Lotusphere 2008: IBM Research - Glimpsing The Future

Irene Greif and Joan DiMicco

Fascinating when you think of this in terms of organizational development, human capital management, social design:

• Social network websites, keeping up with people you know, more you use sites like Facebook, the greater your social capital, the more you know someone the more you trust them - all this has relevancy when it comes to the business value of socializing
• Profiles remain a challenge, why do people keep current their profiles and status of what they are doing (re: lifestream, activity stream, social presence)
• What needs to occur to change social sharing?
• Beehive: social networking in the enterprise, help guide future of Connections, Beehive is an opt-in website, you have a profile that is about self-branding, free-form self descriptions, shared content for connecting, more social sharing so things like photos, lists of all sorts, and events
• Events is the social space before/after the event
• Heavy "buzz" theme to the site - comments, chatter ... becomes a destination for conversation
• Beehive is an experiment, has been running for 8 months, results are somewhere between all work and play - not all personal but blend of personal and professional content - 6500 people using the site - sharing is different inside than outside
• 6500 people created profile pages, 8000 photos, 3500 list, 350 hosted events, users feel more free to share within enterprise vs. Internet - know audience is co-worker
• Note: this assumes a certain corporate culture - IBM may have the type of environment where this level of trust and sharing is welcome - not all organizations are necessarily that friendly. You simply cannot make an global assumption that defacto internal sharing is better in some way than external. You can say that it is different - but not better/worse than sharing on external sites.
• Interesting: can take lists data (top 5 technologies you cannot live without) and convert it into a tag cloud and you can get a sense of what tools are really valuable - you can drill down and poll / ask people to get a deeper understanding of why that tool is so important.
• Events. Hackday - people hacking new/different apps. People not in the community can peer into the event, who was involved, conversations, etc.
• User Profile: automated maintenance of what is being shared and filled out with recent information.
• Beehive lets people connect at a personal level (not the same as Connections).

More on virtual worlds, collaborative games but I have to run to a meeting...