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sociALCHEMY /* */ var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src="http://www.socialchemy.com//" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var wpcomPageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-52447-2");wpcomPageTracker._setDomainName("none");wpcomPageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);wpcomPageTracker._initData();wpcomPageTracker._trackPageview(); #header_content { background:#900 url(http://socialchemy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/header.jpg) center repeat-y;}#header_content h1 a, #header_content h1 a:hover { color: #FFFF99;} /**/ sociALCHEMY Transforming social assets 13Aug Scaling up knowledge transfer By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: knowledge Tags: climate change, government, ICLEI How do you share critical knowledge across a large scale distributed network of organizations? I believe we have a great model in the work of an organization known as ICLEI (”ick-lee”), which was founded almost 20 years ago by the United Nations to develop sustainability practices for local governments. Today its mission has expanded to include adaptation, while the intensity of that mission has risen to meet the growing challenge of climate change.The American branch of the organization - ICLEI-USA - makes use of the knowledge developed by ICLEI-Global in a program centered around what it calls the Five Milestones. These are the basic building blocks that local governments must commit to achieving to even qualify for membership. Resolutions must be passed by these governments before ICLEI will engage them in the program.In essence, ICLEI shares and distributes its knowledge about effective local government action by insisting that its clients enroll in its program. Along with the benefits of being guided through the implementation of sustainable and adaptive processes, member governments get to share with their peers the results of their creative efforts. Many of these can be found on the ICLEI-USA web site under Success Stories. An upcoming online community will provide opportunities for more peer-based knowledge exchange.I tend to think of knowledge sharing as benefitting from informality in conversation, where participants drop pretenses and rely on trust to reveal what they know. Small scale encounters seem to support more open communication. It’s good to know that knowledge sharing can scale to the institutional level where informality is replaced with structure and some prerequisites that demonstrate commitment to learn. If ever we needed to learn as a planet, now is the time. 30Jul Thumbers in the Enterprise By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: knowledge and social media Tags: Thumb generation, distraction, guildsmiths Last month I snagged an article off the NY Times site. It was titled Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast and described how the interrupts from cell phones, email and instant messaging were hurting productivity in the office. When you work independently like I do, you learn to set boundaries and discipline yourself to get things done when you have to. But lately, observing the behavior of people much younger than me, I realize that it’s not so simple when you’ve grown up welcoming the interrupts of realtime connection with cohorts.The article revealed that some of the largest culprits in bringing these interrupting technologies to market are now working together to create antidotes to the problems they’ve had hands in creating. Well isn’t that ironic? Studies have found that “more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions.” That’s worth some attention. One of the research organizations represented on the board of this new interrupt-killing initiative is Basex, and checking out their site, I found more interesting stuff.One report they’ve released (for which I’m not about to pay $299) is titled Technologies to Teach the Thumb Generation. I much prefer that term to “Generation Y” or even “the Millenials.” I’d shorten it to Thumbers because of their obvious mastery of thumb-powered communications. As this generation of interrupt-crazy technically-raised workers hits the organizational landscape, they’re not going to take kindly to attempts to rein in their connectivity habits. But - as the report asks - “What does this mean for the enterprise?”For outside consultants coming in to the organization, the overriding question always seems to be, “Whose idea of technology, interaction and community rules?” The answer has always leaned heavily toward the viewpoint of the CEO, though over the past decade more upper and middle management ideas have been allowed to steer social technology choices. Today we find many enterprises testing the social web waters by allowing innovative teams to employ tools and environments that are demonstrating impressive knowledge throughput on the public Web. The very technologies the NY Times story described as being disruptive can also be very productive if incorporated into a strategy and practice.As more Thumbers take roles in large companies, I can see as much potential for new forms of productive collaboration as I do for distraction and chaos. Let’s not disable new communications technologies preemptively. Let’s instead study how new techno-social skills and routines can bring about more and faster innovation. We’ve got too many needs for radical change to stand still or move backwards. 