Wow, time flies when you're having fun, right? I was planning to blog about my blog's 6th birthday, but simply forgot because of some interesting (and more important?) work I had to do.
Six years ago I decided to start blogging! I remember the first time I clicked on 'Publish'. Man, was I anxious/curious/scared what would happen next. Actually, I still feel those sensations every time I blog. It is scary to share your ideas publicly and have them read, reviewed and scrutinized out in the open. But, in my experience, it has also always been great fun. I met lots of new people via my blog, I learned a lot from all the interactions on and around my blog, and it's a great way to structure my thoughts.
So, expect me to continue blogging in 2013! Last year the number of posts I published went down. You decide if that's good or bad. And if it says something about the quality of the posts. A big reason for less posts is the job I have. I've been very busy (and I'm happy to say so in these economic times). But I do plan to blog more. I want to blurt out more short thoughts and experiences I have. Of course I hope you, my dear readers, will enjoy them. Looking forward to hear from you!
Showing posts with label sharing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sharing. Show all posts
Is our web slipping away?
We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich.
But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
(...)
The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit of history, to know your shit, whether that's about Twitter's business model or Google's social features or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been lost in the current generation of dominant social networks.One of the things I really like about the web is that I know what it was like before the web was there and became so important in our lives. I can also remember the first steps 'web 2.0' brought us and how thrilled I was (and still am) about the next version of the web. After years in the internet and intranet version of the new web, I too am wondering if we're loosing it. I understand Dashes points to business models and what existing services are doing (building walls, cutting off integration opportunities based on RSS, etc.) as reasons for loosing the web. However, I wonder if we should ask even more fundamental questions. Web 2.0 and social media was about refinding our voice. More and more I see the services that helped us refind our voice are becoming less human (walling their garden, changing privacy settings, etc.). They're going against important statements from The Cluetrain Manifesto. And I see less and less people blogging and starting deep conversations (although I must say this is one of the reasons I love Google+). Monetization of services has become more important than the core values of the new web.
Or aren't we loosing it, but are we just getting started? Is it that the early adopters have to slow down and understand that the majority is just starting to understand the concepts and tools of the new web?
Just when I wondered if Dashes would share his ideas about rebuilding the web we lost, he posted his ideas. They are good ideas, even though they're focused on technology, design, funding, business models and the like. These could be good starting point, but as I just mentioned, I wonder if this cuts deep enough to really bring back the web we lost. What do you think?
UPDATE (5 minutes after publishing this post): My friend Ana Silva recently blogged about this topic as well, pointing to Dashes' post and other related posts.
Emailing with @elsua?
But what to do if you want to send him a longer piece of text? Do you request for his email address? I was tempted to but refrained to ask because I knew I would be whipped by him. ;-) So I reached out to him via Twitter (direct message) and asked if we could call sometime soon. That was possible and we had a chat. But, still, I had to send him more information about the opportunity, about 10-15 lines of text. And I’m not going to chop this into 140 character messages. LinkedIn could work, but feels like email. I’m not connected to Luis in Facebook, so I couldn’t message him there either. So I left it up to him. And what did he choose? We had a one-on-one conversation in Google+. Which worked fine. There is no limitation to message link there. Although attachments can’t be sent, a link to it works as well.
This does make me wonder: this one-on-one conversation is basically email in a social network. The shift of email-like communication to social networks is evident and understandable. But does it really make sense to move this kind of conversation there? Isn’t this the sweet spot of email and basically it’s best use case. To use it for one-on-one confidential conversation? I could think of two good reasons to move these kind of conversations to social nets:
- When we think the conversation might me opened up to a larger group later on. When the conversation has been held in the network where this group is, it can easily be shared with them.
- When social networks instead of email is de central hub of the knowledge worker. For most people this is not the case yet (just relate to what application you open first in the morning when you start working…).
By the way, Luis will be at the 2013 Intranet Conference (the company I work for is the organizer). He’ll be sharing his thoughts on the skills of the knowledge worker in a keynote and in a pre-conference workshop he’ll be talking about ‘a world without email’. You can register here!
Why do we share?
