Technology and Organizations

Yesterday was the beginning and the end of the DARPA Network Challenge. MIT’s Red Balloon Challenge Team won in less than 9 hours. (Press Release pdf) DARPA tested the power of social networking and found it powerful. According to CNN, DARPA will be interviewing the participating teams to understand how they built their networks, motivated participation, and collected their information. Realize that false positives were an issue (certainly you can ask people what they see — but how do you know if you can believe them?)

From the DARPA site:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

…and I missed seeing any of them (one was in San Francisco’s Union Square — so I had a shot).

The MIT strategy focused on the viral creation of a social network of support:

Sign Up, Invite Your Friends, Help Science, Win Money! We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all — we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on…

They made sure the payoff model was clear:

It might play out like this. Alice joins the team, and we give her an invite link like http://balloon.media.mit.edu/alice. Alice then e-mails her link to Bob, who uses it to join the team as well. We make a http://balloon.media.mit.edu/bob link for Bob, who posts it to Facebook. His friend Carol sees it, signs up, then twitters about http://balloon.media.mit.edu/carol. Dave uses Carol’s link to join… then spots one of the DARPA balloons! Dave is the first person to report the balloon’s location to us, and the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team is the first to find all 10. Once that happens, we send Dave $2000 for finding the balloon. Carol gets $1000 for inviting Dave, Bob gets $500 for inviting Carol, and Alice gets $250 for inviting Bob. The remaining $250 is donated to charity.

Brilliant.

• Motivation: For you, your friends, for charity
• Opportunity: The MIT Red Balloon homepage was built to easily accept the finds), DARPA made sure they weren’t hidden in invisible locations
• Ability: MIT gave clear hints about how to do this — invite your friends (why didn’t anyone invite me?!), use Twitter, Facebook

Yes, this was a social networking story — but you can also look deeper to understand the value in the MIT approach. They didn’t just rely on social networking, they practiced TOP Management. Technology: They built a solid website enabled to take in exactly the information they needed and then certainly had some technical processing to manage and evaluate that data. Organization: They created clear organizational practices – “This is how to organize your friends,” “this is how you get paid.” People: They used tried and true foundations around the management of human performance — Motivation, Opportunity, Ability.

Well done! Other insights into MIT’s process (or those of any of the other teams’) appreciated.

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I don’t generally make futurist-style statements, but the last two days are begging for one: A big piece of Web 3.0 is going to be the transition from “Live in your In-Box” to “Live in your Browser.” The quote “I live in my in-box” came from a participant in a workshop I co-presented with Scott Schnaars of Socialtext. We were talking about the value and methods of moving from an email centric workflow to one more focused on portals and collaboration workspaces (building from my Kill Email post). The idea isn’t that the work we do while “in our in-box” isn’t valuable — it is real work: we are often communicating about projects, ideas, etc. The idea is that the in-box work carries with it more overhead than the same work would if it were done within a project workspace.

Moving into your browser may be a more efficient place to be, and Gen Y may be there ahead of us. Gen Y doesn’t have to unlearn our (Baby Boomer) email habits.

The other event that pushed me to join the futurists was a discussion I had with Caleb Carter, CEO and Founder of ExistInts. ExistInts joins Google, Facebook, and many others in trying to provide you with a new web home. ExistInts adds a local flavor, while also striving to cross work and social boundaries — smart as many of us have woven our work and social networks and activities together already. Having a “home” that is built to support that model makes sense.

The organizational question is what is the right level? Your social network does provide you work value, and vice versa. These are going to be tied together in our workspace. Should organizations be building portal homes at a company level or at the level of the project? Should individuals be building their own portal homes with rooms for work and play?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwseaport/ / CC BY 2.0

I feel like we are at the stage of construction where the ground has been cleared and the materials are beginning to arrive. Google is gearing up (pun intended) with Google Wave and the Chrome OS:

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

.. while smaller firms like Socialtext and ExistInts are providing purpose-built capabilities.

