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What is Social Computing?

Social computing has to do with digital systems that support online social interaction. Some online interactions are obviously social – exchanging email with a family member, sharing photos with friends, instant messaging with coworkers. These interactions are prototypically social because they are about communicating with people we know. But other sorts of online activity also count as social – creating a web page, bidding for something on eBay™, following someone on Twitter™, making an edit to Wikipedia1. These actions may not involve people we know, and may not lead to interactions, but nevertheless they are social because we do them with other people in mind: the belief that we have an audience – even if it is composed of strangers we will never meet – shapes what we do, how we do it, and why we do it.

Thus when we speak of social computing we are concerned with how digital systems go about supporting the social interaction that is fundamental to how we live, work and play. They do this by providing communication mechanisms through which we can interact by talking and sharing information with one another, and by capturing, processing and displaying traces of our online actions and interactions that then serve as grist for further interaction.

via interaction-design.org

An academic deep dive into the topic from Thomas Erickson, a researcher in the Social Computing Group at IBM's Watson Labs in New York. It includes video interview and commentary from other academics. No, I haven't read/listened to all this content yet, but bookmarking it for later.

Book Review - Open Leadership by Charlene Li

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via amazon.com

I'm not a fan of "leader as hero", which was my initial apprehension when picking up Open Leadership. The sub-title, How social technology can transform the way you lead, also conjures up the image of CEOs issuing moral boosting messages to their staff in 140 characters or posting on their subordinates’ Facebook wall.

Luckily this book isn’t really about that, so don’t let my first impressions put you off.

Li explains in chapter 4 that the title of the book was the result of a simple crowd sourcing exercise - she picked the most popular title voted by people in her social network. Personally, open strategy or open management might be a better description for the subject matter of this book. "Giving up control is inevitable” is the title of the first chapter, but in fact this book is all about control, just using a different kind of management style and business strategy (at Headshift | Dachis Group, we call it Social Business).

The book is divided into three parts. The first part sets out the case for change. The second part, which is described as strategic, is actually a combination of strategy planning and tactical implementation. The final section really starts to focus on issues of leadership and managers related to those following an open strategy.

Through out the book you will find lots of dot point action plans, tests, check lists and also pointers to a set of free resources available on the site that accompanies the book.

From an implementation perspective, I found the section in chapter 6 discussing Organisational Models for Openness particularly interesting. This is something I've talked about before and also discussed in the online engagement guidelines I helped to develop for the Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce. Li cuts this problem slightly differently with three models:

  • Organic;
  • Centralised; and
  • Co-ordinated.

Li quite rightly doesn't recommend one model over another and instead explains the key issues around choosing a model. This leads into a more practical discussion about roles, responsibilities, training and incentives. This chapter, along with Chapter 5 which focuses on guidelines, could almost be read as stand alone pieces and provide some good implementation advice.

To back this up the last chapter contains case studies. While the majority of the cases follow a well worn path of well known brand names, the inclusion of the State Bank of India was a refreshing inclusion. The US Department of State on the other hand was slightly ironic in the era of Cablegate. However. all the case studies are well written and hit the mark on providing informative stories about the journey to "open leadership" and covering the socio-technical issues involved in each example.

Putting aside the case studies chapter, the final section of the book in chapters 7, 8 and 9 really start to get into the issue of dealing with the managers who are responsible for the top -down change required to move to an open strategy. I suspect that the intended targets of this book are unlikely to read and self-analyse their own behaviour and attitudes unless they have already made a step towards making that change. In other words, Open Leadership isn’t the social business version of Who Moved My Cheese.

Instead, what these chapters present is an fantastic field guide for people inside organisations who are agitating for change or who are responsible for implementing an open strategy across their organisation.

Re-reading my review and flicking back through the pages of Open Leadership, I’m suddenly struck by the thought that this book is like the grown up, better experienced and more refined sibling of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The idea of organisations pursing an open strategy really has grown up and the technologies that support it continue to mature. This books sets the scene for management and how to start thinking about dealing with it.

If you are interested in discussing open strategy, the challenges of open leadership and becoming a social business then please join us at the Headshift | Dachis Group Social Business Summit - Over 4 weeks - across 4 continents - 4 Summits will be convened. Sydney,  2 March -  Austin, 10 March -  London, 24 March - Singapore, 6 April.

Desire Paths

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Spotted from my hotel room today, in Canberra. From Wikipedia:
A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand.
The concept of desire paths are also familiar in the user experience world too and I'm not the first or last to think of the information landscape as being like an urban space.

Often its just about having the right perspective to spot the desire path.

BTW A nice story of the intersection between the physical and information space (in this case, maps). Hat tip to Anne.

Designing human-powered business solutions - what the Foldit experience teaches us

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via wired.com

As an awesome example of a game-based science crowdsourcing project, the Foldit project in itself deserves special mention. They demonstrated that humans still have the edge on pure computing crunching power when it comes to solving complex problems.