Oscar makes several interesting statements about sharing in his post. Like this one:
The act of sharing something tells our colleagues something about us and that we think and care about what they might be interested in. If what we share is relevant and valuable to them, they will understand that we have really tried to understand what their needs and interests are. Their trust in us grows.And, citing from an MIT Sloan article about reputation and knowledge sharing:
Reputation also plays a role where rules or systems are unable to spur sharing. Because critical information is often held privately by individuals, workers often can choose to share or withhold such information in their interactions with colleagues without fear of sanction. That leaves reputation as a key motivator in any decision to share or withhold information.Oscar also relates to the influence of culture on sharing. Furthermore, referring to another article, the content of what you share also depends on whether you’ll share it. People share content that will bring them ‘emotional communion’ and not all content is fit for that.
And at the end of his post he points to a post by Nancy Dixon in which see distinguishes two types of knowledge sharing. One is, in my own words, work-related, the other relation-related. Examples of the first are reports. Experiences are examples of the second. More interestingly, both types of sharing have different motivations. Only the second kind of sharing was done for personal benefit.
Interesting stuff, I think. I’ve been collecting articles about knowledge sharing and blogging about his topic for some time as well. It’s not an easy topic. And the above provide interesting insights, but only scratch the surface of this topic.
At the end of Oscar’s post I was wondering what motivates Oscar to share. I can’t talk for Oscar, of course, but I will share why I share. To me there is one big reason to share information and knowledge (as far as I know them now):
Share to learn: I share what I know and see with others because I want to learn. By wording my knowledge in text or speech in itself, helps me to learn. But I also hope to learn from the response I get from the person I’m addressing or that has asked me the question. I hardly withhold information from people. I will if I think that person does not respect me or will use the information in a wrong way.
I think I can unpack this general reason and distill underlying reasons from it. These are:
- Share to show-off: to me there is definitely a show-off element to knowledge sharing. It’s not the most important one, but I do share to show what I know, read, bump into, etc.
- Share to listen: an important part of learning to me is listening. So I enjoy what others are sharing, because it helps me learn. It also triggers me to share by posting things I find interesting and asking questions.
- Share to remember: sharing information is also a way for me to capture things I find interesting. So I bookmark a link, tweet a link or statement, etc. In this way I’ve stored it for later use.
- Share to be more effective: I share to learn and this helps me become more productive. Asking a question in my (digital) network, helps me find (partial) answers more quickly. Once I’ve written about something on my blog, I can refer to it later on. This makes more productive in the long run.
Lessons for big people from Caine's Arcade
You've probably heard of Caine and his arcade. If you have't please go and watch the 1st and 2nd video (below) about Caine. It's an inspirational and fun story. It reminds us how special, creative and fun kids are.
Imagine: Caine's Arcade Goes Global from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.
After watching the 2nd video I was wondering what we learn from these video's. What are the lessons for 'big people'? These are some of the things I came up with:
Imagine: Caine's Arcade Goes Global from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.
After watching the 2nd video I was wondering what we learn from these video's. What are the lessons for 'big people'? These are some of the things I came up with:
- The video's reminded me that we all were once kids. And that even at an older age, it's importance to keep on being child-like. Just look at all the grown-up people that came to the arcade...
- Building things is an extremely important way to learn and get feedback. Caine built things because he liked to and hoped others would as well. The filmer taped the story because he liked what Caine had built and hoped others would as well. Etc.
- We need other people to be effective. Caine built the arcade, the filmer shared the story and people listened to the story. We need all of them, not just Caine or the filmer. And one is not better than the other.
- A story (told on film) is a very powerful way to be effective. Listening to the story and seeing the kid behind the story makes me reflect and think.
- One person can make a difference for a lot of people. This applies to Caine and the filmer/story teller.
- Doing something for someone else's benefit can go a long way. Again, this goes for Caine and the filmer.
Social Media Silo's
I've been wondering about this topic for some time. I've been rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto and found it's been mentioned there as well. And now with the arrival of Google+ people are wondering if this will be the social backbone (must-read piece BTW!).
What am I talking about? Well, we have all these social tools that support parts of our lives. Some only work on the intranet, some only on the internet. Some are more for personal, private sharing, others are more work-related. Many have approximately the same functionality. So, you always get the question: Where should I share my information (without pushing the same information to all these services at once)? And where do I get an overview of all my social interactions?
