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 :-).

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].

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]

¿Y qué tal una reunión sobre Comunidades?

El próximo día 1 celebramos una reunión de usuarios de Macuarium. Los bloggers siguen reuniéndose cada mes en todas partes. Ayer leía con la habitual envidia la convocatoria de otra sesión del MeetUp que organiza Online Community Report en San Francisco. Y veo las estadísticas de lectores para artículos en español: no somos tan pocos :-), aunque no sé cuántos estamos en España.

La pregunta es: ¿habría gente interesada en organizar un pequeño encuentro informal de personas involucradas en comunidades, de práctica o no? ¿Algo que pudiera evolucionar hacia una reunión mensual más temática y menos social, donde pudiéramos comentar, debatir y aprender? Sé de un par de personas que se apuntarían, aparte del que suscribe. Incluso sé de un par de buenos sitios.

En fin, ahí queda la propuesta abierta :-). Si alguien cree que podría ser interesante, puede poner en contacto desde el link correspondiente, o respondiendo aquí, por ejemplo.

Visions of KM 2: another draft of the paper

Yet another draft, indeed :-), of the second paper in this series, aiming to explain the usefulness of knowledge management and its implementation, from a management perspective.

This draft incorporates several changes made since last year, including the latest comments from one of the peer reviewers (I look forward to more). Hopefully the last will be in before the end of next week… because that’s the final deadline. Promise. There’s another paper in the pipeline and it should be advanced by now.

Such long drafting is a bad idea. Version confusion creeps in, eventually (or so it seems). And points of view shift, thus forcing in-depth reworking.

Whether those changes are worth the wait… you will judge better than I :-). Here’s the latest draft if you care for a look.

Visions of KM 2

Comments, as always, are welcome, either here or directly.

Bloggers, politicians, and other symbionts

Over the pond at the US, cyber activism is almost old hat. Bloggers are so many that blogger meetings are hardly viable, and corporate blogs thick enough on the ground to trip over.

On this side, however, things are still not quite there. In Spain, less than in some other corners. So it’s not surprising that open bloggers’ thursdays keep getting organized by different groups of bloggers in different cities, and that politicians aiming to get a message across try to attend them in case it helps raise some buzz. One such periodical meeting is the “Beers & Blogs” event in Madrid, attended by a varied crew and also by many bloggers from the online blogger community of El País, a left-of-centre periodical.

Usual meetings are rather calm affairs where a couple of dozen bloggers timidly network and (eventually) some have a famous good time. There are some “online entrepreneurs” and some aspiring “media”, but mostly it’s an affair for the traditional blogger: personal, opinionated, and thoroughly niche. I’ve been happy to be dragged to a couple of those meetings, with the excuse that I’m now involved directly and indirectly in blogging, and it’s always been nice if not really surprising.

Last week’s event was special, though. It was the second event that was announced to be attended by a politician, and it was hosted at a different venue. And the politician was a peculiar one. So it was crowded.

Rosa Diez (that’s the politician) is probably the most notable specimen to emerge in Spain’s arena for a decade. She has founded a left-of-center party that aims to break the status quo in national politics and to reshape the (haggling) relationship of the state with the regions (and the nationalist parties that send deputies to the national parliament) by reforming the electoral law. It also aims to put an end to no-holds-barred talks with the ETA terrorists. In short, it aims to regenerate the political  life in many ways.

Ms Diez is a very brave woman in more ways than one. She is a diminutive person who stands up to anybody. She also has lived and worked in her native Basque Country and consistently spoken up against the creeping totalitarism of their nationalistic regional government, the pressure agains those that dare to disagree with their official version of truth (a very real pressure) and the umbrage given to violent nationalism; a mixture she calls “fascism”. She spoke against the party line in her old political home, the (now ruling) PSOE party, when it changed tack on alliances and on the way to deal with ETA terrorism. She jumped ship and tried to form a mainstream alternative in a country where political affiliation can be almost hereditary (class sensitivities can be queer, but that’s another story), at a time of heightened and bitter partisanship, thus earning the hatred of a lot of PSOE activists. She is facing a very steep struggle to build a party structure, to gather funds, to get a toehold into any media that will print or broadcast her party’s message… again, in a country in which the media hold very definite political agendas. Harder yet, she’s trying to convince voters that her option is not just viable but more useful than any of the mainstream parties.

