Management

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BBC and the social software revolution

April 27, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

There’s a lot of buzz about the BBC’s recent announcement:
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | BBC unveils radical revamp of website

The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about the difficulties newspapers and traditional broadcast news and information outlets are facing due to the explosion of the Web. And by explosion, I mean not the ecommerce fixation of 6-7 years ago, but the sort of afterboom of the social web. How Craigslist is eating the lunch of local newspapers, because (according to Craig, and I’m paraphrasing him here, from the very excellent interview I heard via podcast) newspapers are supposed to be a community service, and that’s how they work best and how a community values them most.

The authority they derive in their news coverage is an after effect of how well they make themselves into an essential social organ.

The BBC sees this clearly and is doing something about it … rather than whining about the changing world and trying to sandbag against it, they’re adopting the new paradigm.

And that new paradigm is the peer-to-peer world. A relatively new book, “The Wealth of Networks,” takes Metcalfe’s law seriously, and explains the point that many others have been making for a while. From an interview at Open Business:

By “commons-based peer production” I mean any one of a wide range of collaborative efforts we are seeing emerging on the Net in which a group of people engages in a cooperative production enterprise that effectively produces information goods without price signals or managerial commands.

The interview goes on to cover the non-monetary incentives for this kind of co-production. Any enlightened HR person will tell you, though, that similar non-monetary incentives have always been primary drivers for workers; it’s what makes people care about what they’re doing. Getting paid is necessary, but it’s not the immediate incentive every minute of the work day. (If it *is* the main incentive of most workers in an organization, the organization is doomed.)

But enabling people to work this way is something most organizations aren’t used to doing. Which is why there’s an exponential increase in interest about “social software” and how to use it for business. I’m a big fan of the stuff, but it’s only as good as the organization using it: like any other software, it doesn’t fix anything on its own, it only gives people more opportunities to fix things together.

Maybe this is why CFO magazine has an article just a few days old about “Office Collaboration, the Wiki Way.” Maybe it’s why Kleiner Perkins is backing Visible Path’s vision to take social software to the serious corporate world? And maybe it’s why Forrester has an online session happening tomorrow called “Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It” with a blurb like this:

Easy connections brought about by cheap devices, modular content, and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.

(The report from February is for sale here.)

A lot of this might be a little far-fetched. People and institutions don’t change overnight, and certain pockets of corporate culture have more inertia than others. Still, it’s one thing to talk about it like it’s the sci-fi future: then it’s just theoretical and not especially pressing. But it’s another to see it happening all around you. That’s when it’s time to at least have a strategy.

IA Community as MMORPG?

March 9, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

Ok, it could be that my current obsessions are just warping my otherwise good sense (cough), but I couldn’t help but comment on Lou Rosenfeld’s recent post (Developing a Participation Economy) that the participation economy among IAI volunteers he envisions sounds an awful lot like game-thinking.

That is, motivating people to create innovative stuff and work on it to completion — the two places where that seems to happen naturally are in Open Source Development communities and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. (MMORPGs) Otherwise known as MMOs or MMOGs.

In the Open Source movement, the incentive seems to be building one’s reputation and authority in a distributed meritocracy of developers. Being a part of that community is very powerful, and so is knowing that you created a tool that thousands of others use every day and think you’re amazing for making and maintaining it… or even being just one of thousands of people contributing to something so big (FireFox, etc) that being part of a combined effort on something that affects millions of users is, again, a huge incentive.

Lou brings up the point that for the IAI, the above incentives don’t seem to be quite enough. I suspect they could be if IAs were making things like software, but it’s much harder with the sorts of things we make. Curricula, methodologies, etc.

Still, the bottom-up mechanisms for allowing collective intelligence to more freely make things would be helpful. IAI doesn’t currently have anything as sophisticated as Source Forge, for example.

But anyway, Lou mentions another way to do this (which is actually not incompatible with the open source approach), a “participation economy” where people actually get a sort of currency for doing things in the community — currency they can then cash in for things they may need later on.

This sounds very much like what happens in MMORPGs like EverQuest and SecondLife.

So it made me wonder if we could learn anything by looking at communities like those and applying the lessons to making a sort of economy-driven community of practice?

