New means of Communication

Last November I looked with disbelieve at CNN realizing they were relying on blogs to comment the situation in Mumbai. The real up-to date information was coming from bloggers that combined data gathering in their neighborhood with reporting. It allowed the world to follow. Combined with the iPhoto mechanism put in place several months ago, it transformed the way TV’s are reporting events.

But the Mumbai situation was only one step in the change, the Iranian elections and follow-up events have taken this a whole new direction. Twitter has become the center of the battle, and I have been fascinated seeing the events unfolding right from my TweetDeck screen. Courageous people have and are still keeping the world aware of what happens. Several of them seem to have disappeared in prison or even worse. But at the same time we have started seeing the limits of this real time reporting. Israelis, posting themselves as Iranians, have started trying to destabilize Iran through false information.  Fortunately, the Twitter community has quickly reacted and pointed at their feeds as being hoax. They are probably not the only ones conveying wrong information and as such putting people’s life in danger. But that’s probably the least of their problems.

Now, if we bring this to a business community, we will, albeit at a different level, have similar phenomena. We can learn from what happened and put a couple elements in place:

• First, clearly establish rules of engagements between the members of the community. In the context of Iran, this was obviously not practical, but in a business community it is.
• Second, motivate reporting of unacceptable behavior
• Third, warn and then exclude the participants that do not follow the rules of engagements and make this visible

In doing so, one establishes a certain discipline between the members of the community and ensures they are followed. All members quickly understand the implications of not following the rules. Occasionally refreshing those and reminding members helps keep a community functioning well. 

Collaboration, how far to go?

I have spent the last couple days in a workshop around the connected car. We have discussed how the car could be connected to the outside world in the easiest and most appealing way, and what should be done with that connection. What was really interesting is that a number of social network ideas were introduced by the attendees. This got my attention. Social networking being a form of collaboration, what could we do in the car.

Obviously we all do teleconferences from our cars, driving down the motorway, using handsfree obviously. There is a whole debate out there if the driver has the same level of attention to the road while listening/contributing to a telecon. But obviously, this was not what the workshop had in mind. Two main patterns appeared during the discussion. One related to the fact of driving itself, the other to the business interactions associated by driving.

Let me give you some ideas of both, and lets start with the driving itself. The driver is obviously not alone on the road, and anonymously may want to collaborate with other drivers, telling them about the driving conditions on his stretch of the road. Another intreaguing idea was that, if the driver entered the location and timing of his/her next meeting, the car, collaborating with external programs and information (in the cloud), could guide the driver on how to go to the location in the most fuel efficient way. Here we are no longer just speaking about people collaborating with people, but about interactions between people and programs to optimize the trafic and the use of fuel.

The second aspect, the business interactions, got started when somebody pointed out the driver may not be the only person in the car, and even if he/she was, he/she could be stuck in a trafic jam and may want to take advantage of this idle time to warn the contact, prepare the meeting etc. Another collaboration example that was identified was to have drivers and passengers updating a wiki about the locations they cross during the trip, so that others could learn more, discover new curiosities etc. A third example would be if the driver would have access to the location of other "friend", finding out how close they are etc.

So, all in all, it coudl be quite fascinating if we could find applications that make sense while ensuring the security of the driver. All in all, this will require a convergence of car intelligence and the internet, in particular the social networking side. Fascinating.

A Vision for an Integrated Collaboration Environment

Developing the global community I talked about in my previous entry, turns out to be a little more challenge than originally expected. This has nothing to do with the community itself, but with how the developers are working together. Indeed, we are developing this with people from different companies, sitting on both sides of the ocean. So, you would think we just need a little collaboration space and everything would be resolved, isn’t it. Well wrong, first the traditional file sharing tools do not allow to share some types of files (eg. java scripts generated by our PowerPoint to Flash conversion tool), do not allow us to make documents publically available (e.g. Google Docs and PDF documents), and I could go on like this.

As the world becomes global, increasingly companies and people need to collaborate virtually. Unfortunately the tool providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are looking myopically in silos, addressing collaboration aspects in isolation. What we really need is for a company to take the problem from a different angle, starting by asking itself what is required to collaborate and then develop the integrated environment to just do that. So, let’s think a minute, what do we need to collaborate?

