Cory Doctorow is always worth watching: insightful, funny, often provocative and consistently knowledgeable. OK, so I’m a bit of a boingboing fanboy. And yes, the video was posted weeks ago, but I’m just now getting to it.

In this talk, part of the Cambridge Business Lectures series, Doctorow brings together two key topics which I’ve seen lots of folks discuss separately:

• The Internet as perfect copying machine, including the absurdities of digital restrictions management (DRM) and the necessity for changes to business models as a result of a changing technology landscape
• The Internet as (nearly) perfect mechanism for bringing people together for collective action both serious and banal

It’s a mash up of Lawrence Lessing on copyright (including references back to John Philip Sousa’s concern about atrophying vocal cords if recorded music is allowed to circulate) and Here Comes Everybody era Clay Shirky (discussing the traditional cost of organizing, getting large numbers of people working together as the single largest problem for companies to solve in the information age).

There’s also, though, enough Cory Doctorow here to prevent it from feeling like any kind of rehash or unauthorized, second generation degraded copy. My favorite example:

Paris Hilton’s genitals have joined the undead – they will live forever, stalking the Internet until the last plug is pulled on the last network router.

Doctorow points out th risk that the first discussion – the internet as copy machine – has largely distracted us from the second – the internet as a fundamental connecting machine. Here he overlaps a bit with The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It era Jonathan Zittrain, arguing that we can’t allow the solutions to the former use to kill the value presented by the latter. Or, as Doctorow puts it:

We need to have a balance, a detente, that says to these firms, “You can try to make your living, but you can’t do it at the expense of the system that is delivering all of this public benefit. Not just copying movies, but beyond that – beyond that small parochial concern – allowing us to organise ourselves in ways that ennoble the human condition, and if you make it a choice between the Internet and Police Academy sequels, eventually society is going to vote for the Internet, so you can’t make it that choice.”

Well said, indeed – and I liked some of those Police Academy sequels.

He’s currently running a survey, which you should take 10 minutes or so to fill out:

What’s in it for you?:

Respondents who complete the survey will be eligible to win $400 (a random email address will be drawn from all responses to the survey). All respondents will also receive a full copy of the results at no cost. Please provide your contact information in order to receive the survey results.

Only totals and summary statistics will be published. Your personal information and answers will be held confidential, and will not be shared with any outside partner or company.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the results.

I’ve noticed in the last 3-4 months a major resurgence of interest in intranets – though they might be more properly called extranets, since they are password-protected rather than “behind the firewall.” We often begin talking to a prospect about content management and collaboration issues with respect to external audiences – customers, partners, suppliers – and come to find out that the core of the issue is the lack of an effective corporate-wide intranet in the first place.

Maybe “Enterprise 2.0″ is finally mature, when we no longer call it that and just call it the Intranet?

To start with the positive: This is a really solid business book, which sets out a clear methodology (including the Social Technographics Profile and the POST method with which Forrester clients / subscribers are already familiar), walks through a broad range of well explained case studies, and situates the business benefits of the different approaches.

Bernoff and Li have clearly done their research here, talking to a wide variety of companies in different industries about their experiences with “social technologies,” and they do a very astute job of avoiding oversimplification (never suggesting, for example, that every business should follow a simple formula) while also not falling back on the consultant’s refrain (“it depends”) or failing to give real, useful, pragmatic, and actionable advice.

The book is laid out into three key sections (you can see the whole table of contents online):

1. Understanding the Groundswell – in which they lay out the basic context of what has changed and why businesses need new approaches, as well as the social technographics profiles
2. Tapping the Groundswell – in which they lay out the POST method, and walk through all the ways companies can benefit from / leverage this new world
3. The Groundswell Transforms – in which they extend the argument to include how this new set of conditions can transform the enterprise.

Each section is supported by a handful of specific case studies and other examples, which are drawn from a wide variety of industries. There are indices by company and by strategy at the end of the book, so you can quickly find examples from your own vertical or place on the adoption curve.

Li and Bernoff are at their rhetorical best when they are describing the veritable sea change that the groundswell represents:

You cannot ignore this trend. You cannot sit this one out. Unless you are retiring in the next six months, it’s too late to quite and let somebody else handle it. The groundswell trend is unstoppable, and your customers are there. You may go a little slower or a little faster, but you have to move forward. There is no going back.

They also offer solid, sound advice to those looking to manage the cultural change required within an enterprise to successfully pull of “Groundswell thinking”:

• First, start small.
• Second, educate your executives.
• Third, get the right people to run your strategy.
• Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync.
• Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.

Not exactly radical or wholly original advice, but wrapped in the context of real business decisions made by people facing the issues, and informed by real experiences.

In short, I’d say the book is a must read for anyone from a traditional (by which I mean anything existing before the web) business looking to adapt to the internet age, anyone trying to convince their more traditional colleagues or bosses to adopt new strategies, and anyone hoping to sell such folks consulting and technology services.

Having said all of that, there are some minor blemishes – for example, when did del.icio.us become “a simple downloadable application”? Are they talking about the bookmarklets (javascript buttons for your browser to submit things to del.icio.us)? But that is really an exception in an otherwise well researched and well documented book.

Rather more difficult to ignore is the almost complete absence of Free and Open Source Software from a discussion of “Social Technologies.” There is a section titled “people collaborating: wikis and open source” (the lack of title capitalization is in the original – even the book title is in all lower case), but it really should be called “people collaborating: wikis.” Granted, Bernoff and Li aren’t technology analysts per se – in the sense of analyzing development approaches and platforms – and in the POST methodology technology is the last element. But I’d argue that it is critical to understand the context of mass collaboration rising out of open source communities in order to better understand the mechanisms by which communities are created and sustained, thrive or fail, and interact with each other in an online world.

Instead, the whole of the analysis of this phenomenon comes to a paragraph in which we learn:

The same sort of cooperation [as that which drives wikipedia and other wikis] drives other forms of online collaboration, including open-source software products like Linux (a version of the Unix operating system), Apache (a Web server), and Firefox (a Web browser). In open source, technically adept developers combine their efforts to build, test, and improve software products, and the code is available for all to see. Before you scoff at this form of development, recognize that Linux now underpins many Web servers and consumer electronics devices, including TiVo; Apache is the dominant Web server software on the Internet, and Firefox has gone from zero to over 25 percent market share in less than two years.

That’s it, basically, for open source. No analysis of the massive collaboration efforts behind those projects, or how they are managed, arise, die, become businesses, become communities, etc. No analysis of how these and other open source projects provide either models or anti-patterns to be avoided. Not even any analysis of how the open source development methodology and licensing practices have influenced other cultural practices through things like creative commons licensing, open access, and challenges to many fundamental corporate notions of intellectual property.

Bernoff and Li seem to assume that their reader has no familiarity with and no interest in development – which may be accurate – and don’t seem to have much interest themselves in the impact open source can and has had.

(Readers interested in these issues would do well to check out Chris Kelty’s Two Bits and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody – the former on the cultural significance of free software, the latter on how technology changes have enabled and facilitated changes in social organization – both of which I hope to write more about in the future).

What ultimately left me dissatisfied with the book, however – and here we return to the question of whether this reveals more about me as a reviewer than the text – is that it never steps outside its tightly constructed frame, which essentially comes down to “how do I use this to improve my business”?

It isn’t that I expected, or even wanted, Li and Bernoff to craft a revolutionary manifesto – a sort of Cluetrain II or Wealth of Networks for the MBA set – but that the tone is so relentless in its focus it can begin to feel like the only valid reason for the Internet’s existence (and the only valid use of it now that it exists) is to sell more widgets, make people feel better about the widgets they’ve bought, and maybe help a few companies make better widgets.

It ended up reminding me of one of my favorite 80s movie scenes, from Say Anything, when John Cusack is asked what he wants to do with his life, and answers:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Again, to be fair, I’ve got no problem with businesses trying to understand how to adapt to the changing environment the Internet and social media represent, or even with helping businesses figure out how to leverage these new approaches to generate profit or awareness – in fact, that’s a fair description of what I do at Optaros, and what Optaros does more broadly.

It’s just that in the middle of the focus on tapping, listening to, talking with, energizing, embracing, and connecting with the Groundswell (every single chapter title involves doing something with the groundswell or enabling it to do something to your company), there’s precious little exploration of what is driving the Groundswell in the first place, or what it means more broadly as a social and historical phenomenon. Why the groundswell now? What impact is it having on us as a culture, other than just what toothpaste we think is cool?

(Yes, there is a section in the opening chapter on what the groundswell is and why it is happening now – but it is reduced to this level of causality: “These three trends – people’s desire to connect new interactive technologies, and online economics – have created a new era.”)

Ultimately, Groundswell presents “the groundswell” as something which is happening to us – something we are not creating but either passively suffering from or being carried by, like a surfer on a wave. It seems almost a force of a nature – an inevitable technology tsunami – rather than a collective project in which we are all engaged in actively constructing a specific historical reality.

So is it fair to critique Groundswell for staying within its own well-defined purpose? To criticize it for not being The Wealth of Networks?

If what you’re looking for is an eminently readable, well researched, pragmatic guide to business strategies for dealing with this set of social changes, Groundswell delivers. But in doing so, I wish it had taken more time to step outside the framing of this social change as a kind of natural consequence of the inevitable march of technology and understand the set of changes themselves in greater detail.

Disclosures: Forrester sent me a review copy of the book, as they did to a number of bloggers. Optaros co-sponsored a webinar with Josh Bernoff earlier this year on the topic of open innovation. Several of the companies discussed as case studies are or have been Optaros clients, though Optaros was not involved in any of the specific projects described. Swisscom Mobile Labs, an Optaros client project, was a finalist in the groundswell awards. Optaros is a Forrester client. I know a number of people who work there or have worked there.

Enterprise³ consists of three separate, but related, components:

• Enterprise Web and Information Management Conference – a conference that provides technology managers and IT staff with a detailed guide to selecting and implementing technology and product innovations in Web 2.0, portals, collaboration, information management and access, enterprise search, and service-oriented architectures.
• Enterprise Portal and Collaboration Business Summit – an event designed for business users and technology managers that employs case studies and best practices to show attendees how companies today are gaining business benefit from the latest enterprise portal and business collaboration technologies and products.
• Microsoft SharePoint in the Enterprise Forum – this forum provides IT staff with the information they need to deploy a Microsoft SharePoint environment that can be integrated with enterprise-level information management and business collaboration systems.

