Collaborative Thinking

The New Out-Of-Office Message: Twitter and FriendFeed

I was e-mailing a vendor contact as part of a document review process and received this "out of office" message. I think it's perfect. I've cleaned it up a bit below but I think this is a sign of things to come - don't push away, simply redirect:

I'm at the <insert name of event or business trip> between <dates> and will have delayed access to e-mail. If you have an extremely urgent issue, then call me directly at <cell phone info>.

If you want to keep track of me, then follow me via Twitter at http://twitter.com/<name> or via FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/<name>.

Out-of-office replaced by shared situational awareness.

Thinking In Terms Of Patterns

If I was at the Web 2.0 Expo, I would love to sit in on this session - but unfortunately I am in the middle of writing a report due early May (although I have a brief trip later this week). 

Looking at social software in terms of "patterns" can be very helpful. Patterns can represent real-life usage models. The can be comprised of one or more user archetypes (personas), attributes related to the activity and the relationships between those personas and attributes. Specific personas (“Jane Doe is a utilization management nurse and a subject matter expert on infectious disease”) help bring a pattern to life, allowing people to see themselves in the solution that pattern addresses. Documenting a pattern (or usage model) in such a manner helps articulate the social aspects of work and defines a narrative that people can agree on. Not only does this help humanize a solution, but it also enables an IT organization to leverage patterns as templates into which certain tools can be mapped. 

If you’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this week, you’re invited to Wikipatterns Theatre Wednesday, April 23rd through Friday April 25th in the Atlassian booth, #535. Presentations will be held every hour, on the hour during the open hours of the expo. Presentations last about 5 minutes, with 5-10 minutes for Q&A afterward, and focus on wiki adoption and use topics. See the full schedule below for details.

Free copy of Wikipatterns book at Web 2.0 Expo!

Social Networks Help With Fighting Crime

Some fascinating examples of how social network sites can reset assumption regarding how they might be utilized in practical ways. In this case, the two examples below help provide situational awareness to people, enabling them to self-synchronize with what's going on around them - in this case, crime: 

All Sorts of Awesome Here…

Earlier this week, Joseph Porcelli made my day with the following note:

Hi Gina,

My name is Joseph Porcelli. During the day I work for the Boston Police Department. Tomorrow there will be a major article about our new NING Social Network http://e13.bostoncrimewatch.com.

Boston Police was first police department in the country, first to have a news blog, first Neighborhood Crime Watch unit to have a blog, and now we are the first (I believe) to launch a social network.

My other networks on Ning are http://jp.neighborsforneighbors.org, as well as the Mug Project I co-founded, http://www.mugproject.com, and one more, my personal site: http://www.josephporcelli.com.

Keep up the AWESOME work!

Joseph Porcelli

Ning Blog : Blog Archive - All Sorts of Awesome Here…

Holy Facebook, Batman! Let’s fight crime in Manchester, England!

Mark Zuckerburg’s creation has a new role. Fighting crime in Manchester, England. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) (reports TechCrunch UK) has launched a Facebook application which adds local crime alerts to your profile and news feed, getting the news about crime incidents out there to more youthful users of the Net than is normal for most police operations. Users can submit items via links to GMP on the application, and as well as news items, and even get GMP’s YouTube videos. The application appears to be the first of its type in the UK (I’m not sure about the world, but it could be a contender for that title). Quite who developed the app is as yet unknown, but I’ll update when I find out.

Holy Facebook, Batman! Let’s fight crime in Manchester, England!

Social Software: It's Not New, And It Includes e-Mail...

Based on some Twitter conversations - my definition of social software relies on the insight of Clay Shirky (who is referenced extensively below). Despite how vendors are trying to use the term as if they suddenly discovered something new - social software has been around for some time. And despite some vendors trying to constrain its definition to things like blogs, wikis, etc. social software needs to be examined as a continuum of software tools and applications - not as a time-slice to support a particular product agenda.

