I just came across this useful collection of articles on Social Media on Business week – ‘An executive guide to social media’

link…

All of the presentations were very interesting and will all be online shortly. I will update you on their availability and provide a full report on the event in a subsequent post as soon as the remaining presentations go online.

In the meantime here is the presentation I gave on
‘Working with Web 2.0 (Social Software in the Workplace)’

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Government 2.0 Symposium in the IRM Government Center in Second Life

The Panelists were

• David Wennergren, Deputy DOD Chief Information Officer (Moderator)
• Bruce Klein, Director of Public Sector Group, Cisco
• Anthony Williams, VP New Paradigm and co-author of Wikinomics
• Mike Bradshaw, Director, Enterprise Federal, Google

The kenote speech was given by David Weinberger, Weinberger is a U.S. technologist, writer, and
Web 2.0 guru. He is the co-author of the “Cluetrain Manifesto”.

The Seminar took place in Washington DC, but through the wonders of technology I was able to attend the symposium at the IRMC Government Center in Second Life.. Second Life participants could view a video feed, chat and interact with each other and could also submit questions to the panelists.

The presentations started with a showing of Shift Happens (watch it if you haven’t already..)

Shift Happens

The presentations will all be available on the IRMC website shortly.Overall, some fascinating presentations, the event was attended by representatives of over 30 US universities, over 15 government agencies, and personnel from NASA and the Library  of Congress and many more.
David Weinberger’s speech was a little marred for Second Life attendees as his lapel mike was malfunctioning and it was a little difficult to hear everything he was saying but essentially he outlined how for big organisations, change is hard, but then in time, a big ‘shift happens’ and that this shift provides a ‘moment of opportunity’ where change is made easier for organisations if they can only surf the wave of enthusiasm and excitement that is  felt by the public during these shifts, and that government organisations internationally currently have this opportunity..

Anthony Williams (author of Wikinomics)  spoke about rethinking public services and urged government  organisations to open channels for feedback, engagement and collaboration , he gave the examples of ChicagoCrime.org   and Fix MyStreet

Williams also discussed the problems that exist around the ‘complex machinery of government’ arguing that there are too many levels in government, and too many agencies, and explained that this was no one’s fault having grown organically over the centuries, but that  now ‘knowledge must flow horizontally’ as an example of this new type of structure he outlined the Intellipedia project,
Another key issue for Williams was that of restoring trust in democracy, in his view democracy internationally has suffered in recent years, the ‘broadcast’ model of politics is dead, he said. It is time to invite participation and to rethink the division of labour, harnessing mass collaboration to engage people in the creation of a better society. ‘ It is important to remember’, he highlighted, ‘that Web 2.0 (and Government 2.0) is not about technology, it is about connecting PEOPLE’.

Next up was Bruce Klein of Cisco who also outlined his view that Web 2.0 is not about technology but rather it is about ‘culture’ and ‘process’ he also spoke of the urgent need to move towards  collaborative and teamwork based organisations. In his opinion the biggest issues are the leadership and the organisational culture. The leaders need to be willing to change and to adapt to these new structures.  He explained how in Cisco the  leaders who couldn’t ‘get this’ were invited to choose another role..
Last up was Mike Bradshaw, Google’s Director for Government Services, who also spoke extensively about Generation Y / The Net-Gen and the difficulties in attracting them to work in government agencies and the need to open up the enterprise to these new social tools..
The Presentations will be available here.. they are well worth watching,  very focused on a collaborative future, and delivered with a real sense of urgency…

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. Google expects that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and believe that this is a good thing..

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.”

http://knol.google.com/

A survey of 1,000 office staff has found that nearly a third of younger employees would consider quitting their job if Facebook was banned in the workplace.

The survey by IT services firm Telindus found that 39 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access applications like Facebook and YouTube.

A further 21 per cent indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban.

The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16 per cent would consider leaving and 13 per cent would be annoyed.

Mark Hutchinson, managing director of Telindus, said: “An outright ban on personal internet usage is clearly not the right approach.

“However, the challenge is to achieve the right balance between allowing employees personal internet time without jeopardising the bandwidth required for business applications.

“It is commercially unwise to have a bandwidth free-for-all, especially when you consider that downloading a single half-hour TV show consumes more bandwidth than receiving 200 emails a day for a year.”

Companies are increasingly looking to ban sites like Facebook because they clog up corporate networks and take up employees’ time.

Interestingly, the survey revealed that employees would be supportive of a ban if it made other network functions faster.

Increasingly young net users are using social networking sites and tools to stay connected with their peers and also to manage their ‘knowledge network’, given the nature of today’s highly mobile workforce, where staff move frequently between jobs and between organisations, use of these tools can assist individuals to manage their individual networks and also to manage their ‘personal knowledge’. Some examples of this would be the use of LinkedIn or Facebook to keep in touch with a growing number of personal and professional contacts, or perhaps the use of Del.icio.us to store bookmarks instead of storing bookmarks  within a corporate browser installation. The use of Web 2.o tools helps to ensure that when an individual moves between jobs or between organisations, that they can bring many of their knowledge resources with them.

Preventing access to these tools hampers knowledge workers in their work and increasingly access to these tools will no doubt prove the deciding factor for many net-genners in choosing what kind of organisation they would like to work for. Many smart organisations have already recognised the benefits both in increased morale and increased productivity facilitated by the  availability of various Web 2.0 tools.

According to the reports findings, there are seven important considerations to establishing a good intranet…

Link