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Blog Action Day 08 - With a little hope from my friends.

I’m three days late for Blog Action Day 2008 - Poverty, but never too late. Actually I didn’t register and don’t have a blog post about “poverty”, but I thought I would take this opportunity to blog about a local cause that deserves plenty of attention.

My friend Shaun Chandran is a psychologist who works at a place called Parkerville Children and Youth Care, in his words “…working with children who have been through episodes of abuse and neglect and who display a range of trauma-related behaviours.”

Shaun has put his enterprising attitude to work and successfully got an amazing charity project off the ground, with the proceedings going to therapeutic care…here’s all about it on the website:

“WITH A LITTLE HOPE FROM MY FRIENDS is a charity project featuring songs from ‘The Beatles’ as performed by independent artists from the Western Australian music community. The project is a concept album; with songs specifically chosen to depict the journey of a child who has experienced trauma and abuse and is now in care.
The project is an initiative of Parkerville Children and Youth Care, a not for profit organisation in Western Australia that provides care and protection to the most vulnerable children and youth in the community. Parkerville Children and Youth Care has set its roots in Perth since 1903 and is currently in the preliminary stages of establishing Australia’s first Child Advocacy Centre.”

Click image to go to the MySpace page
Click image to listen to the Playlist

“The entire proceeds from CD sales will go to providing various therapeutic interventions for our children. These include music and art therapy, dance, theatresport and therapeutic drumming. Recent research has shown how these interventions have a greater impact on creating sustainable change within the lives of these children by working on the lower areas of brain functioning where development has been heavily impacted by early trauma and abuse.”

Roundup : Rososo, Feed My Inbox, Yuuguu, WiseStamp, Fidj.it.

Rososo - the most simple RSS Reader on earth..similar to WorkHack being the most simple To-Do list. [via DI]

Feed My Inbox - RSS to email…haven’t tried it, I’ve always used Send Me RSS, see more.

Yuuguu - a free desktop web conferencing tool (collaboration, screensharing, etc..), it says you can do client presentations without them requiring Yuuguu…other free services are DimDim, Yugma, Vyew.

The most exciting part is that it integrates with your Gmail / Gtalk contacts. All you do is download the client, enter your Gmail account details and it will grab your contacts, now you can click a contact and they will get a new chat session that asks if they would like to take part in a screensharing browser session. [via DI]

WiseStamp - an impressive email signature (contact widget), also see retaggr [via NW]

Fidj.it - more micro-blogging [via M]

Roundup : Google Moderator, Yotify, Social Mention, Flowgram, GBridge.

Google Moderator - submit questions and vote on them, as a way to come up with a final list of questions to ask before an event, meeting, etc.. Kind of reminds me how Zapproved does a similar thing in streamlining decision-making when it comes to proposals. For similar type stuff check out CircleUp, Ask 500 people [via TC]

Yotify - an amazing keyword alert dashboard [via TC]

Social Mention - a meta-search engine the searches blogs, micro-blogs, bookmarks, comments and more [via M]

Flowgram - compile a web presentation made of up various media types, such as powerpoint, photo’s, webpages, and layer audio over the top…also see VoiceThread and others. If you are after something similar for just webpages, check out Jog the Web and others.
[via M]

GBridge - a third party download for Gmail that allows you to access your desktop remotely or share your desktop, transfer files and synch folders, and more.

What blogging does for me.

James Dellow has blog tagged me on the meme, How do I decide what to blog about?

I’m changing this a little to what blogging does for me.

Quite simply it’s ideas, thoughts and feedback related to the way we work.

I started off being a library and web 2.0 blogger, but since changing work roles I now blog more about KM, collaboration, community, conversation, learning, self-organisation, emergence, and slowly getting into complex adaptive systems. I still occasionally blog about new web 2.0 tools to fill in the gaps.

You will find my blogroll on my blog and if it wasn’t for these people, I really wouldn’t blog much…sure I have my own original ideas, but they are often riffing off other people. The more I read the more it triggers stuff in me, and I evolve my perspective on an idea into the communal pool.

The essence of it for me is that we now have

  • tools other than email to do unstructured work, that is, we can use wikis, blogs, etc…for workarounds, exceptions to the rule. What was once in email silos and document silos is now open, transparent, and shareable. The actual practice of work is now documented, we communally share what process documents never know
  • tools to mimic our offline behaviours of conversation and networking with people. The most exciting thing online is that this type of ecosystem evolves into perpetual learning, and self-organisation, etc…

The crucial step is using a bottom-up facilitation approach in introducing these tools into the enterprise, web 2.0 or not, a top-down management approach aint gonna work.

Blogs as self education

It’s amazing that blogs I read have turned into my perpetual education, and it’s practical education at that…I interact as part of my learning, I am immersed…I distill my thoughts where people interact back.

If I went back to university to study KM, I think I’d have more rebellion and argument in my essays, as a bottom-up framework of working and understanding human behaviour has largely been ignored.
Knowledge workers and the knowledge age doesn’t mean anything until we have the tools, approaches and ecosystems to bring this to light.
Plus I’m learning from practioners on ground zero, they apply methods and find what does and doesn’t work when mixed with human behaviour and the enterprise environment. Sure you can read journals, but reading blogs put you right there…throw out the text books and create your own.

It’s just become an extension of my learning, probably the best learning I have engaged in, because I don’t even realise I’m learning, or I’m not trying to learn, I’m just being passionate and engaged about something.

If you are interested in something and need to research for a year or so, start blogging and reading blogs, because you become immersed where it’s no longer learning, but just something you do. Plus you get a casual and informal feel for your research topic, and network with an army of people who help you research without actually being aware of it.

Blogging for memory management

I guess if I didn’t bookmark, and blog I would find it hard to find stuff to re-read, or remember stuff, and blogging something I read helps me understand it more…blogging is often a stream of consciousness.