We need to recognize the lineage of social software, the instantiations of social software over the years (e.g., e-mail), where it worked - where it failed, and how today's current generation of social software better support social interactions and social contexts better than previous tools (e.g., a wiki vs. e-mail).

If we fail to acknowledge the lineage of social software in terms of its past (e.g., e-mail), present (e.g., blogs, wikis) and future - then we ignore many of the lessons learned along the way and we introduce the chance that we will repeat past mistakes. For instance, much of the chatter around social networks reminds me of the KM holy grail of the late nineties. Vendor positioning of their software as social computing platforms reminds me of the over-hyped marketing of groupware and portals.

Some key points to ponder - or perhaps consider them as "Shirkyisms"...

1.  "I was looking for something that gathered together all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline"

2. "Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize."

3. "One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create."

Additional Background:

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Social software, software that supports group communications, includes everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities -- though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.

Prior to the Web, we had hundreds of years of experience with broadcast media, from printing presses to radio and TV. Prior to email, we had hundreds of years experience with personal media -- the telegraph, the telephone. But outside the internet, we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once. Conference calling was the best it got -- cumbersome, expensive, real-time only, and useless for large groups. The social tools of the internet, lightweight though most of them are, have a kind of fluidity and ease of use that the conference call never attained: compare the effortlessness of CC:ing half a dozen friend to decide on a movie, versus trying to set up a conference call to accomplish the same task.

The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.

The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can't be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.

Our centuries of experience with printing presses and telegraphs have not prepared us for the design problems we face here. We have had real social software for less than forty years (dated from the Plato system), with less than a decade of general availability. We are still learning how to build and use the software-defined conference tables and campfires we're gathering around.

Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

It isn't until late 2002 that the term 'social software' came into more common usage, probably due to the efforts of Clay Shirky who organized a "Social Software Summit" in November of 2002. He recalls his first usage of the term to be from approximately April of 2002.

I asked Clay if it was the loss of meaning in the terms 'groupware' that made him choose the term 'social software', and he replied:

"I was looking for something that gathered together all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline, e.g. Meetup, nTag, etc. Groupware was the obvious choice, but had become horribly polluted by enterprise groupware work."

I asked him why he didn't use the term 'collaborative software' and he commented:

"...because that seems a sub-set of groupware, leaving out other kinds of group processes such as discussion, mutual advice or favors, and play.

The broader issue is that there was no word or phrase that grouped the CSCW and online community currents together without also including a lot of non-group oriented stuff. CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) for example, includes broadcast outlets like C|Net, two-person email exchanges, and spam -- much too broad. There was also no word or phrase that called attention to the explosion of interesting software for group activities that fell outside online communities and CSCW, things like Bass-Station (which is for offline community) or "Uncle Roy is All Around You" (which is computer-supported collaborative play.)"

Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

Social Software

Near the end of 2002, the term "social software" was gaining ground due mostly to the efforts of ClayShirky, the [iSociety] project, and the [The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003]. Shirky held a widely publicized "Social Software Summit", which can be best summarized by its [announcement]:

"Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize. One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create. Recognizing this, the Social Software Summit seeks to bring together a small group of practitioners and theorists (~25) to share experiences in writing social software or thinking about its effects."

Meatball Wiki: SocialSoftware

Enterprise 2.0, Social Networks And Social Media

Dennis pinged me yesterday on his post. I've included some excerpts here but you should follow the citation link to read the entire article which has additional insights and references. Dennis also points to one of my recent posts on the topic. To me, social software is in the tool domain. Social media is in the user experience domain. Social media is delivered via tools (social software).  And both fall under the general umbrella of social computing. We take something like social software, mix in the organizational/culture factors and we have "Enterprise 2.0" (this is a quick over-simplification). Social networking is somewhat of a hybrid - there are tools, and a user experience aspect can exist (especially around a social network site ala Facebook) but there are tremendous relationship dynamics that, as Dennis points out, can differentiate it from both social media and social software - but still under the broader field of social computing.