I’ll be participating in two panels. The first is “Stump the Consultant,” in which a series of consultants (including me) get asked the same question and their answers are rated. (An iPod and noise canceling headphones create an isolation booth while the others answer so that we can’t hear each other’s answers). Should be good fun. Wonder if I’ll get any SharePoint questions.

The second is on “Facebook in the Enterprise,” which is a panel moderated by my former colleague Jarrod Gingras, now at CMS Watch:

Key topics will include security, enterprise IT concerns, “viral” effects, custom applications, privacy, networking, and information sharing.

Fellow panelists include Toby Ward (CEO of Prescient Digital and author of the Intranet Blog) and Kyle Arteaga (VP of Communications at Serena, which relies heavily on Facebook as its intranet). You can read Toby’s take on Serena’s Facebook Intranet here.

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass”

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.

Participating on the panel with me will be:

• Bob Bickel, Founder and CEO of Ringside Networks
• Dr. Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia

Thanks to the conference organizers, I have one free full conference pass to give away. (Full conference pass is $1895 currently and $2095 if you register on site).

To get the pass, contact me. I will choose at random from those who contact me by the end of day Sunday, 5/11.

I also have a number of discount codes which you can use to get a free demo pavillion pass – which gets you in to the demo pavillion as well as “selected keynotes and sponsored sessions” – or $100 off a full registration.

Now (via LaughingSquid) you can watch the video. It’s Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, on the “cognitive surplus” as a characteristic fueling mass collaboration.

Interestingly, this seems to break my facebook app. No longer resizes the iframe to the right size? Something is trying to call location.toString() and getting denied – my guess is that Blip.tv is trying to track where the video was embedded and facebook doesn’t allow apps inside iframes to access parent location.

You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo videos at Blip.tv or put this rss url into Miro and get a channel: http://web2expo.blip.tv/rss

From their email update:

We’ve also received feedback from many of you who rely on trains for travel, particularly our users in the Northeastern U.S. and in Europe. So now, you can click the new Add Rail option in your TripIt itinerary and add a train reservation. You can also forward rail bookings (made on Amtrak, Via Rail Canada, Eurostar, and in the UK Great Northeastern Railway and The Trainline) to plans@tripit.com and we’ll automatically add those rail bookings to your itinerary. If you use other train sites, please forward us those confirmation emails and we’ll work to add them in the future.

Haven’t had a chance to test anything other than Amtrak for now, but it you forward those “This is NOT a ticket” reservation emails amtrak.com sends to plans@tripit.com it does a pretty good job.

It got the time and stations right, picked up the reference # Amtrak uses, and got the traveller info right.

I was mildly disappointed it didn’t recognize Penn Station (NYP) as being in New York City, but that’s pretty easily corrected in the itinerary and I believe it would be picked up from any corresponding hotel reservation you send.

Open-source software projects tend to be initiated and built exclusively by programmers and their focus usually lies, as it should, with core features and technology. But a project that is exclusively driven by programmers usually won’t have an elegant user interface.

This post started as a comment on his blog, but got too long so I moved it here instead.

Reville proposed fixing this problem, in part, by establishing a “Free Beauty Squadron” which would connect designers and open source projects looking to improve their interfaces:

Here’s how a Free Beauty Squadron might work. A volunteer committee of experts asks projects to apply, explaining why they are a good candidate for an overhaul and what they hope to accomplish. When a project is selected, a paid designer flies out to meet one or more team members in person and begins developing a plan. Over a 6 week period, the designer creates mockups and interfaces flows for a new user experience, all in consultation with the coders. When the designer is done, the project has graphic files, documentation of a new UI, and an implementation plan to quickly or gradually put the new interface in place. The designer reserves 2 weeks for future consultation with the project as issues inevitably arise during implementation. The committee then sends the designer to their next project.

While I’m with Nicholas on the problem, I think this is the wrong direction in which to aim for a solution.

It’s not just that it is difficult to add design to the surface of a fully formed application (while beauty may be skin deep, true usability goes right through to the core), or that the interactions between new designers and existing Open Source projects might be difficult, or that the projects would need to take time to implement the new designs (these are logistical problems which Nicholas admits and offers what he sees as reasosonable workarounds to).

The problem is that it sets up the idea that “design work ” (specifically he seems to be targetting visual design, which is only a subset of a broader set of design skills from which many open source projects could benefit) is so fundamentally different than other kinds of production that it requires a different funding mechanism to get produced.

Put another way, why pay the designers and not the coders? Or, perhaps more accurately, why attract and encourage designers differently than coders?

Is it just that designers don’t need the tools open source produces?

Are the varied and sundry motivations which drive coders to contribute to open source somehow not relevant in the design community?

Many contributors to open source are actually paid employees of large companies using the software in question – don’t any of those patrons have designers?

I would assume many designers might appreciate the opportunity to build their portfolios with design solutions to real world challenges – for which their compensation might be reputation and experience, rather than cash.

Part of the problem must be in the code-centric nature of many open source communities, in which your ability to hack is the (only) measure of your worth – but that has been evolving in many projects to include broader skillsets.

So how does the open source community broadly engage with the designers in our midst, without having to create a separate charity brigade?

ICanHasCheezburger, or at least sites like it, should have a place on your corporate intranet.

So Why should lolcats (pictures of cats with captions in the imagined/projected diction of a cat who uses IM/SMS a lot) belong in your Enterprise 2.0?

Developed by two individuals known as Cheezburger and Tofuburger, is best enjoyed without deep explanation – just start visiting the web site, subscribe to the RSS feed (this is the one which works best on my phone), or follow them on twitter. For those who need explanation, start here:

• ICanHasCheezburger/About
• I’M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM: Rapidly spreading Web photo-posting phenomenon centers on felines with poor spelling (Houston Chronicle article)
• im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
• im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology

Because your employees are people too. In fact they were people long before you made them employees. As people, they have interests which only partially (or maybe even not at all) overlap with whatever it is you pay them to do (gasp!).


Part of the disconnect between the fun people have using web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, and (the darling of the moment) Facebook is the fact that they get to talk about things that are not properly corporate. Some folks react to this by worrying about wasted time and lost productivity, but I think that is absolutely the wrong approach – at least if you want creativity, innovation, dedication, and loyalty from the people you employ.

Sometimes laughing out loud at a Lolcat from ICanHasCheezburger does more for my productivity than a week of intensive sessions on strategic planning.

To put it another way, and borrow from Dave Weinberger, your employees’ [interests] are miscellaneous. Or, looked at from the other side, the things your enterprise might be interested in are miscellaneous. Trying to decide definitively upfront what’s on topic and what’s off topic on your intranet will kill, or at least fatally wound, any potential innovation which might happen there.

A few recent examples of miscellany from Optaros’ own Intranet 2.0. (Ok, we don’t really call it that – it’s just our intranet, but it is Enterprise 2.0 enabled – every employee has an internal blog, in addition to forums and wikis for projects/topics of interest, etc.):

• And now for something completely different – a discussion from one of our user experience (UX) folks about Monty Python
• A post from a senior developer on foosball strategy, complete with diagrams of optimal bank shots against which defenses are inefficient and difficult to maintain
• Results of a cracker eating contest in the Austin office
• Photos from the Swiss offices’ joint (Geneva and Zurich) Tennis tournament – our own Swiss Open)

The PEW / Internet Project recently released a report on hobbyists, showing that:

83% of online Americans have used the internet to pursue their hobbies

and:

Relatively younger American adults are more likely than their elders to look for information about hobbies or interests online. Some 86% of internet users ages 18 to 29 and 88% of internet users ages 30 to 49 utilize the medium to pursue hobbies. By comparison, 77% of 50-64 year-old internet users and 62% of online Americans age 65 and older report using the internet to pursue hobbies.

So are these users, accustomed to researching online things of interest to them, going to be asked to stop cold and speak (and read) official corporate voice only when they hit your corporate intranet?

When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).

This little device turns that moment of potential conflict – where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use – into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant – they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)

It’s “just good enough” – carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop – but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.

It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.

It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.

It’s even in RSS orange.

The opening session was Wednesday afternoon with Mark Driver : Gartner’s Open Source Scenario for 2007: Risks and Rewards for Mainstream IT.

This was the session which led to this Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flame-fest. But both missed what I thought was a perfectly rational set of statements:

1. that commercial software vendors cannot ignore open source as a disruptive innovation
2. that commercial software vendors are increasingly incorporating open source in a non-trivial fashion, and
3. that this trend will continue to deepen over the next four years.

Driver walked through some basic definitions and argued that we’re in a Third-Wave of Open Source reactions from Corporate IT: whereas many people in Enterprise IT departments first reacted to open source with some mixture of indifference and irrational emotion (that is both pro and con), the current phase is one characterized by “realism” – which will lead ultimately to “leverage.”

I suppose one could argue it is because of the company I keep, but I’d argue a large number of commercial enterprises passed realism and have been enjoying leverage for some time – but otherwise I think the model is accurate enough in describing the process many organizations go through in learning about open source.

One interesting point Driver made was that open source tends to create “Investment Protection” where proprietary software creates / ensures Intellectual Property protection. In the open source world, the investment the user or adopting organization makes gets preserved, because there is real vendor independence. In the commercial world there is real protection for the investments of the producing organization.

In addition Driver showed Gartner research which demonstrated that many organizations are using open source in “mission-critical” applications – that the percentage of open source software used in a mission critical application was almost the same as the percentage of internally developed or commercially purchased (non-OSS) software used in mission critical applications.

Driver argued that the adoption prioties are changing as open source moves further into the adoption curve and becomes more maintstream or is adopted b more conservative adopters. Where earlier adopters (“technology aggressive adopters”) focused on open source because it provided flexibility and independence, later adopters will be more focused on cost savings and risk mitigation. (All four motivators are important to both audiences – in Driver’s argument it is just their relative priority which changes).

