From ancient philosophers to modern day journalists, the rules of engagement for discourse and collaboration have always been hot topics. In ancient times mass collaboration was limited to communities building churches, discussion in public squares, or monks taking turns to painstakingly write text. Today, in addition to facilitating public debate online, mass collaboration has the ability to build robust and super efficient software. Collaboration is central to Day Software’s ethos. Not only is Day Software born through mass collaboration but its software has social collaboration central to its user experience. We also embrace collaboration with our competitors. The last area is one I want to focus on for this post.

Last month we collaborated with one of our key competitors, Nuxeo, in order to advance an industry standard, which will benefit the content management industry as a whole. We used the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as our neutral “workspace”. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of Open Source software projects.

That word “community” is key.We teamed up with Nuxeo to advance the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard via Apache. CMIS is designed to benefit the growing number companies that need to securely manage a wide variety of online and offline content from different applications in a central hub. This is just one of many projects that Day collaborates with their peers via Apache. On the Jackrabbit project, numerous vendors leverage the community-driven efforts of building a standardized Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repository based on open standards

Despite our competitive differences, both Nuxeo and Day share the same collaborative Open Source mindset that is central and unique to the ASF. In contrast to the more onerous General Public Licence (GPL) model, The ASF model lowers the legal and creative barriers for commercial collaboration and innovation. When you sign up to Apache your day job (excuse the pun) is irrelevant. It’s an environment ancient philosophers would be proud of; the Apache community is working together, openly, equally, without bias and everyone’s contribution is valid.

Open Source is beneficial specifically because it is not proprietary. That means that the user is not locked in to any one vendor. In community Open Source, if a given vendor were to stop innovating, the community can take the product forward. Apache enforces a simple rule: new concepts under incubation do not graduate until there is a proper community that is not beholden to any one vendor. Apache also enforces the principle benefit of Open Source: no one vendor is responsible for driving or inhibiting innovation. Innovation happens.

Commercial Open Source firms – the ones driving much press these days – do not always follow this model. For many commercial Open Source firms, community and collaboration with their peers does not happen. This limits the benefits of the Open Source model, because while the software is accessible, true participation and joint collaboration does not happen.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, collaboration actually helps us to win marketshare and revenue. By serving up the basic product interoperability that developers and customers demand, collaboration frees up our time to focus on unique customer and market driven product innovations and invest more time in services and support. We are not afraid to say we are reaping the rewards of being a collaborative company. Open Source can provide the basis for a robust and profitable business model.

For us Open Source is proving to be a very strong, yet flexible backbone for our business. This should serve as an example to other technology companies that being Open Source is of benefit both to your customers, product development and profitability. The more competitors that join the Open Source community, the better all our products and services will be.

The Flat Classroom Project is currently working in partnership with Don Tapscott on the Net Gen Education Challenge, linking students, educators, parents and business leaders around the world. Check out the joint initiative at netgened.grownupdigital.com.)

This blog post is in response to an invitation from Jeff Plaman at International School Beijing’s 7 Steps Towards 21st Century Education Ning, to write about global collaboration in order to raise awareness of possibilities and to share my enthusiasm for making connections and working across boundaries and borders. I often write about connective living as an educator, eg A Day in the Life, and try to emphasise the need to develop a personal learning network in order to make these connections happen. It is through connections and communications using Web 2.0 and other tools that collaboration opportunities can emerge.

I am often asked how I got started in global collaborative projects, and I am then asked how others can come on board as well. My history in classroom Internet-based, global goes back about 12 years with Global SchoolNet and Cyberfair, iEARN, and now more recently co-developing Flat Classroom Projects. However let’s not drag up the past, let’s focus on NOW and how the reader of this blog (You!) can get involved by joining and/or creating a 21st century global project, and all that entails!

Please note this is written specifically from my point of view and includes the work and projects I have been involved in so is therefore fairly narrow, but at the same time I think progressive.

Concept

The ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with educators and students in all parts of the world using common online tools has changed the way I teach in the classroom, as well as changed the way I work as an administrator. A 21st century educator is connected, communicates in a reliable and responsible way, and ‘flattens’ the walls of their classroom in appropriate ways to enhance the educational learning experience of all. Therefore, every topic, every unit of work, every opportunity needs to be reviewed in terms of how it can be made relevant through external contact and collaboration. Gone are the days where it was too difficult to bring the world into the room. You, the teacher, are only limited by your imagination! With tools such as Skype, wikis, blogs, Elluminate etc there is no excuse for not staging a real-time or asynchronous link-up to support your curriculum objectives. There is also no excuse any more for not participating in a global project, a more deliberated, designed, planned and executed approach to collaboration via the Internet.

I have written many times in the past about the concept of global collaboration.

