Open Parenthesis

Ross Mayfield, SocialText

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.

Moderator – David Coleman, Managing Director, Collaborative Strategies
Speaker – Chad Ata, Software Developer, Brightcom
Speaker – Denis Browne, Vice President, Emerging Solutions Imagineering, SAP Labs
Speaker – Irene Greif, IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience, IBM Research
Speaker – Robert McCandless, CEO & Chief Technology Visionary, BrightCom

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.

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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.

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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?]

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