eLearning is a Natural for Social Networking

eLearning is a natural for social networking but in any social network the path to success is not straight. Different kinds of feedback create a dynamic environment to raise the participation level.

Article sponsored by
Eedo Global Learning Services

David Shaw © 2009

eLearning is a natural for social networking but in any social network the path to success is not straight. Many organizations are implementing social networking in the blind hope that the network effect will kick in to drive up registrations; and then self-organization and collaboration, a feature of crowd-sourcing, will take care of the rest.

As if.

In general, the direct benefit of the network effect accrues to the owner of the network, not to the individual players. Small networks are different. A project wiki, for example, is owned by the project team, and the benefits of collaboration using the network accrue to the team. The team is the de facto owner of the network.

Larger networks are more complex. People join FaceBook en mass because the network effect has made it a social destination. It’s the place to be. But this didn’t just happen. FaceBook has context. FaceBook also has features that made it an attractor initially, and provided a continuing utility to users so that it has a good retention rate. However, the value of 250 million users accrues to FaceBook – it sells eyeballs to advertisers. (Nielsen Research says FaceBook has a 70% retention rate.)
Wikipedia is a different model. A small sub-network of active writers and editors create expert content for the benefit of the many. It’s an open-source publishing model.

LinkedIn, like FaceBook and MySpace, can connect you to friends (second tier) of your friends (first tier) and so on. But this has small value unless you “work your network” like the PowerBook woman in Starbucks working her Tweet Deck. This is so Social 1.0.

Jiggin’ for cod is a great past-time, but deep trawling with a bottom net is more profitable. But even with a deep net the fish still have to be sorted. Social 2.0 should jig automagically for you in the deep trawl by giving you significant feedback.

A large social network has to provide feedback on multiple dimensions so that you’re on the clue train. The dimensions must be ones that you value. And, again, the feedback has to be automated. This feedback amplifies the signal or signals that relate to you and your objectives. The rest is noise.

Without some means of detecting signals you will drown for days in the social swamp. If you have 100 friends in your network, and they each have 100, there will be 10,000 in your second level and so on. Nobody can manually work a network of 10,100 people so people typically join groups and try to work the groups. The effort to do this can be reduced if the system provides feedback to amplify the signal you want.
But how do you do this?

This series has explored social networking from different perspectives because there is no single design pattern. Previously in Engaging Citizens through Social Networking we showed how a public-policy issues-agenda site would work; and a future article will show how to apply social networking to a night club.

This article uses eLearning as a viewpoint to show how you might amplify a signal.

We will start with the light framework for mapping business objectives to social networking described in the previous article, The Secret Sauce of Social Success. Other relevant articles are:

• Developing Governance for Wikis, gives principles applicable to any type of social network.
• Taxonomies and their Cousins are Important , describes the importance of some kind of faceted taxonomy for navigation.

Engagement Strategy

The next step is to develop a strategy. This is the hard part. You can’t just buy a socially adept eLearning application and expect it to self-organize. Your strategy must be a synthesis of your business objectives, business culture, market and technology. If the strategy isn’t aligned, it may simply fragment your message. This is worse than doing nothing.

Two examples of eLearning engagement strategies are given here. The first one keeps it simple and small-scale. It assumes your market is internal. Essentially it’s a variant of an intranet. Note that there is no direct engagement with student prospects in the external marketplace. If your market is really external, an internally facing strategy such as this one will deliver limited marketing benefits. It can, of course, deliver other important benefits internally.

An internally focused strategy

A different strategy is required to engage both internally and externally. One approach that would suit some eLearning environments is to leverage an existing social destination such as FaceBook or LinkedIn. This is feasible. We can do it with either the FaceBook Connect or the LinkedIn OpenSocial application-programming interfaces. The next step is to develop some measurable objectives.

An externally focused strategy

Objectives

Every human activity has a social dimension. It’s the nature of the beast. Similarly, every software application has a social dimension. Some applications have a high-value social dimension, while others have a low one. But these dimensions are often dynamic and always contextual. A book-keeping application, for example, has a generally low-value social dimension. But it has a high one in the context of trying to get your travel expenses paid.

The purpose in incorporating social software in any application is to increase the participation level along some social dimension that maps well to a business objective.

Here are some objectives that could be considered for an eLearning application:

• Increase rate of success
• Reduce time to completion
• Increase take-up of courses
• Increase satisfaction with the process
• Get feedback to improve courses
• Develop courses collaboratively
• Contribute to team building
• Identify requirements for new courses

We say “some objectives” because one strong characteristic of a social network is that it can have outcomes that are not predicted. Social activity is an ongoing and ever-changing conversation, so the feedback changes dynamically.

The next steps in our framework map (a) objectives to functions and then (b) to Web 2.0 tools. But because we want to show how to amplify signals, we will instead use an information architecture.

Information Architecture

The below figure shows one view of a possible information architecture that integrates with FaceBook. Some functions like messaging have not been shown. Most components are optional with configurable access. The main ones are:

• Courses that students can elect. May be part of a curriculum. This is probably one facet of the navigational taxonomy.
• Blogs that instructors and students can write, either in general or about a course.
• Groups, typically a general group for the course led by the instructor and integrated with a group on FaceBook, and study groups set up by students.
• Pages that instructors and students can compose.
• Newsfeed reporting an individual’s activities in the portal.
• Friends to which individuals have linked.
• Notifications that individuals have elected to receive. These are delivered in several direct (email) and indirect ways (FaceBook notification, and maybe RSS or Twitter).
• Recommendations in which the system suggests connections that should have value for a specific individual.
• Synchronization with FaceBook (including single-sign-on).

Example of an eLearning information architecture

Feedback is provided in several ways. Out of the box most social applications give general feedback in the form of notifications of the most recent blog post, page, file, member sign-up and so forth. This is like a high-pass filter that scrapes the world to show you just the most recent mountain tops.