We all need to consider what’s going to make the best neighborhood and architecture for getting our work done. I’m sure it’s going to be in the browser. Have you already moved? In my case, I think I’ve moved, but haven’t completely unpacked. Email still makes up the majority of my work communication and my organization has not yet taken the big step to a web-based workflow. Suggestions appreciated from those of you who’ve moved, unpacked, and finished putting up your pictures.

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A few weeks ago I ran across this IdeasProject video of Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur. He opens with descriptions of how sharing changes everything — sharing versus protecting your ideas. Good points, but he really hooked me when he talked about the value of sharing ideas with social media friends, and how this gives you instant access to their thinking:

It has already changed the way I think. I feel like I live in a room, which is across the world, but I can just call a friend and there will always be someone to answer one of my questions, as long as I share as well with them. It’s two ways. It’s about living in a world with a community that can help you….

It changed me completely. I cannot think alone anymore. I need to think with my friends, all the time.

I think you can extend these ideas to blogging and other public writing. I blog and tweet to think with my friends (join with them in a virtual conversation). I gain from their comments as Loic mentions, and I benefit by having the goal of framing my thinking to join with that of my friends. Psychologists describe this as the “cognitive benefits of teaching.”

The opportunity to microblog, blog, and/or post to Facebook all also have the benefit of being motivational. My friend Leslie Coff and I were talking Monday about how we are often inspired by our friends to write a particular post. For her it is when she has had multiple similar questions from her patients (she’s an amazing acupuncturist and provides a blog as additional outreach). For me, it’s often when I’ve heard similar questions from my students or business colleagues. Our friends can inspire a more thoughtful response than we might be able to give that the end of an appointment or in a quick question and answer period. We are inspired to think, to think for the benefit of our friends, and hopefully for the benefit of engaging in a conversation on the topic.

Do you have time to tweet, blog, or post to Facebook? How do you not have time? If your job is to have ideas, and/or to find ways to share ideas, then enlisting your friends in the work — even if only by giving you a virtual audience — can speed the thought process. I also find great value in documenting my thought process. It took a while for me to be willing to share my alpha drafts with the world. As Loic says later in his interview, “The new way of doing it is getting feedback from the very beginning.” This has its risks, as Loic notes: your friends may tell you you’re wrong, your competition may see what your up to — but the benefits to your thinking win out.

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… and those you want to join your network.

My elder niece came home from pre-school one day talking very seriously about making “good choices.”  Apparently a little boy in her class had not been making good choices and was sent to a different room.

Making good choices becomes more difficult the more choices you have.  I’m struggling with making good choices about my own knowledge sharing.  I generally share my knowledge via (in order of formality and timeliness): Twitter, Business Exchange, this blog, class, and my academic publishing (pdf of my vita).  Each of these channels ties me to a different network.  The networks overlap to a small degree.

Below I present five dimensions to help my clients (and me) make good choices about sharing knowledge with their networks.  This is another topic related to how we all are becoming systems designers — we all need to make good choices about how we share our knowledge so that we get the knowledge to the people who need it, when they need it, in a form they can use, and in a way that doesn’t overburden them.  These are decisions based on technology, organizational practice, and people: part of TOP Management.

Formality and timeliness are two dimensions I’ve already mentioned.  For example, I don’t tend to post to Twitter about past research unless some new and hopefully interesting thought strikes me.  On the other hand, I don’t necessarily expect academic readers to be interested in this week’s current event given that the article won’t be out for over a year.  To do otherwise would be to ignore my audience’s perspective.

Content interest is another dimension to consider as you share your knowledge.  I assume that my networks are interested in gaining benefit from managing technology and organizational practice, and innovation more broadly, or they wouldn’t be following me on my Twitter/Business Exchange/blog/class/academic networks.  That said, I do toss in a sailing or golf reference from time to time because it provides context about who I am.  I like knowing a few details about my own knowledge providers gives me background for interpreting their content.  It also gives us more of a social connection if we have the chance to meet face to face.  Kind of like the beer effect without the beer.

