Photo by galawebdesign - http://www.flickr.com/photos/galawebdesign/2315810343/in/pool-644862@N21/

It wasn’t so long ago that Drupalcon was in the upstairs rooms at the BCEC while AIIM met downstairs in the cavernous expo hall. The contrast between the suits and huge corporate sponsors at AIIM and the open source designer/developer culture of Drupalcon was pretty palpable that year, and the two felt worlds apart.

Now AIIM has launched some online communities of their own and they appear to be using Drupal Commons to do so, with some excellent theming (and I assume development) work by ForumOne Communications:

Enterprise 2.0 Community for AIIM on Drupal Commons (cropped)

Check out Drupal Commons and the AIIM Communities for a sense of what it can do:

• Enterprise 2.0
• Capture
• ERM
• Sharepoint

Yes, there really is an AIIM Microsoft Sharepoint community running on Drupal Commons. Not sure I would have predicted that at Drupalcon 2008.

Photo by ThinkPublic, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkpublic/3042777307/

Eureka Streams, which was announced in late July, is built on the Open Social standard and Apache Shindig. The focus is clearly on (as the name “streams” implies) lowering the barrier to information sharing, in the style of microblogging (think twitter, status.net, and yammer, but also tumblr, posterous, and xxxx). As Ostatic’s coverage put it:

Visually, Eureka Streams is a combination of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Personal profiles let workers to put a face to a name, which is particularly useful for making remote workers feel connected to each other beyond a disembodied voice on a conference call. Plugins allow for real-time sharing of business-related information, including the ability to share articles from Google Reader and import bookmarks from Delicious. Powerful search features help employees network and connect with other professionals within the company.

The video (below) shows the polish Lockheed Martin’s put on the framework, which I’d say competes well with any proprietary platform from a design and usability perspective:

There are many more videos on the Eureka Streams site, showing off various pages and their functions.

Drupal Commons, announced back in April and released at 1.0 in the beginning of August, is built as an install profile for Drupal, leveraging that platform’s legendary strength as “community plumbing” and community contributed modules long familiar to Drupalistas building social sites.

In this video Jay Batson of Acquia walks through a preview release:

Also worth checking out are DrupalRadar’s First Look and Review, and Jay’s other videos on the Business Value of Drupal Commons and the Features of Drupal Commons.

Finally, you can try it out yourself by joining the Drupal Commons community and checking out some groups there which match your interests.

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?

The panelists were:

• Bob Bickel, from Ringside Networks
• John Newton, from Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, from Acquia

Although the conference doesn’t audio tape or videotape the breakout sessions in the smaller rooms – only the keynote – they were nice enough to allow us to record the panel’s audio.

You can download the MP3 (43MB, 128 bit rate) or listen in the player below:

The panel was covered a few places:

• On Jeff’s blog: “Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Drupal Perspective“
• By Kathleen Reidy on the 451 Group blog: “Open source at Enterprise 2.0“
• By Dennis Byron at ebizQ: “Open source, including open source Sharepoint tool, in/at Enterprise 2.0“

Let me know if I missed any.

It’s part of the larger Glassfish project, and uses Apache Shindig as an OpenSocial container – they demo’d OpenSocial widgets running inside Drupal and MediaWiki – all running inside a Java Application Server.

Video:

This could be a compelling option for those looking to run their own open social containers. It isn’t available in source code form yet, but you can sign up here to be notified when it is available.

Here’s his slides via slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

Most of Vander Wal’s focus was on relatively minor improvements which can be made to the user experience (interface and context) of such services which have dramatic impacts on leverage: both in the sense of increasing use and in the sense of making that usage more useful. (Maybe too many words with use at the root there, but I think you get the meaning).

For example, providing what he called “Easy Tagging” which simplifies the choices available to the user, increasingly the likelihood of action.

At slide 35, he begins to get into what I think is the best part – pointing out where the tools are “too simple” – where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.

I’d love to see an open source implementation take the lead here on implementing Vander Wal’s recommendations. Time to revisit the idea of Scuttle as a Drupal module, ready for deployment in an intranet context, integrated with user info, profile, and taxonomy at some level? Anyone working on this already?

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.