Another proof of combativeness came when she dared jump into the blogger meeting, nominally full of rabid PSOE sympathisers, and not just wait for the photo opportunity (as the previous politician to attempt to fish for votes at that venue had done), but actually mingle, circulate, debate, answer, be contradicted, and generally talk to a lot of people about her views on the situation of the country and the policies required to heal it.

In the event, rabid left-wingers eventually stayed away or showed their more dialogant side (I would have doubted their presence if I had not spoken with several). I had the pleasure to be on one of those informal, stand-up-with-a-guinness-in-your-hand debates, and exchange views. Not long enough for much, but sufficient to attest that she has not just sensible views, but also clear priorities. A long familiarity with blogging and bloggers surely helped, but she also showed herself a seasoned crowd-working politician.

Ms Diez was not all there was to the meeting, of course. I had come to talk some things with some people, and I also had time to network, talk and observe. The meeting was exceptional, and as such the number of “outliers” (people just interested in blogging, such as university teachers) , “dabblers” (technically a blogger that does not yet know if he/she will stay the course) and “parasites” (people selling services to dabblers, outliers and even bloggers) was thick on the ground. Some were particularly topical, such as a calling-card-wielding “personal brand sherpa”, and some were plainly trying to nail consulting deals. A few sniffed around for the blogging networks that can bring some money to associates (or buy them out). Many just stood pop-eyed and happy to be counted among the “vanguard” swigging discounted beer. The biggest fish in the blogging pond were notoriously absent, probably preferring the more intimate, focused events of normal months.

All in all, instructive, just as those focused events. Blogging is increasingly coming of age over here, sprouting an ecosystem of services and symbionts, and playing a more recognised role in communication strategies. Financially, it has a while to go before it makes sense. Thanks to Fernando Tellado’s EntreBlogs network, there is now a promising alternative for independent bloggers to get in touch with advertisers beyond Google without being assimilated into one of the “blog factories”, themselves spending much more than is viable in building up their visitor numbers.

The motivation of the inhabitants, the bubbling of the business models, the frenzy of the aspiring symbionts: lots to see, lots to learn. It’s one thing to read about something, and a different one to shake it by the hand. Until recently, I’d been staying physically clear from this in spite of the example of Lilia and Ton. Can’t say it’s my pond, but certainly I’m growing more than intellectually familiar with it.

And talking to Rosa Diez was worth the visit, too. Here’s wishing her a lot of luck and a chance to change this country.

Feliz Año Viejo

No, no es un error tipográfico. Es que acabo de volver de vacaciones y resulta llamativo comprobar que apenas se ha movido nada desde el 20 de Diciembre. Un día de éstos me voy a sentir imprescindible :-D.

Ahora en serio, el 2008 se presenta como una continuación del trabajo del 2007, sin grandes cambios. Terminar proyectos, lanzar sus continuaciones lógicas. Esperar la reacción.

En Getronics, la fusión con Tecnocom por fin empezó a moverse (el día 20 de Diciembre) aunque los cambios reales tardarán en verse… y la perspectiva de que el nuevo dueño limpie la cuadra no es tan buena, ya han incorporado una de las vacas sagradas al nuevo equipo de dirección. En fin. Seguiremos ocupándonos de los clientes y esperando que los jefes no interfieran demasiado. Y quién sabe si terminaremos el año en la misma empresa, o no. Lo malo de las ofertas que tengo es que no puedo aceptarlas, no que no me gusten.

En Macuarium, el 2007 fue el “año de los cambios”, algunos de filosofía y otros de equipo; el 2008 los desarrollará y confirmará. Y por supuesto traerá alguna sorpresa, siempre lo hace (esperemos que no todas sean como la última). Esperemos que yo pueda recuperar fuelle, porque a finales del 2007 estaba casi fuera de combate.

En eme ká eme… bueno, seguiremos escribiendo. Después de unas semanas de tomarlo con mucha calma, hay cosas que contar, y habrá cosas que comentar. Y si el gamberro de Patrick Lambe se acuerda de comentar el borrador que le envié (es el último de los peer reviewers que queda por escribir), podremos publicar el primer white paper antes del final de Enero. Con un poco de suerte, este año veremos más temas en español y más temas relacionados con España y alrededores.