However, I'm particularly interested what the project also reveals about the dynamic of involving 'normal' human players in this problem solving. Andrew McAfee provides an excellent summary:

  1. We are particularly strong at spatial reasoning, or literally seeing solutions.
  2. We have intuition. 
  3. We have great adaptivity - McAfee notes that "technologies like wikis are a big step forward in facilitating collaboration within geographically dispersed groups." 
  4. While collaborating, we exercise a high degree of self-organization (incidentally, we've since this before in immersive gaming - transitory leadership). 
  5. We love competition.

This is all particularly relevant when we think about why and how we should apply Social Business Design thinking to problems faced by organisations.

'Social' means understanding information is socially situated, socially constructed. Now do you get it?

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A couple of blog conversations by James Robertson, Jane McConnell and Toby Ward (who all run an intranet competition or survey of some sort) have been touching on the change role of intranets and the meaning of the word intranet. Toby Ward kicks off by declaring:

"more organizations that are sleeping through the social media revolution will jump on the bandwagon. 2010 will be the year of the social intranet."

However, Jane isn't quite convinced that the social intranet is really here, well not just yet anyway. Meanwhile, James take this conversation a little further by proposing a shift from talking about 'intranets' to the 'Enterprise experience':

"Within organisations, we should start to talk about the “enterprise experience”. What experience do we want to provide to staff in their working lives? What systems should they be using, and how? How do they interact with the information and tools they need to do their jobs?"

If you see my comment on James' post, you'll see that I'm supportive of the direction James is taking this conversation. However, I think Mark Morrell's comment is more to the point:

BT has an intranet. It’s called the BT Intranet. It’s what it does that has created the reputation it now has rather than what it is called.

It’s what an intranet does that it important – not what it is called.

I feel you should go further than you have. In BT we use internet tools as well as intranet tools including Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds of internal and external news for business purposeshttp://markmorrell.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/i-now-receive-only-the-information-i-need/.

I also feel work and personal lives are blurring in being separate distinctive things we do and we are doing more of these using intranet/internet tools.

As this evolves intranets could well become a redundant term and something far more embracing takes hold.

This will because of what people are doing rather than calling an intranet by another name.

Rather than asking, "Is the social intranet really here?", we should be asking, "When are we going to start recognising that intranets are social?"

The Social Life of Information (pictured above) was published in 2000. One (Amazon) reviewer summarised the thesis of the book as follows:

"most interesting information is socially situated, socially constructed, or otherwise impossible to tear from its human roots and package into transferrable units of "knowledge". This has major implications for the viability of certain kinds of information systems, educational programs, and the evolution of an "information society". Yet, most information workers and information products appear to be oblivious to these implications."

Finally, is the intranet community taking notice? :-)

BTW While you are over on James' blog, check out his 2009 Intranet Innovation awards video interview with NYK, about its wiki-based internal news aggregator. NYK's approach is pretty rudimentary - you can find some other examples of organisations using wiki-based intranet platforms for achieving the same goal in Headshift's project files (check out the Legal and Professional Services case studies).

Social Business Design as a metaphor

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At the moment I’m reading Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization (the 1986 edition). This is one of the lesser known management books, but well worth the time and effort to read although some of the ideas he introduces are quite challenging at times. But with all this talk of social media ‘buzzwords’ and debate about the meaning of concepts like Enterprise 2.0 etc, I felt it was time to re-ground my thinking. Another reason is that at Headshift we’ve also started to use a new language built around the Social Business Design framework.

In Morgan's book he explores the use of eight different metaphors to understand ‘organisations’:

  • Mechanistic
  • Organisms
  • Brains
  • Culture
  • Political Systems
  • Psychic Prisons
  • Flux and Transformation
  • Instruments of Domination

Morgan draws on existing concepts from a range of areas - from management to physics - to describe these metaphors. Its fair to say that the metaphors get harder as you work through the book. However, critically Morgan doesn’t just describe them, he also looks at the strengths and limitations of each. The point being that there isn’t a perfect metaphor.

Near the end of the book Morgan starts to talk about the applications of these metaphors to the management and design of organisations. He points out that:

“there is a close relationship between the way we think and the way we act, and many organizational problems are embedded in our thinking... an appreciation of the close relationship between thoughts and action can help create new ways of organizing... we can overcome many familiar problems by learning to see and understand organisation and organisations in new ways, so that new courses of action emerge.”

Social Business Design in my view is just this. Another way of thinking about familiar organisational problems, combined with a way of taking action that takes advantage of “changes in technology, society, and work”.

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I can see a strong relationship between the organisational metaphors of organisms, brains and culture. These metaphors are a counter point to the successful mechanistic metaphor - and I can see many of the arguments against Social Business Design (and related ideas, like Enterprise 2.0) coming from the conflict between them. However, its quite interesting that Morgan commented back in 1986 that:

“Mechanistic approaches to organization have proved incredibly popular, partly because of their efficiency in the performance of certain tasks, but also because of their ability to reinforce and sustain particular patterns of power and control... However, there can be little doubt that the increasing rate of societal flux and change poses many problems for organizations based on mechanical designs”

(Of course, he is just one of many voices over the last few decades saying the same thing, e.g. Charles Handy)

Similarly, those that just want to place business ‘culture’ or ‘emergence’ at the centre of this change, need to be aware that these are also just particular (but useful) metaphors, rather than being the only true view point. In this respect, I suspect many of the real barriers are better understood through the other metaphors (Political Systems, Psychic Prisons, Flux and Transformation and Instruments of Domination) as these reflect some of the darker human complexities that actual make up organisations. The short version is that change is hard for many different reasons!

