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

The Liquid Network: Where Good Ideas Come From

Do you happen to have about 18 minutes of your precious busy time, just before you get things going with your weekend (after a hard long week at work) to spare to go ahead and watch one of those TED Talks that will surely keep you thinking for a while on what true innovation is all about? You do? Then you have got to go and watch Steven Johnson‘s Talk on Where Good Ideas Come From. It’s worth the 18 minutes and so much more!

In that rather mind-boggling talk, Steven comes to share a whole bunch of different stories (Yes, he is quite an amazing storyteller, too!) that try to explain how the whole process of coming up with new ideas that would inspire new innovations has never probably been an isolated process, an individual activity, disconnected from everything, and everyone else! Quite the contrary. It’s all part of the hive mind. In fact, his notion that “An Idea Is a Network” is quite provocative on its own, not only because of what it tries to illustrate for all of us, but mainly because it makes perfect sense as well!

If you watch through the entire TED Talk, you would probably realise about something that perhaps may have passed by unnoticed in the past, which is the fact that coming up with ideas, which could spark that next brilliant innovation, is actually a group activity; in fact, it’s a network activity. Your network(s)!

Steven comes to share a couple of stories where he mentions how local cafes might be some of the best places out there (He mentions a couple of other ones along as well) to throw ideas at your partners in crime, converse about them, enrich them, make them better, and come up with the idea by accelerating the process actively participating in those same conversations / discussions. The whole concept of how that physical, face to face contact amongst people provokes the creation of an idea is fascinating on its own. It’s probably something that most of us have sensed already in the past, but that we neglected time and time again, because we just didn’t trust the network good enough.

Well, now, with the emergence of social networking tools as the major drivers of building that trust effectively, we are certainly seeing how plenty of those ideas and innovations are taking place out there in the open where everyone could participate adding their two cents and at at amazingly faster pace, too! While watching the video I got several reminders about the IBM Jams, for instance, or Spigit, for that matter, amongst several others, because when participating in one of those online events, it does resemble that melting pot Steven was referring to where people come together, in this case virtually, through various different areas, environments and backgrounds to just discuss a specific idea and make it better.

And that seems to work time and time again. Steven’s final quote on “Chance favours the collective mind” is probably as descriptive as it can get on how innovation happens. Wired’s recently published article under the title “Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From“, where both Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson himself engaged on a rather enlightening and educational conversation, is just another testimony of the inspiration of what you can get from just a conversation on a topic where both parties are passionate about. Yes, in my opinion, true innovation.

The one we should spark and encourage not only within the workplace AND every single business out there, but all over the place as well. In our societies. It’s that kind of innovation that we need to inspire amongst us all, specially in the current times we live in, because somehow I suspect that hived and networked ingenuity is probably the one that is going to help us move into the next stage of who we are: The Liquid Network.

Hope you have enjoyed the TED Talk… I surely did and I already feel inspired! And you?

Have a good one everyone!

Technorati Tags: TED, TED Talk, Inspiring, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Innovation, Idea Management, Ideas, Networks, Hived Mind, IBM Jams, Spigit, Chance, Collective Mind, Wired, The Liquid Network, Work, Life, Society, Science, Technology, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity

CommunityBuilders: The State of Community Management 2010 with Rachel Happe and Jim Storer

I think I have mentioned it in the past, over here, in this blog, as well how, inside of the company I work for, we do have this rather special Community of Community Managers / Facilitators / Leaders that over the course of 10 years it’s become one of those essential resources available out there to all of those fellow IBM community facilitators (That’s my preferred term, so from now onwards I’ll stick around with that one…), and to whoever else internally who may be interested, in general, in the topic of (online) communities, as a hang out place where they could share stories, experiences, their know-how, good practices, facilitation materials, community building techniques, etc. etc. in order to help and support one another facilitating their own communities much more effectively. And so far the model seems to have been working really well, specially nowadays when online communities seem to be more popular and resourceful than ever!

The fact that the community has been running for over 10 years is probably a good indication as well of how important and paramount it’s become for IBM’s community facilitators out there. It’s had a couple of dormant stages in the past, but all along it’s been thriving with a bunch of passionate community builders who want to increase the overall involvement and engagement from their own communities members. Yes, that’s right! That’s the name of the community: CommunityBuilders.