• How to Flatten Your Classroom talks about taking that first step by connecting with others, then taking the next step and implementing a project
• Beyond the ‘wow’: Embed the flat learning experience for sustainability talks about going beyond the ‘wow’ factor and engagement and pedagogical shift
• Our flat classroom workshop outline via this blog post, and via our workshop wiki

Power and Practice

I equate practice with power. If you are practicing collaboration you have the power to change the world, one classroom at a time. The power of learning in a social and extended context, yet in a safe and supportive environment is achievable. I think sometimes schools and teachers give up too easily, put this in the ‘too hard’ basket too readily. Some blog posts about this include:

• My 2020 Vision for Global Collaboration, where I give more of the history of my involvement in global, collaborative projects, and talk about the ideals of embedding this into the curriculum, develop digital citizenship skills, unblock tools etc
• The Year of Global Collaboration 3.0, where I talk about the evolution of global collaboration to the 3.0 status. Let me copy the main points again here:

Global Collaboration 3.0

• Fully engaged teachers who communicate with all participants (other teachers and other students)
• Use of Web 2.0 tools for communication and interaction (networking) and for creation
• Different global classrooms work together on a theme/project and become one classroom
• Common assessment objectives
• High expectations for connectivity and collaboration on teachers and students (it is not enough to email once a week!)
• Extended community partners included in the project (other educators, experts)
• Output may be individual or class/school based but includes input from others
• Output uses multimedia and attempts to make a difference to the immediate or extended environment
• Teacher and/or student initiated, student-centered learning

Further to the idea of practice here are a list of resources for the Flat Classroom Projects over the past 2+ years

• Portal for all Flat Classroom Projects, including Horizon Project, Digiteen and the new Net Generation Educationproject with Don Tapscott
• Flat Classrooms Ning: an educational network for educators
• Flat Classroom Conference Ning

Also, here is a current presentation showing the 7 Steps to a Flat Classroom:

The magic of collaboration comes from seeing students andteachers find their own voice and take charge of their own learning. It comes from being given choices and ownership and empowerment of their learning path. In the blog post “The conference that changed lives” I share the amazing power of bringing together people from around the world, students and teachers who came to Qatar for a face-to-face gathering and the magic that occurred before, during and after this event. This post also shares the 4 student videos that came from the winning teams, and is witness to the power of collaboration of strangers. The video that opens the Flat Classroom Conference, found on the Ning, details the development of a collaboration between myself and Vicki Davis that has changed our lives, created a pedagogically significant body of work, and encouraged others globally to reach out and make this happen.

Finally, I think the recent blog post “Take One Hour to Go Beyond Reflections“, comes towards sharing the impact and true magic of global collaboration, when it shares artifacts and responses to the Flat Classroom Conference event.

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, check out posts one and two.)

If it’s designed and implemented carefully, the GCW that I’m proposing would offer us insight into at least four high-level questions:

1. How can the global community allocate its resources more effectively?  It’s all too often the case that fundamental questions such as this one are either ignored or don’t receive their due attention in the rush to make “progress.”  We need to understand how people, technology, and money are being allocated.  This examination would allow us to take stock of where we are in the fight against global challenges and determine where we need to go.  
2. Which players are best suited to accomplishing a given task?  For example, is an NGO more equipped to engage in nation-building than a government?  On what variables, if any, does the answer depend?  Identifying players’ comparative advantages would lessen the extent to which they tread on each others’ turf and create deadweight loss.
3. What geopolitical patterns emerge?  Do certain problem-solving paradigms work better in certain countries or regions or in application to certain global challenges?  Intuition suggests that bilateral negotiations between developed and developing powers will be instrumental to slowing climate change, whereas grassroots, experiment-based initiatives will be instrumental to reversing global poverty.  The more extensive the GCW becomes, the more likely it is that it’ll be able to flesh out that intuition and, again, eliminate deadweight loss.
4. Can we predict where global challenges will go in the future?  Forecasting has long gotten a bad rap on the grounds that those who attempt it advance specious claims to sell books, get on TV, and, more broadly, gain attention.  I agree that one who forecasts to be fashionable doesn’t contribute much to our understanding.  I’d argue, however, that as time passes, engaging in long-term strategic thinking on the basis of objective evidence will only grow  more imperative.   

 
Alright.  Three blog posts about one idea might seem like overkill, but (if you can’t already tell) I’m excited.  If only by virtue of the fact that others are starting to embark on similar projects, I’m convinced that the GCW has extraordinary potential if we get the details right at the outset, work hard, and dream big. 

What do you think?  Please feel free to contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu.  I look forward to hearing from you!

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for part three in the coming days.)

I briefly introduced the GCW in my first post.  For more details, please check out a short primer that I drafted, which discusses its high-level mechanisms, functions, and goals.  My thinking evolves by the second, and I’m talking with lots of people to figure out the nitty-gritty of how this framework would actually work.  As I do so, I’m happy to see that projects in the spirit of mine are starting to emerge.  Here are three recent examples:

