Category Archive for ‘Sharing’ at Interactive Knowhow

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Another way…

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on November 4, 2008

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At the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, JP Rangaswami focuses on the history of workplace communication for his keynote, “Web 2.0 versus the Water Cooler”. In typical JP style, the area he covers is broad, comparative and entertaining - and includes everything from ancient manuscripts to train timetables to the Olympic games.

JP is a familiar face to this crowd, as well as a great speaker, and it seems everyone wants a piece of him after the talk. We’re due to meet right after he’s finished, but it’s 45 minutes before JP finally wends his way down to the community lounge for our interview. He’s still in reflective mode:

“In low attrition, low job-mobility environments, there was a genuine covenant. It made sense to have a consensual style of management. You learnt to take a bullet for the team. And your team would remember. Over time, everything evened out. It was thick ice that you skated over. Consensus was built over long-term relationships.”

This ‘covenant’ did not only affect teamwork, it also impacted on performance reviews and appraisals. “There was institutional memory”, as JP puts it. And this memory was responsible for deciding whether or not it the time was right for a pay rise, or if a minor misdemeanor might be overlooked.

“Nowadays you get moved around. How do you get that information to be valuable? How do you deal with this new world? The silo structures of the past didn’t allow us to access information. Maybe you need to have a wiki-like construct, where knowledge becomes a cloud asset?

In 2001, JP Rangaswami was working as Chief Information Officer at Dresdner Kleinwort, the investment bank, when he decided there had to be a different way of doing things:

“I realised that email was appalling – there were so many ‘broken trust’ implications in it – bcc was evil: ‘I’m going to have a conversation with your boss watching’; cc was ‘cover your arse’ – so I started looking at the problems I had and ways to find solutions to them.”

“Also, I realised, this way of records being attached to messages was the wrong way round. We want messages to be attached to the records. Those were the sort of characteristics I began to look for.”

As Global CIO, JP was responsible for a communications network of 6,000 employees across 35 countries. The way he saw it, the problems at Dresdner Klienwort were caused by four key things:

1. Attrition (the high rate of staff turnover)
2. The high mobility of staff between roles within the firm
3. Cultural differences – the same word meaning different things
4. Linguistic differences – the meaning of words being lost in translation

So, JP started a blog internally, and started championing wikis as a way forward.

“If you capture things using social software…there is a record of how things happened. Now a newcomer has the chance to catch up and understand what’s taken place.”

As a long-time advocate of disruptive technologies, and with a 40 per cent cut to his budget to consider, JP also began to introduce open source products to the company. By 2003, 43 percent of Dresdner Kleinwort’s Unix users were on Linux.

In 2003, JP was named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine and in 2004 he was named CIO Innovator of the Year by the European Technology Forum. In 2007, Silicon.com chose him as one of technology’s 50 most influential individuals, describing Dresdner Kleinwort as “an aggressive leading-edge adopter of innovative and disruptive technologies”.

Now, JP is a managing director at BT Design, heading up strategy and innovation. If his influence there is anywhere near as successful as his impact at Dresdner Kleinwort, we have some delightful surprises in store.

The Grateful Read

Published

Jemima Gibbons

on October 29, 2008

in Sharing

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Stowe Boyd is something of a celebrity in social media circles. He describes his role as “Front Man for The /Messengers” and, with his confident smile, trademark beret and goatee beard, you could be forgiven for mistaking him for an ageing rock star. Stowe clearly loves the ambiguous play on all this.

“The /Messengers is not a band, although it sounds like one,” he writes on his website. “It’s just is the name I dreamed up for my consulting business back in 2007…I am often asked to bring in other consultants or organizations, which I do gladly and eagerly…I consider myself the front man of a constantly shifting collaborative network, a band of doers and thinkers, designers and developers. Sometimes it’s a solo act, sometimes a duo, and when needed a combo.”

