Creating On-line Communities

For one who gets more and more interested in nurturing my nework, I find helping to develop communities fascinating. As an example, I have been actively participating to a group called the New Business Energy (La Nouvelle Energie du Business). This group has been exploring a new contract whereby entreprises need to find new ways of working that put human beings at the center of their business, as most valued asset. I'll talk about in a later post.

Here and now, I'd like to describe the path we took to interact on-line. We started (actually, that's how we met in the first place), with a hub on Viadeo that François created. While Viadeo is good ,as a place for meeting great people, it does not support conversations very well: the editing capabilities for writing posts are basic and management of topics and comments is cumbersome.

Our two main requirements were:

• To be able to interact, as a small group, to organize the larger group's interactions and create content and discussions.
• To provide an on-line environment that would be compelling enough for people to want to interact into.

So we first turned to Google Groups, which was powerful enough, but did not scale well to a community-sized group. At the same time, we launched a group blog on this very platform. Here as well, we found that the balance was too much towards one person providing content to many, as opposed to getting a many-to-many interacting medium. So our blog never really flew off the ground and it's buried now.

The next step was to implement a hosted forum tool (phbBB), thanks to Eric, that we thought would address our two requirements. It did adress the first one well, and in particular provided a good chat tool that we used to schedule a couple of chat conversations of great interest and outcome, but the interface is too text-oriented, which probably made the energy barrier too high for people outside of our circle of animators to adopt.

So, now we are experimenting with our fourth generation of collaboration tools. We have settled to experiment the use of Ning. Building on-line communities there is so easy, as it takes litterally only minutes to set up a new one, whether public or private. So we have a couple now. A private one to handle our core group interactions and a public one that, we hope, will take us to new heights of global interactions with our community (120+ members strong).

Ning's strengths are:

• its flexible and very visual interface, with the ability for developer to really tweak it to their liking
• its summarizing all activites happening in the network and exposing it so people can quickly catch up with what's going on
• its persistence for individuals: one can create multiple networks, be part of many others while keeping only one profile up-to-date, make friends across various communities, etc.
• its blogging, forum, event management, photos, videos and music sharing capabiities

However, Ning is not a Content Management System. Although there is the ability to attach files, their service agreement explicitly warns that Ning is not a repository and should not be used as such. So we are exploring the next generation of interaction tools, a wiki (Netcipia) , which should nicely complement Ning's great conversational features. More on that later...

I'd like to thank my partners in discovery: Carole, Franck, François and Eric, for hours of great talks and profound thinking.

Convergence of Social Networking in the Entreprise

These are interesting times for fostering collective intelligence in the enterprise. More and more people have taken steps to connect with other people they trust, using one or several social networking platforms of their choice (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing, etc.).

A lot of big corporations are now making forays into building social networking capabilities within the entreprise. For instance, Pfizer was one of the two companies to strike a collaboration deal with Microsoft to explore the potential of Knowledge Network, an entreprise solution for mining emails for keywords, and providing people search capabilities, i.e. the ability to search for people with specific knowledge, skills or talents. I'll expand later on the lessons from that particular initiative, the point here is that the traditional approach to getting social networking capabilities within the firewall has been to either bring in a major provider of software solutions or build a solution from scratch.

The big aha for me has been to realize that the content of social networking does not belong to the companies people work for. It belongs to the people. Therefore, companies would be well advised to get the content where it currently sits; i.e. directly from the social networking platforms of the planet.

That is in this perspective that I am very excited about the recent publication of the OpenSocial API standards, which has the potential to offer social networking content for consumption in the entreprise environment. Just imagine the possibilities: company X gets a view of how its people communicate internally and externally, simply by putting together an aggregated view of all connections made by its employees. In addition, it can develop services that help mine internal data along with people data, or using the wealth of information to initiate fruitful collaborative efforts outside the entreprise.

What's in it for the people? Well, they would not have to maintain yet another profile page and connection data in the company they work for, or have to fill all that over again when they change companies. And more importantly, they would keep ownership of their profile page and connections data and bring that to the company they work for as part of their intrinsic worth.

What do you think?

Links of interest:
Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives by Jeremiah Owyang
Google OpenSocial will (hopefully) make social apps more relevant by Charlene Li
OpenSocial: it's the data, stupid by Tim O'Reilly
(I do not share Tim's misgiving about OpenSocial's ability to share data. Some comments are quite interesting to read)
OpenSocial: a new universe of open applications all over the web by Marc Andreessen

Post update at 1:48 pm:
I just came across this article that goes in the direction I was hinting:
Enterprise Social Computing by Jon Williams
I will check the Alfresco WCM platform closely. As a matter of fact, in a completely separate stream of work, I've made contact with folks at Knowings, a French firm who have a partnership agreement with Alfresco. Connections come around...

My take on a Collaboration Maturity Model

Hierarchy versus informal knowledge sharing

Over the past few years companies have paid increasing attention to communication skills, have trained their employees and screened candidates to find people with appropriate skills. All this is generally being done so that current employees and new hires fit seemlessly into companies' organisational structure and easily adopt their culture. What is systematically overlooked, though, are the human assets represented by the informal communication patterns within the enterprise, or between entreprise colleagues and the outside world for that matter. Although, companies have representations of their hierarchical organisation, they do not have means to easily represent the patterns of communication, information sharing and value creation that are the actual paths towards getting work done effectively.

A framework for entreprise collaboration

A way to build views of the way a group or a company interact informally is to perform an organisational network analysis that will help quantify the shape, intensity and value of communication in support of business objectives.

The results will give insights about the maturity of collaboration in the company. I would define maturity of collaboration as the ability for a group or an entreprise to create sustaining value through an unfettered flow of information that can be generated to solve problems, develop products or markets or foster innovation.

Drawing from a number of sources (see linkography at the end of this post), I've been trying to depict a collaboration maturity model that would clearly describe the state of an organisation as well as give clear indications as to what needs to be done to move from one stage to another. I came up with this diagram:

The main conclusions that one can draw from this model are:

• Collaboration moves from aphazard individual initiative to full blown enterprise strategy as we climb up the maturity ladder


• Entreprise culture needs to evolve to nurture, recognize and reward values of openness, knowledge sharing, risk taking, trust and "crowd evaluation" (knowledge value emerging from assessment by the people in an interactive fashion)


• The technical infrastructure needs to evolve towards content and people information accessibility, global metadata management and ultimately provide seemless access to intranet + extranet resources

Linkography:

• Collaboration: A new Key Characteristic for the Information Process Maturity Model
• Collaborative SOA Lessons Learned
• A Collaboration Maturity Model - The Bumble Bee