WorkBook is apparently part of the WorkLight platform, and pricing starts at $10/user/month.

Some coverage:

• WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises (Dan Farber on ZDNet blog – with a photo)
• WorkLight enters the Enterprise Facebook Market (Bill Ives at Fast Forward Blog)
• WorkBook: Getting Facebook Ready for Work (Andrew McAfee)
• WorkBook Brings Facebook Inside the Firewall (Web Worker Daily)

McAfee, who was able to see a demo, has the best details on the workings of the app:

In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight’s offering) just like he’d launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user’s employer— let’s call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers.

But I have to confess my own reaction is closer to Bill Ives, which is, wouldn’t this be pretty easy to build yourself, on top of Facebook APIs?

Maybe a good candidate for our next ONE (Optaros New Employee) training class, wherein the team does a quick project. Our Intranet is Drupal 6 based, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull that in to Facebook. I know there is already a Facebook Module for Drupal 5.x

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?

(Full disclosure: Optaros was a sponsor of the Web Innovation Summit).

Unfortunately I got in too late on Tuesday night to see any of the Tuesday evening sessions. I would have enjoyed Anthony Bradley‘s Web 2.0 Basics Tutorial, based on reviewing the slides and seeing Bradley’s other presentations. I like the way he approaches questions about adoption and Enterprise class Web 2.0 applications.

Wednesday am, running a few minutes late due to a conference call with Optaros colleagues on the East Coast, I wandered into the opening remarks just in time to hear the speaker (was it Adam Tinkoff?) ask “is jeckman in the room?” – he’d been following me on twitter as I tweeted away about my travel saga. (Planes never arrive on time anymore – it’s really just a question of how late they will be or if you’ll get there at all). Best publicity I’ve had from twitter so far, though I’m not sure my “complaining about travel” tweets are the ones I most want to be known for.

Then, I watched the initial keynote session: “Planning for Five Major Mutually Reinforcing Disruptive Discontinuities,” featuring Tom Austin, Gene Phifer, and David Mitchell Smith. Three analysts, five discontinuities – it was a whirlwind trip.

High level, the five discontinues are:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
2. Consumerization
3. Web 2.0
4. [Free and] Open Source Software
5. Global Class Architectures

Although I wish Gartner analysts in general would stop talking about the “hidden costs” and “hidden risks” of open source, since I don’t really think they’re really hidden in either case, most of what they had to say about the five discontinuities made perfect sense to me. If anything, my only critique was that they didn’t seem to me to be telling the audience anything they didn’t already know – but I guess it is difficult to gage the audience’s level of familiarity with these concepts, and the keynote did ground most of the discussions for the following three days in some shared basic concepts.

—

Second session I saw was on Enterprise 2.0, with Anthony Bradley and Tom Austin. (Also covered here in eWeek).

Although they had some logistics issues (the version of the slide deck they had loaded wasn’t, apparently, the one they expected to see) they ran through most of what I’d expect to hear about as Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, like all the major overlapping discontinuities, and like open source, was described as unavoidable – the message to enterprise IT organizations being they need to get involved and move beyond skunk works type projects into real projects.

My favorite section was on the myths and urban legends of enterprise 2.0 (paraphrased):

• People will naturally share things on the web
• There is exactly one right way to organize any set of data
• If you have a good culture, other controls aren’t needed
• Social software is for kids (like Kix)
• Enterprise 2.0 is just vendors trying to sell Knowledge Management in a new wrapper

They also offered a nice list of 8 ways to ensure success and 8 practices to avoid. I won’t reprint them all here (not sure what Gartner’s copyright policies are) but they included:

Success: Start small but real. Be open, let emergent structures emerge, and lead by example.

Mistakes to avoid: Don’t ignore accountability; don’t think Web 2.0 is a “fad”; Don’t have a plan for growth.

–

Having been intrigued by a couple of things Bradley said, I then went to the “Plant Seeds: A Model for Community Adoption in the Enterprise” which he also presented.

I really liked the framework he presented, though I’m not terribly fond of long acronyms (all of PLANT SEEDS is an acronym). Focusing on starting not with “experiments” or “proofs of concept” in the Enterprise 2.0 but real solutions to real problems, with scope controlled so as to minimize risk. Larger successes build from small successes, not from experiments.

