Distributed Work Rules

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About ten years ago it was called computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) but today I would just call it getting things done using the Web. Most of my work is at a distance and I’ve been using Web collaboration tools since they became available. The Web has been around for the past 15 years or so, which means that for anyone under 35, it’s been part of the surround for most of their working lives.

I’ve been working as part of a distributed team that is composed mostly of people over 40 and as a result have accumulated several hundred e-mails on one project alone. I usually get maybe a dozen e-mail per day, but this month has required some serious triage of a hundred at a time. I guess this is how “normal” people work every day. Perhaps the next time I join a distributed team, I’ll ask everyone to accept certain ground rules. If not, I may decide not to play.

  1. Documents that are edited by more than one person must be created, edited and commented upon on a wiki or other collaborative web document such as Google Docs, Central Desktop, etc. (This graphic explains it quite well)
  2. The group must select a text chat method for small details that need to be discussed (Skype, MSM, Google Chat, etc). [Dozens of threads using “Reply All” saying things like, “well done” are a waste of the team’s time]
  3. Document formatting should only be considered/discussed once the content has been agreed upon, and then only one person/agency is responsible.
  4. E-mail should only be used for official correspondence that requires a date/time stamp for archival reasons. Contracts, acceptance of deliverables and official feedback would be examples.

Any other suggestions? Perhaps we need a Distributed Work Manifesto.

Meritus University in New Brunswick

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Meritus University is now the third fourth private online university in New Brunswick, joining Lansbridge [update: Lansbridge lost its degree granting status in August 2010] and Yorkville Universities [and the University of Fredericton]. Meritus is owned by the Apollo Group which also owns the University of Phoenix. Locally, the Federation of New Brunswick Faculty Associations, which represents faculty at public institutions, says that ” … students are being shortchanged by private, for-profit universities, such as Meritus”. This is an interesting statement from those who have enjoyed an oligopoly [defn: An oligopoly is a market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers] on higher education for the past few centuries. I am sure that the paying students will decide in the end which institution offers the best education and related services.

Due to New Brunswick’s legislation that enables the creation of online private universities, we now have three. With their distributed staff this probably doesn’t equate to a lot of jobs but we are beginning to see a bit of a cluster here. Hopefully we’ll see some innovations in teaching and education from these new institutions, and not just a replication of the medieval scholastic model. At Meritus, the focus is on business administration teaching staff who actually have experience in business. Perhaps that’s what faculty at public institutions mean by being “shortchanged”.

I previously wrote about the move toward standardization in higher education and its implications in From Cottage Industry to International Certification.

Deki Wiki

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Another new tool found via Benoit Brosseau is Deki Wiki. This product from MindTouch is open source and seems to have all the right attributes to make it wildly popular:

Similar to CMS web frameworks like Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and DotNetNuke, Deki Wiki delivers a remarkably extensible platform, but it’s a wiki in nature; therefore making it community-centric and significantly easier for end-users to participate. Also, it has a complete application programming interface (API) for programmers.

Deki Wiki is available as a free download; a free hosted service; or with enterprise-level support.

Mahara open source e-portfolio

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My friend Benoit Brosseau told me about Mahara, which seems to fill a growing demand for e-portfolios in education. I like their approach:

What makes Mahara different from other ePortfolio systems is that you control which items and what information (Artefacts) within your portfolio other users see.

In order to facilitate this access control, all Artefacts you wish to show to other users need to be bundled up and placed into one area. Within Mahara this compilation of selected Artefacts is called a View.

You can have as many Views as you like, each with a different collection of Artefacts, and intended purpose and audience. Your audience, or the people you wish to give access to your View, can be added as individuals or as a member of a Group or Community.

Learner control over content access would be one of my essential criteria in selecting an e-portfolio system. More innovation from New Zealand!

Collaboration versus Teamwork

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In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Recently Mark has posted on why bureaucracy and collaboration are mutually exclusive, showing the limited nature of Teamwork …

… in comparison to the more balanced aspect of Collaboration which brings all valence relationships into play.

