infoarch

We need more people that reach out to others. As people are social beings, you would expect 'reaching out' would come naturally. The strange thing is about the time we are living in, is that we learn (again) that this doesn't come naturally. Just look at the state of politics in this world, especially the uprising of the populist movement. And the web, deliberately made as a platform for connections and building bridges, shows this as well. We've all heard of being 'alone together' on the web and the 'filter bubbles' we all like to live in. The web often looks like more of a shouting-at-each-other platform, than a platform for connecting and networking. I see this inside organizations as well. I've worked for quite some organizations and one thing that strikes me is how small the number of connectors is in organizations. People that bridge gaps between individuals, teams, department, business units, office locations and the outside world. The int...

Wow, time flies when you're having fun, right? I was planning to blog about my blog's 6th birthday, but simply forgot because of some interesting (and more important?) work I had to do. Six years ago I decided to start blogging! I remember the first time I clicked on 'Publish'. Man, was I anxious/curious/scared what would happen next. Actually, I still feel those sensations every time I blog. It is scary  to share your ideas publicly and have them read, reviewed and scrutinized out in the open. But, in my experience, it has also always been great fun. I met lots of new people via my blog, I learned  a lot from all the interactions on and around my blog, and it's a great way to structure my thoughts. So, expect me to continue blogging in 2013! Last year the number of posts I published went down. You decide if that's good or bad. And if it says something about the quality of the posts. A big reason for less posts is the job I have. I've been very  busy (and ...

Sometimes I read a post that really gets me thinking. Anil Dashes' recent post 'The web we lost' did it this time. I think reading the full post is well worth your time if you're interested in where the web is headed. Two fragments from the post triggered me the most: We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich. But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. (...)  The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the p...

You all know +Luis Suarez , right? The guy from IBM, that live on the Canary Islands and has declared war on email . Well recently I wanted to get in touch with him to discuss an opportunity that popped up. Contacting him is easy, right? He’s all over social media. Just DM him on Twitter , send a message via Google+ or Facebook. LinkedIn will do as well. I thought I’d share how it went. Did I seduce Luis to hand over his email address to me?  But what to do if you want to send him a longer piece of text? Do you request for his email address? I was tempted to but refrained to ask because I knew I would be whipped by him. ;-) So I reached out to him via Twitter (direct message) and asked if we could call sometime soon. That was possible and we had a chat. But, still, I had to send him more information about the opportunity, about 10-15 lines of text. And I’m not going to chop this into 140 character messages. LinkedIn could work, but feels like email. I’m not connected to Luis i...

Maybe a better question is: why do I share? I was wondering about this while reading +Oscar Berg ’s post ‘ Why do people share? ’. Oscar makes several interesting statements about sharing in his post. Like this one: The act of sharing something tells our colleagues something about us and that we think and care about what they might be interested in. If what we share is relevant and valuable to them, they will understand that we have really tried to understand what their needs and interests are. Their trust in us grows. And, citing from an MIT Sloan article about reputation and knowledge sharing : Reputation also plays a role where rules or systems are unable to spur sharing. Because critical information is often held privately by individuals, workers often can choose to share or withhold such information in their interactions with colleagues without fear of sanction. That leaves reputation as a key motivator in any decision to share or withhold information. Oscar also relates to...

You've probably heard of Caine and his arcade . If you have't please go and watch the 1st and 2nd video (below) about Caine. It's an inspirational and fun story. It reminds us how special, creative and fun kids are. Imagine: Caine's Arcade Goes Global from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo . After watching the 2nd video I was wondering what we learn from these video's. What are the lessons for 'big people'? These are some of the things I came up with: The video's reminded me that we all were once kids. And that even at an older age, it's importance to keep on being child-like . Just look at all the grown-up people that came to the arcade... Building things is an extremely important way to learn and get feedback. Caine built things because he liked to and hoped others would as well. The filmer taped the story because he liked what Caine had built and hoped others would as well. Etc. We need other people to be effective. Caine built the arcade, the f...

Social Media should support networks within companies and over its boundaries. It should break down silo's in companies. The same goes for the silo's in people's lives, work and private life. But does it really? I've been wondering about this topic for some time. I've been rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto  and found it's been mentioned there as well. And now with the arrival of Google+ people are wondering if this will be the social backbone (must-read piece BTW!). What am I talking about? Well, we have all these social tools that support parts of our lives. Some only work on the intranet, some only on the internet. Some are more for personal, private sharing, others are more work-related. Many have approximately the same functionality. So, you always get the question: Where should I share my information (without pushing the same information to all these services at once)? And where do I get an overview of all my social interactions? I was hoping somet...