Where else do I blog

Tumblr - I have a micro blog called Snippets, this is for quotes, book note taking and more raw thoughts

Twitter - This is for spontaneous what’s on my mind, questions, and conversation…this is network blogging, my posts are often directed at someone (like IM, email, telephone), which you don’t really do in a blog.

Check out Friendfeed for my lifestream.

Researching a post

A few people have asked about my internal blog at work how I am able to draw from great sources and churn out a topical blog post in no time.
My secret trick is that I’ve blogged most stuff already on this blog, but the real deal is that when I’m writing a post I consult 3 places

  • I search my blog
  • I search my bookmarks
  • I search my RSS Reader

…and I may search my Twitter network or ask them a question

I seek in places I own, rather than just a googling hit and hope approach. Stuff (filtered through my network) passes my radar everyday, and I learn from it, I have this peripheral awareness, and when it comes to blogging about it I’m already half way there…

The Social Stack and Actionable Collective Intelligence

Lee Bryant sums this all up, see the end of my K-flow post for an excerpt.

Passing on the meme

So let’s see who I can tag to pass it foward, perhaps some people I admire but have not yet networked with…

UPDATE: I think I just wrote a new “About” page for this blog

Post-KM : enterprise 2.0, facilitation and complexity.

Dean from the Infovark blog has a contemporary post, “Knowledge Management Renaissance?“, I guess the question mark is nicely put as it may indeed be considered a war for some.

Some people do not want to be affiliated with the failed KM crowd, and the existing KM crowd have been waiting for the day that the tools (along with the right approach) would come along to achieve their aims…and now these tools are here!

Some would say, what gives the right for KM to hijack Enterprise 2.0.

I’ve posted on the irony that employees became to be respected, that they were not just cogs in a machine, instead they were knowledge workers. They had talent beyond their job, and their ideas and what they learnt from their job or elsewhere could be fed back into the organisation. This is really important for the fast paced services industry, as exploiting know-how is how work gets done most effectively. So the irony was, to try and capitalise and augment the sharing and spread of this knowledge, we had KM use industrial techniques. Just as we were moving away from the industrial age, KM was still treating people as computers that log things and spit them out on demand.

Enterprise 2.0 is based on bottom-up tools that allows for connections and emergence to happen, ie. knowledge workers now have the tools to do work and distribute their talent without really needing a department telling them to do so.

Bottom-up vs Top-down management approach

Venkat’s post about the KM and SM War has merit, his example shows that some KM practioners are incorporating these new tools, but still in the old management style, ie. a planned recipe style approach. Venkat’s says:

“…he completely ignored new elements in the technology and forcefully presented the design pattern for his success as the design pattern for success”

“Where he advocated planning, I advocated ad-hoc experimentation. Where he advocated charters to declare expected value, I advocated a youâll-know-it-when-you-see-it approach to discovering value. Where he talked about convincing SMEs, I argued that you should just watch for opinion leaders to emerge.”

“…not only do Boomers not get complexity, they are suspicious of it, thanks to their early cultural training which deifies simplicity. The result of this difference is that Boomer management models rely too much on simplistic ideological-vision-driven ideas. Consider, for instance, the classic Boomer idea of creating âcommunities of practiceâ with defined âChartersâ and devoted to identifying âBest Practices.â No Gen Xâer or Millenial would dare to reduce the complexity of real-world social engineering to a fixed âcharterâ or presume to nominate any work process as âbest.â”

I agree, the new style is for workers to put the complexity into the software, let them sculpture it to their way of working and connecting. As Bill Ives says:

“The irony of enterprise 2.0 is that you actually get more control because the free form nature of the tools allow the business people to decide on where structure occurs, not the people who make the software.”

The main thing we have to teach is a little on how to use the tools, especially in their context of helping them get their work done more efficiently and effectively, and a little governance (boundaries).

It’s my hope that most existing KM practitioners understand that this new generation of KM has changed from a management role, to facilitating and flow…more about coordinating and guiding.

I do agree with Neil Olonoff’s comment that Venkat is generalising how people typically run KM. When you look at conferences from actKM you will see that these KM’ers have been ahead of the curve in this thinking for a long while.

Keith De La Rue concurs, saying: “Most KM practitioners (certainly most that I know and work with) view KM as being all about people, with the tools a secondary issue. Web 2.0 provides a fantastic new toolkit - one that is far more people-centric that the older tools - and is a great boon to real KM.”

The way I see it, we can’t tell or force seeds to propagate into a plant, it’s not always going to work out, but we can fertilise and water the soil, ie. create conditions for this to happen on it’s own.

Enterprise 2.0 is connecting and networks, emergence and autonomous behaviours result (sense-making), so this becomes closer to achieving the original aim of KM. Doing KM at the individual level becomes more invisible and embedded…practitioners become coordinators guiding people, cultivating and fertilising the soil (this is the KM 2.0 part).

You can also see this in the library industry, with Google and the web, librarian’s are increasingly becoming focused on the reference role of facilitators, guides, assistants in helping you with your approach to your task.

Venkat finishes by saying:

“And it wonât be just a victory of fashion. It will be a fundamental victory of the better idea. SM is an organic, protean, creative and energetic force. KM is a brittle, mechanical, anxiety and fear-ridden structure”

Again, with a bottom-up management approach KM doesn’t have to be this way, just like Marketing 2.0, Learning 2.0, etc…it’s all about a 2.0 approach.

It’s important that heavy weights like Tom Davenport recognise how enterprise 2.0 differs from KM, and how KM 2.0 is about guiding the emergence, and feeding back, making it adaptive as possible:

“…there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But Iâve always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence. Andyâs comment that E2.0 requires âgardenersâ suggests that he agrees.”

