Australia :: Headshift

Relatedness Matters

2010-03-08T07:41:27Z

As the first of the global series of Social Business Summits commences this week in Austin, we're starting a series of blog posts from some of our speakers to position our Sydney Summit and to connect with the topics across the series.

Our first guest post: Relatedness Matters, is from Howard Errey, a Headshift consultant based in Melbourne. As a pyschologist, Howard will be presenting at the Summit on organisational change and why people resist new implementations and initiatives.

"It all started with Napoleon (although Doug Rushkoff, from an economics point of view, takes it back further).
After gaining power he made a law that women could only talk in public with their husbands. Overnight a culture of the refined art of conversation died. It was the beginning of the age of enlightenment culminating in the developments (and crises) of science, materialism, rationalism and hypercapitalism, of the twentieth century.

Concurrent with the maintenance of such "progress", opportunities to relate continued to get squeezed. What results in repeated restrictions in opportunities to relate is a collective or societal hunger for relatedness. The current opportunities that have emerged with social media and web2.0 have caught the wave of these urges. (It would be interesting to speculate that Web2.0 would not have occurred without the pressure of this collective relatedness hunger - but that's another post.) Young people go to Facebook and education has discovered it needs to either go where the students are or create new social space for both direct and informal learning to occur. The new theory of Connectivism has also had popular appeal, the idea being that we learn because we have a social network - a potentially important concept for staff and knowledge retention in a business.

In my city, Melbourne, something also seems to be happening in civic life. Melboune's laneways, formerly dark alleys full of rubbish and graffiti are now being invaded by cafés, bars, music venues and now other businesses are choosing to locate there. What laneways provide is a physical opportunity for relatedness as they have an inherent architectural "pattern language" for connecting - if only because in confined spaces we are more likely to talk - though there's more than that going on. At the moment it's where Melbourne people want to go.

And what are the social business opportunities? Online we can create the "spaces" and contexts for connecting and feeling connected. Our customers and employers are starting to expect to know how they can relate with their employer or brand. As I walk into my local supermarket there are now no gateways treating me as something to be counted. Instead there is a wide open space and a person who smiles and greets everyone. And while this multinational supermarket is probably still trying to Taylorise the business to the nth degree out the back, (and there is no perceptible advantage to the customer) there is at least recognition that humanising of the business could be to their advantage.

So what are the social shifts in your organisation and how can you harness the potential online?

And where are the opportunities to change when there often seems to be resistance to change? Often it can be we least expect and it takes careful observation of social and organisational dynamics before a shift can be effected. As with the current change in our laneways, rather than one factor that makes the change it is often several small but divergent elements through which change occurs - for example, multiple graffiti incidences turned from a nuisance to become celebrated as art forms, combined with other factors like liquor licence law changes and changes in the economy. Factors such as cues in the environment and the language we use can be changed in small ways to over time to create a larger effect, hopefully by design synchronous with the more complex emergent change factors that are seemingly uncontrollable. Rather than linear activity we are dealing with change in environments that work like ecologies, like the humanoids in Avatar, sentsitive to our environments (even in the office!) and open to opportunities to connect and share experience."

Thanks Howard!
Exploring the Melbourne laneways is one of my favourite activities when I'm scooting between meetings - and a great connection between these emerging spaces in laneways and our behaviours online!

Masterclass: Online community engagement for the public sector - 22nd March, 2010 - Canberra

2010-02-19T05:15:38Z

We are taking advantage of the fact that Robin Hamman will be here in Sydney for our Social Business Summit to run a special half-day masterclass in Canberra on Monday 22nd March.

Featuring Robin and facilitated by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, the masterclass will address:

How existing government activities can be undertaken with more impact, wider reach, and effectiveness using social media;
Who should do it (and who shouldn't);
The guidelines and roles a government agency will need; and
Measuring success for different stake holders.

Download the event brochure [PDF] for more information.

Please contact me at james.dellow@headshift.com or call 0414 233711 if you would like to register for the masterclass.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/20534297@N07/2604628036/ Reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Creating Government 2.0 as Social Business

2010-01-28T04:58:12Z

You might have seen from Anne's earlier post that the themes for this year's Social Business Summit hosted here in Sydney on the 25th March are:

Engagement - connecting and communicating with your workforce and enabling new processes to emerge through innovative and novel ways.
Influence - the need for leadership when responding to the transformational shifts in the nature of work we are all experiencing.
Impact - measuring the impact of strategies in terms of engagement, satisfaction, efficiencies and expectations.

