Originally published at Weblogsky.

Austin’s Dachis Group talks about social business design, defined as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.” I find the Dachis overview (pdf) interesting, if a bit scattered. David Armistead and I at Social Web Strategies had been having conceptually similar conversations for the last couple of years, looking at the potential culture change associated with social technology and new media (with Craig Clark), the need for business process re-engineering (with Charles Knickerbocker), and the power of value networks. This morning while sitting on my zafu, I had a flash of insight that I quickly wrote down as five thoughts that came to me pretty much at once…

1. Organizations are already using software internally and have been for some time – email lists, groupware and internal forums, various Sharepoint constructions, aspects of Basecamp, internal wikis and blogs, etc. What’s changed? I think a key difference is high adoption outside work – more and more of the employees of a company or nonprofit are having lifestyle experiences with Facebook Twitter, YouTube, Flickr et al. The way we’re using social media changes as more of us use it (network effect) and our uses become more diverse.
2. Organizations see knowledge management as storage, basically, but we can see the potential to capture and use knowledge in new and innovative ways, e.g. using multimodal systems (Google Wave, for example) to capture and sort knowledge as it’s created, with annotations and some sense of the creative process stored with its product – knowing more about how knowledge is produced improves our sense of its applicability. (It’s exciting to be a librarian/information specialist these days.)
3. Organizations will increasingly have to consider the balance of competition and cooperation with internal teams. I’ve seen firsthand how a culture of competition can stifle creativity by creating a disincentive to share knowledge. I’m thinking we’ll see more “coopetition.”
4. Who are the internal champions within an organization? There will be more interest at the C-level as social technology is better understood and success stories emerge from early adopters. It would be interesting to know what current champions of social media are seeing and what they’re saying. Also – how much of the move toward “social” will come from the bottom up, and how will that flow of new thinking occur?
5. How does the new world of social business (design) relate to marketing? Operations? Human resources? To what extent to the lines between departments blur? How will the blurring of the lines and potential cross pollination transform business disciplines?

A final thought: all the minds in your organization have a perspective on your business, and each perspective is potentially valuable. How do you capture that value? Do you have a culture that can support a real alignment of minds/perspectives/intentions?

Much of our work on the social business side focuses on a key question: how do we collaborate online, or more simply how do we talk to each other with online tools to get things done? Part of the solution is in finding the right tools, or combination of tools, to be effective. Some tools just won’t work in many contexts.

Wiki, for instance, is a tool (or a set of like patterns implemented in various tools) designed to support collaboration, but a wiki often fails to support successful collaboration because one or more essential members of the group don’t (or can’t) use it. This is often because wiki is so undesigned – which can be a strength in making it adaptable, but turns out to be a weakness for those who need more structure, more of an imposed information architecture. Just one essential member’s failure to adopt can produce failure, so the wiki format has succeeded only where it’s been modified (as in the SocialText “wikiblog,” which became less of a wiki as it became more of an enterprise application).

I’ve seen resistance to pretty much any collaborative tool. We tend to use Basecamp, which combines several communication patterns (messaging, wiki, shared to-do lists, file sharing), and we find that among those who have used Basecamp before, there can be a small but significant percentage who push back – who are looking for an effective alternative for whatever reason.

A few years ago I was involved in multimodal “happenings” to create collaboratively a paper published by Joi Ito, called “Emergent Democracy.” We initially combined audio teleconference with a form of realtime chat that included color-coded flags and a “hand” you could “raise” if you wanted to talk. The chat was partly used for these visual cues, and partly as a backchannel that added more depth to the conversation. We took notes on a wiki. The draft of the paper was intially shared as a Word document with change tracking, then dropped into QuickTopic where it could be collaboratively edited. It was finally dropped into a wiki for more collaborative editing. The collaboration was very successful. Today we have reasonably inexpensive tools, like GoToMeeting, that incorporate voice, chat, and shared presentation – very similar to the combination of patterns in the happenings.

More tools are emerging for collaboration, and one that we’ve been studying with keen interest is Google Wave. It’s still very beta, with limited adoption, so our experiments have been limited so far. However it’s promising: in Wave you can create a conversation, add participants at any point after the conversation starts, and play back the conversation as needed to keep track. Wave accommodates collaborative editing as well as conversation. It’s not an application that Google is developing, but a protocol that is being developed with Google in the lead, but with many external developers participating. The intention is to have a far more robust communication protocol that will replace email.