Complex Adaptive System

I have just started to read Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence, and from it I’m taking away the idea that enterprise 2.0 or emergence is not enough on its own, as there will always be a management framework, which serves the reason for being in business.

It’s known that enterprise 2.0 needs facilitation to get adoption and network effects compared to the open web, when there is emergence, the macro picture may show that workers are carving out their own work, which can be seen as adaptive (self-organising), but the question is…

Is it adaptive to the mission and objectives of the enterprise?

Steven gives an example of programmed billiard balls that alter their movement when interacting with other balls…he calls this complex behaviour, “a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions”

“But it wouldn’t truly be considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discernable macrobehaviour.” eg. the balls end up on either side of the table in clusters, even on one side and odd on the other.

“That would mark the beginnings of emergence, a high-level pattern arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents…the balls aren’t programmed explicitly to cluser in two groups…yet out of those low-level routines, a coherent shape emerges.”

But he goes on to say that this is not adaptive, until it becomes useful.

eg. if it was in the interest of our pool hall to attract players, it would be adaptive behaviour for the balls to end up forming one cluster in a triangle shape with the white ball on the other end…as this is useful.

“The system would use local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behaviour well suited to its environment. Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake: it’s a beautiful pattern, but it has no function”

He talks about emergent behavior becoming smarter over time and responding to environmental changes.

KM 2.0 is the adaptive guidance

This is why in my post on the KM Core sample I differentiated between social computing (an aspect of enterprise 2.0) and KM 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 can show plenty of emergence (eg. a wiki evolving or manifesting into a great thing from the input of many people, tagged blog posts in a blogosphere showing us what’s hot and what’s being talked about in a tag cloud…these are low level interactions, that in aggregate paint a picture or emerging pattern), but perhaps it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an adaptive system. Things could emerge into negative patterns, and an enterprise framework is only self-organising in the correct direction to an extent, as we still have a director or manager who has a goal, objective, etc…

So KM 2.0’s role is to harness these gifts of emergence that the manager couldn’t forsee upfront, and is respecting this gift and talent of the knowledge workers…having an enterprise 2.0 ecosystem shows respect already, as it shows that the manager is willing for transparency and people to direct themselves to an extent.
Another important aspect here is that KM is not always about adhering to strategy, in fact new strategy can emerge from listening to the enterprise 2.0 ecosystem.

But at the same time it’s the KM 2.0 practitioners role is to make sure all this emergence is adaptable to what the organisation is about, etc…I don’t yet know much about complexity, so I can’t give examples.

But my question to people like Dave Snowden is:

Is enterprise 2.0 without outside interference a complex adaptive system?

ie. is web 2.0 within an organisational framework, self-organising and emergent that is adapts to the organisational goals.

At this stage I don’t think so, as emergent patterns may conflict with existing goals, this could be for the better, resulting in altering the goals, but it could be for the worse, where the emerging patterns have to be pushed back or dampened.

But in another way I do think workers can become more autonomous, connecting to people carving out their own work projects.

Anyway, this to me is my current stance on the difference between KM 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Practitioner

Some might say that people facilitating enterprise 2.0 do not have to have existing KM skills (which is what anyway?), so KM does not really have to be this role. But to me existing KM practitioners are the obvious choice to guide enterprise 2.0, just as long as they understand complex systems and facilitation. They require humanistic and interpersonal skills, rather than too much focusing on top-down plan and outcome, they need to understand emergence, to let just things happen and then capitalise on this, their is no golden recipe, every situation is contextually different.
They are usually the same person that facilitate or teach offline emergent techniques such as anecdote circles, knowledge cafes, etc…

Existing KM people in organisations naturally become the people responsible for enterprise 2.0, does this mean they change their job title. KM attempted to achieve better performance, sharing, productivity, etc…and this is what enterprise 2.0 also does, but without trying, it kind of just does it if you use it, it has no aim or intention. Enterprise 2.0 goes beyond the original concept of KM (knowledge sharing) to situational awareness and perpetual learning and building capabilities…rather than need-to-know, it “always on” learning.

Are we going to sack KM people and replace them with E2.0 people, or are KM people now going to have a change of job title?

This is really bigger than KM or enterprise 2.0, it’s about a new style of management.

It’s about letting enterprise 2.0 breathe and flow, and adapting to what emerges into decision making

In this post I asked:

“Imagine there was no such thing as knowledge management.
And all through the 1990âs there was only information management, and collaboration spaces, and then 10 years later social computing happened.

When you think about it like this, what actually is knowledge management?”

Generations

Venkat attributes this a generational war with Gen X as neutral (the swing vote), Boomers as idealistic and linear, Millenials understanding complexity and avoiding the big picture (having trust in how it all comes together.)

I agree to a degree, but I wouldn’t say it’s this black and white, I’m a Gen X’er and all my networks (facebook, blogs, twitter, friendfeed) are mostly Gen X and Boomers…in fact there are too many for me to network with…

I think we also need to see this in the perspective of Generation Virtual (Generation V)

Stephen Collins from AcidLabs alludes to not getting carried away by the the age divide:

“Thereâs solid research that suggests the generational divide is at least in part less about age and more about life situation. I agree that as a group taken in aggregate, Gen Y exhibits these traits. And, again as a group they will ultimately be the catalyst for change societally and in business (and I can hardly wait).”

More on this from Shifted HR:

“…all generations have similar values; they just express them differently. It also highlighted that if you are party to a conflict that appears to be about generation-based values differences it is most likely that the conflict is between individuals and that it has nothing to do with their generation and the conflict is about difference in behaviour rather than about a fundamental values difference.”

