Open Space Technology with Larry Peterson

Another bonus of being down in Canberra yesterday was that I had the chance care of ACT KM during the day to learn a little about Open Space Technology (OST) from one the world's experts in this area, Larry Peterson. Larry is on a bit of a tour around Australia and NZ and recently ran an event with ACT KM's sister organisation in Melbourne.

OST is interesting because I can see how social software can act as both a tool to be used as part of an OST session (to capture and publish outputs quickly) but also as a kind of virtual OST.

Technorati tags: Open Space Technology, Larry Peterson, ACT KM, Social Software

A warm welcome for Enterprise 2.0 in Canberra

Chris Barry from AIM Canberra is making good use of their new blog and has posted some photos from my presentation last night. As you'll see I had a very warm welcome.

Special mentions for their support on the night to Mark Shenk from Anecdote, Angela Beesley, Craig Thomler from WordSoup (who is currently doing some interesting things at ActewAGL, including these map mashups), Brad Hinton (for taking the time to send me a follow up email with some thoughtful reading recommendations and for acknowledging a shared interest in industrial history!) and some colleagues from CSC who attended.

Technorati tags: Canberra, Australian Institute of Management

Half-Live Writer from Windows

I'm currently trying out Microsoft's Beta Windows Live Writer. I have to admit that I mostly like it...

It has comfortable look and feel of a Windows application - since it is essentially some kind of Frontpage/Word hybrid, that's what you would expect. And for that reason I could seriously see enterprise users adopting it very easily.

But there is always a "but" - can I find a simple plugin that will let me insert tags AND that will actually install? I don't know why, but this stuff is just so much easier in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird! Any ideas anyone?

UPDATE: Charles Teague from the Live Writer team pointed me in the right direction... I'm now up and running with the latest version and that has solved my tagging needs!

Tags: Windows Live Writer, WLW Plugins

Beware of the Dog

All Rod Boothby wanted to do was explain how he thought Enterprise 2.0 was a threat to traditional enterprise groupware like Lotus Notes... instead a pack of Lotus Notes developers turned on him ;-)

"With all due respect, Rod, you clearly haven't got a clue about what you're talking about when it comes to the capabilities of Lotus Notes and how (apart from basic mail and calendaring) it is used."

Read the comments on Ed Brill's blog too.

Yes, its true: I don't think Boothby really understands Lotus Notes either but that really isn't the point. Stu Downes articulates one part of this in his comments to the original post:

"[Lotus Notes] is competing with very well written web based applications which are increasingly becoming available freely on the web. These disruptive technologies will be in our enterprises tomorrow... I hope IBM can use this post as a jolt to remind themselves that many people are not getting the power of Notes because their own organisation is way behind the times and development curve."

However, I think there is more. Personally what I find frustrating (based on my own experiences of using Lotus Notes) is that the Enterprise 2.0 idea could be informed by an understanding of where Notes came from and what it has achieved. So building on Downes point, it could be a two-way street - Lotus Notes improves Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 improves Lotus Notes.

Unfortunately the real challenge that Lotus Notes faces from an Enterprise 2.0 platform is that it isn't a consumer technology - the trend we have seen is Web 2.0 technologies coming from the outside into organisations and with only few exceptions this is unlikely to happen for Lotus Notes.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software, Lotus Notes, Rod Boothby

Screaming anti-theft system for mobile phones

Very William Gibson... if you've read Virtual Light you'll know about the cars and bicycles that tell people to "Back off!" if they get too close - well:

"A UK firm is hoping a mobile security system it has developed which sets off a high pitch scream, permanently locks the handset and wipes all data if stolen, will halt the spiraling rise in phone theft."

This would be good for any kind of mobile information technology, don't you think?

Tags: Mobile Security System, William Gibson

Reminder: Rebooting the Enterprise with Blogs, Wikis and other Social Software next week in Canberra

Just a reminder:

Rebooting the Enterprise with Blogs, Wikis and other Social Software
Speaker: James Dellow, Senior Consultant - Information And Knowledge Management, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)
Location: Level 3, Engineering House, 11 National Cct, Barton (corner of National Cct and Brisbane Ave)
Time : 5.30pm-7.30pm (refreshments from 5.30pm)

For more information and to register to attend visit the AIM Website.

Tags: Australian Institute of Management, Canberra, Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise Wiki Survey Results - Participation challenges for some

Care of the ELSUA KM blog, a heads up that the results of a survey on enterprise wikis are now available. Some initial conclusions:

• The main reason affecting the choice of a wiki clearly is the simplicity of use and implementation. The expense is only a very small factor.


• The main problem is the lack of participation of the intended users. Almost half of the participants had to deal with this problem at least temporarily. Thus the encouragement of the employees is an important item to add to the success of the wiki.

Interesting that previously we have heard from the Motorola experience that a bottom-up implementation was easy to achieve. However, this survey suggests that this may not be the experience for everyone.

BTW I'd also like to extend my thanks to Tim Bartel for his efforts and for sharing the results.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software, Tim Bartel, Wikis

More user control over multimedia content

We all know that user-generated multimedia content, particularly video, is exploding online but as I've commented before a lot of this content is still static from a Web 2.0 point of view.

What I mean is that if you think about Andrew McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 "SLATES" concept - Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals - then its the deep search and ability to hyperlink from within content that we need to see mature. This isn't to say user-generated content isn't social, I just don't think it is fully integrated into the Web 2.0 model... well yet anyway.

Pluggd's demo of its semantic podcast search has created a bit of interest this last week and Techcrunch has a good summary of what its all about. Techcrunch comment:

"This is one of the most compelling examples I've seen lately of a growing trend: making multimedia content more granular and letting users take even greater control over the media we consume. We don't just want to consume what we wish, we want to consume it in the way we wish."

Also have a look at their overview of Viddler, who aim to make video easier to search via tagging.

BTW Another piece in this multimedia Web 2.0 space is talkr - working the other way, it converts text-based blogs (or rather RSS feeds) into machine read speech.

Tags: hypermedia, Pluggd, talkr, Viddler