Collaboration

Are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert raping the mind of America or are they impregnating them with a chance of rebirthing intelligence?

Here are the three mistakes that cripple brainstorming. No trained facilitator. One of the key tenets of Osborn's approach is assigning a trained facilitator to guide the sessions. But most corporate brainstorming is led by someone who has little understanding of the process or by a manager who has a vested interest in the outcome. "People are uncomfortable sharing wild ideas in front of their boss,"

"Some of the best brainstorming sessions I've been involved in asked me to send my ideas via e-mail before we came together," Wilson says.

Social network sites are the latest generation of ‘mediated publics’ - environments where people can gather publicly through mediating technology.

Persistence. What you say sticks around.

Searchability.

While the for: tag is well known among delicious users (and specifically supported by delicious), some delicious users use the via: tag to track who provided a link. That allows people browsing your links to know who else they might want to add to their network on del.icio.us. Ric Hayman of Aqualung proposes that this could form the basis for a reputation economy online.

let's look a little deeper into the divide between the free thinking liberals, the traditionalist conservatives and the fascist Neocons. Name-calling, yes, unfair, no... by any definition held to a standard of actions over words.

Kompoz is a social workspace for musicians. Use it to compose new music with other artists around the world. Got an idea for a song? Record a track. Upload it. Then invite others to add drums, bass, vocals or anything else!

GroupDrive Collaboration Suite GroupDrive is a business-class file and document collaboration product. Businesses can use GroupDrive to securely collaborate over the Internet without the inherent problems of emailing attachments. Because your files are stored in a central location, users always have the most current version of a document. The GroupDrive Server provides secure file storage and backup for your important business files and documents. With easy file sharing and real-time document collaboration, GroupDrive gives your team a secure private business network that lets you work at the speed of business. The GroupDrive Collaboration Suite consists of 3 components: GroupDrive Server - a secure WebDAV server for storing and collaborating on files. GroupDrive uses WebDAV over SSL. GroupDrive Client - Virtual drive connection to the GroupDrive server enables users access and save files from within any Windows application. GroupDrive Web Interface - A simple and intuitive interface that allows users to store and collaborate on documents from any machine with a web browser and Internet access.

Two European companies show how the collaborative practice spreads from early adopters of wikis at work to become mainstream business tools

Wiki Etiquette

Build structure:

Take it personally: Yes, colleagues will edit your work and you might not agree with every change, but that's the nature of collaboration. It doesn't mean that your co-workers dislike you or think you're stupid. Ignore questions: Colleagues may disagree with your changes and ask why you made them. If so, be prepared to give concrete reasons for your edits. Delete useful content: Many times a posting can be improved by amending or editing it, but deleting content upsets people, and they may feel they've wasted their time. Be chatty: A wiki shouldn't be used as a chat room. Any discussions related to a wiki subject should take place on the discussion or talk page, not on the actual content page. Keep it secret: If you find valuable content on your company's wiki, tell others about it. Wikis benefit from a wide range of contributors.

The following tips come from research into virtual teamwork. Hold an initial face-to-face startup Have periodic face-to-face meetings, especially to resolve conflict and maintain team cohesiveness Establish a clear code of conduct or set of norms and protocols for behavior Recognize and reward performance Use visuals in communications Recognize that most communications will be non-verbal -- use caution in tone and language

Quick Human Answers

Friendsourcing- Last Tuesday, I asked about a web designer for a project. I got back 14 emails in 10 minutes from different sources on Twitter.

Direct People to Good Causes- I’ve seen plenty of posts of someone doing a walk for hunger or a collection for diabetes.

It’s instant messaging with a group. You post a short message via IM, web or other utility (see below) and other Twitterers who are “following” you will see your message. Some have called Twitter a form of microblogging

You can add your friends cell phone numbers by sending an IM to the twitter@twitter.com contact and typing: add CELLNUMBER (where CELLNUMBER is their number)

you might only want to get particular types of news pushed at you

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.  In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0. This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise.  Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube.  And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.    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.  Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries.  Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.

it doesn't help us understand if Web 2.0 concepts like crowdsourcing actually work well in the enterprise.  For one thing, instead of recruiting people who have previously had no relationship with you and cost-effectively aggregating their time together to create large levels of new output, employers have a zero-sum game with Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

the best that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications like blogs and wikis can do it increase the productivity of existing business processes by improving efficiency as well as allowing them to self-improve through emergent structure and behavior.

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.

The 2.0 phenomena isn't replacing the office - it's just making it more productive. Whether you call it Office 2.0 or Office 3.0, a new generation of productivity tools is reinvigorating the way we work, and more importantly, the way we work together.