The latest from our blogs
Under the Radar at the end of March
Firestoker is confirmed to present at Under The Radar.
We are honored to be in great company for our track, with Blogtronix, System One and BrainKeeper all presenting. This is a great lineup because, as far as I can see, we are all in the same space, but have very complimentary approaches and tools. I can see Firestoker integrating each of these tools in different ways.
We will most certainly be the newest startup presenting, and we have truly been “under the radar” with our development, but we relish the opportunity to show off the tool we have been using for our closed beta, and I expect some constructive feedback from the audience and judges.
I get in to SFO on Wednesday morning, but am pretty tied up with meetings in the SJC/PA/Menlo Park area mostly it seems on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. Evenings are free, ping me!
We have been blogging
This blog has a lot of subscribers, so I thought I would give you an update on what we’ve been blogging about lately on our own blogs.
The Firestoker blog will soon become an aggregator of our own blogs on all things Enterprise 2.0. Thanks for hanging in.
Thomas Purves:
Wikinomics Book Launch
What’s a Wiki Good for?
Discovering Facebook
In conversation with Reid Conrad
The Imagination Challenge
Jevon MacDonald
Enterprise 2.0: Where do I start?
2007: The year of Enterprise 2.0?
Report: How can Enterprise 2.0 work right now?
What does the new customer see?
What I wish would happen in Enterprise 2.0 in 2007
Words and the distinctions they create
Manifesto for an Emerging Consultant Counter Culture: Why Change?
How do new organizations work?
The Manifesto for and Emerging Consultant Counter Culture
Blogging the Market
12 Elements of Great Managing, and useful software.
Enterprise2.0 Koolaid continues to gain drinkers
# Link: Scoble covering Enterprise/Office2.0 and connect beam. Excellent discussion follows.
# Rod Boothby of the site Innovation Creators has quit his gig with Ernst & Young to focus on Enterprise2.0 full time. Congrats Rod… what took you so long? 
ps, need a new job?
Knowledge Management vs Enterprise2.0 & Firestoker
Euan Semple on his blog has a mini round up on the current state the Knowledge Management movement. Naturally, he’s opinionated on the subject:
“Compare Dave Snowden’s eminently sensible and insightful analysis of the current state of KM with this load of complete bollocks.”
From the first link,
Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:
1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovationAll the methods and tools of KM from communities of practice to corporate taxonomies are subordinate to those two primary goals. In so far as the IT function supports those goals and continues to use the term KM then it will persist.
A lot of what is happening in the Enterprise 2.0 builds on these exact same objectives as Knowledge Management (Wikepedia link). The twist being that Enterprise2.0 takes the “social”-ish or emergent path rather than the more traditional top-down (as I understand them) methodologies of classic KM.
Euan’s early successes and experiments with introducing some very basic “social media” tools to the sprawling organization that is the BBC was one my own primary inspirations for embarking on the Firestoker project.
If you wan’t to know why… Here is Euan Semple at Lift06 - essential watching, for anyone interested in Enterprise20 or … how to 2.0-the-hell-out of KM
(from the opening line “knowledge management, does anyone even talk like that anymore?…”)
Enterprise 2.0 Night - Tom’s Slides
Tom will post more later, but here are his slides from Enterprise 2.0 Night at the Gladstone Hotel
How to introduce social media tools in an organization
In my follow-up on the Office2.0 conference, I just remembered that I neglected to link to Chris Matthew’s excellent write up on one of the better blogs/wikis sessions. Chris rounds up of some of the tips and advice that were shared for how to encourage traction of the existing tools like wiki’s and blogs within the enterprise. These notes stem from the learning that simply giving users a blank page to start with is not likely to be sufficient to gain traction with these new tools. example tips:
Adoption tricks
1. Leave obvious errrrors in wikis, and then let people fix them. They’ll immediately see how it works.
2. Corporate blogs can grow fast if you hold content contests. Ask for anything, and then let the good stuff bubble up. And let the good stuff be determined by the users.
3. Find the connectors and experts in your office and get them involved. Think of the people that have networks within the company, and who are often consulted voluntarily.
One thing though, I believe Chris may have gotten backwards however, was his first sentence implying that social media reduces tacit interactions. In fact, I believe the value proposition for social media not about reducing, but rather accelerating and enabling more powerful tacit interactions. Tacit work is defined as all those decisions and actions that rely on experience, judgment and context rather then simple procedure or routine.
