Office 2.0 Unconference – continued

Ah, the tyranny of bloggers. I’ll post more about the panel discussion on emerging economies on BusinessIdeas.ro.

At yesterday’s Unconference, I participated in the following discussions:

1. Introducing disruptive technologies
2. How can Office 2.0 vendors make money
3. Does the virtual enterprise really exist?
4. Enterprise 2.0 in emerging economies
5. Productivity in office 2.0

Interesting takeaways and further questions:

• Once a Web2.0 product “succeeds”, it quickly loses coolness (see graph). J. C. MacDonald said that once Groove sold out to Microsoft, it “feel off the cliff of coolness”. If coolness (“Whuffie“) is the currency of choice in the Web2.0 world, and monetary success quickly brings a coolness penalty, what are the long-term options for 2.0 business?
• Disruptiveness is relative. I fully agree with Neil Raden’s point that (paraphrasing) “disruptive” is a coward’s synonym for innovation.
• Dave Mosby raised the very interesting question of how to raise pain awareness. Self-protective denial keeps people sane (“We manage just fine with email!”). I look forward to exploring this question throughout the conference, maybe in the Culture and Technolgy panel later in the day.
• Robin Carey shared some very thought-provoking ideas on the way social media could be used in NGOs and for social issues reporting. I will certainly follow up on this theme, as I find it tremendously promising. This recent Economist article is a good introduction (also covered in more detail by the excellent Humanitarian.info).

By the way… Twitter is still down. Very bad timing for me, as I was looking forward to twitterring through the conference.

More on Meetings on a Wiki

Bill Ives of the FASTForward blog adds some very insightful comments to my earlier post on holding meetings on a wiki.

Bill has an interesting point regarding notifications:

I would add to also allow this [notifications] to go somewhere besides the email inbox. I am not excited when a heated discussion on an email group suddenly drops twenty messages in my inbox. Take advantage of the common workspace here and do not drag in the sins of email spaghetti with its overlapping tangled mess.

I fully agree. I love RSS. I would, however, approach it in a differentiated manner depending on the lifestage of the wiki and people’’s level of familiarity with it. If participants are not used to RSS, I’d rather give them updates via email than wait until they learn to use RSS. After they get smothered in email, they will also be more likely to see the use for RSS :D

Stewart also comments:

One suggestion with the point about structure – it’s important to be careful to use as little structure as possible, and make sure people know that they can change the structure of a page if it makes sense to do so. In other words, the flexibility of the wiki is what makes it such a great event planning tool.

Yes, the simplest structure will usually work the best. Once a community has been using a wiki for some time, structure can be very sketchy and free-form. I find that with a community that has only just started with a wiki, an empty page will not trigger participation. Populating the page with some content – breaking the ice, as it were – gives the discussion the traction needed to get going.

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.