Olivier Amprimo comments on this blog post about the generational neutral trait of curiosity:

“The adoption of social computing is linked to curiosity to use tools and understanding how this set of tools can be customized to create meaningful application for organisations.
Hopefully, curiosity is not a question of age. And the ability to create meaningful applications in a corporate world means one does need to have experience in this environment.
How social tools can positively complement or renew existing processes and help make more profitable or efficient businesses is the key to âEnterprise 2.0â³ adoption. The immature debate on ROI 2.0 over the last summer set the frame: the bottom line is and remains the driver.”

Read more about generational stereotypes.

Technology

I’m not going to get into this but I do agree with Venkat that social networks are more dynamic then expert locators. Briefly my thoughts are that social networks are engaging, they are an actual tool, rather than a look-up thing, check out my comments on Mark Gould’s blog.

Let’s keep in mind that latest reports show us that learning and guidance is the main key to adoption. No matter how low a barrier to entry the technology is, and how many great features are available people need to know how it applies to their routine…ease of use alone is not the panacea to adoption.

Does the enterprise exist?

Just to finish off Gordon from Infovark has a gem on the individuals that make up the enterprise:

“If we want to change the way people work, we have to give up on this notion of âthe enterpriseâ as the thing that needs to change. We have to stop focusing on abstractions like Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence. We canât claim to bring more âCollaborationâ, more âInnovationâ or more âSocialâ into the enterprise. These things are intangible, hard to see, hard to measure, and largely irrelevant to the problems at hand.

Trying to bring about change at the abstract level is impossible. What ends up being sold is a utopian ideal. No wonder most of these projects fail â theyâre designed entirely in fairyland.

What we need to do is get back to reality. Letâs tell the architecture astronauts to come home.

Enterprises are made of people.”

I left a comment saying it’s got to be an ROI for the individual first.

Dean from Infovark talks about enterprise 2.0:

“Thatâs what Enterprise 2.0 is about. Itâs about adapting some of the successful tools and communications technologies found on the open web to solve problems faced by people working in creative, knowledge-based industries.

The priorities have shifted from problems of scale to problems of innovation.”

Related

Has km died, and resurrected as social computing?
Knowledge and its facilitators
KM : Round 2.0
KM 2.0 culture
The emergence of Serendipity 2.0 and Innovation 2.0
Seven ways enterprise 2.0 differs from web 2.0
The KM generation of networks and emergence
ROI for the knowledge worker is ROI for all, and how KM took an ironic approach
The KM Core Sample in relation to IM, KM 1.0, Social Computing, and KM 2.0
The emergence of Serendipity 2.0 and Innovation 2.0
My recent article on KM Review - When Two Worlds Collide
Knowledge sharing for anticipatory awareness
Thereâs more than just supply-side KM
Knowledge Managementâ¦NOT!
KM 2.0 model
Participation is the currency of the knowledge economy
An ecosystem is emerging

5 options for mobile web Twitter.

I mostly use Twitter on the mobile web, when I’m on the train. I once tried to keep up with Twitter, but gave up that idea a while ago, now I just tune in and take a dip in the river now and again, there’s always lots of great stuff floating by.

My issue at the moment is I am following too many people, sometimes I’d like to tune into Twitter and just see what my KM buddies are up to, but I can’t as Twitter mobile doesn’t allow you to group friends into a folder or tag stream like an RSS Reader or Friendfeed. None of the services below offer this either, for me this is something sorely needed. There are some Twitter apps out there that allow you to make your own group streams, but I want this in a Twitter mobile web service so I can just choose a tag/folder at will.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents, here’s a quick list of some mobile Twitter services

NOTE: I’m not including download clients or iPhone specific web sites like hahlo (which doesn’t function properly on my phone)
I once installed Blue Whale for Facebook on my phone, and it didn’t stop buzzing. Out of interest what are the similar Twitter install apps for a mobile phone, where you get pushed content without being on the mobile web (and, can you limit this to just replies and direct messages?).

1. Slandr

Let’s start off with Slandr as this is the most comprehensive…I’ve posted on it before, and it was time for an update.

EACH TWEET HAS
- avatar
- reply
- direct message
- favourite
- retweet
- also includes thumbnails from Twitpic and others

CLICK ON A USER
- follow/unfollow
- direct message

REPLY STREAM
- self explanatory

EGO VIEW

This is all public tweets containing a keyword which is a user name eg. “johnt”
- this is important as Twitter will only show you replies where your name eg. @johnt is at the start of a tweet. If the tweet is - coffee sounds good will @johnt be there - I will not see this in my Twitter reply stream as it’s not at the start of the tweet.
- As you can see the ego view is not for “@johnt”, it’s for “johnt”, so it’s gonna pick up tweets where people have perhaps forgotten to put the @ symbol or perhaps they are just tweeting my name without trying to ping me.

Here’s are some examples of Tweets that will not show up in your Twitter reply stream, including a Retweet, which is like a trackback or linklove really

twitstamp.com

twitstamp.com

DIRECTS
An archive of your in and out box for Direct Messages, you can also send a DM

GEO

Geo friends
- The last 20 locations from the last 20 tweets from people I follow
- update your location (which I recall you can do from the regular tweet box as well using an L: prefix]

Twitter local
- a stream of Tweets based on location range

Local Events
- what’s happening based on location range

SEARCH
- powered by Twitter Search
- what I’d like to see here is a hot link to Twemes mobile for hash tag streams

EXTRAS

Friends/Followers
- a tag cloud of your 100 most active friends
- look up any user

Public Timeline
- self explanatory

Favourites
- self explanatory

HQ
- Slandr’s blog

Twitter Status
- the Twitter Status blog

2. Dabr

After writing this post I infact may be a Dabr convert.