1. The November / December 2008 issue of Foreign Policy spotlights Raj Kumar’s Development 2.0 project, devex.com, which allows site members to, “depending on their level of access, post projects, form networks based on common interests, browse and monitor upcoming bids, find job opportunities, and get in touch with experts on the ground…At the heart of the site, though, is its massive projects database, which currently lists more than 47,000 projects on everything from rural sanitation in Bangladesh to policing in the Palestinian territories – searchable by region, country, donor, project type, or status.  By aggregating this information in one place, Kumar says, Devex gives everyone a chance to find out about opportunities, not just the well-connected…”
2.  MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence just announced an initiative to harness “collective brainpower and computing power” in the service of addressing global challenges.  The “center is developing an online deliberation tool that allows experts in a wide range of fields to get together to share ideas.  Unlike existing online discussion forums, the Climate Collaboratorium requires users to catalog their contributions and connect them to points that have already been made.  Such ‘argument maps’ help eliminate the repetitive, unhelpful comments and tangents that render most online discussion forums unhelpful.  The researchers are also connecting their deliberation tool with computer-based climate models, so users’ suggestions about different parts of the problem can be more easily combined and tested.”
3. The World in 2009, a publication of The Economist, profiles a digital mapping project that  aims to improve how money is spent in Africa: “The kind of maps which in the past had been  held to ransom by secretive African governments will pop up in African internet café in 2009.  Many will be annotated ‘wiki’ style, with layers of information added and verified by  an online community: street names for all, distribution of infant deaths for development workers, livestock density for agricultural officials, Catholic primary schools for a local bishop, and YouTube videos on the best snorkeling spots for tourists…[by using digital maps] teams of epidemiologists working together with medical workers texting in information from their mobile phones will do a better job of tracking exotic pathogens before they become mass killers.  Similarly, aid workers in 2009 will use digital maps for real-time information on famines and conflict, starting with an acute famine in Ethiopia.”

What these undertakings, among others, demonstrate is that a GCW could be an immensely powerful tool for addressing global challenges.  For the most part, they’ve tended to focus on specific global challenges or specific countries.  We need to go a step beyond and focus on the big picture – all global problems in all countries.  

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming days.)

I’m new to the Wikinomics blog, so I thought that I’d say a few words about myself.  I graduated from MIT last year with degrees in Political Science and Management, and now I’m a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, a think tank in D.C. 

I recently entered Change.org’s competition to propel ten ideas to the fore of the Obama administration’s agenda.  Although my proposal to establish a global challenges Wikipedia didn’t make the cut (it came in 66^th place out of about 8,000 ideas), it generated a lot of interest amongst NGOs, consulting firms, and policy organizations.  Here’s the short (and kind of wonky) idea description that I submitted to the Change.org team:

There are currently about 20 global challenges (for example, climate change and infectious diseases) and 200 countries.  A “global challenges Wikipedia (GCW)” would empower us to address those challenges efficiently and systematically.  It would have three parts:  

1.  The global challenges repository (GCR) would be a 20 x 200 matrix.  Its cells would contain
   (a) A history of that global challenge in that country;
   (b) An inventory of the players – the international institutions, governments, businesses, NGOs, and individuals – that are addressing it, and how; and
   (c) A profile of the issue, financial, and logistical networks between these players.   Government-commissioned expert teams, one per global challenge, would ensure the accuracy of contributions to the GCR.
    

    

2. The solutions portal would also be 20 x 200.  Its cells would contain
   (a) Descriptions of policy initiatives that have been successfully deployed against that  global challenge in that country in the past;
   (b) A thread on how to address that global challenge in that country; and
   (c) A thread on how the aforementioned players can collaborate without replicating each other’s efforts and wasting resources.  The expert teams would ensure that contributions offer solution-oriented comments. They would evaluate the ability of the solutions that have worked for a given country to be tested in and applied to others [(2)(a)].  They would also monitor the discussion threads [2(b), 2(c)] to identify areas of consensus and accordingly articulate new solutions. 

    

3. The case studies of past successes and write-ups of new solutions would be inputted into a 20  x 200 solutions repository, which would offer a dynamic pool of insights for application to new challenges.

The impetus behind the GCW is simple – one of the main problems that we face in addressing global challenges is that there are too many players in the game.  It seems like not a day passes without the announcement of a new NGO that’s devoted to mitigating global poverty or promoting corporate social responsibility.  This outpouring of awareness, enthusiasm, and effort is, of course, wonderful in theory.  The problem comes, however, when these players start clashing – sometimes because they’re unaware of each other and sometimes because they compete with each other.

A subtler, but no less important problem is the uniformity (or lack thereof) of their objectives.  Global poverty offers a great illustration.  Some players want to tackle it in a specific country.  Others want to address it in a specific region.  Yet others want to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.  Complicating matters further is that there’s often a conflation of goals.  For example, reducing global poverty and promoting global development are often interchanged even though they have very different meanings.  Collaboration is far harder, and far less productive, if the collaborating parties don’t have the same end goal in mind.

Our task, then, is to rein in the chaos and make the problem-solving resources that we have – people, technology, and money being the big three – as efficient and productive as possible.

–

That’s part one! What do you think?  Please feel free to leave a comment below, or contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu. I look forward to hearing from you! 

It’s official – Gov 2.0 is here to stay. From nGenera’s Gov 2.0: Wikinomics, Government, and Democracy project, NAPA’s Collaboration Project, and Mashable’s recent Gov 2.0 column, a lot has been written on the potential power of web 2.0 technologies in government. Government agencies across numerous jurisdictions have begun focusing on how Web 2.0 technologies can help foster workplace collaboration and innovation. Organizations such as the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Transportation Security Agency, and National Resources Canada have implemented organizational wikis to provide a central point for ideas and discussion.

