Social business adoption best practices #e20s #socbiz

Back after a nice French lunch, Claire Flanagan and Rachel Happe talk about adoption/change and community management.

Claire simply had too much slides and information to give you a good summary. Which is great (to be clear)! I'll share a couple of notes from the talk below.

A nice overview of research Jive did on the value companies are getting was shared by Claire (and is inserted in this blogpost).

Business value of internal social was only realized when organizations did the following:

• senior leaders role-modelling
• integrate social into day-to-day activities
• removal of other tools

So, how to change your organization and get them ready for internal social? Claire shares the following steps:

• process (define what the new way of working looks like, definitely for executives - use cases, which is not persona-focused, focus on processes)
• incentives (reward open leadership, bonus tied to 'open' objectives)
• comms/marketing (executive 'launch' message, success stories)
• training/support (executive training, reverse mentoring)
• role models (recruit execs as 'advocates', use 'external' benchmarks)

Next up, Rachel Happe about driving engagement in (online) communities. Community management is the new management, according to Rachel.

Rachel starts by relating to the different communities out there: drama central, ghost town, a clique, etc.

Recommendations for engagement:

1. define the engagement you need
2. build effective engagement recipes
3. community management (I think...)

So, what is engagement? Valuable engagement advances something, like ideas, relationships, solutions, trust & reputation, and expertise or skill.

Engagement can look very different depending on the goal you have. It also depends are where you are in the relationship with the people you engage with. When you first run into someone, you engage differently than when it's your family.

I liked how Rachel recommended us to use different audiences and platforms to build community and engage with them. Different phases in work ask for different audiences and tools/platforms.

Models for the Social Business Transformation #e20s

The 2nd day at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit starts with a panel discussion about 'Models for the Social Business Transformation' (track 1). Panelists are Luis Suarez (IBM), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Nicolas Rolland (Danone).

Jerome starts with a presentation about his experiences at Alcatel-Lucent. This company is in a huge transformation. The transformation was done in less than 2 years, and started just after Ben Verwaayen started at Alcatel. Engage has become part of their DNA.
They set up a platform called Engage. Now with 60.000 profiles (80% of the org.) and 4.000 groups. There are two official community managers, but the rest is managed by the employees themselves. People decide for themselves what they do with the platform.
They analyze what's happening in the platform with social network analysis.

Benefits for Alcatel were:

1. It restructured the internal communications
2. Commitment to convince and help colleagues (engagement of whole of larger part of organization)
3. Emergence of crowdsourcing principles

Risks and pitfalls (the dark side) are:

1. Copycat of bad hits (copying the existing the existing silos, official vs UGC for comms)
2. Bypass organizational decisions (challenge all decisions made before, sensitve topics, question re-organizations)
3. Questioning impacts for social networting (overload of info, anonymous comments, outdated threads)

Alcatel learned as they went along.

Nicolas also tells about the social business steps Danone is taking. Collaborate, innovation and acceleration were drivers for the roll out of social networking tools in 2009. Opened it for everybody (100.000 work at Danone, 40.000 have a computer). In the 1st year 10.000 people joined. The system allows you to fill in a profile with skills and create communities.

After the 1st year they wondered how they would reach everybody. The network was not the intranet (and it should be they found). So they worked on connecting to mobile devices (with wifi access everywhere within Danone) and video. They are also trying to move towards integrating learning and gaming in the network.

Danone does not find that English should be the main language in the network. English is not used the most in Danone anyway (more Spanish, Indonesian).

Community and Engagement Management #e20s

Next breakout (track 1) at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit is about 'Community and Engagement Management'. Breakout speakers are Joanna Walczak (Lecko), Jerome Colombe (Alcatel-Lucent) and Jon Mell (IBM).

Joanna kicks off with a presentation about what should be understood by engagement in enterprise 2.0. Engagement is the Leitmotiv of community management. Engagement is linked to the employees' awareness of being part of a systemic organization.
A first step of building a successful community is that to acknowledge that the community already exists. The community should be more than sharing ideas. And it should be related to the corporate strategy.

How do you prove the value of the community for the organization? Prove that these new kinds of interactions are genuinely productive, help transform fruitful interactions into capitalizable assets, make individualism and collaborative behavior compatible through 'gamification', and, give some feedback  about the Return on Engagement.

Also provide moderation guidelines for the community. Resist the urge to control the community, bridge between those that express themselves easily and those that don't and deal with conflict quickly and openly. (Although conflict is not seen too much because employees mostly engage in communities with their full name.)