Not that I have time to really dig into that right now… but it’s something to think about.

Redefining “the edge”

November 17, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

On their book-brand site, John Seely Brown and John Hagel have a nicely articulate PDF up for grabs for anyone who wants to register. The article is called “Interest Rates vs. Innovation Rates.”

Here’s a nice bit:

In their relentless quest for efficiency, companies have tended to shy away from the edge. Edges represent uncertainty, while executives crave predictability. Edges generate friction as employees explore, experiment and tinker with unfamiliar needs and opportunities, while management roots out friction wherever it can. With appropriate management techniques, friction can become highly productive, generating valuable innovation and learning.

I’ve been hearing lots of level-headed, wise CEO’s lately say that they’re not interested in the “cutting edge” or that super-radical “bleeding edge”: that it’s not always prudent to be first or do something for the sake of novelty or hype.

But that depends on how you define the edges. The way they talk about edges, typically, is as a straw-man concept. (Who the heck *does* want to do something new for its own sake?? )

The problem is when that kind of thinking makes us comfortable with the status quo and slow, tunnel-visioned, incremental improvement. What I like about this article is that Hagel & Brown are redefining what “edge” means.

The point is that edges represent the intersection of established ways of doing things with new needs and new possibilities. It is this ntersection that creates a fertile ground for innovation and capability building. Employees are forced out of their comfort zones and pushed to question and refine traditional practices.

Asking hard questions about the edges is a great way to start.

Wiki bad or wiki good?

October 19, 2005 by AndrewH | 1 comment

One problem with the participation model is that so much of it is fueled by idealists. Well, it’s not totally a problem, because we need idealists. But it makes the “movement” behind the model seem naive to the more realistic and/or cynical.

I like to think I’m more cynical than not, though I often surprise myself with an occasional rash of gullibility. (I’ve posted stuff here that, looking back, I have to roll my eyes at.)

Wikis (just google it if you need context) have their orthodox fanatics, for sure. There are tons of people who are appalled that anyone would sully a simple, elegant wiki with login authorization or levels of access, for example. It’s not “the Wiki Way!”

But that’s like the first person to invent the wheel being angry when someone adds an axle.

Reflecting its somewhat idealistic origins, the wiki concept started with complete openness, and is now having to mature into other less specialized uses with more general audiences (or, for that matter, more specialized audiences), and it’s having to adapt some more “closed” genetic code for those environments. (Kind of like wheels eventually need tires, brakes and differentials….)

Over at The Register, Andrew Orlowski sneeringly opines about Wikipedia, that the “inner sanctum” is finally admitting the system isn’t flawless and all things Wiki aren’t necessarily holy and beyond criticism. Well, yeah, if that’s true, that’s a good thing. He also points out that Wikipedia is now getting replicated all over the web in spots like Answers.com. I would agree that this is probably not a good idea — taking the wiki articles out of the context of Wikipedia leads people at other sites to think that this is “published” official information, when if they were on Wikipedia they at least understand that it’s editable by anybody, and therefore somewhat less official.

What I don’t especially appreciate about the article is the patronizing stance. It’s dismissive of the participation model, treating it as so much pot-induced hippie talk. When the fact is, many more knowledgeable and experienced people have endorsed this concept and used it in the real world. (Two examples: John Seely Brown’s “Eureka” knowledge network at Xerox; and CAVNET at the US Military.) Are these the idealistic Wiki concept, with no vetting or hierarchy? No. But the “ideal” wiki in any serious real-world endeavor is a straw-man example. Peter Morville recently wrote a more reasoned and informed take on Wikipedia in his column on Authority. See? There are mature perspectives on the usefulness of the model that don’t buy into the hype.