But while government organizations have begun to focus on fostering workplace collaboration from the inside, a new type of collaboration is developing outside the formal reach of government agencies. As part of the Gov 2.0: Wikinomics, Government, and Democracy research series, I recently completed a paper entitled “Net-Gen Networks: How Agencies Can Leverage Outside Innovation Internally.” In this analysis, I document the rise of informal networks in the government sector built around Web 2.0 applications as a means of facilitating collaboration, idea sharing and innovation both within and across agency lines. Whether via social networks like Facebook, wikis, or blogs, these networks have created new authoritative resources for employees without the input or control of their superiors.

For example, Young Government Leaders, a professional organization for young federal employees in the U.S., started as two new government workers wanted to connect with peers. What started as a small happy hour has turned into a powerful informal network with over 2,000 members featuring a weekly leadership blog, professional development activities, community service, and bi-weekly newsletter. Young Government Leaders is not housed in a specific government agency but rather is run independently by volunteers on their own time and provides a sense of community to Net-Gen federal employees going through the same experiences in their career.

Another great example is Firefighternation.com, a social networking site for U.S. firefighters and emergency medical services, and rescue workers. Founded in July 2007 by a Columbia, MD firefighter, this online resource connects members through online profiles, message boards, blogs, news feeds, user-posted photos and videos. With over 22,000 registered members, members use the site to share advice on just about everything, including equipment, training tools, and safety, creating a rich repository of media that the community uses to demonstrate new techniques and lessons learned.

So why are these informal networks being created? Interviews with network leaders and participants reveal that these informal networks are being developed for four key reasons: they fill gaps in the information provided by their employers, they provide instantaneous access to resources and expertise, they’re viewed as authentic communities of peers and venues for candid dialogue, and, ultimately, they serve as innovation incubators in organizations where employees may not be empowered to pursue their ideas. Additionally, they are used as a way to create community, to share best practices, and to find out about additional career opportunities across the public sector.

While these informal networks are primarily being used by entry and mid-level staff, recent talks with senior government officials have shown that these informal environments are even more beneficial to them. These senior officials stated that they want to use collaborative technologies but can’t always openly collaborate using enterprise 2.0 tools because their opinions would be viewed based on their position and considered differently by all employees. For example, the CIO cannot propose in an idea bank for the radical streamlining of the acquisition process without offending his/her counterpart.

Recently, I launched my own informal network – GovLoop.com. GovLoop is a social network that connects the government community including federal, state, and local government workers, professors and students interested in public policy, and government consultants. In only a couple months, it’s grown to over 800 members and the use of the site has been very interesting. I see government employees connecting with people they would never have met and asking questions such as how to use social media and still meet government reporting requirements or how to recruit the Net-Gen to government. In another case, I saw a master’s student in Iowa connecting with the government program manager in D.C. on the topic related to his thesis. Members have started to blog on their own sharing their wisdom on everything from how to survive meeting to climbing the career ladder and finding the best training classes.

I think these are all clear examples of the power of informal networks and web 2.0 technologies. In solving government problems, we should leverage the wisdom of the millions of government employees and their past experiences. While the problem may be new to one person, it has probably been critically researched and solved by somewhere in the government sector.

I believe there will be plenty of room for both formal and informal networks to play a role in improving government in the 21st century. Some people are extremely cautious and only want to collaborate in a formal setting where they know who they are dealing with and trust everyone. Other people are more flexible and enjoy collaborating with a broader set of stakeholders. The role of companies and agencies is to learn to operate and leverage both formal and informal networks so they gain maximum value.

Tools vs. Strategy

Web 2.0 and social networking are tools, they are not strategies.  Companies need to realize that social networks are not Internet panaceas:

Networks work best under two conditions.  First, they must allow people to make sincere connections with one another.  Faking this sincerity can alienate users, reducing the value a social network can create.  And second, they must adhere to the cultures already in place.  This means you can’t take an existing corporate culture and shimmy it into any social network, as Blue Collar Comedy and Deloitte have learned:

• Blue Collar Comedy
  The execs at funny or die mistook their format for their strategy when trying to promote Blue Collar Comedy.  I guess management thought “funny or die + blue collar comedy = money.” But it’s not that simple, considering that the site was taken down. The demographic that blue collar comedy targets, is not the same group of Internet savvy 20 somethings who make funny or die successful.  The site was destined to fail.
• D Street
  The opportunities at Deloitte are great, but the hours can get intense. People have been expressing this sentiment at urbandictionary.com like this.Running parallel to this problem is the fact that most employees use an external network called Green Dot Life to connect with each other.  To deal with these issues Deloitte created D Street – a social networking application – in an attempt to internalize both problems. You can get some background on D Street here.  It’s easy to tell when someone doesn’t have a clear strategy because they will compensate with a lot of buzzwords – i.e. virtual teams, or cross-division collaboration.  These phrases resemble the fluff I tried to pass off as “answers” on my second year H/R exam.

The power of social networks can benefit anyone who participates in interpersonal relationships, but the way that those soon-to-be-networkers will connect to one another can’t be addressed with a cookie cutter solution. Instead, the tools that make up the web 2.0 shift need to be tailored to specific communities. Hopefully, examples of social networking failure, like the above, will become fewer in the future.

