ECIM 2007: Community-ware
Posted on September 7, 2007
Filed Under Events |
Vasily Borisov made this talk in Haugesund at ECIM conference 2007 September the 12th at the workshop “Aspects of Human Capital in IM“. Session supervised by Ellen S. Kjensmo DONG
The topic is self explanatory. We’ll try to talk about communities built around software capabilities.
Without going too much into community psychology or actual software design that we know little of 
Watching muli-million communities based around software capabilities and multi-million businesses done around those communities we cant say anymore that Internet is for kids and geeks. something is happening there.
Kids 
become rich 
Although we talk about the software centric communities we can’t miss out the fact that softw
are itself is driven by the content. No content - nothing to “software” And in this trinity software-content-users content is the most important one. So shared content is mandatory. We need a fair amount of shared content to collaborate on.
Do we share?
Do we share? No we don’t. It is not in the culture. Is sharing natural - yes it is? The proof is Internet sites shared content of which has united millions.
Are we acting naturally - apparently we are not. Every time we have a chance - we split, not join!
Email lists is anti-sharing! Most of the project work is anti-sharing!
Publishing and Posting is sharing! Broadcasting is sharing!
But we want to be natural. So not much of a mind set is to be changed but the tools provided.
When I have a thought - I post it into Livejournal. When i find interesting important information I tag it in del.icio.us
When I acquire interesting picture I post it to Flickr and blog it out.
My blog is 6 years old
I’ve changed 3 computers and 2 jobs since I’ve started. Most of my emails are lost (thanx God). I kept some of the documents but it is so hard to dig something out of this collection. My bookmarks have become inaccessible.
Apparently I’m my blog now. Everything I’ve tried to manage locally allocating the time and doing my best , applying best practices moving stuff from one place to another… Is gone. Everything I’ve published is still with me. Looks like someone has done information management for me For free. And done it pretty damn well. More and more now I consult my published content rather then my local content. It is generally more important because you don’t publish rubbish and it is easier to find since it has a time context once and for all.
And that leads me to a question.
Do we (normal people) need to do information management at all?
Or do we need to find information and knowledge to process and analyse it in our brain and smart applications and produce information and knowledge, publish produced content so others can reuse it and let someone else to manage it for us. (Preferably never seeing this poor chap and not knowing his name)
I can’t answer for you but for me it is an ideal situation. Because…
Information management is boring! Honestly it is for most of the normal people. I spend most of my time moving data from one project to another with OpenSpirit. Create accounts, move accounts, invent naming conventions, ignore invented naming conventions… keeping myself busy.
It almost not making sense.
Therefore it is hijacked by timid, unimaginative and sometimes honestly cruel trolls that “manage” information for us putting it in different places only they know and protecting it like leprecons 
protect their gold.
Not only they hide it they give us applications that do not allow any freedom at all. If we humanise it it’ll look something like this, like it or not:
How to change people mindset and make it done?
Well I’m afraid it is impossible. An Individual is fully formed at 5 years age and changing it in his 50s wouldn’t be a great success The whole question has a wrong postulate its based one. It assumes that people are doing something wrong but that is not true. People and in our world Users are always right. They do what they are allowed and encouraged to do. What their nature tells them. Some a bit more, some a bit less but generally non of them does anything wrong.
It is our Enterprise Information Capabilities that can’t tell wrong from right. They try to force behaviours rather then adopt natural ones and make use of them. We used to see enterprise employees as machines while produces of seductive Internet software view users as individuals. there is no “must” in their world. And that creates total different service levels of which we can only dream. So if we treat our employees as human beings for a change, something might change!
People that say “How we change peoples behavior towards information?”, should change his own self and then try it on mother in law before approaching other people.
It was great said once that the difference between a person with culture and a person without culture is that the person with culture trying to spread his understanding of culture over himself and maximum his family, while the person without culture is mainly in charge of defining cultural agendas for big groups of people and whole countries
Another thing is to treat Information with respect it deserves. We manage Information? No! Information manages us. We spend all our time either analysing it (reading emails, listening to people) or producing it (writing emails, tracing the horisons, creating roumors). We don’t do anything else.
Good information makes our day. Bad information and the world i grey.
Do you think you are looking for the oil 4000 meters below the sea bottom? No. You are looking for the oil at your desk. You don’t drill wells - you drilldown information. That is the reality!
Enough psychology Internet is a tool. Flickr is a tool. Wordpress is a tool. No magic, just good tools.
So what tools do we need to do or more precisely not to do Information Management?
Two types of tools really:
a) Tools allowing us easily publish what we produce. So easy we would not hesitate weather to share or not to share. It is a great challenge now. As soon as we are trying to upload something into something we in our corporate Information management system if it exists our body remembers the pain of dealing with “anal-retentive” software and emptiness in the best case or a big question “Why?” inside seeing how after all hassles and dassles it is being loaded:
10% 50% 99% 99% 99% 99% 99% 100%
Farewell dear Information. Never see you again
Why should I do that. It is not natural. Why do I annotate? Will someone annotate for me. Who do I spend time caring for? How does he/she looks?
b) Tools to find retrieve information in a context. It is easier to find relevant information on web then in corporate environment. Google has done a great job. Things like del.isio.us are taking it even further. We’ll talk about del.icio.us a bit late in a context of knowledge management.
So we need those tools, but if you can name one feature or character that they should posses - what would you name?
I’d say popular. Those tools have to be damn popular! Not only that - they should be usable by all and everyone. Why not? Girls use wordpress, girls use wordpress, engineers use wordpress, top and bottom managers use wordpress. I use wordpress. By definition the community around every popular Internet technology is more diverse then enterprise community.
How to make them popular? We’ll there is not shortage of good advise on the Internet as well. One of my favorite resources is Creating Passionate Users blog.
The “anal retentive guy” app picture was taken from there. And that’s how they see user’s hierarchy of needs:
Like human society walked a long way from fishing and hunting to “living on Internet” so do the computer systems evolve from the ability to cater for basic needs “functionality” to becoming a substitute for those things (flow/enrichment as it is referred to in the picture above.
We can talk for ours about what’s good and bad about the software but it does not worth it since everybody agree on it anyway. I’ll stop just on several features that I wish to highlight:
Agility and change management
Nice chart but how on earth can we manage to serve the large people needs with a ready made piece of software. How can we make those fancy shmancy thing work and change according to the demand.
Looking on Internet again we see that the most inventive and popular sites are not ready made products - they are being developed as they go. another fantastic article to read on my favorite usability blog:
“If you’re not on myspace, you don’t exist.”
Young users of myspace do not care about the bugs in the system cause they know that they will be fixed in the morning. The software is being seamlessly deployed several times a day and serves million simultaneously. They implement what people like and use and remove what people don’t care for. The software is a living organism. That is change management in it’s extreme.
a) Oil companies used to to it themselves when the marked was empty (didn’t exist);
b) They used to buy ready products from Schlumberger and Halliburton when the market was created.
A new approach is getting more popular nowadays. The programming tools especially in a web area reached such a level of maturity and abstraction that is is easier to build applications from scratch and rebuild them rather then maintain the existing. (Don’t mix the conventional maintenance though with the thing that happens on MySpace - those application are being constantly and continuously developed).
That’s not only software industry. Remember the time when cars e.g. were built to run 1000000 without repair, instead of 100K and 5 years as they are now.
So it looks like all the Oil company would have to do in a close future is to imagine the system and then purchase or conduct the agile development service that would actually make sure that the thing is alive!
Indeed Systems and Information Management systems in particular delivered as a service are not too far away. Because it simply makes it easier to manage the change! Nothing more, nothing less.
Encouraging feedback. When I use the Information management software I want to be so close to information that I’m almost getting inside the information. I need it to feel it grow when myself and other are contributing and the resource is growing and become bigger. It’s rewarding. I’ve done the wall, my friend has done the window, we went home came back - our friend in US has done the door and the doorsteps.
This interactive feedback is the fuel that keeps huge open source development community running. The community that nobody believed will survive lacking all fundamental ingredients from funding to management. It did survive. This makes wikipedia the biggest and the most used encyclopedia in the world. People who haven’t seen it don’t believe it can exist.
And apparently that is where knowledge management happens. The tools encourage the community to record knowledge and make it easily accessible. What else do you need? Although I dislike the world “knowledge management”. Management Trolls invented it. I say knowledge production, recording and sharing. That is what happens. Nothing to manage except wives and kids at home
One recent example of knowledge sharing success is del.icio.us. How many people in the audience has ever used it? A simple idea to store Internet bookmarks and associated keywords on net rather then locally and the tool enabling it gave birth to worlds biggest Taxonomy or folksonomy as it is called now. If you want to find something techy and truly useful on the Internet - search del.icio.us, don’t search Google After a couple of successes you’ll truly would like to contribute.
That is an example of “publishing” instead of “concealing”.
Enabling the learning
Does your application have a big button in the middle of the screen for every user saying “ask a question - there are no dumb questions”?. No? Then how can your people learn?
Does your application have another big button next to the first one saying “answer the question - there are no dum answers”? No? How can you people learn then?
Organised application helpdesk systems are going into the past. Questions best answered by the people who are interested and who know, not by an overloaded helpdesk engineer who hates life most of the time. It works so much better. So natural. Ask if you don’t know. Answer if you feel you do.
Providing capabilities to ask and not less importantly to answer the question. Encouraging people to answer the earlier the better is one of the most important factors in building a successful communities.
Ups we started from popularity and went into communities. That is not the obvious step. Popularity is when a lot of people like and use your stuff. Community is when people start socialising around liking and using your stuff. One follows the other. Popularity means common interest. Common Interest is one of the community starters. But why community? What is so useful about it? Why popularity is not enough?
The answer is very simple and in fact unlike the other things in this chat makes perfect business sense! I’ll tell you if you didn’t know before…
Community has ROI!!!
Because it has just replaced helpdesk in a previous topic.
Hmm. Every person with business skill will think - Money! Community seems to be for free. Helpdesk operations cost money. Hm what else can it replace? A lot!
Documentation! Training! Marketing! Even software Design effort!!!
Yes all of it community can do. Build the community and the community will build and support your application for you! This is not a dream. This is the reality.
Closing
We do hope that even in our strange industry that is 5 years behind in terms of IM comparing to finance e.g. and seem to leave by the law:
Oil price is high - we don’t care about anything cause we rich;
Oil prise is low - we cut on IM because it is not an essential part of production facility. In other words - it is not a pipe.
Even in our industry Darwin laws will slowly work and anal-retentive Dinosaurs that consume a lot of food and badly adopt to climate changes will have problems.
Another factor is the demography. Soon enough you’ll start getting employees directly from blogosphere and facebook. If you don’t want them to spend their working day hanging out there - you have to build it internally. There is no other way.