Personalized feedback is given through an individual’s newsfeed, which is shared with friends; and notifications of new and revised content in subscribed blogs, pages, groups, etc.

The FaceBook integration provides single-sign-on with FaceBook and our eLearning platform; synchronizes the course group with a members-only FaceBook group; and synchronizes a student’s profile, friends and activities between the two platforms. Note that this SSO is optional. Students can also log-on directly using the authentication service of the eLearning platform.

As mentioned before, you could do this with LinkedIn. We chose FaceBook for this example for several reasons. The strategic one is that if FaceBook introduces a professional category in its taxonomy, LinkedIn is dead overnight. At a recent and packed business seminar on LinkedIn the attendees overwhelmingly said, let’s talk about Twitter instead.

What is missing from most social applications is feedback about the activities down in the mountain valleys and on the social plain. To amplify these signals, we need some feedback filters.
For example, at the social level the system cannot know what the students are thinking about courses and related content It cannot know what they are saying to each other as represented by arrows in the strategy diagrams above. But these thoughts and convos lead to actions (e.g., subscribe to blog “A”) that are noted by the system and input back into the filters.

The more students, in a course, who subscribe to blog “A”, the greater the value of its social dimension in the context of the course. Its signal is being amplified. It may or may not be amplified in another context.

Connections

We need dynamic filters to amplify signals of interest.

These feedback filters should be designed to correspond to your business objectives. Most are based on an analysis of profiles attached to people, courses, blogs, page, groups and any other significant object. To give you an idea, two filters are shown below. Note these are just examples for illustration and are not meant to be definitive designs.

The first is a filter to suggest candidates that a student might want to connect with as a friend. A simple slot filter would just process the profiles of all students and look for matches. We could add a small amount of feedback and give matches a higher ranking based on friends in common, if any.
But this is still like cod jiggin’. What if the system suggested students who:

• Have profiles that match yours
• Attend the same courses and are active in course and study groups
• Follow your blog or pages by electing to receive notifications
• Have friends in common with you

If you look back at the information architecture you will see that including courses gives the capability to also find friend-prospects based on common membership in a course or study group. Similarly, some students may have elected to be notified of changes in your blog or pages. We call these followers or fans; and this makes them candidates to be friends.

Now we have a filter that is making some value assessments for us, reducing the amount of line time we have to spend in working the network. Some of the value in the network effect is starting to accrue to users.

We might do the same with objects in the system such as blogs and pages. For example, there are blogs:

• Related to your course
• Written by your friends
• Related to other courses your friends take
• Followed by friends
• Followed by students whose profiles match yours
• That simply have a profile that interests you

With this blog filter, the system will suggest to students blogs that meet some or all of the above criteria. It’s a bit like case-based searching.

The consequence of these feedback mechanisms is that they increase the participation level across the entire network. This increase in social interactions produces benefits aligned to your business objectives and, frequently, unexpected benefits that can re-invent and re-invigorate an organization’s purpose.

The Secret Sauce of Social Success

A few notions for implementing a Web 2.0 framework in your organization.

David Shaw © 2009

Everybody’s getting social these days. “Gimme a wiki, no, not that blue one, give me a red one. Oh, and throw in a tweeter, too, they’re so cool. And a Friends tab! We’ll put that on our web. My kids watch Friends!”

The next thing you know, Newsweek magazine is asking readers for their views on Iran in no more than 140 characters; the City TV breakfast host in Toronto is wittering about his race with the mayor to see who has the most followers; the web site about undies wants to know your closest friends; the premier of Ontario bans FaceBook because, well, he knows better than 250 million people; police are in schools warning parents about FaceBook and MySpace; the corporate IT folks are freaking about security; and senior management is trying to preserve command-and-control.

At least the TV host is living it.

The short story is if you’re not using these tools, you won’t understand them. The longer story is that most organizations implement them in ways that give rise to a lot of noise and very little signal. This is not so unusual. We tend to first use new technologies to do old and familiar things. This is unfortunate because social networking has the capability to transform organizations so they can meet the challenges rising from a transformation in the marketplace that is light speed ahead of most organizations. Those that don’t catch up will face a sudden disconnect from their market.

Here is an outline of one approach:

• 
  
  Collaboration in Web 2.0
  
• 
  
  Develop a strategy to engage
  
• 
  
  Develop objectives
  
• 
  
  Map objectives to functions
  
• 
  
  Map functions to Web 2.0 tools
  
• 
  
  Make connections

Collaboration in Web 2.0

Web 2.0 has many faces, and even more interpretations. Nobody really understands what it means, where it is going or what will be the future outcomes.

But fundamentally Web 2.0 is about collaboration. However, there are so many tools that can be used in different ways that it is hard to develop a productive strategy and even harder to predict the future. If you’re lucky your organization will adopt a strategy for information management that will integrate Web 2.0 with existing tools such as document- and records-management, and map them to business processes and service models.

If you’re unlucky, you will end up with new islands of technology and information, in the way that PC hard drives have become the repository of the most current data, and email has become the repository of many corporate decisions. The figure below is a high-level view of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, showing how to apply it in an obvious and low-risk manner. This architecture was deliberately designed to show you how to introduce the tools in ways that provide benefits without requiring a wholesale change in corporate culture.

But as shown below other strategies of engagement should deliver greater benefits, and at the same time meet the challenges of a socially networked marketplace.

Applying Web 2.0 in the enterprise

Develop a Strategy to Engage

To develop a unique strategy for your unique organization you should synthesize your understanding of the needs of the organization and your understanding of Web 2.0. This is why it is important that you use the tools. But ideally the tools are not used in isolation, in the way that word-processing is isolated from email. Collaboration requires that the tools be integrated, easy to use, and part of the daily process.

Two examples are given below.

In the first example, the goal is to drive volume by connecting supply to demand, using amplification of word of mouth. This drives customer sentiment in a positive direction. This is a principle that can be generalized across all social-networking applications.

