Consulting 2.0: complexity vs. single tool software

Lee Bryant, Headshift: (excerpts) The current beauty of the enterprise social computing market lies in the fact that there is no product. It is a consulting, not a software market: the value is to build processes from basic tools. Tools are "basic" in the sense that they do not conform the one problem one solution rule that prevails in IT. These tools are aliens: they have been built for individual web-users, not organisational processed work. These tools consequently require translation because they are unfinished products for the organisation. They offer room for intelligence and exploration as they need to be contextualised, mixed and tweaked to be organisationally relevant and compliant. It is this very nature of unfinished product that opens doors to thinking more profoundly processes and therefore, potentially, the whole organisation. These tools adapt to the organisation, not the way round (as classical software do). The level of flexibility and granularity they offer in terms of functionality open doors to building tailored processes, which is a source of efficiency.

A lot of decision makers do not offer their colleagues and organisation the chance to seize the opportunity offered by social computing. When working on an enterprise social computing project, we have the possibility to revamp / enrich quite a lot of fundamental processes. We have the opportunity to rejuvenate the organisation, create new sources of efficiency, competitiveness and wealth.
We often don't because the client is rarely educated for that. There is a whole literature on the blogosphere related to this reality so I won't detail. We have to trace this back to the education of managers. This would call to open the Pandora box of complexity and enter the field of thinking both the process and the organisation at the same time.

Enterprise 2.0 is not only the mere implementation of social computing behind the firewall (what and how) but more fundamentally the introduction of employee participation on managing the organisation (why). We have witnessed how web 2.0, i.e. people participation on the web, dramatically transformed the web. Enterprise 2.0 is there to have the same impact on organisations. Lee and Livio anticipated this in 2002 when they created Headshift.

Social networks are very powerful in mapping weak ties, those ties that prove in reality very strong. Mapping social relations (aka social network analysis) beyond the organisation chart offers a more realistic view over the organisation, the real organisation. It displays what connections are in place to have things work; what arrangements are in place to bypass official processes that are either too old or too narrow to really work. Getting to know these human connections is a dramatic advantage when it comes to managing or changing an organisation. It helps "change managers" change the organisation with less blood and tears. Enterprise social computing therefore helps organisations recover their real identity and evolve more easily.

What social computing offers are tools for idea generation, conversations and collaboration; to potentially all individuals. Not only it renews and enriches the whole process of managing knowledge from a blunt idea to a validated product (product, service, process, report, ...), but it opens doors for having employees voice to participate in improving the whole organisation. Enterprise social computing therefore fuels the dynamics for learning organisations.

But what is at risk with the growth of software instead of consulting is the disappearance of this opportunity window to profoundly modernize organisations and change our lives. One problem - one solution software can only favour status quo.
The risk is to close the Zoo and re-open the Museum.

MicroPulse Radio

man könnte natürlich den Pulse auch wirklich buchstäblich für webradio verwenden.

man wirft einen titel, wie in MixWit, in den pulse. da ist er dann, in der queue, die abgespielt wird, wenn der pulse kommt.
default vielleicht: 3 stücke hintereinander. oder wirklich nur je 1.
dazu einzustellen: "heavy rotation" (5 wiederholungen), medium rotation (3x), quick scan (1x)

der sinn wäre dann, dass man bestimmte stücke "studiert", also gezielt hört, nicht als wallofsound.
also vielleicht die aktuellen favoriten aus irgendeinem webradio da hinein, in einen loop, der die aktuellen 10 stücke hat.
die wieder raten, taggen und in rss-lists = playlists schicken.

ich würde jetzt Ragoo von der neuen KingsOfLeon hineintun wollen.

IM on e-books

Markus Flatscher: ...

Anti-Kindle von Charles Arthur im Guardian.

Fand (1) seine Beobachtung interessant, dass die Default-Schrift im Kindle viel zu groß sei, sodass man sie zum komfortablen Lesen kleiner stellen muss.

