I know I said I probably wouldn't be cross posting from the Headshift Australasia blog, but I thought you might be interested in two events where I'm presenting over the next few months:
More details over on the HOZ blog. PS Also, have you heard about Senator Kate Lundy's first 'Public Sphere' next week?
Tags: events, conferences, headshift, publicsphere
Today, it is one year since we held the global Enterprise RSS Day of Action - with the help from many people, including vendors like Attensa and Newsgator, the aim was to raise awareness of this critical element of back end plumbing for Enterprise 2.0. I'm not going to make a big deal about the day of action today or suggest we hold another one (unless you really want too!). But, if you missed it the first time around, have a look around my blog or search the Web for further coverage.
Things finally came to head earlier this year when ReadWriteWeb posted what many thought was a premature obituary for Enterprise RSS. You can see my response post here. I still don't think Enterprise RSS is dead - personally I couldn't live without my RSS reader. But its more than that: when ever I feel overloaded by email, every time I subscribe to a search result or mashup something using Yahoo! Pipes, I imagine what the future enterprise could be like if only we had the same access to Enterprise RSS as we do email in the workplace.
BTW Don't forget to check out Newsgator's new whitepaper on the ROI of Enterprise Social Computing.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, RSS, Enterprise RSS, Enterprise RSS Day of Action, ReadWriteWeb, Attensa, Newsgator, Yahoo! Pipes
I was talking about this the other day. Now I don't want to pick on Wollongong City Council (WCC) specifically, but as they are my local council I just thought I would demonstrate how easy it is to start Web 2.0'ifying local council Websites if people put their minds to it. Currently there are no RSS feeds on the WCC Website, but luckily the back end is all SharePoint and it does natively support RSS (thank goodness).
The low hanging fruit on the WCC Website are their media releases... so here we go:
Firstly, by pushing the native SharePoint RSS feed through Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner I can clean up the feed a little and it generally makes performance better IMHO - from this I get a nice clean RSS feed.
The next step is to push though the RSS feed out via Twitter (since that's all the rage at the moment). So, we create a Twitter account for them and a tool like RSS To Twitter.
Now, we just sit back and wait for some news to appear... :-)
Of course there is a whole bunch of useful information that could be pushed out if it was available in the right format, for example geographic information. And yes it would be better if we didn't need to use a bunch of 3rd parties tools to mash it together, but then again this is Web 2.0 in action and none of this is mission critical stuff.
BTW Wollongong City Council are more than welcome to all these bits and pieces if they want them.
Tags: government 2.0, gov2.0, local government, local councils, Australia, RSS, news, feeds, Twitter, Yahoo! Pipes, Feedburner, RSS To Twitter, mashups, Web 2.0
Over on the Headshift Australasia blog, find out how to get a 5 user license for Confluence for just US$5! PS This will probably be the last time I routinely cross-post a link to the Headshift Australasia blog. Remember, you can subscribe to the feed for the HOZ blog here.
Tags: headshift, blog, atlassian, confluence, wiki, enterprise wiki
"Anecdote, Sparknow and Innotecture [aka Engineers without Fears] have been working together for a little while now to find out a bit more about what stories have influence and impact. We've found quite a difference in views, even among ourselves. So we're inviting our combined readership and their networks (and their networks) to participate in Story Week (starting May 4th) Over 5 days we're going to show you 5 stories from different people in different formats, intended for very different audiences and settings. You're going to tell us how you respond to them. We'll tell you what you collectively told us. We'll all learn something in the process. Oh, and it will be fun, too. Watch this space..."
Tags: Stories, Story Telling, Knowledge Management, Matt Moore, Anecdote, Innotecture
There really should be rules about blogging about Twitter (or if we want to speak more generically, micro-blogging). Navel gazing makes for boring blogging. But luckily, there are no rules for how people have to use social media... which is my point:
The only rules are the individual 'game' rules (not just the terms of service, but how the tool actually works in practice) that exist for each social media part. Privacy controls for example are a game rule that people can have direct input into. But one of the most important game rules in any social media application is how you 'friend' people. Some social media applications are strict, whilst others are open.