One of the podcasts I listen to is the HBR Ideacast. They have lots of interesting talks with people. Sometimes these talks are related to articles published in HBR. Recently they interviewed Sherry Turkle of the much-debated book 'Alone together'. You can find the podcast here: Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone . It's an interesting podcast to listen to and think about. I understand the problem she is seeing and describing (although I still have to read the book). I understand she is worried about it too. But every time I read about her book and listen to what she's saying I think: Shouldn't this problem be addressed by helping young and old people understand the new web and using it in the 'right' way? For instance, help people filter the web, search the web, understand web privacy and build networks using the web. I see a huge need for this around me. And I don't see many schools (and parents) stepping up to this task. I liked Tur...

This post should have been posted a long time ago... Being part of a big company was great. One of the great things it brought me was being a member of the 2.0 Adoption Council . The 2.0 Adoption Council is a group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners working for large companies. I was a member of the Council for a couple of years. It was a great source of inspiration for my work. Lots of smart people are in the Council. Actually I was humbled to be part of a group of enterprise 2.0 practitioners that are seen as the leaders in this space. Some had many more years experience than I did. You wonder what they get from the Council? Well, that's one of the great things about these communities: we're all in it to learn and help each other. And that's exactly what happened. Even though some have been in this space for a long time, we're all still just getting started. To cultivate interaction we used Jive, Yammer and Socialcast. And email of course. Even more important were the ...

Well, Arzu just finished her Masters thesis last week with a good grade! As you know I posted   several snippets from her work. Soon her thesis will be public for you to read. I think she did a really good job and the results, though focussed on social bookmarking, are interesting in general if you're interested in technology and social media adoption. But how do you share bookmarks? Do you use a social bookmarking tool? My experience is not many people use a social bookmarking tool. Of course they bookmarks stuff and save the bookmarks in their browser. Hardly anyone knows you can share them publicly as well. At least that's the experience I have. I give workshops about social media and I always have a slide about bookmarking. I've been tempted to leave it out. Because every time I get to that slide and ask how many of them know what social bookmarking is and use it, hardly anybody does. The ratio is 1-2 out of every 10 workshop participants. Is this   the reason w...

It's been 4 years now since I started this blog . 4 years! That seems like a very long time. All I can say is I really enjoyed blogging and will continue to do so in the future. I hope and plan to do more blogging. Some of them will be short (but not as short as my tweets ...). And some will be longer. I really want to share some of my deeper thinking with you and would like to hear what you think about them. I'm also looking for ways to reshare older posts. I don't want to push them at you, but my readership has grown and I'd like to hear from them what their views are on those posts. If you have any ideas on this, please let me know. I still collect bookmarks and comment on them in Diigo. I don't share them here anymore, but you can find them easily . Finally I want to thank you for reading my blog, commenting on posts and sharing them with others. Thanks a bunch, it really means a lot to me! And if you have any comments about my blog or blogging, e.g. tips to im...

Some time ago I told you I have a student, Arzu , who's researching enterprise social bookmarking. We'll she's almost finished with her thesis. And I can tell you, I'm really impressed with her work. She's delivered a very fundamental and also practical piece of work. I hope to share more with you from her work in the coming weeks. I'll share a nice quote with you right now. In her final chapters she refers to research done on 'trust' which I find very interesting. Hsu et al. ( 2007 ) explored the effect of trust on knowledge sharing in virtual communities in different stages. They suggest that trust is developed in virtual communities by repetitive interaction of members over time and appears in three stages: economy-based, information-based and identification-based trust. As the relationship develops, the economy-based trust will move to knowledge-based trust, eventually identification-based trust. In the initial stage of participation to virtual co...

Michael Gotta of Cisco wrote an interesting post some time ago about "Expertise Location: Don't Forget Process & Cultural Factors" . He relates to the fact that Enterprise 2.0 is often sold by saying that social tools help find experts in the organization more easily. However what's the assumption underlying this? The general assumption includes two primary ways of identifying "experts". The first method assumes that employee use of social tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, communities) and social applications (e.g., ideation), enables their talent and business insight to be more visible and therefore more discoverable by co-workers. The second method revolves around the employee profile created as part of an enterprise social network site. It is assumed that employees will readily create and maintain rich profiles where they willingly share information about their job history, interests, hobbies, education, and areas of expertise. Rich emplo...