I was hoping something like Friendfeed would solve this issue. It did, but then everybody left. I even tried to read tweets in Google Reader for some time. That didn't work well. So my silo's are still in place.
These silo's don't only affect creating of social content, but also consuming. A good step in the right direction is what Disqus is doing for blogs: collecting as much of the social interactions around a blogpost as possible. But what I can't do there is reply to a tweet directly from a blog comment.
And then Google+ popped up. Will Google+ solve this problem? I agree with this piece Google has a good chance. It's at least what they are headed for.
In my experience the overlap in functionality and social silo's are a huge barrier in the adoption of social tools. It's one of the reasons people stick with traditional tools, like email and even Facebook (compared to G+...). Everybody's in the email space, so why move to a space where only part of my social graph is?
I'm curious what your thoughts are on this topic. How do you solve this issue in your daily life?
Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone - HBR IdeaCast
One of the podcasts I listen to is the HBR Ideacast. They have lots of interesting talks with people. Sometimes these talks are related to articles published in HBR. Recently they interviewed Sherry Turkle of the much-debated book 'Alone together'. You can find the podcast here: Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone.
It's an interesting podcast to listen to and think about. I understand the problem she is seeing and describing (although I still have to read the book). I understand she is worried about it too. But every time I read about her book and listen to what she's saying I think: Shouldn't this problem be addressed by helping young and old people understand the new web and using it in the 'right' way? For instance, help people filter the web, search the web, understand web privacy and build networks using the web. I see a huge need for this around me. And I don't see many schools (and parents) stepping up to this task.
I liked Turkle's 3 areas where more thinking and debate is needed:
- the role that we are going to give to robots in daily life
- about productivity in the workplace and new social tools
- getting rid of the word 'addiction' w.r.t. computer devices
If you've listened to the podcast, let me know what you think. We'll continue the discussion on your or my blog!
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.
The Difference Between Email and Social Bookmarking
But how do you share bookmarks? Do you use a social bookmarking tool? My experience is not many people use a social bookmarking tool. Of course they bookmarks stuff and save the bookmarks in their browser. Hardly anyone knows you can share them publicly as well.
At least that's the experience I have. I give workshops about social media and I always have a slide about bookmarking. I've been tempted to leave it out. Because every time I get to that slide and ask how many of them know what social bookmarking is and use it, hardly anybody does. The ratio is 1-2 out of every 10 workshop participants.
Is this the reason why Delicious, Xmarks and the like have a hard time? I think so... Most people keep their bookmarks private and share them via email if they're interesting enough. Of course, lots of links are shared (but not stored...) via Twitter.
So, we have work to do. Again it shows social media maybe easy to use, but not always easy to understand and adopt. Training and explaining is necessary. I like the way Arzu explains the difference between email and social bookmarking:
In the e-mail case, the provider anticipates who is seeking or in need of the specific knowledge as a result of inter-personal relationships and therefore intentionally pushes the information through to the recipient. In the social bookmarking case, the provider shares bookmarks without knowing who the receiver is and who might be in need of specific knowledge. In such a case, communication streams are pull-based rather than push-based. The difference between pull and push has two implications for the social bookmarking tool: potential seekers perceive the information in the social bookmarking tool as information overload and potential providers ask for a balance between these two mechanisms. Balancing pull and push processes will optimize the knowledge flow and overcome the problem of information overload by providing people with both awareness of and access to what they need (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Holtshouse, 1998).Maybe this points to a design flaw in most social bookmarking tools? Is telling you who's reading your shared bookmarks an improvement? (You can follow each other's bookmarks in most social bookmarking tools.)
Anyway, I'm not giving up my bookmarking tool Diigo any time soon. Just hope they will keep their head up!
What are your experiences with social bookmarking? Are you using a tool? If not, how do you collect and share bookmarks?
My Blog's Birthday
It's been 4 years now since I started this blog. 4 years! That seems like a very long time. All I can say is I really enjoyed blogging and will continue to do so in the future. I hope and plan to do more blogging. Some of them will be short (but not as short as my tweets...). And some will be longer. I really want to share some of my deeper thinking with you and would like to hear what you think about them.
