John Smith and CoP implication

On a thread started by Hildy Gottlieb over at Com-Prac this week, John Smith returned something that’s both thought-provoking and powerfully put, quoting a very old text:

“[A man must reside in a town] thirty days to become liable for
contributing to the soup kitchen, three months for the charity box,
six months for the clothing fund, nine months for the burial fund, and
twelve months for contributing to the repair of the town walls’

(These categories have intuitive appeal but are at the same time are
somewhat mysterious, I think:
http://www.comeandhear.com/bababathra/bababathra_8.html )

So in community development terms, I think the thing we can do AFTER
welcoming people matters a lot. And that would be: help people to see
a path of successive and successful levels of connection — of taking
responsibility for the goodness they find in the collective life.”

Thoroughly agree. Indeed finding useful channels por the energy of members is probably the most difficult task of facilitators: so many of them want to go beyond building practice and conversations, and yet it’s so difficult to build something useful and motivating with the kind of commitment that most community volunteers can give. A perfect facilitator (or a perfect community) would find tailor-cut engagement opportunities for every member, optimizing growth for the member and the CoP, drawing on their energies without risking burnout…

… now try that with seventy thousand members. But you need to try.

(And one does wonder about John’s reading habits :-)).

Socialtext People - looking behind the text

I wish I could comment with a bit more depth, but these days are as awkward as usual of late (I’m down with a bit of a fever on top of the usual excess wordkload). Still I don’t want to miss commenting this: http://www.socialtext.com/products/features/Socialtext-People.php is a webcast explaining the latest beta of collaboration software maker (it’s already gone well beyond wikis) Socialtext. And yes, it’s a people directory, with many social networking trimmings (groups, subscriptions of the doings of friends), but in fact it’s actually just a very nice and efficient way of tracking the people behind the wikis (and blogs) and adding a “team” or “group” dimension to a large collaboration platform.

It’s not the only news they have (”Dashboard” is the other) on the way to Socialtext 3.0. It’s getting more and more interesting.

By the way, I suppose you know Socialtext is not the only one going “social” in this way. Alfresco’s new “social networking” layer is quite akin, but I don’t know if it’s able to track contributions from all the third-party software it integrates (blogs, forums, wikis), besides the document management part.

The point (if this post has one) is that people directories that enable users to see both ways (finding the author from the content, finding all the content by the author) are a great working tool that can actually be useful in sourcing expertise; indeed they should work much better than the usually current “official expert” directories present in most companies. If you throw in some nice team- and group-support features, so much the better.

Way to go. I’m lookimg forward to a more in-depth look… and maybe a customer demo.

Mikronet and Helen Martin on networks

It’s been a long while since I last posted about the old KnowledgeBoard (I should have a longer look one of these days if I can stick my head out long enough). But the fact is they’ve gone and published Helen’s translation of a very sensible document about setting up a working network, based on the Mikronet experience. Helen knows all about that, and has been a charter member of the H-SIG at KnowledgeBoard too, so I can attest she knows what she’s talking about.

Besides, the piece is short and to the point. Less “internet-enabled” than some would like, but down to earth and based on practice: just the way I like it. You can read it here.

Avoiding spam in online communities: a housework chore, no magic wand

A couple of weeks ago there was an extremely interesting short discussion over at OnFac mailing list. It dealt with techniques to avoid external spamming, especially in online bulletin board systems (forums). Nancy White attempted to capture it, but as yet it’s not been done.

Besides sharing experiences on the effectivenes of email verification (to make sure the person registering at least has a working email and checks it) and CAPTCHA (a non-computer-readable image with a piece of text that must be copied in a form, and thus prevents automated bots from sending messages), the co-listers also talked about the merits of first-message filtering (the first message of any new member goes to a special category, and until approved, the user does not get full rights). I also mentioned the efficacy of message lag (a minimum period between posting messages) in limiting the flooding effect of such bots once inside.

All those techniques are all very well, and indeed heartily reccomended to ward off automated, mass spammers. But they can’t keep human spammers out, nor avoid bots once a human opens the door. The only policy that works, I insisted, is diligent moderator and administrator work to identify and cut off the spam, and to ban the spammers and their servers: active moderation, active use of the software’s pulls and levers.

Well, nothing is perfect all the time (goes a Spanish saying) but today I saw just an example of that, which happened on May 6th while I was looking the other way. At Macuarium CoP system, of course.

7.05 PM. A spammers starts flooding several forums in a bulletin board system with get-rich-quick messages.

7.08 PM. A moderator from a particular forum in the system sees them, tracks them, puts up a warning at a coordination forum (together with links).

7.13 PM. The spamming user is cautionarily suspended by a senior moderator (who can edit any forum), and all messages are moved to the “evidence” forum (pruned from the innocent threads where needed), who reports it in the same coordination thread by him and other mods.

9.32 PM. An administrator bans the user (this procedure keeps the email and IP addresses for security reasons but in every aspect inhabilitates the user profile). And reports it. Starts investigating the spammer. Finds that he’s been using a fixed IP address for his registration and messages.

9.35 PM. The administrator bans the user’s IP. And reports it. This procedure prevents the spammer from ever registering again from the same connection (if it was his home, or his company’s network, it can eliminate the danger of small-fry spammers).

Peace thereafter. And very little work time in total to avoid users having to wade in that trash. Which in turn makes sure trash is so rare that users themselves report in almost as fast as it appears, so reinforcing the vigilance system.

The key is not just a number of clear procedures and effective tools, but a great team of motivated, agile people acting on the spot. This is scarce defense against massive systematic attacks, but it can do away with the main scourge of lists and forums (among other venues): the host of small-time spammers.

No amount of gadgetry can substitute for that, nor guard a community in the web against spammers in the long term. It’s plain (and hopefully smart) housework.

Sunday tag surfing

Before I get down to serious work, here’s a look at the most interesting things caught in the morning’s browsing. WordPress’ tag surfing does add a bit of spice.