Nick Carr (whose blog I’d not even seen until yesterday, but which is suddenly gotten me sucked into its comments here and there) had this to say in
The law of the wiki

It reveals that collectivism and intelligence are actually inversely correlated. Here, then, is what I’ll propose as the Law of the Wiki: Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. Making matters worse, the best contributors will tend to become more and more alienated as they watch their work get mucked up by the knuckleheads, and they’ll eventually stop contributing altogether…

I commented the following: I don’t think it’s necessarily true that the number of participants decreases the quality of the output. It depends on the subject and the people involved. Two physicists can write an entry on Quantum Mechanics, but twenty of them can fill it out will all kinds of specialized information that only two wouldn’t have to offer. But that’s because it’s a circumscribed topic relevant to a somewhat narrow community of practice (which is actually what wiki’s were sort of created to support to begin with).
Once you start opening things up to *anybody* about *anything* — i.e. “vulgar” interests — you will end up with mediocre writing and information about topics that appeal to the lowest common denominator. That’s just how human systems structure themselves.
So yes, once you take the “pure wiki” out of the rarified environment of specialists or small groups, you definitely have to impose some top-down structure and peer review. I don’t think anyone but the most absurdly wide-eyed idealists would say differently.

He answers that he was indeed talking about the purely democratic wiki, and also asks if even in the specialized info areas, there could be such a thing as “too many” involved, that would erode quality.

I think that’s entirely possible, sure. But to some degree I wonder if it misses the point.

In fact, calling Wikipedia after an encyclopedia kind of misses the point too. I think it’s part of what’s throwing so many people off. But I’m not sure what else to call it, really. Other than “The Big General Knowledge Wiki.”

To my knowledge, even the first simple “idealistic” wikis were never meant as “authoritative” sources of knowledge (and by authority here, I mean the conventionally agreed upon and empirically verified facts on a topic). It was a place for quick gatherings over certain topics, simple entry and editing, for groups of people who wanted a place where all their thoughts could stick for later viewing and shaping. That’s great … and that’s what Wikipedia really is, just very very large. It does its job very well: it acts as a quick, simple repository of what people are thinking or communicating about particular topics. It’s not made for eloquence or even necessarily permanence.

Wikipedia is an experiment in taking that totally open environment (the wiki) and seeing what happens if we layer into it elements of traditional knowledge-authority-making. And (I think wisely) the organizers started with as little structure as possible rather than assuming it needed too much. Because it’s a living, breathing entity that can change over time through the actions of its community, it didn’t have to be a Parthenon. It just had to be a decent Quonset Hut. The other feature can be added and tweaked as needed.

As for the messiness and unevenness, I think people need to get over it. If you prefer your information pre-packaged and pre-authorized, go to the traditonal sources (not that they’ll all be correct, but at least you won’t get in *trouble* for it, probably — you can always say “I checked in a real book!” Kind of like all those companies using Linux even though they bought it from IBM — because it’s more official and feels less risky and messy.)

All Wikipedia does is take the relatively invisible market of ideas, the activity of the knowledge hive, and make it visible, in all its messy glory. “Official” knowledge came from the same hive — but the activity wasn’t out there for everyone to watch. It was in academic conferences or the editorial meetings at People magazine.

But we still need “peer reviewed” authoritative decisionmaking around what information should be referred to when somebody wants “the right answer.”

So, Wikipedia, I think, ought to explain this somehow to its users. Now that the community using it has gone way beyond the early adopter crowd, and hits on all kinds of things on Google are pointing to Wikipedia in the first 10 lines, they probably should let people know: what you read here was put here mostly by people like you. Always check primary sources, etc etc etc .

At some point, Wikipedia needs to have ways of denoting how ‘official’ something is — maybe a coding system, where the Quantum Physics page has several physicists looking after it, but the J-Lo page is basically a free for all?

I believe in the Wiki Way. I do. I just think it’s only one virtue among many, and that it has to be shaped to meet the demands of different contexts.

Reframing the debate

October 17, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Victor blogs about a book he’s reading, (Don’t Think of an Elephant — which is about how progressives can re-frame political discourse), and he’s channeling some notes into his post.

Always start with values, values everyone shares.
Use rhetorical questions: “Wouldn’t it be better if…”
Show moral outrage with controlled passion.
Always be on the offense. Don’t negate the other person’s claims; reframe. Never answer a question framed from your opponents point of view.
Tell a story where your frame is built into the story.