(2) ===quote===
it would be foolish to predict how electronic reading is going to pan out, because there are two unstoppable trends going on which have been continuing for at least 20 years and show no signs of letting up: people prefer to read bite-sized pieces of information, and people are reading more distinct pieces. Whether we're reading more in terms of the volume of words compared to 20 years ago is hard to tell, but I'd guess so. That means electronic newspapers - the sort that you update at the railway or tube or even bus station - will have some sort of future.
===unquote===

Stimmt sicher auch, jedenfalls viel eher als Steve Jobs hirnverbrannter Kommentar dass mit ebooks aus prinzipiellen Gründen nichts zu machen sei ("The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.")

Ja, ich glaube, dass flashige kleine Reader-Applikationen mittelfristig mal die Zukunft sind. Da wächst auch was zusammen -- weiß nicht, ob Du die neue Adobe DE-Linie gesehen hast:
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
Der Reader ist super -- ist wohl die erste wirklich kleine nicht gebloatete, wirklich schnelle Applikation, die Adobe je auf den Markt gebracht hat.

Keine Initialisierung von 500 Plug-Ins, keine Volltextsuche mit Response-Zeiten von vor zehn Jahren.
Ich verwende das ausschließlich für PDFs an Stelle das Adobe-Readers.
Die Bookmark-Funktion kopiert automatisch Snippets.

So was in der Art müsste man als kombinierten ebook- und Feed-Reader haben.
Würde mir erwarten, dass das im Lauf der nächsten 1-2 Jahre so der Fall sein wird.

Du kannst selber beliebige Files zu Deiner Library hinzufügen. (Falls es das ist, was Du meinst, bin mir nicht sicher) - aber wie gesagt, es ist nur ein Reader, die ganze Online-Schiene (feeds usw.) fehlen leider.

Martin: kann man mit FeedJournal hineinholen: das gibt PDF aus

Markus: Was ich auch gut finde:
===quote===
Digital Editions 1.0 supports bookmarks, highlights, and text notes via its "bookmarks" panel. These annotations are stored in an open XML format separately from publications to enable seamless annotating across PDF- and XHTML-based (epub) publications and to set the stage for future social networking features (such as sharing annotations within a community of readers).
===unquote===

Ich hoffe, dass es in diese Richtung geht. Ich bin da vielleicht altmodisch, aber ich möchte unbedingt, dass PDFs eine Zukunft haben -- das ist aus meiner Hinsicht die einzige Hoffnung, dass wir an den Endgeräten jemals vernünftige Typographie bekommen werden (was, wie gesagt, vielleicht altmodisch sein mag, mir aber ein großes Anliegen wäre.)

Martin: wie würde der workflow sein?
(1) Web-Text > merken in InstaPaper
(2) Aus InstaPaper heraus, bei schneller Vorlektüre, in ein Google Notebook werfen, das "FeedJournal_topic" heißt.
(3) Mit FeedJournal ein PDF-Journal generieren und downloaden
(4) alle PDFs kommen in einen Ordner, der ToRead heißt
(5) mit DigitalEditions importieren


Am besten automatisierter Workflow: man müsste sozusagen nur eine Pipe wählen, welche Foodchain man möchte (BOOK oder MICROCONTENT zum
Beispiel), und dann würde das alles entweder vollautomatisch ablaufen oder der
workflow step-by-step für mich zum nachklicken, wie bei einer installation,
vorgelegt.

On Personal Informatics, Social Objects, and Design for the Future

This is a compressed version of an IM-Interview with Matt Jones (by Ryan Freitas of AdaptivePath, March 2007). I'm re-publishing it here a sort of - quite fascinating - essay. The full version is here. --

Well - let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else - people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.

It functions as both artifact and instigator. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”An information wake as it’s been called.
I guess the interesting thing we’re coming to see is that the ‘placing on the network’ is becoming less of a conscious act, and more the default state

Dopplr is about the future. [As a user,] you’re creating a model of the future - a proposal of behaviour if you like. That becomes the social object. Part of the sociality is negotiating and changing that - optimising it before it happens. Which is a little bit of what my talk is going to address - the act of making models together.

By participating in these communities, are are we in some sense commoditizing our behavior? While we’re experiencing it through the proscenium arch of the laptop - maybe. But we’re seeing the ‘everting of cyberspace’ into the real world as William Gibson put it. I’d take the example of Twitter at conferences compared to twitter as chatroom.

[I]t doesn’t help that the formfactors and UI of the devices we have still make us dive through the screen. Our devices compete with the world for our attention. [But our] services are starting to complement the world and our attention… at least they are taking the first baby-steps. The UIs aren’t there yet in most cases. But now we have service designers creating things that give timely amplification to our knowledge, decision making capabilities, sense of the world around us. I’m pretty hopeful actually. I posted something to my blog a little while back about this in terms of UIs that allow us to scamper up and down the attention scale. You can see hints of them in little disconnected piles right now.

[L]ast year at SxSWi I was talking about the mobile as a stub-maker / iceberg-tickler:
- Stub-maker - create a small mark that I like this thing, I need to do this later, I want to remember this.
- Iceberg-tickler - give me just the right cupful of the iceberg right now. And those are the sorts of services that are emerging for mobile.

And its happening much faster now that iphone fever has swept the valley.
[So here, with the iPhone, have we got one of Warren Ellis’ “genuine outbreaks of the future”?] Possibly.
[... the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. ... other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored ...] [T]he gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components

Exactly - the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘. I think there are already some awesome things being developed by people like Julian Bleeker for instance in this realm of possibility - he’s making reference designs for physical/digital/personal ‘toys’ and devices.

These are the things that interest me greatly - ‘personal informatics’. Imagine RescueTime extending off the desktop. Scary perhaps… I remember BodyMedia from a few years back and people being terrified of it. I wonder if they are more accepting now? “We’re all policemen now” as Mr. Morrison said. Self-sousveillance for all. We find data about ourselves - these patterns, somehow affirming.

[RF: It's about perfect self-knowledge. All of this data is hidden from us, and we’re the one’s generating it… we aren’t equipped, cognitively, to learn anything more than impressions from our own actions. In attempting to gather more complete pictures of our behaviors.]

... coming back to the social aspect. The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will… [wink]
[ed note, RF: In his groundbreaking comic book series, The Invisibles, Grant Morrison posited the "supercontext" as a sort of existence/construct that humanity is evolving toward. Within it, the bounds of ego and identity loosen up (we merge into one another) and time becomes something we can traverse like distance, dipping into and out of any moment in our lives at will.]

RF: Given your presentations on spacetime, Morrison’s supercontext (and time travel in general) seem pertinent to Dopplr. Morrison had a variety of means by which his characters moved through time ... With Dopplr, are you building your very own timetravel device ...

[As interaction designers, ] We’d like to increase joy, ideally. But we’ve a long way to go with air travel there… “Commodity, firmness and delight” - as Vitruvius said. In that order.

[Design methods as] singularities that just form from everything and nothing. ... You can pretend you have a process and sometimes process is the magic, the invocation you need to get those points to appear. But sometimes they will just come out of the foam. I think the weird thing is that process is seen as something for reducing risk and increasing the reproduction of predictable results. Whereas I’m more inspired by process that creates something unexpected.

[W]hatever you think of Ideo [Jen Learnard ], ‘Build to think’ is a pretty fantastic way of incapsulating that thought. And it’s cheaper than thinking now [nose wink] With mobile it’s essential, and yet hard to do.

[RF: As a Dopplr user, I’m creating trips, negotiating details - and then the ineffable march of time brings me to these social objects I’ve created and translates them into experience. ... The experience complete, I am left with a (massively valuable) trace of my movement in spacetime. ... I keep generating trips, and my context is forced to move forward, and so what I end up with is a constant forward to back stream of data to explore and optimize. If dopplr is the stream, there’s a missing piece, from my perspective. Something to navigate the stream with.]

I think if you look to some of the Glory-ous work of Stamen in things like Trulia Hindsight you get ideas about UI for poring over the past. Looking for patterns and instances. Interfaces for ‘poring-over’ is something I’m very interested in.