Many of our ideas about organizations and leaders were formed at a time when the primary operational challenge was one of getting people to perform tasks consistently and reliably. We leveraged best practices to achieve a uniform approach. We required that everyone be present in the same place and time, in some cases to get the work done, but at a minimum to allow us to gauge performance by watching in-process activities.

But more and more of the work that differentiates our businesses today depends on divergent or creative activities. Our challenge is one of creating environments that encourage people to become engaged, to take initiative, invest discretionary effort in a wide variety of collaborative activities, and, as a result, develop new approaches and ideas, provide extraordinary customer service, or ramp productivity. Think of this challenge as one of setting the stage, creating an environment that engages players from multiple constituencies. It is a “pull” rather than “push” approach to achieving business results.

Does your organization have the processes and practices, the leadership skills and the relationships among participants that you’ll need? Do you have the capacity to collaborate?

Over the last several years, our research has identified the characteristics of organizations that are successful at collaborative activity. With extensive data from teams from around the world, we identified ten factors that are highly correlated with successful collaboration:

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
2. Trust-based relationships
3. Prevalence of networking opportunities
4. Collaborative hiring, development, and promotion practices
5. Organizational philosophy supporting “community of adults”
6. Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
7. Executive role models for collaboration
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
9. Well-defined individual roles and responsibilities
10. Important, challenging tasks

Investing in these ten enabling factors builds an organization’s Collaborative Capacity – its ability and willingness to share information, ideas and insights productively. Conversely, productive collaboration is unlikely to occur is these factors are not in place. A journey to leverage the benefits of collaboration in your business must begin with assessing and, as necessary, building your organization’s Collaborative Capacity.

Think of this like beginning a manufacturing business. One fundamental question you would face is whether you have the right manufacturing capacity. Do you have the right facility? Is it well-maintained? Do you have the right permits and disposal mechanisms in place? And so on. These questions would be the foundation required before you begin any specific manufacturing process.

Or, think of it like assessing the talent in your firm. Most of you probably do an annual review of your workforce, asking: Do we have enough people to deliver? Do they have the right skills and training? Are they engaged?

Assessing your Collaborative Capacity is similar to these two analogies. Do you have the beliefs, processes, behaviors – the things our well-grounded research has shown to have a statistically valid correlation to collaboration – in place as a foundation upon which to build?

In upcoming posts, I’ll share ways you can assess your organization’s Collaborative Capacity and some of the approaches successful companies are using to enhance these factors in their organizations.

Becoming a Collaborative Enterprise won’t just happen. Many of today’s processes and practices – and the culture within many organizations – are not ready to reap the benefits that the new collaboration can provide. The ability to collaborate can be a powerful competitive advantage – but doing it successfully requires the right organizational context.

If you’re interested in learning more about tools to assess or build your organization’s Collaborative Capacity, please let us know.

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.

Wikipedia goes to great lengths on it’s NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy page to explain how and when an article can be considered “neutral:”

The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting verifiable perspectives on a topic as evidenced by reliable sources. The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as “the truth”, in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one.

This sounds great, but I’m concerned that the Wiki system as a whole might have considerable bias built-in. First, consider what Wikipedia is. It’s the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but not anyone does — instead, most prefer just to read (it’s the 7th most visited site online). Just as visiting the site is an opt-in process, so is editing it; the community that creates and polices content is very much self-selecting. This is where I think the problem arises.Something is only neutral within the context of its community. That is, an issue is neutral (in my mind at least) when it exists perfectly balanced between the centres of gravity of two or more conflicting views. Given that the population of people who edit Wikipedia is necessarily drawn from the people who read Wikipedia — but also have the inclination, be it technological or ideological, to edit the site — there is the concern that the editing community has a different makeup with regards to their opinions on issues than the reader community, and the world at large.

Wikipedia attempts to address this by saying that in order for something to be cited as a reference, it needs to refer to a reliable source — one that has a reputation for fact checking and integrity. There are two problems with this:

1. “Reliable sources” have bias built in too. Al Jazeera is reliable to one subset of people, FOX News is reliable to another. Fans of either source would be offended to hear that the other is placed on the same level as their own.
2. The community gets to decide what sources are reliable (because who else is there to, Wikipedia is a community based effort).

The first problem doesn’t have any easy solutions; individual bloggers may be telling the truth with every word they write, but until they have a sufficient following and track record, there’s not really any reliable metric to decide if what they’re saying is admissible. Wikipedians could do research to bolster one-off claims found on blogs, but this practice would be awfully close to original research, something the site strives to avoid.