Driver talked about the possibility of an increasing bifurcation within the open source community between “community class open source” projects versus “business class open source” – differentiated not some much by their features or specific license but by the goals, aims, and cultures of project governance. For conservative adopters whose focus is cost and risk avoidance, community class open source may not be a viable option, whereas for technology aggressive adopters the business class open source may be too slow moving or non-innovative. Additionally, he described the emergence of “gated source” options, which lie somewhere between the open source and proprietary models,

Driver listed four factors enterprises should consider in planning open source adoption:

• Fitness of Purpose (does the software do what you need it to do, well)
• Maturity (is the software project well governed, and capable of reliably producing quality?)
• Your technology adoption profile (is your organization an early, mainstream, or late adopter of new innovations?)
• Deployment scenario (how will the app be used, in the context of the organization’s mission? Is it mission critical?)

He closed by noting that “ignoring open source is not a viable option” and that the days of “skunk works” adoption are over. Enterprises should be planning adoption strategies, just as they have corporate management strategies around procuring commercial / proprietary / closed source software.

—

Unfortunately, given the overlap of the Web Innovation and Open Source summits I didn’t get to attend Nikos Drakos‘ session on “Open Source in the Workplace: What it Promises and What it Delivers,” but based on the ppt from the session I think I would have enjoyed it . He covered the growth of open source outside the “infrastructure and development tools” categories – into areas like content management, collaboration, and customer-facing communications. He also went into the leverage of open source collaboration principles in other contexts – perfect lead up to Yochai Benkler’s Keynote on Thursday.

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

Benkler:

We now live in a world in which:

• The most important inputs into the world’s core economic activities are widely distributed (the ability for globally distributed populations to create information and culture)
• Behaviors once on the periphery of economic concern are moving to the core (social relationships, friendships, concerns about decency and fairness)

Example: The Encyclopedia – used to be thousands of dollars to get a 24 volume set of bound encyclopedias. That pressure drove the price of the Brittanica down to $500 in 1989. That was then followed by Encarta for $59.95 in 2000. Finally, wikipedia which is free.

Benkler mentioned the Nature study on the quality of Wikipedia entries, and Britannica’s response (PDF) to it. (Nature‘s since responded to the Britannica objections).

The reality is that most hands on practicing scientists felt both were equally lousy. (Never ask a deep expert to evaluate a paragraph level summary of a complex topic – they always find it lacking). But that this was even a serious question to be tacked – that Wikipedia could be said by a reasonable person as potentially comparable in quality to Brianicca – is Benkler’s point.

“Information Production” is now the critical economic activity – at the same time that our ways of producing information are shifting to commons based production.

Benkler outlined a number of concepts (and drew distinctions between them) related to Commons Based Production:

1. Peer Production
2. Shared Resource Utilization (things like SETI @Home
3. Free/Open Source Software

Examples included (I added links):

• The search for Steve Fossett
• Craters outlined by volunteers for NASA
• The BBC Help Us Make News
• Threadless
• Learning to Love You More
• Kaitura
• Porkbusters and the Secret Holder
• The Sunlight Foundation Earmark Map
• Black Box Voting and the campaign to decertify certain electronic voting machines
• Media Volunteer (as I’m writing this their site seems to be down – asking for authentication for public pages)
• Cambia BioForge

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

Benkler showed a typology of different ways peer production works, in terms of the types of inputs people are asked to make and the types of organizational strategies they use, as well as the kinds of motivations (extrinsic and intrinsic) driving them. The more creativity and knowledge necessary in the types of contributions people are asked to make, the more you have to move to a many to many type collective form of organization. The major examples here are things like Google and Digg, where the effort required by the user is low (making links on the web means helping Google’s algorithm but you don’t think of it that way, digging something is a single click activity); on the other hand Free/Open Source Software requires much more complex structures. (Not sure if he’s overestimating the “volunteer” nature of open source here given the number of developers on may open source projects who are employed and do this contribution as part of their job).

The key question isn’t whether peer production is a fad – it clearly is here to stay – but how it operates and how we can design to encourage the right kinds of collaboration.

Too much of the theories of cooperation has classically depended on “rational self-interest” but newer explorations in a number of fields (sociology, economics, psychology, evolutionary biology) has started to move beyond that.

Benkler’s argument is that people respond in ways which are not always or first self-interested: people resond in ways which are predictably cooperative under certain conditions:

• Communication
• Humanization
• Trust Construction
• Explicit Norm Creation
• Monitoring / Peer Review / Discipline
• Transparency in Governance
• Fairness (in context – concepts of fairness vary widely)
• Self-Selection (as opposed to assignment to tasks)
• Group Identiity and Investment
• Leadership (older sibling style, not parent)

Benkler made a great point about being wary of introducing extrinstic motivators (ie, money) in systems which have been driven by intrinsic motivators. For example, systems which try to introduce shared ad revenue in the user-contributed-video context may alienate existing users who were motivated by other factors. You try to match love with money and some folks end up not wanting the money and no longer wanting to work for love.

Benkler closed with some of the political impacts of social production – ways in which social production is changing the political reality of people all over the world and ways in which industries, governments, and corporations threatened by social production have tried to push back – the DCMA, Trusted Systems, etc. (Unfortunately by this point he was trying to wrap up very quickly and I didn’t get a good list from his last few slides).

Because Benkler’s operating at a high level of abstraction – thinking about the impacts of peer production at a global and historical scale – it can be hard sometimes to connect his concepts to what companies are trying to do in the “Web 2.0″ space – but his elaborations should help us understand the real fundamental shifts underlying what otherwise might look like a “fad.”

In one tab, Andrew McAfee arguing that sometimes “It’s not not about the technology”

In the other, Jeff Jarvis arguing that “Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)”

At first glance this might seem like a debate waiting to happen: McAfee arguing that he’s growing weary of hearing people say “It’s Not About the Technology” and Jarvis saying “It’s Not About the Technology.” But if you look at what both are actually saying, a synthesis makes more sense.

Thesis, McAfee. He points to the cliche “It’s not about the technology” and explains how in some contexts that perspective can be dangerous:

This perspective is dangerous because it essentially denies two important facts: that technologies can differ from each other in salient ways, and that they can change over time. Losing sight of either of these can lead to confusion, or worse. . . .

INATT, version 2, also encourages the view that there’s nothing new under the sun — that one generation of technology aimed at addressing a business problem is the same as all other generations. So (for example) we need to collaborate and share knowledge better, but it’s not about the technology. We’ve been disappointed with our past results in these areas for reasons that have nothing to do with the technologies we were using, and there’s nothing about any new technologies that give us better chances of success now.

This sense of INATT is pessimistic and self-defeating, even if it’s not intended to be. It denies that there can be improvements, incremental or radical, in the ability of technologies to accomplish important goals. I disagree categorically with this. . . .

Sometimes, at least in part, it is about the technology.

Antithesis, Jarvis: He returns to the discussion of hyperlocal online, and argues that, for those trying to deliver hyperlocal:

Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.

. . . I’m not suggesting that hyperlocal is just a social networking tool. Or just a forum. Or just a bunch of blogs. Or just a listings tool. Or just a search engine. Or just a news site. It needs to end up being all those things and more. And as I said the other day, this will not happen in one place, on one site, but will be distributed across wherever people are being people and communities communities, locally. The trick, once more, is to organize it all. Elegantly.

Synthesis: Those trying to deliver hyperlocal solutions need to recognize the social connectivity already in place within communities, and orient themselves not around content delivery or product delivery, but around facilitating connections between people, and providing elegant organization. Applying the right sets of technologies in the right ways is what will make this possible in new, innovative, and potentially revolutionary ways.

It’s well worth a read, even if you’re not in the PR world.

At first I was concerned it was going to be all too Dr. Pangloss (or Pollyanna, to make the same reference in a different register):

The public relations industry finds itself at an historic juncture. It always has been about social influence – i.e., “relating to the public.” Now that the rules of social influence are gaining precedence over other approaches, public relations looms larger than ever. Working together, internal public relations departments and agencies can better serve their organizations while resetting the mandate and direction for an entire industry.

I was worried this was going to be the story of a “difficulty” turned into an “opporunity” – rather than becoming irrelevant, PR is more important than ever!

But it’s really a very measured and methodical paper – they later write that:

social media must become part of the way public relations practitioners do business or they will become obsolete

and

public relations practitioners . . . should recognize that defining, or redefining the role they will play in this changing communications landscape is critical

In other words, things are changing, and PR either needs to get with the changing climate or risk becoming irrelevant.

Other useful notes:

84% of participating firms they surveyed were “employing blogs on behalf of clients” – that’s an even higher number than I expected. (For the record, no PR firm employs this blog – I write it).

They also lay out changes in skill sets, personnel, and business models agencies and PR firms will need to go through.

Marketing 2.0 – the Beauty comes from the inside

Someone else was going to speak this am, but we were asked to do this session via twitter this morning. So if you have thought twitter didn’t have value – it can.

Some broad thoughts to begin the conversation:

- If you love your customers, set them free – ask them for as little information as possible, and let them engage when they want to. Red Hat example – webinars without forced registration – participants went up dramatically and so did leads! Don’t make people register at all if you can.

- Assume that they are as smart as you think you are. It is ok to give customers lots of choices.

- Transparency: Be honest, open, straightforward. The more the better. CoreMedia tracks their bugs in an open format. Contrasts Sun versus Cisco in terms of how difficult it is for employees to blog – not saying one is right and the other wrong, but the aggressive nature of Sun’s approach (anyone can blog – all you need to do is register and check a box which says you’ve read the policy) is very interesting.

- Self-service – let customers find what they can, without having to call you.

- Anti-marketing – be willing to live with less customer information – the information people willingly give when they contact you is so much more valuable than whatever you require.

- Websites – Your website should assume your customers are smarter than you think, and you put yourself in their shoes, you can make your site more relevant.

Dr. Willms Buhse:

Focus on authentic, personal messages – not a careful honed marketing message.

Be open for feedback – participate in the dialogue.

Change your role as VP of Marketing into Artist Management – your employees are the artists and your role is to help them to be popular.

Whatever perception your customers have – say thank you. Even if you disagree!

Collaboration in Marketing = Gather Feedback

—

Discussion:
The closer you can get the customer to the people who actually build/manufacture/design whatever it is you do the better. You want to get customers to the subject matter experts.

Get employees involved, get customers closer to the experts, use PR for more formal official announcements.

Audience questions:
Collaborating with our customers – should we be incenting customers to participate – tshirts, ipods, whatever.