As more and more routine work in business is automated or outsourced, tacit work is becoming an ever larger and more important proportion of average daily working activity. Furthermore, I’d argue that the efficiency and execution of these test interactions become increasingly key to the competitiveness of both individual employees and the firm is a whole — and this is where “social” media has the potential to be transformative to enterprise.
More on this topic of Enterprise2.0 and Tacit interactions to come…
meanwhile read chris’ post here
Originally posted 2006-10-31, thomaspurves.com
UnSpacers
John Green invited me down to meet the guys at Unspace.
They are a great, tight knit group of developers and designers, with a fantastic office space too. Their model and way of approaching web work reminded me a lot of our early days at silverorange. They exuberance for their agility and rapid prototyping was a big shot of Deja Vu. Thier business model, a massive partnership of sorts, is also how we used to do things, and silverorange still does.
They are also probably one of the best rails shops you could find right now. Their developers and designers are happy, productive, people. What more could you ask for?
What is a New Human Enterprise?
Stowe Boyd recently emailed us to ask about what we are doing with Firestoker. He is the exchange:
Stowe: What do you mean by Enterprise 2.0 ?
Jevon: We started building a tool we called “Sandbox” over three years ago when we saw that a consulting client of ours was ready to change some big parts of how they do business. They are a reasonably large organization with thousands of people spread across North America, and they were starting to get bogged down trying to make decisions from head office.
They went from Enterprise 1.0 to 2.0 [New human Enterprise -j] by providing a space for all of their employees and contractors to share and learn from each other. They had used other tools before, expensive ERP and CRM tools, but those tools kept them in Enterprise 1.0, and that didn’t change their bottom line.
From a business standpoint, we see Enterprise 2.0 as being about a shift in how you treat decision-making and innovation. We have read the academic papers and read the magazine articles, but until we built a tool that allowed this level of collaboration and decentralization, we didn’t have a way to put it into practice.
Stowe: You mention “socially-focused collaboration” in the job posting I saw in your recent email. Could you elaborate?
Jevon: “socially-focused collaboration” is one of the core exercises of becoming “Enterprise 2.0″ . In the last few years the consumer web has undergone a dramatic change thanks to a new world of innovations known we have come to call “web 2.0″. Blogging and all the other easy-to-use, user-generated content technologies have resulted in a major change in how many users expect to participate on the web.
Simultaneously, other innovations in harnessing mass intelligence including tagging, social networking, and standards like RSS have made it easier to filter all of this new content. Each of these social media tools has made it easier for consumers to connect to the content and people that matter to them.
We have seen a major gap in thinking about internal collaboration within the enterprise, and we have begun to address that need through the use of these tools. What we are attempting to do with the Firestoker project is to build out, piece by piece, an integrated and web-base social media platform that helps businesses small and large solve everyday business problems. With each tool we roll out, the overall ambition is to enable every participant to be better informed, better connected or better able to efficiently collaborate on particular daily work activities.
There are a few definitions of Enterprise 2.0 floating around right now, but we believe that it is more about that central shift than anything else.
Stowe: What enterprise issues does the planned project address?
Jevon: I wrote a blog entry in 2003 I called “Break the Silence” (reposted: firestoker.com/blog/archives/4 ) where I said:
The exchange of ideas in many present day organizations is quite dysfunctional. The mere act of sharing an idea between levels on the hierarchy is akin to a direct command, and sharing ideas on the peer level will often result in complete silence around the table. We develop “spirals of silence” in which we create norms, procedures and ideologies all centered around having a gentlemanly silence.
and that was one of the first bits of pain we identified. Knowledge isn’t the only thing that is lost inside most organizations. Ambition, Empathy, and Passion are all things that are even harder to capture. It is interesting that one of the side effects of creating a more socially connected workplace is not only the prospect of higher productivity but also greater employee loyalty and a higher level of commitment to the collective mission.
Static intranets and traditional tools of emails and manuals published pdfs have their place, but humans also have a need to DO. To create, to change, to understand. By incorporating some of the tools of our Web 2.0 world, and we focus them a little more on these natural and human needs, then we hope that we can really drive new efficiencies and enable innovative thinking within the enterprise.
Shopify
Three guys from Ottawa (about 4 hours from us) have been working on Shopify.com which is a brilliant approach to building e-commerce sites. Shopify will lower the barrier to starting an online business much in the same way that eBay did.