The example depicts an organization that has integrated certain aspects of its intranet with an extranet for customer access. Typically, this would be used for managing joint projects. The intranet is internal, behind a firewall. The extranet exposes part of the intranet to customers, subject to security mechanisms and access controls. The web portal is the public-face of the organization.

In a sense, these are different views of a single collaborative platform. For example, a blog published by an expert within the organization would be accessible on the intranet, extranet and web portal. You don’t want to force people to have to go and find something, or to stumble on it by chance.

The outcome is some desired objective or set of objectives. The outcome shown below is “Market Buzz” but you could have more concrete outcomes like products sold, members registered, issues identified and closed, and so forth.

Engaging customers and prospects in a community

However, these activities are driven dynamically by a wide range of possible connections. The nature of the outcome can not be predicted. For example, you may discover that the issues you thought were important are not shared by the crowd, or that your market opportunities are in a different area than you planned.

Shown above are social connections because social conversations dominate all human activities. Although in some cases we can seek to guide these conversations in some constructive way, they are essentially unpredictable. Some examples of connections are given further below.

The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 1.0 was largely a solitary experience. We each trolled the web, and perhaps sent a link to a few friends. We couldn’t easily find like-minded people around the world and engage with them.Web 2.0 gave us the tools to engage the world in conversation by establishing and/or joining communities of interest.

These connections between people are both static and dynamic. We all have regular friends, workplace friends and occasional friends. We engage in conversations that are constantly evolving. Thus, in a digital social network our possible connections with people and their interests and objects evolve dynamically. Feedback about those connections can be used to drive the social network to produce business outcomes.

The next example shows how a different type of organization, perhaps a nightclub, would use a different strategy. This strategy leverages an existing social destination, such as FaceBook or MySpace, and synchronizes content between the social network and the web site. Existing promotional networks, such as “Things to do in My City”, would provide further amplification. A communications plan for special events could provide the basic grist for conversation and amplification.

Leveraging FaceBook and existing promotional networks

Develop the Objectives

At a more granular level are the statements of objectives describing the specific planned results of your Web 2.0 strategy and what it is you are trying to achieve. When you write an objective, remember the SMART acronym: Each objective should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time bound. The objectives state the meat of what the strategy is trying to achieve. When the project to implement the strategy is complete, you need to be able to show that the objectives have all been satisfied. At times, you may have only a vague idea of the goals and objectives but struggle with trying to determine the best way to express them.

Map the Objectives to Functions

When you have identified the objectives, use a spreadsheet to map these to specific functions. A few examples of functions are shown in the below figure. This is another reason why it is important to have experience with Web 2.0 tools. Without such experience, you won’t be able to do this mapping.

Map objectives to functions

Map the Functions to Web 2.0 Tools

The next step is to map the various functions to a Web 2.0 tool. Several tools are shown in the below figure but there are numerous others that you should include in a spreadsheet. As you do this exercise, you will have to weigh the value of each function and tool, examine trade-offs, and set an achievable scope. You don’t need to implement every tool to have success.

Map functions to Web 2.0 tools

Experience has shown that the below technical criteria are critical success factors. One of them, pattern matching, will be discussed further.

• Templates


• Ease of use


• Single sign-on


• Workflow integration


• Access
  
  
  
  • System tray
  
  
  • Portal gadget
  
  
  • Desktop gadget


• Security
  
  
  
  • Profiles, ACL, content/document classification


• Unified communications
  
  
  
  • Including notifications


• Tagging


• Federated search


• Topic clouds


• Making connections (pattern matching)

Of these technical criteria, four are extremely important and might be called the secret sauce in successful social networking:

• Making connections for feedback
• Linking for navigation
• Generating topic clouds for browsing
• Federated search to find stuff across several types of applications

This article only deals further with filters to make connections. Linking was discussed in Taxonomies & Their Cousins are Important.

Make Connections

In a small world it is easy to strike up conversations and, in a reasonable time, make connections with folks having somewhat similar interests. Thus, we might end up belonging to several communities of interest or practice.

In a larger world, even one as small as our enterprise, it is difficult to make connections outside our work group or department. Social networking software makes these connections on many criteria and presents them to us so we can make choices and decide which connections are relevant or otherwise important.

Put another way, to participate in a large social group people need to know what is going on. Suggesting connections is a form of feedback about activities and decisions being made in the group. Obviously this feedback has to relate to the objectives discussed earlier.

Making connections to provide feedback

The figure above shows the basic feedback mechanism. In any area of concern, whether it's interests, issues, objectives, product sales or whatever, there will be the current hot hits everyone is buzzing about, and a long tail of lesser subjects. By getting views on the hits, and using pattern matching to suggest some other subjects in the tail that might be of interest, a dynamic feedback mechanism is created. It has the effect of increasing interest or participation across the entire spectrum. But be aware in your filter design that positive feedback is self-reinforcing and can create a herd mentality.

Feedback increases the participation level

The below figure shows how a simple filter might work to suggest people you might consider as online “friends”. Like the promise in eHarmony, it matches people based on similar profiles. Here, it has suggested a connection established between Person-A and Person-B based on their similar profiles dhfnthfh.

However, there are many possible types of profiles. They can be demographic, purchases made, shared issues, common expertise or whatever else is important to the objectives of your social network. Multiple profiles can be weighted and combined in different ways to increase the participation level and produce direct measurable benefits.

Making connections

Selecting the right profiles and designing the right pattern-matching feedback filters is absolutely crucial in the success of your social-networking application. The resulting collaborations will drive your organization dynamically, much as conversations are now driving your market.

Taxonomies and their Cousins are Important

Understanding several models of organizing information will help in developing classification schemes.

David Shaw © 2009

It’s cruel when you discover a taxonomy for a wiki isn’t working to your satisfaction. Generally it’s easy to develop categories for a small project, but this one was for the deconstruction of a boat. Like many other real-life large objects, boats, MRIs, cars, airplanes and even IT projects cannot be categorized by decimal library systems.