Finding the right tool set is key, but another crucial challenge is social: how do you keep a conversation on track and focused on decision and action? This is especially challenging with flatter hierarchies and headless organizations. In the emergent democracy discussions, we talked about a concept of emergent leadership, which was an acknowledgement that you must have leaders to make decisions and get things done, and in a context where no one is elected or appointed to lead, we look for one or more leaders to emerge. There are questions around how that leadership emerges, how it’s identified, acknowledged, accepted by the group, etc.

In companies and organizations where leadership is based on assignment or election, the questions about leadership are more traditional: how to get buy-in from the group, consensus on decisions, agreement on action items. This is partly about leadership quality (is the leader acknowledged and accepted by the group?), but also about organization (how well is group input and ultimate consensus orchestrated and managed?)

Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin and I recently worked together on a presentation called, an earlier version of which can be found on Slideshare. In defining how to create effective communities – communities that get things done – we considered Bijoy’s “human fabric” of three personality types: maven (knowledge-oriented), relater (relationship-oriented), and evangelist (action-oriented). We suggested that communities, like individuals, can be characterized on a scale between any two of the three personality types. For instance, a community might fall on the axis between maven and relater – i.e. be focused on knowledge and relationships. This is where we would place an online community like the WELL, where members “hang out” and have casual conversations that are not focused on any action or deliverable. We went on to say that action-oriented communities would have a strong evangelist flavor, and would include one or more evangelist types who push for specific results.

This is probably true for any collaborative environment, including a small meeting. An evangelist or action-focused leader could be more effective in getting specific actions accomplished. This person might fall naturally into the leadership role. However a strong evangelist should be sensitive to the relevance of the other personality types: it’s important to have enough of the right knowledge to move forward, and getting things done can require attention to relationship.

In summary, effective online collaborations (meetings, projects, organizations) depend on tools that work for all stakeholders, or at least on a shared commitment to adopt and use the same tool set and patterns for communication/collaboration. Social considerations and leadership are as important as adoption of and commitment to the right tool set. It may be effective to include evangelists in action-oriented workgroups, and to have them lead, but sensitivity to the balance of personality types and strengths is important. And, of course, the reality is far more complex than we’ve taken time to capture here.

From Business Week: “Researchers at IBM and MIT have found that certain e-mail connections and patterns at work correlate with higher revenue production….Researchers at IBM Research and MIT’s Sloan School of Management found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue.” [Link]

This is exactly what Social Web Strategies has been talking about and where we focus. Effective use of social media in and related to the workplace builds social capital and value networks, and this can have a significant positive impact on profitability.

For IBM, research into the networked behavior of its employees promises insights about teamwork, innovation, and the transmission of knowledge and ideas within the company. This is especially important for global companies—say, where experts in New York might be unaware that colleagues in Singapore are untangling a similar problem. IBM researchers fine-tuned management of industrial supply chains a half-century ago; now their challenge is promoting the flow of knowledge throughout the workforce.

W3C has launched the “Social Web Incubator Group” following the report on January’s Future of Social Networking workshop.

The group’s mission is to understand the systems and technologies that permit the description and identification of people, groups, organizations, and user-generated content in extensible and privacy-respecting ways (read also the group’s charter for more details).

From the charter:

The topics covered with regards to the emerging Social Web include, but are not limited to: accessibility, internationalization, portability, distributed architecture, privacy, trust, business metrics and practices, user experience, and contextual data. The scope includes issues such as widget platforms (such as OpenSocial, Facebook and W3C Widgets), as well as other user-facing technology, such as OpenID and OAuth, and mobile access to social networking services. The group is concerned also with the extensibility of Social Web descriptive schemas, so that the ability of Web users to describe themselves and their interests is not limited by the imagination of software engineers or Web site creators.

Thanks to Katrin for the pointer!

Good quick overview presentation by our friend Ross Mayfield, cofounder of SocialText. Social software at work!

Consider the following:

• There are now 306 million Americans
• The average American now watches 151hrs of TV per mo, or approximately 37hrs per week.