26Jul lifestreaming something important By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: greed and social media Tags: greed, silly applications, social media, trivial product, wastes of time I’ve been reconsidering the feeds I follow to inform my blogging here. Obviously, I don’t post very often, and I think I’ve discovered the reason. Those feeds - chosen because they seem to be the most authoritative around the industry of social Web applications and activity - are stuck in a circle-jerking fascination with the financial success of a never-ending parade of products and ideas that have a snowball’s chance in Hell of making any difference in the world.Could it be we have too much time on our hands? I’ve got nothing against leisure; I’m not a throwback to the Puritan work ethic. And I’ve spent enough of my life immersed in community to appreciate the value of maintaining relationships. But the proliferation of digital gadgetry for the sole purpose of informing others of the trivial events that fill your 24-hour, 7-days-a-week life just looks to me like someone’s not paying attention to what’s happening in the world at large. Missing the forest for the trees seems like an apt metaphor.The trees are the countless hours and creative juices that go into “Hey, look at me! I’m looking at you looking at me!” The forest is “Can we summon up the time and creativity to figure out how to solve these important global problems before they collapse our toy-based lives around our ears?”One lifestream that screams out for notice (and yes, it does get a lot of notice on at least a superficial level) is the advance of climate change. I happen to be plugged into that stream, and there’s plenty of news to follow. It changes every day, but the one constant is that we’re not making nearly enough progress in dealing with it. It’s like following a stream of information leading up to a car wreck but without being able to get the driver’s attention. “Hey, slow down! Pull in to the other lane! At least take your foot off the gas!” And like a bad dream, you witness the progression of events and scream at the driver, but no sound is coming out of your mouth.We’ve got plenty of very capable communications tools to spread the word, to engage in global conversations about the situation, to share information and knowledge…it’s not a lack of good enough apps that is to blame for our lack of effective action. A better Facebook or Twitter is not the solution for global warming - and at least those two examples have merit in having been adopted by huge user bases. But the heavily funded industry for crazy social gizmos that barely add any new functionality appears to me (IM ever-so HO) to be a fucking waste of good time and resources.Maybe - hopefully - the adolescent target audiences of these silly applications will move on quickly to a consciousness that includes the planet and environment in which they will mature and grow up. I do have some confidence that people in their 20s show awareness of the world around them and their place in it. Maybe it’s us older generations that are still stuck in the world of venture capitalized pap.If we’re really interested in “community,” we should be engaged with the people who comprise our own in ways that will make the most positive difference in their welfare. The conditions that allow our communities to exist and thrive are not guaranteed. Indeed, many of those conditions are under threat of destruction. Today might be a beautiful day wherever you live - as it is here where I live - but what are you doing to insure that such beauty will endure? 14Jul The rise of “thought-movers”? By cfigallo 1 Comment Categories: culture, experts and knowledge Tags: thought leaders I don’t know anything about Hydrasight (I first envisioned organization that keeps an eye out for many-headed dragons) but its research directory, John Brand recently wrote a column I found on the IT-Director.com blog, which rang true for me in spite of its obvious intent to introduce a new branding slogan.“Thought-leaders are in over-supply: herald the era of thought-movers” is the title and it describes Hydrasight’s current strategic direction. I find the juxtaposition of “leaders” and “movers” to be an interesting way of framing the shift from top-down idea penetration to bottom-up. By enabling more options for communication and collaboration at the organizational levels where thinking can drive team action, today’s online social tools can be more effective in fostering solutions than outside consultancy firms who are invited in to analyze the organizaton, make recommendations to top-level management and even lead the thinking of how those recommendations will be implemented down through the hierarchy.People who work closer to the customer interface have a vivid idea of how those customers regard the business and what they’re looking for in service and products. Empowering them to communicate what they’re learning and to participate in finding good solutions is truly though-moving and experience-based. And though I’m not sure that all of John Brand’s assertions are valid, I do find truth in this passage:Hydrasight believes that thought-movers will not necessarily be those in organisations with the loudest voices, the highest positions of authority, the greatest technical capability or even those who are the most ‘people-savvy’. They will often be the (seemingly) quiet achievers who are able to ‘tune-out’ much of the noise and hype to focus the organisation on implementing real strategic and operational change. 28May A cool Who We Are page By cfigallo 2 Comments Categories: marketing and social media Just thought I’d send out kudos for this graphic presentation of the staff at Rich Apps Consulting. Nice. Not sure, though, what the skills graphs mean next to each person’s mini-bio. Do the bars tell you how skilled the person is on a scale of 100? So you’ve got people who do four things at 80 percent expertise? Are we grading on a curve?RAC also has an intelligent blog article about Enterprise 2.0 here. Largely quoting from Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s hard to go wrong. 