EACH TWEET HAS
- avatar
- reply
- direct message
- favourite
- retweet
- also includes thumbnails from Flickr, Twitpic, and Twitxr

CLICK ON A USER
- follow/unfollow
- friends
- followers
- favourites
- direct message

REPLIES
- this also merges an ego search

DIRECTS
- create, inbox, sent

SEARCH
- self explanatory

PUBLIC
- self explanatory

FAVOURITES
- self explanatory

FOLLOWERS
A long list of people who follow you
- to get a list of people you follow you need to click on your user name stream (a massive scrollable list)
- unlike Slandr you can’t search for users

3. Twitstat Mobile

EACH TWEET HAS
- favourite
- reply
- retweet

CLICK ON A USER
- no actions

FRIENDS
- self explanatory

REPLIES
- self explanatory

EGO
- self explanatory

DM
- self explanatory

4. Tweete

EACH TWEET HAS
- reply
- dm
- favourite

CLICK ON A USER
- reply
- dm
- follow/unfollow

REPLIES
- self explanatory

DIRECTS
- self explanatory

FAVOURITES
- self explanatory

5. Twitter mobile [THE OFFICIAL SITE]

EACH TWEET HAS
- nothing, you cannot action a tweet

CLICK ON A USER
- follow/unfollow
- friends list

You also have menu links to your REPLIES, FRIENDS LIST and PUBLIC

BONUS

friendfeed mobile - FF to go

Not all my Twitter friends are on friendfeed, but of those who are, I can limit the stream to just Twitter.
Further to this unlike Twitter, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, friendfeed allow you to organise your friends into folder/tag or section streams.

A conversation on Twitter.

At the moment the conversational tools on Twitter are Tweader, Quotably and Twitter Threads.

Wall-to-Wall

I had an idea like the Facebook wall, to show Wall-to-Wall conversations between you and another Twitter user.

The best I found was Twitter Advanced Search, where I can do a search like from:johnt to:trib (or vice versa).

The juicy part is when you click the “Show Conversation” link on a tweet it displays this wall-to-wall idea.
Each tweet has this link, and I’m not sure if a conversation is based on time or what.

But still I would like to see “Show Conversation” as its own page, and a clean history of our Wall-to-Wall conversation, kind of like doing a search…”from:johnt to:trib” AND “from:trib to:johnt”

And then I realised I can do this at Tweet 2 Tweet, check it out (not sure what search query they are using).

Replies, Shoutouts, and Comments

The other day I realised that if you click on the reply icon next to a users 2nd last tweet, your tweet when published will link back to that exact tweet, rather than linking to that persons latest tweet. The linkback is on your tweet as a hyperlink called “in reply to userA”.
NOTE: I used 2nd last tweet as an example, it could be 19th last tweet

But if you just type in “@userA” in the text box, then your tweet will default link back to that persons latest tweet. This is fair enough because using this method may not be a reply at all, it may be an initiating shoutout.
If you use Twitter by IM or SMS, then you have no choice but to use this method.

Coming back to it…

When I click the reply icon on someone’s tweet, my published tweet will have a hyperlink (in reply to userA) to that exact tweet , but that person’s tweet will not have a hyperlink back to my tweet ie. it doesn’t appear as a comment on their tweet.

This is what I like about Jaiku
- instead of a reply icon on a post, it just has “leave a comment”
- this threads your comment under their post
- your comment also becomes a new post in its own right

I’m gathering most Twitter use is web, mobile web, and web and desktop widgets; rather than SMS or IM, so this lends to more of a reason why a comment structure would now work, as people can pinpoint the post they are replying to.

If Twitter does end up have commenting one day, will it still be called replies? And what about shoutouts, this is when we use the reply feature to ask a question or say something to someone, but not in response to one of their tweets.

Groups on Twitter.

A while back I posted on Twitter and similar platforms in relation to groups. “Groups” is an ambiguous word, so I cleared it up to be more precise about what I mean, here’s a little re-hash:

Groups - community type shared interest member groups, or perhaps an aggregation stream from a bunch of people, like a public version of one of your contact groups (in this instance there are no members)

NOTE: Channels are similar to Groups, but people are not members. A channel is not organised and doesn’t really have an agenda beyond existing, the topic is usually short eg. #athletics. Whereas a group topic could be more precise eg. Women in athletics who have won medals but had them taken away due to steroid use, and a group could have sub-topics.

Contact Groups- organising your contacts into folders/tags

Groupings - based on implicit attention or on a slice of data such as: people who also saved this bookmark, people who also bought this book, all Twitter users located in Perth, a Techmeme cluster of all the people who posted on this meme (or all people who linked to this site)

Groups

TweetPeek (no longer exists)
Tweet Thread
Tweet Boards
Twapper (mobile)
Crowd Status
Twitter Digest
Twitter Teams (like a channel-hashtags-but limited to a group of people)

FlockUp (a communal contact group, but soon this will stream tweets)
Twitterpacks (a place to find groups or people by topic, location)

Twitter groups in Japan

Channel

Twemes (mobile)
Hashtags
Roomatic
TweetChannel

Groupings
Twitterlocal
@locals
TwitterWhere
Another TwitterWhere
DailyTwitter

TweetMemes and others
TwitScoop
Tweeqs
Twitterholic

There are also lots of recommendation services based on groupings data, here’s a few:
Twubble
Twits Like Me
Twitter Poster
Twannabe

Contact Groups
Twitly (mobile coming soon)
Tweetdeck

Something Twitter are working on

CONTACT GROUP DIRECT MESSAGE
Twitter Groups
TweetParty
GroupTweet

Links for 2008-11-09 [del.icio.us].

Links for 2008-11-10 [del.icio.us].

Knowledge flow networks.

I’ve echoed words by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband that rather than trying to create a knowledge sharing culture, we are instead creating conditions and environment for that to happen naturally via a participation model that facilitates connections and shared context.