I think it fair to say that one of Twitter's failings is the simplistic privacy controls and follow/follower management. If a user's Twitter account is public, then you can follow them. As the person being followed, you are left to your own devices to determine if you want to follow back. With this model, and in the worse cases thanks to a little bit of social engineering Internet marketing, you can easily end up with with people - like celebrities, Internet marketers, news providers - who follow a handful of people themselves but have tens of thousands and even millions of followers. While its questionable in most cases how much social capital they actually add to the Twittersphere as long they don't bring Twitter down because of the volumes of traffic they generate, who really cares?
But we also have to accept these game rule deficiencies in Twitter are also a major strength. It allows people to easily connect with each other - if you think a person looks interesting or said something interesting, then follow them. It has also allowed a whole ecosystem of third party hacks and applications to grow around it (I previously shared my idea for checking a Twitter user's authenticity).
Ultimately, if you don't like what someone is doing or saying on Twitter then you the user still have the ultimate social networking anti-pattern defense - you can unfollow. And in the worse cases block.
Of course if you are out there trying to use social media tools like Twitter to engage with people for business or other reasons, then in the absence of fixed general social media rules it is critical that you understand the norms that are evolving in reaction to the particular game rules for each social media part. Just like any social group, these norms will continue to evolve even if the underlying game rules don't as the usage of that particular social media part grows or matures. (BTW this is also one reason why you should never hire a social media consultancy or service provider to help you, unless they use this stuff themselves).
It is interesting to consider that even Twitter's own definition of spam is an evolving one too:
"Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers."
Me personally, I switched off the option to receive a notification when someone follows me as it was just too hard to sort the expletive deleted Internet marketers from the genuine users (alas, I'm not aware of any celebs ever following me!). These days if you want to get my attention on Twitter you'll need to actually talk to me in a meaningful way. And, for the record I don't expect anything less back.
As Twitter goes mainstream how are you managing followers? And are you following any celebrities (and did they follow back)?
Tags: Twitter, microblogging, rules, marketing, celebrities
A well known pizza chain is the lastest organisation to suffer from a "social media quake" of sorts (check out the view from Twitter) - on this occasion, a couple of employees uploaded to YouTube a series of (what they claim to be) prank videos showing them doing disgusting things during food preparation. The company responded with its own YouTube announcement and the employees have now been fired and may face legal or criminal action.
Its very easy to blame social media for causing so much damage to this company's brand:
"The opportunities and freedom of the internet is wonderful. But it also comes with the risk of anyone with a camera and an internet link to cause a lot of damage"But this whole episode actually reminds me of this quote from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, from the time he was working in a hotel kitchen - he describes the filthy conditions behind the scenes:
"It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour--spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled food. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat. Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of food that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go in looking the picture of cleanliness."Thanks to the modern food and health regulations that didn't exist in Orwell's time, I don't think that pizza chain in question is any better or worse than any other similar commercial take away operation. But lets not kid ourselves. Do you think you really know what happens behind the scenes in any organisation? But is it worse that we know about it or worse that it happens at all?
Tags: pizza, YouTube, socia media quake, George Orwell, disgusting, filthy, transparency
Another post over on the Headshift Australasia blog, this time talking about the future of television advertising. Would love to hear your views on this topic!
Tags: headshift blog
In a HBR article (and discussed in an interview for CIO mag), Morten Hansen argues that some internal collaboration can be bad for organisations.
He puts forward a relatively simple equation that weighs the projected return on the results of the collaboration against the opportunity cost and direct costs of collaboration as the basis for a managerial decision making aid - in effect you can calculate the “collaboration premium” to determine if its worth proceeding. As you might guess from the provocative title, in Hansen’s view the cost of collaboration often doesn’t add up.
On closer reading, I found Hansen really only talking about a specific level of organisational collaboration - specifically project-based collaboration between business units, where there is a defined beginning and end to the initiative (e.g. writing proposals, creating a new product line). In this context Hansen’s examples really simply point at the root causes for failure - that is, internal politics, organisational structures and management systems (both technical and organisational) are all factors that can create barriers to effective collaboration. In other words, if people in your organisation are pulling in different directions, then collaboration is going to be difficult. No kidding?
In doing this he also neglects a whole level of strategic collaboration above this formal business unit project-collaboration and emergent social networking or tactical collaboration below. It also ignores the benefits of collaboration to ongoing operational processes that span internal boundaries. Unfortunately, my concern is that this paper might convince some managers to block all kinds of collaboration without a quantifiable short-term business case.
