The Orange Chair

Steward Mader of Wikipatterns.com asks, Do you spend too much time in meetings and answering email? He shares his story:

It’s equally amazing that with a wiki, I can work with my mates in Australia, colleagues in Europe, and collaborators in the US - all without trading tons of emails and spending hours in meetings. Instead, I email only when necessary (say, to let someone know the address of a wiki space or page I’ve set up for a project). When we do have a meeting, it’s short and focused on discussing something that truly needs to be discussed in person, rather than a long series of updates that people can just as well get by watching the wiki pages where we’re collaborating.

We have a team wiki which we use for organizing the opportunities we’re exploring and keeping track of the things we’ve accomplished. The wiki is very helpful for our weekly update meetings. Before the meeting, we update the list to reflect what we’ve done and what we plan to do. This makes it easy for our manager to keep up with our progress and ensures that all the important points get covered during a short meeting. There are more ways to use a wiki to reduce e-mail and maximize the value of meeting time, and I’m looking forward to trying them out with my team.

How about you? Do you spend too much time in meetings and answering e-mail?

A comment I hear often every time I talk about Web 2.0 is: “Man, I hate that term”. I confess I didn’t like it much either when I first heard it a few years ago. Roo Reynolds had a nice short presentation posted inside IBM where he listed how 3 prominent IT personalities viewed the term Web 2.0. Here are some highlights:

Tim Bray, co-founder of Open Text and Director of Web Technologies at Sun, used to hate it:

I just wanted to say how much I’ve come to dislike this “Web 2.0” faux-meme.
It’s not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right.

Paul Graham, Lisp programmer, venture capitalist and essayist, was not a big fan of the term, but not as radical as Tim:

[The term "Web 2.0"] seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new—that it didn’t predict anything.

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and the person who popularized the term, had a good point though:

There might be a better name (I tried “internet operating system” on for size starting back in 2000), but the fact that Web 2.0 has caught on says that it’s as good a term as any.

Once you go through the seven Web 2.0 principles delineated by O’Reilly in his seminal article “What Is Web 2.0″, it’s hard to keep arguing that the term means nothing. There’s certainly a logical thread - or “gravitational core”, to use his words - that tie together the sites and services that we typically refer as web-two-oh-y. What I typically find is that people dislike the “2.0″ part of the name or the fact that a really comprehensive description of it almost requires you to list the seven O’Reilly principles, like the so-called “compact definition” in his website:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Not very compact to me, especially if compared to the one that James Snell (another IBMer) uses for his developerWorks blog name:

chmod 777 web

This is not a problem exclusive to Web 2.0: concepts such as Semantic
Web, Ontology and Net Neutrality also require some elaboration and
getting used to. Alternate names like Social Web or Participatory Web are theoretically more precise, but not as catchy as Web 2.0.

The way I personally came to terms with using Web 2.0 to define the “thing” that happened with the Web in the last few years is: I stopped seeing “2.0″ as a number. To me, “2.0″ basically means anything using the architecture of participation that’s behind the Google search, Zoho web apps, Amazon’s reviews, Facebook’s platform, blogs, wikis, podcasts and all the other animals in the Web 2.0 zoo. That’s where the 2.0 offspring terms - Management 2.0, Identity 2.0, Banking 2.0, Governance 2.0, Mobile 2.0 - are feeding from.

You can always argue that DB2 is also a bad name, but nobody sees that “2″ as a sequential number anymore. No one asks “when is DB3 coming out?”, but I hear the question “what is Web 3.0 going to be about?” all the time. I don’t actually believe anything will be widely called Web 3.0 or 4.0.

Web 2.0 can be seen as the French Revolution of the web: you don’t have kings and queens telling you what is right and wrong anymore. Eventually, as most sites and web-based services capitulate from their ivory-tower, top-down approaches to a more collaborative and inclusive model, Web 2.0 will gradually be diluted and will lose its meaning and appeal, the same way it happened to e-Business.

A few years from now, we’ll see Web 2.0 more like a movement, similar to the wave of Atlantic Revolutions that started in the late 18th century and to the counter-culture and mini social revolution from the sixties. Minus the guillotines, the long hair and the VW vans, of course.