Airlines make money when planes are in the air. So getting people onboard efficiently is key. Your organization makes money when projects are running smoothly. So getting new people “on board” and up to speed quickly is key.

When you board an airplane, the airline needs to communicate a certain amount of information to you and all the other passengers to get everyone working together toward the same goal: taking off on time. The airline can do this with a PA system, since all the passengers are in an enclosed space, in close proximity both at the gate and on the plane.

In your organization, people might be spread around a building, a city, country, or the world, so a PA system isn’t going to do it. Something else is needed – something that can communicate to people both as a group and individually, and be available wherever the organization does its work. This is where a wiki comes in.

When our team has has a wiki at the center of its operations, new employees have immediate access to the body of knowledge they need to get up to speed quickly. Here are two tips to help them:

1. “Must-Know” Information: Make sure there’s a page in your wiki that points new people to the essential information they should get familiar with right away. This list should link to meeting agendas & minutes, project plans, status updates, and profile pages for others on the team.
2. Profile Page: The first thing a new employee should do is create a page in the wiki with their contact information, photo, job title, brief bio & information about their relevant experience, and what they’ll be working on. Next, they should send out an email to the team, briefly introducing themselves and linking to their wiki profile page. The email shouldn’t contain too much information – people should click through to the wiki page to know it’s there, read the new person’s info, and leave comments for them.

Now, when your new employee meets others in person, they’ll feel like they know each other already. This helps build deeper relationships, and a strong, highly productive team.

Editor’s Note: you can see the Stewart’s earlier posts by clicking on his tag below. Also visit www.ikiw.org.

Artists and designers live by the wikinomics code, always have done. Well, perhaps not strictly so, but the competition model that launched Goldcorp to mega success in mining, and that is improving Netflix recommendation engine, are a way of life if you are an artist, designer or architect. For example, take a look at architecture room, a place where architects and designers go for intelligence on open competitions globally: thearchitectureroom.

It is normal for developers commissioning large new buildings to shout out for architects. Right now you can pitch for inclusion in a short list to design the new Munch Museum in Norway, be shortlisted to design the Olympic Village for Madrid’s 2016 Olympic bid, respond to Orlando, Florida’s competition to design the re-use of the American Federal Building… and there are many hundreds more.

So who is doing what right now in the corporate world? Nokia is calling for furniture designers to promote design that either removes obstacles to mobility or creates movable furniture. Lifestyle products company Muji is running its third annual Found Muji design award, and Peugeot is running its fifth concept car design award. The Peugeot competition has attracted around 3 million hits to the Peugeot website.

What does this mean for the wikinomics era? It’s possibly the best example of professions organising themselves, and the training of professionals, to work in under wikinomics conditions. It’s tempting to criticise the drift towards contests as a way for corporates to secure cheap ideas, and when you think Peugeot pays only Euro 10,000 to the concept car winner, you have to say there’s more than a grain of truth in the criticism.

Platforms that organise ideagoras, such as Innocentive, can similarly stray into the creativity-on-the-cheap territory. What’s missing that would make these contests more practical in the long term is obvious if you look again at architecture and design – the commission. Architects who win contests get commissioned to work on the building. That makes continuous competition bearable and indeed fruitful. It seems to me the Innocentive model is in its early stages and that what follows are deals that enrich winners. A P&G in future might not just shout over the walls for a few ideas but might use the ideagora award to fund the start-up and development of new suppliers who’ve proven their worth with the brighteset ideas.

When skeptics express their doubts about wikis, Web 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0, they often scoff that all these shiny new technologies are flashy, but don’t solve real problems.

Well, what problem could be more real, more tangible, and more important than trying to defend your convoy from deadly attacks by insurgents in Iraq? If wikis can help keep soldiers alive, it sure seems like they should be able to help your company be more productive.

Frank Rath at the University of Wisconsin needed to find a better means of collaboration. Some of the world’s leading polymer scientists were working together with Resilient Technologies on an $11 million project to develop a new kind of airless tire for Humvees.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, roadside IEDs(improvised explosive devices) cause a lot of tire damage,” said Frank. “Then, once the vehicles can’t move, the insurgents attack. If the tires weren’t disabled, the troops could drive out of trouble. Engineers from Resilient Technologies are working with leading polymer scientists and mechanical engineers from the University of Wisconsin to build an airless tire for the Department of Defense.”

The problem was that Resilient Technologies is located in Wausau, about 120 miles and two-hour drive from the university’s campus in Madison. To make matters worse, one of the key members of the Resilience team was based in West Virginia, nearly 1,000 miles away.

In previous projects with Resilient, the university had used email and file attachments for collaboration, with mixed results. “It takes so much time to find the right documents, ” said Frank. “There are so many different iterations and modifications to track, especially when it comes to spreadsheets.”

One of Frank’s colleagues, Tom Smith, was already using a hosted wiki from PBwiki, and suggested that wikis would make the project much more efficient. Frank and his team tried it out, and soon, the entire project team was on the wiki, including five polymer scientists, three from Frank’s department, and 12 people from Resilient.