The second problem is simultaneously easy and hard to solve. The more people edit Wikipedia, the more accurate the alignment of “neutral” to the Wikipedians and “neutral” to everyone else becomes (unless of course people with a specific agenda flood into the site en-masse to try and shake things up). But this is counterbalanced with the issue of getting people involved. Not everyone wants to edit Wikipedia, and not everyone who wants to knows how.

Interestingly, I read this result as meaning that Wikipedia is consistent from first to last. In principle, the more people edit Wikipedia, the better it gets; similarly, the more people edit Wikipedia, the more its version of neutrality becomes one that reflects the world at large. It’s a fantastic resource, and if we want it to continue to improve, at some point, we’re all going to have to get involved.

(A special thank you to my friends Danielle, Eve, and Josh, with whom I had the conversation that resulted in this post. Also of note is that XKCD, did, in some measure, address this long before we did.)

He outlined five objectives for the Forum.  I’ve summarized them below but I encourage everyone to read the full speech, which is a quick read.

First, we will support governments, and particularly the G20, in their efforts to address the systemic risks in the financial systems to stabilize and relaunch the economy. We have worked together with the respective governments to make sure that all relevant issues are integrated into our discussions and that we can create here – midway between the G20 Summits in Washington last November and in London next April – a true global multistakeholder partnership supporting bold but necessary actions and policy changes.

The second objective for our Meeting is to make sure that we look at our world in a holistic, systemic way. The financial and economic crisis is not the only issue that needs a global multistakeholder response.

The third objective of this Annual Meeting is to start a year-long process to help design the systems and institutions that the world needs to really cooperate and to confront global challenges in a much more proactive way.

The fourth objective of this Annual Meeting is to better shape the ethical value base for business, highlighting a clear differentiation between industrial and service companies that provide true value to society and those that make money through paper transactions and speculation. Profit is a major driver of business, but it is clear that it cannot be profit at all costs and that self-indulgence cannot replace reasonable competitive remuneration.

The fifth and final objective of this Annual Meeting is to reconstruct the global economy. Yes, we are in the midst of an enormous challenge but we are also at the threshold of many promising breakthrough technologies, as the strong presence of our Technology Pioneers demonstrates. Today, a great opportunity exists to generate a new wave of economic growth based on technologies, products and services directly meeting societal needs in eco-efficiency, in healthcare, in transportation, in people empowerment and many more.

The traditional knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers do little active work in matching a question with a resident subject expert, instead relying on the community to keep an eye on the topics they’re best equipped to answer. A new social search service (still in beta) called Aardvark.im from the folks at The Mechanical Zoo aims to actively feed questions to self-proclaimed “subject authorities” who take it from there. As you pose and answer questions you build your “knowledge network”—a social network of your conversation participants. The question routing is done via Aardvark’s algorithm, which according to a VentureBeat article, will involve favouring “friends-of-friends” as the first-line recipients, but does the expert finding for you.

The cool element about Aardvark is that it’s a seamless merger of a knowledge market (a la Yahoo! Answers) and real-time conversation tools (Twitter). Want to know where you can get a good sandwich in your neighbourhood? A quick tweet polls the experts in your city, and you have your answer in real-time. Seems like the service could be structured for use within a company intranet too. For example, you could post a question about quarterly performance numbers or about warehouse inventory levels, and the question would get routed to the resident expert in each department, with the responses in real-time. From my experience, that would trump those long email chains that go back and forth trying to find the right person to answer a specific question.

Speed depends on the number of users on the network, which at around 1,200 the service is pretty small (Aardvark is still in beta)—but given that this is a version of an “applied” Twitter, and that beta invites are in short supply, it’s likely Aardvark will find quick cachet with the nation’s sandwich seekers. And other folks too, I guess.

The Bilski patent involved a method to determine appropriate pricing and apportioning of commodity hedging instruments—a process by which companies can mitigate price risk in volatile markets. Hedging and risk management are on the tips of everyone’s tongues these days: Don has written thoroughly about it, and “risk managers” seem to be the only people on Bay and Wall Streets who still get calls from recruiters (not ones who worked for these guys, of course). But the fundamental question, as seen by the court, was “Is this ‘machine-or-transformation’ test satisfied?”

The test is simple in premise, but as are many legal concepts, is readily abstracted into realms unknown. The decision said it clearest:

“an applicant may show that a process claim satisfies §101 either by showing that his claim is tied to a particular machine, or by showing that his claim transforms an article.”