These conditions are:

simple tools, trust, self interest/benefit, and facilitation

…once people form interdependencies, then sharing becomes essential to get work done.

Email is simple, people who trust each other can exchange know-how in emails, and this requires no facilitation. Enterprise 2.0 tools (along with facilitation) can do a similar thing with tools that are more open and transparent, enabling more of an amplified and visible knowledge sharing culture to emerge. The difference here is an ecosystem is manifested where people are networked, and knowledge flows, this is much more connected for people to tap in or tune in to the social capital.

For more on this see my posts, The KM generation of networks and emergence and The KM Core Sample in relation to IM, KM 1.0, Social Computing, and KM 2.0.

Here’s a brief recap of the main points:

E 1.0 E 2.0
Boundaries (access or no access) Unbounded
Struture (rigid workflow) DIY structure and flow
No emergence Emergence (links and tags)
Clunky (high barrier) Ease of use (extension of human behaviour)

My post on KM 2.0 culture listed some general points to creating adoption of these tools or approach to work, such as:

job evaluation, change to a “work in progress” attitude, role-models, transparency, senior management support, champions (facilitation), publish not as you know it, the guru effect (reputation as reward), pilot/showcasing example, etc…

I also posted on a KM 2.0 model where this type of ecosystem manifests into offshoots, that is, we start off with a participation model where people can publish, discover, and connect with each other (basically an open publish and subscribe network), which can lead to offshoots such as new bonds/relationships, collaboration, communities, etc… So once we can connect and converse, knowledge starts flowing, and people are more aware and learning off each other, as a result groups and projects assemble with like-minded people (autonomy).

This is less of a focus on knowledge itself, and more on the platforms for it to flow, we cannot force people to share (we can’t measure this anyway), we can only offer tools that make sharing easy, and more in tune with human nature.

Matthew Hodgson says sharing knowledge is a social activity, which the primary method is conversation. When we have news or need to work on an issue we get together to talk about it; creating a perpetual online version of this is knowledge flow as we can’t always be in the same room, and we may not always be involved in the task, but it may come across our radar where we can chime in. Engaging online means all this tacit interaction is documented and flowing around, but it’s more…a Minutes of the Meeting is going to try hard to be a recording of the discussion, but a raw online forum discussion or blog a post is actually what comes out of people’s mouths. More from Matthew:

âIf we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what â the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems â but also the meaning behind the why and how.â

And a complementary quote from Nassim Taleb:

âThe journal was purportedly written withoutâ¦knowing what was going to happen next, when the information availableâ¦was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.â âWhile we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important.â

And finally we have Dave Snowden’s 7 Principles of KM (I’ll just list them, see the post for an explanation on each one):

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge
4. Everything is fragmented
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things
7. We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down

Networks

Patti Anklam points to some great posts by Steve Borgatti on facilitating knowledge flows in a network.

The two conditions that facilitate knowledge transfer are relational (quality of relationship between people) and structural (macro-patterns in the network).

Relational

Multiplexity - “…refers to the extent to which one kind of tie between two people is accompanied by another kind of tie between the same two people. For example, two people who trust each other might also share information with each other, lend money to each other, and so on”

What facilitates relational sharing? What allows me to seek information from you?

- Knowing you are an expert in an area
- Already being aquainted (as Dave Snowden would say a shared context, high abstraction and trust)
- Access (time zones, too busy-burden of being an expert, competing business units, higher status)
- Trust, interdependencies, reciprocation

Structural

“The structure of social network affects how rapidly information flows from one end of the network to the other. Ultimately, the speed of information flow is a function of path lengths. When the length of the shortest path between a pair of nodes is high, it will take a long time for information to flow from one to the other. Networks with high average path lengths take longer to transmit information to all members. In turn, the average path length in a network is a function of a number of structural factors.”

Density - the number of ties in a network

Higher density means information flows faster, as there are shorter paths. It also means the same or popular/pertinent information may keep surfacing.

Centralisation - a network centralised around a well connected node has great information distribution, but is highly dependent on one node, which can be damaging if they spread misinformation, and lose their dynamic if that person leaves and has to be replaced.
This aspect has good searchability as the the central person (goto person) can point you to where information lives

Core-periphery - revolve around a set of central nodes, and also with the periphery. Note, peripheral nodes are connected to the core, but not each other and core-periphery is not the same as lots of unconnected centralisation islands (clumpy networks)

Conclusion

“In sum, dense, core/periphery networks are very efficient at spreading knowledge. The other side of coin, however, is that they are not good at innovation because it is too easy for the conventional wisdom to swamp new ideas.”

“Promoting knowledge sharing is a matter of (a) creating the relational conditions that facilitate interpersonal transfers, and (b) creating the structural conditions that facilitate diffusion.”

Steve Borgatti has another post called, Creating Knowledge: Network Structure and Innovation, where he talks about the two ways knowledge is created.

Individual Creativity

“In some cases, an individual interacts with a number of others who may be completely unaware of what problem he is trying to solve, and then, with the knowledge gained, the individual goes off by himself and synthesizes a solution.”

I can see a social network doing this all the time, by participating and interacting we are learning from each other.

“People who interact daily come to know many of the same things, and are in that sense informationally redundant. In contrast, people who do not interact will often know many things that the other does not know.”

“The property of having ties to people who are not in the same social circles with each other is called betweenness or “structural holes”. A person rich in structural holes has many ties, and the people they are tied to are not tied to each other.”

I did not know that betweenness or “structural holes” was another way of referring to the “strength of weak ties”

Interactive Creativity

“…new knowledge is co-created by interacting individuals who are bouncing ideas off each other and actively integrating their different perspectives.”

