21st Century Organization

Proving the Value of Connecting Intelligence: Learning from Bill, Victoria, Ed & Renny

Bill Anderson, blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod, Renny B. Amundsen and Ed Vielmetti were all kind enough to add thought provoking comments to my earlier post reflecting on 20 years online.  The result, thinking back to some of the interesting topics uncovered in research for our Knowledge Tree article. Here's some additional thoughts building on their insights.

1. Paying Attention to What we Leave Behind and Managing Identity

Bill Anderson, your observation that:

"Then again, maybe it won't be so great. I don't know about you, but I keep various aspects (not all aspects)of my life separate. And I like it that way."

reminded me of Sandy Pentland and co's work at the MIT Media Lab we've been following. If you are not tracking you might find interesting for considering the breadcrumb trails we leave through our connected lives.  And to me this study of "Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" is stunning.

Victoria, thanks for the pointers to considering our "separate identities" and the move to managing a "single profile" as social networking unfolds.

2. Patti Anklam's "Networks in the World"

Ed Vielmetti, absolutely resonated with your:

"It's really remarkable now that you can bootstrap a 100 person organization.. with no code and no cash outlays (as long as you are will(ing) to tolerate a few advertisements sprinkled throughout)."

For our article I talked with Patti Anklam whom you might know, author of Net Work. Patti speaks about how, in a networked world, we can create "ad hoc organizations"... "to create articles, do business together, learn by stretching ourselves into different media".

I don't know your take on Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" but to me it seems organizations generally need to be paying closer attention to dynamically creating "networks in the world" and leveraging "social production" for nimble operation in a connected world.   

3. What's Next?

Trust Renny that you will share highlights of your speech to the software company user group.

Thanks everyone for rich comments.  Appreciated.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

From Videotex to Facebook: 22 Years Online. So What's Changed?

Thanks to Nancy White and Jo Murray, editor of The Knowledge Tree, the Australian e-journal of learning innovation, with colleagues Victoria Axelrod and Kiki Mulliner I've had the opportunity to co-author a piece on "Learning through participation and connecting intelligence: experimenting with a wiki to co-create". 

The article documents some of our lessons learned through the process but remarkable for me was the excuse to look back at my 22 years online, beginning at the Australian Caption Centre in 1985. Thanks to farseeing Caption Center founders Adam Salzer and Alexandra Hynes I helped create "Edutel", an educational content service for the launch of Viatel, a U.K. Prestel standard videotex service. As this was pre-Web there are few remnants to tell the story. Peter Hosie's reflections on the potential of videotex for education capture the times.

Coming to the U.S. I was fortunate to find my way to the Trintex offices in White Plains, NY where a group of smart, dedicated people were working hard at pioneering the NAPLPS based online consumer service launched as "PRODIGY" in 1988. 6 years later, December 1994, with AOL nipping at our heels, PRODIGY became the first online service to integrate a Web browser. 

In 2007, creating a Facebook 21st Century Organization Group with minimal effort and functionality I never imagined 20 plus years ago, I asked myself the question J. C. Spender uses to provoke discussion at New York Knowledge Cafe gatherings:

"So what's changed?".

Here are some reflections.

1. Today's Invisible Servers, Cables, Programmers and Code

I've heard Cliff Figallo tell wonderful stories about The WELL's early days and heroic efforts to keep the service up as new members joined, including tending the server dressed in formal attire. As PRODIGY grew each morning attention turned to the previous day's peformance levels.  There was a scheduled downtime during pre-dawn hours for maintenance. 

Today we just expect to be always connected wherever we are, and on the move without cable tethers. Failure to do so, like Skype's recent outage, becomes a news event. How many people ever consider the server network Google has around the world ensuring 24x7 access? Wikipedia cites 450,000 servers in data centers worldwide.

Similarly, where are the programmers?  No doubt behind the sites I log into every day ranging from Earthlink, through Facebook, Google,Typepad, Technorati, etc are hundreds of programmers working to add functionality and service stability. But I don't know them, the programming languages they use, or where in the world they are.  At PRODIGY programmers were highly visible, essential and valued colleagues with names, people whom I'm delighted to see when PRODIGY alum gather to mark another year.

And where is the CODE?  I created our Facebook 21st Century Organization Group without seeing a line of code. I considered this while applying John Pederson's rule for making del.icio.us tags display in a Wikispace, to our ConnectedIntelligence wiki. 

2. From Information Sparsity to Overload and Abundant Connections

Did anyone else notice the number of people admitting they were taking time away from being connected to reflect this summer? I sympathize with Stuart Henshall's frustration expressed in a Facebook wall post that as he contributes "to more and more "Streams" with twitter, facebook, social bookmarking, blog posts, wiki pages etc and I'd like to capture that all in one place." In 2007 with the exponential power of network laws at work, our skills are constantly being stretched to learn new tools and manage through this abundance.

3. TIME and ENERGY Become Increasingly Precious Resouces. Knowing when to say NO to Connectedness

Anders Hemre first focused me on the importance of allowing TIME for THINKING during a 2002 article interview.  With "REFLECTION" the topic of article co-author Kiki Mulliner's dissertation, we spent time during our article writing considering the importance.  In a highly connected world, as TIME becomes an increasingly precious resource, knowing when to say "NO" to connectedness to devote hours and ENERGY to creating value from available information and connections seems to me an essential skill.

4. The Technology is Catching Up to Support People Networking, Where the Real Value of Connectedness Lies

As PRODIGY yielded to AOL's mid 90's ascendancy on my office wall was a quote in a Jupiter Report citing Bob Smith from AOL saying:

"AOL understood people come for the content and stay when they get connected."

AOL's focus on chat and IM revealed that understanding.  Reports from the recent Always On Stanford Summit point to what's ahead online.  At minimum, as Facebook is revealing, the technology is catching up to support people connecting where early online services, from The WELL forward, suggested the real value of connectedness lies.

This post has grown long. I also pondered what HASN'T changed.  Grist for another time. 

Thank you for reading if you've persevered this far.  Your reflections and experiences about the evolution of online, and implications of connectedness, invited and welcomed as comments.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Ambient Information = Connected Intelligence

Clive Thompson writes in Wired Magazine ... We're more likely to act on a subtle but continuously present message than an intermittent one we're forced to stare at. It's "the psychological paradox of ambient information".

Imagine using the device for measuring customer interaction with your company or  knowledge sharing among your employees. If it is up, customers are benefiting.  Let's call it a "Connected Intelligence Meter!"

This device exists and is used extensively by project teams at Google, eBay, Microsoft, and the Arkansas Children's Hospital. Ambient Devices CEO David Rose designed the technology which enables his device to tap into data streams which already exist but in their numerical form do not have as great an effect as a glowing orb which changes color.  You can even have the orb as part of your tool bar.

One of the latest applications is to track your personal energy use - are your adding to carbon consumption or helping to reduce it?

We just finished an article  on connected intelligence for Knowledge Tree, an Australian online  journal by using a wiki which Jenny Ambrozek has posted about here.

Although we will not be using an ambient device this time we will be taking real time questions on our live webcast on August 20th  if you are in the Northern hemisphere - midnight for east coast USA and 9 PM for west coast or August 21st for those past the international dateline. 

Please join us by registering at the Knowledge Tree Elluminate Portal  prior to the event.

To view the hardware and software pre-requisites for Elluminate Live! please visit

http://www.elluminate.com/support

Wiki's and other highly interactive social media which depend on collaboration - "connected intelligence" would definitely benefit from an ambient information system to measure participation.  A subtle pervasive indicator to let you know your participation has an effect.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod