Collaborative Thinking

What If Web 2.0-Style 'Life-Streaming' Isn't For Everyone?

Interesting catch-phrase: "broadcast yourself". It's an intriguing spin perhaps on how communication technologies are evolving (slowly)- rather than transmit information in a point-to-point manner to known addresses (e-mail sender to e-mail recipient), we post or stream communication to a space where 1-N people can receive it in multiple ways. As senders lose control of the tool used to interact with the message, those receiving such messages gain control by interacting with information using preferred tools. We can begin to think of "channel switching" as a key communication design point. For instance, a Twitter SMS post ("tweet") can be sent from a range of client tools but does not dictate the manner in which other users will interact with the message. Some users might receive it via SMS while others might see it on the Twitter web site or via IM or even displayed that user's Facebook page (via a Twitter plug-in). Messages can even be subscribed to (example: a tweet can be delivered to your favorite XML feed reader).

The article goes on to discuss Quickeo but the idea of communicating into a space (rather than locking a dialog into a specific toolset), and designing up-front for channel switching (which enables more flexible "1-N" conversation paths), jumped to mind.

A lot of non-techy people, when they hear the words wiki, upload, widgets, layout, blogging, user-generated content and so on, simply tune out; what's available now works for techies, but uploading personal content to a public Web site is a huge barrier for others. Such is the contention anyway of a new San Francisco-based startup, Quickeo, which offers a service for those "who don't want to go public with their private lives."

According to Quickeo, while YouTube tells you to "broadcast yourself," and Flickr says it can help anyone show off their best pictures to the whole world in a bid for Web celebrity, those messages just don't resonate with those who want to share pictures and videos with family and friends but not the whole world. The Quickeo alternative allows you to send any kind of data (e.g. video, photo, audio) in an email format called a Quickeomail.

What If Web 2.0-Style 'Life-Streaming' Isn't For Everyone? (SocialComputingMagazine.com)

Need To Know vs. Right To Know

One of my active research areas right now involves event stream processing and its implications to communication, collaboration and social networking. Specifically, I'm looking at how attention data and "post" activities act as informal, loosely-coupled signaling methods that, when streamed in a public manner, can be combined with sensor/filter/relay mechanisms to intelligently pull messages and information to other people or situate the information to the right place (e.g., a "my space" created as a honey pot of sorts to house interesting/relevant items). A goal of such an environment would be to create opportunities for subsequent connection and interaction (at a person-to-person, group, team, or community level). Examples of attention data and post events would include blog entries, tags, social bookmarks, and changes to presence indicators - even Twitter messages are a continuous stream of post events. The collection and streaming aspects could be accomplished through a combination of pinging, aggregation and XML syndication services. The sensor/filter/relay mechanisms could be instantiated through various clients and agent/watchers. This type of environment would likely not be a single system (overly complex and monolithic) but instead would be some set of inter-connected / net-centric systems of interoperating nodes, without hierarchy, and include some level of trust zones (for security/identity reasons).

Why look into this? Years ago I became fascinated by what DISA and DoD were doing around net-centric collaboration. The DoD felt that it was imperative to move from Task, Process, Exploit, Disseminate (TPED) to Task, Post, Process, Use (TPPU). The design emphasis is on posting, processing and using data and information in parallel. A key aspect was enabling processing to happen in parallel to information access with people having access to information refinement along the way. The thinking (I believe) is that getting information out to those that have a "right to know" through an intelligent pull model is more effective than pushing information through a process first (introducing latency) that makes assumptions about who "needs to know" (often driven by a desire for risk avoidance).

A TPPU model is about managing risk while providing near-instantaneous communication and information access. It avoids scenarios where people are not alerted and failed to become knowledgeable about situations that impact them. It is almost impossible to know who might have a time-sensitive or other relevant interest in the raw data and its refinement as the process cycle continues. It was felt that a TPPU approach would reduce communication latency and improve information transparency. The result of such an environment would be improved shared situational awareness and self-synchronization through net-centric collaboration. This would have obvious operational and battlefield benefits and have a transformational impact on future warfare strategies.

