Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

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.