I’m told that detail and depth are issues I should consider as I share knowledge.  References (e.g., Barley, 1986; Weick 1979), as part of the sentence are not as interesting to most people as they are to academics.  (Really, they are interesting to us!)  Each of my channels provides the opportunity for more and less detail and depth — either by technological limitation (e.g., Twitter and 140 characters), human preference (e.g., my blog audience’s interest), or organizational requirement (e.g., the APA Style Manual).

Signaling is my final dimension, so far.  Signaling is how you let your networks know that there has been a new contribution.  Some of the technologies have their own signaling capabilities.  A few examples:

• Twitter: Network members can decide whether they want email or SMS notification of new posts from specific network members.
• Business Exchange: Network members can follow specific topics or specific people.  Business Exchange then summarizes new activity on the user’s homepage.
• Blogs: Network members can opt in to to automatically receive new contributions via RSS reader or email.

Ideally, some contributions on one network will be of interest to members of other networks.  Often I post announcements of new blog posts to Twitter, my LinkedIn account (the short message area on the bottom left), and my Facebook account. I give enough information so the people on that network will know if it’s worth it to click through or not.  My blog is also tied to LinkedIn’s Blog Link and NetworkedBlogs on Facebook.  As long as these networks have limited joint membership, this crossover signaling is ok.  The more interconnected your networks become, the more careful you have to be about duplication.  Duplication is akin to spam.

We all have multiple opportunities to provide original knowledge contributions (a blog post, and comment to a blog) and/or to share valuable links. I’ve provided these dimensions:

• Formality
• Timeliness
• Content
• Detail/depth
• Signaling

Do you have other dimensions that will help us all make good choices?

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I’ve been meaning to write about Facebook and project management.  It’s taken me a while because I’m “on” Facebook, but don’t do much work via Facebook.  I know renegade teams in Fortune 100 firms who do — so this has kept me wondering what they see that I don’t.  (I tend to use home built Google Sites to support my projects.)

I started my research with a search on “Facebook project management.”  I also tried “Basecamp,” a popular project management tool, and “Facebook” in a separate search.  Basecamp doesn’t seem to have built an application for Facebook (yet?), though there have been calls for integration on the Basecamp forums.

The following are some lightly informed thoughts.  Hopefully we can get a conversation going among people who use these tools.

Interesting aside: Facebook and Basecamp were founded on the same day.  On Feb 4, 2009, both sites turned 5.

There are a variety project management applications available on Facebook (run a search on “project management” from the Applications tab).  Toodooz and Workspaces by Huddle (full web version of Huddle) caught my eye.

• Toodooz: You can upload files up to 1MB in formats: .doc, .gif, .jpg, .txt, .xls, .zip Toodooz seems to be built for Facebook and includes all the basic project management tidbits: Milestones, Tasks, Files, Discussions, Invites, and Notification.
• Workspaces by Huddle: You can upload 2MB files and there didn’t seem to be restrictions type — and you can edit Word and Excel files on-line (note: this is not the same as editing and then syncing with your desktop version — See more here).  Editing does “lock” the file so others can’t edit at the same time.  Huddle also can connect via LinkedIn.  Most of Huddle’s power seems to come from the full web version – the Facebook version seems to only have Files, Notifications, and Invites available (please correct me if I’m wrong).  The full web version syncs with your Facebook version.

Summary: I suspect both of these tools will gain power over time.  For me, I’ll be staying with Google Sites for the time being.  The value of collaborative real-time editing is key for me, so I’m willing to put up with the overhead of creating my own project management workflow.  For folks who live their lives on Facebook, and don’t need collaborative editing, Huddle, Toodooz or any of the other tools may be better as they are purpose-built for project management.  I’ll be interested to hear what my students think about the tradeoffs.

That said, this line alone from the Toodooz page was enough for me to want to try it in my next project: “Create Tasks and assign them to your Toodooz friends.”  I love creating tasks and assigning them to my friends.  Now if I could only get my friends to do those tasks….

As with all such services, please read the terms of service carefully to ensure that it matches your business needs.

Value of Being There (Stickiness) will be my next post.  A reason Facebook is an attractive platform for project management is because people are already there.

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