Jon Mell shares an interesting example of a company that allows communities to be set up (using a tech platform), sets up metrics to measure the engagement in the community and if it doesn't live up to the engagement metics, they'll kill the community.

Jerome shares the Alcatal approach. He mentions that they have about 500 (official) community managers in place. They are an important part of the corporate strategy and change the strategy of the company regularly. 60k employees are in the social platform.

The discussion was mainly about if structure and/or management is needed for community (tools).

I asked a question, based on the above: Would you say a vibrant community is one that a company can try to kill but lives on anyway?
Another question was about the business case for a community.

My Cluetrain Manifesto Notes

It's been years ago since I read 'The Cluetrain Manifesto'. I think I maybe only read parts of it, back in 2001 or so. After leaving Oce I didn't have a copy of The Cluetrain anymore, so I decided to buy my own copy and read through it from beginnning to end. Now there's a 10th anniversary edition making it even more interesting to do so.

Man, what a ride it was. This book is just great. And amazing for the fact they captured what is going on right now so well. This book is a must-read for a social media enthusiasts. But also for all who just started using social media and are trying to understand if this social-thing is a hype or a trend.

I'm not going to summarize the book for you. But I wanted to share some nuggets with you. If you haven't read the book, I hope this will trigger you to go and do so. Please let me know if you do!

• Start here and read through the 95 theses! If you like these and want to know more, read the book.
• "... everything that happens in the marketplace falls into three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction mattered most, conversation less, and relationship least. Worse, we conceive and justify everything in transactional terms. Nothing happens more than price and "the bottom line". By looking at the market through the prism of transaction, or even conversation, we miss the importance of relationship. We also don't see how relationship has a value all its own: one that transcends, even as it improves, the other two." (p.12)
• "... most of the ones I come up with [that apply The Cluetrain well] are essentially small businesses, with simple organizational underpinnings and a scale made manageable by an intrinsic limit on the number of company participants in the conversation." (p.33)
• "The internet was a force of disintermediation. ... The internet was disintermediating the sedimentary layers of increasing nonhumanity." (p.53)
• "Indeed, conversation requires a broad base of agreement from which we then discuss relatively minor differences. Conversation isn't usually about finding the truth. It's a social activity and a way of building social relationships." (p.62)
• "Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns. And we have something else: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it - our craft - and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about." (p.80)
• "Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millenia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand." (p.82)
• "We don't know what the web is for but we've adopted it faster than any technology since fire." (p.115)
• "People talk to each other. In open, straightforward conversations. Inside and outside organizations. The inside and outside conversations are connecting. We have no choice but to participate in them." (p.123)
• "Companies can't stop customers from speaking up, and can't stop employees from talking to customers. Their only choice is to start encouraging employees to talk to customers - and empowering them to act on what they hear." (p.144)
• "The long silence - the industrial interruption of the human conversation - is coming to an end." (p.154)
• "Here's some advice on entering the conversation: loosen up. Lighten up. And shut up for a while. Listen for a change." (p.173)
• "We're all learning to talk anew. We're all going to get it right and get it wrong." (p.183)
• "The web, in short, has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices. And they expect to be able to find what they need and do what they need without any further help from people who dress better than they do." (p.188)
• "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Hyperlinks subvert Fort Business. Business is conversation." (p.230)
• "Via intranets, workers are already speaking among themselves. Via the internet, markets are already speaking among themselves. The convergence of these two conversations is not only necessary, but inevitable." (p.236)
• ""Follow the money" may still apply, but to find the money in the first place, follow the conversation." (p.248)

Well, those are my highlights! Hope they help. What part(s) of The Cluetrain did you like most?

Being a Member of the 2.0 Adoption Council

This post should have been posted a long time ago...

Being part of a big company was great. One of the great things it brought me was being a member of the 2.0 Adoption Council. The 2.0 Adoption Council is a group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners working for large companies. I was a member of the Council for a couple of years. It was a great source of inspiration for my work. Lots of smart people are in the Council.

Actually I was humbled to be part of a group of enterprise 2.0 practitioners that are seen as the leaders in this space. Some had many more years experience than I did. You wonder what they get from the Council? Well, that's one of the great things about these communities: we're all in it to learn and help each other. And that's exactly what happened. Even though some have been in this space for a long time, we're all still just getting started.