Sobre lo demás… el único propósito serio que traigo este año es acostarme antes :-). No sé si es señal de pragmatismo o de alguna otra cosa, pero qué le vamos a hacer. Feliz Año Viejo.

Outsource thyself

What happens when you develop new business competences through your side interests, competences that are not related to your employer’s range of services? Well, you either leave the company, or waste those competences… or convice your boss to widen that range of services a bit.

In other words, if you happen to need a consultant on communities of practice and knowledge management, now you can get yours truly for the duration. Even if you’re a competitor (after all, my employer does not do KM or CoPs), you can now outsource me. There’s already a short but consistent list of prospects, which is gratifying.

Ain’t it a curious thought. I get to do more of the things that interest me without the risks of setting up an independent shop (bad time for that). My employer sells more value-added services. Everyone’s happy, apparently.

Of course, if you think long-term, you’d save a bundle hiring ;-).

Poniendo orden en eme ká eme

Bien, aprovechando que ya está casi cocinado el último white paper del año (es de suponer que no se me cruzará más el cable con el poco tiempo que tengo :-)) y que WordPress.com vio la luz acerca de la diferencia entre tags y categorías hace unos meses, acabo de hacer limpieza. Las categorías se han reducido a las que parecen razonables, y las tags se han liberado y multiplicado desconsideradamente.

No sé el efecto que ésto puede tener en los que navegan por RSS, aunque en teoría debería ser bueno. Por de pronto, el widget de “nube de etiquetas” se quedó desconfigurado y ha habido que eliminarlo, con lo que también he limpiado un poco el márgen…

… y como me sobre un rato esta tarde, me parece que cambiamos también la plantilla del blog. Esta es una gozada pero está ligeramente vista.

(… y por cierto, se apreciarían comentarios sobre el pobre documento antes de fijarlo en piedra. Son sólo 26 páginas de nada :-D.)

Visions of KM 2: another draft

This is one paper that is taking its time :-).

It is the second installment of (hopefully) a series of documents attempting to explain the specific relevance and implications of knowledge management to different roles of professionals, providing some common ground. The first one attempted to summarise the matter for IT professionals; the second aimed at business managers. It attempted to make sense of the flurry of ideas that surround KM and pin down specific knowledge-related policies and practices that can be useful in the organization, plus some change management ideas and some tools. Simply, a clear and brief introduction to knowledge management for business managers, with little jargon and technospeak.

The first serious draft came out four months ago :-), and it was helpfully sent back to the kennel by peer reviewers. It was too dogmatic, it was a bit aggresive, it was too bland, it appeared to concentrate on one perspective, it was not crisp or easy to read, it didn’t provide enough theory background, it was a set of disconnected articles (my own criticism)… and still they liked it well and wanted to see it finished.

I had to go back to the writing table, and it’s been a long time (no such thing as free time of late). The paper is definitely missing polish and a lot of references, but now I’m significantly happier with it. Let’s see what the reviewers say, and let’s hear your opinions.

Visions of KM 2 v25 (26 pages, 1,5 MB aprox).

Mañana empieza Ciudadanos 2.0

Dentro del exceso 2.0 que nos invade (es peor que lo del iPhone, aquello duró menos) se promueven iniciativas que tienen buen aspecto. Por ejemplo, la que nos han comunicado vía la lista SIS, y que reproduzco por si interesa:

Expertos debatirán en Madrid en torno a la “Ciberciudadanía, Gobierno electrónico y nuevos derechos humanos”

La localidad madrileña de Rivas Vaciamadrid acogerá los próximos días 21 y 22 de noviembre la I Conferencia internacional sobre “Gobierno electrónico y nuevos derechos humanos: Ciudadanía 2.0″, con el objetivo de profundizar en el estudio y análisis de las relaciones entre derechos humanos, tecnología y democracia, y en particular, sobre la relación entre el uso de Internet, las políticas de inclusión digital y el desarrollo del gobierno electrónico.

