Regardless of where you stand on the Occupy movement, this photo highlights that even if we forget the protests themselves (and the abuses) something has definitely changed. Not sure if we should really call it citizen journalism, more a kind of governance.

Cleaner, More Relevant Taxonomy and Architecture Means Cleaner Activity Streams

Having a cleaner social taxonomy will improve the quality and relevance of activity streams. Right now, too many streams inside companies are either a firehose of “everything” — or they filter by an individual group.

But businesses — especially large ones — are way more dynamic than that, and need more fine-grained controls that make it easy to create an activity stream based not only on people or system data, but concepts, ideas and projects related to each. So if you’re able to pull together relevant subjects — or sub-subjects — from your cleaner taxonomy, you’re going to have better, more relevant streams that map to specific business processes.

Conclusion: Finding the Middle Ground

Again, I’m not suggesting we revert back to the days of heavyweight information management that turns end-users and their administrators into managers of digital filing cabinets. At the same time, the sheer volume of information shared by both humans and machines today means that leaving this to the wisdom of the crowd might not work as well as many of us had initially hoped in the early waves of social computing.

Or as I like to think about - don't give users a completely blank sheet of paper.

The only type in common with both companies and all the mixtures was fenugreek.

That discovery sent EU investigators in pursuit of fenugreek seeds back down the European food chain, in a rapid-fire search that deployed personnel from eight countries’ food agencies as well as the ECDC, World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. They drafted a detailed 4-page questionnaire that fed data into Excel spreadsheets and a relational database. They crunched (and crunched and crunched) the numbers, and this is what emerged:

All of the seeds came from a single shipment that left a port in Egypt almost 2 years earlier, on Nov. 24, 2009.

Interesting to note that following the E. coli outbreak in Europe, it all started with desktop tools (Excel) being used to collect data for the government investigation. Quoting directly from the European Food Safety Authority report (PDF) itself they used combination of tools:

Data on single parts of the food supply chain were gathered using spreadsheets (MS Excel) for each company. A relational database (HSQLDB version 2.2.4) was used to manage the data/information from the tracing. Additional processing was done using the statistical package SAS version 9.2.

Of course, you do wonder if the investigation could have happened even more quickly or even that the issue could have been pre-empted if Government 2.0 principles (open data, crowdsourcing) and technologies (Web 2.0) had been applied?

Despite this level of traceability, authorities are still concerned that this outbreak is actually not finished, because they couldn't trace every seed or batch that might be infected. Maybe there is still a necessary role for crowdsourcing in this instance that a traditional approach just can't scale to resolve?

Sunday Mail reporter Anthony Gough called me last week seeking my views on a Queensland Police Service Facebook site featuring public comments on crimes and arrests.

Of course, before making a media comment on the matter I took a closer look at the site.

I quickly formed the view that it seemed an excellent community policing tool and a great way for police to get information about unsolved crimes but that many comments crossed the line once suspects had been arreste

Mark Pearson, an academic who specialises in media law, caused a bit of a stir with his reported comments. However, one of the benefits of the Web is that we can go straight to the source and bypass the newspaper editorial filter. Personally I think this is still a grey area - there are still too many variables, such different jurisdictions (e.g. US where Facebook is hosted and Australia where the user live). We won't really know until something ends up in front of judge. An more ideal outcome is that the law (in Australia) will catch up with a common sense view towards social media that meets the needs of our 21st century Web-era society.

I've never been convinced that algorithmic filters are the perfect solution either, even if we create them with diversity and serendipity as a goal:

But we need some level of social filtering at different times, just because of the pure volume of data available.

Look for human curators, as well as computers.

Hat tip to Elsua.

Mark Gilbert from Gartner spoke at the Gartner BI summit in Sydney recently. He said that firms shouldn't deploy collaboration software "out of the box" - I disagree, but I disagree because I'm being pedantic, although I think it is important to be so given this is a Gartner person speaking.

Overall, I think Michael is right to be pedantic. What I'm not clear from Gilbert's statement is that when he talks about the need to adapt collaboration (and social software), is he talking about actual developed customisations or customisations achieved through configuration and user-generated information architecture.

However, Gilbert also mentions SharePoint - and that does complicate things, because of the way I typically see SharePoint deployed, which is with little thought. If we read "out of the box" SharePoint to mean, you've just finished installing the software, switched it on, and announced job done then I can understand why Gilbert might be concerned.

Does this argument hold for enterprise social computing tools? It depends. Architecturally speaking, other "pure" tools of this type (by which I mean, are designed to be or have specific heritage in social software) typically have a greater resilience for dealing with organic and emergent usage. However, I would also encourage people to design for adoption anyway, remaining open to exploring customisation through both development and configuration based on user's and business needs.

Bringing me back to the beginning... you can *sometimes* deploy out of the box. But even while that might be the end of your technical activities, its only the start of the project.

BTW You can come and debate this with Michael and I at the Intranets2011 conference, where we are both presenting.

Robin's post has grabbed a lot of people's attention over the last 24 hours, and its not surprising. When Paolo from eVectors demo'd their technology to me I was really impressed too - in fact, the front end of the Climate Pulse example gives only a few clues about the engine that enables the curating process that Robin describes to happen.

However, my immediate thought when I saw Climate Pulse was, wouldn't this also make a good concept for an intranet?

Could it in fact be possible to shift from the idea of managing content on intranets and instead think about curating it instead? Its an interesting idea that could make intranets more relevant - just like dashboards for metrics have become popular, can we also imagine dashboards for content and activity that are curated by people, not dumb algorithms?