The wisdom of clouds: John Millner doing a panegyric of social-tagging folksonomies. Not bad for a sales pitch. And he’s right (Socialtext’s shared tagging got me to find his post, for instance). An interesting blog on learning, too.

The 3 stages of CMS: Boris Mann of Raincity Studios made a presentation on mid-February that just got posted on DigitalAssetManagementOrgUK (lots of nice educational links there, and some tools), and it does set out very clearly some principles and ideas, aimed at independent web developers, that are not just right but (for me) becoming articles of faith. It’s about the evolution of web sites into complex interconnected bits, and how best to make them. Sage, too.

Knowledge energies: Luke Naismith trying to get some sense out of a recent Act-KM mailing list discussion about complexity and chaos. It was way beyond my depth. Luke’s perspective is more understandable and original (he says “eccentric”). Also nice, the couple of links reflected here remembering the link between any technology and some business model.

Explaining KM: Michelle Laurie (first featured here for her on-the-job pictures of African life while doing soft-edged asessments of KM programmes for a big institution) ploughs on as an independent KM consultant up on the mountains. She keeps using simple terms instead of the usual fodder, or so it seems. Inspirational :-).

Make and sell: OK, so it’s not a blog, but after reading about it in Wired I came across it again today… and it’s worth having a look at the operating model. Ponoko builds things to specification (which is innovative), but has also harnessed crowdsourcing to get itself more orders: it acts as a hub for product designs and specifications, so people can either hire or share bits of each other’s designs… and then get them built.

On hiring and attrition. Paul Ritchie’s ongoing series of comments gets especially practical here, IMHO. As I’m right now in the process of renewing (nor just reinforcing) the collaborator team of Macuarium, which is hard to juggle as we need to find, recruit, train and slowly incorporate into the mix a lot of new personalities while balancing a growing work load; and also part of the building of a new business unit at my employer, which is proceeding in fits and starts, I can agree with both his comment: don’t delay, and don’t hope for magical tool solutions. You may not agree on everything but the blog’s a mine for project managers (and most likely a very effective management tool): the most recent favourite on getting bad news out of the way.

A relevant workshop: Luca Servo’s work with a recent “strategic” workshop with rural radio workers from old Congo looks (and reads) just like the good old ones we used to pull for G2E customers. His work for the knowledge management arm of FAO looks impressive (not least because he seems to be actually applying his masters’ dissertation), but - going practical - the blog’s chronicle of the workshop is relevant in itself as a portrait of methodology. Don’t miss previous episodes.

A perspective of KM: Lee Gaddis is getting to grips with KM in his marketing firm. What I like about his view is that he clearly separates the means (technologies) and the skills (education and training) from the will (mindset and motivation). You can put any tools in place, you can design processes and write them down and train people… but unless it makes sense to them (it’s practical, efficient and worth their while), you will get nothing lasting or practical out of the effort. IMHO, while it’s a very superficial view yet, he’s got that part right. Which is more than most do: so many KM efforst prefer to navigate around incentives and recognition and then fail to reap real change.

Action learning and water management: S. McIntosh, N. Leotaud and D. Macqueen published on the KM4Dev journal a piece on an “action learning” project to examine the ways water is used and managed in several Caribbean islands: through hands-on reasearch and the participation of the stakeholders at every level. The piece is interesting. The link with knowledge management, tenuous but still there. Seeing instances where sharing experience is literally vital helps clear the fog. Found it through the WASH Lessons Learned blog.

The book “We think”: Penny Edward’s recounts the experience of listening to the author of a book on the web’s effect on mass creativity, innovation and collaboration. Which is huge, and growing. Her site is more than interesting (mixing wikis, KM and project management). And since her takeaways are ideas I’m curious about (having close experience with them, I want to analyze them better) it seems I might have a new book on the shopping list.

On participation: Brad Hinton’s got a nice piece on the role of mass participation in business decision making. Based on a specific example, he goes on to elaborate how the involvement of workers will not just be requested, but actually inevitable. Not to be a spoilsport, but I think the kind of involvement people enjoy is not the kind that allows for long-term, thoughtful and differentiating management decisions… but it does form a very fertile ground for managers to make them.

The Facebook business model: as explained by themselves in their site (came in looking for something different; I don’t actually like the place). That is what they really, actually offer. A bit of food for thought, if not many news, in there.

Qué es una Comunidad de Práctica: Carlos Merino at the Departament de Justicia of the Generalitat posted this presentation for a meeting in December 2007, in Spanish. The nature and the keys of success. I find a sore lack of involvement and motivation aspects, but the rest of it is worth reading. Jordi Graells posted another interesting presentation (about collective intelligence and “wiki-administration” in government), in Catalan. The rest of the blog is also full of links to more news and presentations from one of the most active “knowledge administrations” I’m aware of (there’s hope for the rest).

More Spanish knowledge blogging at Comunisfera by Daniel Martí. No, there’s no recent pick to show (mostly links to outside resources: Morgan Stanley’s report on Internet trends, PDF here; Universal McCann’s report on social media use and impact here, PDF here; Cristobal Cobo’s presentation about the Knowledge Economy on Issuu, parts in Spanish, look out for the Issuu machinery also; and I think the link to Planeta 2.0 came from here also), but I’ve been enjoying the perusal. Very relevant selection of themes.

Tangentially, there is Foro de Internet 2008, acongress aimed at internet content entrepreneurs next week (on the 10th) in Madrid. I might attend, since there may be useful ideas about traffic monetization floating around. With the hope of a new member of the family, comes the responsibility of feeding it ;-). And even further away is Barcelona’s UrbanLabs, which sounds interesting.

Reasons to participate in social media. At Groundswell, and also commented at Furilo, there’s a nice useful list. Useful why? Useful because the ends pursued by people when participating in sharing environments are quite more complex (and sometimes much more banal) that some think. If you want participation, look into these. If you’re designing for it, you’d better be creative.

And now, to do some (paying) work.

Mimetic conflict in online communities?

