E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Clay Shirky on Institutions vs. Collaboration – Business 2.0

Earlier on today, while I was getting started with my morning catchup routines, I got things going with my twitterings with this particular tweet: "Having one of those days where I keep questioning whether it’s all worth it pushing the limit as a 2.0 evangelist going against the current". Quite an interesting one, don’t you think? And perhaps a bit more loaded than what I thought it would come out as… Well, shortly after my good friend Jon Mell (From Headshift) shared the following tweet responding to that one I just shared above: "@elsua hold that thought, I should have a blog post for ya this afternoon."

And so I was intrigued… Knowing Jon, I was very intrigued. So I kept going along with my day and all of a sudden he goes and tweets back again the following tweet: "New blog post – Business 2.0 looking at business driving enterprise social software tools, rather than the other way round http://is.gd/YTjJ". And the suspense was over!

I right away head over to that blog post that he put under the heading "Business 2.0" and my head was completely blown away! What an outstanding reading! One of the best I have read through in a long while! Going through it felt good. Perhaps too good! But if you have been a knowledge worker for a while now getting exposed to social software in general and making heavy use of it you will know exactly what I mean and also you would come to the conclusion that exciting times are ahead of us! And I just can’t wait!

Here is one of the several precious gems that Jon shared in that article:

"Organisations need to trust these professionals, they will not be in the office from 9-5 every day. These are exactly the sorts of people who thrive on their personal networks, they are the people who you go to when you need to know what’s going on. Social software brings the same level of productivity increases for these people as type-writers and then word processors did for a previous generation of workers. It takes their natural propensity to connect, to share, to add value and extends it in the same way the internet extends our access to information."

To then finish off with this other one:

"It won’t be enough to hire knowledge workers to survive and thrive in this recession. Organisations will have to change their business practices to take advantage of their abilities, and provide them with the tools to be effective. Word, Outlook and even Sharepoint won’t cut it. They will need custom built social platforms, or products such as Confluence, Jive, Socialtext and Lotus Connections."

Those two quotes probably describe some of the stuff I have been doing for a long while now so well that it’s even scary! I probably wouldn’t have been able to describe it much better myself! And I bet that folks who see themselves as Knowledge Workers 2.0 in the current business world they would feel the exact same way. I am sure! And they probably wouldn’t be wrong…

So what does that blog post from Jon Mell have got to do with the first part of the title from this blog entry, i.e. with Clay Shirky? And that ambiguous title of "Institutions vs. Collaboration"? Well, believe it or not, quite a lot. Allow me to explain …

You will need to go into the TED – Ideas Worth Spreading Web site and check out a presentation Clay did back in 2005! around this very same subject, but perhaps with a bit more powerful message on how the process of knowledge sharing and collaborating was starting to shift from old models into new ones and all of that provoked by the emergence of social computing. And that dating back to 2005! The title of that presentation is Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration and you will be able to find it over here (Embedded version below…) and, like I said if earlier on today, if reading Jon’s blog post was quite an inspiration and a burst of fresh air, Clay’s 20 minute presentation will be like being hit by Inspiration in its purest form! Yes, that good!

Needless to say that is one of those TED videos everyone who considers themselves as knowledge workers should watch; whether you watch it before or after reading Jon’s article it won’t matter; you will be ending up on the same sweet spot, only four years apart in time from one to the other! And you will be left with a single thought in your mind for a long while: exciting times are ahead of us and I am surely excited to be part of it all! And you?

Tags: Business 2.0, Institutions, Jon Mell, Headshift, Knowledge Workers, Knowledge Workers 2.0, Confluence, Jive, Socialtext, Lotus Connections, Connections, Clay Shirky, TED, Ideas Worth Spreading, Inspirational, Inspiring, Inspiration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Twitter

Collaboration Matters 8 and 9 – Lotusphere Highlights with “Los Dos Luis”

A few weeks back I got invited to participate in a couple of podcasting episodes from the wonderful folks behind Collaboration Matters: Stu McIntyre and Neil Burston. And, of course, I couldn’t reject such kind offer. Even more when I found out the other guest for those two episodes was eventually IBM fellow colleague, and good friend, Luis Benitez (Not to worry, we are not twin brothers, despite what most folks keep telling us, even if we tend to look alike somewhat! heh) and on the agenda we were going to talk about Enterprise Social Software as well as detailing some of our key highlights from Lotusphere 2009, held earlier on this year in Orlando, FL.

And so we did take part on these two different fun podcasting episodes, where we talked about a whole bunch of different topics, but always with some of the best highlights, in our opinion, of Lotusphere 2009 running in the background. Now those episodes are readily available for replay and I am sure you may be wondering what we did talk about actually with both Neil and Stu, right? Well, here is a quick synopsis of what you will find in both episodes, to give you a taster of what to expect:

Collaboration Matters 8 – Los Dos Luis (36MB download and running for 26 minutes in Spanish with Neil)

• Lotusphere – the excitement and the challenges
• Successes and challenges for Social Software
• Is Social Software "Mainstream"?
• A Year without email – working in different ways?