The Internet is such a great place to share and learn. I find it a fantastic place to connect with all kinds of people you hardly know, but are willing to share and help you learn anyway. I recently had such an experience I'd like to share with you. Remember my post on knowledge sharing and incentives ? I could have kept this thought to myself, researched it and come up with the answer myself. But I didn't. I blogged about it, commented on a related post (which popped right when I was thinking about the topic...) and shared it in the LinkedIn Group 'Gurteen Knowledge Community'. What did I get back? Did my readers or experts in the field criticize or laugh at me for wondering about this topic or asking 'dumb' questions? Did they leave me in the cold, completely not responding to me at all? Of course, this can all happen, but none of this (has ever) happened to me. I'll tell you what I got back in this case. For one, Nick Milton wrote a separate po...

It struck me when I was watching TV. In Holland we have a program called 'Opsporing Verzocht' (English: We're looking for something/someone'). It's a program to solve unsolved crimes. Basically it's crowdsourcing. The TV hosts and the police tell the people watching the 'show' about a crime and hope someone will have the golden tip to solve the crime. I'm sure you know the concept. Every now and then, when a case is hard to solve the police offer a smaller or larger reward. Hoping this reward will encourage a reluctant (or scared) watcher to share tips about this case possibly  leading to its solution. That struck me. They are offering financial rewards to share information. To my knowledge offering financial incentives to encourage knowledge sharing is advised against by the knowledge management experts. It basically leads to worse sharing and its the wrong way to encourage sharing. Relate to Nick Milton's post on this topic for instance. ...

Recently I did something stupid and I want to share it with you to keep you from doing the same. (Or maybe I'm just the only one who would do this...) For some time now I'm a happy user of Dropbox . Dropbox is basically your personal hard drive in the cloud. I'm using it to store a large part of my personal files. Dropbox works via a website, but you can also approach your files via Windows Explorer (as your other files categorized in folders). Recently I had to move my Dropbox folder to a different part of my computer (corporate disk quota problems...). After thinking it through a bit I thought: Ok, I can just copy this folder to elsewhere. If things go wrong I'll still have them in the cloud (because Explorer syncs my files with my files on the internet/in Dropbox). So I copied them and everything seemed to be OK. But every now and then we have a corporate sync tool making sure your corporate files can be accessed everywhere/everytime when you disconnect your l...

Some time ago prof. Andrew McAfee had an interesting post about what's most important for the success with Enterprise 2.0 . One of the things he mentioned was: Slack exists in the workweek Slack... This term has been buzzing in my head for some time. For one because of the fact that there hasn't been much slack in my agenda the last couple of weeks... But also because many people say they are "really busy" and "don't have time for social media". I organize slack. I work from home regularly if I really want to concentrate on something, like reading and writing (a blog post). Even though I work hard from home I experience it as slack. And when I'm at work I almost always make sure I have one or two hours to read feeds and reflect on them (possibly leading to a blog post, tweet, etc.). A couple of weeks ago we had a cleaning day at the office. We organized slack for a specific reason. I love these days. Everyone is in a different mode, we're a...

Recently I got a DM from @6things saying: "You are very interesting." That's always a great thing to hear. :-) 6things is a relevance engine , as they call themselves. They select 6 things per day in different themes as the most interesting things of that day. Now they are asking others to curate for one week. And probably because they find me interesting, I will be sharing 6 interesting things per day in the coming week with you. I selected the technology theme, so you can following the tweets with #6things_tech . Sharing starts tomorrow, May 23rd. Hope you enjoy it.

Recently the old debate popped up again: what to do and not to do with email? A colleague started a rant about colleagues who continuously CC lots of people. Another chipped in about colleagues using 'reply all' too much. Ah, the beauty of collaboration! ;-) Doesn't it all come down to agreeing how we work together? For this reason many companies set up a 'code of conduct' (or something like this). We have one too. Strangely enough these 'code of conducts' doesn't say much about using email for instance - as far as I know. Some time ago we did an internal workshop with Novay about email productivity. One of the assignments was to come up with 'email guidelines'. The great thing is consensus about the 10 email guidelines we all would adhere to was easily found. (By the way, these guidelines were only approved by the workshop members, not by the whole organization. We still have a way to go...) So, does your company have email guidelines? If...

Recently John Tropea wrote another great post "It's not about knowledge sharing, it's about engagement and context" . In his post he pointed to an older article from KMReview (2004) by Nancy Dixon, "Does Your Organization Have an Asking Problem?" . It's an interesting read (although I find the approach a bit too structured...). Anywhere, in her post I found some great quotes I'd like to share with you. They don't only apply to organizations, but to you and me as well. Here goes! Knowledge sharing begins with a request, not with a solution. (...) Managers sometimes tell me that people in their organization have a problem with sharing knowledge; but more often than not, people aren't "asking." The organization has an asking problem, not a sharing problem. When people ask, the sharing problem becomes moot. How organizations talk about "asking" is critical. When company officials say to professionals, "Don...