Stowe is, first and foremost, a writer and his blog /Message has around 100,000 RSS subscribers. /Message is Stowe’s fourth blog. His previous blogs were hosted by Blogger, Corante and (the now defunct) Convey. He launched his first back in 1999, before the word ‘blog’ was even familiar to most people.

Sadly, all the content this original blog, Message From Edge City, was lost forever when the host company unexpectedly closed. But another piece of Stowe’s writing from 1999 lives on.

While putting together a newsletter item on a piece of chat software, Stowe unknowingly hit on a phrase that described what would grow to become a whole new class of app: that phrase, “social tools” is now common parlance in the online world.

“It [Abuzz Beehive, subsequently acquired by the New York Times] was a great product,” remembers Stowe. “A Twitter-style chat app using email – way before its time. It was a business tool, but it wasn’t about efficiency or number-crunching. It was about allowing a culture to emerge around sharing. That’s why I coined the term – to describe this new type of approach.”

We’re sitting in the Community Lounge at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. All around us, MacBooks are humming and bloggers are tapping away. To the right, Frogpond aka Martin Koser is chatting on Jaiku and Twitter; to the left, information architect Johannes Kleske holds court (offline and no doubt on as well) with likeminded geeks.

Take a glimpse at any screen and you can see a whole range of social tools being used – Tweetdeck, Delicious, Dopplr and Xing are just some of the applications on display.

Thinking on this, I ask Stowe about Workstreamr, the start-up he recently founded with two other partners:

“It’s all about the notion of taking ideas of lifestreaming [broadcasting your life 24 hours a day – via either video or real-time updates of blogging, posting, tagging and any other online activity] and putting them into a work context.”

“Snackr, Twhirl, FriendFeed, Flickr, FeedMeme, Digg – this is why I say I need a 30” monitor, to watch all these different streams.”

I get this image of Stowe standing, like Tom Cruise out of Minority Report, in front of a giant screen of activity, furiously touching the surface to locate and pull down items as he needs them.

The sharp economic downturn has halted angel funding but Stowe hopes that the Workstreamr venture will be up and running again soon. Either way, he has plenty of other projects to keep himself occupied. One new piece of work is /ground – a new blog looking at how the web can solve global problems.

“At Reboot in June [where Stowe expressed concern about unfettered economic growth, rising populations and impending ecological catastrophe] I felt like Cassandra. My argument was that we can’t look to the people who’ve led us to the brink to get us out of this. The only tools we have are on the web. We have to look to web culture.”

I push him on what exactly he means by this - what are the implications are for business?

“I believe a new world order is coming. Businesses need to be more open, more porous, more transparent. They need to operate in a way that’s inspired by the web. Businesses need to be more deeply involved with the communities in which they find themselves. That’s a new imperative.

“The other side of this is that consumers will start voting with their feet. It [social media marketing] is so new that people don’t really know what to think of it. Are our business and political leaders really as ‘transparent’ as they make out? For example, the General Motors blog [GM FastLane - where GM executives write about GM products and services] doesn’t talk about real issues at all.

“Another example is John Edwards [the US presidential candidate who came third to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the recent democratic nominations]. He used Twitter, but when his campaign was over, and he’d lost, he didn’t even say ‘goodbye’ to his hundreds of followers.

“People like this are just using these active communities of people as a way to broadcast their message. It’s insincere at best and at worst, totally cynical and exploitative.”

Stowe firmly believes that, ultimately, people will realise that working together for the common good is way more satisfying than individual gain. In fact, he has come up with a name for this phenomenon – Boyd’s Law:

“People are decreasing their involvement in personal productivity. If people give up personal gain for just one moment – even just a minute of their personal time - the network as a whole is more productive. Look at the network effect of one person having a willingness to help.”

I presume by this Stowe means the increased value of a Flickr photo someone has tagged and is then found and used by a high school student, or of a Wikipedia article read and corrected by an expert, to give just two examples.