I'm also looking for ways to reshare older posts. I don't want to push them at you, but my readership has grown and I'd like to hear from them what their views are on those posts. If you have any ideas on this, please let me know.
I still collect bookmarks and comment on them in Diigo. I don't share them here anymore, but you can find them easily.
Finally I want to thank you for reading my blog, commenting on posts and sharing them with others. Thanks a bunch, it really means a lot to me!
And if you have any comments about my blog or blogging, e.g. tips to improve my blog/blogging, you know where to find me. :-)
I'm also looking for ways to reshare older posts. I don't want to push them at you, but my readership has grown and I'd like to hear from them what their views are on those posts. If you have any ideas on this, please let me know.
I still collect bookmarks and comment on them in Diigo. I don't share them here anymore, but you can find them easily.
Finally I want to thank you for reading my blog, commenting on posts and sharing them with others. Thanks a bunch, it really means a lot to me!
And if you have any comments about my blog or blogging, e.g. tips to improve my blog/blogging, you know where to find me. :-)
Repetitive Interaction Leads to Trust
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?
Re: Expertise Location by @mikegotta
The general assumption includes two primary ways of identifying "experts". The first method assumes that employee use of social tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, communities) and social applications (e.g., ideation), enables their talent and business insight to be more visible and therefore more discoverable by co-workers. The second method revolves around the employee profile created as part of an enterprise social network site. It is assumed that employees will readily create and maintain rich profiles where they willingly share information about their job history, interests, hobbies, education, and areas of expertise. Rich employee profiles create another means for colleagues in need of assistance to search and connect to the right person - or access customized expertise location applications that leverag profile data to find the right resource anywhere in the organization. In both cases, the notion of "transparency" makes it easier for people in need of assistance to connect with the relevant expert.I agree with these assumptions. I also agree with the fact that if employees use social tools they could be more easily found in the organization and/or seen as expert on a certain topic.
Gotta goes on to say expertise location has been around for some time and also points to Cisco's own solution for expertise location, Cisco Pulse. As far as I understand this tool automatically goes through company data and it's creators and builds an expertise map, giving users the opportunity to use the results to find experts in the organization.
Gotta closes his post with his main point by stressing expertise location is more than rolling out a tool in an organization. We have to pay attention to process and cultural factors as well. For instance, scarcity of information and resources. Or: accessibility of certain information due to security reasons. Privacy is also an issue. Is an employee's email box open for the whole company? And, to mention one more, culture. Is there an open culture in which employees want to share and post about their work?
Good points! But I want to go back to the assumption. It is assumed that employees use social tools. But do they? Yep, some, maybe lots will. But what happens if they don't? Are they then not an expert on one or more topic? The answer is simple: this can't be true. Of course, it does say a lot about employees who post about their work. Apparently they are open about what they know or need to know. And they're probably (more) willing to share.
Furthermore, is it possible to share all our knowledge. For instance, a programmer builds a new tool. In most companies he would have to write a report on the new tools. He'll probably also say in which language he wrote the code. But he'll never say: Hey, I'm an expert on that language. That's for others to decide.
So, we need to take a look how experts are really grown and found in organizations. How do you find the person you need in your organization? I've been writing quite a bit about this, so I'll keep it short here. Finding experts has to do with who you know. People refer to each other based on their experience with each other. Based on knowing each other you can say: this guy or girl is really good at ... This also has to do with how open or closed someone is. Someone can formally be an expert on a topic, but if he/she never has time to talk with you then he/she are not the one to go to. If you look at how people refer to each other in real-life you can also see they relate to expertise that can hardly be written down and captured by (social) tools. This all relates perfectly to Dave Snowden's KM principles, by the way.
Can this be supported by technology? I think so. At least for a larger part than the automated solutions I've seen so far. And Guruscan is the only company I know of that does this well.
To be clear: I'm not saying we shouldn't go for social tools or automated knowledge mapping in organizations. They are very helpful and can support more knowledge and communication process than ever before. But don't think you've solved the expertise location problem by using them...
I hope this helps. All feedback is welcome!