To cultivate interaction we used Jive, Yammer and Socialcast. And email of course. Even more important were the meetups around conferences. It was great to meet many of the Council at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt.

One special thing I'll remember is the Council giving me the opportunity to experiment with a prediction market. I don't see many companies using them yet, but I'm sure they will be in the (near) future.

So, if you're working for a large(r) company and experimenting or responsible for enterprise 2.0 roll-outs, I wholehartedly advise you to join the Council. Information about joining can be found on the Council's website.

Where imaginations play, learning happens - A Great Interview

I've always been intrigued by the concept of learning. It's one of the reason I like blogging so much and social media in general. It's a great way to learn!

Every now and then I bump into a great post or interview about this topic. Just recently I read a great interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas about their new book 'A New Culture of Learning' (part 1 and part 2). I was planning to read the book. After reading this interview I'm going to push it up on my to-read list. Thanks Henry Jenkins for sharing this interview with us.

I'll share some interesting statements from the interview with you here:

• One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments.
• Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked world, information is always available and getting easier and easier to access. Imagination, what you actually do with that information, is the new challenge.
• The force that seems to be pushing the knowledge curve forward at an exponential rate is two fold. First, it is the generation of new content and knowledge that is the result of simply participating in any knowledge economy. This leads to a second related dimension: while content may remain stable at some abstract level, the context in which it has meaning (and therefore its meaning) is open to near constant change.
• Learning is not a binary construction which pits how against what. In fact, throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.
• In our framework, we stress that every piece of knowledge has both an explicit and a tacit dimension. The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means. The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices. It is the dimension where the context and content interact. Our teaching institutions have paid almost no attention to the tacit and we believe that it is the tacit dimension that allows us to navigate meaning in a changing world.
• The key difference for us is that in the new culture of learning mentors are very likely to be peers who may have picked up something a little ahead of the curve or who may have more experience in something than their peers. Mentorship is a much more flexible concept and one which is tied less tightly to authority. Since so much of what we see as the key to future learning is passion-based, we think it makes more sense to understand the process of learning as something that can be guided by a mentor, as opposed to being taught by a teacher. No one can teach you to follow your passions, but they can help guide you once you discover what motivates you.
• What we were able to identify were two radically different learning environments, one which was overly structured (such as the contemporary classroom) where boundaries are put in place to actually discourage play, experimentation and real inquiry based learning. The other environment is completely unbounded and unlimited, best represented by the information explosion on the Internet. Absent some sort of structure or boundaries, learning is not any more likely to happen in an unrestricted space than it is in a tightly controlled one.
• Where imaginations play, learning happens.
• What no one seems to pick up on is that innovation by its very nature runs counter to the idea of standardization.
• Another key distinction we are trying to make is to understand the difference between creativity and imagination, two terms that are often used interchangeably. Creativity is a much later stage and something that can not be taught. It is the product of a fertile imagination.
• Inquiry as a core principle of the new culture of learning
• In large part, the role of the teacher needs to shift from transferring information to shaping, constructing, and overseeing learning environments.
• You don't teach imagination; you create an environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish.
• This new culture of learning only works if it can be fed by an enormous influx of constantly updated information.
• We talk repeatedly about the questions being more important than the answers and the idea that solutions to one problem are gateways to dealing with increasingly more sophisticated problems and deeper questions.
• First, play is not trivial, frivolous or non-serious, in fact, quite the opposite. Play can be the place where we do our most serious learning. And second, it is something we do all the time. When we explore, we play. When we experiment, we play. When we tinker or fiddle, we play. Science is play. Art is play. Life, to a great extent, is play.

Good stuff eh?! There's much more in the interviews. And surely even more in the book.

Repetitive Interaction Leads to Trust

Some time ago I told you I have a student, Arzu, who's researching enterprise social bookmarking. We'll she's almost finished with her thesis. And I can tell you, I'm really impressed with her work. She's delivered a very fundamental and also practical piece of work. I hope to share more with you from her work in the coming weeks. I'll share a nice quote with you right now. In her final chapters she refers to research done on 'trust' which I find very interesting.