The Bilski patents were not seen as a transformation of the underlying “article” (in this case, obligations and concepts of risk), as these articles were considered ineligible: they were not “physical objects or substances, and are not representative of physical objects or substances.” (Emphasis added) The applicants hoped that their process, which produced “useful, concrete and tangible results” would be sufficient, but when considered in isolation, that wasn’t enough. An aside

But what does it all mean, Basil? What are the implications to future innovation, especially given the shift to knowledge work, where razor-thin profit margins are often a direct product of business processes (albeit, ones with more gravitas and specificity)? For that we go to one of the dissenting judge’s opinions, Judge Newman. She (and I agree) that the redefinition of the “process” to depend on machines or tangibility (or representation thereof) is imprudent:

“…thus excludes many of the kinds of inventions that apply today’s electronic and photonic technologies, as well as other processes that handle data and information in novel ways. Such processes have long been patent eligible, and contribute to the vigor and variety of today’s Information Age. This exclusion of process inventions is contrary to statute, contrary to precedent, and a negation of the constitutional mandate. Its impact on the future, as well as on the thousands of patents already granted, is unknown.”

The other two dissenters, Rader and Mayer, speak to the desirability of a more concise resolution and the devolution of the patent landscape:

• Rader argues that stressing process-machine relationship is outdated given the current state of science and technology.
  

• Mayer’s dissent is a little more vigorous, and disagrees with business method patents wholly as they stand now
  

• The argument is one that patent law is meant to spur innovation and science, not help financiers structure business arrangements.
  

So who is right? One potential school of thought is that since most technology process innovations are tied to machines so closely, that patenting shouldn’t be slowed by this decision, and Newman has nothing to fear.

My stance is this: Hedging, computer aided or not, is still a fundamental business principle: alone, it’s unpatentable. But the idea that something non-physical needs to be tied to a machine to make it patentable is a surprising (and unwise) decision. It seems like the decision failed to speak to the future, but instead seems to gain its only ammunition on the basis of the “transformation” argument. I agree with Rader that the patent could have been just as ably defeated by arguing its scope was too broad, effectively damaging antecedent work in the area.

My Wikinomics Angle: I’m decidedly Mayer-esque in his “Six Million Dollar Man” idea that we can rebuild the system. Why? Because “we have the technology” that necessitates it (apologies, but we needed some levity. This far it’s been Churchill martini-dry). Patents aren’t meant to replace a business model or prevent others from even doing business. Ideally, they’re meant as an avenue through which innovators can be compensated for their role in science and technological evolution. Instead we’re seeing companies set up defensive minefields as a competitive strategy. Weak. In 1995, Michel Robert wrote that innovation was considered to be the business “Fountain of Youth”, as it was the cornerstone to both success (a product of competitiveness) and longevity (a product of success). Jeff Roberts at McGill University in Montreal wrote a great blog post about how IP should mean innovation, not litigation. He’s a sharp cookie, and fear not, he’s not an anarchist. He just advocates that if IP policy is careless with what he calls the “rights-rewards balance”, innovation becomes an afterthought, not the goal.

Wikinomics in law isn’t about free (little joke), and it isn’t about ignoring property rights; that rigidity was born out of the old vanguard that created walled gardens. But the only way to see over those tall-walled enclaves is a return to a founding tenet of past science:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” – Isaac Newton, 1676

[Aside: The whole "useful…" phrase sounds like something written by Teresa Amabile a researcher who studies creativity and innovation. The stickiest phrase I remember from one of her academic papers was criteria for judging something as creative was dependent on it being "novel and appropriate". I also felt that Jerome Bruner said it really well that true creativity would produce "a shock of recognition, following which there is no longer astonishment." Pretty neat reading for you academic folks.] Back to Post

Ten days after mailing the physical copy of the report to Carleton, Moufid emailed the 32 students whose accounts had been completely compromised, and informed them that the school had been made aware of the attack on security, and had decided to ignore it. One of the students happened to be an intern at a CBC newsroom, and her supervisor found the story to be interesting — it grew from there. Carleton said that they only received the package the same day that Moufid emailed the 32 students, leaving them with no time to do anything at all.

Moufid’s attack came from recognizing a substantial logical flaw in Carleton’s user authentication system: that once someone has access to a compromised email account, they have direct access to just about everything else. After seeing this design flaw, Moufid worked backwards, using what he knew about the Carleton systems, to figure out his point of attack, which turned out to relate to the Campus ID cards.

Once word was out that Carleton was looking for the hacker, Moufid promptly turned himself in. Carleton did not elect to expell him, but instead made it a condition of his continued presence at school that he claim to have lied about alerting the school to the security issue, among several other punishments.

