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Here is a clip from Stowe Boyd's post on the Hunter/Gatherer Future:

Of course, the alternative is right in front of us. We can instead
aspire to hold onto a world based on exclusion, divisiveness, and
caste, where unilateral power politics dominate the world stage, and
the parochial interests of the powerful few control the destinies of
all.
And in business, we will watch as those who best learn how to
collaborate will come to dominate the land-rush into the 21st century
economy, and those who tried to control their markets — instead of
building deep collaboration into their business models, as John Seely
Brown styles it — will fail. It may well be that this will be the
fulcrum upon which human culture turns, pried away from industrial era
models of command-and-control, in business, in politics, and in society
as a whole.

/Message: Moving to the Edge: The Hunter/Gatherer Future

I really believe in this vision of collaborative work based on egalitarian principles. 

believe that the best setting for collaboration — whether in the workplace, or in society as a whole — is one in which these principles of inclusion and egalitarianism are afforded the greatest importance. This is the primary motivation for my evangelism for Web culture, since it lacks any hierarchies except those based on respect, influence, and the inexorable power laws of reputation and emergent individual authority.

/Message: Moving to the Edge: The Hunter/Gatherer Future

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Here is Stowe Boyd summarizing Matthew Glotzback of Google Enterprise on the topic of the self-directed innovator.

Matthew Glotzbach of Google Enterprise gave a mercifully light-on-the-powerpoint presentation that provides a dramatically different insight into the future of collaboration. In a nutshell, he suggests that today's workforce is dominated by a new sort of person, the self-directed innovator. This person is very different than the knowledge worker of the 80s and 90s. They are:

* not process driven — their work flows, rather than being a bunch of boxes and arrows in a process diagram

* collaborates with a broad network of collegues — and wants to remain connected to them at all times

* intermingled personal and work lives — the new blendo reality, where there is no firewall between work and “private” life

* needs information even when not at a desk — they flow like their work, and need information even if working at Starbucks

* does not spend majority of time in a single application — they flow from one sort of work to another

* impatient — don't want to spend a lot of time in meetings, or working with idiots [my words, not his]

Boyd then links this profile to his contention that the individual is the new group:

So the groupware model of collaboration, where neatly partitioned worlds are created, and individuals are made to shift context in order to shift from one social thread to another, seems unnatural to me. The primacy of groups and group membership in old-school groupware is outmoded.

The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways. Moving from groupware premises to “soloware” shifts the dialog about standards and interoperability. In the old groupware model, a company would buy a groupware platform and applications, and roll it out across all the users. It was standardized because everyone was using the same rev of the same product. When the issue of interoperability and standards were brought up, it was approached from the perspective of inter-company communication, or different sites within the same company. But in the soloware model, individuals may be using completely different tools, and share nothing in common but certain standards. But the glue that connects the dots in the soloware world are standards like RSS, IM interoperability, and blog trackback conventions: standards that allow individuals to do their thing, but to allow bottom-up aggregation of their artifacts along social connections. The groups are there, but latent, implicit in the gestural relationships of crosslinking, tags, comments, and blogrolls.

I envision a time where even in the largest organization, our lives as individuals will define the norm for computer-assisted work. The model of soloware will displace the 90s ideals of groupware in exactly the same way that the pre-groupware assembly line models were dethroned in the 90s. In our work lives, even in the largest, most conservative companies, we are instantaneously involved in dozens of projects, with teams of people that are constantly changing, with outside consultants and partner companies, and there is no end in sight. When everything fractures away from stable, long-lasting, closed teams toward the exact opposite, what is left are individuals in contact with each other, through soloware: individual needs first, group needs second, by extension.

We are, first and foremost, individuals. The concept that whenever we do something it should be intentionally in the context of a specific well-defined group is outmoded, and was always an approximation of what is really going on, socially. We are involved in social relationships, and what we do with others is always social, but not necessarily part of a group, or only of one group. So, let's put aside groups, and focus on the individual. The groups will follow.

