Tetbury in Bloom

Have spent the last few days exploring the Cotswolds in the UK and staying at a lovely market town called Tetbury. Yesterday was judgement day for the "best town" competition. Tetbury had won last year and the community was out in force looking to repeat their success. The town was in great shape.

It is sometimes worth reflecting on where some of our modern 'network' terms arise from....and 'community of practice' is the one that comes to mind. In the netwrok world much is achieved through the pride and passion of those working and living in local communities, working to make their community just that little bit more distinctive than others. Success breeds success. Yes it is sometimes competition as is the case for Tetbury, but it is friendly competition and the end result, despite who the overalll winner is, is a lift in standard for the whole. For those in high governance roles it is worth looking at the "better towns" programs and ask is there no better way to raise community standards than look to ignighting local community passion and pride.

Paris city planners

I'm currently in Paris and today is Bastille day....so a good time to be in this wonderful city. This is only my 3rd visit to the city, the last time being some 16 years ago, but the image that has hit me each time is the foresight of the city planners. The wide boulevards, major green areas and spectacular public buildings are testimony to "top down" governance planning. However one is not enchanted only by these major public artefacts. What also gives the city a unique character is the way that these major 'planned' artefacts are blended with the mess of narrow,somewhat haphazard neighborhoods of the left and right banks, the Latin quarter,Montmartre etc. which give the city its real character.

My point here is that Paris is a good example of the balance of governance from the 'planned' to the 'emergent'. When I think of other major cities in the world like London, New York, Rome, Sydney, Washington, Tokyo etc..there is elements of this blend but in my opinion, none have done it quite as well as Paris.

Evangelists and Connectors? common attributes...

During by recent trip to Varese, Italy to present at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 our hosts were kind enough to host a dinner for the speakers to meet physically...many for the first time. The wife of our dinner host commented on the program that three of the speakers had 'titles' of "evangelist"... in my view a somewhat new age funky title that creates an image of passionate promoter who travel broadly preaching the message of their chosen mission. It has both positive connotations in terms of the passion and commitment that it engenders. It also has negative connotations perhaps related to parochialisms and the ability to see alternative perspectives.

The 3 "titled" evangelists, with their comments on the forum are:

Social Computing Evangelist Luis Suarez

http://www.elsua.net/2008/06/23/trip-to-varese-to-present-at-international-enterprise-20-forum/

Wiki Evangelist Stewart Mader

http://www.ikiw.org/2008/07/02/europe-conference-coverage-wiki-intranetblogru-interview/

and Telco 2.0 Evangelist Norman Lewis

In my conversations with the said evangelists, they certainly fitted the image and while parochial to their mission I certainly didn't find that they were ignorant of other perspectives, in fact quite the opposite. Which brings me to the link to 'connectors'.

The day after the forum I was in Matera in the south of Italy to present at the International Forum for Knowledge Asset Dynamics. My presentation was linking social capital to innovation and introducing our 3Es model of innovation. The 3 Es are Exploration, Engagement and Exploitation, with the engagement role seen as the critical 'connector' role connecting exploration networks with exploitation networks. The model resonated well with the audience as I argued that it was not a question of balancing exploration with exploitation, but a matter of managing the process of innovation through engaging, rather than trading off between them. This was totally aligned with the keynote speech of Goran Roos who also argued for innovation as a managed process and not one of serendipity.

So can evangelists play the "engager" role in innovation? One thing is for sure the 'engager' requires the passion and focus of the evangelist. But they also need the respect of the exploitation networks....and perhaps the image of the evangelist might unfortunatley work against this, despite the personal attributes that I have recently observed in Varese.

Enterprise 2.0 conference at Varese, Italy

I had the great pleasure of being part of a very succssful Enterprise 2.0 conference,organised by my good friends at Open Knowledge in Varese International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, Italy on the 25th June. An excellent review has been provided by Sean Carlos http://www.antezeta.com/blog/enterprise-20-varese/ so I willl limit my comments to my reflections on governance in networks:



Norman Lewis' presentation on intergenerational use of technology challenged the common notion of our children being smart because they can use the technology better than ourselves. In some ways Norman was extolling the virtues of children needing to listen and learn from their elders (us!) if they were to really become smart...so everything is changing but nothing has changed :)



In terms of governance in networks Norman's talk reminds us that despite the excitement and gay abandon that the "bottom up" networks can display, ultimately to be really smart, we still need to retain appropriate respect for the hierarchy and formal governance mechanisms.