While my heart goes out to Mouffid, I think he could have handled the situation in a much more delicate manner, Universities are built on reputation, and don’t respond well to students taking direct, public attacks on their reputations.

Since I’m still a student, this story hits home for me. Not because I intend to break into my school’s security system, but because someone else may have already, and my school could be sweeping it under the carpet. As the two links to wikileaks above point out, once the information is out there, it’s out there, and there won’t be a broom large enough to clean up the mess so that no one finds out.

As for how a university expects to have a population comprised almost entirely of the leaders of tomorrow, and be able to repress information that that population has access to, I’m not sure — I don’t see it happening. By ignoring Moufid, and then trying to discredit him (assuming that Moufid had given them plenty of notice), Carleton has set a precedent that will deter future students from bringing forth security issues: it paints their options as either allowing the insecurities to remain (by being ignored when hilighted), or receiving harsh penalties for trying to bring those security flaws to light.

I don’t mean to be hard on Carleton, it just happens to be the school where this incident happened, but it could just have easily been anywhere else. Universities need to make sure that they’re properly prepared for, or at least open to the idea of, uncomfortable situations such as these when the powers that be aren’t the ones with all of the answers.

Members of the net generation will scrutinize everything to make sure that it meets their standards, including especially the security systems that their universities provide. When you’ve got the architects of the security systems of tomorrow on hand, and they’re happy to find the holes in your current security system for you, it seems only prudent to seriously entertain their suggestions.

The project was to go through our research catalogue and back-tag existing content with a standard set of tags. To accomplish this, we needed to define the standard set of tags in a way that was easily accessible for all of us, and somehow it didn’t seem like that we’d enjoy much success copying and pasting from a physical whiteboard. So, we figured we’d try out Google Spreadsheets for an in-office project. It was awesome.

When we loaded up the document and had everyone invited, you could see the color-coded selection boxes of each other user as they went about adding content to the spreadsheet. We would ask each other questions and then see the answers appear near-instantaneously in the document. It was really cool, and it was really functional. Earlier today, Naumi argued that sometimes synchonous work is overrated, this was not one of those times.

What was really striking was that for every edit that we made, the information had to be sent through our router, to our ISP, to a backbone, to Google’s serverfarm and then back again to each other user. What was remarkable was that the data was able to travel several hundred miles through an online spreadsheet faster than it was able to travel across the room if we were speaking. Our experience was greatly enriched by using an online collaborative technology in a face to face setting.

Man, I’m a dork for thinking this is as cool as I do.

Ongoing, a blog focused on truth, technology, and business, wrote a profile of one OSCON talk in particular, one given by Christine L. Peterson, on the topic of open source security in elections. Peterson argues that the US Government thinks that the best way to safeguard rights is to accumulate as much data as possible through numerous types of surveillance, and that the issue of transparency versus privacy is not even on their radar. Furthermore, Peterson thinks that this approach is fundamentally misguided, as terrorism is a bottom-up problem, and “they’re trying to solve a bottom-up problem with top-down tools.” This leads her to suggest that we need bottom-up physical security — and that the open source community is best tasked to develop this new breed of security systems.

Ongoing, however, runs with a point that Peterson makes about 10 minutes in: that all government initiatives using data collected from the public should be implemented with software that is not closed/secret-sourced. This means no private contracts, like what was done for e-voting. E-voting has not gone well, and Peterson thinks that the geeks bear some responsibility for this; she implies that the geeks (especially the open source community geeks) foresaw the issues with e-voting and did nothing, something that is especially bad because no one but the geeks even knew (or cared about) what was going on. So, there’s a call to arms for geeks to unite to ensure technology is problem designed and implemented by (technically inept) political well-wishers in DC.

Issues like privacy, transparency, and the open sourcing of software that plays out in the public domain are tremendously important subjects, but they’re equally tremendously unsexy. People don’t seem to want to learn about them, let alone fight for them. So, has it fallen to tech savvy citizens to step up, and lead society away from the potential pitfalls and abuses of new technology? Or have citizens got an obligation to educate themselves, and just pay the price if they don’t?

Now I’m REALLY starting to think things being thrown at other people is a dominant theme – see here, here, and here. Or if you prefer, you can check out the original – and all the other mash ups – at www.dilbert.com.

