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?

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.

Social Media and Gaming Mechanics

Great slide below by Amy Jo Kim. It describes the intersection of that which makes gaming addictive and social media. She defines game mechanics as "the systems and features that make games fun, compelling, and addictive." Those are:

1. Collecting - Impressive Collections = Bragging Rights (think 'Connections' on LinkedIn); People want to complete collections (only X more to go...);
   
2. Points - Game points from the system and Social points from other players; Redeemable points drive loyalty; Leaderboards drive player behavior; Levels punctuate the game experience and open features.
   
3. Feedback - Accelerates mastery and makes it fun. Social feedback drives engagement.
   
4. Exchanges - Implicit or Explicit
   
5. Customization - Of characters and interfaces

Gaming is also influencing Social Media with the following trends, according to Kim:

• Accessible
• Recombinant
• Syndicated

Here's the presentation:

Fun in Functional 2009

View more presentations from amyjokim. (tags: social media)

I Hope So Too....NYT lets you vote for Hopes but not add your own

The New York Times launched a nice looking system that takes hopes for the new president from 200 people they interviewed and lets you vote for any you agree with. You can see it here. One thing really bothers me about it though and that's that you can't add another 'Hope' beyond those that were identified by the initial 200 people. For the record, I wanted to add "Resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine" but the closest I could find was "World Peace" or perhaps "Global Image"...lame.

It's important for systems like this to embrace the notion that users will not just want to click a button and support what has been. Editorially, it's certainly a lot easier to have a static pool of 'Hopes' but it really limits the benefit of the system in my opinion when you offer a system that makes people want to participate and then takes away or too heavily limits their voice.

All that said, this is a great example of using a collaborative system to aggregate opinions and raise awareness and I applaud the Times for it. Hoping to see more.

Update I: On closer inspection, the Times does allow you to add a new hope using the Comments feature. This isn't being aggregated into the 'Hope Wall' but does have a 'Recommend' feature in the Comments to up vote what you agree with. Definitely better, but not as good as it could have been.