Collaboration Now! is a new show on the business channel, CNBC, hosted by Donny Deutsch. This is a successful advertising guy I’ve come to admire through one of the most positive, uplifting and motivating entrepreneurial shows on television he hosts, The Big Idea, and this new show looks to be just as instructive, informative and intriguing. 

Here’s the premise:

Collaboration is essential to compete in the global arena. In order to stay ahead of the curve, organizations need to redefine the rules of collaboration, build trust in new ways, collaborate in virtual environments and partner with those who help make it happen.

Find out how Boeing’s global partners are building the airplanes of the future, Cisco is helping companies collaborate from remote locations in real time and how NFTRA is working together to enhance trade, not restrict it.

Does your collaboration have the right ingredients to succeed?

With upcoming shows about collaborating in human resources, social responsibility, the future of tools, technologies and approaches, Collaboration Now! will undoubtedly be one that you will want to set to record on your DVR like I did last evening.

In my talks, attending conferences and interacting with my client executives, there seems to be a surprising leadership reluctance to focus resources on collaboration (or, by extension, any crowdsourcing initiatives) and too strong a need to have teams create elaborate business and use-cases in order to justify collaboration software or services within a company.

Sadly in this time of high oil prices, collapsing financial markets and a near capital lending freeze — all making collaboration software, services and training more imperative and yet tougher to invest in and move forward on — there seems to be a new openness to embrace it as the recognition sinks in that we’re living in a time of the greatest shift in human connection ever and finding ways to collaborate with one another is already a critical success factor.

If nothing else this show will certainly provide strong evidence — and do it with well produced, slick and entertaining segments — that you can use to help justify having collaboration be a much higher priority and worthy of investment.

If you’re a leader in your company, an entrepreneur delivering any kind of web applications or social media, or just a frustrated functional area leader who sees the need for more impactful collaboration, then you’ll certainly absorb some key ideas from the topics they cover and the guests they invite on.

As more of us get connected via the internet and through web applications, seek ways to make our collaboration more powerful, shift our old serial and linear processes to ones that are parallel and associative, OSS is a key building block of internet and web technologies and applications. OSS is also gaining momentum globally and affecting all industries and institutions, even educational ones.

That said, educational institutions often lag the private sector in adopting new technologies until proven, especially the Kindergarten through senior high school (K-12) levels. K-12 is often seen as risk-averse and needing clarity about the efficacy and pedagogy of using any particular technology. It must be proven and the benefits to learning and student achievement crystal clear before any technology is implemented, especially OSS.

On the flip side, higher education is a hotbed of OSS use and many projects have origins in colleges and universities. One could argue that our public institutions taking risks, researching new possibilities, and pushing against the membrane of the future is at least as important as their educational mission and has contributed code and thought leadership in OSS.

Though I’ve been aware of the OSS learning management system called "Moodle" (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) for some time, I was both delighted at what I discovered at the U of MN and surprised (stunned might be the better word) by its adoption within Eden Prairie schools where my son attends high school.

There are lessons in this story for all of us about how two very different educational organizations recognized that collaboration, human connection, and the move to parallel and associative learning is at the core of education going forward, and took calculated risk with the OSS Moodle to meet new needs.

MOODLE AT THE U OF MN
While performing some research for one of my clients on learning management systems (LMS), I stumbled across a Powerpoint deck entitled, "Moodle Implementation at the University of Minnesota" (PPT) by Elena Ivanova, I.T. Professional focused on Moodle and Scott Barnard, Emerging Technology Lead in the Digital Media Center.

In the slide deck they discussed why they adopted Moodle. One that came as surprise — and confirms what Minnov8 readers understand about the new collaboration paradigm exploding as the web matures — is that University faculty embraced the Moodle social constructivist philosophy which has, at its core, collaborative learning.

To me, this is a fundamental recognition of the shift occurring with the internet and web. Books like Wikinomics to Wisdom of the Crowds or Here Comes Everybody discuss mass collaboration, an emerging parallel and associative way of learning and collaborating instead of what we’ve always done (i.e., linear, serial learning and collaborating). With more and more opportunities to connect with one another online — and a participation culture of always-on and always-connected continues to accelerate — driving learning models forward that map to what’s happening online is key to the University’s future. 

