Palimpsest has moved. Please visit our blog in its new location for the most recent posts from Scriptorium.

Palimpsest

Building communities one IP address at a time

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 — posted by Simon Bate

Day 2 at Gilbane: Continuing in the Social Computing track

Case studies in collaborative computing

Frank D'Angese - EarthKnowledge.net
Mark Yolton - SAP Communities
Kym Harrington - Sales Edge

Social communities in Web 2.0:

Work best when they are orchestrated, rather than moderated.
Rating and ranking of contributers increases quality of the contributions.
SAP encourages quality by having users award 3, 6, or sometimes 12 points to contributers. When they reach 250 points, they're considered "top contributors" or "highly-active contributors."
The super-top contributors (1/100th of 1% of the best in points, professionalism, and maturity in collaboration) are identified as SAP Mentors.
Management can be concerned in adopting web 2.0 because of exposing weaknesses to competitors, general risk, and disruptive technologies.
SAP sponsors occasional get-togethers so that contributers can meet each other.

Some risks of sponsoring a user community:

Self-promoters and anti-social behavior. Both of these are often handled by the community. "Public humiliation is more effective than policing." sez SAP.
If your company participates, beware of inauthentic interaction.
Sometimes users will vent about the product or company.
A "dead" community (no one goes there) will project a bad image.

Heard in several places. Support calls can be grouped into two classes: How-to questions and true bugs. The point of a user community is to reduce (or entirely offload) support time spent on how-to questions.

User communities follow the "1-9-90" rule. That is 1% of the community are highly active participants, 9% are occasional contributers, and 90% are consumers of the information. SAP focuses on the 9% and encourages them to move into the top 1%.

English tends to be the "lingua franca" of user communities. Multilingual sites present a challenge, because they can be difficult to moderate.

While some communities offer live chat, it doesn't have the value of public forums, because the information in a forum is captured permanently. Live chat is not as public and much harder to track and follow.

Social Media at Tipping Point

Geoffrey Bock - Gilbane Group
Rachel Happe - IDC

Dell seeks out conversations about Dell and participates in them. This has a major positive impact on brand sentiment.

HP Wetpaint -- Advice was so good, people in printing got annoyed.
Worth visiting.

Use of LinkedIn varies by industry. The overall average is 14%. For low-tech companies, use is as low as 2%; high-tech it's closer to 40%.
24% of all employees use some form of social networking.
Only 2% microblog (but I think that reflects much more on the novelty of the concept, rather than an acceptance level).

Gulp. 19% of the US workforce will retire in the next 5 years (this data is a couple of years old). There's a lot of knowledge that will leave along with the people. How do we capture all the knowledge? The preceding figures show that not everyone will use social computing or communities to record what they do. One approach is to establish (and record) conversations with these people.

On the other hand, 41% of 18-35 year-olds use social media and expect it at work. Social media gives them more access to tools, people, etc. It's NOT for just fun, they know it works faster.

Total content of the internet:
161 Exabytes (Millions of Terabytes) in 2006
900+ Exabytes by 2010
It's expected that at that time 80% will be user-created.

Technology for Ad Hoc Information Sharing (open source)

Peter Monks - Alfresco (filling in for John Newton)
Dries Buytaert - Drupal
Michael Wechner Wyona.com

The enterprise sofware sales model is obsolete.
Open source eats $60B a year from traditional enterprise software. Open source is characterized as the "Ultimate Disruptive Technology".

No cost of sales
Typically 7/10 of sales costs fund sales cycle
In Open Source 7/10 plowed into R&D.

MSFT thinks SharePoint will be next platform beyond Windows.

Humans are social animals. The don't want processes. Need minitools to figure out what to do -- particularly for non-tech doc. Technology gets in the way.

Check out Forbes Office Pranks (http://officepranks.forbes.com/).

Terms to pay attention to

Taxonomies - important to content management; critical to searching.
JSR-283 - An upcoming Java API for content retrieval.
RDF - Resource Descriptor Framework, a language for representing metadata. I considered (and passed on) using RDF in one of our projects, mostly because of what seemed like massive overhead. It's probably worth a second, or third, look.

Toolsmith's observations

There is no microblogging tool for the Enterprise (yet).

Many of the tools that make up Web 2.0 have been available for a while. What is different is that a) there is a critical mass of "next generation" tools and b) these tools have been embraced by web communities and the enterprise.

These include:

Developer communities
Groups/ forums
Blogs
Wikis
Ajax

Labels: conferences, gilbane08

4:12 PM Permalink | |

divider

Federating your Enterprise Content

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 — posted by Simon Bate

Summarizing an interesting day at Gilbane San Francisco 2008.

The Gilbane conference focuses on Enterprise and Web Content Management. Not necessarily something directly in Scriptorium's business, but there are many, many tie-ins with what we do do. In particular, structured documentation and XML are golden to Enterprise Content Management Systems.

The keynote address was delivered by Udi Manber, VP of Engineering for Google. One of the more interesting points in his talk was the engineering process within his group. An engineer doesn't ask permission to do anything. Instead, they experiment, evaluate the results of what they did, and then get approval based on the data.

This address was followed by a discussion between Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief at CNET news, and Denis Brown, SVP of Business User Imagineering at SAP. Some points:

Denis described the "consumerization" of the workforce. That is, just as people access Amazon to order books or CDs, when the go to work, they expect to be able to use corporate intranet web sites to perform similar tasks. AND the sites need to work just a smoothly as Amazon.

One topic that has arisen again and again is the security issues presented by Web 2.0. This led me to wonder about IT protections on web traffic. In my experience, IT has often presented a big hurdle for technical documentation teams to make content available on externally facing corporate web sites. There are often reams of paperwork to be filled out...and even more if the pages might be updated more than once every 6 months. Web 2.0 means traffic and content will be flowing both ways. Oh boy.

In the next session I attended, Steven Arnold discussed aspects of his recent Gilbane report "Beyond Search". Beyond his gruff (world-weary?) demeanor he had some good observations. Among them: Enterprise search doesn't exist (because most enterprise docs are not available for indexing); 50-75% of users don't think Enterprise search is working for them; there is no one-size-fits-all search, buy what works for your organization and data; most Fortune 500 companies have 5 to 10 separate search engines in house.

Ross Mayfield (http://www.socialtext.com/blog/) brought some fresh air to a large panel on Collaboration and Social Computing. All presenters had an enterprise focus; that's what they do. But Ross' discussion of "people as first-class objects" was really good to hear.