He described the “legal-precedent” type approach to adding governance to these efforts – you set out high level rules, then as/when examples of borderline behavior (or outright bad behavior) come up, you use reactions to those behaviors to guide future behavior. (Rather than trying in the abstract to determine all the ways people might behave wrongly and explicitly forbid those).

He also described the nature, nuture, or both notion – that some people will naturally want to share, while others will need too see sharing be cultivated and rewarded before they take to it.

Finally, he described the way in which your Enterprise 2.0 efforts need to be integrated, not new silos separate from individuals’ “real jobs” but part of the larger IT ecosystem. The net effect can’t be additional work added on top of a full stack – it needs to replace and ultimately make more convenient the work people are doing – as it will, if the problem is a real candidate for these approaches. (If it doesn’t fit, you may be forcing it as the solution to the wrong problem).

—

The rest of day 1 I spent at Open Source Summit sessions I’ve already blogged about.

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.”

(Quick Summary: there’s more value in more commentary and analysis, less in transcription).

My own liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0 was inspired by many useful liveblogs I’ve read from events – especially David Wienberger (who is able to liveblog while participating as a panelist and chatting on backchannel IRC). Noting the presence of power strips in the seating areas and a working, stable wifi network (as opposed to SXSW), it just made sense to me to share the notes I was taking.

But then a comment by Andrew McAfee made me think more critically after the fact than I had at the time.

McAfee notes:

Finally, I used to think that short talks at conferences were low-pressure events, since they’d be heard by relatively few people and remembered by even fewer. A quick Google blog search, however, brings up about 30 blog posts commenting on my keynote. These will persist unless their posters take them down, and will add to the Internet’s record of my work. This is more than a bit scary for me as a speaker, but for me as a conference attendee this is great news; it means that the overall quality of talks will go up. No one wants to be examined from that many angles and found lacking.

(Just FYI – McAfee’s keynote is also freely available online in video from Altus – to me that would be even scarrier than the blogger’s reaction).

This got me to thinking, about liveblogging in particular, and asking a number of questions I probably should have thought more about a few weeks back:

• What’s the proper etiquette for liveblogging, other than sitting in the back and typing as quietly as possible?
• Does one need permission to liveblog a conference keynote? What about a conference panel session?
• Would that be permission from the speaker(s)? the conference organizer(s)? both?
• What’s the difference between blogging about an event – summaries, excerpts, and commentary – and liveblogging an event? Is it just the time difference, or the percentage of the event covered?
• Does liveblogging get in the way of more substantive commentary?

First, a bit of background on some of the controversies about Liveblogging. I can’t claim to have seen all the various threads on the topics, but here are some highlights.

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, liveblogged at the New Communications Forum March 08 of 2007: New Comm Forum–Winner & Sinners.

Steve Crecenzo, seeing Shel’s post, reacted by posting in the comments:

You know, I would rate the lunch panel as the worst session I saw at the conference, and I was on it!

But your “live blogging” of it was even worse. Maybe you ought to just stop typing for a second, listen to what’s being said, and THEN go back to your room and blog using your notes.

Steve also posted, on his own blog: The problem with “live blogging” and the “blogosphere”.

It’s a long post, but worth reading for its critique of live blogging (as well as a good picture of how conference panels can be put together and how they sometimes fall apart):

As people sit and “live blog” speakers and events, and get a whole bunch of shit wrong but publish it anyway, isn’t that a little dangerous? Especially when the person doing the “live blogging” is a very respected person who has the power to influence a lot of people?

The comments to the post include a pretty good cross section of pro/con on live blogging, perhaps a bit tilted to the con side.

Shel Holtz’s response, Live blogging: a new fact of life, sympathizes with Steve but ultimately disagrees:

The fact is, live blogging has become a core component of many conferences and events, especially those dealing with technology and social media.

Holtz argues that, rather than yet another sign of the decline of thought, this new fact of life is a good thing:

The difference between what live blogging really is and what Steve perceives it to be is dramatic. Steve sees it as reporting, and inaccuracies in the reporting leave misinformation on the public record. But blogs are far less about reporting than they are about conversation. Personally, I see live blogging as a service. As someone who cannot attend a conference (or a session at a conference), the ability to read the post about it offers me insights I would not otherwise have been privy to.

