White House 2.0

Image by Asger Carlsen

Adam Cahill, SVP/General Manager at Carat Boston, writes a brilliant piece in today's Ad Age about Obama's Social Media approach and how he should extend it to his presidency. 

In this current fear climate, a President's main job is to calm the public down and get us focused on the task at hand. There's no need to panic but there's a huge need for hard work, innovative thinking and, dare I say it, community building. This crisis needs more than a partisan solution, it needs everybody be involved, everybody to participate. A Wiki approach to government might sound far-fetched (Do I hear Red Tape, Socialism and Craziness?) but in these times when the government has to basically buy banks, the biggest insurance company and is on the verge of buying up GM and/or Ford, we should ask ourselves: Don't we need lofty goals? Lofty ideas? New thinking? 

And, just to be clear: Let's stay away from the poll-driven politics a la Clinton. But let's come together as a nation and discuss seriously how to get this country back on track. Roosevelt's fireside chats were then. White House 2.0 should be now.

Social Networks and Business

Paul Pedrazzi, writing on the Oracle AppsLab Site, questions the value of Social Networks for business.

So what about Digg and Social Networks make them unworkable for business? Or stated differently, what do they need to become relevant to the business world.

As usual, in the world of 2.0 it all comes down to people. Social sites cannot be all that useful for business until everyone is on them. It’s the law of network effects all over again (remember the fax machine example). The nuance today, is that the people on these sites have to be the ones I care about.

There are lots of people using Digg, MySpace, and more, but from a work perspective, that has very little use to me. I want my trusted group. In simple terms that can be thought of as ALL the employees of Oracle. Sure it would be nice to have people I trust outside Oracle in there, but all my co-workers would be a grand start.

Once you have the people you trust, all you need is content.

Only listening to coworkers and exploring their interests is a good start. But it builds another silo, just like narrowcasting and the demise of newspapers. This might end in a dull and lifeless community. Social networks are meant to build strong connections and explore new ones.

If you want to keep information and connections inside the firewall, social networks don't seem very beneficial. This might be reserved for Wikis. Maybe blogs.
But, as one of the commenters to the original post mentions, wikis/blogs provide content but not context. That's an important distinction. Wikis are important tools to democratize various development processes. Social networks add context to it. Context is a basic human desire. And a fact of corporate life.

Corporate social networks would increase the likelihood of discovering hidden gems since they don't have to work through the hierarchy in order to be heard. That alone should be enough to consider them.

Wikimindmap

This just made my day: Wikimindmap.org is a wonderful that allows you to browse in an efficient and quick way any Wiki content. The tool was inspired by the mindmap technique. It's the perfect tool for research since Wikis can be hard to maneuver and Wikimindmap allows you to give a quick overview of the topic you're researching.

Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life is a "comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing and personalized" ecosystem of websites "that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. A really exciting example of wiki-innovation.

The First Ever Wiki Novel

"Everybody has a novel in them, so they say. Wouldn't it be better, though, for a million people to club together to write one?"

This is the idea behind an initiative launched early February by Penguin Books, in collaboration with students at the De Montfort University in Leicester. Within 1 month they created the world's first 'wiki' novel. Nearly 1,500 people contributed to the writing and editing of A Million Penguins, over 11,000 edits were made. 75,000 people visited the site and more than 280,000 page views were recorded. As Penguin's Cheif Executive put it: "Not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history."

Penguin's blogger, Jon Elek, summarized the experience in the A Milllion Penguins blog:

"I’d like to think that the wiki-novel in the end was self-referential rather than solipsistic. There are some great jokes (or “comic moments” may be a better way of putting it) in it about the process itself, which again brings us back to that old chestnut: the triumph of form over content. And this, I guess, is what people will say in the end: that it was an interesting experiment, shame about the writing. They will be neither right nor wrong. No, a community probably can’t write a novel, but I don’t think the question (which we posed, I concede) is of much use to anyone, especially since the words “community” and “novel” don’t cut much ice in a situation like this
(...)
Speaking of lessons not learned: the wiki-novel did not teach us either that a bunch of hacks with computers can all go write something on the same website. No, what’s been shown is that a bunch of strangers with both nothing to lose and nothing to gain worked toward a nebulous common goal. I guess its she sheer benevolence on display that amazed me most. Well done to all of you. Thanks for writing."

I read a few pages of the novel. Is it a good read? Definitely not.
But what do you expect without any engagements up front, no structure, no vision, no direction? The resulting novel is an awkward mix of styles and unexpected turns.
As any social experiment, the book had to deal with idiots, pornography and an obsessed banana fan. Yes, one 'writer' replaced all the storylines and characters with bananas.

Having seen too many movies with numerous screenwriters attached to it, we already know that a good creative product rarely evolves through involving as many contributors as possible. In the end,
it is still a matter of leadership: the vision and drive of inspired individuals eventually makes the difference between a creative disaster and a focused, innovative result. Maybe we need parameters, a crystal-clear vision and a leadership team to develop Wiki Creatives.
Or as Eric Raymond, chronicler of Open Source, put it: “I think that the cutting edge of open-source software will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest”.