“We’re moving away from a money-driven, hard capital mindset to a gift-driven, social capital mindset,” says Stowe, and he nods his head in the direction of the geeks and bloggers around us, typing away at their keyboards.

“The people here will always trade personal productivity for network connectivity. Above all, they want to remain connected with the people who are important to them.”

With that, it’s time to get going to the bar – where networking will indeed trump personal productivity and the wily Stowe Boyd will, yet again, be proven right.

Sharing = love

Published

Jemima Gibbons

on September 26, 2008

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In between the more classic songs (Jerusalem, etc) that we had to sing at my Church of England primary school, there was a happy clappy number which used to have my class teacher, Mrs Prentice, bopping from side to side in her purple kaftan (okay, so we quite liked it, too).

“Love is like a magic penny, hold it tight and you won’t have any, lend it, spend it and you’ll have so many, they’ll roll all over the floor.”

There is a similar sort of phenomenon at work on the web today. A culture of “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine”.

The academic, Clay Shirky, uses the term “social capital”, which he defines in this way:

“When your neighbour walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time, social capital is at work. It is the shadow of the future on a societal scale. Individuals in groups with more social capital (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential, than those in groups with less social capital.” (Here Comes Everybody, p.192)

Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield puts it into a commercial context:

“Steven Weber [University California, Berkeley] points out that there is no such thing as a buy vs. build equation for deciding to share intellectual property. But we’ve a version of Socialtext that’s free for up to five users. We can afford to give that away.”

Socialtext doesn’t disclose how many of the 4,000+ companies it serves use only the free version, but Ross is clearly seeing the strategy reap rewards.

As another example, Ross points to the success of WikiHow – one of the most-used wikis on the web:

“A while ago Jack Herrick (WikiHow’s founder) decided to start using a Creative Commons licence. He can send you a graph where you can see massive growth take place at the point where he changed the licence.

“That’s Web 2.0 – how sharing control can create value. We’re seeing more transparency. We’re seeing a culture of sharing versus one of hoarding… we’re shifting from a need to know culture to a need to share culture.”

Ross points me to a recent blogpost by a member of the US State Department which sums this up nicely.

With even established US government organisations as the CIA (Intellipedia) and US State Department (Diplopedia) now using wikis, it’s surely only a matter of time before everyone starts “sharing”.

But sharing needs to be done in the right spirit to work properly.

Purple-clad “Mrs.Prentices” the world over will be watching!

Don’t worry about Bluebeard

Published

Jemima Gibbons

on August 31, 2008

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It’s February 2008 and I’m putting together a session on legal issues for my creative entrepreneurship students at Kings College London.

I’ve been reading Don Tapscott’s thoughts around Wikinomics and excited by the business possibilities of open source development and creative commons licensing…but the media lawyer coming in to talk to my students can’t – or won’t - cover that area.

So when the invite to the Open Rights Group workshop: Creative Business in the Digital Era drops into my inbox, I’m curious. The workshop’s in March, a few weeks after the legal session for my students has taken place, but at least I can relay any new info to them.

So I apply for a place, get accepted and trundle along to the basement in Soho where the workshop’s taking place. And that’s how I come to meet Suw Charman, former ORG Executive Director, blogging doyenne and keen social media activist.

Suw’s wearing a suit and talking legalese in a posh accent, but she’s got her nose pierced, so she must be okay.

Suw and I get to meet up a couple of times over the next few months, and it’s clear that no search for leadership 2.0 would be complete without getting her take on it.

Fast forward to August and we’re sitting in the amenable confines of One Alfred Place on a sunny Wednesday morning, talking shop.

So what does Suw think the main problems are when it comes to business taking on these new approaches?

“The challenges are cultural more than anything. People don’t understand how giving something away for free can form a viable business model. There’s so much propaganda out there – in the film industry, the music industry and, to a lesser extent, the publishing industry – it’s easy for people to get swept up by it. Copyright violation isn’t theft. It’s a completely different thing. If I steal your wallet you don’t have it any more, but if I copy your music…it’s different. The main issue is mindset.”