Hsu et al. (2007) explored the effect of trust on knowledge sharing in virtual communities in different stages. They suggest that trust is developed in virtual communities by repetitive interaction of members over time and appears in three stages: economy-based, information-based and identification-based trust. As the relationship develops, the economy-based trust will move to knowledge-based trust, eventually identification-based trust. In the initial stage of participation to virtual communities, new members who have little knowledge about other members and their activities would develop economic-based trust that rests on behavior in general in the community. Economic-based trust (also called generalized-trust by Kankanhalli et al. (2005), competence-based trust by Abrams et al. (2003) ) is related to the economic gains such as increased knowledge, decreased time etc. Once the economic-based trust is set, individuals may feel a moral obligation and urged to reciprocate the contributions offered by the system. In online communities, reciprocity follows a generalized pattern; individuals decide to contribute when they benefit from the use of any publicly available information. The last formed trust is identification-based trust (benelovance by Abrams et al. (2003)) is based on emotional bonds between individuals.

This is really interesting, don't you think? These steps can be used when we build and cultivate communities in general and in the social space specifically. It also helps us do the right thing at every stage. For instance, don't expect employees that have no emotional bond with each other to share voluntarily. When a community is created/started people will decide to join or not. The decision will mostly be made on 'what's in it for me?' criteria. So, you have to be able to answer that question, or else they'll move to the next community and share there.


What do you think? Are these stages helpful? And do they relate to your experience?

Intranet opportunities and challenges in a multi-brand organization #epem

Jenni Laajarinne of Amer Sports Corporation is the first speaker today! 6300 employees. Amer Sports is behind brands as Wilson, Atomic, Salomon and Suunto.

Her talk will focus on using social media applications to encourage community-thinking.

She has a case example of our organization using and internal social media application to encourage community thinking in the year that marked the company’s 60^th anniversary.

They have home-grown CMS, created by IT. They have 6 brand intranet and 4 business area intranets. These intranets are pretty autonomous: the look-and-feel is different, the structure is different, etc.

They were looking for a fun and exciting way to celebrate the company’s anniversary. They wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the employee’s passion for sports. They set up an intranet page to share their sports moments. It ran for 3 months (so it should be simple to use for there is no time for adoption!) and there was a monthly prize. Employees could upload text, pictures and videos of their sports moments.

The content could be searched in all kinds of ways (type of sports, year of event, name of contributor, votes, comments).

They also defined what they would like to measure to tell if it was a success or not. It was a mix of soft and hard targets. Like: raise awareness of Amer Sports and passion for sports, raise awareness for anniversary, gather at least 100 sports moments, engage 2250 absolute visitors during the campaign and increase usage of the Amer Sports intranet.

They 106 sports moments and the number is still growing even though the campaign has been stopped. 3500 unique visitors and lots coming back more than ones.

Social computing and the collaborative intranet #epem

RichardHare, British American Tobacco is the next presenter. They have 60000 employees. Richard is a Knowledge, Communication and Collaboration Consultant.

He starts out with the question who loves their intranet? And who’s users love their intranet? Not many hands go up.

Complaints about their intranet:

• Search takes 20 seconds to return meaningless results
• Content out of date
• Difficult to navigate when based on hierarchy

… but people still want sites.

They connected the roll out of the content management tool to the roll out of the new corporate brand. This helped pull things together. (He showed several local intranets. Most looked the same.)

Their intranet only has top navigation, no left-hand navigation. Activity updates in the middle, daily news on top. People-centric navigation.

Evaluation of the set-up was done with senior management based card sorting and benchmarking. To define if people can find things and understand what the labels are called.

Social media at British American Tobacco

• 1997: online communities based on Notes
• 2004: blogs
• 2008: social networking

Reason to start had to do with a 2005 survey telling their employees were more afraid to say what they thought. So, they set up communities. But the users needed encouragement. They set up a workshop and wrote a manual on community building. Communities still weren’t flying. So they tied it to the World Cup 2006 and it helped people open up.

Then they opened up the creation of communities. Then moved over to blogging. Also accompanied with some guidelines.

In 2007 they saw social networking taking up speed. So, in 2008 the set up Connect, which is their internal social networking site. This implicitly leads to a people directory. They made a cool visualization with Gephi to show how BAT is connected.

The survey of 2009 showed that employees value these steps and that they are more open (share their voice more openly).
The whole platform is built in-house, based on Lotus Domino.

Overall strategy for employee portal evolution into an enterprise 2.0 platform and integration of effective use of social media for employee engagement and internal communications #epem

Next up is Viviane Dupre of Bombardier.

Bnet evolution will be done in a more formal and structured approach. It’s more than intranet; an enterprise 2.0 implementation.

They have high level management buyin for the project. A heavily organized governance model.