Adopting and applying these concepts more broadly is intriguing. Almost all organizations could benefit from a TPPU-like model in terms of improved enterprise agility, resiliency, and performance - and would positively influence innovation and knowledge management efforts). This, in a round-about way, gets back to "the need to know" vs. "the right to know". It does not necessarily mean an end to push-centric systems, they continue along in parallel to intelligent pull models. Clarifying my thinking around the balance between the two models was triggered by a comment from Urban Mermaid below. It's a fair point and highlighted some incomplete "thinking out loud" on my part in an earlier blog entry.

In any case, this post provides a glimpse into some current research activities. Feel free to comment ... this is not fully-baked in my mind, I'm bouncing ideas off of various clients and vendors and found this post by Jeff Jonas especially helpful.

Comment from Urban Mermaid

interesting that you mention people wading through the stream of information and extracting what they want. however, what i've found in my job of providing research & analysis is that i still have to actively push information to people.

it's like the advertising mandate to break through the clutter.

sure, there's definitely people willing to wade through it and that's a cultural value that's beginning to embed itself, but i also feel there's still a need to have some information that gets fed to people.

A cure for e-mail attention disorder? | CNET News.com

Applying models and practices from gaming environments as a means to improve how organizations communicate has some intriguing possibilities. This article examines the use of currency and some tenets from the field of economics (scarce resources) as a means to encourage better behavior and attention management. 

A cure for e-mail attention disorder?

Silicon Valley start-up develops system to help manage e-mail overload that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies.
Images: Handling e-mail overload

By Daniel Terdiman
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: February 28, 2007, 4:00 AM PST

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Corporate managers concerned about the amount of time employees spend sifting though mountains of unwanted e-mail may soon have World of Warcraft to thank for providing a solution.

That's because a Silicon Valley start-up called Seriosity has come up with a system to help manage e-mail overload that borrows heavily from the virtual economies and currencies found in WoW and other large-scale online games.

Known as Attent, Seriosity's system is essentially a new currency--called the Serio--that corporate e-mail users spend to indicate a message's importance: the more important they think the message is, the more Serios they spend on it. Recipients keep the Serios in the messages they get.

Similarly, when someone receives a message with Serios attached, they can indicate how important they think it is by responding with an appropriate number: none or very few if they think the message wasn't valuable, an equal number if they want the sender to know they appreciated the message or more than the original number to show they agree that it truly was crucial.

But Serios is a currency, and therefore a scarce resource, so users get a limited amount. The idea is that they have to spend the currency wisely, always making sure they have enough to send more with future messages.

And while the system, strictly speaking, is enterprise software, it was directly inspired by the virtual economies of online games like WoW. There, players accumulate gold or platinum pieces or some other form of currency and can spend them on weapons, armor, dwellings and the like that themselves have real monetary value as demonstrated by what people will pay for them on auction and third-party Web sites.

Ultimately, the point of Serios is to help large enterprises manage their employees' attention.

Source: A cure for e-mail attention disorder? | CNET News.com

Apple Innovates Again: iPhone

Cingular is the partner, impressive form factor and features.

Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye (comments, Cisco?).

Source: Engadget

Technology Deployment versus Technology Adoption

IT organizations have historically focused on a variety of aspects related to the deployment of information technology (e.g., architecture, applications, integration, networking, infrastructure, security, and operations) with little resources spent on technology adoption. This situation can be overly simplified by saying that IT pretty much concentrates on the plan-build-run phases of the technology lifecycle. Some organizations might append "retire" for the sunsetting aspect of legacy systems (plan-build-run-retire). But few organizations would insert "adopt" into that sequence. I think it's a fair comment to say that organizations equate "run" to "run away" when it comes issues related to the technology literacy and adoption challenges faced by users. People equate adoption to training and training is often one of the first areas cut in terms of budget and resources. But adoption is more than training on the tool, it's about change management and working more effectively. Adoption is about literacy, understanding technology in the context of work and becoming fluent in its use so that the technology becomes part of a user's work style (and potentially their lifestyle as well).