Clearspace’s social networking function offers detailed profiles of your co-workers as well as a ‘mini-feed’ to keep users updated on what their colleagues are working on. Its wiki platform helps deal with long chain e-mail responses, speaking to the ‘wiki happiness’ diagram that Anthony Williams pointed us to in one of his previous posts. Clearspace’s blogging capability lets employees express their interests, opinions and talk about areas within their expertise. Most importantly – all of this is searchable.

A Forbes article featuring Jive points to a blind-test of several collaboration options, including Clearspace and SharePoint (the dominant enterprise collaboration suite, created by Microsoft). “People voted unanimously for Clearspace and were so won over they made bumper stickers that said ‘Friends don’t let friends use SharePoint.’”

Jive understands its competitive environment and sees the need to adapt its strategy to the demands and restrictions of the market since it is up against heavyweights like Microsoft (Sharepoint has over 100 million licenses sold since 2001). In an interview with CIO magazine, Jive’s CEO Dave Hersh points out that around 80% of their customers have SharePoint.

Although Sharepoint is good at work flows and files, it’s not as good with working with web content and online collaboration. To compete with companies like Microsoft, Jive has developed Clearspace to be extensible (understanding that it would be near impossible to convert all of Sharepoint’s established customers): it has the ability to integrate with Sharepoint while Jives’ discussion forum software is bundled into Oracle and SAP’s portal applications.

For more articles highlighting jive and clearspace go to their news section.

This situation is open source collaboration at its finest. Mozilla made the source to Firefox open source. This allows them to harness the researching power of thousands without employing any of them. In addition they don’t even need to employ full time programmers to fix the problem. TippingPoint programmers find a solution to the problem and sell Firefox only what they need. The researchers are also happy because they are compensated for any discoveries that they find. Every one is a winner.

Many people believe that it is impossible to make a profit using open source, but this is clear evidence that the belief isn’t true. TippingPoint and Mozilla are utilizing open source to achieve greater profitability than would be possible using traditional business methods. In addition, they are able to create a safer, higher quality product. The benefits of open source are undeniable, and you can expect more companies to utilize this power in the near future.

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and publish the audio files on the Internet. Our goal is to record all the books inthe public domain.

Kevin Kelly’s website has a great description of it given from contributor Paul Goessling:

Last year I took a cross-country road trip with my 10-year-old daughter, and we were greatly entertained by the free public domain audio books available from LibriVox, an online forum which connects readers (as in those who voice the text) to books, then makes the resulting audio files freely available to all. The library is strictly public domain material, but is very extensive. Most of the books we listened to were read by just one person (“going solo”), but readers can volunteer for individual chapters of books in progress. We listened to The Prince and the Pauper, The Mysterious Island, The Wind in the Willows, Five Children and It, and several selected poems and short stories. (Kudos to Timothy Smith for The Mysterious Island — a tour de force!). Online coordinators organize the readings, which are generally excellent. Some readers provide wonderful voices for each character; some simply read the text. The books are available for download from the website, or can be downloaded via iTunes, which we did and then listened to from the iPod in the car

In case you want to contribute to the community, here’s where to get started.

CrowdChess is a fascinating social platform all about pushing the boundaries of human intelligence. A platform to see what happens when thousands of people from all over the world with diverse ethnical, cultural and educational backgrounds, of different age and social status have a common goal in mind and are working in tandem on solving the same problem together and outsmarting their opponent. Whose strategy, foresight and vision are superior, is the ultimate question.

Players sign up and are randomly assigned to be part of either the white or black team, each player suggests a move, that suggestion counts as a vote. Whichever move has the most votes at the end of the time-limited turn is the team’s move.

This model of collaboration is similar to Digg. I think it’s fundamentally misguided. The Digg model works okay for ‘news’ (unless you’re a huge fan of lolcats and two-year-old memes, then it’s awesome), but it’s not working towards any specific goal, it’s just aggregating what people like at some moment in time. Wikipedia is a prime example of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ but the way that wisdom is made manifest is completely different from a Digg or CrowdChess model. With Wikipedia, anyone can contribute an incremental improvement. Even if their single contribution isn’t all that great, it still pushes the article along in the right direction, and it can be easily undone if it’s less than beneficial.

Digg, and more directly, CrowdChess, are manifestations of the fallacious appeal to popularity. Chess is a game of fantastic complexity and choice, more often than not, the most obvious move is not the best one, instead, you look for a move that (ideally) furthers one or more of your agendas on the way to victory.