I do agree with Dennis that I rarely hear the term social media applied internally. I'm really not sure why - since in my definition - social media is about the user experience. But I think it's one way people try to draw lines in their minds to differentiate internal efforts from external initiatives that involve brand and other marketplace factors.

Social networks clearly apply to organizations however. I feel quite strongly on this point. Yes, they are tremendously over-hyped and yes, we are making many of the same mistakes associated with "knowledge management mania" of the late nineties and the "groupware craze" of the late eighties / early nineties. The holy grail pursuit of enterprise portals also comes to mind.

But social networks have existed for centuries and it is important that business and IT strategists understand the nature of such relationships and participation models. While power relationships are a valid point to call out, I disagree with how Dennis frames that particular aspect as significantly more important than other dynamics that influence relationships, formal/informal structure, culture and so on. But that's fine - we can agree-to-disagree. I do agree on the "irrational exuberance" being touted by different evangelists regarding social-anything.

What we need to do is not lead the discussion or the solution by talking about social networks or social anything in most cases. We need to talk about the solutions in terms that business and normal people understand.

• Business decision makers and other strategists need to hang their hat on an argument that demonstrates value to the institution. That's their role. Avoiding this requirement leads to institutional forces fighting back. Example: I talked to a company where middle management pushed back on the use of E2.0 tools because their roles became disintermediated. The public/transparent collection of information on blogs, wikis - coupled with RSS, etc - really cut into their perceived value as the "messenger" so they started asking people to go back to e-mail sent to those middle managers so they could summarize the information and bring it up the chain.
• Normal people need to know why they should care, why should they be aware of such applications or tools, why they should change their attitude and behavior to become engaged, to participate and contribute (this angle is very centric to the person on the edge and not a stakeholder in the institution per se).

If we can talk about how a social application improves how utilization management nurses in urban and rural areas can better share information to improve their own activities, streamline workflow and improve relationships with external providers (doctors, hospitals) - and it just happens to be a social network / community platform that plays a key role - then wow, that's great. Sign me up. But don't tell lead with the social network academic argument or the consumer metaphor of Facebook. Social technologies augment business activities so express the solution in those terms - do not "do social media for the sake of social media" or "social networks for the sake of social networks".

Facebook is attractive as a reference model to IT organizations because the site implements concepts that leverage many of the experiences organizations have gained over the years with collaboration platforms. Facebook supports its own messaging system, allows posting of documents, allows for group discussion forums, and displays a user interface reminiscent of enterprise portals (including how the platform integrates with application plug-ins – conceptually similar to portlets). However, Facebook also implements social networking concepts that are new to the vast majority of organizations. Strategists unfamiliar with the field of social networks beyond its technology aspects are unlikely to realize critical aspects such as:

• how culture influences awareness of, and engagement in, social networks
• how social networks can be structured in a variety of ways with, and/or without, technology as a mediation focus point
• how relationship dynamics influence participation (e.g., politics and various power plays)

Strategists unfamiliar with the inter-disciplinary research field of social networks (e.g., sociology, anthropology, mathematics) and focus primarily on tooling aspects are unlikely to realize the criticality of non-technology factors.

Facebook is one example of a usage model to help structure participation within a social network, and one reference point to leverage as a technical blueprint, but it is not the only framework possible.

The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media

Most CXO’s I know, who represent a cross-section of businesses both large and small, have concerns other than E2.0 and social media. Now that the consumer facing social media style stories are emerging, CXO’s are starting to pay attention to what this might mean for sales and marketing effectiveness. That’s a good thing. But the moment that equation is turned inward, the mood goes dark.

CXO’s instinctively know that internal collaboration, whether through rudimentary technologies like blogs and wikis hold significant efficiency promise. They know the technology is relatively inexpensive compared to other types of enterprise technology and that implementation can be rapid. They also get that in the longer term, these technologies could hold incredible promise for business effectiveness across their entire value chain lies in releasing huge amounts of resource back into the business. None of that is disputed. What is disputed are two things, social media and social networking as applied internally. Why?