This is not the fault of IT groups. It's the fault of the organization at-large. In many cases, I find that business decision-makers do not have a governance framework that can value technology adoption. So it is rare that I hear about anyone, including IT groups, having a strategic role, budget and resources to participate in the organizational development aspects of applying technology effectively. The norm is to essentially throw it over the wall to training groups or let end users fend for themselves. Some experts feel that such problems will be solved simply by deploying social software (under the banner of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and such) or that younger workers will come into the workplace with such literacy embedded within their DNA (e.g., "digital natives") having grown up in a world where they communicate via a new collection of tools (e.g., blogs, instant messaging, etc.).

I'm not so sure we should accept the notion that technology literacy exists simply because someone has social software is supposed to be easier to use. And I'm not so sure that younger workers, although familiar with these tools, have the know-how to use the tools effectively in a business context.

My sense is that organizations need to prioritize technology literacy and adoption issues over the next couple of years and closely involve IT organizations in such efforts. 2007 and 2008 will see a wave of new applications and infrastructure platforms coming out from major vendors and the emergence of more socially-oriented tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, and social networking). These new platforms do indeed offer powerful new metaphors for people to work differently than previous generations of technology.

But the tipping point, in terms of delivering value back to the enterprise, is shifting from deployment (simply making the technology available) to adoption (making sure that users change behaviors). This is more than simply training on the tools, it's about making sure that users are aware of the capabilities of these tools (i.e., literacy) and are willing to work differently (take risk, explore new ways of thinking, new ways of doing and new ways of interacting).

Adoption helps ensure that users are engaged enough to apply these tools in a productive manner that leads to improved business performance and innovation. That's why I believe technology adoption will become a enterprise-wide mandate for the next two years.

The following articles triggered this train of thought:   

Cal State will soon demand technological literacy

The California State University, in conjunction with Educational Testing Service, is putting the final stages on a technological literacy test that gauges students' tech competency. Students would have to pass that test in order to move on to higher-level courses.

Source: Cal State will soon demand technological literacy

Testing for Technology Literacy

Professors, librarians, and other college officials are increasingly coming to grips with the somewhat confounding reality that despite students’ affinity for IPods and their complete comfort with Google, many of them lack the technological literacy they need to navigate today’s information landscape. But recognizing the problem is not the same as knowing how to measure or fix it — tasks that many colleges are puzzling over.

Source: Testing for Technology Literacy

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Are College Students Techno Idiots?

Susan Metros, a professor of design technology at Ohio State University, says that reading, writing and arithmetic are simply not enough for today’s students. What is important for learners is information: how to find it, how to focus it, and how to filter out nonsense. But for many students, their main source for information is Google, which Metros finds troubling.

Source: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Are College Students Techno Idiots?

Open-Source Spying - New York Times

Here's a test. First, read this article (it is fascinating) and just appreciate the situation that analysts find themselves in while working within intelligence agencies. After you read the article. Pause. Take a deep breath. And read it again - only this time, insert your company, your peers and yourself into the story. Pretend that it's not about intelligence agencies but your own organization. After you read the article - how close is your enterprise to the basic problems identified here regarding inefficient and ineffective communication, information sharing, collaboration and organizational networking? Now, before you run out and throw a blog or wiki silver-bullet at the problem - consider the organizational and human capital dynamics that need to be overcome. Culture and change management barriers trump technology thrown at these types of problems virtually all the time.

The job of an analyst used to be much more stable — even sedate. In the ’70s and ’80s, during the cold war, an intelligence analyst would show up for work at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., or at the National Security Agency compound in Fort Meade, Md., and face a mess of paper. All day long, tips, memos and reports from field agents would arrive: cables from a covert-ops spy in Moscow describing a secret Soviet meeting, or perhaps fresh pictures of a missile silo. An analyst’s job was to take these raw pieces of intelligence and find patterns in the noise. In a crisis, his superiors might need a quick explanation of current events to pass on to their agency heads or to Congress. But mostly he was expected to perform long-term “strategic analysis” — to detect entirely new threats that were still forming.

