Archive for SocialText
by Jon Husband
October 11, 2008 at 1:50 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Change, Community, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Robert Scoble, Social Computing, SocialText, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0
At the end of September (seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?) Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext announced the go-to-market of SocialText 3.0 (Connected Collaboration With Context), involving the integration of Facebook and Twitter functionalities into the wiki-based Socialtext collaborative platform.
In my opinion this reinforces a major trend that I believe will redefine how knowledge work is designed (I wrote about this massive trend and its importance in the Ark Group publication "Making Knowledge Work - The Arrival of Web 2.0").
What I mean by trend is that over the past two years all the major workplace software vendors - Microsoft, IBM Lotus, Open Text, Google, Oracle, EMC Documentum, SAP, Adobe and so on - have all launched (or acquired companies that provide the elements of) "renovated" platforms that have collaboration and social computing at their cores. As just one example of the ongoing evolution in this arena, see Bill Ives’ recent post about Microsoft’s investment plans for Sharepoint, in which he notes "The next release of Sharepoint, Microsoft will be investing for the paradigm shift to more web 2.0 capabilities".
When a critical mass of large organizations have upgraded or migrated to platforms with collaboration and social computing at their cores, I expect that the changes to the ways people work with information and each other to create and use pertinent knowledge will accelerate.
In the case of Socialtext 3.0, I think it’s very smart to make explicit the "transfer" of massively-adopted consumer technologies to make it easy for people to connect, collaborate and co-create as they are already doing outside the firewall. Leadership and management will change (or have to) to see this as an opportunity to focus people on what is important and what needs to be done - including increased tolerance for new ideas and potential innovation - and not as a crisis of control.
Rather than recreate all the links, I’ve let Robert Scoble do the work for me from this excerpt from his blog post of September 30th.
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SocialText Brings Enterprise Facebook and Twitter to Wikis
Socialtext is making big news all over the Web this morning. Here’s a rundown, later in the post I’ll talk about why. I also have an exclusive video of Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext demonstrating the new features to me.
Ross Mayfield, for my cell phone camera last night, explains the changes in this 18-minute video.
Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext, writes on his blog “Hello Socialtext 3.0!”
BusinessWeek: Socialtext 3.0: Will Wikis Finally Find Their Place in Business?
Webware: Socialtext co-founder: Enterprise Twitter isn’t enough.
eWeek: Socialtext Signals Marks Wiki Provider’s Move into Enterprise Microblogging.
Dawn Foster notes the move of Enterprises to social.
Zoli Erdos says “Socialtext Becomes Really Social.”
ZDNet: “Socialtext enters Twitter for Enterprise sweepstakes.”
TechCrunch writes “SocialText 3.0 blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise.”
So, why are these changes important? Because they bring the social features that many people have gotten to know on Twitter and Facebook into the Enterprise along with advanced wiki functionality.
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I would add "They represent an early look at the ways most people will work (and the kinds of tools they will use) within another five to ten years"
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by Joe McKendrick
November 27, 2007 at 12:46 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Community, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, SocialText, User Revolution, Web 2.0
“In order to get maximum value from this ever-growing collection of ideas and information, in a real sense you have to un-manage it. It’s by un-managing it, by allowing everybody who touches it to add to the connections, to add their own links, ideas, reviews, bad ideas, good ideas, insights—that’s how the collection grows. Just as with the Web itself, it cannot scale sufficiently if it’s too centrally managed.”
-David Weinberger
David Weinberger, who I had the pleasure of meeting at FastForward’s San Diego confab earlier this year, and who’s work has graced these pages (Hylton provides a list here), recently discussed his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous, with the editors at KnowledgeWorld.
David says we are entering a Miscellaneous Economy, enabled via technology, which is providing us with rich two-way knowledge and interaction. As he put it: “with the digital miscellaneous, we find all sorts of ways that the things are alike, all sorts of connections and relationships. We’re doing that together. We’re doing it over the course of time. The digital miscellaneous pile is getting richer and richer with connections, meanings, significant relationships.”
David says that the Miscellaneous Economy is evolving out of the Web of relationships that is developing as a result of social networking technology. “It can be as ordinary as a link,” he explained. “A person links one page to another because she sees some relationship between them. Tags are another expression of a relationship. The semantic Web does this also. All of these relationships are preserved and are available to help us find what we want. The miscellaneous becomes rich with potential, with multiple layers of meaning and a near infinite number of ways of organizing it.”