“We’re using the wiki to help us with all the work it takes to get from concept to real product. We use the wiki for spreadsheets on market development, documents with examples of other airless tires, images of competing products, project progress reports, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) sheets, and QFD (Quality Function Deployment) documents,” said Frank. “All the different variations are stored on the wiki. If we didn’t have the wiki, we’d be emailing those files back and forth all the time.”

The bottom line for Frank is that wiki collaboration is an integral part of the project. “Using the wiki eliminates confusion, duplication, and the potential for errors. PBwiki is a simple and easy-to-use platform that lets us coordinate and execute critical projects.”

As for Frank, he’s planning on using wikis for other important projects, such as helping the AAPM (American Association of Physicists in Medicine) improve cancer treatments. “I’m on an AAPM task force on improving the quality management system for cancer radiation therapy, and we should be using a wiki for that too. I’m working with top doctors and researchers–their time is incredibly important, and it shouldn’t be wasted searching for the right email attachment.”

When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many.

Let’s look at an example – the expense report. It’s a standard process, with a common form that people need to access, complete, include receipts, and submit for approval.

If the organization’s accounting office uses a wiki, a staff member can add a page, explain the process for filling out an expense report, attach the blank report template, and make sure the page can be viewed by employees logged into the wiki. That staff member might also decide to make the page editable, so that others can refine the instructions based on their experience. Another option is to restrict direct editing of the page, but enable comments so that people can leave feedback and notes in addition to the instructions. The accounting staff can then update the instructions and procedure based on comments, and leave reply comments to let people know that their feedback has been incorporated.

Either option is more participatory than a static page, and more efficient because people throughout the organization can add useful knowledge where it makes the most sense – on the wiki page, in context, instead of cluttering email inboxes with messages that will be mostly ignored.

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where all employees can become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the evolving knowledge about how to reach those goals.

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)

– Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained

A corporation too, is rather like Dennett’s sea squirt. When young and growing, it is all innovation-everywhere – strategy is an active line function, a brain, through early twists and turns towards fertile markets. Research isn’t a separate function because it is all research. As it matures, the organization may take root in a comfortable market… and eat its own brain. Strategy shrinks and becomes a backroom staff function, and R&D is first localized as a vanity function (“we have a lab with 50 star PhDs!”), and then gradually shrunk. Then one day, the market is threatened and everybody screams, “Who moved my cheese!” The capacity for active strategic steering and innovation everywhere has been lost.

How do you keep it alive in a cost-effective way? How do you prevent the animal from permanently becoming a plant? Succumbing to Luddite researcher screams for more blue-sky funding is dumb – history proves that doesn’t work. Here’s a smarter way:

Reverse Surge Capacity

Look at this picture (all P/L and margin is bundled into “operations,”):

Much of this picture will be obvious to innovation professionals: the traditional 3-bucket R&D investment model of blue-sky research, near-term development, and “spiky” incidents when operating business units call on R&D for surge-capacity to fight fires.

A reverse surge (the leftmost downward spike) happens when R&D spots an opportunity to draw business unit staff into research roles and actually reserves part of its precious budget to fuel such spikes. If it works, the reverse spike may trigger a new business growth spurt. This is anathema to 1.0 innovation theologians (R&D is supposed to preach and beg for money from the business units, not give it away).

Toy Example

Here is a toy example, with some simplified, illustrative tactical/operational detail, based on real examples I’ve known. A line of business has had its main product displaced by a competitor and seen a sharp drop in revenue, leading to some layoffs and serious anxiety. This unit, at the time it most critically needs new ideas to survive, has no spare resources with which to find and develop the new ideas, and is under threat for further cuts unless it immediately redeploys some remaining resources towards a believable option. A frustrated unit employee blogs internally about the situation. An R&D manager spots this, connects some dots to some market developments she’s been watching cheaply through external industry blogs, and some waiting portfolio “seed” ideas, and triggers a reverse surge. R&D steps in and provides short-term funding to support a cross-functional research-led team tasked with seeding a growth opportunity, with constraints that link the effort to innovation priorities. R&D gets the market expertise it needs (hint: here’s why this is crucial to innovation), and operational staff get a chance to step back from quarterly pressures and work on some of their longer-term ideas born of field experience.

This is reverse surge capacity: an operational unit has been drawn into innovation work in a serious way that goes way beyond online brainstorms (which just clog traditional stage-gate pipelines more in the worst case). The recipe is simple, but very unorthodox (which is why the few examples I know of – which unfortunately I can’t talk about – have a ‘maverick’ feel to them, but they are starting to appear with increasing frequency). Note the complexity of the story – it isn’t a chaotic bottom-up Kumbaya storyline where a wiki magically produces a business. It is like a complex, stochastic chess game, where some of the pieces move by themselves, and some are moved deliberately, against a changing board.

The Theory

The key is to recognize that innovation is a partly situational, rather than a purely structural function. Innovation everywhere is not about everybody coming up with and pursuing their own ideas all the time. That is even worse than preachy PhDs trying to come up with all the ideas and throwing them hopelessly over walls. Innovation everywhere (really, innovation anywhere) is about orchestrating innovation in a flexible enough way that whoever is best positioned and motivated to go after an opportunity is able to draw on the resources to innovate. Wikinomics provides the doctrine and social media provide the high-clarity internal and external visibility and social networks to spot and react to ‘reverse surge’ opportunities. What is missing is the hard-nosed operational and tactical management middleware, capable of moving resources around, which the reverse surge model begins to provide.