In this case I started with the numerical taxonomy defined by S1000D, an international standard for airplanes, boats and vehicles. I adapted it based on experience from a project at the Coastguard, then three experts reviewed it and gave a thumbs-up.

The taxonomy has over 400 starter nodes. Around the creation of node 200 I began to feel “This isn’t right. It’s not how people think.”

This was a body blow. MediaWiki, the base of this project, doesn’t allow renaming categories in any easy way. The solution was to engage in a displacement activity like raiding the fridge. Instead, I wrote this blog to help you understand why taxonomies are important.

The Problem

S1000D uses a numerical classification scheme. The idea is that if you know the reference for engine repairs, then it doesn’t matter which aircraft is on the ramp for repairs because the information in its manual will be under the standard reference number. Even if it’s a car on the ramp for repairs, its engine information will be under the same reference number as in the aircraft manual.

Many taxonomies, library systems, record-management (RM) systems and even accounting systems use numerical taxonomies. Shown below is an extract from the standard Government of Canada scheme.

Numerical classifications are best left to witch doctors

The advantage of numerical schemes is that they allow a simple standard breakdown of information. For example, general information about taxes is 1008.100 and likewise, general information about marketing is 5006.100.

But the problem with numerical taxonomies is that they are inaccessible by mere mortals. It requires a trained RM witch doctor to tell you how to classify a document, and then how to find it a year later. The taxonomy becomes a black hole, probably of less use than the jumble on your hard drive.

Knowing this I converted the S1000D numerical model to a natural-language model. In other words, plain English. But one of the problems encountered was this:

 Boat Type
    Boat Type.Sailboat             
           Boat Type.Sailboat.Sloop
           Boat Type.Sailboat.Yawl
    Boat Type.Trawler

This was logical in a numerical topic.subtopic.subtopic scheme but in plain language it was better as:

 Boat Type
    Sailboat
       Sloop
       Yawl
   Trawler

Also,

    Maintenance
          Maintenance.Suppliers
         Maintenance.Suppliers.Equipment

Was better as an entirely different construct:

 Maintenance
Suppliers
Equipment Suppliers

And

 Operations
Operations.Harbour
     Operations.Mooring

Was better as:

 Operations
Harbour Operations
Mooring Operations

As you can see, a numerical model that allows an expert to know the topic and level of subtopic doesn’t translate easily to plain English. The danger with this revision is that I might encounter namespace clashes that I wouldn’t have with the original strongly typed names.

So, why bother with this, why not just put it into a wiki? Well, it’s not that simple. Even wikis need some kind of classification framework.

Let’s review some of the basics.

Namespaces

Taxonomies are associated with namespaces. If you read the technical definition of namespaces, your head will probably start to hurt. Here’s a simple one. A table in a written report is in the document namespace. A wooden table in your kitchen is in the furniture namespace. So, a namespace identifies the domain or context for a given vocabulary or set of terms.

Many namespaces are formalized. If you look at the source of an html page and see dc:publisher in the header, it simply means that the term publisher as used there is the one defined by the folks who developed the Dublin Core (dc) set of definitions.

Similarly, in MediaWiki a page name that starts with Category: denotes that the page is in the category namespace.

Without going into deep detail, you will recognize that this is similar to the example with an office document having multiple relationships.

But there are other possible knowledge representations.

Wheel of Wheels

Years ago on a project with thousands of nodes we experimented with a wheel of wheels. The goal was to let users navigate while always knowing what content was to the left and right of them, and also up and down.

Wheel of wheels for navigating nodespace

In the example in the figure, a user would start at 1.0. She could then navigate from 1.0 to either 2.0 or 3.0. If she went to 2.0, she could navigate to 2.2 through one of three paths. The node at 2.2 is also part of a sub-wheel with its own paths of navigation.

This example wheel represents the simple taxonomy shown in the figure left-below. The same figure on the right also shows all the possible navigational paths for one section. You could also adapt this to a navigational scheme for a set of web pages, using nested drop-down menus and hyperlinks for both the inter-links and back-links. But this would give you just one organizational scheme for the content, and people often come at content with a different context in their mind, i.e., a different mindset or facet.

Wheel of wheels in a more familiar form (left) and its navigational scheme (right)

Taxonomies

Taxonomies are trees or hierarchies of classification much like filing cabinets. We’ve all been brought up to understand filing cabinets or their modern equivalent: the Windows folder structure. In a taxonomy, or in your Windows folders there’s only one place to put a file. Supposedly.

Just tell me where to put my file...

Back in the real world, a year has gone by, you now have 12,000 files on your hard drive, you have a new task, and you remember a document that would help you. But you can’t remember the thought process that caused you to file it…where? You can’t even remember the file name or the title. And you didn’t put any keywords in the properties because you didn’t know you might need it in the future, or what the context would be. So you try Windows advanced search but you can’t even remember words specific enough for Windows brain-dead search and it returns 1200 hits including spreadsheets.

More than 50 hits is too many for you to process. Less than 20 means you might have missed the file you’re looking for.

Then you learn some simple tricks. Your organization doesn’t have a user-friendly document-management system, or if it does you don’t have permission to set up categories so you start using MSDOS-type file names to denote versions of a document: name_v1_2009-05-12.doc. You even create an archive folder to simplify housekeeping.

You make sure you email copies to co-workers, so you have backups. You start to put copies of the file into different folders because it has more than one context, and you want to be able to find it again in the distant future. Then somebody asks, “Who sent a copy to the customer, and does anyone know what version it was?”

That’s because your document really has relationships similar to this one:

Documents usually have many relationships

Relational Models

Hierarchical databases soon ran into the same sorts of classification problems, and so the relational database model was invented. Let’s use a simple example using a recipe for Coq au Vin. When you first started collecting recipes it was good enough to put this chicken recipe on an index card or copy-paste it into an OpenOffice or Word document.