A certain thread initiated by Zbigniew Lukasiak at On-Fac mailing list got my wheels grounding. He’s mentioned the theories of French anthropologist Rene Girard as relevant to the social setting of online communities. While those theories are many and require books to explain, there is a core called “mimetic conflict” positing that the desirability of something comes from imitation of the other, not from the goodness of the thing; that such imitation of desire leads to conflict; that further imitation by others propagates the conflict and its focus, until the object -or possibly the first rival- are destroyed, or beyond.

On the list, Rosanna Tarsiero has made some useful reflections on envy in those communities.

Going back to the concept (as much as one can from reading excerpts) it does seem to play a role, in several ways:

Holier than thou. People who come to cherish the community mores (rules, ways), first helping the moderatores, then pushing further and further and finally attacking the moderators or even seriously damaging the community in order to push the “reformation”. You may remember a case recently described of a forum member (a graphic designer) who manifestly cared about the community but maimed hundreds of threads as a negotiation tactic.

All for the people. In the same vein, people who have been working in furthering the social or face-to-face aspect in coordination with the leadership occasionally see themselves as personifying the “real community” and can protagonize coup d’etat crises or (failing that) split attempts. We’ve had three of those in ten years.

The good of the community. Finally, at times people who have been giving their effort to supporting or helping members of a certain group (”community” in a wider sense, “conversation space” in a more realistic term) within a specific project, strike out on their own to start something with the same goals, usually very similar resources, and strikingly similar ways… thus splitting the community and weakening the original initiative.

All three cismatic processes can be driven by many causes, either personal or practical; they can be fully justified indeed. There are ways to see them coming, to minimize the eventual impact, to manage it when it comes. The striking aspect is that, in my experience, there does seem to be something else involved (and here I’m not just looking at Macuarium, whose ten years give ample scope for most things, but to many other online communities whose evolution I’ve seen or participated in).

For one thing, the “desired object” is the very same than before the split, but now it’s desired for oneself, not for the old group.

But also, there is often a very intense conflict. The new project does not strike out to raise its own tribe: it almost always is cannibalistic, at least to start with. It fights the other for possession of the (perceived) good, which can be the moral high ground but can be much more concrete. And as Gerard predicts, succesive newcomers and others can imitate not just the longing for that good, but also the animosity against the original rivals.

I remember one extreme case, a couple of years ago. A tiny splinter group of “rebotados” (can’t easily translate that -rejected, disillusioned…) ex members of Macuarium had came to roost on an old Macuarium initiative, long since sent to live its own life. Besides turning it into an attempted clone of our forums, they infected it with such paroxistic hatred that they sported mottoes such as “To win or to die” against the “cortijo”. They failed both in driving the initiative and in consolidating an alternative, but (at least in the second aspect) they keep trying. They foam just a bit less at the mouth.

I had usually viewed such things (especially the bile) as just expressions of envy and bad character. Gerard puts them right in with human nature, which is a bit disturbing.

We have tended to deal with this with quiet and work, although any of them is extremely tiring and painful. We assume that most projects in our domain will come from people who know or have participated in ours (you can hardly help that when you reach 80% of your target public). We assume there will be splits. We assume there will be some artificial rivalries (with some bitter words and aggresive behaviours thrown our way) and that many new projects will attempt to feed off our resources and teams. Let’s say we adopt a rather relaxed view to being the “rival” by default. We just hope to regrow the tissue.

That’s not saying we don’t fight back against cannibals (and we do indeed use the “scapegoat mechanism” that Gerard describes). We just don’t play the rivalry game, but rather stick to doing our own work in our own way (in other words, making sure that the object of our desire is not imitative but as original as possible), rebuilding fast, burning the scar closed, getting over it - and occasionally rejoicing when we see them imitate or fail. And seeing how many efforts in our domain have failed, I can’t help thinking that ours is a healthy option. But also, that we’ve been managing by the seat of our pants something that could be done in a more rigorous, systematic way.

Must try to read Gerard :-).

PS - And yes, I can see mimetic conflicts within communities too. But those are a different issue.

Talking Open Source with John Powell, Alfresco CEO

A word of warning: “talking Open Source” here means talking about the business model, the pros, the cons, the competitors, the parters and the developers, and even some parts of the roadmap, but not the code or the Alfresco application itself. At this week’s Alfresco Community Conference in Barcelona there was a lot of other interesting people, not least Alfresco’s John Newton, Ian Howells, Kevin Cochrane, David Caruana and Nancy Garrity… and I had to go and interview John Powell about the business side of things.

And I’m very happy I did. And very thankful for the answers. So here goes the transcript.

Miguel Cornejo. You’ve been three years now with an Open Source business model, running a company radically different from what you were used to. What would be your takeaway?

John Powell. By and large, the Open Source business model makes all aspects of a software company’s easier because, without having to hide your intellectual property, you can get the great ideas from anyone who has an opinion on that, across the globe, to help you in the development, the QA [Quality Assurance]… and the propagation of your product. So from that aspect, it makes everything really really easy.

The challenge of the Open Source model, for a commercial Open Source company, is to keep the balance right between the community and the subscribing customer. Because really, the subcribing customer will only subscribe if he sees value, and there will always be people in the community who will never subscribe. And we have to get the balance right because without the subscribing customers there would be no company and the community would then lose the major engine for the development of Alfresco.

MC. The role of that engine is one of the most interesting parts I’d like to talk with you about. So you see… John Newton said yesterday that about 10% of current Alfresco code comes from the community.

JP. Yes.

MC. But what part of… you also mentioned that the leading edge is where innovation comes from. So what part of the value, the added value beyond the document management core [of Alfresco] comes from the community?

JP. I think what they do is they give us insights into a lot of the practical applications. As anyone who uses software would know, when you get software delivered from a software vendor, you often have a “Why did they even think I would work that way?” moment, with the interface or the workflow or whatever… so I think what the community does for us is it gives us much better feedback than you can ever achieve with the closed source products. That is, they can get to grips with not only product but also code, and extend that and show you concrete examples.