28May A tool for assessing wiki appropriateness in the enterprise By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: culture and wiki Tags: appropriate, assessment This is one of the Questions of the Moment, isn’t it? Will wikis help launch your company into the creative vanguard or will they seed conflict and confusion throughout your workforce? Is it a wiki your marketing division needs or just smarter use of SharePoint? I’d like to think that my experience would be useful in helping a company find the answer to that question, but it would cost the company more than the $195 that ITA is charging for its Enterprise Wiki Appropriateness Assessment document. Helpfully, ITA also recommends, “For a more complete analysis, this tool should be used in conjunction with the ITA Premium research note, “The Many Faces of Enterprise Wikis.” That’ll cost you another $195.I’d like to be able to evaluate this product, but I’m not gonna pay 400 bucks to find out how useful it might be. Hopefully, the documents tell you to first go and interview a lot of people within your organization to see how they currently work with one another. 28May Can government get smarter? By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: culture, flattening and wiki Tags: content management, government The answer should not be, “It can’t get much dumber.” What I’m getting at is more focused on the social media angle. Can wikis and blogs (for example) be implemented within government in such a way that they will help make our public servants work smarter and more productively - that we’ll get more of our money’s worth?One reason I ask is that this product review on the GCN (Government Computer News) site begs the question. Check it out and see how you feel about the recommendations for implementing the $15,000 (for small groups) Team Page 4.0 application. I’ve got no argument with the review’s recommendations of Team Page as a content publishing tool, including its ability to assign many levels of read/write permissions and staging content for selective previewing. But when applied with social interfaces like wikis and blogs, it seems likely to wash the “social” right out of the application.Here are some lines from the review that had me scratching my head wondering why you’d bring wikis and blogs into your government workplace only to lock them down with good old “Team” Page. OK, I know…State Secrets, National Security, etc. But, still, we’re beginnig with relatively inexpensive enterprise level apps and then adding a relatively expensive enterprise application to neutralize their effectiveness. A poorly deployed blog or wiki can do your organization a lot more harm than good. Even at open federal agencies, releasing information willy-nilly is a recipe for disaster. But with careful planning and deployment, even the most secretive agencies can benefit from this relatively new technology.* * * If you think about how wikis and blogs work, they are essentially the same thing, though with different permission levels. That is how TeamPage can become all things to all people, even a content management tool used as Web server. Beyond the important matter of permissions, TeamPage’s ability to handle data is impressive. If more wikis were designed this way, they probably would be more widely used in government, either as internal tools or for public comment.* * * Pricing for TeamPage varies. On the low end, with only a few users, you can get the program for $15,000 with annual updates of $7,500. This is a little expensive if you have only 25 users. There are less efficient but far cheaper ways to manage your wikis and blogs — even some freeware programs. However, having a large number of users involved in wikis and blogs increases the complexity and the potential for disaster — both technically and by giving out the wrong information to the wrong people. If you have more than 200 users, you can purchase the unlimited license for $60,000 with annual updates of $30,000. This is isn’t cheap, but there is no better way to manage wikis and blogs supporting multiple projects from one program. 27May Craigslist under siege By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: community and culture Tags: hackers, trust, vandalism John Nagle has been investigating the increasingly intense battle between Craigslist and spammers who insist on mass-posting in CL community spaces. His findings so far were published in this Techdirt post. It’s a real escalating battle - one that I’m sure is going on in many other places, but is especially remarkable in this case because Craigslist is such a flagship for how online community can grow and sustain itself with minimal intervention from management. Nagle ends his description with this: It’s not clear yet who will win. Craigslist may find something that works. If it doesn’t, however, it could be toast for the success story of Craigslist.Say it ain’t so, John. But let’s look at this in terms of the overal social life of the Net - a societal environment that seems to be able to find a point of equilibrium at increasingly large scales. Millions of people now find life on the Internet to be within their comfort zones. They’ve adapted to the uncertainties of privacy, security and identity even though the occasional bad thing happens.Craigslist is regarded as one of the assets, one of the jewels of the Net’s social development. One has to ask why anyone would put it at risk. It’s not the place you’d think a profit-minded person would go to scam revenue. And given that one of the places where much of the spamming is taking place is in Personals, I have to think that the intention is to ruin the sense of trust that brings people to use that part of the community space. CL runs on mutual trust. If that can be compromised, people will certainly abandon the Personals section.So is this simply a mean person? Is someone making money from this activity? Is there any other reason someone would be trying so hard to sabotage Craigslist, other than to prove that they could do it for a small competitive circle of trouble makers? 