...

In the context of ’social’ anything, these are incredibly important concepts because what we’re really talking about are power relationships. In any business, power relationships are what provide the hidden glue that makes organizations develop hierarchies and structures. We see this reflected in almost every major form of software you care to examine. From process workflows that mange order to cash, through problem resolution in the call center and out to procurement. We have baked those relationships into the structure and organization of everything we see as providing the means of operating successful businesses. Then all of a sudden, business leaders are asked to forget everything they know, accept that structures can and will be subverted but that it will all be OK because people will naturally want to collaborate to get things done. This is a fundamentally incorrect assumption.

...

While the benefits of collaboration may be blindingly obvious and the path laid out on a platter, it is only by first understanding the absolute requirement for top down, wholesale DNA change that you stand a hope in hell of making these technologies work within the enterprise. How might this be encouraged?

...

What I will say is this. All the internal marketing efforts currently being expended will not do it. Neither will the application of liberal doses of FUD. Don’t wait upon the next generation because they won’t do it for you, despite what some pundits might think. You can absolutely forget the latest shiny new object coming out of the fertile imaginations of most (not all) Silicon Valley development shops. Leave that to the consumer obsessed. Which includes Twitter; as currently iterated and (probably) Facebook.

The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com

Talent Management: Create An Environment, Not An Edict

Worth visiting the site where there is a transcript, audio and video session available:

Ask any CEO or senior level executive what his or her biggest challenge is, and the answer is almost always finding and keeping good people. Yet most executives fail to manage their company's needs in a way that recognizes the unpredictability of the global marketplace. In a book titled, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, proposes a new approach to this issue based on applying the principles of supply chain management to people. He and Joyce Bradley -- senior vice president and general manager, Delaware Valley region, of Lee Hecht Harrison, a global human capital consulting firm headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. -- spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about talent management, including the challenges of managing employees in a recessionary economy. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

The Talent Hunt: Getting the People You Need, When You Need Them - Knowledge@Wharton

Another Example Of Facebook Integration:

Community is where the people are:

Awareness uses the Awareness Facebook Application Framework to create branded Facebook applications customized for its customers, giving them a new way to engage with their online community members by extending the reach of their communities directly into Facebook and leveraging Facebook's viral promotion features. The Port Charlotte Voice, a New York Times Regional newspaper, is the first customer to implement the Awareness Facebook Application Framework, allowing the newspaper to present a variety of headlines, user-generated content and more from its online Awareness-powered social media community directly into Facebook.

The Awareness Facebook Application Framework is included as part of the Awareness Enterprise Social Media platform and leverages all of the enterprise social media benefits in an existing Awareness-powered community. The application also respects any security or permissioning restrictions built into the community, so it can be used for private and closed communities as well as public and open ones. The application, which will appear in the Facebook directory when registered with Facebook, is installable by any Facebook user and can be shared using standard Facebook application sharing functionality.

http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/news/press-releases/awareness/041508.asp

Re-org at Microsoft relocates UC head to its emerging markets unit

Anoop Gupta resurfaces in the Unlimited Potential Group:

Taking Poole's place at UPG is Anoop Gupta, whose most recent project at Microsoft has met with some success: Unified Communications, the company's strategy to move telephony onto the PC platform where the software industry can have a stake. Gupta is a veteran researcher and educator, having served over a decade at Stanford University as a computer science professor, and thereafter having served Bill Gates as his personal technology assistant.

BetaNews | Re-org at Microsoft relocates UC head to its emerging markets unit

Threading The Needle Of Successful Community

Interesting clip on Threadless.com. 

Participatory Surveillance: Co-mingling Intimacy & Exposure

I recently came across two articles independently that actually come together quite nicely. Leisa Reichelt is credited with establishing the term "ambient intimacy" and has coined a new term she refers to as "ambient exposure" (see the first citation below). Both concepts and the perspective she provides as context came out when I went back and re-read something I had come across earlier (see the second citation below).