It occurs to me this sort of thing isn’t bad advice for *any* situation where you’re trying to effect change. For example, if you’re trying to get your company to think differently about how it develops software, and how its current practices are antithetical to its purported values … not that I know of any companies that would do such a thing.

bplusd

October 14, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Jess McMullin’s blog, about which I just found out, has some great stuff already. I particularly dug this quote:

bplusd

Design thinking emerges from design methods and process. But people can get to approaches that correspond to design thinking, without designers or design methods. The principles of iteration, of prototyping, of observation , systems approaches, and play are powerful ingredients in business success. Those principles are discovered by more than just design thinkers, and it’s arrogantly risky to assume we have a monopoly.

You tell ’em, Jess.

Irving WB on Open Standards & Innovation & Flux

October 11, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Irving Wladawsky-Berger

I just thought this was a fascinating post. Here’s a chunk:

Coase also pointed out that, for a variety of reasons, there is a natural limit to what can be produced efficiently within the firm, which is why all businesses also have a more or less extensive supply chain, and strive for an optimal balance between what work gets done inside and outside the firm.
This balance is now in flux. Since we can now use technology, the Internet and open standards to begin to automate, standardize and integrate business processes, those transaction costs described by Roland Coase are dropping precipitously. Consequently, the whole nature of the firm, and what it means to run an efficient business, is going through very extensive changes. These are not easy changes. Not only is there a great deal of innovation required to automate and integrate business processes, but perhaps more important, there are even greater changes in culture required to transform Industrial Age business models to something more appropriate to our Internet era.

Collaboration czar at IBM sounds off

October 5, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Wladawsky-Berger writes about the big picture of the Internet and the rise of collaborative work … here he references a lecture he heard:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation

[In his lecture] Professor Benkler is essentially saying that collaborative innovation is a serious mode of economic production that has arisen because the Internet and related technologies and standards now permit large numbers of individuals to organize themselves for productive work, in a decentralized, non-market way. A similar argument has been made by Steven Weber, Professor of Political Sciences at UC Berkeley and Director of Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, in his writings, and in particular in his recently published book The Success of Open Source.

This is an excellent article… makes a lot of great points.

I think one thing, though, that a lot of “cross-corporate collaboration” thinking is missing is that so many corporations need the same thing just within their own walls — cross-silo collaboration. Most major American corporations are like collections of companies with a shared logo.

A plug for my current employer

August 29, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

I just want to brag a little about my current employer.
While most places would be horrified that anyone might take a few minutes out of the day to check on the status of areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, my intranet just published a quick item with links to various resources (National Hurricane Center, Red Cross, etc) encouraging people to keep tabs on the event “and about friends and relatives in affected regions.”
Even a cynic like me has to admit that’s a mark of a pretty excellent company.

JSB trove

August 26, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

I’ve been rolling around in an orgy of reading on design and innovation lately. And JSB’s site is a fine treasure trove. I just heard him on Talk of the Nation, discussing China. I felt like calling in just to be a fan-boy, but figured that would just annoy the radio producer.

johnseelybrown.com: chief of confusion

Why can’t we keep things simple? Sure, we all complain, but why can’t we design stuff that mere mortals (like you and me) can use? There are many reasons why this doesn’t happen, but one of the main ones is that we, technologists, continually overlook the social resources that people use to orient themselves, to navigate through complex territory, and to help each other figure things out. Some of these ideas Paul Duguid and I cover in our book, The Social Life of Information, but others go to the heart of how we can design transparent systems that fade into our subconscious and are just there, not in our face.
Take the U.S. Constitution. Part of the constitution’s strength was keeping it simple and honoring the social resources that a community of imagination (i.e. the nation) could deploy to evolve its interpretation as the world evolved. Design applies to institutions and nations, and individuals as well- the freedom to design your own life…

Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown – Knowledge@Wharton

June 23, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Looks like a fab interview including John Seely Brown, at the “Supernova” conference. I haven’t read it yet, but Brown’s involved, so for me it’s a must-read anyway. Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown
I got all excited for a minute when I saw it was connected to Wharton, but then my hopes were dashed when I realized it’s not being held there (close to me in Philly) but in SanFrancisco.
Hey… SF … what’s the deal with hogging all the excellent happenings huh?? Share a little, maybe?

ganked from Joho

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