MC. So you then do “as the community directs” [quote from his talk earlier in the day].

JP. Yes.

MC. This leads to another question about what is the motivation of these developers, because some of them are developing that excellent new user interface you are working on without ayone paying them, without budget let’s say.

JP. Yes.

MC. So how do you involve people up to that level?

JP. Any Open Source project relies predominantly on people with an interest, perhaps doing something in their part-time or down-time, as like a bit of research, on anything useful, that often gets taken up. So for example some of the stuff we saw today. Because those guys employed by partners of Alfresco, they’re doing some interesting things but they’re also improving their knowledge that they’re then able to demonstrate to their customers in their market, that they actually are experts, they have added value. So…

MC. It would be a sort of “proof of competence”?

JP. Yes. So I would say, it’s a bit like… you see, what’s the value of going to the gymnasium to your job? Well, probably if you’re more awake, if you’re sharper, if you’re fitter, it’s going to improve your aptitude at work. At the very least, these community developers may improve their skills, they make themselves more marketable, and a few of them come up with really great stuff than can then feed back into the whole community.

MC. What’s the role of such proprietary software vendors such as Quark or SAP next to Alfresco [both are differently involved in deals with the company]?

JP. From Alfresco-the-company’s perspective, there is an important role to work with those types of organization, because for many of large customers, they demonstrate that Alfresco is a long-term player and here to stay, and when they see other large companies, particularly from the proprietary world, commiting to Alfresco technology and getting into bed with Alfresco, it gives them a good reassurance. From Alfresco’s perspective, we want to work with those companies because we acknowledge that they have huge user bases and by working of them, if only a small proportion of their user base becomes interested in Alfresco, it’s obviously a good thing for Alfresco in the long term.

MC. Yes. About the new 3.0 release focused more in the user end… it seems to me you’re keeping stable the document management back end where you manage the heavy metal, and now you allow people to customize more the user end of things… I feel your real competitor, rather than Sharepoint, would be FileNet or Documentum.

JP. Yes. Well, I think what we’re seeing is that with version 3.0 what we’re actually doing is we’re adding a social computing application to Alfresco. So Alfresco’s platform framework will still be there, to build large-scale document repositories, to have large-scale web content management, or internet-scale www sites. [Version 3.0] doesn’t remove anything from that, what it does is add a social computing application into the heart of the environment, and that is I think one of the key differentiators that we have to Sharepoint. Because Sharepoint cannont go into the www world and they haven’t got the enterprise scalability to tackle the large scale document libraries.

So from our perspective, the version 3.0 is all about leveling the playing field and giving customers the potential to jump into Alfresco the same way they’re jumping into Sharepoint. But the benefit of Alfresco is, once they jump in, then they can go in any of those other directions, whereas with Sharepoint they will be very very limited and constrained, and obviously through lack of choice they will be tied into a Microsoft stack in the future.

MC. Indeed. I was going to ask you further about Sharepoint, which as you say is very much limited, but I’m afraid we have very little time [Here a kind bystander asked to be allowed to listen in to the discussion]. As I was saying, what would be your key differentiators, beyond the social layer that’s new, against the current document management application model, like FileNet and Documentum?

JP. I think the key differentiator here is that we’re coming from the Open Source world, in that there will be much more capability to extend and participate in the customization and support with Alfresco that with Documentum or FileNet. Now, those systems will still have an application, and there’s probably many many hundreds of man years of development in those, but for most customers… they’re not that interested in that legacy, what they’re looking for is a modern architecture that they can take forward.

MC. So that would be [with] the flexibility and the ability to take them the way they want? Which wouldn’t happen in a proprietary or “legacy” system?

JP. That’s right.

MC. Very good. Now then, jumping a bit to a different subject, you are Open Source but you are not following the, let’s call it “classical”, community model. It’s a company-led Open Source effort. This means… what?

There is evidently some kind of direction, some kind of leadership or vision, that you’ve been providing, not just coding in-house. Because even if the community does some part of the code, you do provide a lot of things to that effort. So you’re Open Source, but with a different model…

JP. Yes. Well, in fact I think we have the advantage that we got to learn from another great companies that pioneered another great communities, that pioneered the Open Source model. And I think that if you look at today, you’ll see people like SugarCRM, Alfresco, mySQL…

MC. … OpenBravo… [Based in Pamplona, sort of friends of the house]

JP. OpenBravo, yes, I know these guys. You’ll see that actually, there are some differences in our model, but you’ll see the model is tending to come out in a very similar direction. A company that employs probably 90% of the core developers, and really commits to the maintenance and support of that product through the future.

MC. So you see that as a viable long term model for the future?

JP. I think there still be some great true, hmm…

MC. … “community-driven”?

JP. … community driven projects, yes, but I think in some particular areas, particularly where the persistence of data is very very important to a company, then this marriage of a commercial company culture with Open Source, is the ideal solution.

MC. Absolutely [ ].

JP. You know, any company, at some point in time, they like another company to do business with, and it’s quite hard to satisfy that when it’s a difuse community of developers. Now, for some applications that may not be about the persistence of core company data… We’ve heard here presentations from customers who are looking to keep content for a thousand years. You know, a thousand years is way beyond the imagination of, I don’t care what anyone says, of any computer system today [ ]. But you know, I think a hybrid model in effect, where we’re trying to bring the best of both worlds, a commercial, contractual-based organization where customers can feel secure in that, with the support of a vibrant community to avoid the risk for the customer of the old vendor lock-in proposition. Alfresco cannot hijack its community.

MC. Perfect. Now, another jump in the subject… As you get into web 2.0 and collaboration for this community layer that you’re working in right now, I’ve seen you’ve been very interested in things like the Facebook integration but until today I saw no mention of a forum component, a bulletin board system…

JP. OK. We need to do more on that. But it’s always been an area where we’ve said, we don’t want to be inventing all of the ways of consuming and generating content, so we don’t write a wiki, we don’t write a blog… We want to integrate those capabilities. But what we’ve been building so far is really the plumbing to do that. And I think what we need to do now is get more examples of where we’ve actually surfaced those… If you look at the Alfresco website, the wiki that we use, which is MediaWiki, is embedded inside Alfresco, so the content is versioned and managed inside Alfresco.