Matthew takes us down the Google path following this idea of “soloware”, based on three principles:

1. redefine the inbox — he showed a bunch of the features that Google has built into Gmail as an indication of how smart add-ons (like presence, instant messaging, PDF, and calendar integration) can make the plain old inbox a source of collaboration

2. search as the navigation paradigm — there is too much for any fixed map to work, so just surrender to the void, and throw away ther notion of taxonomic organization of the web, your email, or your harddrive

3. power of the cloud — web 2.0 mashups, and global collective intelligence is the only way that we can innovate fast enough to build the collaborative solutions we need.

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John T at Library Clips writes an extensive review and analysis of BlogBridge library. If you are interested in a trial account, please email me and let me know.

BlogBridge:Library is now open for preview and later today will be open for trial.

If you don’t know what BlogBridge:Library is check out my post, it’s basically a feed directory organised into topics, and with a built in blog.

Now that the enterprise is beginning to take on blogging and RSS there is a need to showcase these feeds, and also a need to discover and share feeds.

Features

Firstly let me say that the idea is that you can tailor this library to your website/intranet…

The homepage has a navigation bar where you would list some or all your topics.

The body of the homepage displays whatever topics you like, maybe just a selection…you could add a link to the navigation bar for A-Z topics, or if you had similar type topics like blogs, RSS, OPML, web2.0, etc…you could group these on a webpage and put a link in the navigation bar called “best of web2.0 topics”.

As you can see the homepage has an OPML, this contains every topic, and every feed within every topic…pretty neat…graze it in Optimal.

As you can see every topic has a thumbnail of the feeds website and a direct link to the feed, you can browse feeds within a topic similar to a slide show…also notice each topic has an OPML.

NOTE: each topic OPML is an “include” in the root OPML (homepage)

Each topic has its own page (eg. Apple Mac), as does each thumbnail (or click on the thumbnail to goto the native site).

Each topic displays a picture of the topic owner, the homepage displays a picture of the library master.

Another great feature is the Top 10 and the Top 100, both with an OPML.

There is also the library masters inhouse announcement blog.

A really simple and effective outlay, not too overloaded on features…the uesr friendliness design is important for RSS newbies.

I’m excited to see how the bb:library develops, it’s a great idea that Pito is opening up a trial, I’m keen to see how many topics are added and how these topics will be organised

…will there be a category/directory to house the topics (top-down), or will a tagcloud do the job (bottom-up).

If you are browsing A-Z topics it would be good to Collapse all topics, so you can quickly browse the topic list, and expand a topic you would like to see.

Since each thumbnail page is dedicated to a feed, it would be good to see the latest posts from the feed…I think this will be coming as these pages have alot of space at the moment.

What about the latest posts from a topic (river of news or sorted by feed)…maybe a feed grazer like Grazr would fit in nicely. I think this is important for the try before you buy factor…indeed all this will be coming soon in good time.

In the future maybe each topic could have it’s own inhouse blog, or if topics are organised into a category/directory, maybe each category could have it’s own blog.

This blog could be used as announcements or even as an editorial blog covering the best posts within each topic…this is what the editorial blog does for the Corante Web Hub.

NOTE: I know bb:library is just what it is a library, but I think it also could have the potential for editorial coverage…not just a place to find feeds/opml’s but also a place to graze feeds/opml’s and keep up with the latest in these topics via the editorial blog.

How does this compare to Top 10 Sources?

Firstly the idea is to have your own library customised to how you want it.

Secondly it is a directory first, whereas Top 10 Sources is also a directory but it’s focus is on displaying content rather than the source.

Both can be social, everyone can be a topic master, and maybe open up their topic for communal editing (wiki-ike).

In saying all this, these 2 services are very similar but one is emphasising on sources, the other on content.

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I have been catching up on listening to a podcast series we are hosting: Eric Mankin's Innovation Tip of the Week:

This is a gold mine of valuable insights on how people and organizations innovate.