Why is she particularly interested in what’s happening in the creative industries?

“I like the Tim O’Reilly quote about obscurity being much more of a threat to artists than piracy. The boundaries are being pushed a lot more in certain creative sectors - publishing, for example.”

Sue cites publishers such as Baen, Tor, Friday Publishing and even Penguin with its 1000 Penguins Project, as examples of businesses who are willing to experiment.

“It’s logical for writers such as Neil Gaiman to have blogs, to build up an online community. The blog builds up anticipation and then, when you actually publish your book, you can release it into your reader community.”

But Suw feels such approaches (what ORG has termed the “loss leader” model – giving some of your intellectual property away in order to sell further intellectual property) are by no means limited to creative businesses.

“For example, look at manufacturing. Look at the maintenance manuals for those classic cars that people have a soft spot for – they go for loads of money on eBay. If you’re a fan of the Ford Capri or the Ford Cortina and Ford gave you access to those old manuals online, you’d love it.”

Suw thinks that every company should do an IP audit to find out what could be released out into the market to help build and/or sustain a community.

“Obviously 100 per cent transparency isn’t good. If you’re Worcester Sauce, you don’t want to give away your recipe – that’s your unique selling point – but it’s all about being open and imaginative. Every company owns some IP that would be useful in building a community of fans. It’s all marketing. It all goes into generating warm and fuzzy feelings of goodwill.”

Suw’s not the first person I’ve spoken to to reiterate that our current Taylorist mindset has only really taken hold in the last 100 years:

“We have to remember that there’s this limited period that started with mass production and ended with digital production. [Mass social media] marks the end of a small minority of people having control. We’re seeing the democratization of culture.”

Be that as it may, Suw is clearly exasperated current legislation:

“Copyright law is becoming an ass. It’s technically illegal for you to copy a CD that you own onto your iPod. The law is so out of step, it’s becoming like Latin – a dead language. It’s not protecting the rights of the artists or the creators. It was created to benefit society. Now it’s no longer doing that. Technology has moved on, while copyright law has become massively more restrictive. You have to ask, what good is society getting out of this? When any law starts getting massively out of step with the society it represents, there is going to have to be a massive change.”

Suw is critical of the DCMS for going against the findings of the Gowers Review, which concluded that there would be no long term economic gain from copyright term extension.

“The Gowers Review was a very sensible report which recommended that we reconsider copyright law. The DCMS has completely ignored it and now says that it’s backing term extension. It all goes back to that question of propaganda. The very word piracy is overloaded with pictures of bluebeards and people getting their heads chopped off.”

So, is she optimistic for the future?

“It all depends on how successful the old school are in perverting legislation to prevent development of the natural business models. There’s so much corporate lobbying around. What’s interesting is how far the pendulum will swing one way before it comes back again.”

Coming soon to a TV near you…

Published

Jemima Gibbons

on August 22, 2008

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The headquarters of Arup (although no-one in the firm would like to refer to them as such), is made up by three shiny buildings on Fitzroy Street, on the north-east edge of London’s West End.

Two of the buildings have been recently gutted and re-furbished, while the third, newly re-opened, was razed to the ground and completely rebuilt.

At first glance, the buildings don’t look too dissimilar to the ordinary office blocks in that part of town. But then you look a bit more closely and see a flourish here, a serpentine line there.

Arup is a hybrid firm of engineers and architects, and has been at the top of its game now for some 60 years. Sydney’s Opera House, London’s Gherkin, Edinburgh’s Scottish Parliament, Beijing’s Bird’s Nest – they all have the Arup signature.

Futurist Duncan Wilson meets me at no.13 Fitzroy Street, and shows me round the new public exhibition space, currently focusing on Arup’s work in China – nicely timed, with the Beijing Olympics are taking place as we speak.