MC. And the users and skins are too? That’s what I was looking forward to see on the bulletin board side. I still believe most of the unstructured information is not handled in documents, but in informal conversations… so if you can’t handle that, you can’t handle the company’s knowledge.

JP. Right.

MC. So you’re working on that, we can say?

JP. Yes.

MC. Then… that would be more or less all I wanted to ask.

JP. OK. Thank you.

MC. Thanks a lot.

Another cautionary note: as soon as Mr Powell’s had a chance to have a look at the transcript, it will be corrected of any mistakes he finds. So enjoy them while you can.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s paper on collaboration

34 pages of good sense, presumably: you know I’m a The Economist fan and I appreciate their sister company’s products. Nothing groundbreaking, but at least they like to be solidly grounded. So when I learn (thanks to TechRepublic) that Cisco’s paying for the free distribution of this paper, I can’t help passing the word.

You can find it here: “Collaboration: transforming the way business works“. If it’s not up to standards you’d like, tell me - I probably won’t find time to read it until the evening. It certainly looks biased, since it’s based on a poll of managers and C-level execs, which can give very curious ideas about the real practices of the wider organization. We’ll see.

Alfresco European Community Conference, day 2 (updated)

(Yes, you guessed it, I’ve been tinkering with he Pompeu Fabra’s wifi network for half an hour and now we’re about to begin the sessions, so this looks like being brief).

Yesterday was supposed to be a rather closed day for partners and developers, which I attended by kind invitation. A rather interesting event, in many senses. To name a few:

• The people, of course. Some interesting developers, with either interesting stories, or connections, or business possibilities.
• The story. I already know Alfresco, but not at the deep-developer level. Some of the things getting done with it (integrations, mostly) are worth seeing, especially when explained by the authors. And the upcoming Alfresco 3.0 Community edition, with its huge emphasis on interface (”presentation layer”) and configurability (”customization”) while keeping the fundamentals (document model, backend) in place… was interesing.
• The open source. As an industry-conference habitual, it’s quite interesting to see how the Alfresco people interact with their developers and partner ecosystem. Not just integrating the most notable coding aditions into the main product (something, say, FileNet would have to pay for, or deal with very differently as a paid add-on), but actually drafting developers to help with the upcoming redesign. Doing it live, too, in the room.

That said, yesterday’s venue wasn’t right (lots of noise). I really can’t find any other thing to complain of :-). Today’s sessions, open to all, are more standard-looking. John Powell is doing the intro, and I have to save batteries, so next comment may come tomorrow (seeing as the wifi network and I get along :-)).

Update: well, three hours into it, it looks like I’ll be able to have a short talk with Mr Powell later on, sort of an interview. Will come handy for the piece I’m writing on Alfresco 3.0’s declared roadmap and intentions. If you have any question suggestions, do comment them here, fast :-). I’ll be doing it old-style, handbook and all: didn’t plan for it.

Time of changes, again

Well, here we go. Or at least, here we’re supposed to go. Today I’ll be boarding a new “intrapreneur” project within my employer. Or so it seems, things have been moving more slowly than I’d like these last few weeks.

If everything goes well, we’ll be launching a beautiful, productive effort in a very challenging market (both internal and external). The exact contents are not yet clear, but part of the fun is that I should be helping define them.

On the other hand, it’s probably the riskiest move in my career. Not that it wasn’t time to do something slightly radical.

The fun part is that this shift is probably the least radical of the changes we’re attempting these days, at the family level. More news about that in some ten days, at least for some of you.
So many things are on the move that it’s almost sure that something significant will have changed by next month. Almost :-). In some way.

Rethinking social networks (II): the community core

This is the continuation of an article on the nature of online social networking services and their likely evolution (the result of too much time spent analysing them and designing one). In the previous article, I was forward enough to propose a definition of them as:

“permission-based mutual awareness and communication services. They allow us to build “white-lists” to filter out people, and keep only those we trust and appreciate enough to share delicate (or personal) information with, or to allow to intrude upon our time.

That is a social network, redux. The rest is incidental to the focus of the network: it can be social, creative, or professional in varying degrees, and will thus offer filter-associated services to further those ends.

In other words, a social network service is an utility, not a content provider.”

But that is hardly the complete picture. Because, at its core, online social networking services are not just about the networking, but about the community-generated content.

Community within

The filtering mechanism in a social network’s “friend of a friend” system fulfils exactly the same role than any (healthy) online community: finding like-minded people whom you can trust. An online community provides not just a list of like minded people but also a reputation gauge (you can observe their long-term activity and some often some more immediate signs of trustworthyness).

Also, a community emerges around conversations and shared items (links at Digg, articles at Wikipedia, photos at Flickr, videos at YouTube, job offers at LinkedIn, cracked software at MacSerialJunkie, solutions to common problems at communities of practice). Most often those items coalesce around “seeded” or editorial content: user-generated content emerges in answer to original, resource-generated content. And at online social networking services, these communities are fostered as the best way to expand the immediate personal network through finding other peers (Facebook groups are a prime example).

In other words, online social networking services are often (if not always) a symbiont of online communities. The bare network goes nowhere.

Network effects in the community and the network

The social networks add specific services that rely on the “white-listing” of specific people (not every community member is a friend you would trust or reccomend or wish to play with). Some are as silly as Facebook’s Vampire-and-zombie games. Some are as practical as LinkedIn’s endorsement requests. Some are oriented to other network users, some are visible to all. What they all rely on is the ability to give different sets of people different access to your data and your time (or inbox).

Most communities have to deal with a similar problem. At Macuarium, buy-and-sell activity (sort of classifieds) is limited to certain users whose trajectory is well known.