“Interactive creativity also calls for heterogeneity — it is the successful synthesis of different perspectives that creates something new. But because the interaction in this context is more intense and more important, the relationship between the people needs to be very good. In particular, they need to be able to understand each other well. This tends to mean that the participants are fundamentally similar in language and background concepts. It also means that affective elements like simply liking each other are helpful, as are good social skills.”

We have heard Dave Snowden talk about this very point where he refers to: trust, interdependencies, reciprocation, and the level of abstraction (common wavelength of your relationship). If these aspects ain’t there, you ain’t gonna get any sharing happening, even if you have the ferrari of social networks and blogs.

Innovation

“People need access to a diversity of skills and knowledge in order to innovate. This argues for being as well connected as possible. If we want everyone in a group to be in a position to innovate, this will mean a very dense network in which everyone is connected to almost everyone.”

“…radical innovators are too well connected to the network, they can get swamped by the prevailing wisdom. As a result, radical innovation is facilitated by sparser and clumpier networks…”

This is similar to the “strength of weak ties” mentioned above. In a social network we can form our view of the network by adding contacts (subscribing to parts of the flow), but because it’s unbounded we are free to roam and investigate, we may decide to search and browse or subscribe to blogs of people we don’t know, or subscribe to a keyword search. All this allows us to go beyond our usually circle of know-how…Andrew McAfee expands on this with his enterprise bullseye post.

Conclusion

“The answer to the question ‘what should my organization’s network look like to enable innovation?’ depends on the kind of innovation.”

[ADDED 14/11/08: “Enterprise 2.0 is more likely if…

Technologies
- Tools are intuitive and easy to use
- Tools are egalitarian and freeform
- Borders seem appropriate to users
- At least some of the tools are explicitly social
- The toolset is quickly standardized

Support for the Initiative
- Incentives exist, and are soft
- Excellent gardeners exist
- Patient and dedicated evangelists exist
- Energy and activity are primarily bottom-up
- Effort has official and unofficial support from the top
- Goals are clear and well-explained

Culture
- People are trusted
- Slack exists in the workweek
- Helpfulness has been the norm
- Top management supports lateralization
- There are lots of young people
- There is pent-up demand for better information sharing”]

Related
KM: Round 2.0
Conversations, Connections and Context
7 seconds to knowledge share
Post-KM : enterprise 2.0, facilitation and complexity
Knowledge Managementâ¦NOT!
KM 2.0 : doing your job or giving back to the organisation
Knowledge sharing in the new KM
The emergence of Serendipity 2.0 and Innovation 2.0

Links for 2008-11-12 [del.icio.us].

Links for 2008-11-13 [del.icio.us].

Are you really doing Enterprise 2.0?.

The other day I posted on Knowledge flow networks and Post-KM : enterprise 2.0, facilitation and complexity, these along with an older post include how I think KM and enterprise 2.0 can come together.

In this post I pointed to a post by Tom Davenport on recognising the difference in the planned and outcome KM approach compared to the enterprise 2.0 emergent approach (with sharing, learning, connections happening along the way). He also concurred with Andrew McAfee saying there is an element of facilitation and gardening, this is the part I call KM 2.0. I think KM 2.0 is a layer on top of enterprise 2.0.

Samuel Driessen’s post pointed me to a comment by James Dellow on Tom’s post. Samuel disagreed with James that enterprise 2.0 is only about technology, saying it’s also about the people and the networks.

It’s all semantics at the moment, sure enterprise 2.0 is a technology that allows connections, network effects and emergence that we didn’t have previously, but we all know without participation and management 2.0 values it’s nothing.

When we talk about enterprise 2.0 we often also mean the culture, adoption and human part of it, we assume a new style of bottom-up work. The last thing we want to do is stifle the potential of the tools with a top-down approach. I think KM 2.0 comes in to make sure enterprise 2.0 is left alone and emergence can happen, but then comes in to guide and facilitate, to make sure it’s adaptive in the best possible way.

Anyway this leads me to some descriptions of this movement by James Dellow in an article in the Image & Data Manager Magazine Sep/Oct 2008.

Lately James writes a lot about Intranet 2.0, and is even seeking a publisher for a book on this subject.

James offers various ways or choices in implementing Intranet 2.0 into your organisation.

1. Tactical Social Computing
2. Enterprise Web 2.0
3. Enterprise 2.0

Tactical Social Computing

This isn’t really Intranet 2.0, it’s more about a team here and there using social tools like blogs and wikis to get their work done. eg. using a wiki in a call centre to list workarounds and contexts that aren’t covered in procedures, using a blog rather than email to communicate and announce to the team, etc…

Often these instances of social productivity are by IT Rogues and Tech Populists who are early adopters and using tools to help be more effective because IT is just too slow. But as James says this tactical approach is a great stepping stone to a more holisitic or broad implementation…a way to demonstrate to IT and get them involved. It’s a great idea to pilot a few teams with some low cost/free tools to showcase and be a role model of how effective it is to work with these new social tools, and the things that happen along the way like emergence and sharing. If your plan is to get more serious about this don’t make your pilot group too big, otherwise you will have migration to do when you move to you new system.

So whether it’s on your own, or with the help of IT it really costs nothing to test the waters, compared to traditional enterprise software…this is a big difference in itself, and inturn allows us to take this type of approach.
At my work we have not gone Intranet 2.0 just yet, our Intranet is still top-down, lacks customisation/personalisation, user input, etc… But we do have Communities of Practice for teams, cross-team workgroups, and shared interest groups. You could say this is our tactical social computing approach, parallel to our Intranet. If things go well here, which they are, this warrants confidence to revamp our Intranet into a social network of sorts.

