Large organisation adopting social mediums, who thrive while sharing before the social tools, tend to become avid representatives of the Enterprise 2.0 and social workplace, those companies usually harvest value out of the social workplace and introduction of a digital means to extend their natural work process.
One of the best example is Deloitte and the Yammer love affair, Accountancy consultants share information to survive, they are a co-organism that just got extended with the services of yammer.
Wouldn’t it be great if this was the case for any company? presenting the tools, educating the people and bang we hit the gold vein of the social workplace era.
Sadly this isn’t the case, we have to understand that we are not at the stage where companies are ruled by the social generation. Employees do not fully understand the value of information sharing, and in some cases regard information sharing as a loss of job security.
Pondering about this for a while i though, how can we then promote the use of the social workplace in organisations?
One of the methods is to expose the non users to the users, making the public know about the small groups of people who produce value from the social workplace.
There are probably multiple ways of doing so and i cant even imagine all of them but the one i think will create create value and help in exposing the network is Digital Curation.
Digital Curation is similar to the curation of the art in the museum, a selection of the best “Content”, based on predefined criteria representing the company business and culture, are selected and maintained in a shared location. These items are catalogued (Tags, Categories etc.) and indexed for quick find.
This curated content is transmitted through common medium in the organisation with the aim to expose and educate.
What i envision is the exposure of the company through email to a curated valuable set of snippets and links from the social workplace.
This will get some inquisitive people the small push to discover what was going on.
It will expose the tools without the fluff, only the stuff.
But most importantly it will give the value to the people and the best reaction can be a conversion due to a mishap, “If only i had this info yesterday” type. A person who relises the work related value of the Enterprise 2.0 is going to be hooked and become the best advocator.
This is not to replace an appropriate education to the system but more to enhance that with sharing the current experience on this new tool, teasing people to join the crowd.
If we can change the peoples perceived value of the new tool then it will get its proper place.
But this is the side benefit of curation, the main benefit is that curation will enable a timeline representation of the value from the network and will enable the curator to then report of the value increase or decrease as it appears in the network.
This monitoring of the social workplace and the deeper metrics it represent will enable a better monitoring on the networks value production.
Goverment 2.0 Is the audiance ready? #oahack
Its been a great weekend in OpenAustralia Hackfest, first let me thank the organisers who have done an amazing job, Matthew Landauer, Alan Noble, Pamela Fox, Henare Degan and Tim Ansell who organised the event. And a special thanks to our amazing sponsor Google who gave us the space, the food and the great prizes.
A big get well out to Rob Manson, getting sick in the first day and missing out. Hope he gets better soon.
There were some great hacking done on government data and some nice things that have not matured to applications during the weekend.
There is one thing, that keeps blinking at the back of my mind.
Is the crowd we are serving the data ready?
Will they be able to use the interface we give them?
It seems there is a gap, a big gap, between the technology world and the political realm. there is always a gap, i was not aware of how deep it is. Reading License to Drive in the Digital Economy exposed me to a troubling figure, a quarter of the people in this land are social web illiterate,
“27% of those surveyed aged 14 and over were not currently participating online. These statistics give some indication that about a quarter of those surveyed would struggle to become active participants in the digital economy.”
This poses a big question about utilisation of the Government 2. and the usefulness of these tools.
It seems that the information gathered from these types of applications will be biased towards the more capable social layers, thus creating a worse situation to the social segments not represented.
What should we do?
How can you enable all the crowd to be part of this participation age?
This is a big questions that got some mentioning
My take is that we need to child proof our applications and match them to the profile of a non technical and non social aware person.
As we develop our systems we should strive to get the information to the users in the most simple to follow and understandable form, thus making it easier to consume and make available to all users of the web.
Keep your interfaces accessible, make them conform to WCAG 2.0, if you are not a front end developer DON’T develop the front end.
There was a cry from Tim Ansell, during free hacking sessions and later in the lightning sessions, to find any one who can prettify his interface.
Do the same, there are a lot of people that are very capable and would love to do so.
May the web be with you.
NSW Sphere – Government 2.0
Its been 3 weeks since the NSW Sphere and the announcement of aps4nsw competition been announced by our PM Nathan Rees.
There has been some movement in the twitscopia but nothing been announced in the website.
Is this open gov? i know its a competition but you can show the people who have submitted an idea cant you?
It looks like its not picking up in the site, which is deceiving and might lead to less participation.
Even the datansw twitter and site are not giving up any information.
This hurdle is the main characteristic of the information sharing we lack from the government, just seems like this apps4nsw is missing the main point and that is dont be RailCorp!
On another note there is a cry from the people to become more active in the creation and not the discussion over the next social applications. some tweets from today
“@rbuerckner @purserj agreed. Let’s have a mix of thinking and *doing* – lots of small wins and examples needed #gov2au”
“@trib @purserj #gov2au We can think all we want, right now it’s time for doing, need to get on with it”
This is all true but there is a lack in Government participation, not You Penny you are the best, to enable us easily accessing the data, so in addition to that cry i will add use your personal contacts to move the government and make the required data available. there are people inside the parliament house that want this to happen and will gladly help you so just be pushy.
Just a bit more about the enablement of the social age in the government services and the risk that is growing out of it, reading the long article by Charles Leadbeater and Hilary Cottam about the individual making their own decision over the support of the government to disabled people using In Control‘s social platform made me think about the possibility to manipulate the system.
The way that the writers look at the personal enablement and the role of the social worker is a bit naive to my taste, the system grew to become what it is today because the clients have driven it to that not because of a conscious decision to endorse red tape and disable their employees with forms. people are looking to manipulate the system and the system is using their employees to be gatekeepers.
My thought is that we need to rethink the way we as a public gatekeep these new social platforms and let the professional do their jobs at the same time.
So let me ask for the new social gate, a tool to enable the community to stop the cheating an robbing of the system and let the money flow to the people who need it most. who is going to take the plunge and thinker the details?
Prediction Market Enterprise 2.0?
Was looking at the prediction market post by Andrew McAfee titled Mobs Rule, which in my opinion misses the point, he describes one of the companies he is involved in Crowdcast i started pondering about the validity of a prediction market as an enterprise 2.0 tool.
Taking on this tool has some distinct usage for businesses that is capable of generating value.
Avoiding the need to rely solely on the Project Management methodology to predict the delivery date of a product or the end of an it upgrade, adding to that the ability to predict the success of the latest campaign, is a extremely efficient tool that is able to generate significant advantages and better profit.
My personal problem with the Prediction Markets is its a self-fulfilling prophecy once the prediction is out, and it tends to direct the out come more then predict it.
The base product of Crowdcast uses an interface, from the demo, looking quite rudimentary and may be a bit too graphic, seems like it is not a poll like and uses adjustments to select a response.
I hope they have more interfaces that enable the users to make a selection though.
Crowdcast promise to bring the market internally and make the organization as the crowd to do the selection.
This is probably good in a very limited type of organizations, one that could have the internal critics, the huge ones. if you read te book the wisdom of crowds you are probably familiar with the two basic assumptions that the crowd needs to bet on the score and needs to be heterogeneous to achieve the best predictions.
So how can we make this a part of the toolset if the enterprise is not as big as it needs and certainly not as heterogeneous in the thought process and loyalty to the company.
I love the google prediction market experiment excerpt
In the last three years, Google has conducted the largest corporate experiment with prediction markets we are aware of. In this paper, we illustrate how markets can be used to study how an organization processes information.
We document a number of biases in Google