As your collection of recipes grew, you started thinking about different ways of classifying them. One way would be to put them into a relational database that had a few classification tables such as shown here:

A relational database uses linked tables to establish relationships

Faceted Taxonomies

As folks began to realize that information has many facets, web designers developed faceted taxonomies. These have become very common.

Below is an example of a web site that categorizes recipes by Meal Type, Food Type (meat, vegetable, etc.) and Cuisine. Each of these categories is a facet. In the case of the Meal Type, it has been exposed at its second level, to reduce mouse clicks and simplify navigation. Food Type and Cuisine could be expandable menus.

Faceted taxonomies provide several navigational entry points

Thus, Coq au Vin could be found as:

• Its name in the index.
• A dinner meal.
• A chicken recipe.
• French cuisine.

Network (Wiki) Models

Wikis use a network model of organization. A network has no discernible root; although you might nominate one or more to serve as facets or entry points. The below figure shows our Coq au Vin recipe. Note that it is the only topic in our network. All the other nodes are either categories or subcategories.

A network has no root

Basically, this network says Coq au Vin is:

• A recipe
• French cuisine
• A chicken dish
• Suitable for a dinner meal

In MediaWiki or Wikka, as an example, at the bottom of the page we would put:

[[Category:Recipes]]
[[Category:FrenchCuisine]]
[[Category:Chicken]]
[[Category:Dinner]]

Also, Category:Dinner could readily be subdivided into Category:Appetizer, Category:Entrée and Category:Dessert.

Folksonomies & Ontologies

Are best left for another day....

Developing Governance for Wikis

Trust is the most essential element in the success of a wiki on your intranet or extranet.

© 2009 David Shaw

Trust and transparency are absolutely necessary

Social networking applications like wikis, socialware, blogs and groups are sometimes implemented in the simple expectation that they will yield magical results. No thought is given to governance, and its role in driving success. Instead, social apps are driven by hype and expectations set by the fantastical growth numbers in public applications like FaceBook and Twitter, or the marketing around applications like SharePoint.

(Every organization with a SharePoint installation thinks it’s doing social networking. The reality is that if they have SharePoint they don’t have a clue about it: they most likely have a multitude of virtual webs that are defying unification in any sensible way.)

Let’s take blogs as an example of hype. Reading about blogs it’s tempting to think they are easy money spinners. The reality is that most blogs are never ever read, and those that are read need tens of thousands of hits per day to generate significant revenue.

Figuring out how to generate those hits is a big challenge, and this is no less true for your intranet or extranet wiki. Simply installing a wiki in the belief that it’s a better mousetrap won’t change anything. You might as well order a blue one or a yellow one, depending on your taste. Making a wiki work takes planning and effort. Self-organization, a key tenet of social networking, will only do so much.

To appreciate this, take a look at almost any group on FaceBook and figure out what are the tangible outcomes. Mind you, it’s not as bad as the narcissism in the wittering that goes on Twitter. Frankly it’s more interesting watching a pigeon toe-walk across an intersection. There’s more thought going on, and an identifiable context.

Governance Models

A successful wiki needs a governance model. There are three types of governance model:

• Prescriptive


• Descriptive


• Reflexive

A prescriptive governance model is rule driven. Usually the rules are proscriptions with severe consequences specified: “Thou shalt never do such and such…severe infraction…full force of…including dismissal.” This is the first preference of most bureaucracies. By nature bureaucracies are driven by fear, not trust, and thus not open to innovation or to re-inventing their purpose. All organizations seeking to survive in a constantly changing world must periodically re-invent themselves.

A descriptive governance model is interpretive. It is based on guidelines. The organization trusts that its employees are mature enough to understand the guidelines, and to interpret them from day to day. The interpretations are usually context-specific. Sometimes the employees may make mistakes, and this is critical. Mistakes must be accepted (fear must be driven out), but this is where many organizations start to fail.

For example, a magazine publisher once derived great pleasure by finding typographical errors when the presses rolled, and calling the editor to complain. Many employees working in similar environments become fearful of what the CEO might think, and self-censor. This defeats the purpose of social-networking tools like wikis.

Governance has to be internally consistent. For example, if it claims to be a participatory democracy then no aspects of governance or content should be excluded from discussion and decision. Administrators at any level cannot suddenly declare fiat.

A reflexive governance model does not rely on outside authority for legitimacy. Governance is managed by the members of the social network. This model is entirely dependent on self-organization. It is not suited to business or government because it cannot be aligned with corporate business objectives.

Similarly, a prescriptive model cannot be aligned with corporate business objectives. The rules become barriers to achieving the innovation that defines social networking. Simply, if you need to be prescriptive, don’t plan to implement social-networking tools except in very narrow task-oriented ways.

A descriptive model based on trust is the best way forward for most organizations.

Developing Trust

Governance has to be based on mutual trust. Trust is a two-way street. Show trust and you will receive trust. Many people think that trust must be earned; whereas trust relationships develop when you first extend trust, inviting the other parties to reciprocate.

As shown in the opening graph, the trust effect is vitally important in a social network. The more open an organization, the more the participation rate increases. If the degree of trust is too low, the participation rate doesn’t reach an inflection point and the wiki stagnates.

This is best illustrated with the issue of moderation. Most wikis can be set so that content can be moderated or not. This goes to the heart of the trust issue. Managers worry inordinately about “what if someone posts some terrible thing?” The knee-jerk response is to require that all content be scrutinized by a moderator before it is released publicly. This is the old Web 1.0 publishing model.

If you don’t want to be as open as Sun Microsystems (see below), there is a middle ground. Don’t censor content but let other users flag questionable content. Flagged content can then be hidden by the wiki application and referred to a moderator for review and re-publishing.

This lets the members of the wiki exercise a form of peer review independent of management.