La convocatoria buscará identificar los factores que suponen un cambio real en la definición de los límites de la democracia y el concepto de ciudadanía, por medio del debate acerca del derecho ciudadano a diseñar la tecnología, mercado global de la ciudadanía o la crisis de las utopías digitales, los cambios de la ciudadanía clásica a la ciudadanía digital o el anñaísis de los actores locales en la redes globales. Otros temas de debate serán las estrategias y políticas públicas para el desarrollo de la ciudadanía digital y experiencias concretas de Gobierno electrónico y políticas de inclusión digital en Europa, Asia y América Latina.

Participarán ponentes como Langdon Winner, Saskia Sassen, Emilio Suñé, Ramón Queraltó, Javier Bustamante, Andoni Alonso, Margarita Barañano, María José Fariñas, Eulalia Pérez Sedeño o David Cierco. La Conferencia concluirá con un Manifiesto a favor de la ‘Ciudadanía 2.0′.

Organiza el evento el foro de investigación y acción participativa ( fiap ) para el desarrollo de la sociedad del conocimiento, con la colaboración del Ayuntamiento de Rivas Vaciamadrid, la entidad pública empresarial Red.es (MITyC) y el Ministerio de Administraciones Públicas (MAP). También colaboran Indra, Cisco, T-Systems, La Caixa, Fundación Telefónica, Fundación Ciudadanía y ElPaís.com. La asistencia es libre y gratuita previa inscripción a través de la web de la Conferencia.

Sabido es que mi querido empleador es una empresa profundamente sensible a estos cambios en el uso de la tecnología y las expectativas ciudadanas, y que apuesta por fomentar la formación de sus empleados aprovechando estas ocasiones (que por cierto también lo son de venta…). En la medida que lo anterior es cierto, estaré allí.

Webinar sobre Enterprise Data Mashups de Denodo

Se trata de un webinar orientado a conseguir partners y revendedores (lo que sólo será interesante para algunos) pero buena parte del contenido gira alrededor de un concepto muy útil: la integración de datos dispersos por la empresa (y no normalizados), de modo que se les pueda hacer accesibles e integrarlos con otras fuentes de datos estructuradas y no estructuradas para construir herramientas útiles (”mashups”) con el mínimo coste posible, siguiendo la filosofía web 2.0.

Por supuesto, la idea de Denodo es vender su propia herramienta y metodología para hacerlo. Lo que no quiere decir que no pueda resultar útil. Puedes apuntarte aquí.

Esperemos que éstos no tengan problemas con sus servidores… :-).

Publicaciones: download trouble

Como ése título se entiende en los dos idiomas, lo dejamos así: de momento, parece que las Descargas de Macuarium.com (donde se alojan estos documentos) no funcionan como es debido. Estamos en ello.

A warning to users attempting to download papers of the Publications section: the hosting arrangement at Macuarium.com is having trouble and the downloads don’t seem to be working. We’re working at fixing it.

Sand castles and evolution management

Last night Josien Kapma and John Smith phoned in for a conversation, as part of their effort to catalogue and understand the ways communities raise and use financial resources; I’ll be looking forward to the results. We talked mainly about Macuarium.com, which has a peculiar business model, and we meandered a bit along the way.

One of the issues raised was “how do you cope with the changes” in the community membership, in the stakeholders, in the ecosystem, in the competition, in the companies that affect the domain…? Changes that affect the way people relate and communicate, their practices, their requirements and availability, and their business objectives. How can you build a financially sound community on shifting ground?

Well, you can’t. What you build is a community designed to change, to balance those shifts, to adapt… and to rebuild. Like any other business. There’s a long piece in Spanish (which I hope to publish some day, but not yet) about business practices. It’s called “The Sand Castle“, and the conversation brought it to mind.

You may be familiar with sea-shore sand castles. Some are wonders of ingenuity and architecture. But there’s one thing they all have in common: if you leave them alone when the tide rises, they eventually disappear.

But the key here is “eventually”. Any fixed structure that doesn’t react to the continuous variations of the environment will get washed away. Management isn’t a race, it’s ongoing. You never finish.

Some people come back in the morning and rebuild, and a bit of observation leads to finding out which features survive better and worse, which can be lost without harm to the core characteristics (or with little rebuilding cost) and where your effort will be wasted.

