Office 2.0 – Online communities

Finnern told us the key to having a large number of community participants is to give out iPhones :D

The first question: where do we start? We are in a different place than we were; we’rea learning how social communities work. The rise of social web is driven by its utter simplicity – driving enormous growth. Most of the content is created by “us”, propelling the peer production model. The blogosphere is the biggest conversation in the world.

Self-formed communities – ex. KatrinaList. CafeMom is a sample of a real-people social network vs. SV network. Average people in an organization will not have time to adopt these tools. This is something that we have not yet found a solution for.

Problems: the 2% troublemakers; the 9x problems (new tools must be nearly 10 times better for people to have incentive to switch – Harvard research). Many are concerned that 2.0 will decrease productivity [and we're all so excited about how they increase productivity?].

Diane Davidson – found that when people say bad things, approaching them directly solved the problem. After some time, WebEx found people asking “can we do this in a community?”

Robert Duffy – Intel is opening up, looking at social media to make sure they keep being relevant. Participating not just internally but also going out to other places where discussions are going on as well.

Mark Finnern – finds that most of the growth on SAP’s communities for business processes consulting comes from word of mouth.

Josh Hilliker – when launching Intel vPro, wants to talk to the people within partner organizations who are bloggers passionate about silicon. Research is moving from talking to individuals in enterprises about what they want – to talking to the community as a whole.

Mike Walsh – talks about companies outside of the usual adopters (hi-tech industry) looking at online communities and obtaining great benefits?. [This is something that I am very interested in. Does anyone know of a company in the construction industry using enterprise 2.0?] Mike gives two interesting examples that I will have to look at: Dwell.com and Autodesk communities. I wonder

Comment from the audience: “Community can be a nice way of saying that we are shifting the burden of tech support unto our customers.” Diane sees it more as broadening of what gets done, a win-win situation. Offering joint ownership of our products [Apple, where are you?] Josh makes a good point that community is faster than support.

Audience asking for 5 tips on how a start-up can build a community. Answers:

• start with a great product
• one-on-one relationship
• listen and react so people feel heard
• hire your top contributors
• set your goals so people internally are on the same page
• find your greatest advocates
• market the community
• keep it open as much as possible (a minimum of private areas)
• reward people for providing good content and participating

What resources to allocate for launching a small community and growing it?

• do you want to build your own platform or buy? integrated or best-in-breed?
• WebEx had almost no resources internally
• need to find people internally who are willing to change the way they work
• Intel has a few positions of “Community Manager” (Josh’ position). Very very nice!
• Josh also makes the point that launching communities in Intel is very much like a start-up
• Intel has a goal of shifting the content to the community and ultimately spinning it off

Very nice panel, thanks to all the panelists!

Office 2.0 – Knowledge Worker 2.0

Stephen Collins has an interesting point about the KW 2.0 being cross-generational. They wnnt to know how they can give and get value. This is perceived as a lack of loyalty – when it is in fact just looking for value. They will then walk out the door with a wealth of unshared information.

How to make sure they are engaged? Give them a community – let them collaborate will colleague. Need for awareness; these people love to share. People get demoralized at work when the effort they put in doesn’t get recognized. It is very important to have a Learning organization culture. Silos kill knowledge sharing – you need to kill walls. KW 2.0 dont’ have respect for authority: this derives from knowledge rather than power. Need to have management validate the new working style. The metrics around what you’re doing need to be changed: the output should count, not the number of hours they spend there.