But there is something less intuitive here: whereas a community (and especially a community of practice) benefits from network effects, increasing in value as more and more people become members… a social network balances on a different wire: if too many people join a person’s specific network, it becomes useless. If it’s too easy to contact someone, it degenerates into spam (see Facebook).

The reason is self-evident: the type of information you share on an online community is not as sensitive as what you share with your social network (or at least it shouldn’t). You can rather safely publish your contact details in your CV at LinkedIn, but you really shouldn’t post them in a web forum. Or to coin another definition: The value of a network is not given only by its potential size, but also by the user’s ability to restrict its actual size.

All in all, they are quite different animals.

Is there a synergy for Communities of Practice?

Many online community tools are starting to provide some basic “networking”. Invision Board software has long offered the possibility to not just blacklist specific community members, but also to mark others as friends… and also, to exhibit some more personal information in your user profile (pictures, visitors, gender). One of Joomla’s most popular components is CommunityBuilder, which happens to be a social network builder.

Indeed, just as social networking thrives around communities, networks can add a dimension to communities. Whether or not that dimension fits in with the community’s goals is another matter: if you’re designing a community of practice, fostering closed groups of friends looks rather counter-productive. But it can be turned to good, or so our early research seems to indicate.

Planning for social networking as a purely social, casual “friending” tool for self-expression could be an option, but seems to add little to a CoP beyond entertainment value. Since pages served are sometimes useful (advertising-financed communities), this is not irrelevant.

On the other hand, tapping into the implicit (or even explicit) endorsement quality of those “friending” actions can add serious value to a CoP’s own services where they rely on reputation, and open business opportunities through the use of connections.

The catch is that those services that benefit most from a network are essentially those that are not exactly part of the community, but rather add-ons that feed on them. Examples are the classifieds section, or the job board, or the freelancer market… or indeed, the business introduction service (even inside a firm, finding the right person can be a problem). Most of them lately seem in the company of social network business models, but almost useless without a wider community pool.

Even niche marketing (staple of social networks’ monetisation theory) relies less on narrow networks than in wider, affinity communities. Convergence is unavoidable.

And we will be there :-).

Rethinking social networks (I): essence and evolution

This week, the topic of social networks is all over the place; indeed it even stars on The Economist (once and twice). Just like when a shoeshine boy starts talking stock tips, that means the topic has gone definitely mainstream. Only this time it’s not a completely bad thing.

Still, the Economist has fallen on this year’s truism: they repeat the oft-heard arguments about people wanting to either connect with people who are not registered in their walled garden of choice, or wanting to move their whole profile and friend list to another service. They are both false, IMHO. And the solutions touted (independently managed personal profiles, open ID management) are tangential to the issue.

Social networking services are essentially (let’s coin a definition) permission-based mutual awareness and communication services. They allow us to build “white-lists” to filter out people, and keep only those we trust and appreciate enough to share delicate (or personal) information with, or to allow to intrude upon our time.

That is a social network, redux. The rest is incidental to the focus of the network: it can be social, creative, or professional in varying degrees, and will thus offer filter-associated services to further those ends.

In other words, a social network service is an utility, not a content provider. It’s closer to an operating system than to a web portal. The differences are serious, as we will see.

What the journalists talk about

The shoe… sorry, the article authors criticize the (apparently constraining) need to visit each network’s home page to make use of their services. This is not a universal truth: witness Linkedin’s plugins for several of their services. It is simply a consequence of some of the network’s revenue generation models… and of the technology they use, to a lesser extent. There is nothing in the essence of a network that requires the visit - even if it’s often the most convenient way to access it - and the evolution towards distributed access is already marching on.

Something else The Economist comments as news is mostly old-hat too. Most existing online services are already drawing heavily on the primary networking tool, the email: contact lists are routinely exploited to find people you want to add to your network, if not to grade the type of information that is shown to them.

That’s where the Economist hits a real bugbear of social network users: they often wish they could (discreetly so as not to give offence) rate the type of “friend” that someone is, in order to allow them more (or less) restricted access to their information and their inbox. This is currently in its early infancy, but the need grows larger as the main networks lose their original specialised character and attempt to mix contacts from several spheres (social, business, family, casual). As far as I’m aware, nobody’s yet offering a non-offensive, effective grading system.

The false bugbears

Now let’s see the truisms, because they’re rather important.

First, it’s been stated that users would like networks to be transparent (be a member of one, freely access members of others). Even if each network’s services were the same, I don’t think it’s true. You use a network because you like the way it handles the filter, and because the people you want to allow in are mostly using that service. You don’t go about putting profiles just anywhere (unless you’re a compulsive networker or a total newbie), and making your profile acessable from anywhere would be just the same. Imagine your sister’s friends in Facebook asking for contact to your LinkedIn data. Or viceversa.

The second (jump network with your full friend list) is scarier still. Imagine the shock of finding yourself in your friend’s new network service, accesible to another (and possibly totally different) sphere of his contacts, subject to different access filtering rules. No way.

Garden walls are there for a reason

What the users (we) want is a way to handle profiles in a coherent way. Interconnection, but definitely not transparency. Allow your preferred network to “encapsulate” and handle your data (or maybe just part of it, to make it more complicated) but also allow it to speak to other systems so you can add a contact whose data is not housed in the “home” network; your network should only be allowed to access and present the data that your friend has allowed for that kind of connection (i.e. the brief resumé, or the Flickr feed, or the blog feed, or whatever). And viceversa: once you have connected two profiles (put them in each others’ white-lists) it would be nice to be able to message from one to the other.

But that does not require transparency. That requires standards (for cross-identification and access to data)… and a very coherent and strong way to filter and grade access. The standards are easy to build on today’s technology (Mugshot already allows members to see an aggregation of your friends’ activities on other networks, Facebook communicates with any external email account, Google is pushing common building blocks). The filters are not here yet, as already mentioned. With that in place, things like Flickr feeds or LinkedIn miniresumés (already available to the masses) could get their versions for “friends in other networks”.