Paul Waldman, on the other hand, asks “Is it just me, or does liveblogging really, really suck?” (Tell us how you really feel, Paul):

I appreciate the value of up-to-the-minute information as much as anyone. But I can’t ever recall reading a liveblog of anything and coming away feeling like I learned something. I mean no offense to my colleagues who have liveblogged at one time or another, but I have to question whether the activity has any value at all.

Similarly, Allen Jenkins argues that Liveblogging is for irritating snots . . . real men take a Moleskine:

And here is the greatest shame: livebloggers tend to be the smartest, savviest people in the room. The people best able to absorb a presentation on Day One at a conference, absorb two on Day Two, and another on Day Three and weave all of their thinking into one excellent article or blog post. But what do we get? Off the cuff blog posts and “tweets” that they, let me call it, should be ashamed of. I will not name names, but I read the liveblogging of many colleagues from conferences I cannot go to: folks, take notes instead. Reflect. Talk to the other attendees. Then write your posts. You will be doing the world and your own reputations a big favor.

Seth Godin also weighs in on the side of the “is this really useful?” camp:

On closer inspection, it doesn’t work particularly well. I mean, not only was I there, but I was speaking, yet I can’t make sense at all of the posts. That’s because most people don’t take notes to be read. They take notes to write them. The act of writing things down triggers different areas of our brain, it focuses attention, it makes it easier to remember things. You can read your blog notes later and say, “yeah, I remember that slide…” But for an outsider who’s not there, the amount of information that’s imparted is small indeed.

Angelo Fernando wonders, in the context of setting up a conference, what the conference organizer’s role in this should be: “should there be some guidelines conference organizers should set?”

So between all these posts, and their comment threads, you can see a few basic camps emerging.

Some argue liveblogging is inherently bad, because it:

• Encourages those in the audience to pay more attention to their own notetaking and posting to their blog than the live speakers or fellow audience members
• Allows poor notetakers to post inaccurate summaries of events, potentially harming reputations needlessly or without real context to add value
• Dilutes the value of attending the events live, or selling access to conference proceedings and such – material to which the liveblogger does not have copyright clearance
• Gets in the way of deeper thinking – about, absorbing, reflecting, and then posting about the event offers more opportunity to add value than the relatively immediate (and unmediated) coverage of liveblogging

Those who argue in support of liveblogging point out that liveblogging:

• Provides a service to those unable to attend the event, capturing some of the “feel” of the event
• Is conversational, like blogs in general, and therefore should not be held to the same critique as journalistic reports of the same event would be. Liveblogging declares itself partial, incomplete, informal – therefore the audience understands these are not edited or formalized conclusions
• Creates an opportunity for people to react, correct, and respond to what was said
• Contributes to the worth of the event, by giving it more attention – paying organizers back in free publicity more than it costs them in exclusive content

My own experience was rather mixed. I definitely saw some value in exposing the content to folks who were not there – great increase in traffic, some good comments, and an uptick in subscribers – but those are just benefits to me. Did others benefit from my liveblogging? It’s hard to speak for anonymous readers – I did get some positive feedback from readers who appreciated the effort and the content, but I don’t know how many found it a flood of useless raw notes – useless but not annoying enough to complain about.

On the negative side, I did get the feeling that it interfered with my conference experience in a few ways.

First, the simple logistics of always getting to a power strip, getting onto the conference network, and starting the shell of a blog post into which to write ties you up right at the moment where you should most be talking to other attendees. You lose that 5 minutes right before a session begins or after one ends. It isn’t a lot of time, but it is key time – I could actually feel a bit disconnected from other conference goers due to managing the laptop. (Am I using the laptop or is it using me as a source of movement and constant power?)

