Harold Jarche

NRC IRAP Workshop Follow-up Links

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Here are the follow up notes from the session in Halifax this afternoon on Open Source and Web 2.0.

The Open Source Initiative

Social Bookmarks, that are searchable and shareable, on the topics of Open Source and Web 2.0

Videos:

Web 2.0

Open Source by Greg Papadopoulos

Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of Networks) at TED 2005

Cathedral & Bazaar story

Tools & Applications:

If this is your first time to this blog, check out the Key Posts or look into the major threads here, such as OpenSource.

PS: For those who attended, and got a free book, I’m looking forward to the book reviews ;-)

Karyn asks, How did you get started in social media?

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This is in partial answer to Karyn’s question. My first foray into using the Web for more than just gathering information was in asking questions to those who were publishing. Kieren Egan, author of The Educated Mind, posted e-mail comments on his web site, and my post from 1997 is the earliest I can find online. For the next several years, I read a lot online and made some comments. Jay Cross‘ earlier websites were a common spot for me to make comments. During this time, I used online discussion boards and many closed platforms, but not much on the open Web, as there weren’t many options.

My first step toward almost blogging was with QuickTopic in 2003, discussing topics like elearning R&D and Open Source for learning. I still find QT an excellent discussion board. I later moved to Blogger, which I found to be a more flexible platform for the expression of my opinions, such as this from October 2003:

I believe the next great business model for an elearning entrepreneur is to provide high quality installation and support services for a select group of open source learning systems. Your customers will soon realize that you are not trying to sell them the next upgrade to get more cash, because the software is free. You will be selling your knowledge, experience, and customer service. Many IT departments would be more apt to use open source if they knew that it was strongly supported. Also, there is a lot less conflict of interest when you remove the vendor from the ongoing support.

Maybe I should have invested in Blackboard stock instead ;-)

For me, social media have been closely linked with my becoming a free-agent (June 2003). Blogs were becoming easier to use, and by early 2004 I had this one up and running on Drupal. Since then, it has been a fast trip testing out so many different platforms and applications that I cannot remember them any more. Thankfully my blog has become a knowledge-base so that I can find out what I was doing and writing about four years ago.

Social media – first blogs, then wikis, bookmarks, SNS, micro-blogging, etc – have provided a richer way to engage people whom I would not have met other than online. It has allowed me to engage many communities, such as edubloggers and open source advocates. To say that social media have made a difference to my professional practice would be an understatement. Much of my current practice has become focused around social media. Five years ago I would have said that I was a training and performance improvement consultant. Today, I would say that I specialize in social media for learning and working.

Going Solo

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I would have loved to attend the Going Solo conference in Switzerland last week, but alas I had neither the time nor the budget to fly across the Atlantic. I’m starting to see more interest in the option of freelancing and I think that some of this has to do with demographics (aging boomers looking for something to do) as well as economics (globalisation, outsourcing and downsizing). For instance, I was a bit surprised at the high level of interest in my presentation on Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet.

I also see the free agent route as one of the only practical ways of currently implementing wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, with a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology“.

The only situations where I have witnessed a real “two-way flow of power and authority” is when I work with other free-agents. All of these relationships have been built on trust and in most cases there is not even a contract. I think that free-agents, working together, will eventually come up with the new organisational and management models required for a wired future. I don’t see how we can make incremental changes to industrial organisations and expect them to change their DNA.

If you want to see the future of business, take a look at how interconnected free-agents do business today and find out what they still need to do better.

Queen Street Studios

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A theme on this blog is that of a Commons, or third-space that connects people in their work and living. The Queen Street Commons on PEI was one of the first in Atlantic Canada and a slightly different model is offered by Queen Street Studios in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia:

Fondly known as QSS, its genesis emerged from the personal and professional background of its creative director Julia Rivard. Her vision was to create a place for creatives to meet, work and share ideas. Together with her husband Trevor, Julia purchased the historic Union Protection Company property, built in1895 at 50 Queen Street in Dartmouth. In the summer of 2006, the interior of the building was transformed into a unique space and Julia’s dream became a reality. Today it is a vibrant space nurturing the creative energies of its members, and reaching out to the HRM community and beyond, to further the growth of the profession.

QSS offers various levels of membership services, ranging from $150 to $675 per year. It also houses the for-profit QSS company, which provides the nucleus of the business energy that seems to result in many opportunities for its members. Students are welcome and QSS will be offering an incubation program soon.

This looks like a focused and pragmatic business model that is growing a local ecosystem of independent companies. It is the kind of business development that our governments should be supporting, instead of creating jobs (a.k.a. indentured servitude) by luring multinational corporations to set up temporary shop in the Deep East.