If you work in government you might be wondering about the relevance of these issues, but having worked with a mixture of public and private sector clients over the last few years I can assure you that these are challenges facing all types of organisations.

Just like their counterparts in the private sector, public servants are all too familiar with the same organisational and technological merry go round experiences in the workplace. While the electoral cycle brings some predictability to life in the public sector, other events like the global financial crisis and policy changes, like those coming from the Gershon Review, can bring unexpected surprises. And now that the outcomes of the Government 2.0 Taskforce have been published, public servants face the prospect of being expected to engage with the public online. If this isn't a transformational shift in the public sector workforce, then I'm not sure what is!

Of course one of the ongoing debates in the Australian Government 2.0 conversation relates to the organisational change required to allow new approaches to government administration to emerge and become sustainable. 'Culture change' is the catch cry, but the reality is that many public servants have limited direct experience with social media on the Web or even access to comparable technologies inside the firewall.

This is unfortunate because I don't believe Government 2.0 can be successful in the long term if we only focus on external online engagement. The Headshift/Dachis Group Social Business Design framework acknowledges three broad focus areas:

Workforce Collaboration;
Business Partner Optimisation; and
Customer Participation.

However, these focus areas do not exist separately to each other. For Government 2.0, if we are going to use the capabilities of social computing effectively - in this case online engagement - we need to purposefully align all the elements in the organisation that contribute to its success. In other words, we can not expect public servants to work in an agile way externally (Customer Participation) if they can not do the same internally (primarily Workforce Collaboration, but also Partner Partner Optimisation). In fact, we have a pretty good idea of what Government 2.0 might look like from the outside. The next challenge is to design the new organisational architectures for government agencies that can support it.

Leadership is needed. We need to engage with the public sector workforce. And we need to be able to demonstrate the value this change brings to both the community and the operations of government.

If you are an aspiring Government 2.0 leader and would like to participate in our Social Business Summit, please request an invitation by contacting us at australia@headshift.com.

PS I will be attending BarCamp Canberra on Saturday 6th February - please come and find me if you would like to know more about the Summit, Social Business Design or the Online Engagement Guidelines we created for the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

Considering the influence and impact of Social Business

2010-01-24T02:18:48Z

Announcing the Social Business Summit, Sydney, March 25, 2010

"Considering the influence and impact of Social Business for your organisation."

We're delighted to announce the final event in a series of global Social Business Summits hosted by the Headshift/Dachis Group will be held in Sydney on Thursday, 25th March, 2010.

Our event, that completes the series commencing in Austin on the 11th March, followed by London on the 18th March - will bring together a diverse range of thought leaders and business innovators to both share experiences and contribute to facilitated discussions on the future of social business design.

We intend to consider and address the impact of social tools on the way we organise, structure and manage knowledge and people in businesses, both internally and externally. The Sydney event has selected three key themes: engagement, influence, and impact.

Engagement: The organisational culture and how implementing change strategies impact your business. As we return to work and review the year ahead, there's an opportunity to reflect upon the new potential afforded by the global turbulence many organisations experienced in 2009. In the Australasian region, there are early indicators of growth and return of business and consumer confidence. While in contrast, business commentators are signalling a workforce that is "changed forever" by the GFC. A report from Chandler Macleod Group describes tired and disillusioned staff who have endured tough times and a warning that it's a critical time to re-engage, to provide flexibility, to revise and revisit values and rewards. In Social Business terms we see that as connecting and communicating with your workforce and enabling new processes to emerge through innovative and novel ways. However, traditional change implementation approaches frequently experience resistance to change. How do we address workplace fatigue and spark innovation for new approaches? What will be the impact on organisational culture?

Influence: The roles and responsibilities in a Social Business. While considering the need for change, the question arises in many organisations about the need for leadership - who will take the responsibility for this change role? Where does the role for the integration of social tools connect with organisational structures? Consulting firm, SHL, calls for a return to charismatic, transformational leader who will motivate and engage - yet back in 1994, Doug Stace & Dexter Dunphy (in Beyond the Boundaries: Leading and re-creating the successful enterprise) referred to the leadership of change and highlighted that change will frequently come from initiatives within the organisation which can create strategic conflict with leadership - but will the cultural renewals from the 90's provide us with any insights for the types of transformational shifts in the nature of work currently being explored?