Can be a good idea – the main currency to use is reputation – let other users rate content contributed, gather their contributions in a profile, etc – reputation is the primary currency that matters in many of these contexts.

Audience comment – this isn’t marketing 2.0 but unmarketing. How do you help a marketing team understand the value of this, if your marketing team isn’t aligned with this vision. (Resembles the challenges in bottom up emergent collaboration in a top down command and control environment).

Audience Question: What about transparency in a professional services firm versus confidentiality or concerns about proprietary methodology, etc.

The most important thing is reputation for execution – ability to do good work consistently. Transparency will help you with that.

—

Speaker – Sam Weber, VP Technical Services, KnowNow

Customer story – large outsourcing company and the challenges they face in keeping over 40,000 employees in 120 countries up to speed.

Roughly 30 intranets, portals, and knowledge bases, over 1000 internal blogs – the challenge is how to distribute information in such a mess.

Agenda:

• Information management gap
• The solution
• Customer examples
• Enterprise options
• Q&A

[Sounds a bit more like a pitch than I was expecting this morning . . . didn't even get my grande soy latte this morning, so I may just be less receptive, or more snarky, depending on your perception.]

Problem is information overload – within and without the firewall.

Status quo: Insuffienct. Email is overused, static portals are broken, search isn’t the answer. [What's a static portal? A portal not built on KnowNow's technology? I think "static" and "portal" don't go together.]

[This makes at least twice now that I am seeing the same slides a second time in three days - these same slides were part of the "Launch Pad" presentation form KnowNow.[

The solution: Bridge the Information Gap through Syndication (RSS) in the Enterprise. We call this Live Information Management.

Step 1: Access and monitor all information sources.

Step 2: Automate relevancy.

Step 3: Push relevant information to employees, customers, partners

Step 4: Capture user behavior

Technology - the "Enterprise Syndication Server" [provided by someone like KnowNow, one assumes] in the middle takes all the feeds from within and without, aggregates, filters, finds relevancy, and delivers back to users, via RSS.

In order to effectively leverage RSS within the enterprise, here’s what we’ve found to be the minimum requirements:

• Monitor many if not all sources inside and outside the enterprise
• Match content to users based on relevancy
• Leverage network effects
• Deliver information to users as available
• Provide enterprise security and management
• Enable end-user personalization and control

Customer stories: Wells Fargo, an unnamed bank,

Audience question: Why is it better, in this case, to send out an alert about something which has occured as an RSS feed rather than an email?

Answer: first, we alert a lot of ways – desktop widget, feed reader, portal – there’s lots of ways to do this. Ultimately what we heard was that the alerts via email were frustrating to users because it was just another email in a series.

Options for the Enterpise:

1. Wait for major vendors to offer RSS. (2-5 years)

2. Stick with status quo (email as main information sharing and distrubution tool)

3. Implement and Enterprise Syndication Solution

While viewing these pictures, hum the tune to “Do You Know the Way to San José” – the version in my head is Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but you may have an earlier version.

150 years of continued success leads to some long history and some deep pockets of legacy. We can’t just throw up wikis and blogs and say now we’re enterprise 2.0.

Don – how do we get started?

Ross – first, figure out what you’re already doing. We’ve had years of bottom up, and often there are experts inside the company already. What if you take the unofficial projects and bless them with official leadership – this can make it truly transformative. Share control in order to create value.

Joe – we’ve been very conscious about experimentation – about having multiple lines in the water. What are the upsides / downsides of suite products, or waiting for the large vendors to enter the space, versus best of breed or multiple best of breeeds. The idea is to make many small bets.

An experiment – social network. Yes, we want one – but the challenge is that people want to use the network to find experts but don’t necessarily want to be found as an expert. You have to also experiment with your culture, and how these tools and techniques will play in your environment.

Kim – I think about SpikeSource itself – a company really run by email, and getting not just the engineers to use the wiki but *all* the users. In order to participate in certain things you gotta do it via the wiki – carrot and stick.

Joe – Can I share a mistake? A mistake I made was to go after email – wow, wouldn’t you love to get rid of your email? It was painful coming down off the other side of that mountain. Even if that is your goal, keep that in small internal voice not as the primary goal.

Don – a plan with a client who wanted to start with the CEO and top 200 executives. Bad idea. Start with a pilot, with an easier barrier. In the case of the LA Times, don’t start with editorial – start with something like community activities – either there is a play at the local high school at 8pm or there isn’t – factually verifiable stuff would be an easier place to start.

Don – what about challenges? (Ross mentioned freeriders, Kim talked about enterprise barriers, Joe mentioned culture fit). What are the real challenges?

Ross – this room is full of real people dealing with this in a practical sense – PR team, legal team, brand police – a lot of the challenge is finding proof stories or success stories that are safe and difficult to disagree with, then building on those successes. Not that different than starting other kinds of projects, except that you’re going to get more volunteers. Maybe start with a quiet pilot.

Joe – And don’t deploy it. It is an adoption. Turn it on and set it free in the ecosystem, not deploy it enterprise-wide. You really have to find the right first project – you get this new shiny tool and man if everything doesn’t look like a nail when you’ve got that hammer. But you have to take time and go slow enough to locate the right opportunity.

Kim – In the last year it really seems to me this has settled in. When I’m talkign to executives the problem has shifted from “what is web 2.0″ to “how do I get it working in my enterprise” – from “what is a wiki” to “lets talk about wiki proliferation and how I control that.”

Don – How do you collaborate with control – isn’t that an oxymoron?

Kim – it does sound like it but there are ways it works. Leveraging existing wikis by gradually moving people to a standard platform – it isn’t about shutting down the bottom up innovation which has occured but about bringing people together on a standard platform.

Ross – there is a shift in good IT departments that is moving from Control to Foster – it isn’t just about controlling and restraining innovation – it’s also about finding the right way that central IT can foster usage of these tools.

Joe – you’re right. It isn’t about standardize, simplify, shut down – its about making innovation possible, about supporting and enabling the enterprise to win. Part of that is helping people locate the right tool for the right purpose.

Audience question: We’ve heard a lot in the last few days about bottoms up adoption – but if there isn’t an enterprise strategy for this (involving IT, HR, Operations, and everyone) – it can’t be pure decentralization. This isn’t just IT’s concern but the Enterprise’s concern.

Don – good transition into a closing though. Leadership – you have to provide enough leadership to cause this to happen versus you have to get out of the way and let it happen – these two thoughts can be conflicting or cause cognitive dissonance.

Ross – I still think to a large extent IT’s role is to get out of the way and let users create business change through collaboration. You have to enable the employees for this to be powerful and empowering.

Kim – I agree, but at the same time you need central IT involved so that you don’t create islands of information. I’d like to see IT grow into the mode of leadership around these technologies, not reverting to the role of naysayer or the one who rejects these tools.

Joe – I definitely think there is a need for IT to get out of the way. Adopting standards based, lightweight, manageable and flexible tools – minimizes those problems of data islands and such – if each implementation is open and extensible it will be easier to connect them. We started with the IT group deliberately – here is our chance to stand up and be a shining example of what is possible.

Don- closing thought: there is a new paradigm emerging, centered on collaboration. This is going to happen and you need to be ready to lead it or be left behind.

[Full disclosure - Procter & Gamble are an Optaros client and SpikeSource is an Optaros partner]

Web 2.0 is real, has real benefits which are clear.

What are the Enterprise concerns?

• Cost of point solutions
• Security and Compliance
• Import of data from existing systems, and exporting to other data destinations

Overcoming the obstacles: SuiteTwo.

Forrester’s conclusion about integrated suites – respondents prefer to get software from a single vendor.

[Editorial note: Puppies are cute, too. Asking the question the way Forrester did could never lead to any other conclusion - see my other blog post on that point.]

Suite Two, Spike Ignited, Spike Net – products from SpikeSource makes available to help enterprises reach Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 while overcoming their objections.

Benefits – open, extensible platform, well integrated with rich metadata.

Example SuiteTwo customer: Clearswift

CEO level decision – Jon Lee – example of how these technologies are starting to come top down not just bottom up.

International professional recruiting consultantcy. Need to share information about jobs and prospects in trying to match them to each other.

Fully integrated suite of web 2.0 applications. Highly extensible and flexible. Collaborate with control.

Enterprises are made up of people.

In building enterprise software, we’ve screwed up several ways. First, we’ve designed software for buyers, not users.

We’ve also tried to push structure and complexity into the tools – taking it out of the social network and trying to put it in the software. This makes it really easy for others to replicate, and hard for your users to embrace.

Instead what we should do is allow the complexity to live in the social network, in the human realm, and leave the tools much more open and simple.

Power law of participation – low threshold to high engagement – depth of engagement rises as you get closer to core. Some folks will just freeride and listen – some folks will get much more deeply involved. We need to think about the whole spectrum, not just the active users.

Read / Favorite / Tag / Comment / Subscribe / Share / Network / Write / Refactor / Collaborate / Moderate / Lead

(Mitch Kapor on Collective Intelligence / Collaborative Intelligence and the difference between them)

Recognizing I’m doing a 10 minute thing I’m going to dive into practicality.

What to wiki? Depends on your goals.

The four Ps: Process, Practice, Projects, People.

The hardest part is to get agreement on the goal. Start with a group of people and try to define a goal.

Potential goals:

• Wikipedia inside
• Editable intranet
• Small group communication / email replacement

Or, start with with Practices – not best practices (too formal) but practices – just getting people to write down and share what they are doing – FAQs, Glossaries – you will get “happy accidents” – a link to a page I never thought existed, but find someone has already created.

Sidebar: check out politicopia.com – wikis which allow debate around various bills with user participation.

Or, start with a Project. This is the classic technical case – which is not a bad place to start so long as you start at the beginning, not throwing a wiki at a project at the end or even in the middle.

Lastly, what about starting with Processes – this is perhaps the most complicated piece. Exception handling – what is the actual process we are supposed to be following. Is this really process?

Large computer manufacturer example – call center for business processes – they check to see if there is a script available, if not, they go into the wiki – they’ve gone from 20 clicks to find info down to 4.

Today we launched WikiWidgets as a small feature – including a mechanism for doing really complex editing in a very simple fashion. Also SocialCalc 1.1 released today.

