I thought DeFrag on the whole was worthwhile - although I would have preferred much more time to brainstorm (forced to brainstorm, I guess) with attendees. I got the sense that the panel participants were not necessarily a whole lot smarter than the attendees in the audience. I was also bothered by the nonstop microblogging. I mean, guilty, as I got sucked into it (I hadn’t really microbloged before, so I was playing around with it) .. but come on - you come all the way to Denver to listen and pay attention - not to stare are your laptop. I think old bad habits die hard, and microblogging is just a worsening of the whole ADD problem with social technologies. I few people did note that they thought following on Twitter was more sensible than counting how many followers - the people who listen are the ones gleaning the “signal” from the noise.. Anyway - here’s my summary of what I learned at DeFrag. I am liking my fleece, btw.
Trip report
DeFrag ’08 / Denver, CO / Abigail Lewis-Bowen
Overview:
In its second year, DeFrag has gained a cult following as the place for discussing the intersection of technology, people, society and business. The conference description is:
“As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data.
In the largest sense, we’re all looking to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw data — to accelerate the “aha” moment.”
In opening remarks, conference co-organizer Eric Norlin suggested that while the Internet has “solved” the problem of time, space, and (nearly) identity, what remains is the challenge of identifying the right tools that accelerate the process of insight into the massive amount of data on the Internet.
The core challenge that lies ahead, and one put to industry leaders at this conference, he suggested, is to figure out how to build software that helps individuals make “creative leaps… not just attack the rational workflow processes.”
Highlights from the sessions:
Strategic Intuition
Professor William Duggan, Columbia University, Author “Strategic Intuition”
Duggan gave a dynamic and insightful keynote on his theory of how arrive at the kind of insight that comes, not in a blink of an eye, but over a period of time where the brain synthesizes the elements of successful intuitive thought.
Using examples from history, including Napoleon and Steve Jobs, Duggan broke down the brain processes that synthesize prior art, personal experience and “presence of mind” into a moment of insight.
The Social Networking Gap
Mark Koenig, VP, Saugatuck Technology,
By 2010 - one quarter of business process improvement initiatives will include the integration of social information into the context of business applications and workflows
To build value with social networking, organizations must:
· Be prepared to change the way they do business
· Embrace transparency
· Be responsive
· Most importantly, know your culture and define business objectives and metrics to match
Vendors must:
· Counteract the unstated fear of their customers that sharing information will lead to a loss of power
· Map solution use cases to business objectives
· Create template solutions based on best practices
Harnessing the implicit value of the “social graph.”
Charlene Li, Forrester Research
The promise of the “open Web” is the ability to see, share and leverage the community and the crowd to do things better – the building blocks of which are open Web standards, and new tools to aggregate social activity. For the enterprise, the same trend promises to build on the culture of sharing and openness that we see on the WWW.
Enterprises can “prepare to open” by:
1. Leverage existing identity and social graphs
2. Get privacy and permissions strategy in line with open strategy
a. Find your trust agents
b. Open up your data and mental firewalls
i. (but allow people and employees to create their own “personal” firewalls)
c. Prepare for the demise of the org chart
i. How does work get done?
d. Begs the question: What is role of the manager? What new types of leadership are needed in the Open Enterprise?
Building social capital in an enterprise
Neeraj Mathur, Sun Microsystems
Neeraj presented Sun’s efforts with building community - review of the “Sunspace” application where they have fostered community activity with a few innovative ideas:
With web 2.0, begin by identifying what problems we’re trying to solve:
· How do I contribute?
· How do I find stuff?
· WIFM? (What’s In It For Me)?
Focus moves to building community equity, creating a two-way conversation, rewarding sharing, and enabling discovery of who knows what.
Building Community Equity:
· How do I gain capital in a virtual world?
· How do I know my value?
· WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me)
· How do I gain social cred and become trusted?
To display knowledge capital and build trust, Sun used digital “medals” displayed on SunSpace – these medals represented levels of professional achievement or training, basically mimicking the certificates often posted on office walls.
SunSpace aggregates data around the following:
Contribution Equity: (CQ) à what you contributed/attached/wiki edits/blogs/
Skills Equity: (SQ) à what you know, learned
Participation Equity: (PQ) à rate/vote/comment
Displays an “equity bar” showing amount of equity in the community. Everybody knows their score, but nobody sees other scores.
22,000 users / 300+ communities /
Enterprise 2.0 is a social movement, not a technology
Network World coverage with reference to J&J efforts: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/110308-social-networking-collabora…