Bridging with Conversations

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I’m currently working with several communities of practice and helping to find appropriate web tools and techniques to foster their goals. I was going over some previous documents that I’d developed and found a diagram that may be helpful. It shows how you need to move into a space of shared conversations before you can work on sustaining a community of practice (CoP).

Many organisations are cut off from their clients/customers and the Internal staff are often focused on the inside of the company when they should know much more about the customers they serve [no customers, no job]. Shared conversations start the process of creating shared knowledge, but first a level of trust must be developed. This happens over time, and is supported by the creation of tools to support the work. Over time, these conversations are supported with the right tools and this can create an environment for a performing business network. It takes time and commitment, not just words, but in the end there is a dynamic and resilient network of trust, based on work that is meaningful to each individual.

A Partnership Economy

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Jon Husband, whom I finally had the chance to meet in person this week, sent me a link to a 1999 article by management guru Peter Drucker. Jon tells me that this article helped spark his concept of wirearchy. In Beyond the Information Revolution, Drucker explains the similarities between the printing; industrial and information revolutions. He concludes that we are definitely in a knowledge economy and that knowledge workers, as the only means of economic production, can no longer be treated as employees.

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries [the new ones created in the 21st C] depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) “shareholder value” as its first — if not its only — goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

If you agree with Drucker’s reasoning, which I do, then there is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging workplace. We are seeing some signs of innovation in companies like Google, that give 20% independent research time to their engineers, but there is much more work to do.

The companies and societies that create and master the new models for wirearchy will be the leaders for the next century. However, there is no guarantee that this will happen here in Canada, the US, or Europe. In fact, it probably won’t happen where industrial models and values are the strongest. Look at the working definition of wirearchy and see if your organisation even remotely practices anything like this:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology

FrenchPod Launches

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As New Brunswick continues on its self-destructive path of eliminating early French immersion without a viable alternative, we now have FrenchPod, a [subversive] learning option that bypasses the politicized education system:

FrenchPod is a language training service designed around your needs, rather than the traditional constraints of language schools and publishers. Technology solves these problems and can make the learning of a new language easier.

We take the best pedagogical approaches of the classroom, layer in the community features of the social web and tailor a customized learning pathway for each student.

Note that networks route around obstructions with ease, and we now live in a networked world.

Little Brother

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I picked up Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother for my son this weekend and read it myself on the plane home. I don’t read much fiction but I really enjoyed this one, which I feel is a much better story than Eastern Standard Tribe, the only other book of his I’ve read.

I really couldn’t put the book down. It reminded me of books like Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Snow Crash, and I think that it will resonate with teenagers (I found it in the Teen section of the bookstore) as well as anyone interested in technology, culture and the limits of state-controlled security.

Little Brother is available as a free download (Creative Commons Licensed) so you don’t have to outlay any cash. I personally prefer the paper format for longer reads. Here’s the opening paragraph:

I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”

*Not* pronounced “Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn” — unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet “the information superhighway.”

I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you’re going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who’s really on the ball.

“Marcus Yallow,” he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn’t very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson’s habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion — it’s a survival trait.

I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut — I didn’t want to blow my downloads — and got ready for the inevitable.

“Report to the administration office immediately.”

Open Source & Business

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I’m preparing a workshop for later this month and one of the topics will be the rise of open source and the business models around it. Here are some interesting sites and comments that I’ve come across lately:

Matt Asay: “The benefits of SaaS [software as a service] also point to its greatest flaw: it’s the ultimate lock-in scenario when it comes to your data, even though it “liberates” the user from software. In fact, it’s this very liberation that creates the problem. If you don’t have the software, you really don’t have the data, no matter the vendor’s data policy. My data qua data is only as useful as the software used to open it up and read it.”

The Economic Times: “Clearly, the IPR-based [intellectual property rights] model for innovation is just not working. Strong IP protection is encouraging protectionism and is harming the way science is done. Many more patents are taken out to stop others from working than to protect one’s own research. It is premised on very high costs of development, that are sought to be recovered through high monopoly pricing of products.”

Dave Snowden: “… I think the position deeply confuses the concept of open source with that of not having to pay for things. It also fails to understand that all business models make money somewhere, the issue is where and (to my mind the most important thing) the degree of transparency of said business model. ”

Guillaume Lebleu: “The idea is to not view open source as an all or nothing strategy, but rather as a marketing technique to segment your market and maximize revenue, except that in the open source case, the revenue is mostly intangible.” [follow link for charts]

I’ll be summarizing my workshop and posting here by the end of the month.

Mailserver Down

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If you’ve sent any e-mail messages to the @jarche.com address this past week, i may have missed it, as we’re having some technical issues with the mailserver. My posted e-mail still works though – hjarche AT gmail DOT com.

Update: All is working now :-)