CrowdChess completely negates this. The individual players might each be trying to push their own strategies, but unless, by some statistical impossibility, they all share the same strategy, all individual strategies will fail equally to be realized. While it could be argued that even without strategy, if the pool of players on one team agree on the best possible move each time, they’ll likely find themselves victorious, I don’t think that this is a valid objection: if each team is comprised of players from all skill levels, they will at best pick an average move. CrowdChess even goes so far as to restrict the ability of teams that work well together to get even better; they encourage all new players joining the action to join the winning team.

“Decepticons: Missuse technology!”

At any rate, I’m hoping that I’ve sufficiently revealed myself as a chess geek for one blog post. I’m inclined to think that I’m right about this though, as Mashable is reporting that the site is for sale on eBay. At the time of writing, it had no bids.

If you think I’m out of line on this, feel free to challenge me to a game of Yahoo! chess in the comments. Bring some friends if you like.

Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines (for instance a series called BLEACH centers around the chaste relationship of the main characters, but dojinshi versions feature the characters hooking up).  How do fans repurpose copyrighted material without drawing legal fire?  Via an unwritten, implicit agreement between dojinshi writers and established media companies, what Pink refers to as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”).

I’m not a big fan of comics, either North American or Japanese, but this strikes me as a much more enlightened relationship between media companies and fans. (Though, from what I gather, these dojinshi are pretty racy and feature characters doing things ..er.. outside of their normal realm of activities — kudos to the manga companies for being so tolerant.) It would be great if instead of slapping YouTube users with c&d’s for remixing their content, media companies just silently paid attention, then picked the best content to develop for larger use. Maybe some day!

Ok, not quite.

My friend Abram Hindle is doing some fascinating research: he’s working on ‘mining artifacts from versioned software.’ Here’s what that means:

In software development, programmers use a central database to keep track of every change made to the code of their software. This database keeps copies of all earlier versions of the software, as well as the current version (and maybe some unstable versions for testing).

Abram is writing a piece of software that analyzes a development database like the one described above. This software looks through every iteration of the project’s code and determines what changes were made, by who and when, and stores that information in it’s own database. Based on this data, mined from comparing and contrasting previous versions of in-development programs, Abram’s software is able to figure out how much time the programmers spent on each part of the program. What’s more, the software can even determine which programmers create or fix the most errors.

These techniques and methods allow programmers to be socially linked by virtue of what parts of the code they edit — regardless of when either programmer makes their contributions and changes. On being able to map programming contributions socially like that, my buddy Phil says “I think if we did that here at my work, I’d be best friends with a guy who quit 10 years ago.” And he’s right: lots of companies have version control databases that reach back 5, 10, even 25 years. With this software you could look inside of the old code and take a long view at the effectiveness of programming teams over the years under different management regimes, or just track the lifetime growth of a given subroutine.

This form of data mining isn’t only applicable to software programming, though; it will work with any kind of version controlled document (I’m looking at you, wikis). With a mining program like this, you could examine your company wiki and see — nicely summarized — the types of contributions that each editor makes, how long they take to do it, and where they like to spend their time editing.

All of this isn’t without its dark side, though. Programming can be an involved and complicated process, often too much so to be neatly summarized by a graph. That is, there’s the danger that normal programming practices could be misunderstood by managers, who penalize programmers for generating errors, all the while losing sight of the fact that those programmers are generating, by a wide margin, the most code.

I think that this is just one example of a larger theme: that we’re able to extract useful data from the very process of creating and sharing useful data. I’m very excited to see where research like this goes over the coming months.

A recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit suggests that adopting a broad definition for collaboration can be detrimental and can in fact detract from “true” collaborative efforts. The main focus of the report is the role of trust in enabling collaboration, but the opening section of the paper lays out a valuable framework for understanding the difference between collaboration, cooperation, and coordination.

From the report:

Research shows the term “collaboration” is used to cover the gamut—from projects designed to cut costs, increase efficiency and improve compliance to those involving working with outsiders to develop new products. Most often, collaboration is achieved through the use of early-21st Century technology to enable 20th Century processes. Collaboration is usually focused internally on producing derivatives of, or improvements in, existing activities. It is rarely seen as a total success.

While value can be derived from many different types of co-operative activities, the research suggests companies may be doing themselves a disservice by categorising every such initiative as collaboration.

In fact, the research indicates that companies might benefit from a more disciplined approach to defining and executing a collaboration strategy. Increased rigour could enable organisations to attain greater success and value from collaborative ventures—and better prepare them for the increased challenge of collaborating as the business environment becomes more globalised, communication becomes more virtualised, and the workforce absorbs an increasingly tech-savvy demographic.