Building Trust

In a descriptive governance model, the discussion is steered so that it has an outcome that is aligned with a business objective. In effect, when people know the objective they can (and will) self-organize. Trust is built by:

• Formalizing online deliberation


• Becoming a trusted venue for controversial discussions


• Being consistent

Be very focused. The narrower the purpose of a wiki, the more successful it will be. The obvious exception is a horizontal application like an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. Most wikis are vertical applications in a specific domain.

Structure collaboration so that it has momentum toward an identified outcome. People should know the answers to questions like “what are we trying to do” and “why are we doing this”. Synchronize the collaboration with phases of workflow, so that in a sense it is gated. Recognize that gating decisions do not require 100% knowledge.

Encourage consensus building and accurately reflect dissent & minority positions.

Sun Microsystems shows trust by being very open. It allows any employee to create a public blog. Sun has only three governance directives:

• Don’t do anything stupid


• Write about something you know about


• Make it interesting

NRCan also shows trust. Its wiki principles are:

• Collaborative work environment
  
• Free & open access


• Code of conduct


• No firm rules


• Guidelines & procedures

Developing Governance

So how do we develop governance? The starting point is to strike a governance committee consisting of key stakeholders. This committee’s first task is to develop a clear understanding of the purpose of the wiki. The purpose should be expressed as part of a written charter that establishes the scope of the wiki.
Some of the issues that the governance committee needs to address are:

• Decide basic values guiding organization & governance committee


• Define success & cost-benefit


• • Establish performance measurement


• Establish operating budget


• Set expectations of participation committee members


• Set expectations about attendance at committee meetings


• Establish accountability framework for:


• Committee


• Committee members


• Establish evaluation criteria for committee


• Establish recruiting criteria & means for committee members


• Define subcommittees


• Establish training resources for committee members


• Establish conflict resolution


• How do members of the wiki committee deal with decisions when we disagree


• Are committee meetings open


• Should committee members promote the wiki

Engaging Citizens through Social Networking

The rise of social networking tools on the Internet is changing the relationship between citizens and governments. Governments that fail to adapt risk a disconnect with their constituents and younger employees, and a rise in social unrest. Governments adopting social tools will engage their constituents in a more productive dialogue.

David Shaw © 2009

Social Networks

The rise of Web 2.0 social networking tools on the Internet is changing the relationship between citizens and governments. While the outcome is unknown, social tools may eventually facilitate the General Assembly of the world’s citizens. Already they provide a means for governments and other organizations to engage their constituents in a more productive community dialogue.

The shift has been so rapid and pervasive that it is hard to remember a world in which we were dependent on librarians and bricks and mortar reference libraries. Today, led by Generation Y, the NetGen, we use:

• Google for answers
• Wikipedia for information
• FaceBook for socializing
• MySpace for artistic communities
• LinkedIn for business networking
• Instant messaging for networking
• Blackberry or iPhone for always on communications
• Other ways of networking online

Depending on the authority, the NetGen was born 1981-1996 or 1977-1996 (6.5 million in Canada). Generally, baby boomers are defined as born in 1943-1960; and GenX in 1960-1980. The existence of these three demographic cohorts in the workplace creates a tension that should be understood not just by the HR department but also by managers and technologists seeking to adopt the collaborative web.

In particular the NetGen values speed, freedom, openness, innovation, mobility, authenticity and playfulness. Having grown up with open social applications they expect the same in the workplace.

Similarly citizens are adopting these tools to interact on a massive scale. Previously, governments only had to attend to special interests and lobbyists. Ordinary citizens could write letters, or organize a protest, and then be forgotten. Today, they can organize quickly on a national and international scale.

But without supporting governance frameworks, practices and guidelines it is hard for traditional organizations to achieve significant change. Fortunately, as Amazon shows, the technology can also be architected to resonate automagically around desired outcomes.

Still, in most cases NetGen will have to show the way in the workplace.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0, coined by Tim O’ Reilly in 2005, is an eclectic mix of technologies, social ideas and applications. Concepts such as Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 use Web 2.0 components in real-world collaborative applications.

Web 1.0 was largely static and proprietary. Organizations developed, revised, reviewed, approved and published content in mostly flat web pages.

O’Reilly’s map of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is participatory, interactive, collaborative, and features a rich user experience. It is the collective commons. Typical components (mostly open source) for building collaborative applications are:

• Wikis
• Blogs
• Forums
• Messaging (chat, SMS text, etc.)

First Generation

The first generation of Web 2.0 applications embraced collaboration and connections in a limited way. For example, deploying wikis here and there will not drive volume in the desired outcomes.

Adopting wikis in an an organization in a static way

Wikipedia, while being an enormously successful collaborative platform, does not leverage social connections in any significant degree. Even FaceBook fails to capitalize fully on social connections. FaceBook is just a large address book.

FaceBook makes connections mainly between friends. If A knows B and B knows C, then it suggests A and C should be friends. FaceBook collects user profiles on books, movies, TV, groups, interests and so forth, but it doesn’t use these to build and match people on this type of synthetic profile.

Only 10.5 % of Wikipedia’s users are active

Second Generation

The second generation is typified by market leaders like Amazon and Google. Both are always exploiting your connections in the long tail to present you with new choices. As you make new selections, your connections morph and you are given a new list of choices. Amazon, for example, makes connections between books viewed, purchases, rankings, reviews, discounts and more.

All automagically.

These techniques are starting to be applied in issues-based wikis such as President Obama’s changegov.org and WhiteHouse.gov, and the Globe & Mail’s Public Policy Wiki.

Simple wiki framework that converts issues into an agenda

Driving Automagically

The challenge today is to integrate social tools using open APIs and semantic web techniques with fit-to-purpose social graphs. The goal is to drive volume in some desired outcome. The outcome could be sales, problems solved, reports written or whatever. To achieve this, the objects have to have properties, connections and a context.