With that I will stop so that we have more time.

Tapscott

Happy to be here. Flew in late last night – but hey, sleep is overrated.

I totally believe there are fundamential shifts underway: from closed hierarchy to the open networked enterprise.

(Which is from my 1992 book – paradigm shift).

We started, in response to some of my debates with Nick Carr, a syndicated project: “Winning with the Enterprise 2.0″ – one of the summary reports has been made available on the enterprise 2.0 conference site.

Four drivers for change:

1. Web 2.0
2. The Net Generation
3. The Social Revolution
4. The Economic Revolution

Old web was html, new web is xml.

Kids who have grown up net enabled – see Growing up Digital – it isn’t even technology to them, it is like air. Baby boom echo. Instead of a generation gap we have a generation lap.

World Conference of IT panel last year – video at www.newparadigm.com.

Four startling new principles for running a company:

1. Peering
2. Being Open
3. Sharing
4. Acting Globally

What are the new business models for future:

1. Peer pioneers – Linux, MySQL, but also in financial services
2. Ideagoras – like Innocentive Network
3. Prosumers
4. The New Alexandrians: The Sharing of Science
5. Open Platforms and APIs
6. The Global Plant Floor (Mass Collaboration)
7. The Wiki Workplace

Final thought: This is a paradigm shift.

Paradigm shifts are almost always recieved with coolness if not worse. Those with vested interests will fight change. The shift demands such a different view of things that established leaders are often last to be won over.
(Marilyn Ferguson?)

BrightCom

One of the things were working on is gaze correction (so that you know when I’m looking at you – in a room of people), telepresence.

Perspective corrected viewing – trying to measure the viewing angle in software – to make it clear that one is looking at one person not another. Rendered work environments – so you don’t have to paint all the rooms the same way – a rendered environment that looks to me like I’m looking into my office – but the other person thinks I’m in their office.

Imagine a photorealistic, high definition, second-life type example. (ob matrix example)

Video in second life – on the BrightCom private island in second life – projecting people’s video presence into second life at avatar size. Make it look like he is actualy in second life but is in video.

The other way is to take someone’s photorealistic avatar environment – goal is to eventually be indistinguishable from reality.

One of the things that is increasingly happening is the post-rendering of hollywood stars – to make them look more perfect than they are. Photorealistic avatars alng with supplemental information.

Cool second life demo. Also ability to project a second life avatar into real life.

—-

Irene from IBM, talking about
Many Eyes.

Inspired in part by the NameVoyager – java applet which shows popularity – as you type in a name it tells you about popularity.

Was created by one of the folks behind the SmartMoney map of the market.

Why did it work? Simple API, simple to tell people how to use it. Unexpected patterns emerge, different perspectives – this is what inspired us.

Visualizations on many eyes, with bookmarking capability.

Data sets are bookmarkable, so you can share visualizations you’ve created, and notes on them.

—-

Denis Browne from SAP – talking about Widgets.

Web 2.0 is penetrating the enterprise. [I saw this same slide just yesterday. I know we're all trying to be on message, but do I need to see exactly the same slide as was used in the keynote? Instead, it just makes me wonder about using "penetrate" to describe web 2.0's entry into the marketplace, as though the enterprise is some non-permeable membrane or first line of defense.]

Three ways to Enterprise-Class Web 2.0. [More of the same slides from yesterday - extend applications, build new ones, or build mashups. Let's get to the demo . . . ]

[Makes me wish the Judges from the "Launch Pad" got to comment on the From the Labs stuff too - but I guess that would make it hard for people to participate.]

Widgets – dashboard like stuff, pulled out of SAP and presented like Mac OS X or Vista desktop widgets – with login, with security, etc. Sales example: commit numbers in the forecast, open opportunities for a sales person, on the desktop.

[Editorial note: Widgets are pretty, but this is hardly experimental, cutting edge stuff, eh?]

—

Questions: Discussion about audio in second life, and some work BrightCom is doing on that possibility.

You can even check my notes to see how well I captured what was said.

Short version: build a really good platform that actually helps people collaborate, turn it on, and get out of the way.

* Moderator – Rob Preston, Editor in Chief, Information Week
* Speaker – Mike Fratesi, Manager, Solutions Marketing, Unified Communications, Cisco Systems, Inc.
* Speaker – Oliver Young, Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc
* Speaker – Toby Redshaw, Corporate Vice President, I.D.E.A.S., Motorola
—

Plan for the panel is to fairly informal – no ppt (yeah!!)

Toby first –

IDEAs – information, data enabling architectures and systems?

One of the nice things about motorola is that you can make up your own title.

Motorola runs on what we call Intranet 2.0 – 75,000 users on the intranet every day (with only 60,000 employees that’s pretty good).

We had a decent knowledge management application that worked for the scientific guys but now we’ve added more open systems a few years back- now we have 4400 blogs, 4200 wikis. We just turned it on – didn’t ask anyone, didn’t tell anyone, just let it grow. We’re also using scuttle, implementing folksonomy – I thought this wasn’t going to work (it’s like Arlo Guthrie doing IT) – but it really does work. People actually see new relationships and heatmaps and things they would not have seen otherwise. Social networking, smart, almost spying on you (you’ve got to be careful) with companies like visible path.

The key is that it just has got to be super easy to use, and (here’s a radical idea) useful. People will vote with their clicks. The higher up you go in the hierarchy the less it gets used – which I think is a real thing.

–

Oliver covers Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 for Forrester.

What I see is a bit of a dichotomy. The marketing and communications departments, lines of business – you find a lot of people really excited about these tools and what they make possible. But when you take a look at IT, especially among CIOs, you see a lot of fear. This is decentralized, emergent, difficult to control, under the radar. How do I lock it down? How do I make sure we’re secure, compliant, meet e-discovery rules, and don’t break any laws.

In my mind, they’ve learned lessons from IM. They tried to keep it out – employees used it anyway, whether CIOs liked it or not. This time, they are hitting it head on – we know we can’t keep it out – so how do we use it in a controlled fashion.

What I see is a lot of what I would call controlled experimentation. We’re not seeing a lot of “let’s change the way we do our jobs” with a lot of fanfare – instead there is a lot of skunkworks, quiet growth. The challenge is that this lessens the impact – only those who know where to look for it will find and use it.

–

Mike – Cisco and unified communications platforms.

Our recent acquisition of webex. Our goal is to leverage our broader unified communications solutions in conjunction with some of the web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, folksonomies, etc) – from a unified communications platform perspective we still think a lot of collaboration is real time. (It may not be the main point of the show, but a lot of folks are doing real time distributed communication).

From a Cisco perspective, we’re huge consumers of our own tools – see Cisco at work which talks about how we use these tools in our own jobs. We’re also much more aggressively moving from an ad hoc model for deployment (bubbling up) into a multimillion dollar initiative to completely revamp our intranet and our directory, and integrate with our presence capability, and make it easier to build communities of interest. There’s a very comprehensive, centralized approach to restructure the company from a command and control model to a collaborative model.

—

Rob: Toby mentioned 4400 blogs, 4200 wikis – sounds like a mess. Who owns these things?

Toby: I own them. The whole point is you’ve got to have a really small team to do these things – if you have a big team it will get very quickly out of control. We have 250 knowledge champions, selected by the communities they represent – sometimes 230, sometimes 250 – but roughly there. This is taken as a badge of honor to be a knowledge champion – to garden the wiki, to make sure nothing too awful happens. The other thing you need is a brilliant enterprise architect who is also a smart information architect – who makes sure things work together – and then you let it go.

This is what companies do anyway. I don’t beat nokia or cisco or siemens by having better buildings or shinier cafeterias – companies are groups of humans working together using that dumb stuff (buildings, cash, machines) – if you can get them working better together, you will win. We think like chess – if I get to move twice as often as you I will win, even if you are ultimately making smarter moves each time.

Rob: Oliver – you mentioned how tools are making their way into the enterprise without the sanction of IT. Is this a real problem or just a paranoia IT needs to get over.

Oliver: To some extent all security is paranoia. Real major security breaches are rare – someone losing a laptop is a bigger problem than the kinds of breaches we’re talking about in blogging or wikis. But there are real issues – if you’ve got more than 100 employees, at least 1 of them is blogging, and talking at least somewhat about their job – and with current regulations about ediscovery, SOX, that’s a potential problem. What was interesting in our recent survey was that even at those companies which made absolutely no investment in blogs/wikis had 3 to 8% of people using them.

You need to make sure you have corporate policies about blogging, wikis, public commentary, etc – if your terms of employment don’t mention this stuff, it is a problem. It is the well meaning employee who can cause difficulty here.

The other way this stuff comes into the enterprise is the SaaS model – Salesforce.com, SocialText, etc – I can sign up and use these things without IT consent. Using these tools without a coherent strategy around them can lead to issues.

The third way is Sharepoint – all the major companies are brining this stuff into your enterprise in the next upgrade cycle whether you like it or not. A lot of employees worry about employee productivity- do I need to worry about my employees spending all their time sitting around blogging? How am I going to educate my employees about appropriate uses?

Rob: Mike, you talked about John Chambers and the top-down approach being taken now. Can you talk a bit about how that gets pushed down into the rank and file?

Mike:

The approach is to really enable these changes from the IT purchase perspective but also endorse very publically the need to change the way we work – we need to be using the tools to a greater extent in order for us to be successful. We purchased webex, fiveacross, and implemented a new group within development that will focus on collaborative software. We’re doing it on multiple levels – restructuring, refocusing, aquiring, endorsing – but also at the same time coming at it from a bottoms up perspective – wikis and other self-organizing approaches. The top tells the rank and file that self-organizing works – offer explicit consent and support and then get out of thew ay. A balance of support and guidance from the corporate level but also bottoms up self-organization.

—-

Toby – you do need to have some structure. If you just let everything emerge all over the place in a fully freeform environment – you will, when it gets big, have enterprise spaghetti like you’ve never seen. So have a small centralized group that identifies platforms and standards – but then let it spread widely. So it isn’t a free for all.

–

Rob: Is it a demographic thing – young folks / old folks?

Toby – it’s really a question of two different kinds of approaches – we’ve found it actually fairly even across the workgroups by age – it was a question of how close you get to actual work being done – the more you got close to actual work the more you get usage.