If you only have time to listen to one of these podcasts, I recommend the one on American Idol which is not only topical but interesting in terms of how we manage risk. Eric looks at mistakes of omission and commission and how these different types of mistakes influence our choices and ability to innovate.

Programming chief at ABC Andrew Wong made a type 2 error (an error of commission) when she passed on American Idol. Most errors of commission are never discovered. They are stopped without being shown to others to take on the risks. Since they are invisible they are much more common. Passing over American Idol is a classic error of commission. In fact the only reason the show got picked up by Fox was that Rupert Murdoch personally ordered his subordinates to buy it. The point here is that many innovative projects are killed before they see day light.

This is just one example of the many insights Eric Mankin has packed into these small gems. If you are interested in innovation, download this series and the next time you are on the treadmill, you will gain brain cells along with burning calories.

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One of my favorite bloggers, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, writes today about a presentation he recently heard by John Seely Brown on Learning and the Community Library. (Slides are attached…to download them click on the image below). After having just completed an innovation boot camp with the American Library Association, I believe that John Seely Brown has identified a very important niche that libraries can play in new forms of technology-enabled learning. Here's what Wladawky-Berger has to say about the ideas here:

Another very important way kids are learning all kinds of new skills is by participating in the virtual worlds emerging around game playing, especially massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life. What kinds of skills does it take to be good at such virtual world games? John listed among others: pattern recognition; continuous decision making; conquering immense complexity; and constant learning. World of Warcraft has the notion of “Guilds”, and John also listed the skills needed by a good Guild Master: create a vision and set of values to attract others to your Guild; find, evaluate and then recruit players that have a set of diverse skills and which fit with your norms; create a platform for apprenticeship and the teaching of new Guild members; orchestrate group strategy and governance; and create, sell and adhere to the governance principles of the guild and adjudicate disputes. Are we talking about a game, or are we talking about the fundamentals for organizational leadership?

The world of multi-player online games seems to be providing us with more and more clues as to the kinds of skills and training tools that we need for the dynamic virtual work environments that seem to be increasingly important in the future. This came up, for example, in IBM’s recent Global Innovation Outlook in which one of the top recommendations is to look at massively multiplayer online games as one way of teaching the leadership qualities needed in the emerging world of massively distributed virtual work environments.

Formal education and schools have a major role to play in building the store of knowledge, teaching the core materials needed for critical thinking and providing institutional certification of expertise. But, if we insist that formal education is the only way to learn, we will invariably fail, both because there are limits to what you can teach formally and because considerable numbers of people learn differently and are thus left out of formal education, which can focus only on the majority. That is why it is so important to look for innovations in education amidst all the different ways we learn, and to focus particularly on the new ways people are learning informally, especially as part of communities that tinker, design, play games, create, remix and generally learn by doing things they really like to do.

Some of these communities will be virtual, with members distributed all over the world; some will be physical, with members living in the same towns and neighborhoods; and some will be a hybrid of the two. Libraries, which are pervasive throughout the US, can play a unique role by becoming social spaces for informal learning in their local communities.

Given that our knowledge-based age is basically an age when learning is more important than ever, there may be no more critical innovation challenge for us.

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Richard McManus who writes the very good blog, Web 2.0 Explorer, has published a good review of Preparing for Intranet 2.0, the chapter I recently published with Bill Ives. He says:

I come from a background as a Web Manager, Web services-driven dashboards will result in much more useful, usable and personalized intranets so I'm very familiar with the challenges of creating a functional Intranet in a corporation. Not least of which is to get employees to contribute to their Intranet. In my experience it's been very difficult to get office people to adopt blogs and wikis. So while I absolutely accept that the Web is a collaboration space and a two-way communications medium - principles stated at the beginning of the chapter - the real challenge is to get generally overworked employees to actually use the Intranet. That said, I think the nascent world of web services and personalized start pages (maybe dashboards is a better term to use in the enterprise setting) has a lot to offer corporations….