Knowledge Sharing and Incentives Revisited
I recently had such an experience I'd like to share with you. Remember my post on knowledge sharing and incentives? I could have kept this thought to myself, researched it and come up with the answer myself. But I didn't. I blogged about it, commented on a related post (which popped right when I was thinking about the topic...) and shared it in the LinkedIn Group 'Gurteen Knowledge Community'.
What did I get back? Did my readers or experts in the field criticize or laugh at me for wondering about this topic or asking 'dumb' questions? Did they leave me in the cold, completely not responding to me at all? Of course, this can all happen, but none of this (has ever) happened to me. I'll tell you what I got back in this case.
For one, Nick Milton wrote a separate post about my question. Secondly from the Gurteen Knowledge Community I got several replies. I'll share some here:
Pink and others have also done some TED presentations on this.
As Dave said, tasks with simple action-objective structures do well with exogenous rewards like money/tokens/etc., but anything where reflective thought, innovation, creativity, etc. are involved or where the action-objective link is complex, exogenous rewards tend to have the opposite effects.
My guess is that it is a Stroop-effect thing going on or one of those mutually inhibiting effects like when you wake up the nucleus accumbens with a reward like cash and the generosity of a person takes a dive.
In a practical sense, I have seen how money rewards or even individual rewards tend to simply lead to gaming behavior and a big pile of worthless junk instead of usable or novel material.
Bottom line is that you are trying to increase use of social values, not inhibit them.
- Posted by Matthew Loxton
Samuel, read Dan Pink's book "Drive". In the book he says that the research shows that for simple tasks that require no cognitive processing - rewards work - but for more sophisticated tasks that require even a modicum of cognitive engagement - they have an adverse effect. Asking someone to call in to report that they saw something in connection with a crime seems to me to fall in the first category.
Dan Pink and Alfie Kohn also state that when you offer a reward for something - the reward becomes the motivation and replaces the intrinsic motivation to do good. So I would not be surprised if research found that people who are rewarded to report a crime would be less inclined to do so at a future date when no reward was offered.
So yes it seems to be more subtle and at times counter-intuitive.
- David Gurteen
Agree...that's why for KM I think it's about "engagement" that's why I think this slidedeck is spot on http://www.slideshare.net/TSystemsMMS/the-wikipedia-myth-enterprise-20-knowledge-management
Dan Pink also has a video for RSA http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/drive-the-surprising-truth-about-what-motivates-us
Also and animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
To mix it up, here's some research on children
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/685512595/rewards-reduce-intrinsic-motivation-the-children
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/391619553/being-cautious-about-rewards
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/391616299/intrinsic-reinforcements- John Tropea
Isn't this wonderful? Direct answers to my questions, pointers to information answering my questions, implicit links to people knowledgeable about the subject, etc.
Thanks all for your help! This has been my repeated experience as a blogger. And I hope this post will encourage many more to start or continue blogging. The blogosphere is alive and kicking!
Knowledge Sharing and Incentives
It struck me when I was watching TV. In Holland we have a program called 'Opsporing Verzocht' (English: We're looking for something/someone'). It's a program to solve unsolved crimes. Basically it's crowdsourcing. The TV hosts and the police tell the people watching the 'show' about a crime and hope someone will have the golden tip to solve the crime. I'm sure you know the concept.
Every now and then, when a case is hard to solve the police offer a smaller or larger reward. Hoping this reward will encourage a reluctant (or scared) watcher to share tips about this case possibly leading to its solution.
That struck me. They are offering financial rewards to share information. To my knowledge offering financial incentives to encourage knowledge sharing is advised against by the knowledge management experts. It basically leads to worse sharing and its the wrong way to encourage sharing. Relate to Nick Milton's post on this topic for instance.
But is this true? Am I missing something here? Was the conviction about incentives more subtle. For instance, financial incentives work only in specific cases, like crimes? And if so, what type of cases in organization compare to them?
Moving a Cloud Drive (Dropbox)
For some time now I'm a happy user of Dropbox. Dropbox is basically your personal hard drive in the cloud. I'm using it to store a large part of my personal files. Dropbox works via a website, but you can also approach your files via Windows Explorer (as your other files categorized in folders).