Oliver – I think there is a “propensity to use” issue which is age-sensitive. You’re working in organizations which are very tech savvy and have a more adopter-friendly profile. It’s not that older employees won’t use this stuff, but that younger employees are more likely to be predisposed to thinking of this kind of collaboration as useful – they are used to doing it. The familiarity breeds predisposition to use the technology.

I think Motorola is right on with the knowledge champions – that is what can help flatten the adoption curve – once people less likely to adopt get to see people adopting and see the benefits – those evangelists can get others on board at the grass roots level.

But the same was true of blackberries (or motorola smart phones) – the older audience may not at first have seen the value but now they are seen as indespensible – and this is a change that happened quite quickly.

—

Rob – how are you measuring the success of this stuff?

Toby – it is having an effect but it is slow to measure. Companies like ours built campuses in the 50s and 60s in order to futher collaboration – people bumping into each other informally creates a different effect. We’re starting to see that same synchronicity happen thousands of times a day. We’re seeing, just as an example of the output, less email and more usage of other collaboration tools – we see that as progress.

Oliver – this is difficult to measure. Even email, if you’d never seen it before, would be hard to measure the ROI of – it is a soft ROI. It may take a leap of faith. The cost of a missed collaboration is very difficult. It also depends greatly on the implementation / installation – sometimes the impact of more immediately visible, sometimes the impact is negligible or even worse. An example where a specific installation removed the need for 2 employees who managed a database – but those kinds of examples are hard to chain together into a bigger picture.

Toby – we see lots of those stories. Sales folks and how long it would have taken them to gather the information they needed to make a sale – how quickly they can do that now as opposed to before we had these tools is a very compelling story that people get quickly. You can’t measure it – (cycle time is up 12%, and quality is up 3x – how’d I measure it? I made it up) – but you can see it. – it works.

Oliver – surveys can help. How satisfied employees are with the toolset. Before and after – you can at least measure change in employee behavior and satisfaction.

Mike – First, we’re seeing tremendous value where these things get deployed. Izone, for example, the billion-dollar-business-ideas portal / wiki Cisco is using (mentioned in the keynote the other day). That’s just one example – product launch is another example – ask anyone who works in association with product launches and they will say I can’t tell you exact metrics but I know things work much better now than they did before.

—

Audience questions: In order to make the info searchable, how much guidance did you need to give about how to tag, or how to support search?

Toby – the folksonomy stuff, we’ve got about 2600 users signed up, but also a lot of people viewing other people’s tags. All of it is very simple – one page web display that says “here’s how you do it.”

If you can’t explain it in one page, it isn’t the right solution. If the team it takes to build it can’t be fed with two pizzas the team’s too big. [Editor's note: so long as one of those pizzas is vegan, I'm on board].

Audience question: how about reverse mentoring?

Toby – unless you’ve got some mean-spirited employees, it will happen informally anyway – but it is a good thing.

Audience question: how does this impact project management? Does it replace Project Management?

Oliver – it can be a supplement. Most of these tools really augment rather than replace existing technology – it is rare you actually ditch existing technology.

All these tools can be very helpful in circulating information within and across teams – which is a big piece of PM but not all of it.

Audience notes – on reverse mentoring, we add two questions to our interviewing process – are you familiar with blogs, wikis – if so, what do you find useful about them? On the PM front, we use wikis and the like to keep agile teams in synch with each other.

Oliver- the problem in my experience isn’t to find evangelists. You’ll find these folks running blogs and wikis already outside the enterprise context. Getting existing evangelists involved in what you’re doing is important.

Toby – we use open text live link, which integrates well with MS tools. The first thing the teams do is go suck up whatever is valuable from the existing wikis and blogs – so it shortens much more the time upfront used for “what are we going to do, how are we going to collaborate” stuff.

Mike – it’s also about extensible tools. You need to be able to extend what you’re doing.

—

Question from audience: How did you deal with the evangelists who may have lots of different preferences – if you’ve got mediawiki, socialtext, twiki, whatever – how do you get everybody together on a single platform.

Toby – we hunt down people who bring in IT from outside, and terminate them. We have one central IT environment and you have to use it.

Audience: is it more the stick or the carrot.

Toby – it’s both. But they have to both be real.

How did the culture change at Motorola?

Four things:
1. You will not be silo oriented, you will be outward facing.
2. You will not tolerate dissent.
3. You will create both carrot and stick.
4. In order to change management, you need to change management (40% of top leaders aren’t there any more).

[I may have the four things misnumbered there a bit. Sorry]

Q / note from audience:

Adoption and the age curve – sometime this has to do with how stuff is presented – raw RSS feeds versus cultivated, aggregated, sorted feeds. If you make it more relevant to their needs they will adopt.

Toby – I don’t want senior leaders – business unit managers, doing a lot of collaboration – I want them making decisions – I want the folks who work for them collaborating.

Oliver – There are always a group of employees who are not going to change – you need those folks looped in. (Let them get RSS in email, let them email the blog, let someone else put their stuff on the wiki).

Mike – it also is a question of making it part of what they need to get the job done – to some extent those who don’t adopt will sort of fade away as they won’t be involved – people have to want to be involved.

Audience comment: getting buy in from legacy people – the metaphor is the talking to a colleague you haven’t seen in a while, that kind of conversation is valuable and can be extended to people who aren’t there. Selling the information you can get access to that you wouldn’t get otherwise which can come from these technologies.

Toby – the single best business vehicle I believe is the face to face conversation. You have to be careful that these other tools don’t fully displace that relationship but supplement it.

What would a conference look like if we took seriously the fact that the answers to the most puzzling enterprise 2.0 questions are social, cultural, organization, rather than technical? Maybe it would be an unconference, à la BarCamp.
</update>

I’ve survived quite a bit of death-by-powerpoint already today.

A few themes are emerging – I will update this as the day goes on. (And please, feel free to share your own in the comments!):

Where are the millenials?
Changing workforce demographic is on everyone’s mind. But I see, frankly, few people here at the conference who likely are millenials. I didn’t go around asking people how old they are, of course, but my general impression is that the network savvy, collaboration-oriented twenty-somethings I keep hearing about in presentations aren’t in attendance.

It is/isn’t about technology
Everyone keeps saying it isn’t about the technology, but all the presentations are about technology. This is perhaps too easy a critique since most conferences are that way – vendor sponsorship and all. But if it is about people and culture, rather than technology, way too much of today was from a vendor point-of-view. Definitely get the feeling that there’s money in them there hills.

Enterprise 2.0 or Collaborative Technologies
There’s a kind of bifurcation between the “Enterprise 2.0″ main title of the conference and the “Collaborative technologies” subtitle. The E2.0 meme is all about emergent social software – unstructured, freeform, experimental – where the “collaborative technologies” folks seem more focused on enabling people to collaborate within their hierarchical organization – make your project team more efficient, without changing anything about the organization itself. Rough distinction, obviously, but perhaps will become a more meaningful one.

Blurring of networks across work and social life
this is perhaps the most interesting one to me. What does it mean that employees are also consumers? That our social networks blur work and social life – my set of contacts is partially friends I came to know outside of work, but also friends I got to know through work, colleagues and former colleagues, clients and prospects – all these folks mix and mingle in sometimes unclear ways.

* Moderator – Larry Cannell, Enterprise Technology, Ford IT
* Speaker – Aaron Brown, Program Director, IBM
* Speaker – Lee Phillips, Senior Director, Knowledge Discovery Solutions, FAST
* Speaker – Matt Eichner, Vice President of Strategic Development, Endeca
* Speaker – Seth Gottleib, Principal, Content Here

Larry: This won’t be a pure demonstration – but I have asked the panelists to record some screencasts and show a bit about what their products do.

Quick demos from the vendors, followed by Seth and I leading a Q&A session.

Search itself has become critical to just about everything. In some reports, 90% of navigation is search. (I even sometimes use the find command in the browser to find search, if the search box isn’t obvious).

New VW site – a competitor of my employer – but notice the prominence of search. (vw.com)

Anecdote – his wife never types a url in the address bar – she searches on the company name – that way, instead of one option, she gets many and is more likely to hit what she wants (try Ford as an example – www.ford.com versus Ford in a google box).

Intranet search versus Internet search – why is it so hard to get Intranet search right? Isn’t search just search?

What are the components?
- Crawl (index)
- Query (what am I looking for)
- Show (here’s the query)

What’s different in Internet search?
- Access controls (what can we show or not show)
- Crawling is insufficient for intranets – much of what you need isn’t in an html page or can’t be crawled
- No page rank to support query location – there often are not rich intranet links

But all is not lost – there are some chances to improve intranet search
- We know the user – we have identity in a way internet such does not

—-

Aaron – IBM.

Two quick demos on key technologies – semantic search (going from simple keywords to real concepts)

OmniFind Enterprise Edition – bringing semantics to search (for example, returning phone numbers based on pattern recognition). In addition, users can tag urls – dogear, social search. Also matches bluepages.

Also shows a rich semantic search example – parsing not just keywords but a sort of natural language index which breaks the indexed content down into concepts, not just word or pattern matches – in the law enforcement space.

—

Lee – FAST

FastIDEA – information discovery & everyday analytics

Helps user narrow, surfacing clusters within results, enabling users to save searches as topics. (Example Vioxx and lawsuits – not all the other items about Vioxx).

Saved topics can be private (no one else can see my topic) or public (let other users benefit from my topic definitions).

Notifications – rss, email, many options for display, timing, etc. Enabling users to create basically a portal of topics – information discovery not typical “search.”

This is “search beyond the box” in the sense that the box is no longer the heart of the problem.

Fast also has a Personal search platform – desktop search. (fastPSP)

Also an advanced version with more complex query filtering / narrowing, different handling of the results.

(Sorry – got interrupted right there and missed a bit of the end of Lee’s demo)
—-

Matt – Endeca

We think about the context of search – it isn’t just about the user finding, it is about discovering new information that enables you to make a decision.

We think it is the machine’s job not just to respond to the users queries, but to expose information about what underlies that query response – to expose different slices across the results. Could be summaries, pie charts, bar charts, maps, whatever.

Endeca’s guided navigation automatically surfaces dimensionality – showed the wine demo which I think is available on their site.

[Full disclosure - Endeca's an Optaros client, though what we're doing for them is not directly related to their core search technology).