Every object has properties, connections and context

But how do we amplify the signal above the noise threshold? One obvious way is to leverage existing connections. This drives word-of-mouth which begins to resonate amongst the connections. But it is impossible for even the largest organizations to attract and build resonate networks on the scale of Amazon, FaceBook, Google, or MySpace.

Connect supply to demand by amplifying word of mouth

There is no sense in trying to turn your public-facing application into an alternative social destination. It is much more effective to leverage existing networks. A variety of open standards makes it easy to rapidly develop complex social applications that interface with FaceBook, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Portal framework interfacing with FaceBook

After you’ve identified the desired outcomes, it is feasible to start to make connections that drive success automagically.

Social graphs resonate to drive new connections

Collaboration

Peering works well when the product is information or culture, and when tasks can be bite-sized chunks. People are motivated to participate by feeling good or by self-interest.

Personality types that feel good are those that like to solve problems, and/or build things. Those that are motivated by self-interest want to gain experience, exposure and acknowledgement, and connections.

Whatever the motivation, social networks in government quickly become a place to:

• Share solutions about problems
• Vent about experiences
• Learn from each other
• Solve problems

Critical success factors in achieving this are:

• Leadership
• Meritocratic principles of organization
• Can’t be controlled but can be steered
• Mix of hierarchy and self-organization
• Narrow subject focus, charter
• Promote self-organization
• Voluntary participation in shared outcome
• Mechanism for weeding out weak contributors
• Openness – don’t protect all of the intellectual property
• Roles & guidelines

Best Practices

Some best practices that have been derived in social applications are:

• Solve real world tasks
• Enable self expression
• Embrace self-organization
• Expose friend and associate activity
• Drive communication
• Browse the social graph
• Build communities
• Don’t restrict choice
• Drive the head and the tail

Social Change On the Network

The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA is in part an indicator of the maturation of social networking and also the profound demographic shifts occurring in western societies. Obama successfully used tools like Facebook and SMS text to energize his Generation Y supporters. He carried the 18-29 youth vote by 34% over McCain. Obama’s web MyBO is the most Internet savvy site ever mounted by a politician.

Born August 4 , 1961, Barack belongs to Generation X (see Comments about Generation Jones). Social networking aside, his election is also a passing of the torch from the Boomer generation to its progeny. Most boomers don’t instinctively understand Web 2.0 and its social networking. If they have any understanding, it is likely as late adopters or lurkers. Incidentally, Barack delivered his first weekly radio address via YouTube, and is appointing a technology tsar to his team as he prepares to be President 2.0.

Having some understanding of the different values driving these three generations is key to adopting social networking in any organization.

The most flagrant indicator of the maturation of social networking is Microsoft’s extremely late entry into the field as a mimic with a planned Windows Live update in the coming weeks to compete with MySpace and Facebook. The update will integrate notification of Twitter messages, Flickr photo uploads, Yelp reviews and WordPress blog entries.

Most organizations expect social networking to creep in through the back door because they don’t understand how to plan it. With some justification: planned societies always fail. It’s like trying to set objectives for knowledge capture without understanding that knowledge is contextual and has a shelf life. The sell-by date comes quickly.

Every application and process in an organization has a social aspect. At its simplest, it’s how we get things done. Sociologist Robert Putnam argues that voluntary association with other people is integral to a fulfilled and productive existence—it makes us "smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy."

At a different level there may be some visible benefit. The value graph for a book-keeping program is very different from that of a community of practice. The social activities around book-keeping are more about how do we get things done. For example, “Does anyone know how I can get reimbursed for these expenses?”. Having a prior chatty relationship with someone can pay dividends.

In a community of practice the social activity is more structured but still semi-structured. There are conditions of admittance and higher expectations of contribution to the social group. The benefits are more widely visible.

One of the difficulties is that social groups tend to be age groups. Boomer males are not welcome in the group of twenty-something females. Mixed sex and mixed generation groups do not have an easy dynamic. If you’re a boomer you can check this out by joining Facebook and looking for a group to join.

The differences are profound. In earlier times, people tended to follow in the footsteps of their parents. But two brutal world wars sowed the seeds for massive demographic and attitudinal change.

In 1996 David K. Foot published Boom, Bust & Echo describing the demographic shifts occurring in society and the consequences. The Echo generation is also the Net generation. Generally, boomers are defined as born in 1943-1960. GenX is 1960-1980. GenY, the echo, is 1981-1996. Don Tapscott in Wikinomics defines the Net generation slightly differently as 1977-1996 (6.5 million in Canada).

Worldwide there are more than one billion people in the Net generation. These are people who have grown up with the Internet not as something new but as something that is part of the fabric of their lives. Today (2008), they are 12-31 years old, so the leading edge of this cohort is already entrenched in government and business. These are the people who are aggressively socialising using Web 2.0. Their experiences with collaboration on a wide scale do not fit well with rigid hierarchical top-down modes of organization. A mixture of hierarchical and peer-to-peer is advisable.

Slightly earlier in 1964 Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media foresaw that “….the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.” Web 2.0 is about participating on a shared canvas rather than passively receiving information. It is the New Gutenberg that Telidon and Web 1.0 failed to deliver.

Another difficulty is that much of what passes for socializing on this canvas is drivel. “I’m at home with a sick kid.” “I’m sooo mad!” “Should I buy the blue one or the red one?” You start to think that GenY is very lonely. Then you catch yourself sending a friend a text about your walk by the river, maybe with a phonecam picture attached.

Yeah, we all want to feel a connection with someone.

© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com

The Rise of Cloud Computing

Web 2.0, the collaborative and social web, is based on a mixture of technologies like AJAX, XML, RSS and on and on. As most people experience it, it is also based on applications like Facebook and Gmail that use cloud computing. The Blogger engine used in this blog is another example.

What is cloud computing, and why should you care?

Somewhere in 2005-2008 storage online got cheaper and more secure (in some contexts) than storing locally or on your own server. This was the birth of cloud computing.