In this sense the article is particularly disappointing because it fails to look at the bigger picture of collaboration in organisations. For example, he describes a solution for bad collaboration in one organisation as the appointment of a manager with “a broad personal network within the company”. However, its this very kind of beneficial below the line informal collaboration that Hansen omits from his discussion and risks blocking
He also confirms that while the experienced teams they evaluated found the cost of collaborating on proposals provided no direct benefit, “novice teams at the firm actually benefited from exchanging ideas with their peers.” So shouldn’t we factor in the total organisational costs and benefits of collaboration when evaluating a single project?
The other issue that Hansen fails to address with his collaboration premium calculation is the benefit of both experience and systems that can help to reduce the cost of collaboration - which is exactly why some of us are excited for the potential of social computing to contribute to collaboration and knowledge management in large or distributed organisations. Unfortunately, as Clay Shirky discusses in his book, the return on investment of social computing is hard for organisations to see.
At a high level Hansen is right when he calls for cultivating the right kind of collaboration, but by then encouraging managers to add up the pros and cons of each project in isolation sends the wrong message.
Tags: Harvard Business Review, HBR, Morten T. Hansen, collaboration, Clay Shirky, social computing
I don't get out west that often, but I just thought I would mention that I will be in Adelaide (Tuesday 7th) and Perth (Wednesday 8th) over the next few days. I have full days, but have time to talk about Headshift, government 2.0, social computing, social media, collaboration and even knowledge management over a beer in the evening if anyone is interested. Just drop me a line or give me a call - I'll be staying in central Adelaide and Perth.
Tags: chieftech, adelaide, perth, beer, travelling, on the road
I don't think we should be surprised to be getting mixed message about the value of being online. On one hand some (Australian as it happens) recent research suggests that:
"people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not."Meanwhile, we have had a run of more scare stories locally about people getting sacked over online behaviour, in particular negative comments about their employers or their jobs.
I have to say, searching around some of the social networking sites it wasn't that hard to find examples of things, in the current environment, that could get people into trouble based on those reports. I am actually surprised by the number of people who either don't know or don't care about privacy settings on social networking sites (even people who might catch the media's attention right now - perhaps they aren't looking that carefully?).
Only say online what you would say face to face
Hat tip to Mark Woolley for the video - there are more on his original post.Tags: internet, society, employment, sacked, social networking, privacy, The Cluetain Manifesto, Facebook, YouTube, Mark Woolley
This is still my blog, but Headshift Australasia has a blog too now (with an RSS feed here). If you enjoyed my slides from BarCamp, you'll enjoy my first post over at our Headshift blog, where I go into a bit more detail about the thinking behind my presentation.
Well, what are you waiting for? Get over there and comment already :-)
Tags: headshift blog
There is a stream of pics tagged with barcampcanberra2 on flickr, including a couple of me...
and
My slides from #barcampcanberra...
A Gov 2.0 Postcard from Headshift, London
Lots of discussion today about running a Gov 2.0 barcamp in Canberra - so keep your ears open for details.
UPDATE: For those that want to dig a little deeper with the examples I used, here are some links to sites mentioned in my presentation:
Tomorrow is #barcampcanberra and I’ll be getting up early to drive down from Wollongong for the day. I’m planning to talk about something Gov 2.0 flavoured and have been thinking about where Australia is compared to the rest of the world. For example, while at Barcamp in Canberra this week, over in the US a Government 2.0 Barcamp is taking place - they ended up capping this event at 500 people.
Now, I don’t believe Twitter is the beginning and end of social computing, but it does provide an interesting benchmark for comparison. Lets consider the UK and Australia:
Local authorities in the UK on Twitter = 90 out of 468 (approx. 20%)
versus
Local councils in Australia on Twitter = 3 out of 677 (less than 1%).
Those 3 councils I’m aware of are the City of Sydney, Mosman and Wyong. There may be a few more, but let face it - we would need to pull a lot out the hat to match the UK's efforts to date.
Now, when you look at the combined 10,000 or so followers the UK councils have attracted so far in the context of the UK's total population, you might be tempted to argue that Twitter isn’t actually having much of an impact. However, two points need to be considered:
Firstly, Twitter isn’t a numbers game - considering the low barrier of entry for establishing a Twitter presence, it provides an excellent return on investment compared to other hit and miss broadcast communication approaches - its not a passive communication tool as information is getting specifically to those that want it. Some of those Twitter followers will be acting as information brokers, so news and other information will be passed on through other information channels, including both the traditional media and other social media.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it is a sign of UK councils have far greater willingness to experiment with social media as new ways of communicating and engaging with the communities they represent.