For example, individuals in an organisation many resist new social computing technology not because it doesn’t not work or does not add value, but simply because this change threatens their self-image of where they fit. Or they reject it simply because someone else in the organisation presented the idea. (Of course, they will apply a mechanistic view to present their arguments as a rational response!)

If inherently the totality of the organisation fights against change, then neither the Social Business Design approach or any other management concept alone will be able to overcome this challenge alone. However, the great thing about social computing and Web technologies is that where the organisation is open to change in even a small way, then they allow us to take a human-centred approach that:

  • Involves people who will be affected by the change from the very beginning;
  • Supports safe experimentation and ‘agile’ solution development (rather than being locked into a choice of solution); and
  • Allows people to finish (and continue evolving) the design of the solution as they start to use it.

Change with Social Business Design becomes a journey with that organisation, not a one off intervention.

IT Failure and Social Computing

I'm not a lot of things that people might assume. For example, I'm not that much of a technologist that I can't see when technology fails. Often it's the little things that hurt and I have a mistrust of anything labelled self-service ("self-service for whom? Me or the guy I've just entered that data for?").

Take the case of my local train station. It has a ticket machine that accepts $50 notes, but will only give change up to about $20. Unfortunately the cost of a peak return ticket to Sydney is itself only just a little over $20. And there I was with my crsip, new $50 fresh from the ATM.

I had already watched some guy shoving in $2 coins this morning for his ticket, but the machine rejected them all. It accepts coins but decided it didn't like his.

Luckily for both of us there is a HTBBCS in place at this station. What's that? You don't know what HTBBCS is? But I think that you do... It's a "Human Technology Based Business Continuity Strategy". Or in this situation better known as, A Bloke with some Change.
A Bloke with some Change is needed because if you travel without a ticket you naturally risk a getting a fine from a ticket inspector. You see the technology doesn't fail everyone often enough that it can be accepted as an excuse, but it's not reliable enough to not have the Bloke with some Change.

It could of course be better - they could accept other forms of payment - but you know what, I quite like the Bloke with some Change. In a way he is a much better class of technology because he is multipurpose - he can tell you when the next train is due for a start or why it's running late. Old Mr Ticket Machine just looks blank if you ask him anything.

In the past you had two choices with information technology - pretend it is perfect, or accept it's imperfections (and in many case, this becomes a factor in adoption failure). Today, social computing can help fill that gap. It's not going to solve every problem of course, but in some cases it might just be your Bloke with some Change at a point of failure in your systems and processes. Customer service comes to mind, but there are so many other possibilities.

The Wizard of Enterprise 2.0

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The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is a Wizard of Oz event for me - I don't mean I'm the Tin Man waiting for a Dorothy to take me down the Yellow Brick Road to Boston, but like many of these overseas conferences it looks like a magical place that I can just glimpse far, far away on the horizon. I actually haven't been following it that closely this year - I've been far to consumed with my own projects and helping to push our local Government 2.0 agenda with events like Public Sphere and Us Now Sydney (have you got your tickets yet for the 9th?). However, I have enjoyed reading a couple of summary posts from Gil Yehuda, particularly installment 1 and installment 2 of the 3 he has posted so far.

I particularly like his point about the frustration of hearing yet more “motherhood and apple-pie” lessons about E2.0. He also writes:

We need to further clarify what we mean when we say Enterprise 2.0. It started to get pretty slippery at times. I heard about many Web 2.0 concepts.  But fewer Enterprise perspectives. Yes, they were there. And indeed those were the highlights of the show. But I'm not going out there and telling businesses that they should allow intranet access to Facebook and YouTube in order to make their workers more productive. Really now. We're inspired by Web 2.0, but we have to bring it to the work context.

I had always hoped that we might see a guiding light coming from the father of Enterprise 2.0 on these matters. I know he has a book coming out and all that (which is great, as its still likely to be essential reading as a primer on the topic) but as the idea of enterprise social computing evolves, I find that I'm still looking but failing to find any new magic in these ideas. Perhaps however its just a case of the concept maturing and that we do understand it enough. Maybe its simply time to stop thinking about it and just take action?

I noticed Susan writing about the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that:

Yes, the baby was born in '06, started crawling in '07, and now is running around like a maniac with boundless energy in '09. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is now a healthy child, growing stronger and more willful every day (just a cabinet door away from getting into trouble...)

Perhaps, what people are gradually learning as Enterprise 2.0 grows up - just like Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion - is that they don't really need any more magic and that they actually do have the brains, heart, and courage to make it happen if they try. Some where over the rainbow indeed?

What do you think?