Impact: the ROI - creating transferable actions that lead to workplace productivity and greater efficiencies. As Lee points out in his post citing Clay Shirky - the cost of collaboration is close to zero! Yet despite the abundance of case studies and reports available, many organisations don't know how to foster collaborative environments. Instead preferring to continue with a transactional model and division of labour that will to negatively impact any endeavours to realise the potential of social business tools. Continual references to the "bottom line" and ROI of social business strategies restricts our abilities to consider the impact in terms of engagement, satisfaction, efficiencies and expectations. Such value is delivered through infrastructure effectiveness and strategic differentiation. Today's technologies are influential and successful because they are both powerful and flexible - isn't it time our work practices mirrored the same qualities?

We will be joined by a number of local and international speakers - they will be announced shortly along with the program. Further blog posts, including posts from guest bloggers on the themes will provide further opportunities to expand and shape the Summit conversations.

Join us in Sydney to reconsider the nature and interactions of work - engage in open, facilitated discussions with thought leaders and practitioners who will draw on their local and international experiences. This event is by invitation only and admittance is limited. If you would like to request an invitation, please email australia@headshift.com

Finally, no more cookie cutter online communities

2009-12-18T03:10:49Z

I first became seriously involved in online communities while working at a professional services firm in the early 2000s - our total sum of knowledge about running 'discussion databases' fitted easily into about 1,000 words (just right for consumption by users inside the business who had volunteered to run an internal community of interest).

Thinking about those guidelines today, I think for the most part the technology to enable online communities has evolved a lot further than our practical knowledge of using online communities in a business or government context. Pretty much you can boil down the popular advice about creating online communities that is available today to the same generic guidance we provided people all those years ago.

However, I've been following Robin's project that he blogged about the other day with great interest as it shows how sophisticated our knowledge about online communities is finally becoming. Robin's report of 70+ pages is long way from the 5 page hand out I used to use.

At the same time, Anne and I have been working on two Government 2.0 Taskforce projects - the first ("Project 8") involved us developing a toolkit of Web 2.0 tools and guidelines to help government agencies engage online, while the second project involved actually running an online consultation ("Project 15").

For Project 8 - and Robin provided some input in this too - we have developed about 200 pages of guidelines, examples and templates - it is intentionally broad in scope, designed to meet the needs of a surprisingly large range of use cases (twenty-seven use cases, in fact) for online engagement by the federal government in Australia.

And for Project 15, with a much smaller and focused scope, we have applied the same ideas but put them immediately into practice.

All the projects highlight the importance of applying design processes that create specific approaches and guidelines for specific organisations or situations. As you can see from Robin's project they completed a number of activities to develop their approach and made recommendations that touch on more than just technology and process, but people and organisational issues.

This is exactly what Social Business Design is all about.

Or in other words: Finally, no more cookie cutter online communities.

We are currently seeking input for Gov 2.0 Taskforce Project 8

2009-11-04T01:31:01Z

Headshift is currently completing a project for the Government 2.0 Taskforce, to develop online engagement guidelines and a Web 2.0 toolkit for Australian government agencies (see the brief - PDF or RTF format).

Our approach for this project involves creating use cases for online engagement that will underpin and connect the two main outputs from this project into something that will give some practical guidance to people working in the public service.

We've already been reaching out to people about these use cases, both in person and online through forums like the Gov 2.0 Australia mailing list, to get feedback and ideas. So if you are working in government and would like to provide feedback or have information to share, please get in touch.

Recording of our Designing for Adoption webinar

2009-10-23T21:18:01Z

A recording of our Designing for Adoption webinar is now available on Atlassian.tv:

The slides themselves are also available on SlideShare.

We invited people to ask questions during the Webinar and here are some pointers to further reading:

Mark Morrell describes how BT has used a different coloured global navigation bar to help users distinguish between published corporate content and user generated content on the intranet;
You can read more about the Freshfields example here and also Lee Bryant's and Ruth Ward's (of Allen & Overy) slides from their Allen & Overy case study presentation at the 2007 Perfect Information Conference;
There are also more Confluence case studies here and I also recommend reading about Clifford Chance's experiences with Confluence.

If you have a more technical orientated question of the type that was covered at last month's Confluence User Group meeting in London, please let us know and we can put you in contact with one of our brilliant Confluence ninjas.

And of course if you have any other questions or comments, please add them below.

Webinar: Designing for Adoption - Friday 23rd Oct @ 9am (Sydney time)

2009-10-19T01:15:45Z

This Friday morning (9am, Sydney, Australia time), Anne and I are excited to be presenting a webinar for Atlassian. We will explain the benefits of customising Confluence and how applying a user-centered approach can help to overcome the typical barriers of enterprise wiki adoption.

We will be covering:

The benefits of using Confluence as an enterprise social computing platform;
The user's perspective and barriers to wiki adoption;
Taking a user-centred design approach with Confluence; and
Examples of user-centred design for Confluence from Headshift's portfolio.

To attend this webinar, please register here.

Note: please check your local time zone for this webinar while registering. The webinar is being hosted across the International Date Line.

A Wiki Case Study: Replacing a Static Intranet at a Law Firm

2009-09-15T09:45:53Z

A few months ago we announced the release of the Social Networking for the Legal Profession report by the Ark Group, which was written by Headshift's Lee Bryant and Penny Edwards.

The London team recently followed up the release of this report with a special 'Insight Event' for the legal profession last week, which include three of the contributors from the report sharing their experiences. They were:

Mark Gould - Head of KM, Addleshaw Goddard;
Stephen Perry - Head of Knowledge and Business Development Systems, Freshfields; and
Sam Dimond - Director of Knowledge, Clifford Chance.

You can also read Penny's summary of Mark's presentation on how social software helps to close the loop on knowledge management in law firms and on Stephen's presentation, 'A portrait of the social intranet' (including his slides).

Because I know everyone loves a case study, I'm going to focus on Freshfields as Stephen outlines exactly why they moved from a traditional intranet to a wiki - all of which I'm sure will sound very familiar to you:

They had out-of-date content that was difficult to find and complex to maintain;
The intranet was sucking up time and effort to manage; and
It was hard to use.

These are pretty common challenges with first generation intranets. Quite naturally, users had become dissatisfied with the intranet and this was reflected in usage rates.

But rather than trying to fix something that was inherently broken (e.g. tidying up the content, reviewing the information architecture or simply throwing a new Web CMS at the issue), instead with some help from Headshift they decided to try a light weight, lower cost Web 2.0-based platform - in this case, a Confluence wiki.

Quoting from Penny's summary, the results have been:

Previously, the firm had around 40-50 global editors. Now there are around 2000 people contributing to 270 spaces. There are approximately 20,000 pages, with 1200 updates a day. The diverse and regular contributions helps to keep content fresh and up-to-date.
The platform also links people, ideas and insights, building up a rich network that is beneficial to both firm and individual.
There has been minimal training (more in the nature of hand-holding) to get people over initial hurdles.
People's feedback indicates that they now feel better informed about what's happening in the firm, about the sectors that they follow and clients that they work with.

Of course, we don't simply drop in a wiki and walk away to get this kind of result. Picking a suitable social technology is key, but it also has be supported by an appropriate social computing approach to implement it.

UPDATE: See Sam's presentation and notes for some implementation tips.

Regardless of your industry, I think that this kind of result speaks for itself about the potential for a social computing-based intranet. The question is, what's stopping you?

Powered up Downunder!

2009-09-02T04:54:17Z

While we were asleep downunder, the Twitterverse was going wild with the announcement of the Dachis Group's acquisition of Headshift - followed by a series of blog post commentaries.
Rather than re-post what Social Business Design is all about, I thought I'd share some of the conversations that have been occuring and then situate these comments into our local context.

Here's a selection of blog posts that attracted my attention - in no particular order - and apologies to those I haven't represented - happy for you to add a link to your post in the comments area of this post:
From Neville Hobson: Is Social Business the new Black
From Luis Suarez: Executing Enterprise 2.0: Dachis Group acquires Headshift
From Tim Bull: E2.0 may be hype, but Dachis is joining the gold rush
From Larry Hawes: Social Business leaps forward with Dachis Group acquisition of Headshift
From Gil Yehuda: Dachis + Headshift = ?