I reached out to Ms. Ivanova and Dave Sandum, Eden Prairie School’s Director of Operational Technology, to discuss the reasons behind the adoption of Moodle (Sandum could not be reached after repeated attempts and his comments are from this Eden Prairie News article).

On this point about collaboration and the fundamental shift occurring, Ivanova said this, "That would be a question for someone with a PhD in education, but I personally think that (Moodle) does not impose any major obstacles. It still supports and encourages linear structure of a regular academic course."

You have a site which is broken into the weeks/topics, and every week you add materials to read (pdf, words, lecture notes), and activities to participate in (like assignment, quiz or forums). Once you feel comfortable you may use more collaborative features, like allowing students to rate one another in the forum, add and comment on glossary entries, and more."

Ivanova also emphasized that Moodle is also easy to use and intuitive, has a rich set of tools, lots of 3rd party add-ons, good design and the University team behind Moodle could point to a highly successful implementation of it at U of MN-Crookston.

Ms. Ivanova made it clear that this major adoption at the U of MN didn’t come easily and they still have an active license with WebCT and it’s used throughout the University. In fact, she’d worked with WebCT and Desire2Learn (another LMS) for several years, and thus could see that Moodle was missing some features (like releasing courses with certain conditions attached or timed release).

How successful is Moodle adoption at the U of MN?  Total user base has 44,000 users and over 2,000 sites in production (667 are in-use and active), which places UofM in the top 2% of moodle installations by user count. (As a point of comparison, there are approximately 2,600 active sites on WebCT yet at the U of MN). (More statistics here).

MOODLE AT EDEN PRAIRIE SCHOOLS
While attending curriculum night at Eden Prairie High school (where parents get an introduction to teachers, curriculum and the overall high school experience) for our ninth grade son, his American Studies teacher pulled up an orientation slide and talked about access "to our Moodle site."

Since my son is in an enriched program with a remarkably challenging textbook (it’s even a dense, difficult read for his Mom and I!), having what our son needs online with Moodle means he can access all of his support materials from home whenever he needs it (and like most kids, he forgets stuff at school but can get it online now).

Eden Prairie News reporter Leah Schaffer wrote this article about Eden Prairie’s adoption of Moodle and comments by Dave Sandum where he emphasizes the collaborative and social aspects of the Moodle LMS and where they’re headed directionally:

"A classroom automation system,” is how David Sandum would describe it. Sandum, the techonology director for Eden Prairie schools, said Moodle gives teachers the ability to organize and conduct entire lessons in classrooms electronically.

"[It] takes things to the next level where you’re able to basically work in a collaborative form." It breaks down the traditional four walls of the classroom, to create “anytime, anywhere learning [and it] really puts the social networking elements into learning," said Sandum.

Sandum said they looked at Moodle as a pilot to see if its adoption went well, as far as student learning. It turns out that they may go beyond Moodle. Sandum said their goal is to basically create and support, internally, an Eden Prairie MySpace for education.

In my discussions with various Eden Prairie teachers over the years — including one who was a favorite of both my kids and a credentialed educational technologist, the now retired Sally Knaeble — I was always taken aback with the almost laughable (and sad) lack of technology in the schools.

Outdated computers, lack of teacher self-publishing tools (K-6 and middle school websites look like they were done in 1997 and blogs? What’s a blog?), inadequate portals and parental tools (like something as simple as shared calendars amongst teachers that we could subscribe to, and/or RSS feeds from pages), a $4.6 million annual bond referendum passed in 2004 with $2M each year for technology improvements is now bearing fruit. Ironically the free Moodle software — with servers, support, training and other costs attached — is a smart use of this funding.

What impresses me more about both the U of MN’s direction and Eden Prairie schools embrace of Moodle is this: a deep and profound recognition of the new paradigm of human and machine connection driven by the internet; the demand for online access to information, materials and each other around learning; and the willingness to adopt OSS and discover how even learning can become more parallel and associative and begin to wean students off of the old ways of serial, linear learning.