As Weinberger was talking about yesterday, the metadata is critical to so much information today - those metadata can be used to enable the kind of information filtering Endeca is doing. In addition, long form documents can have metadata extracted based on contents, patterns, etc.

---

Larry - Search has come a long way from that basic search box.

Seth - I come at search from a different perspective, having spent most of the last 10 years working in content management - as a customer of CMS, a user of CMS, a systems integrator, and working for CMS vendors. I've also been on the board of a membership organization (CM Pros). My company, Content Here, is a vendor neutral analyst and consulting firm focused on content management.

Search has an odd relationship with folks used to managing structured data - information architects and the like - since in theory good search means you have to worry less about how the content is organized. But ultimately good search relies on good metadata and structured content.

[More full disclosure: Seth's a friend and former colleague of mine from Optaros and Molecular].

Discussion:

Lee: Let’s talk about portals and search. Often there’s been a challenge with search and portals – brittle layout, architectural and usability issues with traditional portal implementations. We think there’s an interest in search-driven information portals, where each sub portlet is a result of query.

Matt – one big difference we’re seeing is that there are many more comparable experiences out on the public web which get better all the time – these can make the internal information discovery systems seem even worse than it has been. (Part of the consumerization of technology).

Aaron – absolutely. This consumerization has to do with easier interfaces and also other things users experience as consumers first – del.icio.us, for example, or RSS feeds from somewhere like Google of everything matching your company name, or technorati, or blog search which leverages social input.

—

Q from audience: Faceted search is great – but in my experience people don’t go past the first page of results, and filter by simply doing a new search rather than using filters and such. In filtered search, do you expose tags upfront, allow users to choose tags, or expose no structured filtering at all and let people brute force keywords? Pure unstructured, semi-structured, or fully structured?

Aaron – I guess I’d say they aren’t so different or separate. You might have use cases which call for different mixes of the three – in some cases unstructured data exploration might lead to more structured investigation as a second step.

Matt – Buzzillions example- facets driving the structured entities but also facets which are tags provided by users. (So that’s both taxonomy and folksonomy in a single application).

Q from audience: What’s in going to cost to do this? What’s the line between I have to do this and it is still to cost-prohibitive?

Lee – comes down to the question of the value of the decisions the users are trying to make on the basis of what they are finding.

Seth – lots of studies on ROI of search and intranets. A lot of the measurement is based on time to find things – what’s the drag on a knowledge worker finding irrelevant results. Nothing is overly compelling as a concrete case – too many of the ROI stories overstate the drag (four hours a day trying to find things I can’t find?). But it ultimately comes down to what the cost is of having people not find what they need. The technology is probably the least expensive piece of it – as opposed to the people’s time taken to garden the index and make improvements in response to use, checking query logs, etc. Those are costly activities in people time, not just technology.

* Moderator – Rob Rueckert, Investment Manager, Intel Capital
* Speaker – Chris Alden, EVP, Professional Products, Six Apart
* Speaker – David Cassady, EVP of Operations, SpikeSource
* Speaker – Greg Reinacker, Founder / CTO, NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
* Speaker – Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Socialtext

Panel introductions:
Greg Reinacker from Newsgator – founder, CTO – now, people come to us saying “I need these technologies” as opposed to us trying to expain to them what they need. What we need to overcome now is the “what about sharepoint” or “what about IE 7 and Vista” challenges as an RSS vendor

Ross Mayfield – founder, CEO of SocialText – the first wiki company. Perhaps the first company to call themselves enterprise 2.0. Four years ago we had to explain what wikis were, and what the could be used for – the four ps. Projects (this is the classical example), Practices (short of best practices – just write stuff down), People, Portals? (lost the last p there). Now there is a widespread understanding of the tools. Also generational -people who grew up doing their homework on myspace when it was called cheating, they get to work and it is called collaboration.

Chris Alden – heads the business unit at SixApart for movable type and typepad. Moving from punditry to productivity. As people find that these new ways of having conversations can be very useful – there is a whole new set of needs which emerge as you talk about taking blogs to the enterprise – ldap integration, getting everything working together. Ultimately I want ease of use, best of breed, but also I want them to work together.

David Cassidy, Spike Source. Could be open source, could be next generation / web 2.0 offerings, could be proprietary offerings. What we’re surprised about with suite two is that though it was targetted toward small and medium size businesses, large enterprises have taken notice – Shell, etc. Most of the companies have these technologies in place in one form or another, and the question they face now is what to do about how to control those pieces.

—

Q: Most of this seems to come in through the back door – someone just buys a wiki or a blog. What challenges are you seeing as you try to get to enterprise deployments through the CIO?

Ross – Bottom up was the way it was going to happen in the first place – so we had to organize business models around it. You’re going to get to the CIO one of two ways – either one day the CIO wakes up to the prevelance of the solutions or you come in through the front door. When you get clear goals, you get adoption. That’s the better way to get into an enterprise – with clear, concrete goals. IN that case, you’re the good guy helping the CIO meet his goals.

David – a need or initiative may form in one division, but were seeing enterprises where every new initiative touches a number of departments and there is a need for centralization in IT for efficiency if not compliance.

Chris – enterprises are used to buying big solutions, and making big bets – finding a big bang that will solve all their problems. We’re hoping enterprises will adopt a bit more experimentation – make many small bets. Start with some lightweight, easy to use, best of breed apps and grow from there.

—

Q from Audience: For a long time our goal has been to protect core information assets from the outside and even from the inside.

Greg – Security is core to all of these solutions. It’s not about “information wants to be free” – its about integration with active directory or ldap.

Ross – it’s not information that wants to be free, its people. If you think of information as a phsyical asset that needs to be divided for security, you will be preventing collaboration – you will be in the way. Web 2.0 is about sharing control in order to deliver value. Clay Shirky – processes is an embedded reaction to previous stupidity. You need to question whenever security is the default choice.

Chris – When you buy movable type, you’re not buying a religion. Some discussions are better in a controlled environment – people have a need for revision history, for user logins to read feeds, etc. Sometimes people want more transparency enabled by tracking – what was changed when by whom.

—-

Q: Along the same lines, in a SOX-compliant world, where people need to worry about information sharing and unexpected release of information, do we need to worry about this?

Ross – this was already happening with email. Many of these tools actually make compliance more possible because they track who changed what and when. They actualy increase transparency rather than reducing it – if something bad happens, you can find out who did it and when.

Greg – when we go in to work on an enterprise sale, we don’t lead with “change how you do things” – we let the enterprise tell us what they like and don’t like about what they are doing – we’re their to enable.

—-

Q from Audience: In my org, we are managing risk – we need the ability to control at a high degree of granularity – even if we never have to use it, we need to know that we can. What about the ability to manage on a granular basis.

Q from Audience: When and how will this go beyond a platform for pontificators to pontificate?

Ross – it’s already happened.

Chris – Plenty of examples on our site of different people using blogs as a mechanism for communication. We’re already seeing these used for very practical reasons. Citrix, for example, using MT to share data from campaigns for different products. TWA, an ad agency / communications firm – they use MT to communicate across offices. They used to send DVDs back and for – now they use MT.

Ross – this is our burden and our opportunity. People come to the concept of using these tools with expectations from the consumer side – they expect vandalism, for example, which has not happened yet in social text’s history.

Greg – there are also innovative solutions that are not what people are thinking of in general. BOA, for example, changed a fax-notification driven fraud alert system to a popup alert, blog driven approach which gets the information to the people who need it – not what the original tech was for.

—

Q from Andrew McAfee – what have you all learned about initial adopters? Who’s jumping on this stuff. New workforce? Geeky folks?

Chris – I don’t think it is so much technical/non-technical issue, so much as “how painful is your problem” – how difficult is it for you to communicate to the people you’re trying to get to. People frustrated by the slow timeline of more complex heavy tools – what we see is really based on the need, not the kind of person. We want authentic dialogue and real collaboration – the system has to be easy.

Ross – traditional early adopters plus four exceptional:
- therapist (organizations with crazy transitions going on),
- shopping mall (consumerization – first wiki customers were also early bloggers),
- bar, (literally – met employees at the bar – social/work blur),
- genius bar (some leader who wants to try something new to improve innovation)

Moderator – I’d also add to that last one – most of the new enterprises really have a group devoted to R&D.

Greg – we find it doesn’t take a lot to get someone to adopt it once you show them some content they like.

David – it isn’t a question of getting them to adopt these technologies – they already are using them – the question is just really how to get them to control / manage / deal with the technologies which are already there.

—

Q from Audience: What about information hoarders? What’s in it for me?

Ross – You don’t need everyone in the conversation. Don’t convince them. Get everyone else using it – it is ok to have a large number of lurkers.

Chris – You can answer every question individually, or you can answer it once in a permanent location and then you don’t have to keep answering it – it can reduce your work burden if you’re the person to whom everyone goes to.

—

What about a company where people don’t feel any pain – they think that they are already fine with email.

It’s about saying rather than doing x, do y – instead of writing the email, write it in the blog or in the wiki – but make sure you’re not creating additional work.

Ross – let them still use email! Most of the tools can convert an email into a blog post or a wiki page.

Greg – also don’t forget that lurkers can be valuable contributors in other ways – their attention is a value. Lurkers are people too.

—

Q from audience: Have you noticed a tension between corporate structure (hierarchy) and the flat web 2.0 model – does the tension exist?

David – collaboration as a whole has a flattening effect, yes. So the kinds of work for which this kind of technology is effective are naturally flatter as well.

Chris – a lot of companies are looking to us to help reduce the hierarchy – they want the tools because they like the opporunity to flatten. (In some places they need hierarchy that’s ok).

Moderator – in fact, Intel Capital invested in lots of collaboration tools throughout the 80s and most of those failed – because they were too hierarchical.

—-

McAfee – is there any example where the hierarchy wacks someone virtually?

Chris – more often what we see is that there are conversations out in the public that they want to control but can’t. But most of the time these tools you have an identity and that creates a more respectful conversation – it isn’t anonymous.

—

Q from audience – bottom up versus top down – which is better for adoption?

