infoarch

A while back I read Wikinomics , by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. I really enjoyed it. So when they published a new book, Macrowikinomics. Rebooting Business and the World , I was curious, bought and read it. The book Wikinomics was about the power of mass collaboration for business. But this new model of collaboration goes beyond a business or technology trend. It's a "more encompassing societal shift". So, this new book wants to show how wikinomics and its core principles can be applied to society and all of its institutions. Principles What are the wikinomics principles? The 6 principles summarized for you with a quote. Collaboration - "... the collective knowledge, capability, and resources embodied within broad horizontal networks of participants can accomplish much more than one organization or one individual can acting alone. Of course, hierarchies won't disappear from the economy in the foreseeable future. Nor are we likely to see large top-...

The Dachis Group recently shared a really nice overview of "The 2010 Social Business Landscape" , written by Dion Hinchcliffe . One of the tools I missed in his overview is 'social tagging' or 'social bookmarking'. Based the research being done by my student , Arzu Yucekaya , on social bookmarking, I've thinking about and discussing with her why social bookmarking adoption seems to be harder than, for instance, the adoption of enterprise microblogging. At least, in the company I work for... I'd like to share a citation from a (preliminary) version of her literature research. This citation relates to the adoption of knowledge sharing tools in organizations in general. She writes: In the context of knowledge sharing systems, public good nature of knowledge introduces two major challenges that organization face (Prasarnphanich & Wagner, 2008): 1. The start-up problems (achieving critical mass) 2. Discontinuity problem (sustainability...

Prediction Markets have intrigued me for some time now. I've been reading about them in books such as 'The Wisdom of Crowds' and 'We are Smarter than Me' and 'Wikinomics' . The examples they give are inspiring. But still I find the number of examples, also on the Internet, quite limited. And I think I understand why now. I'll explain why below. But first something great happened to me some time ago. For one I joined the 2.0 Adoption Council . Which is a great group of enterprise 2.0 practitioners and enthusiasts. It simply is a group of people in this area that want to learn from each other. And then recently the 2.0 Adoption Council set up a Prediction Market. Ah, this is great, I thought, it would give me the chance to experience a Prediction Markt in practice. So I jumped in! This prediction market was focused on Enterprise 2.0 business and technology. Several statements in this area were put up and the market kicked off. Every participant go...

Sitting in the train I had time to read 'What Matters Now' . I loved it. It's a very inspiring read. A great way to tap into the minds of great people. And all that for free! All contributors were asked to write a one-pager about a word. E.g. Power, Harmony, Compassion. Here's some of the parts I enjoyed most: Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. -- Michael Hyatt (This relates nicely to my post about Vision vs Scale .) The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth. This year, your job is to find them and attract them. -- Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC - all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolu...

Oof, really have to get back to blogging... I've been very busy with a product creation process re-engineering project. In general terms it's business process re-engineering. Recently the business team release their process descriptions, way of working descriptions and requirements to manage the processes. I'm in the Architecture Team, but also one of the Functional Team members. So now it was our turn to take the requirements and flip them into a functional specification. Interesting but cumbersome work... As I tweeted I'm also reading Chris Anderson's book 'Free'. And I'm really enjoying it! One of the interesting remarks he makes is: every that goes from atoms to bit will be 'free'. But Chris Anderson doesn't stop thinking. In the last Wired issues he says the following. Very interesting stuff! "Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms,...

Recently I read a couple of interesting posts/articles about innovation and invention. First of all, Dev Patnaik has a nice post about what empathy has to do with innovation . Dev has seen "companies prosper when they're able to create widespread empathy for the world around them". Empathy is: the ability to reach outside of ourselves and walk in someone else’s shoes, to get where they’re coming from, to feel what they feel. And this should be widespread in the organization. People within the company are able to stand in each other's shoes and in the shoes of their customers. They understand what's happening outside and respond to that accordingly. In this way the edges of companies start to blur. Dev says we're lacking empathy not innovation. This is an interesting point also related to the posts stressing the importance of an innovative culture . One of the facets of empathy is praising others. Steven DeMaio over at the HBR blog has an inter...

How do you pick up weak signals and make sense of them? In some cases we'd rather not pick them up at all. This goes for us personally ('what is being said about you?') and for companies ('who's talking about us and why?') MIT Sloan Review ran a very interesting article on this topic: "How to make Sense of Weak Signals" by Paul Schoemaker and George Day (Spring 2009). What is a weak signal anyway? Shoemaker and Day define it as: A seemingly random or disconnected piece of information that at first appears to be background noise but can be recognized as part of a significant pattern by viewing it through a different frame or connecting it with other pieces or information. I was surprised to read that "fewer than 20% of global companies have sufficient capacity to spot, interpret and act on the weak signals of forthcoming threats and opportunities." It would be nice to read some best-practices in this area. A general framework to ma...

Bumped into an article and a post that got me thinking. One is an older article (that I reread after going paperless ). It is titled "Tailoring IT Support to communities of practice" by Agresti (in: IT Pro, 2003). The other is a recent blogpost by Oliver Marks, "Sorry, the helpdesk doesn't cover that" . What I was wondering is: How many companies are crowdsourcing their IT helpdesks? I see most companies still maintaining traditional helpdesks. So, every employees knows the numbers he/she should call, you call the helpdesk and they try to help you. Usually there's also a system to support that process. This tool supports the helpdesk to manage calls and their solutions. And employees can check the progress of their incident/question. However, we all know lots of stuff that is IT helpdesk-ish is solved by asking colleagues for help or Googling the solution. And the solutions the helpdesk provides to one colleagues is shared among the helpdesk people, but...

Did you see the way people are trying to improve MS Outlook? The website 'Outlook's broken - let's fix it' is a protest site against the proposals for a future version of Outlook. But it's also a way to share and collect ideas about what Outlook should look like in the future. This is a great example of collecting ideas for future product development (using mass collaboration for innovation)! I also like the way they visualize all the contributions. It shows the power of Twitter. It also shows contributors they're not alone: lots of people agree with you and we can shape the future together or at least try to influence it. Shouldn't every product have such a site, with a tweet fetcher? Oh, and my contribution can be found here . --- If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers: Collecting Ideas Mass-Collaboration Style http://twurl.nl/dlqkq6 Tags van Technorati: innovation , masscollaboration , crowdsourcing

It's been a while since I bumped into a PhD thesis on mass collaboration. The Wikinomics blog pointed to it . The thesis was written by Mark Elliott and is titled "Stigmergic Collaboration. A theoretical Framework for Mass Collaborationn" . Pretty interesting title, I thought, and I hoped more people would read and discuss it. But I haven't seen much talk about Elliott's work yet.  Anyway I promised to write about this book and I hope my post will get people to at least read this nice piece of work. Well, there's a lot from Elliott's work that I would like to pass on. I'll mainly write on what I learned (and I'm not even sure if I really grasp all of it). You can find a summary of the book on Mark's site, so I won't make another one (for you). The concept 'stigmergy' was new to me, even though I like to read about complex, living systems and concepts like 'coevolution', 'edge of chaos', etc. So what is 'st...