And posts from the Headshift/Dachis team that will explain more about what we're all doing:
From Lee Bryant: Power Up! Level Completed!
From Jevon MacDonald: We are growing!
From David Armano: Dachis Group expands internationally with Headshift
From Peter Kim: Welcome Headshift!
From Kate Neider: Dachis Group Ecosystem Expansion

Nearly 18 months ago I convinced Lee & Livio that a presence in the Australian / S.E. Asian region was a significant opportunity worth exploring...and reflecting upon our journey, I believe we've brought a level expertise informed by experience and best practice from Headshift UK to the region.
We've been actively sharing and building best practice in areas such as the development of Government 2.0, where Lee and James' contribution - ReBooting Australia - to the Centre for Policy Development is part of a submission to the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

Our growing cutsomer base extends across FMCG social media monitoring, innovative social learning networks, internal communication implementations and intranet re-developments. While a number of these social software projects enable the sort of collaboration we understand to be "Enterprise 2.0", this announcement signals a very important leap forward - not only in our powerful ability to execute these projects on a global basis, but that we are moving the conversation from being centred around technology as the solution to being about a fundamental change in business process as we enter the next phase of enterprise social business practices.
The HOZ (Headshift Australasia) team, as a member of the Dachis Group, are exhilarated by the broadening of opportunities and extension to our existing capabilites. We're currently scheduling some conversational events, if you'd like to know more contact Anne or James.

Upgrading Democracy in Australia - Reboot needed

2009-09-01T06:48:38Z

The Centre for Policy Development is an independent Australian public interest think tank. Lee Bryant and I were invited to submit an article for the latest edition of their Insight Magazine, which became available online today. The theme for this edition is:

the brave new world of open government, open access to government information, collaborative policy development, democratic renewal and all the amazing initiatives conjured up by the idea of Government 2.0.

It includes contributions from a range of politicians, academics, activists, and even a few consultants like us! Our piece, Rebooting Australia, was based on Lee's column for Reboot Britain, but rewritten to address the Australian context for Government 2.0:

Lee Bryant and James Dellow, of Europe's leading social technology consultancy, Headshift, propose the application of some 21st century solutions to Australia's problems - use government spending to seed innovation; harness people power for rapid, iterative improvements to policies and services; and, of course, open up access to government data.

This edition of Insight also formed a submission to the Government 2.0 Task Force, so it was great to be part of that process too.

Social innovation gardening

2009-08-25T10:26:42Z

I wrote this short piece about the relevance of Government 2.0 to service delivery at a local level:

The exciting dimension of Government 2.0 is the impact it can have on communities where Local Government is at the front line, along with other community service agencies and organisations.

Of course, it is at this service delivery end that many people start to point out the deficiencies of all this technology evangelism. People working directly within disadvantaged communities or who are involved with the delivery of community services want to see tangible examples of how this new technology can actually help them to do their jobs better. For example, what use is Twitter to an elderly person with dementia, or a refugee that can't read English?

Read the rest on Local Government Focus.

Reframing practice: creating social learning networks

2009-08-13T06:16:19Z

Anne has recently been published in Emerald's peer reviewed Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, with an article looking at social learning networks:

The future of online learning lies with the development of social learning networks, but the value will only be experienced if organizational learning practitioners re-frame their practices to enable learners to share, collaborate, build knowledge, network and learn.

Unfortunately, we can't provide a copy of the article but I'm sure Anne would be more than happy to discuss it over a coffee if you are interested.

SharePoint or Wiki?

2009-08-11T05:08:46Z

This article was originally published in the May/June 2009 edition of Image & Data Manager magazine.

Archimedes famously told us that with a long enough lever and fulcrum to rest it on, he could move the world. The story of designing next generation intranets that are based on social computing principles, what some call, "intranet 2.0", is also locked in a similar paradox: in theory just about any Web-based collaboration or information sharing tool has the potential to be a social computing platform, if only we have enough time and budget for its development.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great case in point. Massively successful, the free version of the SharePoint 2007 family, known as Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS), has slipped into organisations and has found itself embraced by users and IT departments alike. In many organisations, SharePoint may have been the first collaboration solution they had experienced as an improvement to networked file shares and email.

However, Wikis have also grabbed the attention of many organisations. Despite being a decade old technology, it was against the background of the Web 2.0 that Wikis finally appeared on the corporate radar. They offered a revolutionary "every page is editable" alternative to expensive or rigid Web and document management systems. And just like Windows SharePoint Services, there are many 'free' wiki software options available as open source.