After a while (and with the permission of beach bulldozers) you notice that some sand lumps are still there in the morning for a long time. During the day, they sprout ingenuous defences (wave breakers, chanelled moats, higher and thicker walls), often quite away from their core. This enables them to survive the first tide in recognisable shape, even though each wave changes the shape of the defences, and the tide eventually overcomes them.

Last summer I saw a specially good example, a large prow-shaped keep surrounded by terraced solid walls, and shallow channel moats. It survived for over a week, carefully tended by some holidaying family (it was a strange sight late in the evenings, the keep looking solid like a grounded ship among the fishermen). When they left, it crumbled fast (with help from footloose children).

Communities and companies are like that. They need continuous tending and rebuilding, reshaping and learning and repairing. Some people seem to think that setting up a community of practice is a one-off task you can complete and leave to run on its own. It isn’t. You either keep rebuilding or the changes in the environment, the needs and behaviours of members, or stray events, will dissolve it.

The financial side is clear. You need some core funding source, and you need to tie it down and surround it with as many defences as you can build. You then go on to complement it with less secure, more variable sources that enable you to build better things, but which you can let go without disappearing (and yes, that means choosing a business model and a marketing strategy and sticking to it to build defensive barriers; it also means experimenting).

Your core may get very big eventually, but it’s always subject to the effects of a radical change so you better stand ready to correct, evolve, rebuild. Those outlying defences may prove to be useful and become a fixture, even if you need to invest periodical efforts in it (changes in partnerships according to circumstances: you can always have one, if you’re always ready to seek a new one when the current agreement runs its course).

Above all, the sand crumbles. The team changes. The reliable stalwart of the forums decides to go blogging on their own. The moderator grows tired, jaded or demotivated. The dominant portal sprouts a service that mimics yours. The municipality cuts funding for training initiatives. Evolution in the only constant in a community that aims to persist.

And evolution means adaptation. When you’re made of sand, you can’t just wait out the waves: you can’t win.

So you change the terrain and you adapt: you don’t build vertical wall, but slanted ones that allow the wave to spend its force with minimum damage (or you find a way to collaborate with the domain’s established forces, such as industrial organizations and training outfits). You find ways to minimize the strength of the surf with diverting moats (or strike publishing agreements that draw the competitive sting from other resources such as blogs). You raise the floor within the walls so as to turn it into a cliff instead of a hollow (or increase the cohesiveness of the team with a coherent communication and confraternization policy). You observe. You look around for better ideas, and you experiment.

And when the water breaks in, you rebuild. And it will get in. Because you’re made of sand.

Just, maybe, not this tide.

The law and online Communities of Practice

One of the uncommon characteristics of Macuarium (my little consulting company and the mothership of a few sites and forums) is that it incorporates a legal department right from its inception. Sure, the reason is that the other partner is a lawyer with an interest in the Internet… but also, that I’ve always believed in knowing the lay of the land and carrying a big stick.

And today I’m especially happy, as it seems we’re about to win another one of the real-life tight situations in which our bright legal department has proven, once and again, its mettle. The full version -it’s a long yarn- will be written in Spanish after the dust has settled, but the take-away may be relevant for other readers.

In most countries, there is a growing bevy of laws concerning online CoPs. Serious projects would do well to keep an eye on:

Intellectual property rights. Who owns what and which rights are awarded/kept/returned during the “member lifetime”. In other words, what rights does the CoP have over the contents that members create, what rights have members themselves; what happens when someone ceases to be a member, etcetera. Can you edit their texts? Can they demand that you erase all messages, once they’re no longer members? In all likelyhood there’s legislation about this in your country too, and your user terms should take the issue (and the laws) into account.

Privacy rights. Especially in Europe, there’s a rather solid protection of people’s private information… but there’s still very little precedent and quite a lot of confusion about what is personal information, what isn’t, and how to exercise a person’s rights. This should be taken into account from the design phase: you may need to register the user databases with a government agency, to establish access procedures for users, and to create appropriate security conditions for the data… not to mention gathering and handling it with extreme care. Failing to do all that can get you into really hot water.

