Group items tagged

SharePoint’s poor support for individuals working on multiple different teams

cumbersome and incomplete integration

"Whether it’s the lack of a workflow-based provisioning process, or enterprise-level administration, or the ability to effectively categorize large numbers of documents or PowerPoint slides, SharePoint remains ill-suited to enterprise-wide collaboration and knowledge management,"

Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007 Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free By Justin Fox

It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin's big idea--that there are important human motivations beyond what he called "reckless individualism"--is very relevant these days. That's because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free.

he proposed in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the survival of animal species and much of human progress depended on the tendency to help others.

At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise.  The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list.

  Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure.  This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones.

Community, communication, consideration. The three founding principals of marketing your blog to an audience, whether general, or specific. People want to get be a part of the next thing, so give them a chance. 1. Community Whether you start up your own community, or join others, via means of MyBlogLog, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and others, this is a guaranteed and proven way to get visitors, to get hits, impressions, and often quality traffic, because you know that these people haven’t just clicked on a random link or search engine listing, but have seen you or your website’s profile, and followed it through to your homepage/landing page. The best ways to get the profiles themselves noticed? See below… 2. Communication I don’t mean ’spam’ by this either. Get involved in genuine discussions, with other people of similar interests, start up a civilized, profitable, knowledgeable discussion, then when you’re finished, ask if they’d take a look at your blog or website. You’d be surprised how many loyal readers have come to my own blog in this way. Simply leave comments in communities, on social networks, on other blogs, etc. Still not quite your way of dealing with people? 3. Considering All the time, you have to consider the reader. Who are you writing for? The reader. Who will be navigating your blog? The reader. Who should you devote your time, energy and attention to? The reader. Consideration is important, and you can show this in many ways. Either by having a clutter-free, easy-to-follow design, or you could alternatively try getting the readers involved, by asking questions in blog posts, or website statements, and opening up comments. If people comment, strike up a conversation with them, and keep them coming back. Answer their queries and requests with solid, reliable, dependable answers, and take note of the feedback they leave by using it, and putting it into action. If someone states that your text is hard to read, change the colour to stop it clashing so much with the background, or simply make it slightly larger. There are lots of ways you can show consideration to your audience, and it shows just how loyal you are to your readers through this. If someone spots an inaccuracy in a blog post and tells you, don’t be lazy. Go change it! They’ll keep coming back, they’ll tell their friends, and in turn this C will do word-of-mouth marketing wonders. The Element of Surprise You’ve looked at both SEO, content and the ‘C’s now, but my last tip is probably what has brought me the large majority of my visitors, both loyal and one-off traffic hoppers. Differentiate yourself, do something different. Be daring, be random! Try something wild, or something completely unheard of, whether it’s outrageous, or greatly beneficial to the reader. Sometimes, even beneficial to the writer! (http://www.techzi.net/donations/) Mad things work out great sometimes, other times, they really can lower your reputation, so it’s time to take calculated risks here. My advice? Follow your instincts. Be an entrepreneur. Take that risk. Make it happen. Throw a competition (http://www.techzi.net/competition/), for all the good it will do. Stand out and be different. Darren will sure know what I mean by that…

CityWall is a large multi-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the everchanging media landscape of the city. The new interface launched in October 2008 also allows working with 3D objects, which enables multiple content and multiple timelines.

CityWall presents images, videos, descriptions and discussions on how nature in Helsinki benefits and disturbs dwellers. A single tree, for instance, can be both a useful physical shelter, an appreciated element in the urban landscape, a source for an irritating pollinosis and a danger for traffic. Many of the changes in the benefits and nuisances of nature are, at least partly, dependent on human activities. The settling of rabbits as permanent residents to Helsinki, for instance, follows partly from global warming that allows released pet rabbits to survive winters in urban green areas. To participate in this discussion, visit CityWall Flickr page and add comments there. You can add images to this discussion by attaching tags "cwnicehki" for nice things and "cwnuishki" for things that are nuisance in Flickr (additionally put tag "cwhkirabbits" if the photo includes rabbits!). You will need to establish your own Flickr account for this (this is a free service).

the "LHC Grid,

"This is the next step after the Web," says David Colling, a scientist at Britain's Imperial College, which is contributing to the Grid. "Except that unlike the Web, you're sharing computing power and not files."

the experience of collaborating on such a large computing project has proved invaluable,

When faced with the choice of learning new technology and chatting to colleagues on the phone and email to get a job done, if it can be done with what they already know they will go with that; Collaboration tools work best when your collaborators are geographically distributed and in other time zones and I wonder how many teams have that as a situation? Sure, globalisation is spreading and small, nimble operators are connecting using these tools, but how many large corporations are active users? I know IBM is and I would imagine technology firms would be at the vanguard. I was surprised however when PriceWaterhouseCoopers consultants arrived in IBM because there were unfamiliar with collaboration tools and disinterested in using them. It works best when all the collaborators are equally enthusiastic and capable in using the tool. It just takes a handful of influential members of a team to stop using the tool for the tool to be abandoned. The majority of people in organisations are baby boomers (I'm not sure this is true) and haven't been brought up in environment using collaboration tools. I was in a pub the other day meeting our complexity group and I overheard a small group of people in their 20s and 30s talking about the MySpace interactions. These people already know how to use the tools and will expect them in the workplace.

Work organizations increasingly adopt shared electronic databases. However, employees' unwillingness to contribute to shared resources undermines the utility of such technologies. Current research is limited to either a utilitarian or normative perspective. To advance understanding in this area, this study proposes a three-dimensional framework. It includes the utilitarian and normative perspectives as two complementary dimensions in addition to a third collaborative dimension. Based on this framework, the study identifies three key organizational processes and advances an additive model to predict employees' willingness to contribute to shared electronic databases. An empirical test was conducted to assess the model in a large manufacturing organization. The test showed both significant overall effects of the model and significant main effects of each predictor variable. The article will discuss the findings and address both theoretical and practical implications. Key Words: information sharing • collective action • organizational knowledge • knowledge management • collaboration • communities of practice • identification

But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice.

I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.

Some of them provide a ranking of most popularly bookmark pages of the moment. I use this ranking function without bothering with the tagging part of sites.

Enabling Virtual Organizations

EVO, developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology

desktop sharing