Social Glass

In a previous post I discussed how competition fuels innovation, and that in order for this to happen innovation must self manifest. Enter the Knowledge Market. Wikipedia defines a market as:

..a mechanism which allows people to trade, normally governed by the theory of supply and demand…

Markets operate in a “…space, actual or metaphorical”, called the marketplace. A simple example of this are farmer’s markets where farmers showcase their crops and livestock on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. Potential consumers locate goods they’re interested in by wandering through the marketplace and purchase what appeals to them. The price of goods fluctuates throughout the day based on supply and demand principles - if a farmer is having a tough time selling his tomatoes he might start offering special discounts (and these special discounts can be heard by everyone - you’d know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been to one of these things) to increase demand.

The Enterprise Knowledge Market
In the same sense Enterprise 2.0 is a virtual marketplace for knowledge, where knowledge workers, through the Discovery process, “wander through” corporate knowledge assets and consume what interests them. Knowledge workers also compete with each other as producers, not on price, but on the usefulness of their information. Usefulness relates to recognition, and recognition is good for a knowledge worker’s career.

The value of a knowledge asset, then, doesn’t have a $ figure associated with it, but is instead related to the demand for said asset, which can be determined by:

• the number of people who subscribe to it
• the number of incoming links to it

Google.com does a great job of placing useful content toward the top of it search results page, and the enterprise version of Google does the same. But the enterprise knowledge marketplace, the Discovery process, needs to be more than just Search.

With the stock market I can receive constant updates on the value of stocks and follow the supply/demand fluctuation in real-time (represented by price variance). Inside the enterprise, if I had services similar to that which Technorati provides, I could better understand the supply/demand for corporate knowledge assets. Technorati ranks the value of blogs based on incoming links, but inside the enterprise this needs to be extended to include subscriber counts (feedburner) and other knowledge assets (not just blogs). I could then, in real-time, understand the value the organization places on content items by reviewing subscriber and incoming link counts, which would fluctuate in much the same way stock prices do. This platform, combined with enterprise search, augments the Discovery process and increases the effectiveness of my Enterprise Knowledge Market.

And it’s having an effective Enterprise Knowledge Market that’s key to driving participation and recognition.  If knowledge worker contributions can be discovered and valued, knowledge workers have a huge, self-motivated, incentive to contribute, and that makes the enterprise better off as a whole.

SocialText has released SocialText Open pre-installed on a Virtual Machine.  Checkout the download page here, and Social Text’s release here.  I’m currently downloading the 460MB VM.

This is a great move for SocialText as their opensource version is difficult to install on its own.  The Virtual Machine will certainly make it easier to evaluate SocialText Open or even use it for small groups and projects.

There’s been a lot of discussion about 37 Signal’s Basecamp over the past few months. I was curious, and from a timing perspective it just so happened that I was leading up a new project, so I went over to the site and created a new account. I’ve got a team of about 5 or 6 young and enthusiastic people working for me on the Strategy phase and the first thing I did was set them up. The second thing I did was migrate the Milestones from my project plan to Basecamp, and I also added a few TODOs.

Within about an hour my RSS aggregator was buzzing with updates. My team started posting messages (blogging), comments and content through the Writeboard (kind of like a wiki).

“Is this Enterprise 2.0?”, I asked myself.

Not quite, but close.

Basecamp is perhaps more structured than I’d expect an Enterprise 2.0 solution to be as it’s centered around project management (the notion of “Milestone” and “TODO” seems to me to be project oriented). But the collaboration and capture of tacit knowledge elements are certainly there, and the signals, boy do I love the signals. Maybe we can call this “Project 2.0″.

Anyway, I think the folks at 37 Signals have done a great job and I’m eager to try out their other products.

An observation - I’ve noticed a substantial drop in posts over the past 4 weeks in Enterprise 2.0 blogs I read, namely:

• Firestoker Blog
• Innovation Creators
• Dion Hinchliffe
• The FASTForward Blog
• Ross Mayfield’s Weblog

While I must admit I miss the more constant influx of the latest on Enteprise 2.0 I’m going to take this as a positive sign.  Perhaps this means that the brain power behind these blogs is being redirected from the blogosphere toward Enterprise 2.0 software development or implementation.   Time will tell.

Apologies for the lack of posts lately.  Things have been pretty hectic at work (plus I’m moving into a new house, so that adds to it).  I thought I might briefly comment on my efforts to bring Enterprise 2.0 to my organization (or at least a part of it).  It’s interesting playing the role of client - where Enterprise 2.0 vendors want to engage with us to deploy the sofware - and consultant - the arduous task I and a band of few have of convincing others that “legacy CMS is bad and Enterprise 2.0 is good”.

I’ve found that many others within the organization have already taken strides to deploy mini enterprise 2.0 ecosystems.  When I speak with them (my allies) I feel emboldened by the possibilities and the amount of brain power that is pushing our efforts.

With the others (lets just call them non-allies), the approach has been to ensure the value proposition is properly manifested, that there’s an understanding that we want to share knowledge, innovate, and make the organization better as a whole.  The funny thing is this stuff just makes sense.  And when people get it, they push it, and that builds momentum.