The idea of interacting within in a mediated public space (such as Twitter) is clearly an exercise in participatory surveillance. A similar situation arises with services such as Friend Feed. In both cases, I have people "following me" on Twitter or subscribing to my shared activities on Friend Feed, whom I do not know at all. In some cases, this works out well - sometimes the notification that I am being followed causes me in turn, to follow that person if they seem to have some mutuality with my interests. In some ways, these types of mediated public and the ability to establish some level of mutually assured surveillance (reminds one of the cold war term "MAD"), can promote some amount of homophily. 

On the other hand, as Leisa rightly points out, it can make one feel uncomfortable as well. Especially when you are followed/subscribed to by someone that you cannot in turn, establish a similar level of surveillance. The sense that there is an unequal power distribution in the relation can lead you to block that person from following you for instance (as I've done at times in Twitter). This situation can lead people to seek certain "walled gardens" (e.g., Facebook) within which they feel more comfortable to share information because such interactions are within a closed circle of trusted relationships whose ties perhaps reflect real-life connections.   

Article snippets and citation links below:

Ambient Exposure

It’s been more than a year now since I first wrote about Ambient Intimacy, and in that year it seems a whole lot has gone on.

.....

All of these changes in the past year have gotten me to thinking about something that I’m going to call Ambient Exposure. Exposure in terms of disclosing information of course, but also exposure in the way that a trader might think of it - a vulnerability, a risk associated with taking a position that could, potentially, result in loss or harm.

.....

In the same way that we are not necessarily good at or able to forecast the impact of choosing to add someone to our contact list, we are similarly perhaps not good at anticipating the impact of sharing particular types of information with others.

disambiguity - » Ambient Exposure

Participatory surveillance

In the following I suggest using the concept of participatory surveillance [5] to develop the social and playful aspects surveillance. First, online social networking is related to the traditional hierarchical surveillance concept. Second, the aspect of mutuality will be studied. Third, I will elaborate on the idea of participatory surveillance with regards to user empowerment, subjectivity building and information sharing.

.....

Empowerment, subjectivity building and sharing

In the following, I will call attention to two aspects of surveillance in the context of online social networking which are missing or underdeveloped in the previously discussed concepts. These are the idea of user empowerment and the building of subjectivity, and, second, the understanding of online social networking as a sharing practice instead of an information trade. Together, these two aspects, along with mutuality, makes up what I call participatory surveillance.

As mentioned earlier, a hierarchical conception of surveillance represents a power relation which is in favor of the person doing the surveillance. The person under surveillance is reduced to a powerless, passive subject under the control of the “gaze.” When we look at online social networking and the idea of mutuality, it appears that this practice is not about destructing subjectivity or lifeworld. Rather, this surveillance practice can be part of the building of subjectivity and of making sense in the lifeworld.

.....

Online social networking can also be empowering for the user, as the monitoring and registration facilitates new ways of constructing identity, meeting friends and colleagues as well as socializing with strangers. This changes the role of the user from passive to active, since surveillance in this context offers opportunities to take action, seek information and communicate. Online social networking therefore illustrates that surveillance – as a mutual, empowering and subjectivity building practice – is fundamentally social.

.....

The practice of online social networking can be seen as empowering, as it is a way to voluntarily engage with other people and construct identities, and it can thus be described as participatory. It is important to not automatically assume that the personal information and communication, which online social networking is based on, is only a commodity for trading. Implicit in this interpretation is that to be under surveillance is undesirable. However, to participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself – or your constructed identity – with others.

Accordingly, the role of sharing should not be underestimated, as the personal information people share – profiles, activities, beliefs, whereabouts, status, preferences, etc. – represent a level of communication that neither has to be told, nor has to be asked for. It is just “out there”, untold and unasked, but something that is part of the socializing in mediated publics.

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance