I'm watching John Seely Brown's plenary address at the 2006 Collaborative Technologies Conference, which is a wide ranging and fascinating talk on ways and forms of collaboration. Lots of good stuff and plenty of blog activity around this and the other talks - but in many ways echoing (in a good way) what is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom in our brave new world...mashups, Second Life, "honouring the emergent", etc. Something that did make me think though, was his description of how an Asian apparel company (Li & Fung) has a large number of suppliers (10,000+) that it has organised into loosely coupled supply and innovation networks where knowledge, practice and process are shared between companies. Hmm...now the way I've generally thinking about collaboration, sharing, security, etc, has been fairly simplistic: there are essentially 2 situations - you're inside a firewall, or you're on the outside. Most available tools focus on the external world (technorati, del.icio.us, etc). Some companies are starting to think about replicating these tools and services within organisations (an external service probably cannot subscribe to, tag or bookmark internal content). But how do we facilitate sharing and collaboration across a number of different companies ? The partners don't have access each other's internal space, and using an external service reduces their ability to reuse internal content (unless they want to copy it to an external service, and then keep it up to date - yuck). It also maybe implies a need to agree on a common set of tools (good luck !) - and suddenly they're not very loosely coupled anymore. So, is there (or will there be) a need for something like a reverse proxy architecture that allows proxying of interesting internal content (feeds, web content, web service calls) to authorised external services ? Or am I making up solutions to problems that don't exist ? Or, even worse, am I misunderstanding something ? [tags]ctc2006, collaboration, internal, external, collaboration, proxy[/tags]

Exciting times ahead...

I played around with Mog yesterday - a music based social network that tracks what you play etc, lets you connect with people, blogs - all the usual kind of stuff. Some of the coverage:c|net, zdnet, Red Herring.

Underwhelming. As a reasonably long-term last.fm subscriber, I'm not sure what mog has that would make me want to move. Let's see:

• Track what I'm playing ? Got that.
• Blogs, yup;
• forums - covered;
• tagging, likewise;
• networks - whether explicit or emergent - also there.

Actually, mog doesn't do emergent networking (creating neighbours based on similarity) - or at least I don't think it does. I would check but I seem to have become un unmogger - the site won't let me log in, won't mail me my password as it doesn't recognise my email address, and won't let me sign up again with that email. Humph. Once feature that last.fm doesn't have is that you can upload your entire music collection, but you'll need to be patient...I left it running this morning having processed about 70 songs in an hour, and I have no idea what it's going to do with the information.

Anyway - not a chance I'll move away from last.fm to mog. Tom Coates sums it up aptly:

"It's got some attention because it was linked to from BoingBoing, but I have to be honest, at first glance it looks a lot like a crappy last.fm - a site that they completely haven't acknowledged in most of their press"

[tags]last.fm, music, collaborative, mog, audioscrobbler[/tags]

Every so often I decide that I need to skim through my keyword feeds in Bloglines (more to get my number of unread posts down below 4 figures than in the expectation of finding anything really useful). This morning, I was skimming through one of my ROI feeds, following a couple of links, much of the same stuff - yes ROI is probably important, yes we can work out how much paper is being saved, probably, no we can't get into anything more convincing.

And then, like a 40 watt bulb flickering to life I had an epiphany. Given that calculating the ROI of the squishy stuff is really really really hard, and generally it's the squishy stuff that's the most important (more engagement, better communication, accelerated innovation, more reuse of existing information, talent retention, productivity increase, etc), then why not use a tool that seems ideally geared towards arriving at a close approximation of reality without needing or being able to measure directly? I am, of course, talking about crowd wisdom.

Here's how it could work:

• Implement your hard-to-measure-the-ROI-of initiative (for example, redesign your intranet to be more usable, or implement social bookmarking, or an internal blogosphere, or whatever)
• Set up a mechanism to aggregate the wisdom of the crowd - maybe a prediction market (although aren't they usually associated with events that have a measurable outcome such as "Who will be the next President", "Who will win the World Cup, etc" ?). Maybe all that's needed is a simple survey asking people how much they thought had been saved, or how much extra revenue earned.
• Add and divide, and obtain average. I'm sure there are plenty of slightly more rigorous statistical techniques here for processing the numbers (eg throwing away outliers, etc), but essentially, that's it.
• The hard part is now trying to work out whether that number bears any actual resemblance to reality - but maybe that's easier to judge when there's a number in front of you.

I admit that this doesn't let you know the ROI up front (would that be worthwhile, asking employees to predict the ROI before implementing ? Is that too complicated a question to ask ?), but it might give you some justification of impact.

What do you think ? Stupid idea, or just impractical ?

[tags]ROI, measurement, fuzzy, squishy, metrics, aggregation, crowdwisdom, wisdomofcrowds, predictionmarkets[/tags]