Remember this formula:

• Some employees must be innovating all of the time
• All employees must be innovating some of the time
• All employees must NOT be innovating all of the time
• Innovation leadership must orchestrate this opportunistically

The Gory Details

Of course, as anybody in a modern innovation role will recognize, I have over-simplified the picture. There are a lot of operational competencies that must be mastered to make this approach routine and effective, and no company operates this way routinely today. You need to understand the intricate interplay of strategy, doctrine, tactics and operations in a modern enterprise, and understand the art of opportunism – a key skill in the 2.0 world. You need to understand and learn to play the changing game of talent management, and the rich variety of roles required for successful innovation. You need to master outsider innovation and open innovation practices, develop a deep appreciation for Coase economics, and develop social media capability maturity.

But then, plants don’t evolve into mammals overnight.

Sea Squirt 2.0

Going back to the original metaphor, imagine instead that the brain shrinks, but not to nothing. When something disturbs the rock, our hypothetical creature’s generalist brain cells recognize a new, promising rock, and generate some hormones that temporarily turn some body cells into specialist brain cells uniquely suited to the task of moving towards the promising new rock. The sea squirt 2.0 uproots some tentacles, moves them gingerly over to the new rock, straddles the two for a while, and then possibly moves the remaining tentacles, before shrinking its brain again.

In Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast, New York Times writer Matt Richtel looks at the growing problem of fractured attention in the workplace – thanks to email, instant messaging, and other interruptions that are costing employees 28% of a typical workday – and the cost isn’t just measured in time:

In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

I often talk about email as a “push” medium – that is, you push messages out to recipients, and each person gets their own copy. This seems simple enough, but two problems emerge in practice. Each new email message can be an interruption, and the fact that a separate copy goes to each person means that it isolates people from each other.

Also, with email there is the perception that you have more control because you can select recipients, but in reality you have less control over the message because you can’t control where it ultimately goes. Any of the original recipients can forward it, and this can leak sensitive information, take things out of context, and give you a whole new set of problems that require a lot of time and work to deal with. That can mean even more lost productivity from more important work.

A wiki, by contrast is a “pull” medium – it pulls people in to look at content on a single, shared page that everyone can edit. That means people see all the changes that everyone else makes, and in builds a stronger connection & community instead that’s just the opposite of isolating. allows you to do two things:

Explicitly set access permissions on a page to restrict who can view and edit it. Others can’t change this so information the needs to be protected really is secure.

For information that isn’t restricted, the awareness that it can be widely read requires you to think about what you include and how you present it so that it will be clear and useful.

Here’s an example of this from Nate Nash:

Frankly, I sort of like the idea that if some moron in my company drops an F bomb on a blog post, that slickness is immediately exposed to the entire company. I hope he gets fired. And HR keeps the post up as an example of “what not to do with the enterprise Wiki.” If you are that dense I am 1) glad other people know, 2) convinced you don’t deserve a job here, and 3) now aware that we might need more stringent hiring practices. All good things in my book. This staffing action can happen in our Wiki.

After a long day of work, you plop down on the couch after dinner and turn on the television. Your myTV channel pops up and you begin to scan your customized start channel, which shows you what shows have recorded on your DVR, what shows on network TV you might like based on your recent viewing habits as well as what your social network is watching, the top UGC clips of the day from YouTube and other video sharing sites, as well as a robust search engine that will allow you to find and download virtually any TV show or movie every published, at costs ranging from free to $19.99 per download. Furthermore, with a couple clicks on this page through your remote, you can send content to your wireless device or your car’s hard drive over your home network – a virtual digital content consumption utopia.

The reality, however, is something much different, despite all the technologies needed for this vision being well established and available. A relatively recent article (editor’s note: November 2007) in Business Week has titled I Want My iTV is an excellent read on the forces at play in the royal rumble of media consumption. The article focuses on the battle for the living room, and it highlights how the promise of the convergence of TV and the Internet is long overdue yet continues to be hampered (in the US in particular) by the various stakeholders in the value chain each trying to protect their business and avoid being disintermediated by new technologies or business models.

The author correctly notes that lean-back technologies like DVR and Sling have changed the way in which we watch traditional TV – both time and place can be shifted. Simultaneously, lean-forward technologies like YouTube and other video sharing sites have brought to light the potential long tail impact of UGC and short-form clips, while Move Networks allow us to consume long-form content with amazing picture quality and reliability on our PCs. Nevertheless, the article’s author wants to watch what he wants when he wants it from his couch and points out the present limitations of the living room, particularly around the area of search and discovery of content on demand.

This is a particularly timely problem, and one that startups and industry incumbents are trying to tackle. Furthermore, virtually every player in the value chain is not only trying to protect their current position, but leverage new technologies, viewing behavior, and business models, to expand their sphere of influence and control. Apple is one of the better examples of a company that has capitalized on new technologies and behaviors, and the huge success of its iTunes-iPod-iPhone-AppleTV hardware/software combination has more than one major player feeling Apple has grown too powerful, culminating with NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker’s comments that Apple has “destroyed the music business” and the removal of NBC content from iTunes and the launch of Hulu.com.