Online service legislation. Almost every country has its own version, and online service providers are subject to quite similar obligations everywhere regarding their responsibility in online behaviour of their users, and the way they can provide their service. This limits (or opens) what you can do to a misbehaving user, and what you can ask others to do, as well as setting out your obligations toward judicial or police investigations.

Honour and free press legislation. Each country has a different balance between the rights of free expression and those that protect the honour of third parties. When people write with abandon, they very often tread on the toes of others, sometimes beyond their legal right. Then that becomes the responsibility of the CoP organisers, who can get hit or even sued. Terms of use and moderators have better keep that in mind.

And I’m not even going into copyright law or protection of trade secrets :-). The jungle is quite dense that way… we’ve been there, we know (we even got friendly with Apple’s famous lawyers, and learnt a lot about Argentine IP). Enforcing your users’ appropriate behaviour and enforcing your own rights can be a bit of a chore, but it’s far easier on well-built foundations.

Also, it’s important to remember that online CoPs are subject not just to the laws of the country origin, but also to those of the country where its servers are hosted (i.e. if you’re Spanish but hosted on the US, a US suit can get you off the air). Other countries’ legislations might not hold sway but still affect you or your relationships with third parties.

All in all, it pays to be aware of all those laws, agencies, procedures and precedents. It does a lot for your peace of mind, and can save you from more serious losses too. The fun thing is, most CoPs out there seem to live blithely ignoring most of them… until they crash into a mean ex-user or an outraged third party.

And, take it from me, they do exist. It’s just a matter of time.

Upcoming: the Knowledge Wave paper

Friends and colleagues (and some very curious and kind souls) may have noticed that I stopped talking about the second “Visions of KM for management” paper, before summer. There’s a reason: while I believe it was essentially solid, it had a very big flaw and another serious one. It lacked focus and (as Rosanna Tarsiero put it) it had a “style” problem. So it’s been sent back to factory.

The paper that is emerging instead looks like a book, but there will be a white paper version in the usual format :-). Here’s a bit of the draft intro. As usual, comments will be appreciated (publishers especially welcome :-D)… and I expect to have some more chewable stuff soon.

“The Knowledge Wave (intro draft Sept 07)

In the 1980s, Jack Welch turned GE around by its ears and cast it into practically the only thriving large conglomerate in a world of specialization. He did it by raising the pressure (and the bar) for results, and by enabling the means to achieve them. And one of the main ways was sponsoring, pushing and enshrining a series of knowledge-sharing initiatives among managers that spread good practices and new ideas around the divisions and the conglomerate, turning GE into one big business-improvement hothouse. Among the many stories he tells, there’s a fine one about a man saying all those years they had paid him for his hands, when they could have had his brains too for the same price.

In the 1990s, Mr Welch realised that not even GE was large enough to contain all the best answers, and began casting outside for better ones. This he called “boundarylessness”, and predates the “Open Business” concept by a few years.

Another “boundary-less” example is brought by iconoclastic Steve Jobs. Upon his return to Apple he forcefully eradicated the “not invented here” mentality to turn Apple into a leader… by skillfully integrating its core abilities with the best solutions out there, pioneering consumer USB and Wifi, drafting in UNIX, reinventing the MP3 player, and blasting away the smartphone market with the iPhone. All of them are fundamentally outside concepts turned into a new product.

These are only two examples, but you can see many more around you. Ever since the 80s (and probably earlier) competitive pressures have forced ambitious companies to focus on the flow and acquisition of business-relevant knowledge, both inside and outside the firm. Some have managed, some have tried, some are being overrun and pushed down-market.

At the same time, technology as been reaching a tipping point. The adoption and evolution of internet-based technologies has enabled communication in ways that were not even dreamt of (save in some brilliant science fiction), and in the last few years are seeing the erosion of the last barriers to adoption: cost and complexity of use. Tools that were the preserve of tech-intensive, cash-rich companies at the turn of the century can now be used (in improved versions) free as an online service. Personal publishing is non-news. Online fora are everywhere. Wikis are mainstreaming. Teleconferencing is old hat. In short, information sharing is becoming cheaper and faster, and does not require courses or formal executive meetings to take place. Which is not to say they are no longer needed.

