An ecology behind the firewall

How can business best use web2.0 tools?

The trick in any community is maintaining that delicate balance between diversity, individual opinion (voicing) and collective, reflective insight, finding applicable content, having the freedom to annotate and receiving timely notification.

Encouraging personal views, commentary, opinion, critique and news, helps to ensure diversity, brings in new voices and memes, creates the space for innovative ideas. A RSS enabled blog is the ideal tool for this. Think personal control & ownership, fast learning curve, permanent pointers via unique post URLs, simplified time-based structure, ways to gather feedback via comments and trackback, auto-archiving and more.

The blog allows bottom-up inputs, promotes cross-linking, seeds connections and captures distributed 'conversations'. If the posts are tagged, searchable and available for subscription, these affordances help to promote self-organization.

At another level, we need permanent concept level aggregation, a space where we can get collective information, where current views are synthesized, best practices are made explicit, information is continually updated, sources are referenced and there are pointers to people to contact for help, mentoring, advice and consultation. Here the wiki comes into its own.

Imagine if every business built its own wikipedia!. Authoritative, applicable, crafted, aggregated multimedia content available as text, images, audio files and video.

To tie this ecology together, provide notification, annotation and back-channel links, we will need social bookmarking applications similar to flick'r and Del.icio.us. This will allow cross content notification and referencing, provide the affordance that links items on the wiki with uploaded images, interesting podcasts and points to relevant conent on blogs. The tags allow us to browse related concepts using the tag cloud, giving a broader view than keyword search and avoids the trouble associated with maintaining a strict classification system and taxonomy.

This mix of tools will help promote self-organization, bust functional silos, increase corporate agility, speed decision - action cycles and help to keep employees on the same page.

Now tell me I'm dreaming big time.

Comments

[tyelmene]

these social-interative technologies have already achieved a benefit just by their very development.

**what does the "social-orientation" of these technologies and their socially like-minded business practice consulting counterparts all of which are experiencing success in the open marketplace say about the "function(s) they provide/issues they address?**

the old/current kmci view of "knowledge management" is/has always been ill concieved. information is *not* knowledge. however knowledge activating artifacts used in combination with socially activating design process are the future of knowledge practice. knowledge is a continous "designing" process and social interaction is the means by which knowers can interact and develop "meaning." with these technologies as enablers, we as praticioners are now empowered to turn the corner and move from km to the next era.

now, the adoption into organizations and wider enterprise is the natural domain for these new developments to thrive. i predict the adoption of these will not only take place, but will usher in the "real" knowledge practices/organizational learning era.

dave4400- regarding your quest for an aggregator, check out zesty news -( http://www.blazingthings.com/ )- from kevin dangoor of turbogears fame. i use it as my "local" rss/atom aggregator and it works very well for me.

[Dave44000]

Building the conceputal models that underly your business should be an ongoing effort. Doing this would give clarity to all the functional cultures that comprise the business. Ontological conflicts would be exposed, not so they could be negotiated away, but rather exploited and used to show that it isn't personal.

It would be easier to build intuitive software applications if developer efficencies were ignored and user efficencies were amplified. Then, UI designers wouldn't have such a hard time putting a nice face on a lousy and only partially correct model. Yes, we would do things a little different, but the cost of clunky use would go away. Those costs are invisible, so nobody focuses on getting rid of them. They slowly choke a business.

Yes, in some manner the encyclopedia of your company should be built.

[Mark Berthelemy]

Hi,

What's missing from the piece is an intranet-based aggregator that's as simple to use as Bloglines, with an API that can be used by an offline client (eg. Greatnews), but will pick up feeds from inside the firewall as well as outside.

Does anyone know of such an animal? Open source preferably... Elgg is getting there, but doesn't have the interface simplicity of Bloglines, and doesn't connect people together who are reading the same feeds.

[Euan]

It is behind the firewall Nancy. 16,500 forum users, 2,500 wiki users and 300 bloggers!

[Nancy White]

Euan, is this for BBC staff, or the public and is it viewable?

[Lee Bryant]

You're not dreaming. It is happening and more companies than you might realise are open to these ideas if implemented in the right (usable) way.

Have a look at this post for some thoughts on how we might actually package and deliver this kind of service.

[Euan]

Hardly - this is exactly what we built at the BBC.