Four wiki implementation take-aways

Nathan Wallace posts a great case study on creating a wiki intranet at Janssen-Cilag. The approach is refreshingly common-sense. My main take-aways:

• Pre-implementation conversations are a great way to create excitement and obtain personal commitment to maintain content. Also helpful: sharing articles that give a glimpse into the possibilities.
• Use the “social force control” argument when pitching a wiki: if social forces keep people from sending out weird email messages (which colleagues do not see), social forces will act more strongly to keep people on target in editing a wiki page. Also helpful: pointing out that changes captured in a wiki and monitored will be much easier to manage than the quiet behavioural departure from “norms” experienced by many companies.
• Use Wikipedia as an uber-known example. This provides a very positive point of reference for a new technology that is disconcertingly free-form.
• Offer ultralight training – Nathan was able to offer the necessary training in 5 minutes. After that, one-on-one coaching and a help section provide ongoing support. Also helpful: Begin with a basic help file, and as people have more questions, explain – then ask them to update the help section. People who are only just learning how to do something are much better equipped to explain to their peers than an “expert” is.

Nathan’s approach to content ownership and maintenance is remarkably simple and clear:

1. If someone isn’t willing to maintain a piece of content, it can’t be that important to the business.
2. We happily show people how to do things with the site, but we don’t do it for them.
3. Occasionally we highlight sections of the site on the home page, which is a great way to drive the defacto owners to clean it up a little.
4. We encourage people to have high expectations for content on the Intranet. If something is missing, please report it to the appropriate area of the business, or better still, add it for them.
5. The answer to verbal queries for many departments has become, “it’s on JCintra [the wiki/intranet]“. This reminds people to search first and ask later.
6. In the end, the quality of content in an area is a reflection on the defacto department owner, not the Intranet itself.

How to hold meetings on a wiki

In the days immediately following our first World Cafe, our team couldn’t find time to hold an evaluation meeting. We decided to try holding the meeting on our wiki, and found that the results were better than in a traditional meeting. Here’s what we learned:

1. Allow enough time for the discussion. While a traditional meeting can last as little as a dozen minutes, the time-distributed nature of a ‘wiki meeting’ makes it necessary to allocate at least one day, depending on how busy team members are with urgent projects. Don’t expect people to drop everything and participate on a wiki discussion. We created the wiki discussion as soon as the World Cafe ended, and within 24 hours had obtained input from all team members.

2. Offer structure. As you create the wiki page, populate it with questions and issues. Make the structure simple and specific. Add content, don’t just post the meeting agenda. Include all relevant information, spell out your opinions on each subject and ask for more information where necessary. People are much more likely to respond if all they have to do is agree / disagree with an opinion or answer a specific question.

3. Encourage participants to openly sign their contribution. Mediawiki software parses three or four tildes (~~~~) into the signature of a participant to a discussion. A simpler option is to simply preface each comment with “Ron says:…” While most wiki software allow readers to find out who performed each edit, openly signing content goes a long way to keep the tone conversational.

4. Provide participants with tools to follow the discussion. Whether your software produces RSS feeds or simply sends email, make sure everyone knows how to set up frequent notifications. (Wouldn’t it be great to have wiki software produce Twitter feeds?)

5. Manage the discussion. While a moderator is usually not necessary once you have created structure and obtained participation, a discussion will often require participants to gather additional information or perform external tasks. Someone might have to install and demo some software, make some phone calls, cross over into the office of a non-participating coworker to obtain his expertise on a particular issues, or simply dig up some information. While participants will often self-organize, it is your job as the initiator of the discussion to follow through. Above all, make sure you keep contributing with any information or ideas made necessary by the discussion.

6. Capture actionable items. Regardless of the project management system your team uses, it is very important to capture and act on any requests made during the discussion. At the very least add ideas to a “To consider” or “Someday” list that everyone can see. Discussions on a wiki are available for reference, and few things discourage people from participating as much as the evidence that their contribution was not followed through.

7. Declare the meeting closed. Give participants 3-4 hours’ notice to put in a last word. After, that, formally close the meeting. Post a notice at the beginning of the wiki page. Don’t leave the conversation open-ended. It’s discouraging.

7 enterprise uses for Twitter

Toddlers explore a dozen different ways to use a new toy. Twitter is an oddly seductive new toy. Twitterers – and non-Twitterers – are busy looking for productive ways to use it. Some find it can offer personal wellbeing, support networking, amuse professionals, or create “social proprioception”. Others find out that it’s better not to bang yourself on the head with it .