Nowadays, knowledge workers generate knowledge flows in every direction. Some are taking place inside your organization. Some are taking place across it, as employees share with colleagues from outside the firm. Some are happening beyond them, thus depriving you of competitive advantage.

The knowledge wave has hit the world of business. You can either ride it and make the most of it to improve your business, or you can be submerged.

You may have realised that both companies and leaders chosen to illustrate the point did not simply add a few systems or talk kindly to their people. Managing knowledge is managing the whole business, and doing it well means changes as much as it promises rewards. I suggest viewing “Knowledge Management” as just as another management discipline to improve the profitability of your assets… by letting them use their brains.

In this paper, we will be exploring a few ways to do it.”

An impressive document trove

During a very nice, quiet thread over at com-prac, one member (A J Christopher) dropped the URL of a document repository as a reference for CoP and team building…

… and, as another member was quick to spot, it’s indeed a trove of good practical literature on project management and knowledge sharing. Lots of perspectives, overall very practical selection. Worth the time of a perusal… and more. I’d guess it’s bound to be useful for most people in the field.

It’s ProjectConnection’s papers section (not all of them from them) and it’s here.

Blow your mind (sort of)

Talk about conflicting influences :-), how about mixing a NGO crusader with ex-GE “Neutron” Jack Welch?

Last year I had a bit of a shock when reading Hildy Gottlieb’s blog reflections about goals and means, and the way many organizations become focused on means and forget what their mission is. Actually, the shock came when I realised that it had happened to the organization I lead to a serious extent.

Then came this summer’s indigestion of Jack Welch podcasts and books. If I hadn’t shared so many management views, I probably would not have heeded his strategy hints… but I did.

The Macuarium organization is a queer beast. It has two firm goals: to serve as an experimental, learning environment in ebusiness and knowledge management… and be useful to Spanish-speaking Mac users through information, fostering mutual help and knowledge sharing.

In fact, we have been increasingly swallowed by the means: a complex forum system with a web portal, and the attending processes and relationships and non-goal-furthering complexities of technical support and finance. What would Hildy say?

Also, we are the dominant CoP for Mac-using creative professionals (aka knowledge workers), our forums gather over 80% of threads on our core topics. But that makes for a cozy view and little chance of evolution. Welch suggests (among other things) defining your market in a way that you have 10% or less. What’d he say?

With those two ideas at the back of our minds and a lot of sand to tread on, the Macuarium shareholders discussed, argued, proposed, discarded and envisioned for a whole summer month. We came back with a somewhat clearer view and an evolution strategy that looks like taking us into several new places, some of them commented here… and taking serious shape by the day.

This post is just to reccomend the process, and the catalysts :-). They remind me of that old tip: “Blow your mind - smoke gunpowder”.

Now auditioning…

… for yet more projects :-). This is getting crowded and yet they come.

Remember June? That was nothing. The previous betas are still on course or growing into services, alliances are being seeked (and some even struck, amazingly), contracts drawn, meetings attended, contacts rekindled, software installed and configured, servers fitted, best practice manuals come off the press, articles get written, teams renewed, iPhones presented (wait, that wasn’t me, was it?)…

On my day job, projects get satisfactorily closed and (immediately) relaunched with new contracts, goals and budgets. My employers have even managed to realise they should back my EMBA (whenever I manage to enlist and find the funds, of course). I’m beginning to feel busy. But then, if I’d got them to pay for it, I’d feel utterly surreal, so “busy” is not so bad.

A consultant friend recently said (loosely) that hearing what I was up to was listening to Chinese: it sounded so techy and so far from business management. But it’s not: it’s all about designing and enabling new processes that will support a better business model. The early part (design the business model and the new organisation) I did this summer, on the phone and stepping on waves and dodging balls (yes, the beach). The drudgery part is the tech, and it gets a lot of effort to get right. The fun part comes as processes become enabled… and change management begins :-D. Oh, am I going to enjoy this year end…

BTW, if you happen to have a nice KM-related project (preferably paying -I’ve got an EMBA to pay- or really interesting) that can be done in off-hours or with partial dedication… don’t hesitate to call. Before the post-holiday lift draws off :-D.