As much as organisations advertise for “team players”, what would be best are workers who can truly collaborate by connecting to each other in a more balanced manner with all the facets of their lives. Of course that would mean that the blunt stick of economic consequences would have less overall significance.

Learning professionals as first responders

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When I was in the Canadian Forces Medical Services much of my work was in preparation for mass casualty situations, such as would happen in a conflict. Hospitals and medical personnel train for mass casualty situations because the rules are a bit different from the standard admission process. You are overwhelmed with casualties and the system cannot treat everyone as they would like or need. Priorities are set. An important role is that of triage [from the French verb “to sort” – Processus de prise de décision utilisé sur les lieux d’une urgence et servant à classer les victimes selon les priorités de soins – Grand dictionnatre terminologique].

I was thinking that triage is good metaphor for learning today. We are inundated with information and sources of knowledge. Learning professionals can help sort the signal from the noise by understanding the current circumstances of the organisation and do an initial triage. Of course the situation will be changing so what was important yesterday may not be important tomorrow. Only by constantly looking outside and inside will the learning professional provide a valuable service.

So if anyone asks why you’re reading 100 Web feeds and checking out the chat on Twitter and Facebook, tell them you’re doing triage.

I am a Canadian

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John Diefenbaker, Prime Minister of Canada, in 1960, while referring to the Canadian Bill of Rights:

“I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”

I was only one year old at the time. Of course, each generation has to keep fighting for its rights and freedoms and ensure the rights of those who cannot.

It’s a great country — Happy Canada Day!

The business of social media

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I had the opportunity/chance/pain of being on a social media panel for our Third Tuesday Meetup, so I couldn’t resist a post called Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel. It’s a humourous post with much truth between the lines. I’ve found that just about everybody today is a social media consultant and I’m glad that I never used that descriptor for my professional services.

As much as I enjoyed Berkowitz’s main topic, there is one comment that answers several of the questions that I get asked about this “Web thing”. It’s by Janet Johnson who provides the specifics that most people want from panels but don’t often get:

I’ve personally observed ROI (expenditure = time) mostly in the following areas:

1) Improving collaboration for virtual teams scattered around cities, countries and such – Twitter is especially great for that.

2) Lead generation for consultants – especially in the areas of RSS, infrastructure and social media (big duh, but it’s true).

3) Awareness and thought leadership – especially for those whose markets serve early adopters/18-35 year olds today, although the baby boomers are adopting to, and using the social web quite quickly.

Negotiating the mesh of social meaning

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I finally got around to reading Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. I thought that I understood the premise and contents fairly well from my readings on the Web but I was pleasantly surprised by this book, which is now available in paperback. There is lots here that I will refer back to and the book will definitely stay on my reference library shelf.

For instance, I already knew this concept ;-)

In the miscellaneous order, the only distinction between metadata and data is that metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying find.

But then we go one step beyond the Cluetrain:

The markets that conversations make are real markets, not mere statistical clusterings.

I highlighted this passge near the end:

In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning, even though we can’t yet know what we’ll do with this new domain. Certainly some will mine it for knowledge that will change our lives through science and business. But knowledge will only be one product. Knowledge’s new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning. Knowledge is thus not being dethroned. We are way too good at knowing, and our continued progress – and survival – depends on it. But knowledge is now not our only project or our single highest meaning. Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning.

This made me pause and think about what we mean when we discuss knowledge work, and if it may be the wrong label.

Your market is laughing; at you

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has hit some success with a program that gets viewers to create mash-up advertisements that spoof traditional advertising.

The number of ads made for a range of fictional products – a beer, an anti-ageing cream and a bank – and the number of times they have been watched, 280,000, has surprised ABC programming chiefs.

However, this is not going over well with the industry:

But yesterday the chairman of one of the biggest industry groups, Robert Morgan of Clemenger Communications, panned the series, saying it “demeaned and trivialised” the business.

Here is an important note to corporations; Cluetrain Thesis #20:

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Gee, what’s next, people making fun of education?