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The 2010 Social Business Software Power Map

via dachisgroup.com

From my colleague, Dion Hinchcliffe:

"The Social Business Power Map, presented above, is an attempt to identify the major social media trends, how they can be mapped generally along consumer/enterprise axes, and where they are in terms of their overall maturity level today"

Dion provides a more detailed breakdown of each technology in his post and also makes this comment about social networks, which he places in the mature state:

"Social networking is now expected to surpass the top used application online, Internet search, in the near future. There is little likelihood that social networking will be disrupted in the near term though certainly most businesses have not yet adopted them internally and many current block their use from inside the firewall. Unfortunately, the number of businesses blocking access to social networks is going up, not down as they continue to get a handle on managing the perceived risks of social networking. See my discussions on CoIT and how workers are increasingly using their own IT to route around excessive control of their channels of communication."

From Boxes and Arrows: Designing for Strong, Weak and Temporary ties

Our social web tools must start to understand the strength of ties, that we have stronger relationships with some people than with others. And with this knowledge they need to adapt.

There are three kinds of relationship ties:

  • Strong ties: People we care deeply about.
  • Weak ties: People we are loosely connected to, like friends of friends.
  • Temporary ties: People we don’t know, and interact with temporarily.
via boxesandarrows.com

A great Boxes and Arrows article on the need design social apps to reflect the different needs of strong, weak and temporary relationship ties.

The focus here is on public Web applications, so I suspect some minor refinements might be needs if you were building an application being used within an organisation or some other network, where the trust dynamics are different. For example, inside an organisation roles and position in the hierarchy provides an additional trust structure to use (although bear in mind, it does not necessarily embody social capital based trust).

At some point this would probably also be a good model to add to the Project 8 materials, to provide more depth to the user experience principles we put forward.

What we need is open innovation for social good, not social media

I really haven't a chance to fully reflect on the Social Innovation Camp experience (yeah, that was back at the beginning of March!) other than a resolution that if I get to take part next time, I'll be picking a team and rolling up my sleeves so I can dive in and really contribute something substantial. I did end up helping out one project with a bit of emergency 'wire-storming' (i.e. collaborative wireframing, under time pressure using Balsamiq Mockups), but even just with my super user skills (as opposed to being a real hard core geek) I've realised that I could probably still have helped out more with actually developing a working prototype. This is based on the fact that what I saw at SI Camp was that rather than coding from the ground up, I saw the teams that were able to deliver working prototypes accelerate the development process by using tools like Drupal, Django, MediaWiki, and Pligg.

In this respect, while good ideas are important, I think the real benefit of the SI Camp approach is about testing those ideas in practice. In fact, allowing people to have the opportunity to play with an idea (rather than simply thinking or planning it) is an important step in the design process. This doesn't mean that the prototyping process was entirely perfect or that we saw enough iterations of each idea this time around at SI Camp, however I'm confident this will improve with experience. In the end, my biggest take away from the event at this point was that the design process itself - rather than the social innovation ideas that came from it - has great value.

I actually think it would be interesting to now take the SI Camp concept and apply it in a more targeted way, to solve a specific need. Right now I'm reading the UK's NESTA report on their open innovation approach, called the Corporate Connect programme. This isn't restricted to the non-profit or government sector, although their open innovation ideas can perhaps surprisingly be applied equally to both the commercial and non-commercial sectors.

Two case studies in the NESTA report stand out:

* Cancer Research UK ran an open innovation competition to crowd source ideas for new fund raising ventures, where the winning ideas themselves received seed funding from the charity to get started; and
* Tesco (a UK supermarket chain) organised a 'T-Jam' to bring customers and external software developers together to design new online shopping applications.

I know you are probably thinking, what's the link between Social Innovation Camp and these ideas? Well, both these ideas used Web 2.0 approaches as part of an innovation process that either created a social innovation (Cancer Research UK) or encouraged the use of a public good (Tesco's shopping API - T-Jam, just like GovHack). Social good takes many different forms, but what has changed is the tools and techniques we have at hand to help those new ideas emerge. 

While on the topic of creating 'social good', this brings me to the Digital Citizens event I attended last night, about Social Media for Social Good. Personally, and while I wouldn't criticise the event overall or the calibre of their panel (who had great experiences to share), I left feeling that I wanted more breadth in the discussion about creating social good beyond using social media for communication. It was of course primarily a digital agency and PR crowd at this event, so to an extent this was to be expected.

However, as someone from the non-profit sector commented to the organisers as they passed around a collection bucket, they don't want donations... they want to tap more effectively into the ideas and experiences of the people in the room. This doesn't change the fact that social media is affecting how the non-profit sector engages with the media, its supporters and the people they assist or support (and @KaraLee_'s experiences with Headspace is a good example of how to do it right). But I think there is scope, as 'digital citizens' exploring this world that is emerging, to look beyond Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

To quote the NESTA report:

Open innovation represents – in part at least – a re-invention of the organisational models that we have come to take for granted. In a networked world where knowledge is becoming like water, it is no longer possible to ring-fence what we know or have invented and to create new value through internal means alone. Rather our networks and partnerships are increasingly becoming the key to value creation, above and beyond our inventive ability as organisations. 