The jury is still out on whether IP video is a good or bad thing for broadcast TV, which compiles the hesitancy for big companies to make major commitments one way or another. The music industry faced a similar problem with Napster, and Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit against GoogTube is oddly reminiscent of simpler, static web page days. Only this time, there is no doubt about the future of the Internet and its role in our lives.

A recent paper by Wharton economist Joel Waldfogel titled “‘Lost on the Web: Does Web Distribution Stimulate or Depress Television Viewing?” tries to measure the effects of online TV clips, both authorized and unauthorized, on television viewing between 2005 and 2007, using a survey of viewers’ tendencies. The study compares 287 young people on the University of Pennsylvania campus and ultimately finds that time spent viewing programming on the Internet – 4 hours per week – far exceeds the reduction in weekly traditional TV viewing of about 25 minutes. Overall time spent on network-controlled viewing (TV plus network websites) increased by 1.5 hours per week, indicating video clips on the Internet likely increase awareness of a show thereby encouraging more viewers to watch the show in its entirety when it airs on a network. However, in many respects, this study is already outdated, considering the new models launched by Hulu.com and abc.com have yet to be broadly studied by economists or researchers.

In order to harness the power of the Internet in the living room throughout the consumption of digital media, whether it’s focused on search and discovery or social networking, to be successful the players involved must embrace the principles of Wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

Openness: This is a significant challenge given TV’s history as a closed, walled garden system. Nothing says the cable and satellite companies have to give up the garden viewing experience, however they do need to tear down the wall and open this up to web-based content, broader user preferences and eventually third party application development within the garden (e.g. Facebook). If the cable and satellite companies do not move in this direction, it will open the door for a third party appliance like AppleTV, next-generation DVR or Sling, or video gaming console to do so.

Peering: Peer to peer assisted distribution models – if done correctly and with DRM in mind – can help reduce the expenses related to content delivery and consumption for the service proviers as well as the consumers. P2P can be contained to certain geographies or neighborhoods, or one’s social network in order to sharing like-minded content.

Sharing: The prospect of fusing social networking elements into the TV experience has already launched such companies as Joost and Veoh, as it is believed that some of the most engaging and useful features of Web 2.0 like social rating and ranking can be directly applied to watching TV. Nothing says this has to be done on your PC only, although to take place in the living room, it does require a healthy degree of openness (see above) as well as solving some user interface issues caused by the remote control.

Acting Globally: The delivery of studio content, both domestic and foreign, over broadband networks coupled with the on-demand content acquisition consumer mentality, radically changes the economic models for syndication currently used. Additionally, with half the world “flat” as Thomas Friedman has explained, along with place-shifting TV technology, the global media consumer will want to watch more and more international content, if available, and content that was previously considered domestic will quickly find new international audiences.

Cellular phones did not reduce the demand to talk on the phone and by all accounts increased our total talk time. However, the introduction of cell phones caused an erosion of the land-line phone business (along with the death of the pay phone business) as many consumers realized they only need a cell phone. IP video does not reduce the demand for watching short- or long-form content, and as Waldfogel’s study suggests, increases total video consumption time, although in the not-so-distant future, some of us may start to realize the only thing we need from the cable company is broadband service. Stay tuned.

Joshua Beil is the Director of Social Media & Technology at a publicly traded telecommunications company and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, a wireless ISP operating in Honolulu. Josh was named one of Pacific Business News’ “Forty Under 40″ in 2006 and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. He has been the primary author of numerous industry research reports on the market for small business Web hosting and Internet infrastructure services, holding research analyst positions at Tier 1 Research and IDC. His personal blog is www.beilblog.com and he can be reached at jhbeil@gmail.com.

I believe you can love what you do at work.

When I look at the sore subjects of work – email overload, unfocused meetings, and the confusion & misunderstandings that drag down projects – I see opportunity. A grand opportunity to take a step back, get a clear perspective on what really matters, and fix these things so that work can become meaningful and fulfilling.

Hi, I’m Stewart Mader, and I’m pleased to have been invited to guest blog with the Wikinomics team. That paragraph above is from my blog Grow Your Wiki, and it’s my call to action to people inside organizations who feel disempowered by existing tools and business processes.

I’ve been working with wikis for five years, ever since I built my first wiki community for collaborative science curriculum development, and I think the paradigm shift it represents – direct user editing of the content on a web page – is as significant as the Internet itself. When Tim Berners-Lee created the WorldWideWeb, he envisioned it as a “creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext (info.cern.ch)” and wikis enable people to do just that.

Growing wiki use in your organization is worthwhile because it creates an environment where everyone is empowered to directly make things happen, which gives people a deeper sense of purpose and accomplishment. That’s not something I can say for most other tools, like email. It’s essential if you want to build a successful new venture, or ensure the relevance and success of an existing organization in this rapidly changing world.

This is the first in a series of guest posts, and in the next one I’ll discuss how a wiki can address the growing problem of lost productivity because of interruptions during work. Have you ever said this? “I just can’t work in the office because there are too many interruptions and distractions.” If so, my next post might be able to help.