Second, the sheer effort involved in trying to do a good job of liveblogging – capturing well what was being said – meant that by the end of the day I was far too tired of the experience to post any reflective thoughts. In my experience at least, liveblogging meant that I was not able to write more value-added blog posts in which I summarized, drew conclusions across panels, argued for a different interpretation or approach, and so on. (This wasn’t helped by the 1.5hr commute to the conference each morning and home each night, or the fact that I was also manning the Optaros sponsor booth when it was open, and doing other work – not complaining, just saying it made for some really long days and probably sapped my ability to make cohesive arguments).

Third, I found myself stuck in trying to cover everything – as though I was somehow letting someone down if I didn’t liveblog on e of the sessions. Why shouldn’t I only cover sessions I found interesting and insightful? Do I need to spend my time liveblogging a vendor sales pitch? I felt that it actually increased my urge to make snarky comments. Not that there’s anything wrong with well developed, constructive criticism – but I don’t want to focus on snippy comments interjected in the middle of someone’s presentation. Seems juvenile at best. (Ok, I don’t think I was that bad – but I could see how people could get caught up in the opportunity to say something funny for humor’s sake rather than as a sustained thoughtful critique).

So would I liveblog again?

I certainly will continue to blog about conferences I attend, and capture notes on presentations, keynotes, and panels I find interesting. But I don’t know that I will liveblog in quite the same way.

For me it’s less about the permissions issue (though I will certainly keep an eye out for what is explicitly allowed and disallowed at various conferences – as a speaker and as an attendee) then it is about the opportunity to add value, not just record transcripts.

Even if I do find myself with the urge to share my notes from a conference, I’d want to make sure that it is not interfering with my ability to engage the folks around me and that I’m preserving time and energy to actually reflect on the event, not just transcribe it.

While there may be value in sharing relatively unprocessed notes – for some occasions – I don’t think it is worth the effort, when compared to synthesizing, analyzing, arguing about, and engaging the material rather than just transmitting it.

In short: more commentary and analysis, less transcription.

What do you think? Should bloggers get permission before posting about conferences? Does this apply to all bloggers or just liveblogging?

Two side notes:

The funniest reaction I saw was a quip in the comments of a liveblog of Bruce Sterling’s rant from SXSW: “liveblogging is for sissies. when you’re cutting edge, someone else liveblogs it for you.”

Alice Marwick liveblogged from a workshop on “Ethical Surveillance” – the irony of which is not lost on her: “I’m going to selectively blog some of the sessions, since I didn’t bother to get anyone’s permission for this. Would this count as micro-surveillance? I wonder.” Is liveblogging a form of surveillance? What if you identify people in the audience asking questions?

Good references on liveblogging (more about how to do it well than whether to do it or not):

• Liveblogging post mortem (from July of 2005!)
• Live Blogging Best Practices (June 2006)
• Liveblog your next event
• Tips for Conference Blogging (a three part series)

In Jeff’s description:

In this podcast we discuss some of the details behind the Liferay-Alfresco-Roller solution Optaros recently implemented for one of our clients . . .

Or Ian’s:

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are hot on everyone’s lips at the moment. In this Podcast I interview Jeff Potts, of Optaros, about an Alfresco application they have delivered that brings together:

• Alfresco outside the firewall
• Alfresco inside the firewall

• Alfresco for document management
• Alfresco for Web Content Management

In this Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 project, Alfresco is integrated with:

• Portal – Liferay
• Blog – Roller
• Tagging – Alfresco

Specifically we discuss:

• The goals of the project
• Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and characteristics of these types of projects
• The components used in the solution
• The consumerization of IT – Web 2.0 Components within the Enterprise
• How to find out more

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.

Moderator – Michael Sampson, Principal Advisor, Collaboration Success Advisors
Judges – David Coleman, Stowe Boyd

Four vendors – each will present for six minutes, then 1 minute of judge feedback from each judge.

Collanos

Enabling cross-organizational talent.

Team collaboration across company boundaries – freelancers, design firms, offshore contractors, others – they need an environment optimized for this approach.

Email, on-demand, and enterprise IT all have limitations for this environment.

Synchronized P2P, no server, workspaces sharing- real time and asynch.

Synchs automatically in the background between team members.

Looks like it is Eclipse based – Collanos Worsplace – shows you who made changes when. Today they are announcing voice services (conference calls within the interface – an add on component, collanos phone – looks like skype.