Current version of the Bnet employee portal is from 2004 with less than $100.000 investment. It replaced 100 plus intranets. They have 350 content managers. Minimal governance at the content level. Bnet has been identified as a business critical application.

In May 2009 they did a survey. 5000 employees responded to the survey. 64% gave a negative rating of the home page. They also asked what employees actively used on the internet. Like Youtube, LinkedIn. 42% were contributors in 2009.

This project was also used to improve employee engagement. By empowering employees, be recognized. Increased employee engagement should lead to increased customer engagement.

They wrote up a mission for the Bnet. Stressed enabling and increasing productivity.

Three pillars of Bnet: Communication, Personalization, Collaboration. She does not use the work ‘social’ because of the negative connotations it has to some.

Bombardier also uses Wordpress for their blog platform. They are working on a internal Youtube. Not so much for formal communications, but for human interest.

Personalization means LinkedIn type profiles on the company directory. Picture, short bio, blogposts, expertise, etc. Employees can fill in what they want.

Collaboration is about the deployment of collaboration tools to support dialogue, professional networking, communities of practice and collective intelligence.

They are still researching if their new platform actually contributed to improved employee engagement. The results have just been collected.

What are the business benefits?

• Increased employee engagement
• Adapt to new reality. Viviane also relates to what young employees expect of corporate tools.
• More efficient use of staff
• Lower computing costs
• Reduced travel expenses.

They consider themselves as followers and tap into experiences from other companies, wrt. tools, business case, etc.

They chose Sharepoint as their defacto platform. (This was decided by IT…) She's not sure if SP will replace WP, but SP will be overall platform.

Strategic intranet governance and business driven adoption of social media for increasing value @ BT #epem

Wow, that’s a whole mouthful! This is the first presentation at Employee Portal Evolution Masters 2010 in Berlin. I’ll be live-blogging through this conference. The subtitle of the conference is Strategic business approach for employee portal lifecycle management and integration of social media in rapidly changing digital environment’. Another mouth-ful!

Mark Morrell, Intranet Manager of BT has the honors of opening this conference. The title of his talk is the title of this blogpost.

BT’s intranet is about 16 years old. It started in 1994. It’s available to 140.000+ employees including 3rd parties. All information and applications are online. They can access it wherever they want. They use it for collaboration online too: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, Twitter. Their intranet was also a push towards a more paperless office.

They benchmark their intranet through the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. And they’re one of the best…

Why did they start using social media? Social media is technology embedded in social behavior. Social networks, global data networks, etc are BT’s business drivers!

Social media also meets the demands of the younger employees. Nearly 90% of BT people under 25 use social media. Less than 50% of BT people over 50 use social media. Mark sees people are blending work with personal use of social media (also relates to more BT employee working from home when they want). For that reason they use social media that is already available as much as possible. Like Twitter. They therefore use one persona not different identities for all use of social media. So, there’s not a personal and work Twitter account for Mark.

Social media external is used to interact and develop new relationships with my customers, partners and suppliers. They don’t use it as a marketing tools.

Mark stresses in general social media tools are easy but you should also make sure they stay that way. Also w.r.t. social media guidelines. They have guidelines for using social media. E.g. no anonymous posting. Balance guidelines with benefits as well as risks.

Benefits are:

• Finding the right person
• Finding the right information
• Joining a community of interest
• Sharing/creating views and opinions

They want to actively research the benefits people have gained by use of social media.

Mark walks us through their intranet. You can find much of this on his blog. No commenting on BT news yet. Employees can submit their news (like birthdays) but it is curated. They show the last 3 wiki-pages, blogposts and podcasts on their Intranet homepage.

They have about 700 active blogs (at least 1 update every month).

The BT wiki (based on Mediawiki) is related to as their encyclopedia. Navigating through blogposts and wikipages is done with tagclouds a.o.

BT also has regular CEO chats (with the real CEO).

Mark also tells it took quite some time to convince senior-management to allow and adopt social media inside and outside the company.

Best Practices for Regaining Business Agility #e20s

CheeChin Liew (BASF) is up on the stage.

Interesting how CheeChin compares the development cycles in the organization with the development of communication tools. The increasing speed in product development cycles at BASF requires different communication skills and tools.

Connect.BASF consists of three pillars:

1. networking. Employees can be visible, profiles, in communities.
2. knowledge sharing. Communities (there is overlap with point 1), tags and search etc.
3. collaboration. Blogs, wiki's etc.

It is a global platform.