This article originally published on Minnov8, a site dedicated to Minnesota Innovation in Internet & Web Technology

The problem? Any person, company or organization serious about investing time, effort, energy and resources building atop them — and delivering their content in an embeddable container on their website, blog, “FaceSpace” page or elsewhere — need to find a way to make money.

Now before you get all riled up with, “Hey Borsch, you numbskull. Haven’t you heard of the freemium model or that giving content away drives other business?” hear me out.

The answer, of course, is “yes” as evidenced by clients I’ve recommended implement a free/paid/pro version of what they offer online, as well as the huge success I personally experienced when giving away my report, Rise of the Participation Culture (RPC). With the latter example, for me to continue to carve out the time necessary to create quality deliverables like a line of social media ebooks, videos or presentations, there needs to be a way to make some dough off of them.

Arguments like, “Just give your stuff away and people will find you and new markets and opportunities will open up,” is mostly bullshit or a far too optimistic generalization for all but a few who do it. Yes, I believe that there is validity to “free” or otherwise I wouldn’t give stuff away (like free speaking engagements, free initial consultations, pro bono work, or free reports like RPC) but I limit those to 10% of my time or otherwise I’d get nothing else done.

There’s a real crazy-maker though, with licenses, and the fact that these offerings are geared so that YOU as a user, generating content, make NO MONEY and that THEY benefit from your effort.

I have several clients that have “members only” or otherwise protected areas that only customers or clients can access. For the most part, offerings like SproutBuilder, Acrobat.com, and the new Flowgram I just experienced, have no Pro-level, paid accounts which allow my clients (or me) to deliver secure, protected, yet embeddable content containers that we can monetize by selling them, a subscription to them, or otherwise deliver them behind a protected login to customers or clients with whom we have a monetized relationship already in place.

Here’s the other crazy-maker: the licenses. Flowgram says, in part, in the license you agree to in order to use their service:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the
promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

These sorts of clauses are in licenses from virtually every company that has some sort of embeddable, web content container with user generated content and a business model that allows only one type of content creation and delivery and that’s a free one!

As my wife and business partner says to me often, when I agree to a coffee meeting so someone can pick-my-brain, “It’s easy to give away your time and deep knowledge for free“
and she’s absolutely right. It’s even more time consuming to create (quality) content and really easy to give it away for free. It’s much harder to monetize that content online and these web content container companies aren’t helping to make that easier.

So current and future content container companies: you’re competing with hundreds of Web offerings with different types of embeddable web content container approaches and we can’t keep up and there probably aren’t enough of us free content creators to allow you to build critical mass anyway. How about helping some of us (yes, you can still keep your free-built-on-users-backs model intact) to be able to make high quality content available online and to let us make some money?

Over two years ago, I had the privilege to be a leader of a session at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston (now called Enterprise 2.0) on “Business Continuity and Collaboration” which focused on what are typically two discrete and separately funded initiatives in any company.

At the outset, I laid out my premise that business continuity investments are usually made to ensure that information technology and telephony systems have backup, failover and redundancy so the company isn’t suddenly out of business if disaster strikes. To a very limited degree, work processes (and the people that perform them) are detailed along with possible ways in which they could continue to function in the event of a disaster, all in an attempt to ensure the business keeps going.

Continuing on with an overview of collaboration investments, I briefly laid out how these are typically driven by the desire to make work processes more efficient and reduce cycle times, but also to find ways to drive more innovation with people that connect and work with each other.

The problem? In almost every single organization I’ve been a part of or involved with as a consultant, these two don’t intersect and leaders don’t seem to realize that unless the people in their organizations have the company, directory, work processes and information at-their-fingertips and are using these systems day-in and day-out, if there is a disaster there’s no way they’ll be learning it then!

The opportunity? That these systems should be ones that are funded together as both innovation infrastructure as well as business continuity systems, and that people should be using them all the time. If virtual collaboration systems such as VoIP, groupware, web conferencing, webcams, and other “2.0-like” communication methods are something that everyone uses and knows how to work with at home or within the organizations walls, then if disaster strikes they’ll simply find an internet connection, log on and do their work.