• Well, first we need to share documents either with a know community, with a larger group who’s names and e-mails we do not all have, or be made publically available. These documents may just be looked at, may be downloaded, may be commented upon (with notes or voice) or may be edited by particular members of the community. Obviously we would want to keep track of any activity around the documents.
• Second, we may have to interact, either asynchronously or synchronously, using text, sound or video, or any combination of those. Interactions may be private (between two people) or with a group. During those interactions, documents may have to be referred to and shared. Data may be made available also.
• Third, we may have to work together at a common task, in that process we may share real-time information, documents, and we may use a common application that can be on one of our systems or in the cloud. Here again this can happen between two people or with a larger group.

A number of supporting functions should be available. These include a group calendar (that links with the calendars of the members to identify availability etc.), action item lists, a parking lot, participant information, version control, etc.

Most of what I describe here is available in one form or another on the internet, but there is  no consistency, no easy way to cobble it all together, and even if we managed, we would spend our life login on to different systems. Why is nobody looking at the collaboration needs of globally dispersed people and addressing their needs, rather than continuously coming up with incompatible tools.

Building a global Community

With a colleague we have embarked on what turns out to be a real interesting experiment. We are building a virtual community focused at a specific group of people with responsibilities. The objective is for them to be able to continue their discussions, idea generation and thought leadership exchange although they can no longer meet in  conferences, during exchanges etc.

To do this we have started by identifying what they were looking for and identified a number of specific subjects. We are now hunting for thought provoking content in those areas and are looking at experts that might be willing to trigger discussions. We believe this to be of key importance to initiate the debate and to attract the users back to the site. The objective is to release content on a regular basis. Content consists of short  sessions, up to 20-25 minutes each, that can be viewed when-ever time is available. We keep the sessions short because we believe it is difficult to attract the attention of the user for longer periods of time. If the subject requires more time, we suggest the contributors subdivide the presentation in multiple parts.

Associated with the thought leadership subjects we have dialogue areas where the users can discuss the subject, respond to each others comments and initiate an open debate in the community. If they wish a more private discussion they can contact each other as the contact details of the members are known by the others. Over time we may develop sub communities, but that will not be part of version 1.0

We are also planning an open forum, where any question can be raised. This will, amongst others, serve as a source for new subjects as we expect members to ask questions about what keeps them awake at night.

A library offers background documents, links to blogs, articles, RSS feeds etc. This is really the information base the members can rely on.

We are in the early stages, ready to launch. The feedback we received from people to whom we showed the prototype are very positive. So, let’s hope it works. It is something new we are trying. All suggestions are welcome.

On-demand Presentations

Working with teams all over the world and being used to share my presentations for them to use, I am often confronted with the request to share with them what I say during the presentation. It is difficult to get everybody on the phone at the same time and walk them through the material. Also, they end up using things at different moments in time and may have forgotten what we discussed when I walked them through the material. So, finding a good tool to record voice and synchronize with PowerPoint slides has been one of my objectives for quite a while. I do know you can record narration with PowerPoint, but if you want to listen to it, you need to download the whole file. So a “streaming” approach was what I was looking for.

Over the years I have been experimenting with many tools. Some only worked with a Microsoft Streaming Server, which I did not have access too, others took a long time to download prior to start, others did not support features of PowerPoint 2007, others did not synchronize well, or left long blank periods in between two slides, others made extremely large files etc. Some seemed to do everything I needed, but cost several hundreds of US$, and the trial version did not really allow a thorough test.

May quest may have reached an end, as I found a small plug-in for PowerPoint 2007, called ISpring. At this point in time, I only tried the free software component and frankly, it seems to work like a dream. It converts PowerPoint into Flash, and my 16 minute trial presentation takes about 11.4MB. The production is extremely simple. Using PowerPoint narration, the audio is recorded and the timing of the slides is set. Once that is performed, a plug-in module, labeled iSpringConverter, allows the production of the flash files. Three files are created, one of which is an html file to link to for playback. As I mentioned it is extremely simple and works well. And on top of that it is free. The only drawback is that the iSpring logo appears in the control menu. To get rid of that, the Pro version, currently at 199 US$, is available.  It’s simple and it works.