More recently, Wikis have evolved beyond the core "every page is editable" concept to include other social computing features such as social networking, tagging, mashups, discussion forums, blogging, activity streams and even microblogging. In this respect, some wiki solutions can now defined more as social computing platforms and less narrowly as lightweight Web content management systems (WCMS).

SharePoint as a social computing platform

You might be surprised to hear me question SharePoint's capabilities when we consider that many of the foundational features in Windows SharePoint Services are intended to support collaboration. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also provides users with My Sites, which supports social networking. But while there is no doubt many organisations are happy with SharePoint's collaboration capabilities, when it comes to enterprise social computing that level of satisfaction depends very much on how you define collaboration.

For example, 'conversational collaboration' is a relatively new phrase to enter the lexicon, but it is reflective of the increased awareness by collaboration specialists that there are in fact many different styles of collaboration - some of which revolve around 'documents', while others are more social and revolve around people networks, activity and communication.

In the case of SharePoint, the style of collaboration it supports out of the box is very much a product of its ancestry. SharePoint has evolved through the combination of different products into the platform we know today as SharePoint 2007. In particular, its origins in SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2001 mean that it was originally architected to be a user-driven environment for document-centric collaboration by ad hoc groups of users.

This is still very evident in the current version of SharePoint. Sites can be created that the system administrator can delegate control over to a group of users without compromising the overall security of the whole SharePoint system. For this to work, SharePoint uses a site collection and site hierarchy model that creates self-contained sites and often further sites within sites. Functionality like blogs, wikis and discussion forums is then available to be deployed within individual sites.

While this is a strength in terms of supporting a user-driven collaborative pattern for teams, experience now tells us that left uncontrolled SharePoint can go wild. This ends up creating both new information silos and a management nightmare for the IT departments.

A critical success factor in large or complex SharePoint implementations is now generally accepted to involve strong system governance that includes templated sites, centralised meta-data and strict controls over what users can actually modify in their site design. Unfortunately, these sensible SharePoint management controls run counter to the emergent spirit of real social computing.

The modular fashion in which blogging, wiki and discussion forum functionality is provided in the hierarchical site framework also tends to fragment conversations and relationships between different types content. Just as file attachments live in document libraries, each wiki page, blog post or discussion thread also lives in its own particular folder type. This again reflects SharePoints' document-centric architecture.

And while its true that My Sites provides a social networking layer for SharePoint, this does not fundamentally change its underlying anti-social document-centric nature.

Designed for social computing

The first wiki appeared in 1995, well before Tim O'Reilly imagined 'Web 2.0' or Clay Shirky coined the term 'social software'. However, with some justification we can claim that the wiki concept actually helped to define and create the model for social computing*.

More recent interpretations of the wiki concept have taken this model and refined these features, for example rich text editing and adding fine grained security features, or integrated other social computing concepts like blogging, discussion forums, tagging, social bookmarking, social networking, mash ups and microblogging. In some cases, the wiki has matured into what might be better called a social software suite. But fundamentally, even when we add new features, a wiki is engineered to support social computing from the ground up.

Of course, before we get carried away, not every wiki solution is equal either - for example the online wiki comparison site, http://www.wikimatrix.org, lists over 100 different wiki products broken down by different licensing models, technical specifications and functional capabilities.

While we can depend on Microsoft products like SharePoint to work in Microsoft-based environments and take into account enterprise computing requirements, the same does not apply to wikis.

For example, Mediawiki is a popular open source wiki but reflecting its origins and its intent as what we might consider to be pure wiki, it currently lacks a native rich text editor (although they are working towards one) and even the creators will tell you to look elsewhere if you need fine grained access control. Mediawiki also needs an open source database back end to go with it, where as there are other wiki solutions that will work with commercial database products.

The commercial version of the Social Text takes an alternative approach - while Social Text runs on open source technology (e.g. Linux), it is delivered either as hosted solution or a fully managed hardware appliance. Unlike MediaWiki, out of the box Social Text provides support for widgetised dashboards (based on the Google OpenSocial standard), tagging, social networking, activity streams and blogging. Social Text have also been particularly innovative with introducing integrated spreadsheets and microblogging to their wiki (including a desktop microblogging and activity stream client).

Atlassian Confluence on the other hand runs on J2EE and works with commercial databases like Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft SQL server. It is highly customisable and where functionality is missing, it can be extended through plugins that are managed from with the administrators console. Confluence also supports tagging, blogging and activity streams and social networking. Users can also access powerful macros to customise or add in-page functions like calendars, special formatting and other actions.