OpenID, or any unified login system that allows a person to have a single set of data for identifying themselves in several services, is a reasonably good idea (whatever the security risks of a single point of entry for so much data). It would help to build those Mugshot-type aggregations.

All in all, the walls are more important than the gates: the value of the network is in the quality of the filter. If the services it allows are relevant for your goals, your people will happily join. But if you can’t restrict access to your data, you can’t publish it safely, and the network loses its point.

The future?

As far as I can see, it looks like we’ll either see services that are able to coherently aggregate other, specialised services (the way Mugshot is very slowly going), or generalist services that allow much more precise and efficient filtering of information and access according to “friend profiles”, thus becoming completely different environments depending on the use they’re given.

The first way (integrating outside data) is urgently demanded, if imperfectly supported. The second is just as urgently demanded, as the large network services swell beyond usefulness into spam-generation machines.

And of course, there is the actual services offered on top of those white-lists of contacts and contacts of contacts. There needs to be a lot of innovation in that field if the social network companies hope to become really serious businesses in their own sake. Because they mostly aren’t, yet… and some bubbles will eventually burst. That’s one point The Economist got right.

Social network building and the bootstrap business model

Yes, I realize the title is a bit on the abstruse side. Please bear with me :-).

Picture this. You own a web property that is occupied by a thriving system of online communities.  They are focused on very specific areas, share some synergies, and combine serious support and professional practice with a more leisurely, social side. Affiliation (the identification of people with the communities) is strong enough to be notable.

You manage those communities hands-on, with a bootstrap budget and a policy of zero debt… plus a network of excedingly qualified volunteers. Financially, it’s a lightweight; you don’t seek to monetise it beyond the needs of keeping it healthily running. So it’s amply solvent for its needs, which is not saying much (say a couple of years’ full operating budget held in cash).

Now, shake it a bit. Say you are quite familiar with social (and professional) networks outside your community. And you see some evident value-adding potential in reworking some of the current community features into network features. Like the contact-handling, job board (resumés and references), in-house market for goods and services, and artist portfolios. You’ve been looking into the issue for some months. Indeed, you’ve been tinkering and looking up partners for some of the services since summer, but closed nothing.

Then, some of the volunteers come for a chat. They’re sensible people who know their way around the net. And they ask you to seriously consider going the whole network hog.

You say you don’t have time, and neither do they. They answer that we should flesh out the collaborator team anyhow.

You say that you don’t have the infrastructure, and absolutely refuse to build it on outside resources (except as a customer). They answer that we could easily tap into open source, and even drive our own initiative in that terrain (that was playing dirty, they know I like the idea). You can farm out most of the hosting weight to free services. And you need new servers in any case.

You say it would compromise focus on learning and productivity. They say that well-chosen and built services would do nothing of the sort, and agree on your shopping list (although adding some more social knick-knacks to the mix).

You say that would require a different outlook and leaving the bootstrap model to go corporate in a more consistent way. They remind you that you’ve been telling them that for over a year.

All in all, you know it can’t be done without a lot of trouble, work, change, uncertainty, trial and error. In would require a lot of management innovation to do it in our usual, bare-bones, volunteer-driven way… which is a requirement. It would take (and gobble up) a lot of time. You also know your system of communities is a sure-fire starter for any network - indeed, the network is already there, even if it’s not efficiently channeled, around the people who collaborate in the forums. And you would learn a lot.

Add some background scenery. You have just finished a paper that was keeping you busy. You just dropped your job for a more exacting one. You can’t travel in the short term. You have so many stress-generating elements in your hands that they cancel each other out.

So, in that situation… what would you be experimenting with this Easter vacation ?

Got it in one. By the way… any practical ideas would be appreciated :-).

Visions of KM 2: paper finished at last

Well, it had to happen :-). After many months of rewriting and peer-reviewing (and enough version shenanigans to discredit me as a document manager), the paper is done.

For quite a while now, I’ve felt that most business managers were not getting a clear message about knowledge management. There is a lot of academic debate that not even the academics can make practical sense of, a lot of discredited methods still trying to prove themselves, quite a lot of smoke about social software and enterprise 2.0… and a cart load of vendor-talk about all sorts of technology or services solutions. No wonder KM has a fame as a perplexing discipline.

And it shouldn’t. Managing knowledge is a practical part of business management, an essential good practice. Every organization does it, at least by default, and it can bring great benefits if done well.

“Visions of Knowledge Management 2 - Knowledge Wave” aims to deliver a business-friendly view of what KM is about, what it is good for, and (in very broad lines) how to go about it. It’s no rehash of literature: it reflects my opinions and experience, and while there is a basic theorethical layer, it’s as practical as it gets… but it’s not a complete manual, of course :-). 27 pages can only serve as a primer.

So - here it is. Click on the picture to download.

Special thanks to the patient peer reviewers, Rosanna Tarsiero, Ed Mitchell, Paul Ritchie and Patrick Lambe. All have brought hammer and chisel and a very particular point of view. The finished paper does not fit the vision of any of them - which is good: it aims to be a bridge between different ways of looking at knowledge management.

As always, comments will be more than welcome: even if it’s finished, it remains open to changes, just as every other paper published here.

[Added: if you don't get along with the download page, try a direct route].

Two million messages

Yep, you heard well. This afternoon the Macuarium CoP system gathered its two-millionth message :-). This is being a very significant month (and there’s more news coming).

Still, I’m not especially impressed by the number of posts. It’s not an essential metric. We do have a high participation rate and all that, much higher than average… but what I’m rather proud of is the “signal-to-noise” ratio. We’ve reached that milestone while beating the drum of “use your searches, no repeat threads” and the “keep offtopics off the topics”. We have one of the most to-the-point, moderated methodologies out there.

And it’s worked well enough to fuel continuous, increasing message and membership growth. Up to two million messages, and beyond :-). All of them, all those stories and solutions, available online.
Did I say I’m immensely proud of our team? And our members, too.

