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 been trying to dig into the Digital Workplace intranet meme a little more.
For some context, at the beginning of the year Jane McConnell noted:
I’ve tested the term “digital workplace” at two intranet conferences recently, one in Stockholm and one in Paris, and with several of my clients. The term has had an impact on management decisions in two recent client cases.
However, McConnell also reflects on the fact that the phrase itself isn't new and points to the use of the “digital workplace” back in 2000 and 2001. I actually found an even earlier reference, from HP back in 1997, who described its aim as:
to facilitate information sharing and to bring information closer to people
...by putting printers in offices. :-)
I'm also reminded of Negroponte's book, Being Digital - published in 1995. He wrote the following in a preview piece in Wired magazine about the future digital society he imagined:
I do believe that being digital is positive. It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people in ways beyond not knowing whether you are a dog. In fact, there is a parallel, which I failed to describe in the book, between open and closed systems and open and closed societies. In the same way that proprietary systems were the downfall of once great companies like Data General, Wang, and Prime, overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies will erode. The nation-state may go away. And the world benefits when people are able to compete with imagination rather than rank.
Taking on board some comments from Twitter about this I can fully appreciate the need to coin simple phrases that intranet managers can use to influence and get the attention of their internal sponsors. But lets be clear: the digital workplace isn't coming, it was already here from the moment the first desktop PC clone appeared in offices. Think about the impact of the humble spreadsheet.
In another blast from the past, consider Davenport's insightful 1994 HBR article, Saving IT’s Soul: Human-Centered Information Management. I wrote this reflection on Enterprise 2.0 and Davenport in 1997 and summarised the following from Davenport's original article:
Not only does this advice still hold true today, but we finally have the tools to do it. Yet this was written over a decade and a half ago!
We could go back even further of course... Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, etc.
Clay Shirky on the other hand first started talking about 'social software' in 2002.
So where does this leave the Digital Workplace? I just can't help feeling that the intranet community - and I mean those who are currently focused on the narrow domain of publishing or communicating digital information to staff - are at a tipping point. I hope as many as possible make the right choice and engage with current perspectives, rather than holding on to the past remade.
In any case, the Human Centred Intranet doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
Image Credit: Flip Clock 5.05 CC NC-ND
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?
Free wasn’t what I expected. Its not a manifesto for simply giving everything away. Instead its a broad discussion of the economics of free and the disruptive business models that the Internet has created. As part of this, the book also looks the motivation for people to participate without compensation and behavioural economics, including the inherent conflict this creates for organisations that deal in content and intellectual property (like the media, gaming and music industries).
Free is written by Chris Anderson, editor at Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. Fundamentally, if you accept his arguments, Free comes down to set of business model that depending on your viewpoint either take advantage of the Internet or force you to change how you market your products and services because of it. These are:
On the Internet, the first two models are really an extension of traditional marketing techniques - e.g. advertising on television and radio. However, the popular Freemium model is really one that has come of age in the digital Internet era. The Freemium model is particularly evident in the software industry and can be seen as a distinct variation of the direct cross-subsidy model - instead of a cross-subsidy across products purchased by a customer, a minority of premium customers pay for the majority of free customers. This is not as unfair as it sounds, since the overall scale of the user base actually benefits those premium customers but ensuring a better, well supported and scalable product.
A fourth market is non monetary markets. In a way this is a challenger to all of the above business models, if critical mass is achieved. Wikipedia is the classic example, but Anderson also includes file sharers under this banner. Unfortunately non monetary markets reflect the nature of the beast - Anderson says he doesn’t condone copyright infringement, but that in effect it would appear a non monetary digital market trumps any other kind of digital market. This is very much in the vein of Negroponte’s classic, Being Digital.
The only defence against non monetary markets appears to be related to identifying needs that the market can’t serve, such as convenience. For example, in Anderson’s view paying a small fee for a music track from a site like iTunes is much easier for the vast majority of adult users, who lack both the time and patience to deal with P2P. Alternatively, companies are faced with the choice of adopting this market as part of their business model. For example, make your profit on live events but tap into non monetary markets as a low or no cost way to promote your brand.
In this respect Anderson acknowledges that there is a fundamental different between selling things that are made atoms versus bits in the digital world. This is positioned essentially as the difference between the scarcity of the physical world and the abundance capacity of the digital environment. To be successful we need to reconcile both and the challenge is that we are a point of transition, trying to work what will be free online, what people will pay for online and how to draw a line between that and the physical world where traditional rules still apply.
Personally I thought this was a great book - the ideas above have certainly got me thinking about not only the bigger picture of the impact the Internet is having, but even my business model as a consultant (I’m actually already a participant in the free-based economy). However, I think there are still lots of unanswered questions:
These aren’t arguments against change, just a statement of the issues and challenges ahead of us.
Also, on the theme of abundance versus scarcity, I would also like to see someone write about the idea of applying the digital abundance idea inside organisations in relation to Enterprise 2.0 (a kind of “Free Enterprise 2.0” - maybe I’ll talk about this in another post one day).
As part of his own promotion of the book, Anderson did release the whole book online so it could be read gratis. Unfortunately that promotional period has expired so you can’t access the free text version of Free on Scribd anymore, but a free audiobook is still available for download.