Picking the right wiki software is not necessarily difficult, as the options for an enterprise deployment can be narrowed down quickly. However, it is important that the wiki software selected supports the social computing functions you intend to use it and that it can be customised easily for those requirements without breaking functionality.

Customisation is still important

One misconception about wiki software is that you are stuck with the basic layout and raw look and feel that comes with it out of the box. However, the vast majority of wiki software allow some form of customisation to style, layout and navigation, although to a lesser or greater degree depending on the particular product.

While such customisations might be considered to be purely cosmetic and therefore unnecessary, in fact the need to tailor a wiki for an organisation is probably more important than when designing a traditional static intranet site.

Not only do these customisations help to reflect key organisational messages (e.g. branding), but more critically they help to provide 'scaffolding' for information and collaboration where users can work. Without them, an out of the box wiki is effectively a blank sheet - people have no idea about what they should be doing in it or where to start.

Tip: If this sound like over engineering the wiki-approach, the overhead and risk of tailoring a wiki is far less that trying to do the same with SharePoint because the underlying social computing functionality and socially-orientated information architecture already exists. Also, once you have established this 'scaffolding' you can move quickly to deploy your wiki and work directly with users to finalise the Wiki's structure. You can read about some read some real life Wiki-customisation case studies in Headshift's project files.

And the winner is...

By now it should be clear that if you pick the right wiki platform, it is by far the superior option for building "intranet 2.0" solutions. It is important to realise that such a wiki is a better choice over SharePoint not just because of the functionality it provides, but because its native social computing architecture lends itself to an customised implementation that can be achieved quickly, more effectively and at less cost.

However to be fair to SharePoint, while its document-centric collaboration capabilities for teams may have opened the door for it into many organisations, it is often chosen for its broader portal capabilities that support transactional business needs like document and records management, business process management and business intelligence.

This may mean that SharePoint is going to be part of your organisation's information system whether you like it or not. If this is the case, then you are faced with a much harder choice. Either begin down the road of customising SharePoint or allow a wiki to stand side by side with SharePoint. In fact, this is an option where ever a legacy Web-based application or specialised Web-based information management tool exists (like a document management system).

Considering enterprise wiki vendors like Confluence and Social Text are partnered with Microsoft and provide SharePoint connectors, is deploying a wiki along side SharePoint such a crazy idea after all?

*In its purest form, a wiki reflects a collaborative pattern that is: Focused on efficiency and ease of use; Encourages contribution of user generated content and permits the information architecture to evolve overtime through this participation; Maintains content quality and integrity through social, rather than systemic controls; and Manages content in a way that is Web page-centric (and not document-centric).

Don't short change online citizens

2009-08-10T23:57:04Z

If you follow me on Twitter, you will know I've been critical at times of the Australian government's recent efforts to embrace Government 2.0 and more technology-supported participatory approaches. So far I have been generally disappointed with the examples I've seen to date, including the Prime Minister's own efforts. Personally I feel that online citizens are being short changed.

Surely, you might think, I should be encouraging these early steps? And perhaps I don't understand the difficulties of change in the public service? These are all reasonable excuses. But rather than treating my comments as a criticism, I would ask that you try to think of them as a kind of tough love instead.

There are three key areas where I believe Australia's Government 2.0 efforts are failing right now:

Making Government 2.0 about the use of Open Source software - Don't get me wrong, Open Source has a role to play, but in itself building a Website on Open Source doesn't make government more accountable or participatory.
Not getting the basics of social media right - Many of the examples I've seen don't support the basics of 'social' in social media. There are plenty of successful social media patterns to follow, so I really can't see any excuse not to learn and build on those patterns.
Poor user experience - In sites that are explicitly geared to participation in a political process it needs to be both easy to participate and clearly demonstrable that participation will lead to an outcome (even if that outcome isn't one that every user might agree with).

The last issue really gets to the point of my Public Sphere 2 presentation - Government 2.0 isn't about e-Government and simply Web-enabling existing processes of engagement. Instead its about supporting engagement and participation processes that don't already exist. This doesn't mean I don't welcome e-Goverment initiatives, however transacting with government online is an area I'm confident that Australian governments at all levels are actually quite capable of doing.

Experimentation with Government 2.0 is fine, but its a poor excuse to not do things as well as they could.