According to the study, the top three uses of true collaboration among large enterprises ($10 billion+ revenues) are: improving internal processes, increasing efficiency, and lowering costs. For small- and mid-sized companies (less than $500 million in revenues) the main focus areas of collaborative initiatives are: developing a new product, increasing sales, and improving customer service.

For the complete findings, read “The role of trust in business collaboration.”

novhk (pronounced “invoke”) calls itself “The First Community-Managed Eco-Friendly Surf-Inspired Clothing Company.” The Los Angeles-based cooperative has been recruiting members since December and, with over 2800, is set to launch on June 5. For $50/year, members will help make major business decisions using a web-based community platform. 35% of profits will be distributed to members in the form of merchandise credit, with the rest being used for reinvestment and charitable donations.

It is unclear how involved members will actually be. Merchandise credit is not as enticing as cash. And, there is no incentive scheme to reward those who contribute more to the business.  Still, this is a fascinating business model that combines principles of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and social responsibility. Could it be a model for the future? 

In college, everyone has those professors that can really get under your skin. It drives us crazy because, when they look at you, you can almost see their mind weighing the value of your comments and opinions upon the number of degrees you have. If you’re a freshman, you might as well be five years old. This attitude could be one reason why many frustrated people view school as being “just another hoop to jump through.”

This message is not a shot at professors…well, maybe some professors (the kind nobody likes, that get the frowny faces on ratemyprofessors.com), but more a shot at the way many universities see their students. Are students assets or liabilities to administrators?

If they are seen as “liabilities” that professors have to deal with in between their papers and research, then schools of the future are going to face some trouble. This Net Generation disagrees with the old idea that: Students are blank slates that come to school to learn what the all knowing professors tell them. They quietly do their homework, conform, and in four years jump out from the hoops. Due to a childhood of social networks and parents encouragement to voice their opinions, the Net Generation refuses to do busy work, expects that they will be listened to and empowered to execute their ideas.

For large red tape organizations like universities, that even have “Space Committees” to create policies for picture hanging on walls, this can be hard to swallow. However, some are starting to see the importance of building a “community of assets” from their students and facilitating communication and collaboration between communities, government, businesses and students.

During her inauguration speech, Purdue President France Cordova outlined the importance of making organizational and strategic changes for the future by explaining the plans Purdue has for its students in the coming years. Purdue has seen the United States’ need for talented young people in science and technology. For this purpose they have changed many of their teaching goals to include:

1. Lowering class sizes

2. Steering students toward those disciplines

3. Creating an entrepreneurial culture to attract students

4. Allocating funds and resources to interdisciplinary research projects

5. Creating a culture of collaboration through localizing eleven interdisciplinary centers

6. Building commercial research parks to encourage partnerships with national and global businesses

7. Creating a cooperative “Super Project” between two of their offices

8. Setting a standard for leadership and global awareness

It seems that under the direction of President Cordova, Purdue’s students won’t view their education as jumping through hoops, but making a difference by collaborating, empowering and innovating.

From the article:

The urban playground movement is the latest example of how social media is being used to organize groups in public settings for a common goal — in this case, sheer entertainment. “The Internet and mobile phones now make it possible for anybody to organize collective action,” says Howard Rheingold, author of the book “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” who teaches social media classes at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. “Instead of it being a broadcast type entertainment, people are making their own.”

Mr. Bracken and Ms. Kufner have organized three pillow fights in New York and two in Toronto. Among other events they host: large-scale capture-the-flag games on city streets and subway dance parties. Word spreads through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and the organizers’ email lists. Anyone who wants to show up can participate.

The events are growing in size. A Facebook group for this year’s pillow fight in New York drew a confirmed attendance of about 12,000. Approximately 5,000 people showed up for the public whacking, dressed in everything from bee costumes to rat suits. “‘Free’ will become the new model for everything, and this is free entertainment,” Mr. Bracken says.

Videos of pillow fight and other flash mobs are here, here, and here.

The way it works is simple. Greenbook uses funds generated through sponsorship and advertising to purchase renewable energy certificates from its provider 3degrees who sources these certificates from various providers of renewable energy. Renewable Energy Certificates (REC) are a way for producers of renewable energy to seperate commodity electricity & environmental benefit into 2 seperate components in order to more easily facilitate the production and distribution of renewable energy. When a REC of a given unit of energy is purchased, that unit of renewable energy is inputted into the power grid and therefore displaces the same amount of fossil fuel energy as the American federal law mandates that those who manage the power grid purchase renewable energy whenever it is available. Every month Greenbook purchases a certain amount of RECs/CO₂ reduction through sponsorship and advertising and distributes it among current users*.