Collaboration Matters 9 – LS09 Connectr BoF Review (41MB download and running for 30 minutes in English with both Neil & Stu)

• What is a Connectr?
• Who was there and what did we discuss?
• Tools versus Enablement & adoption
• What Social tools are people using – injecting Social Software capabilities into the existing application landscape
• Actually using Social tools – asking questions and opening up the Silos
• Do Social Software Best Practices really exist?
• Who is driving social software adoption within organisations?

As you will be able to see plenty of really good and interesting topics where both Luis Benitez and myself shared our two cents on what we have been seeing in this social software space for a little while now and where we may be heading next. On episode #8 I even got a chance to talk about living "A World Without Email" and this particular episode may be more interesting to those folks who speak Spanish, since we had the entire conversation in Spanish! Funny enough, it’s probably one of the very few podcasting episodes I have done in my native language. Yeah, too funny!

On episode #9 you will be able to get a grasp of our first public reactions to the BOFs session both Luis Benitez and myself did along with Stu on the topic of Connectr. Perhaps one of the most engaging and interactive sessions I have been talking around the subject of Enterprise Social Software, adoption, social tools, the so-called "best practices" of social software (Priceless that one, I can tell you know, and something I will be coming back to shortly as well with a couple of follow up blog posts) that I can remember in a fully packed room.

So, I am going to leave it there for now, and would encourage you have a listen to episode #8 where you can find out plenty more about social software at the same time that you can practice your Spanish skills , or have that rare chance where you can hear me talk in Spanish about some of the 2.0 subjects I have been really passionate about all along. On episode #9 you will be able to find out, first hand, what we learned from the BOFs session (Connectr) we did at Lotusphere.

From here I just want to take this opportunity to share a special thanks! to both Stu and Neil for their time and for their kind invite to the Collaboration Matters podcasting show and to my tocayo for sharing along all of the good stuff he has been doing all this time in the field of social computing and, more specifically, around IBM’s Lotus Connections. Thanks, guys!

Tags: Collaboration Matters, Stu McIntyre, Neil Burston, Connectr, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, A World Without Email, IBM Lotusphere, Lotusphere 2009, Lotusphere2009, LS09, BOFs, Lotus Connections, Connections, Enterprise Social Software, Social Software Adoption, Best Practices

Toward Government 2.0 by Matt Hodgson

Continuing further with the recent bunch of blog posts I have put together under the subject of Government 2.0, I thought I would come to the topic today, once again, after Twitter did its bit as my preferred dynamic RSS feed reader. That’s when I bumped into a superb video and presentation link on this very same subject by one of the folks who has been doing, for a while now, a tremendous amount of really good work around Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0, and which I have grown to admire and show plenty of respect over the years for his insightful and thought provoking ideas on how to make the most from social software in a business environment and beyond.

I am talking, of course, about Matt Hodgson, author of the highly recommended Matt’s Musings blog, in case you may not have subscribed to it just yet, and where, earlier on today, he shared a blog post under the title "Toward Government 2.0". In that article you will be able to read through about a presentation he will be doing to "a number of executives and committees this week on Web 2.0 and its use in government — ie: Government 2.0".

It’s a 76 slide deck that you will be able to breeze through rather quickly, but you will be exposed to such a level of incredibly inspiring gems in it that you will be digesting it little by little and for a long while. So many slides with incredibly powerful messages on how governments, in general, can tune in into making use of social software to engage with 21st century’s (Net) citizens 2.0 that this blog post would not do it justice to just name a few. Yes, indeed, it is that good!

You can check out the slide deck directly over at Slideshare, or you could also flip over through the pages in the embedded version shared below:

But before you eventually do all of that, I would strongly encourage you, as a taster, and a little bit of a teaser, too, to check out this YouTube video he also shared earlier on and which will help set the stage of what you will be able to find in the overall deck. It lasts for a little bit over 90 seconds, but, believe me, it will be worth it. It’s incredibly well done and it touches base on most of the items that the presentation deals with in much more detail. The title of the YouTube video is "How can government leverage Web 2.0?" and here you have got the embedded version as well:

I know that some folks out there might be questioning Matt’s reasoning behind both the video and the presentation, more than anything because of the extra focus on the current Web 2.0 and local government landscapes in Australia, but if you take that into the context of a specific country, your own country, you will see that the various challenges and, most importantly, the huge potential and ideas that Web 2.0 brings into the table, and which Matt nicely details further along, are eventually not all of that different from our very own. Wherever we may well be… Quite the opposite! So …

Welcome to 21st century Citizenship 2.0! Our (Your) Voice!

Tags: Matt Hodgson, Matt’s Musings, Engagement, Empowerment, Government Next, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Government, Society, Humanity, Inspiration, Insights, Online Collaboration, Twitter, Social Workplace, Government, Government 2.0, Culture, Technology, Social Web, Transparency, Trust, Opportunity, Citizens 2.0, Citizen, Slideshare, Citizens 2.0, Citizenship 2.0, Choice