Richard Florida in Sackville on 6 Feb 2008

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Richard Florida, author and blogger, will be presenting a lecture at Convocation Hall at Mount Allison University on 6 Feb ’08 at 7:30 PM.

The title of his lecture is “The Creative Class: The Role of the Artistic Community in Building Towns and Cities.” Everyone is welcome and there is no admission charge.

Given Sackville’s designation as a cultural capital this year, Florida’s presentation is timely. I may not be able to attend due to some client work, so perhaps some local blogger(s) will be able to get to Sackville and post a report.

Some (more) thoughts on online communities for business

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I’ve been asked on several occasions over the past year to see if it’s possible to build a “facebook-in-a-box” for an organisation or association, so I’ve put some thoughts together here. It’s still a work in progress.

This is a follow up from a previous post, The Community Goldrush.

Implementing a Niche Business Network

The success of business-oriented online communities depends more on implementation and mobilization of its members than any inherent design. In the context of many business associations, two motivators are evident. The first is an organizational commitment to create the online community and act on the community’s input. This would be the high level perspective in order to advance the goals of the association. An example objective of this community could be to identify solutions to common problems faced by members. The second motivator would be incentives on an individual level so that there are rewards for members who contribute meaningfully to the goal of the community.

According to Jay Deragon some aspects of an online community that would be attractive to adult members of an online community include:

  • The Learning Factor: With all the hype, craze and media coverage of social networking platforms, i.e. Facebook and Linkedin, many adults are drawn to the medium to learn what the hype is all about.
  • The Connection Factor: Once adults enter networks and learn the tools of the trade many are amazed to find the presence of other adults they know and many they don’t already engaged with the medium.
  • The Affinity Factor: Adults begin to find association with groups, causes, forums, media and other affinities which relate to their interest both personally and professionally.
  • The Business Factor: The predominant business segment using social networks today is employment recruiters. However, as the medium and adult participation has grown there is an exponential growth of business opportunities that adults are learning to facilitate using social networks as the medium.
  • The Creative Factor: Adults, and their businesses, are applying creative ways to use the technology behind social computing to extend its value to both personal and professional needs.
  • The Expectation Factor: When you consider the creative possibilities of social networks adults expect to the formation of some economic and social value to be derived from their participation whether currently or in the future.

The business models behind online communities are varied. Large sites, like Facebook and MySpace generate advertising revenue and the founders may be looking at selling the community to a larger media company. However, for smaller, niche communities, others may be willing to pay for access. According to Ross Dawson, the Sermo site, which only allows access to registered medical doctors, attracts physicians with a need to confidentially discuss cases amongst their peers.

The business models can become far more pointed with a clear target audience. For example, Sermo charges $100,000+ for financial institutions and others to access the medical discussions, so they can assess doctor’s responses to new drugs or medical advances.

Implementation Factors

Fist we have to have a good idea that many members of the association/organisation would be interested in the concept. This can come from market research, informal interviews, anecdotal evidence or previous experience. A suggested action plan could be:

  1. Have initial discussions with the association’s executives in order that they understand the concepts around the development of online communities.
  2. Align with at least one of the association’s longer term goals.
  3. Determine who will be the initial Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople (see graphic below) for this community.
  4. Design the initial technology and support structure.
  5. Start with a very soft launch and no announcements and work with the early members to grow the community.
  6. Once the community reaches a determined size, start looking for targeted sponsors.
  7. Continue to support the community with good conversations, technical support and whatever else motivates members.

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Need an Escape Plan?

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I really enjoy the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog and now you can prepare your own escape to free-agentry with this audio program and workbook. Check out “3 Steps to break through the fear of leaving your corporate job so you can get on the road to starting your own business“:

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I have no connection with this offer, other than being a regular reader. This also seems like a great gift for co-workers who are constantly complaining about their jobs. Think of it as a get out of jail free card ;-)

Usability – KISS

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I’ve been enjoying CBC Radio’s Spark program that looks at technology and culture. The host, Nora Young, is knowledgeable and runs a great show. I pick it up on air from time to time and have downloaded a podcast or two.

As I was listening today, I heard that there was a wiki for sharing information and ideas so I thought I’d give it a try. The site is built on SocialText, which is an enterprise class system, probably good to be able to scale up as needed. I registered and added my two cents worth on one of the wiki pages. I found the interface confusing and got frustrated a couple of times when menus would pop up that made no sense to me. Now, I’m a fair bit of a web geek and am usually comfortable poking around these systems. I wonder what the more mainstream Web surfers do when they try to add comments here?

If you want people to really get involved in the conversation, you have to make it dirt-simple to do so. That’s one reason I don’t have captchas or membership requirements on this blog. I really like getting comments and feedback, so I keep it simple.