Ross – Bottom up, but with approval / consent / investment from top down – invest a bit in training – doesn’t have to be a lot but some – develop a shared language / approach to knowledge management in this way. If you’ve got consent to build a large scale enterprise wiki, take 10 people and do a quick start approach – invest a bit upfront so as to avoid problems down the road. Start with small group, hand out 5 invites to each, do another wave, keep going so that when you “launch” there is already a there, there. You’ve also created some built in connectivity and relationships in place to help manage the community before you get to a full scale connection.

David – with suite two, we’re seeing also some classic buying patterns – where a CIO says I want to get control of some of the uses of this technology within my organization.

—

q from audience: what about post-adoption recognition? Are companies seeing, after the fact, real changes?

Chris – I’ve mentioned quite a few already – but more are at the website movabletype.com

Moderator: When we created SuiteTwo we used our own wiki, and the product itself is an example of using our own approaches.

—

Q: Where’s budget coming from?

Ross – don’t forget about open source options as well – movable type, social text – Greg’s working on it.

David – people don’t recognize how cost effective these applications can be – a fraction of the cost of similar enterprise options- in many cases people can do this on an expense report?

—–

Q: Is this just preparing the way for incumbent enterprise vendors to offer these features in their applications (Microsoft, IBM)?

Ross – they’re going to have these features as checkbox feature lists,but when you go look at them they’re going to suck. It’s really the absence of featuritis that defines a good product in this space. There are experts out there, third parties, with real expertise – don’t just accept the enterprise vision of your favorite vendor.
—

Q from audience: what percentage of overall costs is license?

Chris – depends on what you want to do. Some people get started easily, some people invest a lot in post-install consulting dollars. A lot of what we do is take what enterprises need and incorporate it into the platform. Could be 0x could be 10x depending on what you’re doing.

David – we’re seeing some “small bite” mentality – might start with a 5k “quick start” for Suite two, but could turn into a large enterprise scale out with someone like unisys, or even someone like O’Reilly doing strategy about how you should be deploying suite two style applications.

Ross – Suite Two is an appliance in order to keep costs low. It has its origins in work (point to point) that many of us were already doing in terms of standards for moving content from wiki to blog to rss enterprise feed. Some of it is open source, all of it is API based – it is all easily integratable into your existing infrastructure.

David – you can use hosted, you can get an appliance, you can also get plain old software.

Greg – That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t real costs to doing this stuff – like any traditional enterprise application.

—-

Q from audience: Isn’t a blog just going to be another data type? Blog is just a rich text editor with tagging capabilities. Why wouldn’t this just get folded into an existing application.

Chris – I disagree with how you’re defining a blog. I think of it more as a lightweight content management platform – managing multiple blogs, authors, users, forums – I think of this as a much broader concept. Some of this will get commoditized by the larger enterprise vendors – but we will continue to innovate on top of the existing state of the art.

—

Q from audience: 600 wikis – integrate or migrate to some future standard. Also ECM – how does ECM fit into this picture?

Ross: There are benefits to migrating to a standard. THere’s part of me that doesn’t like this because when you collapse them together you miss something. There are network effects and serendipity that comes from multiple different platforms moving in an enterprise – so don’t completely migrate to one and only one.

Chris – many customers use movable type as an ECM. We’re constantly added more features which head in that direction. Not addressing the high end, but the middle – those middle players are often served just as well by a blog-platform as by an ECM platform, at a lower cost.

Greg – ECM platforms are going to be around for some time – they do some great things and are necessary in many cases. But we’re seeing is people taking content out of blogs and rss into ECM, or takign content out of ECM and feeding into the RSS feed.

Stowe Boyd, Editor/Writer – /Message

The core concept of “Social = Me First” is that everything truly social is at heart about the individual.

There are lots of new applications which have taken over the old groupware notion of “groups.” But rather than having to belong to specific groups (see his recent blog post on facebook and geographic networks, in which you can only belong to one region) the group should be virtual projection based on what I am interested in and what I do.

Me first:

• My Passions
• My people
• My markets

The edge dissolves the center

It’s what he calls bottom up belonging.

My collection of friends (my buddy list) itself defines what I belong to.

Me, Mine, Market – the process starts with me, and what I am interested in – that defines a market.

The buddylist is the center of the universe

I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections

What kinds of social tools are you all building (asking the audience)?

Audience: we’re trying to figure out what social tools to add to an existing tool

Audience: Project structure – team members, accumulated personal to it’s lifecycle.

What about the relationships that endure across projects. Example: 16 different logins for basecamp but no centralization across projects. I can’t see all my work across projects. (Jason Fried told him he was a boundary case).

The big question is what endures – independent of the specific project.

Q: Any of you using consumer products in the enterprise?

Answer: Facebook. Unsuccessfully. People couldn’t deal with the personal/business line – people got scared and started to go clean up their facebook profiles afraid of what their bosses will see.

Answer: Another big issue is that everyone wants to use these applications to find experts, but no one wants to be found for their expertise (because that would mean work).

Answer: At least one German company had an internal profile / expertise portal shutdown by the labor union

There’s also potential value in the neighborhood concept (as in last.fm) – uncovering people who like the same stuff as you – discovering connections implicit in a social network rather than starting from who you know and the explicit social network.

The same bottom line occurs – we’re helping people to buld the same rich buddy lists.

This is a world of discovery.

Discovery of:

• Things (but this is a red herring)
• Places (the third space)
• People (who fill those places)
• Themselves (at the still point of the turning world)

They may not know it – they don’t need to know it – but if you are going to build tools to help fill the social need, you must be aware of it.

We are people through our relationship with other people – we need places in which to interact with those other people – we often use those spaces to talk about stuff.

[This helps explain, or solidify, a problem I've had with lots of social tools - social tools which don't have a place for the me page. If there isn't a persistent profile page that tracks my activity - and preferably one I can pull into my blog - then it can't really ever be social.]

Audience question: What about places where work isnt fun and hierarchy is the norm? There will be huge barriers to leveraging social netowrking.

Absolutely – people want personal reward and growth. Adoption of the principles inherent in the fabric of social networking is revolutionary with respect to command-and-control approaches to organizing work.

Another way of saying this is that if the workplace has no place for me – if individual self-expression and fulfillment are not important, social networking will fail – but so will everything else that is bottom up.

Enterprises are generally not enlightened enough to recognize that what workers are doing is actually a voyage of self-discovery – but it is ultimately a necessity for those of you truly trying to build social applications.

Q from Audience: In the IBM presentation earlier today they talked about Enterprise software as though that had to come from a large incumbent like IBM. What’s your guidance to firms?

Look to the edge – there’s no reason why the core enterprise needs to be served by large scale centralized IT. As there is more decentralization of work there can also be more decentralization of IT.

We’re going to go through the same thing we went through with IM – it will be banned at first but ultimately the users will win.

I’m going to talk about what we’re finding in our own use of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.

Basis: Migration of our economies from task work to information work.

It’s at the edges where web 2.0 has started to penetrate the enterprise – collaboration.

45% using blogs. 43% using RSS. 35% using wikis – per IDC QuickLaunch survey Feb 2007.

More and more work is information based – in more and more fields.

Consumerization of technology. People did not used to take expectations of what IT should be like at home and bring it to work. Often things like Google have unlimited or virtually unlimited storage but at work you have 200MB limit. We’re expecting SAP to look like Mac OS X dashboard or Vista gadgets.

People bringing in outside technology can be a challenge in that they don’t comply with all the enterprise compliance needs – they may not know what’s really needed behind the scenes or what the impact is.

MISO vendors – Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle.

A better approach – leveraging Enterprise 2.0 but with your existing platforms.

SAPs goal is “Enterprise Class Web 2.0″

Enhance existing processes – use web 2.0 tech to make existing investments work better.

Example: Project Delta – replacing the executive assistant.

SAP NetWeaver as a platform for Enterprise 2.x, yada yada.

Example: recall problem using SmartWorkspace – basically a teamroom concept bringing people together, with task assignment, presence awareness (online). widgets, etc.

Enable emergent processes – service enable SAP functionality and allow the creation of more flexible applications.

11:00 am–11:30 am
Derek Burney, General Manager, SharePoint Platform and Tools, Microsoft

People drive business outcomes. Your employees are the ones who really have customer relationships, know what customers want, know where your operation is inefficient, and so on.

The Microsoft approach is People-ready software.

We’re evolving toward a new world of work – people interacting with each other across many different boundaries. The role of software is to simplify how people work together.

Being connected 24/7/365 and what that means to work/life balance.

Also, changing workplace demographic. Millenials. Different ways of collaborating and different expectations.

Business Productivity Infrastructure.

Five core capabilities:

• Unified Communications
• Business Intelligence
• Enterprise Content Management
• Collaboration
• Enterprise Search

This all sits on top of Office Business Application Services (workflow, openXML, etc), in the context of a secured, well-managed infrastructure.

Four categories of relationships to people: employees, partners, customers, and non-affiliated people.

They want to take Wikis, Blogs, Enterprise Search, Rss Feeds, Social Networking, Profiles, and Presence awareness and integrate them into the infrastructure (outlook, office, etc – wherever and whenever you are doing work).

Several areas to discuss of applications leveraging MS technology:

First area: promote experts and enable collaboration
Shows a “MySite” example – basically a profile site with user’s experience, former projects, interests and expertise, etc. (Looks like the Optaros intranet profile site as well). Also shows a beta of a newsgator project built on top of sharepoint.

Second area: Strengthen customer relationships

Shows examples: the Wisewoman site, Mytalk.com.au – these are consumer oriented, marketing-based engagement sites.

Third area: Build Next-Generation Applications

Office business applications combining ease of use and familiar interface of office with back end system data.

Examples: Duet, Dynamics (formerly GreatPlains?), some ISV examples. Also mashups- not just enterprise data but also data that lives out in the cloud. Silverlight apps – popfly.com, Silver Surfer trailer example for Fox.

Fourth area: Unify your Communications Modalities

Next edition of Live Meeting, better web conferencing.

Last area: Accelerating product innovation and development

Enable customers to get involved in generating good ideas for product improvements.

Launched today: Community Kit for SharePoint V2 – community driven initiative.

Example within Microsoft is mashup days – where they pull together people from throughout the company not just within the sharepoint group.

Rapid run through of a variety of ways of using Enterprise 2.0 technology.

Think across the whole enterprise – not just your employees but also your customers, partners, and unaffiliated folks.