Tailorable blog

Sharing great places to work “on the go”

While travelling, I’m always hunting for places with plugs, good coffee and preferrably wifi as well. How great would it be to have them as point of interest in my navigation system? If any of you know of such a database, please, please, pretty please, let me know.

Anyway, today I found a great spot: “de koffiesalon“, at the Utrechtsestraat in Amsterdam. Really great coffee made by skilled baristas, upstairs a long table with plenty of plugs and free wifi. The only problem is that now I’m so happy about finding the place that I first want to share this with you, before getting to work… 

Promoting the Triple-I Special Track on Knowledge Sharing using Social Media

As part of the Triple-I conference in Graz, Austria (3-5 September 2008), there will be a Special Track on Knowledge Sharing using Social Media. The special track focusses on real-world experiences with Social Media and tries to find answers to research questions such as:

• How is Social Media applied at the interface between enterprise and customers or partners?
• Which factors facilitate and impede the successful implementation of Social Media?
• Which Social Media applications are most promising for what purpose?
• What are the approaches in introducing Social Media?
• How is Social Media integrated with semantic technologies and to what purpose?

I hope you will consider sharing your experiences at this special track, as I am one of the program committee members

More information can be found on: http://www.i-know.at/kss.

New Ways of Working & Social Embedding

Currently many organizations are experimenting with more flexible work arrangements for their knowledge workers. Well-known examples are Best Buy’s Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), and, here in The Netherlands, Interpolis. Although there are different visions of the New Way of Working, it usually involves more freedom and responsibility for the knowledge worker, more trust by the employer, while maintaining cohesion in the company (social embedding of knowledge workers). Information and communication technology can help in this process by allowing people to work from anywhere at anytime, while still being able to find each other, communicatie and coordinate their actions. So far so good, and actually most basic solutions for anytime, anywhere working have been around for at least 10 years (laptops, e-mail, cellular phones, file servers).

Veldhoen + Company (in Dutch) state that a change towards the New Way of Working requires a balanced change of the physical environment, a mental change and a change of the virtual environment. Many initiatives just focus on putting new tools in place, some address new management styles (such as the Results Only Work Environment), some try to provide knowledge workers with a stimulating physical work environment (like Interpolis). But how about the stimulating virtual work environment? Just being able to share files and folders does not really stimulate me to socialize with my team members. Meanwhile we know that social embedding (feeling connected to our colleagues) is a factor that requires extra attention when working more and more at different locations and at different times.

What I am curious about is whether wikis, blogs, social networking sites and applications like Twitter can help us feel connected, share our passions, know what others are up to and socialize also in an office environment. And how to make sure this all is nicely embedded in a virtual environment that actually stimulates us to socialize? Any thoughts or examples (good and bad) are very welcome.

One man, one avatar

Recently, I had two experiences with avatars and the identity of the person controlling them that made me wonder. Here is what happened:

When visiting the ABN AMRO island in Second Life, I had a talk with their virtual hostess, Amber Jung. We talked about some part of their presence in Second Life that I was interested in, after which I flew away (as these things go in SL) and explored the place. Coming back to her, 15 minutes later, I just told her my impressions of what I’ve seen. After a few sentences, I noticed that her replies were a bit odd. She told me that she just took over the shift to control the avatar, so she did not know about our previous conversation. The difficulty for me was that I had no way of knowing this, since her name and appearance did not change in the meantime.

The second situation happened when Hans, a colleague of mine quit his job. Since he used to be in charge of our test area in Second Life, he owned our virtual land and the objects there. As it is not always possible to transfer ownership of objects to another avatar in Second Life (this is a property the creator of an object can set), we decided that the easiest option would be to transfer his avatar to me. The funny thing was that for the outside world this transition was totally invisible. He kept the same name and the same appearance (only in a cheaper outfit, as Hans kept his virtual classy business suit). So people who knew the avatar before, would engage in a conversation with me and I would have to tell them that I was actually somebody else, although I looked the same and had the same name. These things do not happen that often in the real world.

I wonder if we can design virtual worlds in such a way that users controlling the avatar have the option NOT to be anonymous. Of course you can indicate in SL the “first life” information deep in your profile. However, that information is so hidden that no normal person will regularly look at it, especially if you already know the person. One more consideration when thinking about the business uses of virtual environments.

Reboot 9.0 and new work environments

Please visit Ewan McIntosh’s blog (http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/06/reboot9_your_id.html) for a discussion on my session “Your ideal working environment” on Reboot 9.0.

As I mentioned in his comments as well, I loved the stories people told about their ideal working environment and the fact that this seems to be not only very personal, but also depends on what type of activity you are engaged in (creative or having to finish a paper).

Also very interesting to hear what some people considered ideal social software: software that understands when it is okay to disturb you with awareness information and when not: a Twitter that knows when to bug you. I certainly see some design challenges and possibillities for further research there…

The good news is that I will be able to test some of the suggestions I heard in the near future: the kick-off of the Telematica Instituut project on new work environments is next week! In this project we will start living labs at various medium-sized and large organizations to test the impact of new, flexible collaboration processes. We know that social software opens up new possibilities for communication and even enables new working processes. However, we also expect that the motivations of people to collaborate do not change significantly. So, with this consortium we are going to investigate new working environments, in the physical and organizational sense and in terms of (social) software support.