As Greenbook relies on sponsorhsip and advertising to generate revenue the more users that join – the more money raised and the more CO2 emmissions reduced. It doesnt stop there. Greenbook is using a wide array of offerings and fully leveraging community involvement to help save the environment. The application provides a forum where users share environment saving tips with each other combined with a rating system that pushes the most popular tips to the top of the list. Tips range from keeping your tired inflated properly for improved gas mileage to buying your food from local producers which reduces transportation pollution. Although some tips are not as useful as others,

the large supply of helpful suggestions provides an effective platform to collaborate and inspire others to live their lives in a ‘greener’ way. Greenbook even provides a shopping service with an array of pre approved ‘green’ products (powered by Amazon). In the near future, Greenbook plans to launch a suit of games that users can play to win credits to purchase more RECs and further reduce CO2 emissions.

Greenbook is effective not only because of its direct positive impact on the environment but also because of the large amount of environmental awareness it creates. One issue to wonder about is whether geographical boundaries will play a role in the popularity of this service. Since the unit of renewable energy that is inputted into the power grid is sourced from various regions that most likely will not be close to a user’s location, might users turn away from this method of CO2 reduction? Surely, global warming is a global cause for concern but won’t people prefer to minimize ommissions closer to home?

*for those who really want to make a difference 3degrees offers a footprint calculator on its website that allows users to instantly purchase renewable energy certificates equal to their carbon footprint.

Last week in this post I described how the owner of Plenty of Fish.com is able to earn $10 M per year by leveraging the sites users to perform the tedious labor required to operate such a site. This posed the question of how much profit can be made before donators demand a piece of the pie: Quite a bit it seems as Facebook has recently announced its intention of leveraging its users – without compensation – to translate its site into various languages.

The ‘translation’ application has already been downloaded by several thousand users from networks such as “Madrid” or “Berlin” who will work alongside professional translators hired by Facebook. Users of this application can translate words and phrases from a list that Facebook provides or may choose to search through the site and translate the words Facebook has highlighted. 

This example provides some insight into how great of profits such a crowdsourced effort can bring in before donators demand compensation. Although Facebook doesn’t report its annual earnings, this approximation estimates its annual net income to be roughly $50 M. What’s more perplexing is that this ‘translation’ application doesn’t seem to be very entertaining and yet it is still attracting thousands of users. Imagine what an application that was fun and served an underlying purpose at the same time could do. In fact, that is exactly what Google did with Google Image Labeler that lets players compete with each other to label and tag images to improve the quality of Google’s image search results. 

The possibilities would only be limited by creativity but one thing is certain – there will not be a shortage of eager volunteers ready to put in the hours. However, this begs the question – why are these users performing such tedious work for free? Do they really see Facebook as a worthy social cause? Or are they simply that bored?

This is the classic prisoners dilemma, which provides an important lesson for many budding young economists everywhere. If you (assuming you are the prisoner) talk, you either end up going free or getting a five year sentence. If you don’t talk, you either go to jail for six months or ten years.

From an individual standpoint, this makes it very tempting to talk, even though the best thing for the prisoners is if both keep their mouths shut – hence the dilemma, as the the optimal individual decisions do not lead to the optimal group outcome. To get to the optimal group decision, the prisoners must work together – which in this case means having a strong, established trust.

Which takes us to cooperation, and in a roundabout way to Dr. Nowak. As covered in this NY Times article (free registration required), Dr. Nowak has been using the principles of the prisoner’s dilemma to study cooperation, which he argues is one of the three basic principles of evolution (the others being mutation and selection).

It appears to be a fascinating bit of research he is doing, and the implications of it are great – while enabling and benefiting from cooperation is a key element of wikinomics, Nowak is also using the same principles to do things like seek out a cure for cancer, and wade knee deep into the study of evolution and altruistic behavior.

According to Dr. Nowak, the conditions in which cooperation can arise can be shown in a simple equation: B/C>K. That is, cooperation will emerge if the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio of cooperation is greater than the average number of neighbors (K).

Not surprisingly, the real juice for cooperation comes when reputations come into play. By pioneering a version of PD in which players acquire reputations, They found that if reputations spread quickly enough, they could increase the chances of cooperation taking hold. Players were less likely to be fooled by defectors and more likely to benefit from cooperation.

Further… Reputation has a powerful effect on how people play games. People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.

Do you think there might be some implications from this relevent to the role of reputation profiles in sites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, etc… and could this type of research help formalize/ structure and analysis for optimizing relationships within an ever evolving peer production community?