networks the best response to unrest”, a quick look at how community and the police are using social media to help with cope with the rioters in the UK or the post about Designing Mobile Apps by Bill Ives.
Those two posts indicate that our content has evolved and our initial purpose has been fulfilled with widespread discussion of E2.0 occurring in businesses and organizations of all sizes.
With that in mind, we will be closing the FASTForward Blog. Microsoft has hosted this discussion and we think you will agree that it has offered a forum for some stimulating, thought provoking and at times controversial conversations and for that we are thankful and hope that you have found value in your visits.
We have asked our most active bloggers over the last year to post closing comments for you. Thank you for the opportunity to host the conversation.
by Bill Ives
July 1, 2011 at 3:54 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Jim Worth has done a very valuable service by setting up a wiki, Enterprise 20 Boston Social Web Coverage June 20 2011, to collect the coverage of the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. It includes:
- tweetlog transcripts of each day
- conference links
- the presentations
- the blog posts
- press coverage
- pictures and videos
- conference tweeters
I am amazed and grateful for what Jim has done. He has done this for other events see his complete listings. It was a great event and here is the record of what was done and the comments on what happen. I also enjoyed spending time with him at a number of sessions and events. Thanks, Jim.
by Joe McKendrick
April 22, 2011 at 5:55 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Is corporate social media ethical? Is there a “Tom Sawyer syndrome” at work in which people are suckered into doing work thinking that it’s something to be enjoyed?
Those are the provocative questions raised by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the recent South by Southwest Interactive confab. His argument: a key value proposition of social networking is crowdsourcing, in which an actively engaged community contributes new ideas for innovation, or even does some piecework, for little or no compensation. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Zittrain argues that these may be morally questionable ventures.
On these pages at FastForward, we have explored some of the opportunities social networking provides for businesses to improve customer interactions, including reliance on influencers to solve customer problems, as well as crowdsourcing. In the former case, a company essentially can be spared hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer service costs as proponents on the network take care of sticky problems with products or services.
As one observer recently summed up the economics of crowdsourcing:
“Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”
Still, Zittrain argued that many social networked arrangements amount to digital sweatshops and opportunities to exploit distressed labor. As he was paraphrased as saying at SWSX:
“Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money. In many cases, companies have persuaded people to complete simple tasks for no pay at all, instead offering recognition within the volunteer community or points in the guise of a game. Mr. Zittrain called it ‘a wonderful Tom Sawyer syndrome.’”
However, many crowdsourcing arrangements do have compensation at the end, since many are positioned as competitions. Corporations such as GE and federal agencies including NASA position their crowdsourcing efforts as such, with a cash prize at the end as incentive for the selected innovation. As such, these activities may be as morally questionable as an essay contest.
A counterpoint raised at SWSX was that unlike digital sweatshops, efforts by participants are entirely voluntary, and end-users can log off at any time. In many cases, the work provides benefit to society.
Along these lines, consider the work of Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), which has marshalled more than 25,000 volunteers from across Europe and the globe have been partaking in the digitization of historical collections at the National Library of Finland. The Digitalkoot program enlists online volunteers, via crowdsourcing, to help digitize millions of pages of archive material. The project is catching all the text that optical character recognition technology misses, and therefore requires manual patching. Through two online games, volunteers complete small portions of work, or microtasks, to help correctly digitize historical content. The national library reports that the volunteers have already completed more than two million individual tasks, totaling 1,700 hours of work.
Also, while the idea of crowdsourcing labor sounds scary, it also is a huge opportunity for many workers as well. Drake Bennett, writing in the Boston Globe, observed that crowdsouring has opened up greater opportunities for workers and companies across parts of the globe. For example, txteagle, which distributes work to mobile cell-phone users across the globe to handle image, audio and text-based tasks. txteagle is now one of Kenya’s largest employers, employing a 10,000-strong workforce is a network of freelancers.
by Rob Paterson
March 25, 2011 at 8:23 am · Filed under
Adoption, FASTforward'09, Intelligence Services, NPR, Social Media
It appeared that the White House was blindsided by events in Egypt at first. The traditional intel sources failed to spot the undercurrents that suggested a revolt. NPR report today that this oversight is being corected – the Intellignce Community is going to learn how to scan the web for “smoke”.
Traditionally, intelligence agencies have relied on top-secret information to track changes in other countries. But wiretaps and secret intercepts didn’t help U.S. officials predict the Arab Spring that has brought revolution across the Middle East and North Africa.
In hindsight, officials say there could have found some clues about what was about to happen if they had read open sources more closely. Now they are searching for systematic ways to do that.
The uprisings in the region have shown intelligence officials that they need new ways to understand what motivates people around the world. While traditional intelligence tools can help, they are limited in their ability to put their fingers on the pulse of society or anticipate fickle human behavior.
“The traditional intelligence community is absolutely biased toward classified information,” said Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, an Army intelligence officer and head of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “I think that open source provides a critical lens into understanding the world around us in a much more dynamic way than traditional intelligence sources can provide.”
Isn’t this how all “intelligence” will work now?
In the past we have asked questions? Used artificial groups like focus groups. Our choices have influenced what we heard back. But now, we can listen and see patterns emerge. This is how we will also present the data – not in a linear report but as a pattern. Too weird an idea? Check this brilliant example of patterning and the Middle East designed by the Guardian. Here by taking a pattern perspective, we can see how momentum builds and broadens. We can see the dynamics!
We can all do this for any issue that we care about.
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