Your ideal working environment

What does it take to create a working environment that stimulates productivity, collaboration and knowledge sharing? On this question I am initiating a conversation at Reboot 9.0.

Looking from a human, organizational and technological perspective, what does it take to create a working environment where we feel happy, where we are productive, where we collaborate and share knowledge? What practices and tools do you consider essential for your ideal working environment? And… how do we balance the freedom, trust, responsibility, and social cohesion in such an environment?

Not only at Reboot, but also here I would like to hear what you consider essential to achieve this. At BlogWalkEleven we already started a discussion on key ingredients that are needed to keep creative, heavily networked, independent thinkers (”Digital Bohemians”) happy within the boundaries of an organization:

• Providing them with opportunities to share their passions
• A healthy mix of freedom, trust, responsability and social cohesion. The latter actually requires that their passions are shared by other people in the organization.
• Access to the resources they need in order to keep up-to-date (digital libraries, blogs, RSS feeds)
• Access to the resources they need to keep connected: their own blog, Skype, conferences, gatherings of like-minded people. I am missing things here, please add…
• Recognition of success: their added value to the company is in bringing creative new ideas from unforeseen perspectives, linking previously unlinked developments, understanding and explaining how new technology developments could impact the organization.

I’m more then happy to hear your thoughts on this. And hopefully we have a chance to discuss this in-person in Denmark.

Typing to an empty room

Last week I finally gave my first presentation for a Second Life audience - and it was a bit weird. I have attended quite a few business meetings in Second Life, but now was the first time I was on stage, presenting slides and “talking” to the audience about business models for a presence in virtual worlds. 

The preparation took a bit more time than usual: instead of just preparing my slides, I also had to export them as separate images and place them in a virtual screen. Fortunately, I carry around a presentation screen from the EduNation shop in Second Life. So, I arrived with my own virtual presentation screen and laptop in the virtual conference room a few hours before, to test things. Fortunately, it was easy to contact the owners of the virtual room to get rights to place my virtual objects there: I was simply added to the group of owners.

More annoying was the fact that voice communication is still not supported in Second Life. There are some ways of using external software to create an audio stream and then make that stream audible in Second Life. However, we did not have time to set all this up, so I ended up preparing the key sentences to type with each slide in a separate document, to make sure I could give the presentation at a speed that kept the audience happy.

The presentation itself went okay, but it was strange: it was a bit like talking to an empty room - except for the fact that I was typing. Normally, you use the non-verbal cues from your audience to see if they understand you, to decide on the pace of your presentation or when it is time to add something funny to wake them up. These non-verbal cues are missing in Second Life and my audience (of about 10 local organizations active in Second Life) was a bit hesitant to interrupt me with questions. Usually, feeling the energy from the audience and providing them energy is important, and all that was missing here. So, it was good to have this experience, but I certainly prefer to give face-to-face presentations, even if the content is about virtual worlds.

By the way, the material about business strategies in virtual worlds, on which my presentation was based, is online: Does Your Company Need a Second Life?

From Russia with love…

Today we have the last day of the final meeting of the RUSMECO project. I’m having mixed feelings about it: it is always nice to finish a project, but I’m also sad this one will soon be over. The project is/was about improving the competitiveness of innovative Russian SMEs by helping them start a Community of Practice to share knowledge and experiences. Apart from the management and design challenges, the project provided me with many opportunities to get to know many interesting Russian people and helped me gain more insight in the Russian culture.

The project has resulted in three connected communities: one in Moscow (Zelenograd), one in St. Petersburg and one in Ekaterinburg. These communities of iSME members meet regularly face-to-face and have an online platform for sharing content, having discussions, performing self-assessment tests and even following trainings. According to the other project members, the project has also resulted in our marriage and little Alexander - but we have to see if those deliverables also end up in the list towards the European Commission

Anyway, the project was a great source of experiences, a lot of fun and I hope to work with these people again soon! But for now, back to the last items on our to-do list.

The joy of doing “embedded research”

Recently I have been doing “embedded research” in Second Life. It started with me exploring this 3D social environment in the evenings, trying out how to construct things there and how to earn virtual money without getting tired. Pretty soon, I was also interested in the real value of such virtual social environments for organizations. This could well be a hype, but I believe that the underlying idea of a 3D environment where people can interact, explore and perform activities together is likely to stay - even if a Second Life turns out to be finite too. As such, I was very excited when the Telematica Instituut started a project into the business options of Second Life and I happily volunteered to be the leader of the pack.

For the project we chose an “embedded research” aproach: we created avatars for all project members, explored the environment, did interviews with organizations in Second Life and attended virtual meetings there. Basically, the stuff I was doing anyway in the evenings, but now a bit more structured, and using my serious avatar: RJ DeSantis.

I strongly believe that great things can happen when personal passions and professional activities are aligned, and this was certainly the case in this project. It was a lot of fun - the only sad thing now is that it is coming to an end. For those of you interested in the results: they will soon be made public, in real life as well as in Second Life.