Enterprise Web 2.0

This is more focused on Web 2.0 oriented architecture and Web application frameworks (AJAX, XML, AIR, ATOM, RSS) rather than the social aspects such as blogs and wikis. From the article:

“- Dashboards that can be rapidly “mashed” together in days to answer an emergent business problem

- Alerting systems that integrate information from internal and external systems using RSS

- Rich and intuitive AJAX interfaces on Web-applications that people want to use and reduce the need for extensive end-user training

If you follow this path, be aware that an Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy may perhaps intentionally open the door to Enterprise 2.0. Once the lid is off the box, it may be difficult to quarantine the social aspects from the technology components of the Web 2.0 software development philosophy. The nature of Web 2.0 tools and a key ingredient of their success is that theyempower users to build their own tools and contribute content, so getting the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies without the social element will need to be carefully managed.”

I’d also like to add to this the emergent nature of the tools themselves, not only can we publish, comment, and tag content to watch it evolve and see patterns emerge, but this also happens with the technology. Here’s an excerpt from Rod Boothby on this:

“VCs usually donât like the idea of a âplatformâ. They want to see a killer app first. But, it is quickly becoming obvious that having a platform IS the killer app. Or at least the killer differentiator. By platform, I mean something beyond a simple API. It is a mechanism for letting 3rd parties add value to your application through extensions and plug-ins.
WordPress, with all the 3rd party themes and application plugins is a great example of something that gets better as more people use it.”

Enterprise 2.0

From James Dellow’s article:

“…an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is something quite different from either the tactical use of social computing or the narrow adoption of Web 2.0 technologies - it is both a technology and business change, where social computing tools help flatten and also reflect the flatness of organisations.”

James uses Andrew McAfee’s SLATES model as a criteria for Enterprise 2.0, which I have mentioned before , and which Stephen Collins describes in his encompassing blog post.

As James points out a tactical strategy is not going to meet the criteria of the SLATES model which describes the components of Enterprise 2.0. James says something really important here for those that think they are doing Enterprise 2.0 just because their work has a few blogs and wikis.

“…for it to work the SLATES model must apply across the information workplace - not a single siloed tool, since this represents a tactical strategy instead.”

“…the subtle difference between a tactical strategy and Enterprise 2.0…is really the relationship between the enterprise social computing environment with the shape and culture of the organisation.”

The posts I linked to at the start of this blog post have my view on the conditions for enterprise 2.0 to take place and the facilitation involved to nuture and guide the emergence.

To spread and evolve know-how, percolate emergence, create autonomous behaviours, and social productivity, we need the conditions for these things to happen.

Network Effects - without a critical mass of participators, contributors, and collectors (and tagging, linking, voting) we cannot have emergence. A sign of this are sites like Wikipedia, TechMeme, delicious, Twitter, etc…

Participation - we need bloggers, commentors, editors, taggers, etc…

Self Interest - we have more chance of Participation if our motivation is self interest and connection, and easier ways to do our work. Along with self satisfaction, a feeling of belonging and connection, and socially generated reputation.

Ease of Use - we have more chance of Participation if the tools are easy to use and unstructured so we can bend them to our needs

Transparency/Support/Bottom-up - management need to govern rather than manage, they need to lax control and take a facilitative and leadership approach. Less planning for outcomes, and more emergence of output. People need to able to express themselves, within a governance framework, without fear, otherwise this may stifle contribution, which gets us nowhere.
The facilitative approach is to cultivate connections/networks/conversations, garden, steer, guide… This leads to a paradigm change to management 2.0, in order for enterprise 2.0 to flourish. Strategy can now be influenced or gifted by what’s surfaced from the crowd, rather than just a bunch of bigwigs in one room, really it’s a win-win situation.

James points to some quotes on these points:

Michele Egan, World Bank
“Collaboration and facilitation (rather than control and vetting) are key drivers in the successful utilization of new and existing technologies, as well as in unleashing the willingness of people to contribute with their effort…Let a thousane flowers bloom does work, even if you have to pull a few weeds on ocassion”

Andrew McAfee
“These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed”

As I mentioned my work does not have a potential fear factor as we can so far only express ourselves in blogs and forums within communities, these are small boundaries governed by a owner, compared to the boundary of the whole enterprise. If something not suitable was said in a community, only people in that community would know of it, and it could be easily picked up by the owner and dampened.

The real test would be if our intranet had a social network component, where rather than seeking a community and requesting to blog, instead each person is given their own house (as opposed to a shared house in a community) as their personal profile where they can connect with others and blog what they know, or…This is more of a test on management as people are given a blog even if they don’t know what it is, and it’s their own space, rather than a group space. If something out of line is said, it may spread to all eyeballs in a flash.

More on Enterprise 2.0

I thought we’d better include Andrew McAfee’s definition, compared to others:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

And more…

“Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia’s definition).

Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
- Optional
- Free of up-front workflow
- Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
- Accepting of many types of data”

I really liked this excerpt by Rod Boothby:

“In McAfeeâs article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, McAfee says âWhen I use âEnterprise 2.0â² as an adjective, I mean âsupporting of emergent collaboration.â”

“I believe what McAfee is saying is that everything new and interesting in the Enterprise isnât necessarily emergent. If IT builds an AJAX application that must be used by end users to account for their time, there is nothing emergent about that system. Therefore it isnât Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is about decentralization of responsibility. This requires a completely different way of managing people.”

“Enterprise 2,0 isnât about building solutions for end users. Enterprise 2.0 is about building tools that end users can leverage to build their own solutions.

Out of those highly customized end-user built combinations of people, process and technology, will emerge better business practices. Better because they will be more intelligent, more flexible and they will generate more long term competitive business advantage because they will generate more innovations.

To be truly useful, these tools have to plug into the back end of any corporate entity. Critical features will include audit trails, access control, version control, authentication, provisioning and backup. The best Enterprise 2.0 systems out there will have thought through these issues.”

Related
Seven ways enterprise 2.0 differs from web 2.0

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