Free version and premium version, SIP standards based. Mac, Windows, Linux

Phone will launch in beta by the end of the month.

Stowe – I’m not sure the world needs another collaborative, everyone share everything with everyoen tool – this was a crowded space. Groove went down this path, but ended up needing a server.

Clarizen

On demand, collaborative, project management for your business.

18 months old company.

Achieve true collaboration – any project, any document, discussions, forums.

Drive adoption through participation.

Unique email interaction.

Stowe – isn’t that what I take to keep my eyes clear – Clarizen? I get to finish my comment from before – isn’t this very similar to eRoom? Many have gone down the path that you are going down.

David – these are v1.5 tools, not 2.0 tools – seems like a little of this a little of that, but I’m not seeing what is compellingly new here.

Liquidtalk –

High energy guy – people checking their blackberries, we’re very very busy, we’re out of the office a lot – higher expectations. THe problem is a disconnected, potentially disengaged workforce.

In short, people work hard and long.

Liquidtalk – mobile workforce engagement.

Create, find, organize and push audio/video business content to mobile devices.

Liquidtalk.biz – media pushed to his playlist – all he has to do is sync. Whenever he connects, he gets things synched onto his laptop – like a digital briefcase.

Knowledge should be as easy as a conversation – make content more liquid, more mobile friendly.

David- this is a little bit more interesting. I wish new vendors could explain what they do in one slide, not 5. It’s more than iTunes for business its a DVR for business – timeshift the conversation. More like TiVo for business than iTunes for business.

Stowe – I feel compelled to talk about the slideshow – I expected something different than it lead to ultimately – not that this is bad, but it was different than expected. It feels more like a plugin to something else than a standalone application – part of a salesforce.com or a portal. A set of features looking for a bigger player to be part of.

KnowNow

KnowNow Live – The Live Information Management Application for Today’s Enterprise – Sam Weber.

This is the first time in my career I have something that people are actually excited about.

The key thing is it is user driven.

Status quo is inefficient: Email is overused, static portals are broken (too many subportals), search isn’t the answer (burden is on the user)

All of these things result in an information gap.

We create more efficient relevant information exchanges so that info finds you.

Stowe: I always want more demo and less talk. This sounds interesting but I see you have a long uphill battle against the big giant enterprise CMS folks, who are also going to present this kind of functionality – crowded space.

David – in the web2.0 space, those who are doing the aggregation will actually make money. So I think you are on the right track there – pull is better than push. But the key question is the one Dave Weinberger asked the other day – is it 9 times better than email.

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.

* Moderator – Jessica Lipnack, NetAge, Inc., CEO and Co-Founder
* Speaker – Bill Ives, Web 2.0 Consultant and Writer
* Speaker – Dan Somers, Managing Director, VC-Net
* Speaker – Jeffrey Stamps, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, NetAge
* Speaker – Milton Chen, Founder and CTO, VSee Lab
* Speaker – Tom Witkin, VP Marketing, Sitescape

Milton’s attending virtually (webcam).

Why do we call it 90% people? For a very long time, everyone we talk to about collaboration tells us that it is 90% people not technology.

Jessica makes everyone introduce themselves (“I do the incredible irritating thing”) – name, organization.

Dan – VC-Net is a consultancy in London and New York.

Bill Ives – trained as a psychologist, work with people on collaboration – happy to see people first.

Tom – I do all the marketing for sitescape.

Milton – VSee software being used to show video and the ppt.

Milton will run the presentation.

Jessica – sometimes people tell me “the IT people” don’t get the culture side – but we met Milton through a group CIO at Shell – there are IT people who get the culture and we need to reinforce that.

[Editorial note: why are at least the first two presentations in this panel so very much about technology - that's 40% at least which is fundamentally technical!]

Milton’s presentation – why is John Chambers wrong about telepresence?

VSee – free, low bandwith, video and audo conferencing. 10-40% of the bandwidth others use. P2P and Http tunneling.

In determining the resolution necessary – the question we asked ourselves is “when is a smile not a smile” and different resolutions.

What we see is that even with a cheap webcam, you can get the necessary resolution with a small, focused, field of view.