Duncan’s job, as one of the eight-strong ‘Foresight’ team, is to run ‘thought-leadership-type’ workshops and create content for the ‘Drivers of Change’ project, which publishes books and flashcards on future trends for both in-house and public use.

He admits that Arup is a great place to do this sort of work. Famous for its flattened hierarchical structure, with 10,000 employees all owning the firm, Arup is renowned for its innovative culture.

“If you go back to Ove Arup [founder] himself, his whole approach was that design should be holistic. In the 1960s and 70s, that was highly unusual. That collaborative approach (engineers working in conjunction with architects) is embedded in the culture here. There’s a ‘de facto’ sharing nature. People expect it [openness] of Arup.”

However, even Arup’s directors do not always sit easily when faced by projecs requiring open source and alternative approaches to intellectual property.

“One of the issues is that we’re starting to use new technologies. Senior executives don’t use Flickr, Facebook etc (in fact, sites such as Facebook and Youtube are banned as they are considered a waste of time and, more importantly, bandwidth). The underlying message is ‘how can we control this stuff’. But it’s mostly just a fear of the unknown.”

One of Arup’s current projects is the design of Don Tang, a huge eco-city in China.

“We’ve whole teams of engineers working on the modelling process, seeing what works and what doesn’t, trying different things. We already use games technology for a lot of the modelling. But it would be great if, rather than just number crunching in isolation, we could open source some of this information, put it into a Sim City type of environment and watch what happens.

Traditionally, like most industries, the engineering sector doesn’t share, but Duncan can see huge public benefits opening up it certain types of data could be pooled.

“Take post-occupancy valuation for instance. That’s when a team of architects go back into a building to see if it’s functioning correctly, if it’s providing the type of environment it was designed to provide. The role of the facilities manager within companies is becoming more strategic and important as environmental concerns are increasing. I can see a future where the data of what a building is doing – eg, how much energy it’s using, and where - can be streamed for public consumption.”

You read it here first – time for the ‘what my building is doing’ channel.

The Barnet Crusader

Published

Jemima Gibbons

on August 15, 2008

in Knowledge and Sharing

. 1 Comment

One day, back in 2005, council worker Dominic Campbell found an unsolicited email in his inbox. The email was inviting him to a business breakfast on ‘customer insight’. The breakfast was at Mosimann’s and it was free, so Dominic thought ‘why not?’

At the time, Dominic was working in a back office for the IT department of the local council in Barnet, one of London’s leafier outer boroughs. He had been there for five years (since graduating in Geography from Manchester University), and was relatively happy with his lot.

Then, at the breakfast, he met James Governor from the UK consultancy, Redmonk.

“He was just completely bananas and brilliant. He said there was this thing called del.icio.us and this thing called salesforce. And we were just nowhere [in terms of using these new tools].

“I tried to get James in to the council to open them up and get them to understand this stuff. I completely failed…but James did enough to inspire me to leave and set up on my own.”

Dominic is sitting with me (ironically enough), in the walled garden of the Euphorium Bakery in Islington. He’s clearly relieved that he took the chance to set up Futuregov because, three years on, things have come full circle.

Dominic is now back at Barnet Council, but working as a consultant, and implementing the kind of IT solutions he only dreamt of as an employee.

A bit of background: Barnet Council is led by Councillor Mike Freer, who blogs at www.leaderlistens.com. Outside Barnet, not many people in the UK have heard of Mike, but he may be about to become a bit more of a household name. He’s due to stand in Margaret Thatcher’s old constituency, East Finchley, in the next election and is tipped for the Cabinet if David Cameron wins.

Ever since Webcameron, the Tories have been upping the ante to Labour over which party does new media best. So it’s in Freer’s interests to look web 2.0 savvy. In fact, he’s done such a good job, that even Labour are keen to get involved in his work (the DCCG recently invested a significant amount in ‘social marketing’ for Barnet council).

All in all, a good time for Dominic to be around, then?

“Barnet is at the vanguard of redefining what a council is. They’re trying to work out how they can become an enabler [for the people] in their area. They’re trying to do something better than sending out Surveymonkey surveys. They’re trying to open up the policy-making process.”