Recently I had to move my Dropbox folder to a different part of my computer (corporate disk quota problems...). After thinking it through a bit I thought: Ok, I can just copy this folder to elsewhere. If things go wrong I'll still have them in the cloud (because Explorer syncs my files with my files on the internet/in Dropbox). So I copied them and everything seemed to be OK.
But every now and then we have a corporate sync tool making sure your corporate files can be accessed everywhere/everytime when you disconnect your laptop from the next. This sync tool did his job and because I copied the files it thought: Ok, I'll just delete them all as you wish.
Even more painful was the fact that someone had shared two folders with me to collaborate on some files. These were gone as well...
A bit of panic broke out then... All my personal files are gone! What happened?! I know and understand now that I should never have COPIED those files, but I should have MOVED them. If you go to Dropbox 'Preferences' you can easily see the current Dropbox folder location. And just behind that location there's MOVE button... Using that button makes sure the folder copying goes OK and you don't loose your personal files.
Oh, and how did I get my files back? Well IT makes snapshots of my drives every hour and saves them for some time. I was able to find the right snapshot and copy my files back to the Dropbox folder. Hooray for our IT department!
Hope this helps.
A Slack Day
Some time ago prof. Andrew McAfee had an interesting post about what's most important for the success with Enterprise 2.0. One of the things he mentioned was:Slack exists in the workweekSlack... This term has been buzzing in my head for some time. For one because of the fact that there hasn't been much slack in my agenda the last couple of weeks... But also because many people say they are "really busy" and "don't have time for social media".
I organize slack. I work from home regularly if I really want to concentrate on something, like reading and writing (a blog post). Even though I work hard from home I experience it as slack. And when I'm at work I almost always make sure I have one or two hours to read feeds and reflect on them (possibly leading to a blog post, tweet, etc.).
A couple of weeks ago we had a cleaning day at the office. We organized slack for a specific reason. I love these days. Everyone is in a different mode, we're all working on the same thing and there are clear results at the end of the day.
I was wondering: do we need 'a slack day' every week (excluding Saturday and Sunday...)? One day a week for us to sit back, reflect on your job, read inspiring and thoughtful information and share your insights. Or am I wrongly tackling a deeper cultural issue with an organizational solution? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
UPDATE 14-10-2011: Good quote and post about slack.
Sharing 6Things
Recently I got a DM from @6things saying: "You are very interesting." That's always a great thing to hear. :-) 6things is a relevance engine, as they call themselves. They select 6 things per day in different themes as the most interesting things of that day.
Now they are asking others to curate for one week. And probably because they find me interesting, I will be sharing 6 interesting things per day in the coming week with you. I selected the technology theme, so you can following the tweets with #6things_tech. Sharing starts tomorrow, May 23rd. Hope you enjoy it.
Now they are asking others to curate for one week. And probably because they find me interesting, I will be sharing 6 interesting things per day in the coming week with you. I selected the technology theme, so you can following the tweets with #6things_tech. Sharing starts tomorrow, May 23rd. Hope you enjoy it.
Email Guidelines: Do You Have Them?
Ah, the beauty of collaboration! ;-) Doesn't it all come down to agreeing how we work together? For this reason many companies set up a 'code of conduct' (or something like this). We have one too. Strangely enough these 'code of conducts' doesn't say much about using email for instance - as far as I know.
Some time ago we did an internal workshop with Novay about email productivity. One of the assignments was to come up with 'email guidelines'. The great thing is consensus about the 10 email guidelines we all would adhere to was easily found. (By the way, these guidelines were only approved by the workshop members, not by the whole organization. We still have a way to go...)
So, does your company have email guidelines? If so, how did you define them? And if not, what are your ideas why your company doesn't have them?
Do You Have an Asking Problem?
Knowledge sharing begins with a request, not with a solution. (...)
Managers sometimes tell me that people in their organization have a problem with sharing knowledge; but more often than not, people aren't "asking." The organization has an asking problem, not a sharing problem. When people ask, the sharing problem becomes moot.
How organizations talk about "asking" is critical. When company officials say to professionals, "Don't be afraid to ask for help," their words actually work against asking. Asking for "help" denotes helplessness.
Or at least it can. It doesn't have to. To me it's a state of mind. I don't mind asking even if people think I'm helpless. But how about you? Do you ask questions easily? And are people asking you questions?
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