What’s the meaning to business? David provides three ways in which businesses can profit from the Miscellaneous Economy:
1) Businesses can let customers organize information: “Under the traditional way of organizing, which works very well for physical objects, the business decides what is the best way to organize and categorize its stuff, and what are the right paths through it. …What you think of as a survival backpack may be to a customer a good graduation gift or the perfect shape to carry her new video camera. For another customer, it may be reminiscent of the backpack he had when he was in the Boy Scouts. You enable your customers to find the information that they want far more efficiently if you allow them to participate in the categorizing and organizing of it. And especially if you allow them to do it together.”
2) Businesses can uncover previously unseen relationships: “By using tools that allow that information to be broken out of its assigned categories, you will discover relationships you didn’t know were there. You’re going to spur innovation, you’re going to discover efficiencies and you’re going to enable people across your organization to find other people who share their passions.”
3) Information mashups: “You’ll also get more use out of your information because your information makes more sense when it’s mashed up with other information. Not infrequently it happens that by allowing information over here that looks like it shouldn’t have anything to do with that other information over there, we discover what we never expected to discover.”
by Rob Paterson
October 23, 2007 at 3:38 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Michael Yon, Public Media, SaaS, Social Media, SocialText, War, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Thanks to a reader - Rob Lantz - I have discovered the Ernie Pyle of our time.
His name is Michael Yon. Michael works for no paper and lives off donations. He is writing the most compelling material of the conflict in Iraq.
Here is a taste - gripping and so human - so different from CNN
Off course the official Army hates him - but as you can see by this article - the guys love him. He is a real warrior, was in the Special Forces, who can pick up a weapon when it all goes wrong as it does in this story.
What’s really like on the ground for both US Troops - now moved out of the Green Zone and into the community - and for the Iraqis who live there - what do both really need from each other? Here Yon shows us a view not seen before by “Real” journalists who read the press releases in the Green Zone.
Without a paper behind him - he can tell the truth. The more we can publicize his work the more the truth can be told - a glimpse of the “Paper” of the future?
by Joe McKendrick
October 7, 2007 at 9:04 pm · Filed under
Community, Enterprise 2.0, Messy World, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0
My colleague Rob Paterson just shared with us how online social networking has changed the way students interact with their established and new communities.
Perhaps there’s a warm and fuzzy feeling we’re all getting from the connections and networks that are now accessible to us on a daily basis.
Tim Bray, a founder of XML and Web 2.0/Web services/SOA luminary, says that many of today’s social networking experiences are overrated. Yet, he is able to step back and marvel on how the Internet has changed our sense of community.
Interestingly, the global community fostered by the Internet has begun to take on the warm feel of a friendly, busy cafe, he says:
“The Net’s killer app has always been other people. There are side benefits, like access to all the world’s information. But the links that matter aren’t between pages but people, and they’re strong and rich and subtle. Multiply the infinite flavors in human relationships by a thickening bundle of means-to-connect; that product is what’s new and what’s good and what’s exciting.”
“It feels pleasant to step into my local on the way to the office (double latte in my own cup). Yeah, it’s warm when cold outside, shady when sunny, smells of coffee and baking. But that’s background; what matters is the faces I recognize and others I don’t, and always, always, the buzz of conversation. That’s what the Net’s starting to feel like.”
From a workplace perspective, this is the gist of what has been called the “personal outsourcing” phenomenon. When we turn to others for information, or to collaborate and share, we call upon a community of associates or experts that spans the entire global, versus simply running to an associate that has an office down the hall. The global community has become our community of peers, friends, and potential acquaintances.
Not every needs all the bells and whistles, however. Bray admits, for example, that he can live without some highly hyped sites, such as Facebook. “For me, the value is in promoting intimacy, seeing what my friends are doing. And Twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the Facebook bull*** and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in. So recently I don’t Facebook much.”
by Joe McKendrick
September 5, 2007 at 3:40 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0
A group representing the Digitari of our era — Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington — teamed up to write and post what they’re calling “A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.”
The document is mercifully short, and lays out these rights in a very succinct way. The document addresses data ownership, control over this information, and freedom to distribute this information in the manner the owner sees fit.