Update: Here’s the wiki I was commenting on. Craig Hubley’s comments after mine are worth reading.

A Pictoral Commons

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Flickr has initiated The Commons, initially in collaboration with the US Library of Congress.

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

Perhaps this idea will be embraced by Canadian cultural and archival agencies in order to share our common visual history, instead of letting these pictures gather dust.

The notion of putting these artifacts online for sharing may be an idea that’s ready for take off …

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… or in other words, we should cooperate for the common good:

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I would recommend that teachers covering US history in the periods of the 1910’s or 1930-49 [the two sets currently available], should get their students to check out these photos and contribute some tags to show that the community finds them useful.

Update: Stephen has picked this up and linked to some other comments on this initiative. The fact that these photos are on Flickr is important because it links them to a community that understands tagging and probably includes many people who would not normally visit the LoC site. Flickr may be a proprietary system but the photos are accessible to all.

Aggregating Bookmarks

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I’ve used various social bookmarking tools, such as Furl and Magnolia, but have settled on delicious for a while. If you use many bookmarking applications, as well as rating tools like Digg, you might be interested in SocialMarker, which lets you save a page for filing on several systems at once.

SocialMarker lists 31 tools, several which I’ve never heard of, and a new bookmarking service, Mister-Wong, which is targeted at the education field.

Fair Copyright for Canada

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Have you joined yet?

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From the Facebook group description:

In December 2007, it became apparent that the Canadian government was about to introduce new copyright legislation that would have been a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian legislation was to have mirrored the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention legislation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties … Instead, the government was about to choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a “Canadian-made” solution.

 Update: Now is the time to put pressure on your Member of Parliament. Check out Michael Geist’s list of Copyright MP’s.

Site Stats

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Tony has asked several fellow bloggers to share their site stats. Obviously I use a different stats package than Tony does [actually, I use several, which all give different data]. Anyway, for what it’s worth and in the interest of finding some patterns in this mess, here are some screen shots of my raw stats. The first image shows this site since it started in April 2003 (the blog went live in late Feb 2004):

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Much of my traffic comes from referrals (61%); less from search engines (19%). Some popular search terms (2007) that bring people here are – learning; open source lms; moodle scorm 2004; benefits of blogs; training vs education.

Here are where most of my visitors come from:

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How clear is your business case?

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Stock markets are shaky and a financial crisis seems inevitable. What does that mean for e-learning or learning 2.0? Will the training department be seen as a critical business function and will online collaboration skills be viewed as essential for maintaining a flexible learning organisation? Or will training and education be seen as luxuries in a time of belt-tightening, layoffs and uncertain markets?

I think that it will be difficult for training and education to be heard above the clamour for scarce resources and investments. Much of the e-learning market is still courses online and it’s hard to give a direct measure of value per course in times when each dollar is counted. Just think, what are the perceived business costs if a course is canceled or put on hold? Learning-related initiatives will need to have clear long and short-term value so that executives will not be able to ignore them. Whether you’re a vendor or inside an organisation, are you ready?

On the other hand, creating performance support tools can be a much more obvious business case. If you’re not in the performance improvement field, you may have to be soon.

The e-lance economy?

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In 1937, economist Ronald Coase published an article, The Nature of the Firm, in the journal Economica. Within the article, Coase argues that firms exist because there are costs inherent to free markets – such as costs of communication, of sharing information, of trying to find goods and services. Given these costs, Coase suggests that firms are formed because it is more efficient and less expensive to complete many of these tasks internally within a formal organization rather than outsourcing them to the market and thus incurring these added costs.

Alex Slawsby on the Innosight Blog looks at the nature of the corporation and how advances in information and communications technologies may be enabling a more modular approach to work, especially networked free-lancers, or e-lancers.

… the ‘e-lance economy’ may represent a modular stage of organizational evolution – indeed, an architecture of easily swappable or plug-and-play components (e.g. individuals or resources). In an age where closed, proprietary systems are recognized as inhibiting the ability of organizations to respond to or even identify innovation-borne change, modularity seems a promising answer; virtually every element of the value chain could come together on an ad-hoc, objective, modular basis without being hamstrung by the subjectivity and myopias brought on by business process and the long-term commitments to physical infrastructure, a capital investment in which innovation may quickly make irrelevant.

An example of this economy would be open source software development, with its lack of organisational structure and the ability for anyone with the right skills to plug in or out of the project, yet maintain the integrity of the code. A key question though is whether e-lancing will become the dominant economic model, as the corporation is, or only suitable for certain industries, such as the film industry’s project-based work model. If e-lancing is more effective in most industries and becomes our dominant work model, then organisations will have to rethink everything from HR to supply chain management.