So how can enterprises / small businesses play with this toy? Dodging the danger of helplessly floating in a river of tweets, here are seven theoretically productive enterprise uses for Twitter:

1. Task status updates from team members.
Your team probably spends considerable time asking each other “What have you been doing”? Once members start twittering their activities, most verbal updates become obsolete. Added benefit: If I see that Laura is doing some research on The Monkey Corporation, I’m more likely to let her know that I just happened to tag a couple of blog posts about them on del.icio.us over the weekend.

2. Real-time presence status for IM.
Few people update their IM status regularly. Using Twitterific to automatically update status messages on Adium or mood messages on Skype will encourage colleagues to consider IM status before interrupting. If my status says you are “Crafting the Best Article of the Year”, the guy next door might be less likely to IM the latest joke.

3. Informal timelog.
As a personal motivational timelog, Twitter is without equal. By the time the entire world knows that I’m Crafting that Best Article, I feel a little more disposed to actually launch MS Word. If my co-workers know as well, I might actually write a couple of sentences by the end of the day. Added benefit: If someone forgot to log billable hours on a project, the information could be extracted from Twitter postings.

4. Assign tasks while away from the office.
In good GTD manner, items should be processed only once. If I’m on the subway and suddenly remember that Alex should install a new MediaWiki plugin, I can Twitter it from my mobile phone – rather than write it down and hope I’ll look through my notes by the end of the week.

5. Notify of important wiki updates.
Teams using wikis for project management can twitter mission-critical wiki updates. Bill: “Just off the phone with Jobs; see http://monkeycorp.server/mediawiki/apple_hostile_takeover“

6. Update everyone on last-minute schedule changes.
Whether I’m running 10 minutes late for that staff meeting or my next client meeting just got delayed, I often end up calling one co-worker and asking her to update critical others. Twitter will easily update everyone from my mobile phone.

7. Process IM in batches.
Twitterrific is automatically set up to receive updates every 30 minutes. This hits a sweet spot between the immediacy of IM and the impossible ideal of checking email once a day. If it’s burning, co-workers can use direct IM. Otherwise, message updates are processed in batches every 30 minutes. I remain available but retain some sanity.

Twitter is no corporate powertoy. It still lacks usergroups; you can’t get privacy, either (Update: as twittersweet indicated in the comments, you can make your updates private and improvise groups). Small businesses might cope by using anonymous accounts. In corporations, do you think we’ll see Twitter look-alikes in next-generation IM systems?

Green Cafe

Last week, our team at SOPOLEC hosted a World Cafe based on the question: “What can be done to encourage sustainable building practices in Romania?”. We called it the “Green Cafe”.

This was my first experiment with hosting a World Cafe, and it was very exciting to see groups quickly become engaged in conversation, leading to very clear common themes across the different groups by the time participants re-united.

Hosting this event at our office required a little creativity. We created six spaces for discussion, including a number of offices, a conference room, and our terrace. I was worried that, while spaces such as the terrace would create welcoming environments for discussion, drier spaces such as the conference room would be rather forbidding. However, people were so quickly engaged in conversation that the environment was quickly out of mind. In some spaces, people felt more comfortable sitting on the floor.

When using multiple rooms to host Cafe conversations, it becomes a challenge to end each round of conversation: by the time you move between the rooms, people are confused as to who is staying and who is leaving. We always seemed to end up with 1-2 tables where the table host was left alone… and then had to round up the stray people left on the hallways continuing previous conversations.

After three rounds, of conversation, everyone convened in the main space for coffee. We taped the visual products of each table to the walls, people moved from one to the next, trying to quickly grasp the content. After a 10-minute discussion in which we summarized the 3-4 common themes that had been discussed at all of the tables, the Cafe participants enjoyed ice cream on the terrace while continuing their conversations.

(My colleague Anca wrote about it on BusinessIDEAS.ro)