Good friend and smarty-pants Tom of Firestoker is organizing and hosting Enterprise 2.0 Camp at the Epicure Cafe in Toronto on November 7th. I hope the Epicure can handle the crowd.
I am very interested in how organizations can tap into the power of social media tools like blogs, wikis and others to improve productivity, foster creative collaboration and aid in customer and community development. Check out Tom’s recent posts to get yourself up to speed. See the MIT Sloan article by Andrew McAfee “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”.
One of the important concepts in this discussion is the idea of what Kedrosky called emergent structure. Letting go of control is not equal to chaos. Knowledge management has tended toward control and an imposed structure, designing ontologies and complex knowledge capture mechanisms and such. Social media is about allowing a structure to emerge from the wisdom of the crowd. This parallels the argument of people like Shona Brown that the most successful, innovative companies live strategically on the edge of control and chaos. This implies that success in implementing social media tools in the enterprise isn’t about abandoning structure, but taking a different approach to structure and fostering that tension between chaos and order. Gardening, not engineering.
by rajahh
In my recent government work, I see huge untapped potential for using these tools to improve stakeholder relations, improve agency accountability, facilitate partnerships and creative collaboration across ministries and across public/private boundaries. Sean Coon wants to “2.0 the hell out of government”. Realistically, government will be much slower to adopt these tools than large corporations, because market signals for improving productivity and agility are lacking and the political environment and organizational culture of government has a strong bias towards controlling risk, which is ultimately political risk.
Lots of food for thought.
Technorati Tags: enterprise20, office20, government20, socialmedia, Web2.0
November 1st, 2006 at 6:32 pm
i completely agree, mark, but if we don’t start rallying around the possibilities of generating a transparent and accountable government, as you hinted towards, they’re sure as hell not going to make the first move.
the great thing about the 2.0 meme is that it essentially deals with sharing data and information, freeing it up from previous constructs and twisting it into interfaces that produce knowledge.
political blogs and aggregators have been doing that for a while now, but the efforts are still very decentralized and meta-data, content, feeds, etc. aren’t being captured and twisted as i’m suggesting.
now… imagine a domain that not only present political blog posts, but one that’s grounded in an interface that presents, say, the 435 seats in congress and 100 in the senate as the centerpiece. imagine developing a digg-like interface, where people can vote on latest news/posts streaming in about each politician, his/her recent voting record, latest multimedia (youtube, etc.), pork spending, basically, anything that contextualizes the job of the politician… and then turn that into a pagerank-ish algorithm for the “strength” of individual politicians.
of course, we’d want to mandate user participation with home address checks; maybe an advanced form of open id?
once we get politicians worried about their “politicrati” popularity like so many bloggers do with technorati rank, imagine how that would begin to shift their attentiveness (i mean, what congressman would want to be rated 435 out of 435? or even 175 of 435?)
we could even create an algorithm to display how far politicians stray from representing the desires of their constituents based on issue and voting polls in their districts/states… and then give the politician the podium (within the interface, of course) to explain why they *led* in that direction, instead of following the popular consensus of the voters.
so many possibilities…
November 1st, 2006 at 6:47 pm
[…] Mark Kuznicki and Tom Purves picked up on a line I dropped in a few posts a while back; how we should “2.0 the hell out of government.” I’ve expanded on my original thinking in a comment on Remarkk! […]
November 1st, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Wish we - Connectbeam.com, could be there. We are committed for another event during this time. We are based out of Bay Area California, and at least one of us is a Canadian citizen from Toronto area.
We are finding Social Bookmarking intersecting with enterprise search and Intranet portals is hitting a sweet spot for lot of enterprises. I feel gov stands to benefit just as well.
November 6th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Thanks for the shout out Mark! And you are right, Epicure can’t hold us
and as a note to those who may have signed up earlier, thanks to the huge response, the venue has changed from Epicure Cafe to the much larger Gladstone Hotel (another 2km west on queen st W).
January 22nd, 2007 at 3:41 pm
[…] I left a comment in the thread that might sound radical, but I think it would be a great way to up the degree of transparent discourse in government. […]