This is great stuff, as it defines the rights of service consumers versus providers. But it does leave an open question: how does it apply to users within corporate settings, using corporate networks? We already know that email and IM messaging is not the “personal property” of the originators, but that of the company from which it originated.
The Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web reads as follows:
“We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
- Ownership of their own personal information, including:
- their own profile data
- the list of people they are connected to
- the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.”
by Rob Paterson
August 29, 2007 at 8:36 am · Filed under
Charles Handy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0
Why is collaboration so hard in organizations? Every organization that I know tells me that it is hard. Hard - all but impossible! Why? Why? Can Social Media help improve collaboration? I have had no success with just the introduction of the technology. Is there something missing?
I think that I stumbled upon the something that may be missing this week as I was struggling with this question of why it is so hard for organizations to collaborate and to adopt social media. I think that the missing link is having the right context. Throughout history, technology has changed before the prevailing context. Two examples:
- In 1941, the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. But they were decisively beaten in days. Why? Because the French’s context for using tanks was still based in static defensive warfare - Tanks to them were mobile pill boxes. The Germans saw them as a raging offensive torrent. Same technology - different context - different result!
- All airlines except one - use the traditional model of mechanical “efficiency” - usually by playing off pilots with flight attendants versus ground staff versus check in staff. All airlines except one - thought that fleet unification or better use of technology - would save them money. Only one understood that the key to the single most important factor in keeping costs low - having the highest fleet utilization rate (Planes in the air versus on the ground - was not through efficiency but through collaboration on the ramp. Their entire organization is deigned to promote cross fertilization and collaboration. A host of rewards and penalties reinforce this aim. That airline makes more money that all the rest of the industry. None have been able to change their context to follow it - of course that airline is Souhwest.
My aha was this - If you introduce Social Media into your organization without thinking about the new context for enterprise - you will fail as did the French and the other airlines
So then what context?
When we use the word “Organization” we default to this model. An organization that breaks up work and people naturally into separate and competing parts. I say competing - because this is also how we allocate capital and resources - the parts compete for the attention of the “father” as kids do for the car keys. At the centre of this context is Budget and the idea that everyone and everything inside the department is “Property” that has to be owned by the Head. Hence my Feudal analogy.
This model excludes all externalities such as suppliers and customers. Departments will rather die that share resources with another department. Of course the people inside cannot collaborate - it is logical and wise that they don’t. For the real aim of the department is not the customer or even the larger good of the whole enterprise but the expansion and or the protection of the department itself. Hence the reason why most organizations in the end default into being self serving. They are designed to be so.
So what is the new organizational context?
I think it looks like the logo for Ross Mayfield’s Social Text. It’s intellectual father is Charles Handy. It is his Shamrock idea made real by Social Software.
In The Age of Unreason (1989) he proposed the Shamrock organisation as a business model. Many have tied the symbol to his Irish background. The shamrock has long been powerful in the Anglican Church of Ireland because of its apocryphal use by St Patrick as a symbol of the Holy Trinity.
For Handy the first of the three leaves represented the professional managers and administrators � the organisational core. This leaf is shrinking in size. The second leaf contained the contractual fringe. Its contributors to the organisation were vital, but they were outsiders. In the third leaf were those including the portfolio workers, as well as temporary workers and part-timers. They contributed much, but they could never be considered part of the organisation. Many didn�t want to be. They wanted jobs but not careers. They frequently worked for a number of disparate organisations. In Handy�s language they were like fleas feeding off elephants. The latter were the large organisations. This was an analogy he pursued in the autobiographical The Elephant and the Flea (2001).
Social Text’s logo sheds for me new light on Handy’s idea or an organic structure whose role id to get a lot of resources for much less cost that by having to own them all like a Feudal Lord.
Let’s briefly explore this idea in practice.
You are the president of a small Public TV station. Your staff is already maxed out with putting the existing world on air. How are you going to make the transition to being a public media company? You have no spare resources. You have only modest internal expertise in the new. You have no way of having God suddenly give you the money to create the new. But you know that if you don’t - you will be dead in maybe 5 years?
In part 2 - I will offer up how such a President could solve this paradox by using the Handy Model and Ross’s Pentogram as a guide. In the mean time - give this paradox a whirl yourself