Perhaps a better topic to discuss might be open innovation for social good?

Social Business Design - its not your children's Friendface

I was watching the Friendface episode of the IT Crowd the other day. At one point, Roy, Jen and Moss are all sitting in the office together but end up talking to each other on 'Friendface'.

It made me think for a moment that this is probably what many people fear their workplace will turn into if they open the floodgates to social computing. I don't mean the FUD about time wasting online with the real Facebook and Youtube etc, but the fear that face-to-face interaction will be replaced unnecessarily with chat boxes. Not everyone is a technophile after all.

The situation in the IT Crowd isn't as silly as it sounds. When we talk about management or organisational design issues, we have a tendency to separate out the technology (particularly the information technology) from the human aspects. In my opinion technology is always socially situated... and we see this playing out in the workplace when we notice that people actually exist in a hybrid environment of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (even more so, if we included telecommunications in that definition). The task switching issue between physical and online can be real, particularly when we experience it through the paradigm of the older style collaboration tools.

However, another side of this argument is that what is bad for one person or group of people in the workplace, isn't necessarily bad for another. For example, if Roy, Jen and Moss weren't sitting together in the same office then chatting online actually becomes a positive and potentially productive mechanism.

I would actually argue that there is definitely a step change in the value proposition for using communication and collaboration technologies that takes place between different organisational compositions with different orders of magnitude, although it is hard to pin-point when exactly that happens. It is not necessarily about small versus large organisations, although clearly a small co-location work group may find less direct value than a similarly sized geographically or time-zone dispersed team. Increasingly social software is also allowing computer-mediated collaboration to extend organically beyond the the normal organisational boundaries - in fact, remove the arbitrary organisational boundaries (which are really simply intangible legal and social constructs anyway) and we find that everyone is part of a network.

The issue of using social computing in the workplace then becomes one of:

  • Understanding where different people sit in the network and how they add value to work flows;
  • Understanding the barriers to participating productively in that network that social computing technology could improve*; and
  • Designing social computing solutions that minimise the effect of task swapping between interacting with the physical and online worlds.

Call this the Social Business Design process if you want. But its certainly not you children's Friendface.

*BTW the best way to achieve this is through a combination of analysis and participatory design, leading to solutions that support further refinement of those solutions through an emergent design process. You see why I added this point as a foot note ;-)

A version of this post has also been cross-posted to the Headshift Australasia blog.

Social Business Design: Coaction as an impelling force

I was thinking about the word 'collaboration' this morning.

We often talk about collaboration being poorly defined; others argue that collaboration doesn't encompass fully the way in which people work together - for example, co-operation and co-ordination. It is certainly true that these days we can qualify - from a technology perspective - the differences between document-centric collaboration through to an appreciation of different values and process of conversational collaboration. We can also think about degrees of collaboration - between people working together closely as a team, collaboration that cuts across organisational groups and collaboration that extends beyond the organisational boundaries, with customers, business partners, industry and community representatives, and even professional peers.

However, collaboration isn't always seen as something useful or beneficial. In times of war collaboration can also be a crime; likewise in organisational life collaboration can also be seen as risky - intellectual property or corporate secrets might be lost, a company's competitive edge could be jeopardised or it could even result in breaches of trades practices laws. However, it is possible to think positively about collaboration even between competitors - industry clusters are a prime example.

An interesting and related work to collaboration is 'coaction'. The Free Online Dictionary lists three meanings for the word coaction:
  1. An impelling or restraining force; a compulsion.
  2. Joint action.
  3. Ecology Any of the reciprocal actions or effects, such as symbiosis, that can occur in a community.
If we reorder these meanings slightly, I can see a nice progression from the simplistic idea of collaboration as joint action, to the more complex view of collaboration within an ecology (which fits more modern views that organisations are complex systems) and then finally to something more directed and powerful. This concept of collaboration as an impelling or restraining force is more than just a semantic idea to think about, as we can see this at work in social networks all the time.

I think this is why Social Business (in the sense of Headshift/Dachis Group's Social Business Design concept) is such a powerful idea, as it is about taking advantage of new organisational designs made possible by the capabilities of social technologies so we can take advantage of coaction as a purposeful, impelling force.

Photo credit: Shunting

New research from Pew on Social Isolation and New Technology

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey is the first ever that examines the role of the internet and cell phones in the way that people interact with those in their core social network. Our key findings challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology
via pewinternet.org

Well worth reading. Its just shows that our relationship with technology is often a lot more complex that it first appears.