What do the "Out There" People in Your Organization Think?

The Attention Company posted an interesting survey on what it calls the "Out There" people. See the "Out There" survey and the "Out There" reactions.

In a nutshell, the survey makes the following points as described below:

• The "Out There" people are the ones "participating in online communities"
  • 20% of your organization population very active
  • 32% are somehow active
• They are the winners in your organization
• Information is everything:
  • Employees at the bottom levels of an organization have most of the knowledge
  • Transparency in decision making increases the likelihood of success

These points are particularly interesting when put in context with organizations and how better information sharing techniques can help organization perform better. This shows the benefits of having a strategy to best disseminate information and knowledge within a company.

Confluence: A Nice Product Evolution

I have been tracking Confluence for a little while now, I have to give credit to their team for a nice product evolution.
In 2.0 in November 2005, they added label or tagging support with cloud display and improved their dashboard display. See their 2.0 release notes.



More screenshots are available in this slide show.

In April 2006, in their 2.2 version, they added support for personal spaces. See the 2.2 release notes.



And, this January, they are adding people directories in 2.3. See their 2.3 release notes.



For those interested in getting in touch with their developers, some of their personal spaces are available online.

Wikis: New Trend For Consumer Oriented Web Sites?

Wikis have been around for a while. The open source community has long been using them as a means of communicating project updates and documentation. The Wikipedia phenomenon has played a significant role in increasing awareness and demonstrating the power of Wikis. Now it is time for consumer oriented web sites to jump on the band wagon and leverage Wikis as a means to provide better alignment and customer focus for their web sites. How much customer focused can you be? There seems to be a trend for a new generation of consumer web sites to leverage Wikis as a way to foster their community involvement and provide better customer focus. Granted customer reviews have been around for a while; just select one product on Amazon and consumer reviews usually abound. The paradigm shift here? The entire site content is driven by the community. This has the potential for early adopters to disrupt their industry business models. Some examples:

• Trip Advisor: This is probably the best example. Trip Advisor is opening its travel guides content to the community at large. If this takes off, this could be quite disruptive to the travel guide industry. No more outdated content; get to read about the not so-well known places to visit. Leverage millions of tourists and local inhabitants to participate in writing Trip Advisor travel guides content. Look at what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia industry...
• Product Wiki: Another good example of what consumer shopping web sites could become. Let your community decide what you should sell and talk about. This could be fairly disruptive as well. Sell what your customers are looking for and develop micro communities of shopping web sites where customers drive what should be on the product catalog. The risk here is that, third party resellers figure out the trick to push and promote their own products. But with the proper controls in place, this concept has some potential.
• Wet Paint: Provide a framework to create Wikis focused on specific consumer areas. Check out Wiki XBox 360 for the XBox fans.

This is just a small subset of the next generation of consumer web sites and still very much a work in progress. But well worth a few minutes of blogging...

Market Dynamics For Idea Validation

Here is an interesting idea. Use market dynamics to weed the good ideas from the bad ones. I just happened to read an interesting article from today's New York Times ("Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas" by William C. Taylor) that outlines just that. I personally find the idea quite appealing. The premises go as follows:

• Allow anyone in your company to have Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for their ideas.
• Have every employee allowed to trade $10,000 of those idea stocks.
• Let the market dynamics decide.

This is not a completely novel idea but Rite-Solutions has a product (The Innovation Engine) that does just that. A modern take on the suggestion box...

Agora: A Community Network Visualizer

Wish you could get a better understanding of the dynamics of virtual communities? Who are the key members of the community, how do community members interact with each other? Well, here comes Agora... Stefano Mazzocchi sent an email to the Apache community demonstrating Agora and its usefulness in analyzing online communities. I must say, it is very nice. 3 years of data collected to give you an in-depth view of various communities' interaction. Here is an example of the Jetspeed development community from January 2003 to July 2005. I was curious to see how much I had contributed to the community so I decided to highlight my own name...



if you want to try the tools for yourself, go to the demo posted by Stephano. Or check the latest version of the application from MIT on their Welkin project home page.