Workspring: Hosted Collaboration-as-a-Service?

The Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design (a top program intersecting design, strategy, and business) - recently showcased Workspring in an event. Workspring is the creation of Steelcase, which is traditionally in the office furniture business.

According to the website:

"Workspring introduces a new way to work away from work. Discover a truly productive retreat—infused with local flavor, equipped with collaborative tools, and designed with your goals and your comfort in mind."

What Steelcase has created is an environment in which you can take your team away from the often stagnant office environment and into a space that is designed for creativity and collaboration.

Workspring's model makes me wonder about the potential for hosted digital collaboration environments, places where - based on your collaboration needs - tools and services (Workspring has session managers that create the space you need) are put together to promote the success of your team. Managers could move beyond what their IT folks can support and into collaborative spaces that are designed for their goals and with support staff that can help to promote success.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for a Wave app here?

Expertise Based Question Routing

A core theme for me in my study of collaboration technologies has been transferring tacit human knowledge from the siloed "wetware" of our minds into sharable digital media. One of the best interaction models we've found as a species to get knowledge out of someone is the question. Pose a question to the right person and you're likely to get the information you need.

Often, though, the hard part is finding the right person to ask. Here are some approaches used today:

1. No targeting. The idea here is to ask as many people as possible in the hopes that one will have at least some knowledge about the question. An example here might be asking a question to your Twitter followers or Facebook network. The idea is to make your information need explicit and available to as many people as possible without time spent focusing on a limited more suitable set.

2. Targeting based on coordinating structures (e.g. ontologies). Systems can offer the ability to focus targeting by providing a shared structure for those with questions and those with answers to leverage. An example of this is Yahoo! Answers as well as a site that I was involved with called GradShare. The ontologies in these systems enables those who would answer a question to navigate to the questions that are most likely to draw on their expertise.

3. Targeting based on personal knowledge. Characterized by reliance on personal knowledge of an individual and their areas of expertise, this approach is the most common and is based on an ability to both match a question with the expertise of a personal network as well as the ability to successfully engage the targets once found, including management of any social dilemmas such as trust.

Finally, a new breed of system is emerging that is perhaps best exemplified by a small firm called Aardvark. The approach that Aardvark and similar services takes is to use coordinating structures such as tags but also to use technology to classify the match between the question and the potential respondents and the to route the question only to those people who get high relevance scores. It doesn't always work but I've been using Aardvark for some time now and it's regularly asking me questions about where I live - which is easy enough - and what I know about (Startups) - which is not so easy. I've never filled out any questionnaire from Aardvark about my expertise so somehow they are able to determine that I have expertise in Startups and then send me related questions from strangers.

I think that an algorithmic approach to expertise finding and matching to improve question routing is an excellent idea and will be a major trend in the future of peer to peer information systems. Good matching increases answer quality, likelihood of particpation (I'd imagine), and future participation (both by the asker and the answerer). The impact within corporate environments or within professional communities (e.g. imagine a doctor being able to ask a question and getting an answer from a colleague they do not know that is dead on) could be substantial.

Collaboration As Mindset

I was involved in a negotiation recently that raised an internal question. Is collaboration a mindset? Specifically, in addition to the mechanics of collaboration, must there be the correct mental framework within the minds of participants in order to create the opportunity for that collaboration to be successful? Here's the dilemma that prompted the question.

Two organizations (OrgA and OrgB) exist and both pursue the same market (MarketC). For FirmA, MarketC is its sole market and for FirmB it is one of a handful. FirmB possesses a rich network within MarketC but FirmA does not. FirmA has a proven product and process in MarketC, FirmB does not but is working on it. An executive at FirmB seeks to become an executive at FirmA in addition to his position as an executive at FirmB. Does this raise a conflict of interest in the fact that the companies were both addressing MarketC? It seems to and thus precludes the ability for this executive to work for both firms.

On the contrary, was the response from the executive. FirmA, he said, can benefit substantially from FirmB's network and FirmB can benefit substantially from FirmA's product and proven process in delivering to that network. Instead of seeing a conflict of interest, he continued, it was more appropriate to see an opportunity that would raise the tide for all parties, most especially the customers of collaboration between FirmA and FirmB. Further, the fact that the executive would be part of both organizations would facilitate the collaboration through cross-fertilization and improved information flows. In terms of how that executive should manage conflicts such as allocation of time, ideas, and potential customers, that would need to be detailed in advance and agreed to by both firms such that the executive could be in a position to allocate to the "best" Firm for the customers.

This is a long story I know, and I have yet to parse whether it is either viable or the best example of what I'm talking about when I say "Collaboration As Mindset" but what struck me is that this executive had a valid point. Instead of thinking about firms or individuals seeking to maximize their exclusive advantage, collaboration needed to be framed as thinking about how parties can work together to offer something better, to solve more problems, to create more insights, to engage and empower more people, and then to have value flow to them accordingly. If done correctly, that value will be more than what they could have accomplished on their own. In other words, both companies could be better off with a collaborative approach that re-framed success as exclusive advantage to success as sustainable co-advantage.