Now, consider what these numbers mean:

When 306 million people each watch 37hrs of TV per week, we as a nation have spent 11.3 billion labor/hours per week expended, essentially unproductively, on passive engagement with television programming of some kind.

As a nation we are so graced with real wealth, the wealth of functional communities and strong networks of relationships (social capital) from which we continually build and rebuild our related networks of commerce and finance, that we can afford, even while in the grip of the greatest recession since the Great Depression, to spend billions of waking hours per week sitting quietly in our homes passively watching TV.

Amazing.

Got the recession blues? Big clue to effective action here. Got a team with recession blues? Multiply it.

*This blog entry inspired by Clay Shirky (book – Here Comes Everybody), and his concept of ‘cognitive surplus.’

e-Patient Dave deBronkart, my colleague at e-Patients.net, is concerned about the reliability of Medpedia, which has just launched its public beta. Dave is coming from the perspective of an advocate for the concept of participatory medicine, defined in Wikipedia as

a phenomenon similar to citizen/network journalism where everyone, including the professionals and their target audiences, works in partnership to produce accurate, in-depth & current information items. It is not about patients or amateurs vs. professionals. Participatory medicine is, like all contemporary knowledge-building activities, a collaborative venture. Medical knowledge is a network.

Medpedia’s collaborative knowledge base, they say, “provides medical professionals and organizations a central place to record their knowledge and receive national and international recognition and visibility for their expertise.” They also have a professional network and directory, “a free communications and networking system, a place to organize conference attendees and speakers, a professional expertise directory, a recruiting tool for research collaborators, and a clinical referral network.” In summary, “only physicians and Ph.D.s in a biomedical/health field can edit the Medpedia knowledge base directly, and only health and medical professionals are to use the professional network,” however “consumers have an important role to play in the evolving model of Medpedia. They can suggest changes to the Article pages, and they can participate in ‘Communities of Interest.’ ‘Communities of Interest’ is the part of the Medpedia Platform that brings consumers and medical professionals together to share knowledge around conditions, treatments, and lifestyle choices.”

There’s a barrier here between the patient and the medical professional, and the nature of that barrier is suggested by the3 use of the word “consumers” above. Participatory medicine suggests that patients can be partners in, rather than consumers of, their treatments. Dave makes good and reasonable arguments for modifications to Medpedia to manifest and facilitate the physician/patient collaboration – let patients as well as clinicians comment directly on Medpedia articles, and rate their helpfulness. He suggests a model similar to the Amazon review.

Why include patients? As e-Patients instigator, the late Dr. Tom Ferguson, as well as many other physicians in recent years, learned, patients empowered by knowledge can come to understand their bodies and their conditions better than anyone – they have literal skin in the game. e-Patient Dave notes how he was saved by a treatment that most patiens with his condition (stage IV, Grade 4 renal cell carcinoma)never know exists, or if they hear about it, they’re told that it’s “high risk.” Actually many physicians are simply not knowledgeable or not current4 with their knowledge. This isn’t surprising – there’s more knowledge emerging than anyone could hope to track. But many patients with a specific condition will dig deeply into whatever knowledge is available. As Dave says, “people get radicalized when it’s personal. When it’s your life, your child, your mother, and they’re in peril, it matters whether the info you’re reading really is current, up-to-date, the best possible.”

The possibility for a “participatory medicine” was less likely before the Internet emerged as a platform through which anyone could potentially have access to any and all knowledge. Now that we have the platform, the question is, who has the right of access to what knowledge, and who should be in which conversations? This is a big question for the healthcare establishment and industry, and the nature of the Medpedia project puts it squarely in the middle of a knowledge revolution.

What do you think – should professionals have a monopoly on healthcare information? What role should informed patients have in gathering and assessing medical knowledge?

Dan Schawbel talks to Seth Kahan about building communities, which Kahan describes as beehives. [Link] The conversation includes a point David Armistead and I have been talking about quite a bit:

Do you think a company will survive the next decade without establishing a beehive?

Successful companies today require a social component to succeed. In the early stages a company may be able to get by with only command-and-control running operations. But, as soon as success starts to take place, knowledge sharing – which operates outside the traditional hierarchical org chart – becomes critical. Companies that prefer to isolate their members by keeping their noses to the grindstone, focused only on their work program lose valuable competitive advantage. I don’t know of a company today that can operate that way and succeed.