It would be unfair of me to bash Australian local government over the head with Twitter. There are lots of reasons why government as a whole in Australia isn’t experimenting with social computing to the same degree as the UK (and the US, Canada, etc). And, as I mentioned earlier, there is more to using social computing in government than Twitter. For example, look at HeadShift’s Commission for Rural Communities case study:
“The Commission for Rural Communities ensures that governmental policies reflect the real needs of people living and working in rural England... [they] faced the challenge of uniting groups and individuals based in very different places.”
Sounds like the kind of challenge we face in this wide brown land, right?
So, if at least four Aussie councils have now done it, what’s stopping the others from at least sticking a toe in the water and start investigating the possibilities? Well, to help on that front here are some Twitter focused tips:
If you work in local government in Australia I would love to know more about what’s stopping you from experimenting with social media and social computing.
BTW This wasn't a scientific survey of Twitter use! My rough calculation of the number of local authorities in the UK is based on data from local.gov.uk and Wikipedia. For Australia, I used a figure from the Australian Local Government Association. I also used data for Twitter from the Local Government Engagement Online Research Blog and twitter.com/uklocalcouncils. Also, if I’ve missed out an Aussie council on Twitter, please let me know.
UPDATE: Care of the Stap isi blog, here are examples of a few more Aussie local councils on Twitter - City of Bayswater (toe in the water, but not twittering as yet), Mitcham Council, and Toowoomba Council.
Tags: Benchmarking, Government 2.0, Barcamp, Barcamp Canberra, Twitter, local government, councils, US, UK, Australia, TwitterLocal, RSS
Like anyone who works in the enterprise social computing space, Thomas Vander Wal's post about SharePoint was essential reading. He concludes:
"What is clear out of all of this is SharePoint has value, but it is not a viable platform to be considered for when thinking of enterprise 2.0. SharePoint only is viable as a cog of a much larger implementation with higher costs. It is also very clear Microsoft’s marketing is to be commended for seeding the enterprise world of the value of social software platform in the enterprise and the real value it can bring. Ironically, or maybe true to form, Microsoft’s product does not live up to their marketing, but it has helped to greatly enhance the marketplace for products that actually do live up to the hype and deliver even more value."However, the responses have been just as interesting, like Mike Gotta, Michael Sampson, Oliver Marks, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Todd Stephens (Sharepoint versus the World, Sharepoint Bites Back and Another Sharepoint Myth Debunked).
And what about me? What do I think?
I have to say that there is certainly a ring of truth about Vander Wal's analysis, but... I'm not entirely convinced about the basis of his arguments.
The test for Enterprise 2.0 isn't cost or a list features, although we do expect it to be built using Web technologies and ease of use is important. However, even in those cases Web-based doesn't just mean Web browser based and I would claim 'ease of use' is in the eye of the beholder. No, the measure of SharePoint's Enterprise 2.0 worthiness is in how it is used and how users are allowed to use it. And there is where, from looking at the SharePoint product suite and my experiences in the field, that I have a problem with SharePoint.
Out of the box, there are trade offs in SharePoint that make it a passable document-collaboration tool, but in doing this it is structured in such a way that it also silos and constrains users and information. Beyond document-collaboration, other potentially interesting portal features, like the Business Data Catalogue, require the intervention of administrators and visionary IT management. So its a user-driven environment only within certain limits.
I'm also not convinced that SharePoint has heralded the era of Enterprise 2.0. What is has done is provided a low barrier of entry to a Collaboration capability that has been lacking in the majority of organisations and in that respect it has opened the door to Intranet 2.0, but in most cases SharePoint is deployed in a way that is very far removed from Enterprise 2.0. At this point we do start to find that the complexity in the SharePoint suite and its technical and information architecture become a barrier to using it as a platform for Enterprise 2.0 in the future - and its here Vander Wal's arguments start to play out. Unfortunately IT professionals only have themselves to blame if they deploy SharePoint haphazardly and get bitten by it later!
Still, there are off the shelf options that can help enrich SharePoint as a social computing tool - ReadWriteWeb covered a few of them last year - but even with these in place you will only have affected one part of your overall information workplace. That is, you've added some social features to your intranet (and they might have an impact), but you haven't really evolved into Enterprise 2.0.