Ho did they start? It started in Communications (by Cordelia Krooß). They convinced to start a steering committee around this topic (@shake ) with a board member as sponsor. CheeChin was in R&D. He had launched wiki's there. E2.0 was not started by IT. IT came in later. This project is now permanent.

In the launch phase they focused on IT implementation a lot. They have connect.BASF days with external, inspiring speakers. They do a lot of demo-ing and presenting. Consulting is also part of the job, helping departments/groups understand e2.0 and use tools.

Up to the pilot phase BASF had 1000 users. Lots of communications up till then after that they stopped communications.

CheeChin shows in numbers how Connect.BASF went viral: 15000 users! But signing up is not the whole game, he warns. Growth has been nicely spread out over the regions.

BASF's communities grew emergently. "Don't coach them from the beginning." They have 4 types: experts and professions (U4O), projects and working teams (O4O), social networking (U4U), initiatives and services (O4U). (U=users, O=organization)

Best practices for adoption:

• people-oriented and voluntary character
• visible commitment from top management
• leadership by advocates and community builders
• transfer of communities and workflows
• sharing of benefits and success stories

Leading Like a Shepherd

A nice quote taken from Andrew McAfee's article "Shattering the Myths About Enterprise 2.0" (HBR Nov. 2009):

A leader ... is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.

Not the End of Wikipedia

It's been a while ago I wrote about an interesting piece by Larry Sanger on the Edge blog. That article questioned "the "epistemic egalitarianism" adagium of Wikipedia." In my words: "everybody is equal, an expert is not more (knowledgeable) than a non-expert, together we define what it true."

This article by Sanger and my post about it, popped up in my mind when Wikipedia changed its policy so "the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people", as Chris Wilson phrases it on Slate. Of course this move was widely debated. The Slate article gives a nice summary, as does the NY Times.

My first thought about this move is nicely stated by Wilson:

No matter how you spin this new policy, there's no getting around that it gives more power and control to a small group of people. But if this were a big problem, Wikipedia would have flopped a long time ago. As I've argued before, the encyclopedia's success is largely due to the devoted efforts of a small number of obsessive editors, many of whom are quick to undo the work of trespassing newcomers. Rather than a signal Wikipedia's coming of age or a shift away from democracy, these new rules merely formalize, for certain pages, what's already happening on the site.

Secondly,this move just makes explicit what already was practice anyway. Have you ever tried to write a new entry or edit an existing one? Go ahead and try and you'll find there are people fiercely protecting 'their' lemma.

Thirdly, also relating to the previous point, absolute egalitarianism is an illusion. To say it in the words of Alex Wright: "Networks and hierarchies are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they usually coexist." (Glut, page 7, read all of ch. 1 for more context). There's always some form of hierarchy in a network. Wikipedia's move make that explicit.

I think this also relates well to the way wiki's are used in enterprises. Usually they start out by trying to copy what Wikipedia is doing. But in practice you see you always need some form of hierarchy (not too much!) to get things going. Just like with communities of practice.

Tags van Technorati: wikipedia,wiki,policy,community

Tribalization of Business

Just wanted to point to this very nice interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs. This short (6 min.!)interview gets into all the key issues of communities and organizations ('tribalization of business'). That's really impressive. What I really liked was what Francois said about measuring the success of communities. Andrew McAfee recently wondered if we should introduce 'enterprise 2.0 metrics'. I wasn't sure if this was a good idea and suggested:

Can’t we ‘just’ ask for stories and try to quantify them? Ask employees to tell managers how the tools helped them or others become more productive.

Francois says the same for communities: the stories about the communities tell you their success.

Again, great interview. I'm definitely following the Beeline blog from now on!

Tags van Technorati: community,communities of practice,enterprise2.0

7 Key Knowledge Management Principles

What are the key principles for knowledge management? Dave Snowden has been thinking about this topic (a.o.) and kicking against the KM world for some time.Now, he updated his old 3 rules to to 7 principles based on his thinking about KM in the legal profession. They are:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
4. Everything is fragmented (also refer to this one).
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

Great principles to chew on (as Mary Abraham says). Not only for the legal profession, but for all companies!
With respect to 'number 4' I'd also like to point to another great post by Snowden on bottom-up, low-cost knowledge management, starting with setting up blogs.Wiki's could/should be the next step in Snowden's bottom-up, low-cost community-building approach! John Tropea of Library Clips tells us how, by answering the question how blogs relate to wiki's.