Problems in traditional videoconferencing – typcially you have go to a room in order to do telepresence, which takes you out of your context.

In summary, traditional video conferencing is too often a very expensive telephone booth – artificial, doesn’t respect how people work.

Q: from audience – what about the idea that the size of the image affects how compelling it is?

If you see people at “real size” (life size) it is more compelling – but the affect of that is overblown as compared to the benefits of real context and low bandwidth.

—

Tom from sitescape

Cool collaboration – ICE core. Things we are doing that we think will make it cool.

People are accustomed to certain set of tools – they are used to structuring information.

How do I as a user find the nuggets that other users have put in there?

We’re building tools that let people build their own blogs or wikis or what have you, but then invite their friends to come and see, through things like virtual folders – add people to the team and grow the pool of participatnts.

This is an on-ramp to team collaboration. Also working to get algorithmic approaches to really maximizing the team – what kinds of people do we need on the team not just from an expertise and location perspective but from a human perspective.

Human communication is not structured and formal but loose, messy, chaotic, and difficult to understand algorithmically.

It is much more important to think about the people and how they interact and how they get to the information they need.

Probabilistic latent semantic analysis.

Q from audience: but aren’t you saying the answer here is technology, rather than the answer being people?

—-

Dan from VC-Net.

Where is your CCO? Chief Collaboration Officer.

There are many collaboration tools – a sound collaboration strategy incorporates them all.

Aysnchronous, real time, etc.

Workspaces, IM, Email, Audio conferencing, web conferencing, desktop videoconferencing, f2f – a pyramid, with workspaces at the bottom – at the top is more critical information, longer meetings – at the bottom is shorter interactions but longer memory (persistence).

If you have a CCO and a bunch of technologies, now what?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that collaborative technologies are like telephones – and if you just give them to people they will know how. I think they are more like a baseball / cricket bat – in poorly trained hands they are just a destructive weapon – to use them properly you need to know about and work with the team.

You need virtual teaming skills – don’t just assume that virtual teams work. For that matter, don’t assume that non-virtual teams will just work!

In collocated teams there are some natural pressures towards collaboration. in virtual teams there are inherent forces pushing people apart- even harder to keep people on the same page.

The empowered COO still has challenges – Communication (tools, protocols, skills), Work (planning, understanding), People (leadership, trust, team building), Time (resourcing, time management, rewards).

Progress in these areas can be measured and quantified – find KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), do audits, figure out what is working and what is not.

Make real measurable results – pay per KPI even if need be.

—-

Bill Ives

Insurance industry example – turned this problem on its head, and recognized that people were using the email technology and not the other technologies made available. In other words, they were collaborating, but the collaboration was funneled into the wrong directions.

Getting the users engaged in the system – asking people what they want and really listening to their input – made all the difference. Shared learning.

—

Jeffrey Stamps

Story of working remotely with an engineer via basecamp, etc. Actually found it very liberating – the tools really are there, particularly if the team really work to help each other. If the team leaders recognize a diversity of cognitive styles, work to ensure the whole team is engaged, virtual collaboration is absolutely possible.
—-

Comment from the audience:

Given the collaboration is 90% people, we should be sure that our “measurable results” are also tied into people – the kinds of metrics HR has traditionally measured – recruiting, retention, employee satisfaction and growth, etc.

—

Question from Seth Gottlieb – how do you address the conflict between mobility and social ownership, given that the workforce is more mobile? (If you do social boomarking on an external site like del.icio.us, do you take that with you when you go?)

Dan – set the appropriate culture. But some bad apples will occur and expose security information to the outside.

Bill – these tools can make bad behavior more clearly evident.

Seth tries to qualify – he’s talking about good behavior, but they need to move on.

[I get the question - I own OpenParenthesis as a blog, and if I ever leave Optaros (the odds are it will not be the last company for which I ever work before I die) the blog goes with me. Is that a problem for the modern enterprise?]

one more audience question:

Virtual teaming, natural gravitational pull is apart – do you think that will remain the case with the next generation workforce? Will gravity change directions?

Dan – it (the natural push apart) will lessen, but the downside is that other behaviors which were stronger in traditional experiences may need to be redeveloped or expanded.

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.