That shift in mindset made me look at the challenge of collaboration differently. I've gotten used to thinking about enabling collaboration as requiring architectural or technology based solutions when in fact it may just as equally - or perhaps even more - be about shifting a mindset from the historically dominant one based on absolute exclusivity to the collaboratively enabling one based on shared benefits and limited exclusivities.

The Power of Being Cute

A fascinating experiment from ITP on getting a robot from point A to point B in New York City. A highly successful approach is to have a simple robot that just goes straight but with a cute external appearance and a clearly visible statement of its goal location. Bottom Line: Strangers intervene to get the robot to where it needs to go. In one case, 29 random people helped a robot cross a park.

More here:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/tweenbots-cute-beats-smart.html

Equally amazing is that in multiple runs, the robots always succeeded in reaching their goal and were never damaged.

Boundary Objects

Came across a great concept while reading the article embedded below. The concept is the 'boundary object', which seems to have been around for a while in cognitive science. The basic idea is that in order to move beyond the limits of the individual mind to create successful collaborations, we need to create externalizations of our thinking and work that others can interact with much as we interact with our own thoughts internally. By externalizing our thinking in the form of a boundary object we also gain the potential to get critique and feedback from collaborators with differing skill sets. In other words the externalization acts as a common boundary with which multiple people can interact. The result is a synthesis of new thoughts, insights, and ideas framed around the boundary object.

Interestingly enough, this post is itself a boundary object!

Transcending the Individual Human Mind

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work collaboration

Social technology in large companies boosts productivity

There's not any data cited in the video below to back it up but the take away is that large multinational businesses can benefit from inclusion of software that supports connections between employees. Main themes cited were the importance of transparency, expertise identification, and associated productivity gains. Video is about 2 mins.

Is it worth it to give your personal information to Change.gov?

I just came across the Citizen's Briefing Book on Change.gov and was all ready to participate when it asked me for the following information in order to register:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Zip Code

Their privacy policy says that they track IP addresses and then has the following little ditty:

It is our general policy not to make Personal Information available to anyone other than our employees, staff, and agents.

Doesn't that mean the entire government of the United States? What's a citizen to do if you don't want to have your personal information known but you want your voice heard and your right to participate? Or, more simply put, is it worth it to give your personal information to Change.gov?

Nature Publishing Group Launches Scitable for Undergraduate Genetics

Nature publishing group has launched Scitable, an online "collaborative learning space" targeted at undergraduate students and teachers interested in genetics. This is the latest in a series of social information tools that Nature has launched. Past offerings include Connotea (collaborative reference management), Nature Networks (science social network), and their Open Text Mining Initative (scholarly content common data exchange standards).

Scitable is extremely feature rich and supports both synchronous (messaging) and asynchronous (questions, discussions) communications. Here are some key elements:

• The core data model seems to have Documents; Topics>Sub-Topics; People; Groups; Discussions; and Questions. They also have something called a 'Learning Path' which I can't really understand. That data model and architecture will enable Scitable to scale to other areas such as Biology. In this first instance Topic=Genetics and SubTopics={Evolutionary Genetics; Gene Expression & Regulation; Chromosomes & Cytogenetics; ...}.
  
• Each SubTopic has an editor. There are 9 Sub-Topics currently. There is some editorial overlap in the Sub-Topics. The Genetics Topic doesn't seem to have an editorial board that I could find.
  
• Over 150 undergraduate level articles explaining key concepts in Genetics. This content has been bundled by Nature (more editorial work there) into packets that professors can add to classroom groups.

What Nature is doing with Scitable is expand the notion of "publishing" to include the creation of environments that support understanding through user content creation. They're also offering core infrastructure to support collaboration amongst the genetics research and teaching community.

Update I: Here's the Press release from Nature Education. Also here's a quote from Nature Education Head Vikram Savkar:

“Research supports the fact that while science students are still using textbooks and library resources for their science classes, they are now depending increasingly on the internet. However, reliability of information is a concern. Our goal is to provide an authoritative and compelling science resource on the internet for students and faculty anywhere in the world.”

Currently Reading: Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

Title: Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

This is an edited collection of works on the progress in cyberinfrastructure and cyberscience to support distributed research across global research networks. Includes background on terminology (e.g. the difference between an extended research group and a collaboratory); results from successes and failures in subject-specific and multidiscipinary collaborations and data sharing projects; interviews with designers and participants; and an ontology of collaboration types that have been tried in the sciences across some 200 projects. I'm only into the first few chapters but is a great read so far. I was particularly struck by a concept put forward by Michael Nentwich that cyberscience is science that takes place in a the medium of information and communication technology as opposed to the traditional physical medium or cognitive medium (thoughtspace).

There's also a local contributor (University of Washington), Dr. Matthew Bietz.