The key is to deliver to each audience the information and services (which will be collaborative and two-way) that they need to do their jobs. So the Marketing and Sales team for example gets the latest market intelligence, sales data (e.g. from salesforce.com), niche news, their email, spreadsheets, etc. You could even make it more granular - so that sales managers get the more high-level information they need, whereas sales people on the road get jobs data delivered via mobile devices. If anything defines Intranet 2.0, it's that it'll more resemble a web services-driven dashboard - than a wiki or blog….I also think some of the more innovative Web Office tools that I've been profiling here - such as Dabble DB, Jotspot Tracker, Zimbra, ZohoCreator - will be utilized a lot on Intranets over the coming years. I won't repeat my previous posts, but my main point is that those kinds of apps offer unique, hybrid, more collaborative functionality - not found in Microsoft Excel or even Google Spreadsheet…..

I agree with his assessment that the new interface to the Intranet is going to look like a web-services dashboard. As part of our own innovation in this area we are working on new interfaces built on web services dashboards. Here's screenshot of a sample dashboard I built on netvibes:

This includes a sample calendar, my gmal, a few important feeds, my delicious tags, and a presentation that I uploaded to flickr and can now display fully on my page.

On another tabbed page, I have added podcasts that I am tracking:

Netvibes has a nice interface for playing your podcast in the browser:

For this interface we are using a publicly available AJAX desktop in the browser. It is set up with open feeds and inputs from many sources and gives me a nice aggregated view of my key interests.

In the context of an intranet, this kind of interface could aggregate all kinds of information being published behind the firewall: status reports, working group reports, spreadsheets. This is the next generation of interface for our clients.

McManus concludes:

Gilroy and Ives provide an excellent primer on RSS, blogs and wikis for corporations. They show how those tools can be used to increase user participation and create content mashups. And those are compelling features of a modern intranet, for example for knowledge management purposes. But the real power of 'intranet 2.0' I believe is the web services-driven dashboard vision, where the Intranet becomes a much more useful, usable and personalized resource. The key is the Intranet must serve the needs of the employees, such that they simply have to use it day in and day out - in order to do their jobs.

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I have experimenting with Google Video and posted a movie I made about my trip to Assiniboine on the service:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-847182090091993296

I also did a search under innovation and found a Charlie Rose interview with Eric Schmidt of Google that is extremely interesting.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078924020791361373&q=innovation

This Charlie Rose program costs $.99 to purchase for viewing and downloaidng. It may be that this is a way to distribute learning content and get micropayments for it.

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Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe in his Enterprise Web 2.0 blog references Andrew McAfee at HBS who has been writing about how enterprises use social software.

Debate continues about whether Enterprise 2.0 is about new infrastructure or about new modes of collaboration. I've tried to be very clear that to me it's the latter, and not the former. Enterprise 2.0, in other words, is about new communities, not communities' new plumbing. If we keep talking about the plumbing we're going to lose the attention of business leaders. And that would be a shame.

Dion continues:

And while it's true that business leaders tend to prefer to focus on what first, and how second, understanding that form follows function is probably critical to actually exploiting this new way of using the Web and the intranet for true two-way collaboration….Thus, accessing the benefits of Web 2.0 in the enterprise means understanding what it is and how to apply it. This can be a chicken and egg problem since there is no what without some how in this case. Blogs and wikis work so well because they are extremely simple ways to collaborate and hence more likely to be used by more people. This directly helps these collaboration models encounter fewer barriers to use and increased reuse and other second order usage scenarios. Appreciating what makes them simple and effective, which includes that they are delivered via a browser, require not prior training, little structure, and are syndicated via some mechanism is the essential function that provides the form we are looking for.

In our work with clients we are seeing how important it is to lead with function and build form around function. Our Learning 2.0 Boot Camp is designed to immerse people in a new network built on social software platforms so that they can experience these new modes of collaboration and then understand how to adapt them to their own business processes.

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