Cloud computing has many definitions and some of those definitions have variants, so it can be quite confusing. Think of it as a further move into the Internet. You could also think of it as a move back toward centralization and away from decentralized applications on desktops. Or, as an evolution in, and form of, outsourcing through hosted or managed services.

Almost any managed service can be taken into the cloud. For example, managed security firms that provide spam filtering, anti-malware, backup and email encryption functions have taken disk encryption into the cloud.

It’s also a further development in the use of browsers as a desktop environment, as exemplified by Google’s Chrome, and the possible rise of the Internet as an operating system. Like Web 2.0, under the hood cloud computing is not a simple phenomenon.

The basis of cloud computing is in massive data centres. By locating on cheap real estate, close to cheap and abundant sources of electricity, close to cheap and massive bandwidth pipes, and by using new hardware and virtualization technologies, it is possible to provide computing services at a much reduced cost. These cloud-based data centres provide redundancy, scalability to meet peek demand, and a high-level of data security. Think of it as service available on demand.

There are two general configurations: grids for intensive computing like image processing; and utility computing for pooled or multi-tenant environments focused on meeting service levels with the optimal amount of resources. Most web applications use utility computing.

At the corporate level, the market for hosted development platforms or virtual data centres is dominated by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Other big players are Google, Oracle, Yahoo!, and recently IBM. The latest players off the bench are EMC and Microsoft. EMC is offering Atmos utility computing using stored and replicated objects in a managed namespace; while Microsoft has its Windows Azure service described by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie as "Windows for the cloud".

Numerous other lesser-known companies have been established for some time but the battle for market is shaping up between players with deep pockets, i.e., Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Another corporate and also a consumer market is software as a service (SaaS). A corporate example is Salesforce.com while Blogger, Facebook and Gmail were already mentioned as consumer applications. Another variant, albeit an internal cloud, is government’s Shared Services.

Besides social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr, cloud computing also enables online applications like Hotmail, Gmail, Google Apps, Zoho Office and the like. Today you can use word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, image editing, email, and store your family pictures on the Internet, all from your web browser. Desktop proxies like G.ho.st can consolidate all your applications in a desktop GUI, making Windows even less relevant. Generally these are all free services supported by advertising revenue.

Why you should care

The issues in cloud computing have a greater potential impact on consumers using free applications than they do on corporations using commercial cloud services.

The business model for large organizations using the cloud has a firm base in cost reduction. Data centre operations are located where energy, bandwidth and real estate are much cheaper, and the marginal cost of scaling for peak or unexpected demands is low.

But the business model for consumers has less certainty. It’s based on advertising revenue. You get the application and the ‘Net storage for free, as long as advertisers are willing to pay for your eye balls. If advertisers become convinced that this has no (or less) value, because they cannot ascertain (or start to believe) that your ‘clicks’ are not converting into sales revenue, then they will spend less on it.

Recessions and economic events like the meltdown of Wall Street will also cause companies to slash and burn their advertising budgets. These factors will threaten the financial stability of the organization giving you free applications, and storing your data somewhere.

Facebook, for example, has >100 million users but no clear business model independent of advertising revenue.

The pricing model of your Internet Service Provider (ISP), especially for file sharing and downloads vs. uploads, may also impact the business model and affordability of this ‘free’ service.

Financial stability of your cloud service is important for both corporations and consumers. Stability consists of the business model, cash flow, equity and other factors in the organization providing your services. Corporations have available a range of financial reporting services and tools to analyse this risk. Consumers do not. Even large corporations may not be able to understand the extent of this risk in today’s zombie economy. Events favour those service providers who are sitting on a lot of cash.

Converting from your free applications to a subscription-based service may not give you any greater surety. It’s been obvious for several years that large software vendors would like to convert users to an annual subscription model. Recurring revenue maximizes their revenue and reduces some risks. This will tend to drive the smaller providers out of the market, pushing you toward the oligopolies.

The location of your data storage is important for corporations and consumers alike. It should be in a politically secure country with strong data-protection laws. You don’t want to wake up some morning to discover your data is being kept in Shanghai, and the Chinese government is trawling it and your Skype mail. Of course, you won’t do much better in the USA where the department of Homeland Security is amassing every piece of data it can about corporations and consumers, all in the name of freedom. The UK is even worse. Encryption, like cash, is king.

(Unfortunately Canada lacks the national infrastructure needed to be competitive in this market.)

Protection of intellectual property (IP), i.e., your data, is not something most consumers think about. It will be covered absolutely in contracts governing the provision of corporate data centres. But it’s most likely not covered in free cloud services used by consumers. Don’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find your account has been closed (for any one of a number of reasons), and you have lost several years’ worth of family photos. Customer support is unlikely to be very supportive.

The same thing will happen if the service provider goes out of business. You, as a consumer, will never get your data back.

This is probably the single biggest reason why I do not want my data on the ‘Net.

Performance in throughput, response time and availability are other factors to consider with consumer cloud services. An application running on your desktop computer will always be faster than a browser-based one running on a remote server. Period. And you will never have to worry about the ‘Net being down when you most need it.

Recently both the free and paid versions of Google's Gmail were down for a day. This hurts if you depend on it as a mission-critical application. But to be fair, I've seen similar failures in large enterprises running their own systems. At one company, the single-sign-on servers went down for a day, so no applications were available.

Centralisng your data, or putting it on the ‘Net, is always a security risk. That’s why (some) organizations have disaster-recovery plans. Letting a third-party manage it increases that risk of data and ID loss. The potential pay-back for a hacker or terrorist is that much larger.

For consumers the risk is a breech of privacy, as employers read about your party-hard lifestyle, and exposure to ID theft.

The best solution for consumers who want to use the cloud is an asynchronous application that lets you work offline with the power of your PC and periodically synchronises with the cloud application.

As for me, I will keep my data locally and back it up using a cheap USB hard drive.

© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com