Sun blogging turns communication upside down

May 31, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

Sun Microsystems’ blogging approach changes the company’s communication and knowledge management. In wikinomics I encountered Johan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun, with his unusual approach of not being him the only one blogging but also his colleagues, whom he encourages to blog publicly about their work and anything else they are interested in. His concept has an outcome of about 3000 bloggers (around 10% of all employees).

The Sun blogger Jörg Moellenkamp did an interesting presentation last April during the re-publica conference. He explained enthusiastically how he communicates directly with his clients or other programmers, and how ‘direct communication’ improved his personal learning. Beside of a policy, the basic limited rule for blogging at Sun is: don’t tell secrets. This evokes the question: “Have you ever had a situation where a blogger posted something they shouldn’t have?“, which Linda Skrocki answered in her blog. In other words Sun has shaped its own blogosphere with almost 70.000 articles mainly in the realm of its work – as a provider for network computing infrastructure solutions.

I think this blogging approach offers a combination of internal and external knowledge management offering all sorts of community of practice. Blogs contribute to codify tacit knowledge and connect people inside and outside the organization. It also offers a different concept for customer relationship management.

I asked Möllenkamp if this approach is limited to the software industry or even those ones with an open source concept? He answered that it is rather Sun’s unique culture, being it very open and putting a high level of trust in its staff. I wonder how this model could be applied to other industries or even non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? It could certainly enhance the accountability of NGOs and even more important, give opportunity to a real multiple networking for an organization in order to make their work more creative and effective. And as Allison Fine argues in her book Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected it would make members or sympathizers participants for social change.

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Wikinomics: Being open, peering, sharing and acting globally

May 23, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

Recently I finished reading the book Wikinomics. I wondered whether it is just another buzzword or if it contributes to the discussion of how the Internet changes our world. In any case the authors left some answers open to be written by the readers themselves.

After reading the introduction I was fascinated to read how Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams link different developments from the last year together and describe its implications. They argue that virtual networks, collaboration through the Internet, and the open source concept will have increasing influence on businesses, organizations and science. Those companies, which do not open up to these changes will have decisive competitive disadvantages in the future. The authors underpin their thesis with many interesting examples like Procter&Gamble’s approach to cooperate in research via innocentive.com, or a gold-mining firm, that got striking results by a innovative contest over the Internet to find new exploring methods.

“Just as collaborative tools and applications are reshaping enterprises, the new Web will forever change the way scientist publish, manage data and collaborate across institutional boundaries.”

The way the new web will change science is manifold. A key will be open access, so “the world is your research department.” An outcome will be rapid diffusion of best-practice techniques and standards, the availability of just-in-time expertise and increasingly horizontal and distributed models of research and innovation. An interesting example is how young scientists design open-source at NASA. But I wonder how developing countries have opportunities to participate in this process?

“Peer producers apply open source principles to create products made of bits - from operating systems to encyclopedias.”

Through crowd sourcing or commons based peer production new products will be developed collaboratively over the web. In my opinion this peer to peer approach is a serious alternative to traditional business models. Open source promotes this approach and is already extended to videos, music or design. The organization  for social entrepreneurs, Ashoka coined the phrase open sourcing of social change (but to have a copyright on that phrase is quite counterintuitive).

In my opinion the open source concept and the need of companies and organizations to open themselves are going hand in hand. Both are horizontal mostly bottom-up driven processes. Both indicate the need to share knowledge in an open manner. In particular the difficulty of dealing with complex problems, an overload of information and increasing competition pushes us to engage and collaborate in open networks.

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Unconference - an online learning approach in real world

May 17, 2007 | comment3 Comments

Unconferences are spreading around the world and it proves that Internet communication behaviour, knowledge sharing approaches, and the open source philosophy transcend into real world. But what is unconference? Basically it is a get together of people who would like to exchange certain themes. Interested persons can join the two day discussion and brainstorming. One important rule: everybody is a listener and a presenter at the same time. The event is organized over a wiki. It can be practically organized by anybody.

Unconference - offline learning through an online approachBut what makes it so special and different? Some weeks ago, in April, I was lucky to join a barcamp, a form of unconference, here in Frankfurt. Robert Basic and Franz Patzig initiated it. In the following weeks the wiki gained life and people signed in as attendees, proposed topics in the realm of web2.0 and coordinated logistics and even a sponsor. Here are some interesting impressions that I got from barcamp Frankfurt:

  • At the beginning, as there was not a fixed plan, everyone was curious waiting around for something to happen. After half an hour or so, two initiators explained the concept. This was followed by short but funny introductions of each one of the 150 attendees, who, most of them had very different backgrounds and worked in very different fields.
  • After the little introduction, everybody crowded in front of the board (photo) to see the offered sessions and to add an extra one or join with another similar one. That was enough to start the various presentations. Some people did sophisticated power-point presentations for creative commons while others talked freely about knowledge management in enterprises. Discussions arose and new sessions developed out of them.
  • The event offered an informal atmosphere with many open minded people. You could easily ask questions to each other and network. Small groups were formed spontaneously to discuss and to brainstorm. The common interest and open approach in how to address problems was very interesting.

To me, it seems that unconference is overlapping with open space, which is more of a method while behind unconference there is a philosophy. It is fascinating how unconference motivates people to network and collaborate. In that regard, it is quite different to conventional conferences because it is a bottom-up approach, highly creative and can be used for all sorts of topics. In Canada transit camp discusses local development, and in France a wine camp was organized. Some other examples are Kenya or India where Barcamps were also organized. Lastly, this fascinating initiative is explained in detail in a book, which is of course written as well in a wiki.

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Fair trade laptop - an extra 30 euro would be enough

May 12, 2007 | comment2 Comments

Fair trade coffee is widely known and successful, but what about fair trade computers? This was the question of a session at the re-publica conference back in April with Frithjof Schmidt (member of the European parliament) and Andrea Manhart from the Ökoinstitut in Freiburg (ecological institute).

The labour conditions of workers, who manufacture notebooks in China are burdensome. Environmental problems of the production process are widespread as well. “A price raised of 30 euros would significantly improve these conditions,” says Andreas Manhart in a pioneer study (German) titled “Social implications of laptop production.” Other interesting findings from the study were:

  • Despite rising commodity costs, laptop prices have fallen continuously throughout the last years. Production has been changed to locations such as China.
  • Almost all laptop brands are produced by eleven Taiwanese firms, like Qanta, Compal or Wistron, who have the right manufacturing knowledge.
  • The cost of labour is not higher than 30 euro per laptop.
  • The ongoing competition between laptop sellers reduced the profit margin to 3% in average.

NGOs give now more emphasis to the problem of toxic waste. Greenpeace started a campaign with a green electronic guide ranking of laptops. As a consequence to ngo lobbying Apple announced last week “a greener apple” campaign, which promises more recycling efforts and the removing of toxic chemicals . The two blogs greenguy and being the change have a coverage on that.

But a fair trade approach also includes the social implication of laptop production. Its goal is to protect labour rights and guarantee environmental regulated production. A recent survey in Germany showed that many consumers are willing to buy fair trade laptops. Interestingly, A. Manhart said that a certification process does not necessarily bring the solution because it is impossible to monitor the widely distributed value-chain of laptop production especially in China.

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Mobile phones for development

May 7, 2007 | comment1 Comment

A lot has been debated about the one laptop per child initiative, but less has been said about the use of mobile phones for development. Even though according to a DFID and vodafone study “the number of mobile users is growing twice as fast in developing countries as in developed countries. Africa has now the fastest-growing mobile market in the world.” Another example is Grameenphone, which provides universal telephony in Bangladesh using microloans creating new income opportunities especially within the rural population.

For the first time communication technology is widely accessible in developing countries, and that does not only carry economical potential, but also social implications. This offers new approaches for development as it is shown in a BBC-report: sms information services such as job announcements, or money transactions through mobiles –where bank accounts are scarce, or network linked to activism and its effects on social hierarchy. The following examples show more successful approaches with positive impacts:

Mobile phone use in Africa

(Photo has been taken from Esthr from flickr)

The adaption of mobile technologies and its approaches can be totally different and vary between countries and cultural settings. But it seems clear that technology itself is not the driver for change, instead, it is what the people make out of it, and the approaches which are ideally developed or adapted to the local context. An example of that is the EPROM program, which is trying to encourage people in developing nations to learn how to build applications for mobile phones. Another interesting question is whether a connection to the web will enhance the usage of mobiles to share knowledge and to coordinate networks. Maybe Twitter could be such a tool that will bridge the web and the very popular use of sms to organize and coordinate as Soyapi Mumba describes in his post. To be continued….

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What I learnt about social bookmarking

May 6, 2007 | comment2 Comments

I started using the social bookmarking service del.icio.us a year ago, without actually knowing if it was worth the effort. Although it took me quite a while to get behind its potential and I am still learning about it, I can now say I love del.icio.us. For those of you who have not heard about it and who have also experimented with it, I recapitulate my learning curve with the social bookmarking in 10 steps:

  1. At first, I appreciated to access my bookmarks from everywhere but I never really used extensively my favorites in my browser.
  2. Now I have to think about the tags (key words) for every bookmark and was puzzled about the sense of it and whether it is worth the time. Luckily I installed the browser plugin and just had to deal with a little pop up window.
  3. I found the “saved by 1 other person” link and look through other link lists and can get lost in interesting and boring websites just like in Google search. Here and there I find very interesting documents but did not use it frequently because I searched mostly without a goal.
  4. By tagging and checking other people’s tags, I discovered new information and connection in knowledge domains. I started integrating these into my tags and when needed I also reformulated them.
  5. Thanks to Dorine Rüter, I joined another approach of an distant passive community of practice through a tag experiment called npk4dev (latest links are in the right sidebar), which is used by several people from different locations and organizations to share bookmarks on nonprofit knowledge for development issues. A bigger tag stream experiment is used through nptech (nonprofit technology).
  6. I started adding interesting people to my network, so I can see their bookmarks as well. After a while, I realized how valuable most of there new bookmarks were. You can see how information is delivered and spread through the web and can follow network connections. I decided to put my network in my feed-reader.
  7. I took a closer look at my tags and analyzed which ones are heavily used by other users and have interesting links (for example ICT4D) and add the RSS to my feed-reader. (Want to know what RSS are and why it is of advantage to use them? Check out this video!)
  8. I started posted links to some people from my network and try to integrate colleagues and friends into the same sharing. I noticed that people observe very closely the links from other people, and I asked myself whether a tag could or might give to much information about a person. (Luckily I found the “not shared” feature).
  9. I noticed that I referred more and more to delicious instead of Google to search for information, even though it is slower. With an easy keyword, the results are better and most important from other users evaluations.
  10. I wondered why del.icio.us does not offer new features such as improved search, ability to form groups and send messages, or to use it better for collaborative tagging experiences. I wondered how I can use it better for my personal knowledge management and start using for instance a tag for a to-do-list.

And now I even started a blog and integrated my bookmarks and use the same tags to structure my writings and to enhance my learning. To summarize it, I really needed some time to learn how to use social bookmarking creatively and efficiently. And I am still amazed how tiny little details give new opportunities in how to use this tool. A great screencast for the benefit of tagging and social bookmarking has been made by Beth Kanter. I hope this is interesting for beginners and practitioners, and I am curious to hear about your experiences.

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