Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Andrew McAfee writes about the concetric circles for knowledge workers - there are close colleagues, people you directly work with, people you could potentially work with, other people in your company and people you have no relation to. Social networks are tools that allow you to widen the second circle. They allow you to get to know more people for possible collaboration you do not know already and they allow you to manage loosely coupled relationships to more people than you could without tool support.

A recent piece by Alex Iskold: The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn't says social tools in the enterprise allow communication paths outside the organization chart graph. The reason is that classical tools for enterprise organization like the org chart focus on positions, not people. To illustrate this, you could use a sketch like this: We can see clearly the boxes and arrows, indicating the organizational structure. As for the people, the organizational contents, we can only see the head clearly, for all other people in the organization that we do not know directly, vision becomes blurry.

With social networking tools it becomes possible to see the actual people behind the positions, you can find out about interests, activities and create an image of a person you have not yet met in real-life, but which could help you in a future challenge.

This allows you to create connections and social structures that span multiple branches of the organizational tree. As an effect, people become more important than their position in the org chart and you can create more decentralized organizational structures like virtual teams.

As a side-note: While writing this post I realized how this people (social content) over organization (social structure) notion reflect David Nüscheler's mantra of "content first, structure later" applied to social systems.

The first unconference session I moderated tried to answer the question: Do virtual organizations really exist?.

We first tried to define what an virtual organization is and came to the concusion that in virtual organizations knowledge workers work distributed over

• time
• place
• and organizational borders

on one common task. A knowledge worker in a virtual organization is almost always member of more than one (virtual) organization at the same time.

The existence of virtual organizations seems to be bound to the size of the organizations that host them. In small companies they are ubiquitous, so that the question "Do physical organizations really exist" can be posed in the future for small knowledge-centric companies such as design- or consulting agencies. Already today virtualization of organizations seems more the rule than the exception for small companies.

Why is it that large companies have a lower share in virtual organizations, when it can be argued that not being able to open up and to create virtual organizations is a competitive disadvantage, as it prevents the best allocation of resources in the company. At the same time, lots of Fortune 2000 CIOs are observed to try to open up their infrastructure, to lighten their infrastructure in order to allow collaboration.

The main issue seem to be firewalls. Not only hardware and software firewalls, but also the policy firewalls that surround them, so that tools like Skype and Groove that are designed to circumvent the physical firewalls are still blocked.

The examples of Skype and Groove have been used to pose the thesis: "In the future, all enterprise tools have to emerge in the consumer market." Afterwards you add enterprise-features like accountability and supervision, as Groove did (Btw. when will Skype release the enterprise-ready Skype-appliance?).

The effect, reduced coolness can be described using following chart: With increased enterprise adoption and commercial success, new tools and techniques become less and less cool.

Mentioning supervision, what about privacy? Privacy can be seen as quality of service and with increased use of tools like instant messaging in enterprises, vendors will try to raise the quality of service and thus open up to privacy concerns. An interesting question asked was: "When will instant messaging be 'part of the job' just as having a telephone on your desk is now?"

As a last question I asked "What tools do you need in order to create a virtual organization right now?"

• Internet
• Skype
• Wikis
• GoToMeeting

One problem still open is how to collaborate across time zones, because "people want to sleep when it is dark outside". Answer: we need to enable our organizations for asynchronous collaboration.

This is the second session I moderated in the Office 2.0 Unconference 2007. I started with a prepared presentation on open source tools for Office 2.0.

The tools covered are

• Roller - Blogging
• Mindquarry - Collaboration
• Jabber/Tigase - Instant Messaging
• Chandler - Calendaring

The presentation incited an interesting discussion, some of the questions I can remember are:

Isn't Chandler a dead project? It has been in works for seven years, but no release has been made and you can see zero adoption.

From a technical point of view, Chandler is by no means an abandoned project. Eight active developers, frequent releases and a product that is technically up to date tell a different story. However, from the viewpoint of adoption, Chandler is not yet a big success. The main reasons I see are:

• No 1.0 release
• Community: most chandler developers are still employees of OSAF
• No commercial backgrouding providing support for in-production scenarios.

What are the main obstacles for integrating these four projects?

The main topics for an integration effort would be single-sign on and user-management, single user interface and data integration.

What is the open source business model?

This has been answered before, for example here.

How does the MPL (Mozilla Public License) work

Mindquarry is using the MPL, this caused the question. Under the MPL, interested developers can take the source code, modify and extend it and sell the modified and extended product to their clients provided all modified source code (but not added code) is made available under the terms of the MPL again. This model benefits the original developer, the extender and the customer.

The first session on today's Office 2.0 unconference was hosted by Scott Gavin and focused on the topic of Social Networking in Companies or Enterprise Facebook. What the participants of the discussion were expecting from a corporate social networking tool are following features:

• Profile pages with freeform editing (Some people are using MediaWiki for this)
• Inclusion of existing social network data from LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc.
• Yellow Pages functionality
• Skill Database (in order to find an expert)
• Job Database (if you are a designer in one department, you can be found by people in other departments that need a designer, too)
• Connections (who knows whom)

Other things learned in the conversation:

• When you build networks: start with small, heavily connected networks, they have the highest values for participants
• Blogs are good tools for self-promotion and social networking (even in a corporate environment)
• But you have to push it yourself.
• Scuttle is an open source del.icio.us clone

Product idea of the session

Create a dynamic social network profile based on what you do. Create a software that aggregates your personal information like

• blog post you read and write
• bookmarks you share
• files you create and share
• mails you send and discussions you take part in
• connections on Linkedin, Xing, Facebook

Then aggregate this information and match it with related people in your company.

After more than 24 hours of traveling, I am finally in my hotel room in San Francisco, ready for the Office 2.0 Conference 2007. My clock tells me it is 11 pm, but it feels more like 8 am after a night without sleep, and it feels strange to sit without a seatbelt fastened.