So, being pragmatic, what can we do about SharePoint to make it as Enterprise 2.0 friendly as possible?
And if all this sound too hard, well perhaps SharePoint isn't the right choice for your organisation after all.
Tags: SharePoint, MOSS, Microsoft, Enterprise 2.0, Intranet 2.0, enterprise social computing, Thomas Vander Wal
How do you know that a Twitter account represents the person or organisation that they say they are? Just a thought, and this might sound complicated, but I think this could be an easy, workable solution.
Obviously it wouldn’t have to be mandatory (I mean, we still want Twitter to be fun!).
What do you think - could this work?
Alternatively, a great business model for Twitter could be to offer premium accounts that are “validated” by Twitter as authentic.
Tags: twitter, trust, online identity
Alas, data.gov.au doesn't really exist but it is at least an idea in the US. Craig provides some commentary in the Australian context and explains that "In Australia we even go to the extent of copyrighting government data." That's not a good starting point but of course we have to accept that here in Australia, our history, geography and the origins of government are quite different from the US. Having said that, while we can't avoid what happened in the past, it doesn't mean things can't change. Craig goes on to draw comparisons to the Wikipedia story:
"As history has recorded, countries that remove barriers to the free flow of ideas and information develop faster, are economically more successful and their people enjoy higher standards of living. Fostering innovation directly leads to national success. So in a world where some countries make data freely available, how do other nations continue to compete? To draw an analogy from the publishing world, Wikipedia disrupted the business model for Encyclopedia Britannica. By providing free 'crowd-sourced' information of greater depth and about the same accuracy as a highly expensive product, Britannica has been struggling to survive for years... In other words, you cannot beat openness with secrecy - the only way to remain successful is to step towards openness yourself."Like it not, change is coming to government around the world and Australia can't bury its head the sand.
Tags: government, government 2.0, web 2.0, australia, craig thomler
My, doesn't time fly. Alex Manchester nudged me the other day and asked if I could help get the word out about Step Two Design's 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards. Now in its third year, the aim of the awards are to:
Since this is an Aussie initiative, I'm more than happy to spread the word. You'll find more details on Alex's blog. To date I think the awards have thrown up some interesting winners that reflect great examples of the state of the art, but I'm still waiting for something really innovative in the intranet space - maybe this is the year?"celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets. The goal is to find these ideas (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider community."
Perhaps part of the challenge here is throwing off the baggage associated with the word "intranet"... what do you think? What does intranet innovation mean to you?
PS You'll find details of some of Headshift's own innovation with intranets on the Projects page.Tags: step two designs, alex manchester, headshift, innovation, intranet innovation awards
I was busy busy twittering on the day, but realised I had neglected to post anything post-conference about Ross' Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum a few weeks ago.
So what did I learn? Firstly, my main take away was that I noticed a big change this year from people asking what is Enterprise 2.0 to how do I do Enterprise 2.0. My second take away was an observation that while the IT and Marketing communities have been sharing experiences with using social computing, there isn't enough sharing between those groups and the Learning and Development sector who are another significant group that are using the same tools.
I really enjoyed hearing JP's address, although I think some people were disappointed that it wasn't some kind of high energy key note motivational thing. Personally I admire him for his achievements, passion, ideals and his thoughtful and well written blog posts, not the buzz. Bear in mind also that JP joined us via videoconference and it was pretty late in the UK.
I also think Brad Howarth made a good attempt to integrate the background Twitter stream into his panel discussion :-)
I also ran a series of mini-workshop on implementing wikis... and the one common issue that came up time and time again that people wanted to discuss was how to encourage more participation. Luckily my mini-workshop actually addressed this in part by asking participants to think more critically about their objectives and how that matched to both how their use of their wiki software and their expectations of how staff would use it. In one instance it sounded like the wiki was really being used just as a simple Web Content Management System (WCMS), so you can't really expect high levels of collaboration, conversation and contribution. However, to highlight my earlier point, at least no one asked what is a wiki!
If you are interested I've uploaded the slides from my handout, however they are based on my original (and apparently popular) Intranet 2.0 slides:
Anyway, a big hat tip to Ross for pulling off another great event, including ensuring we all had power and wifi available. Other conference and event people, please take note!