I tried to get James in to the council to open them up and get them to understand this stuff. I completely failed…but James did enough to inspire me to leave and set up on my own.”

Barnet runs a project called ‘The Future Shape of Barnet’ in which it attempts to redefine the role of the local authority, and how it should work.

As part of this project, the council is engaging with residents and crowdsourcing ideas from staff and residents alike using web 2.0 technologies (with the help of Futuregov). Barnet now uses wikis on its intranet, and has got a page on Facebook.

“OK, so there’s only 25 fans at the moment, and they’re all council employees, but the very fact Barnet is on Facebook moves it to a different place.”

All well and good, but the fact that Barnet is so unusual says a lot about the state of play in the IT systems of local government.

“Anything freewear or open source is seen as flakey or dangerous. There’s a saying that you won’t get fired for buying Microsoft. All these people are Microsoft certified and Microsoft is flooding local government. Almost every time I go into a council I walk past a SharePoint salesman.”

Isolation is another problem:

“For people working in councils, the only contact they get with the outside world is when someone visits from SAP, Logica or Microsoft. This person tells them that whatever they’re selling is cutting edge, and they’ll hand over £1 million.”

So what are the chances of all this changing?

“Putting organisations like that into a network instead of running them as walled hierarchies is a massive step. At the moment it’s only beginning to happen, and that’s just in marketing.

“It’s gotta be another twenty years [until things really start to change]. The people in their twenties now who’ve grown up with computers, they’re the ones who are going to do all this [web 2.0] stuff naturally.”

But for Dominic, the future for genuine social change should really be outside the hands of local government altogether:

“To be honest, I’d rather government step back and let the social innovators [private entrepreneurs] do stuff. Local government should actually worry about little else than being a series of listening posts, keeping an ear to the ground on what people really need and want.”

Is Open Source a closed book to business?

Published

Jemima Gibbons

on June 20, 2008

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It was great to hear Robert Cailliau talk at Media Futures 2008 as part of a panel discussion on openness and innovation.

Cailliau is an ex-employee of CERN and worked with Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the inception of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.

Here is his take on the use of open source:

At that time [when we were creating the web] there were many different people thinking about this idea [the web] and ours was the one that took off. If we’d locked it up [ie: not used open source], those other people would have got in on the act.
I likened [the development] to a field of weeds rather than a strong forest. Because of the diversity [of people involved], it wasn’t possible to pick out the good contributions. After a short while you began to see who was competent and who was not competent.
A hierarchy of ideas and of people began to develop. This became the Consortium (in 1995) and the Consortium was a way of getting the web standards in place and of keeping them open.
How do you actually pay for your open systems? This is a problem. I saw a number of people who were very enthusiastic but then lost interest and became involved in something else. And you lost their ideas. Because there was no rigourous authoritarian structure to keep them.
We need a way in which people can make anonymous payments and end this vicious triangle of author/reader/advertiser.

I asked Robert and the rest of the panel how they thought we could encourage businesses in general to use open source - not so much for software (where the case is proven) but for completely different products and services, the Goldcorp Mining example used by Don Tapscott, for instance?

Mark Birkbect (webBackplane): The open source ideas of trust and openness will work in business – but the business mindset is set against that. I believe businesses will open up eventually.

Ian Forrester (BBC Backstage): Read The Cluetrain Manifesto and also Reading The Cluetrain, the blog of Sarah Mines, a marketing woman at the BBC (who I convinced to write a blog about her changing perceptions as she read it).

Matt Webb (Schultz & Webb): The web is in danger of becoming polarised – on the one hand we’ve got people believing in freedom at all costs and on the other there are people who want to close everything down.

Robert: I’ve nothing to add.

Well it was late in the day and I guess everyone had their eye on tea and cake, but I was saddened I didn’t get the chance to corner Robert afterwards and press him on this!

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