In “Why Facebook and MySpace Won’t Change the Marketplace,” Tom Davenport argues that although consumers are gaining power through the use of Internet-based social technologies, there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding trend towards empowering employees. He writes:

But are there analogous trends within companies? I don’t see them. Since employers pay employees, that gives them a certain power to start with. And while employees may trust other employees more than their senior management bosses, they are usually reluctant to say so publicly. Employees don’t even fully control the content in their own emails (with widespread email surveillance and those embarrassing brand signatures many employees are forced to use), much less the overall messages that their companies send out into the world. In general, I wouldn’t say the power held by employees has increased much in recent times, and with the decline of unions, the rise of the imperial CEO, etc., it would be easier to argue the opposite position.

It’s interesting to compare that with my experience with IBM. I’m new to the company, having officially started last October 15, but in a sense I’ve been there for almost two years because I did my master’s research with the IBM Toronto Center for Advanced Studies. Intranet blogs and bookmarks helped me connect with people around the world at different levels in the organization chart. So far, my experiences with IBM have made me feel that we do exercise trust and personal responsibility in intranet social computing, and that these tools help us build those relationships with people we might not have met without a serendipitous connection through social computing.

Is this universal? No, but I think it’s a good thing that social computing triggers us to ask questions about organizational culture and openness. There needs to be that fundamental trust that employees won’t misuse these virtual watercoolers, and an orientation towards collaboration that acknowledges contributions from all over the company. Will Facebook, MySpace, and other social computing tools change a workplace where control is everything? Probably not. Early adopters of these tools might be fired as fast as they are found. In an organization characterized by openness and trust, though, social computing can help people connect and do amazing things.

Intranet social computing tools aren’t about controlling the conversation, but about enriching it with information simply not available on the Internet. Intranet social computing also helps create a place where people who are new to social computing might feel safer about trying it out and talking about non-confidential matters. Random encounters in social computing often turn into productive collaborations because of shared organizational goals and resources.  Enterprise social computing goes far beyond just allowing employees to access consumer tools such as Facebook. How far? Let’s find out!

Via Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist’s del.icio.us bookmarks

If you read this IBM article on “getting into” social software, you’ll find my story. I’ve graduated and joined IBM since then, and now I’m even more passionate about social computing than I was before. I see the benefits around me all the time: the connections I make, the conversations I have, the interesting tasks I get to work on… Wow.

Wouldn’t you love to be able to say that about your company? =)

When Aaron Kim and Bernie Michalik briefed me about the Emerging Technologies team (part of Application Development Innovation, Application Services, Global Business Services, IBM), they told me about the cool presentations they gave to our clients… and how strange it was to not end a Web 2.0 presentation with a link to a blog. We all blog within IBM, of course, but that’s behind the firewall. So now we’re starting an external blog to make it easier to keep in touch with people and to share some of the cool ideas we come across in IBM. Our job is to help companies figure out how to make the most of emerging technologies, and it’s a pretty exciting time to do so.

The usual disclaimer applies: we don’t speak for IBM, etc. =) I think this is a good thing, because it would be difficult for me to speak in business-ese in a blog post. That would just be odd. Instead, take this blog as a collection of different perspectives. Let me introduce the team so that you have an idea of where we’re coming from.
- Sacha Chua

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Aaron Kim is a Solution Architect and Web 2.0 Evangelist. He has worked with a broad range of enterprises to design, implement and manage complex web infrastructures and applications. His industry experience includes banking, insurance, retail, utilities and healthcare. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of São Paulo and an MBA degree from the Rotman School of Business (University of Toronto). Aaron co-chairs the IBM Web 2.0 for Business community, with more than 700 members worldwide. He has given numerous presentations on Web 2.0, Social Computing and Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasting, and has helped clients in Canada, US, Spain, UK and Turkey bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise.

Bernie Michalik is a senior IT architect who works at the Centre for IBM e-business Innovation, Toronto. Bernie is responsible for designing e-business solutions and making sure they perform well. With twenty-two years’ experience in designing, creating, and implementing complex IT solutions, Bernie Michalik has performed in a wide variety of roles, from leading large teams in the creation of large-scale infrastructures to individually developing custom software for global clients. Twitter - Blog -

Sacha Chua is a technology evangelist. She loves exploring emerging technologies that can help people connect, collaborate, and be more productive. Her master’s thesis at the University of Toronto involved expertise location with enterprise social computing in a large organization. She has given numerous presentations on various topics including Web 2.0, open source, and Emacs, and has written articles on productivity, open source, and other social/technical topics. Twitter - Blog -

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We look forward to getting to know you too!