Windows into communities: conversations and the “dynamic community” concept

I’m up to the ears in work these days and posting a bit slowly, but I don’t want to forget about this piece. Eric Hoffer has come, from a semantic web perspective, to an interesting issue. Or two.

The first is technology. He outlines a vision where he can gather the threads of relevant conversations from different communities (board- or list-supported conversations) as well as those running at (and across) blogs. All filtered according to domain and person interests (i.e. just the issues and the people he chooses to follow).

This is in fact quite closer  than one might think. Most blogs are efficently tagged according to domain, and track links quite well; a better-built RSS reader with appropriate filters could enable the blog part of his vision. Tagging forum posts and threads is not as widespread but it’s already started (pushed by search engine optimization, to be fair) and most are already quite proficient at generating RSS feeds; again, filtering well-tagged feeds for interesting domains and authors should not be impossible (whenever tagging becomes widespread).

So his vision of a personal, “virtual”, tailored community is not impossible. Indeed, there may be a business model not far from the surface, there.

The second issue he raises is a social one, but he raises it only implicitly.

OK, let’s assume the reader works, and that it’s viable to participate in those conversations (registration issues, participation interfaces… at a basic level, there doesn’t need to be any integration). The user can sit in the middle of his virtual “dynamic community” and follow any conversation, and even dip into them at will.

The question is, is that really a community?

Yes, it’s a window into a “conversation space”. Yes, it’s a domain. It can be a community in a wide, lax sense (as in “the worldwide coal-mining community”). I’ve heard it called a “domain community”. But I don’t think it’s really any sort of community.

In as much as a community is a social construct, with some shared procedures, goals and culture, and some personal affinity stemming from all of those, and not just a set of streams of information, it’s not.

Participation is not everything it takes to belong to a community. Remember the “honourable lurker” concept? And there’s participation without belonging, both legitimate and parasitic.

Eric’s reader would give us a window into many communities, into many disparate societies and their conversations. But it would only gives us fragments (the bits and pieces that we state we’re interested in). We would get all the domain context, but we would miss most of the social contex. We could be universal lurkers (and sometime participants) but not members.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I want Eric’s viewer as soon as someone builds it :-). It’ll save me a lot of time for staying abreast of what’s going on.

I’m just stressing that a community is more than nodes and information streams. It just doesn’t fit in the reader.

Jotspot returns as Google Sites

Now this is a press release I like:

Greetings!

We’re contacting everyone who’s expressed interest in learning of
JotSpot registration re-openings on the JotSpot website. And
today, we’re excited to announce that JotSpot is working on Google
infrastructure and has been re-launched as Google Sites.

Google Sites is the latest offering from Google Apps, a suite of
products designed to improve communication and collaboration
amongst employees, students, and groups. Google Sites makes
creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can
quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including
videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and
easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their
entire organization, or the world.

To get started with Google Sites, you’ll first need to sign up for
the Google Apps edition that’s right for you (if you’re not
already a Google Apps user). Start the sign-up process at:

http://sites.google.com

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043)

Go get it :-). I’m already tinkering and it looks great.

An unexpected almost prize

I just learned that the project I’m leading for a Spanish public agency almost won a prize yesterday. In fact we came in first finalist for the Computing Magazine 2008 prize for the “best ECM project of the year” in Spain.

ECM is acronym for “Enterprise Content Management” for those of you who don’t do letter soups, it covers document management and web content management and many things in between. And the almost prize is rather sweet for a number of reasons:

• This is the first public acknowledgement (hey, we’re in print and all) for my work for Getronics; there have been several nice things said about my work for Macuarium (we even won ReD magazine’s “Best Spanish website” back in 2001) and I’m quite satisfied about the acknowledgement of my KM work (the eventual expert panel and the ear of people I respect)… but Getronics actually pays my salary, so it’s nice. Unusual, and nice.
• It’s a commendation for my boss’ decision to support me: that project started as a disaster until I tore the claws of an incompetent project director off it and took responsibility for everything myself. That was really hard to do and yet another career risk, but it now seems it was the right decision. Especially comparing with the results of the projects that remained in his hands (no comment).
• It’s such a small thing of a project. It runs on MS SQL Server, while the competitors are all big Oracle boys. It uses French-born Eversuite as the platform, instead of EMC Documentum or Vignette as the winner and second finalist do. It’s such a tiny team, when faced by the groups that did the other projects (most of the time, a single analyst coded - a real artist, Jose Luis- while I managed, dealt with the the customer and designed the app). A tenth of the budget. And yet its effect on customer processes is deep and wide enough to leave that mark.
• [I thought that] The project that came in third place is… from the company that just bought Getronics’ Spanish operations. So it looks like the people who will run the show here at least know about these things enough to do almost as well as us ;-). [Actually, I got it wrong, it's by a different competitor].

Besides all that, our marketing people say that if a tiny little project, without either a powerful technology partner or a powerful patron customer, ever wins this kinds of prizes… they’ll think the magazine’s editors are not doing their job well. A case of sour grapes surely :-), but still: the winner is a splashy, pushy regional government and the second finalist is the Spanish national bank, and you already know the platforms they’re using, so hmmm.

So, you know, today I’m rather surprised and rather happy. An almost prize for my real job. Go figure.

[Edited to correct a mistaken impression]

ActKM’s survey list

ActKM is a thriving KM community, heavily Pacific (Australia and Asia) but quite cosmopolitan. They run a list, an annual event, and some online resources. They have also just put up on their wiki a list of the surveys that have been done (or are being done) by members using the ActKM list, plus an interesting page on how to do the same. Plus, some of the surveys’ results are published.

All in all, something to look at if you’re into KM research. If you do, please consider posting the results too :-).

Stephen Collins’ “Power to the People” presentation

Another Joitske-found surprise. This presentation is neither new (mid 2007) nor groundbreaking, but it does convey -contundently- the social-tool part of effective knowledge management, from the worker’s perspective. Yes, it can be criticised on several counts, but whatever we say, it’s worth looking over.

You can find it here. Go. Now.