Source: Open-Source Spying - New York Times

Communication Technologies, A Decision Tree For Users

Dave Pollard's "How To Save The World" blog is one of my favorites because it forces me to think and reconsider my assumptions around certain trends and positions I take as an analyst. The diagram he has recently posted is worth your time reviewing.

Part of my task in my current consulting assignment is to develop the client's strategy for the use of e-learning and other communication tools. So I thought I'd update the decision tree I developed about three years ago. The result is shown above, and reflects the decision from the perspective of employees of larger organizations with a broad range of communication technologies at their disposal (or, in some cases, technologies that should be at their disposal). This assumes the organization has sufficient budget to invest in some commercial solutions, or to build their own.

Source: How to Save the World

It certainly would be useful if "senders" of messages were able to go through such a decision tree instinctively. Some of the challenges I find when I talk to clients:

• Senders have imperfect information; they honestly may not know whether or not a message is going to result in a back-and-forth exchange.
• Senders may think that the question is very straightforward ("yes/no") however the receiver may have an entirely different perspective due to a lack of context, a conflicting set of background information, etc.
• Senders may not think that they are collaborating - the sender may be thinking communication, the receiver may be thinking that they are collaborating around an activity and the message is part of that joint work.
• Sender and receiver may not know how many people will end up being involved in any conversation or joint activity. They may not have any idea of the elapsed time required to conclude such conversations or activity as well.
• Whether or not rich media is or should be involved is also often impossible to predict. I may not know whether my partner has rich media capabilities or not. He or she might have such technology at their desk, or in a conference room, but they might be mobile at the moment. There are many situational variables to consider.
• Against all of these framing items for the decision tree, the sender and receiver have other messages and activities that require similar decision trees. They can only afford so much time to optimize the best channel for communication. Often this ends up in e-mail, the least common denominator.

So, in concept, the diagram is a valiant effort to help orientate users and try to change behaviors. The reality however that I find within large enterprises is that users typically lack perfect information and perfect knowledge about the future series of interactions and activities a message will create. They can make best-guess assumptions and they can use some common sense to put "things" (documents, etc) into workspaces or wikis and keep channels for communication (alerts, notifications, commentary) with links back to the artifacts being discussed/referenced. Receivers can use XML syndication tools (RSS, Atom) to monitor workspaces and other broadcast communication tools (blogs, tags, bookmarks) to discover topics of interest.

Another very intriguing post on a similar topic (communication) was one not too long ago by Lilia Efimova ("Mathemagenic"), on "Weblog-mediated relationship: a co-constructed narrative". Her blog is another collection of writings that influence my thinking on "the bigger picture". Her post and diagram is a fascinating look at how communication channels and associated tools are merely movements in the complex choreography that occurs as people interact.

We're still very early in the process of observing, learning and understanding the models and patterns associated with effective communication and collaboration across people, groups and networks without burdening users with complex rules, decision trees and such. Diagrams, like the ones depicted in Mr. Pollard's and Ms. Efimova's posts, are important stepping stones since they help visualize our thoughts and provide scaffolding for subsequent discussion.

Presence: Thinking Way Beyond The Buddy List

Just some short-hand notes (not complete thinking) to capture thoughts-in-progress:

Presence & identity: At the core, presence is "you" but how many "you"'s are there? I have many personas: Principal Analyst at Burton Group, a technology geek to my circle of friends, father/husband to my family, a customer to some companies I deal with, etc. In some cases, I'm a made-up person (screen names on AOL or a member of some social networking site). It's important to not go too far down the road in terms of solving presence without due diligence regarding how it relates to identity and how identity is managed and secured.

Presence & location: Presence also touches upon where I am - my home office, on the road at a Starbucks, at a hotel, at a conference, etc. Location information is also important to consider when devising a strategy around presence.

Presence & environment: Somewhat related to location, presence could include insight to the environment around you - the capabilities and/or constraints of your computing environment (connectivity not good enough for video) as well as the form factor(s) you have at the moment (mobile device vs. a PC).

Presence & activity: Presence is influenced/impacted by the activity you are involved in as well as the activities of others. Certain activities preclude me from being available. Other activities might make me freely available. And there are all sorts of combinations in-between.