Emanuele Quintarelli showed an interesting slide on the the adoption rates of the technologies that make up Enterprise 2.0. Predictably wikis, blogs and RSS feeds were high on the list and just making the list was social network analysis (SNA) which at least vindicated my presence on the speaking panel! I commented in my talk that while SNA is new to the Enterprise 2.0 world it has a heritage that goes back some 75 years.



Listening to David Terrar's talk on on-line communities provided a deja vu experience for me from my days of working with communites of practices at BHP Billiton. While those communities were only lightly "on-line" using discussion lists and early stage on-line community tools and still relying on face to face meetings, the important community roles of community leader and communications facilitator and general support bodies appear to map directly to the on-line only community world.



I have been working virtually with Stewart Mader on applying SNA to his wikipatterns site, but had met him in person for the first time at this event. I was not alone as many of the panel members commented on how this was the first time that they had been able to meet their "on-line" buddies in the flesh. One of the more interesting findings from my analysis was the number of highly valued relationships that had been created by participation in the wikipatterns community, many that had now moved beyond the wikipatterns site. I will be writing a full report on the project....in a wiki of course! Stewart in his talk managed to make me feel guilty about writing my book in the traditional way, with the typcal time consuming processes involved with editing and publishing. Creating his last book on a wiki looked absolutely sensational. I'll definitely look to following his lead next time.



Thomas Vander Wal's talk on folksonomies filled a knowledge gap for me. Social tagging has the potential to being a librarian's headache for some time to come. Again the tension between top down categoration and bottom up 'freewheeling' with the winner being the end user was clearly evident. No doubt the appropriate governance response will be somewhere in the middle, so in the mean time, as social tagging grows it will be interesting to watch the response from the librarian 'establishment'.



Luis Suarez is a fun guy and willing to put his beliefs into acti0n by no longer using e-mail. I'd like to stay in contact with Luis, but will have to now work out how :) Perhaps the governance insignts from Luis comes from our discussions outside the forum. Luis some how managed to talk his 'establishment' employers into letting him work from an island in the Mediterranean...obviously got them at a weak moment...but apparently the empire is striking back...something I'm sure all remote workers have experienced. Again an example of the governance tension that exists between top down management and embracing the bottom up "power is in the network" approaches.

CeBIT Australia and the Partnership Scorecard

We were happy to be a finalist in the "Early Innovators" award for our Partnership Scorecard at CeBIT Australia this year. The award is targeted at the big research units so we were pleased that our garage level R&D was in such good company. It was also our first time manning an exhibition stand. Here id Cai Kjaer and I at work!

IT Governance and compliance approaches

I am just completing the preparation of a paper I will be presenting at the UK Social Network Analysis conference next month called "Governance and Corporate Social Capital: Friends or Foes?" The basic point I am making is that governance schemes today are largely compliance driven, which assumes that there exists a "best practice" standard against which compliance can be measured. I make the point that the IT industry and IT governance are complex environments, made even more complex through the introduction of Enterprise 2.0, Open source, Multi sourcing, public iIT infrastructure etc.. I use the Snowden Cynefin framework to illustrate this fact. I introduce corporate social capital as a means for offering a complementary co-operative approach to IT governance and a new frwamework for IT governance inclusive of it

More on objectivity

I have just been reading a major government call for expression of interest for a major construction development in Sydney. The pages devoted to probity reinforced the benefits of objectivity and why one might strive to achieve it to ensure that the market place works fairly and without corruption. People however, are not machines and we all "suffer" from our own biases and perceptions built up from our own personal experiences. Those assessing government tenders are no exception. While the tender evaluation process aims to be objective and probity officers are employed to watch out for conflicts of interest, can we be sure that social structure is not having an influence on decision making? I don't think so. Perhaps we should be emphasising "fairness" over "objectivity". Social structure can work to enhance fairness by excluding those that are perceived to be operating unfairly. Objectivity tries to exclude social structure effects, with doubtful results.