27May Enterprise ad hoc 2.0 By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: culture, flattening, social media and wiki Tags: corporate culture, innovators Reported in CIO, this survey by the non-profit group AIIM tells us that while so-called Enterprise 2.0 applications are deemed “imperative” or “of significant importance” by 44 percent of the companies surveyed, “almost three-fourths (74 percent) acknowledged to having only a ‘vague familiarity’ with the technology. In fact, 41 percent claimed they had ‘no clear understanding’ of Enterprise 2.0 at all.”I don’t find that surprising, given that terms like “Web 2.0″ and the derivative “Enterprise 2.0″ do a poor job of describing how the 2 evolved from the 1 in the first place. To say that they are “more social” or rely more on “user-generated content” would not explain their use within an enterprise environment. And given the fact - supported by the survey - that tools like wikis and blogs are most often adopted ad hoc by small groups, teams or departments within the larger enterprise, it’s logical that the rest of the company would lack the context to appreciate how such tools might help them if adopted company-wide.A hierarchically managed enterprise (some redundancy there) is not going to naturally support the culture that most effectively uses social media. And yet, there seems to be a sense within at least that 44 percent of respondents that moving in that direction is “imperative.” The writing is on the wall that competition through innovation requires more fresh thinking, more brainstorming, more low-risk idea generation. These are all supported better through the social media that have come to dominate the civic forums of the Web than through the silo-structured enterprise platforms that organize information exchange within corporations.Those of us who work in social media need to develop better descriptions for how these tools can be adopted effectively. Jerry Michalski calls our process “weaving a global brain.” One element that’s essential if social media is to work is trust. If he corporate culture fosters trust among its workers, then social media will prove useful. If not, no amount of understanding or training will make a wiki or a blog work. But will social media force its own culture to grow? That’s a challenge that only the corporate executives in charge can answer. 27May Mainstream Media Project - high quality audio programming By cfigallo 0 Comments Categories: community, culture and social media Tags: interviews, podcasts, radio Want to have a great listening experience? Check out the programs found at the Mainstream Media Project, based in Arcata, California. I’ve listened to some of their stuff and to my ear, it’s better quality sound than the excellent programs found on National Public Radio.I’ve listened to programs in the series called A World of Possibilities and found the interviews to be very intelligent, informative, well edited and a pleasure to listen to in terms of the sound quality and music choices.Recently, I listened to “Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times” which included interviews with Crawford Stanley Holling, Dr.Brian Walker, Dr. Carl Folke, Charles Redman, Will Stefan, and Dr. Frances Westley. Some other program titles are:Food Deserts: Nutritional Starvation in the Land of PlentyHome From the War: Re-integrating Ex-CombatantsAcross the Great Divide: American Youth Reach Out to the Muslim WorldRegrowing Community (One Tomato at a Time): The Remarkable Return of Farmers’ MarketsThis week’s program is “Lockdown: The Secret World of American Prisons,” which it describes as follows: Go behind bars with us into the American prison system to see what we’re doing to others in the name of justice. We’ll try to find out whether the atrocities that horrified us when revealed in an Iraqi prison were the work of a few bad apples or whether such things are systemic and occurring here in American prisons. « Previous Entries Transforming social assets Cliff Figallo Nancy Rhine Subscribe to sociALCHEMY Scaling up knowledge transfer Thumbers in the Enterprise lifestreaming something important The rise of “thought-movers”? A cool Who We Are page August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 community culture experts flattening greed invention knowledge marketing social media Uncategorized wiki Collaborative Thinking - Mike GottaCommon CraftDion Hinchcliffe’s blogFull Circle AssociatesPresilience.orgSociate Blog  Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Redoable Lite by Dean J Robinson _qmeta="qc:adt=0;bti=sociALCHEMY;lan=en";_qacct="p-18-mFEk4J448M";quantserve(); st_go({'blog':'3275580','v':'wpcom','post':'0','subd':'socialchemy'});ex_go({'crypt':'D6%7C%2CY1mq%2CQJifJLxma6%2BFsm%3Dh%26.f33i%3FMahU%5Bf%3FcsvGm1PFAhKK7YQNe12Azn%2CZNii0GeGYvT-71DdQL3%26AQN%5Dh2DIEm%5B9MGMOPDqt_6_qAODtg%2Cn%3F4F%3D%5BJyU%2F%3FS%2C.S%25%25LmjsmGFsiV41gJjp6emla%2BABju%3Fa%7C%25v_1y'});addLoadEvent(function(){linktracker_init(3275580,0);}); |
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