One of the various different activities that we organise for this specific community is actually monthly general education events around the topic of community building, more than anything else to help them keep up with the fast and rampant pace that online communities are growing under, further on, at the moment. I am one of the co-leaders of the community, along with a couple of other folks, and we are always looking for rather interesting and noteworthy education events that these community builders could benefit from, whether with internal or external speakers.

In August we had the great pleasure, and true honour, of having with us Steve Dale, who spent a bit over one hour with us talking about How to Build and Sustain Online Communities; session which, if you would remember, I blogged about over here, in case you would want to refer to it back again. Well, for September we had another couple of external guest speakers, two of my favourite people in online community management; Rachel Happe and Jim Storer, co-founders of The Community Roundtable initiative.

If you are already familiar with the fine work The Community Roundtable folks have been doing over the course of the last few months around successfully facilitating online communities and sharing plenty of those good practices, there is probably very little introduction that I need to do. However, if you haven’t heard about them, and you are facilitating an online community yourself, I can strongly encourage you all folks to check this superb blog post that Rachel herself shared a little while ago under the heading “The Community Maturity Model“, which comes to talk about perhaps one of the more comprehensive and resourceful maturity models that may exist for (online) communities out there. It surely is worth while a read!

So, like I said, back in September, we had both Rachel and Jim with us for about an hour sharing plenty of great insights on a piece of work they have done just recently which I think would also be worthwhile going through it over here as well. Now, Jim helped out facilitating, along with a couple of us, the backchannel that we had in place for this event, while Rachel was taking it away and delivering a rather inspiring presentation on the topic of “The State of Community Management 2010“. And now we have got both the presentation materials as well as the recording of the event readily available to share it with you all.

That’s right, both Rachel and Jim have been kind enough to allow us to share with you folks out there both the presentation materials that she used, which are slightly different than the ones she has got available over at her Slideshare space under the same title, as well as the audio and video recording of the session. And I am thinking that after that introduction shared above, I better speed up, go ahead and share with you folks the details of where you could go and download the materials, so you can dive into them right away!

Thus without much further ado, here you have got them:

• [Presentation Materials] The State of Community Management 2010 with Rachel Happe & Jim Storer (.PDF 1.6MB)
• [Recording / Replay] The State of Community Management 2010 with Rachel Happe & Jim Storer (.MOV 39MB)

If you would want to get a little bit of  teaser of the kind of materials that both Rachel and Jim presented to us, you may want to have a look into the Slideshare link I shared above, which I am also going to embed below:

As you may have noticed already, the presentation was all about the Community Roundtable Maturity Model covering the following areas: Strategy, Leadership, Culture, Community Management, Content & Programming, Policies & Governance, Metrics & Measurement and Tools, sharing a bunch of good practices on successful community facilitation for each and everyone of those characteristics. Like I said, whether you are new to facilitating online communities or whether you are a seasoned community facilitator yourself, or whether you are just interested in online communities in general, I can guarantee you there will be something out there for you that you would learn by the end of the presentation itself. I am sure.

If you have a little bit over one hour you could spare here and there and would want learn more about how online communities are *the* major drivers of adoption for social software within the enterprise, amongst several other things, I can certainly encourage you all to download the materials and dive right in! You will enjoy them!

From here onwards, I just want to take this opportunity to share across a special thanks!! with both Rachel and Jim, for spending some time with us, CommunityBuilders, and for sharing plenty of those great insights and good practices on what it is like being a successful community facilitator. Thanks ever so much, folks! We had a blast and I surely hope to have you guys as our guests in the near future once again!

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Communities, Education, Enterprise 2.0, Events, IBM, Innovation, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Learning, Productivity, Recordings, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0, Webcasts, Steve Dale, CommunityBuilders, Communities101, #cmgr, CommunityBuilding, Facilitators, Online Facilitators, Online Facilitation, Online Communities, Community Managers, Community Leaders, Community Owners, Community Stewards, Facilitating Communities, CoPs, Communities of Practice, Community Roundtable, Rachel Happe, Jim Storer, Matury Models, Community Maturity Model, Slideshare, Good Practices, Strategy, Leadership, Culture, Community Management, Content, Programming, Policies, Governance, Metrics, Measurement, Tools