Presence & role: People wear many hats. There are default roles that might show up in a presence profile but perhaps not all possible permutations. There might be roles that are viewable through certain filters. For instance, someone might be considered a first responder in case of an emergency on their floor in a corporate office. Loading the filter for a "first responder role" into a presence system could display that view of presence information. Roles might also be tacit, my activities might grant me a role for some duration, or my expertise (know-how) or network strength (know-who) might make me "present" on-the-fly.

Presence & meta data: Presence can be assigned to artifacts. I might tag an artifact with meta-data that is resolved in real-time (e.g., author for a document, subject-matter expert) that might only display in a list of search results. Presence is attachable to any application element. Presence as "live" meta data (presence-enabled systems) is a good discussion to have with developers (workflow, etc).

Presence & availability: Availability is a subjective thing - always, sometimes, never, to everyone, to someone, to no one. If I say no one do I not mean my wife or boss. Can I delegate availability? How does availability relate intelligently to all the above (when I am in a certain activity I am unavailable)?

Presence & Social Relatedness: Presence conveys a type of peripheral vision and social nearness (cognitively) that it is important to consider the "connectedness" implications of presence in terms of social networks and community.

Presence & attention: Both inward attention (managing access, interruptions) as well as outward attention (am I trying to get noticed, or to let someone know something, by setting my presence status to a certain state).

Presence & federation: Not just across various organizational boundaries but also across identity boundaries. Security (confidentiality, privacy) comes into play more prominently.

Presence of objects: presence of "things" as well as people so RFID is a type of presence. My presence can be inferred from objects near me or that I handle or wear (nTag).

Presence & agents/avatars: As technology progresses and we automate tasks via bots of various sorts, what type of presence do these "instances of me" have as they act as my proxy? Am I present in real-life when I am in Second Life?

I'll end with that one ... food for thought and for consideration as to how some of these items relate to assumptions currently made around presence systems. How many assumptions based on instant messaging, IP telephony and so on will get in the way of a more expansive view of presence? How do we deal with the discovering, aggregating, brokering, filtering, de-duping, syndicating and other issues? Are we wrong to assume only SIP-based presence systems need apply? Will we have a flat presence server model (federation, clearinghouses) or will we also need a server-of-server model? There's a lot to consider, from many angles - socially, organizationally (including business process and application aspects) as well as technically.

I've covered real-time collaboration since 1996 and for the past few years (at Meta and at Burton) have argued that presence needs to be considered as its own architectural topic.

The Business Innovation Insider: The Nokia 888 communicator changes shape on demand

Concept designs are important, they disrupt linear thinking. And with this particular design, the idea of "phone as playdough" is actually interesting.

"A personal mobile communication device which lets you be free and fun. It is light, simple and carefree. You can change its form according to your needs during the day. You don't have to carry it in your pocket or on your wrist. You can carry it anywhere, in any form. You can roll it, bend it, put on your clothes like a clip. It also makes some form changes that makes it more ergonomical, i.e. when you want to talk on the phone, the body form turns into the form of the good old telephone. You can personalize these forms and record them. So it fits you the best in the way that you have chosen. Also e-motions let you send forms to other 888 users: i.e. you can send a heart shape to your girlfriend or a dancing figure to your friends to call them to the party tonight. This way you can talk without words."

Source: The Business Innovation Insider: The Nokia 888 communicator changes shape on demand

Faster Than A Speeding Digg?

Could Clark Kent get the Daily Planet to publish a story faster than Digg? The Digg coverage of the Rumsfeld story - 4 minute timeline from submission to frontpage - is a powerful example of what's possible with social software and (most importantly) a passionate community. 

Kevin Rose is on stage talking about what Digg knows. He says they have 600k editors that digg stories. Yesterday they set a record for fastest story to hit digg frontpage - the Rumsfeld resignation story took just 4 minutes to hit the homepage after it was submitted! He said netscape and reddit also got the story on their frontpages before mainstream media. 33% of diggs for popular stories typically come via Swarm or Stack.

Source: Kevin Rose at Web 2.0 Summit