No question this is, perhaps, a bit of a simplistic and high-level view of a complex set problems and opportunities, but having led a functional area in a large corporation I can tell you that people only know what to do if they’ve done it and are doing it all the time. It becomes part of their internal knowledge base and they just use it without thinking.

This is the same reasoning behind drills you’ve done in school and that emergency services do all the time: if you go through a scenario again and again and again, when the emergency hits people know exactly what to do. Drills with systemic infrastructure could be avoided altogether if the same systems people use daily also function as virtual business continuity systems, they’ll know exactly what to do in the event of an emergency.

RESOURCES

• Good definition of Enterprise 2.0 here by Dion Hinchcliffe
• Microsoft’s Architecture Journal article on Enterprise 2.0 here
• Blogs:
  • Enterprise 2.0 Conference blog is here
  • Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang has a strong Enterprise Web category
  • The Workplace Blog
  • Enterprise Web 2.0

But what about you personally? Your kids? Your small-to-midsize business (since much of what is described above is large enterprise-centric)? What if you’re a school district and need to plan?

If there are any hiccups in our distribution system, your family will
be competing with everyone else stripping the grocery store shelves
bare. Earthquake prone areas could see water and power lines severed. I can tell you based on numerous conversations I’ve had with people that if an avian flu pandemic hits and a kid dies at school, classrooms will be vacant as parents keep their kids home.

One of the best sites I’ve seen yet is a Federal government (Dept of Homeland Security) site called Ready.gov. They have preparedness information (and all sorts of documents like checklists) for businesses, older americans, people with disabilities, pet owners, just for kids and more.

What they don’t have, again for those of you (us) that are not with a major corporation, is specific information on what happens if disaster strikes and how you could walk out of your small business, not have employees show up for your midsize business, or teachers and kids not arrive at school, and what systems you’d use to replace or allow you to work virtually from any place there’s an internet connection.

For that, start at a place like eConsultant, a site that lists over 1,200 Web 2.0 services. You’ll find offerings for every price point (or free) and level of complexity you could imagine in areas like collaboration, web conferencing, voice over IP (VoIP), project management, and more. If you can’t find a product, suite of products or online methods of mapping much of your business online and making it virtual, I’ll be quite surprised.

Again, your needs will vary and the complexity of choosing and mapping your organization to more of a virtual and online one isn’t a trivial matter. But not having a strategy or plan that includes some sort of virtualization of your personal life, organization or school is just not wise. Combining it with a collaboration initiative kills two-birds-with-one-stone.

My favorite blog that discusses this issue, Om Malik’s GigaOM, had these two posts that are a must-read if you care at all about this issue:

a) 5 Questions About Comcast’s New Bandwidth Throttling Plan by Stacey Higginbotham

b) Memo To Comcast: Show Us the Meter for Metered Broadband by Om Malik

While I completely understand that Comcast has a business to run, shareholders to please and profits to make, it is also crystal clear to even a casual observer that they now hold too much power in residential broadband.

If you don’t believe me and are in a Comcast-served area, just try to get bandwidth even close to what Comcast offers for a reasonable price and you’ll quickly find that you can’t. At my home, I have Comcast 768kbps upload/8mbps download speeds, but with their “Powerboost” technology I’m achieving ~2mbps up and ~16mbps down frequently. Qwest, for example, could offer me a flavor of DSL with 384kbps upload/5mbps download for nearly the same price. Slower is NOT better when it comes to broadband!

250GB’s per second might seem like a lot, but it’s not, and if you don’t care about what the ramifications are of this for you personally, then also consider how this will stifle innovation.

This is a defensive move by Comcast who makes their money off of distributing video (and increasingly video-on-demand). As more and more of us watch television online — and competing services from AppleTV, Hulu and others accelerate — all of that competing content will be flowing down that Comcast broadband pipe…and they won’t be making money on it in the same way.

From Comcast’s 2Q 2008 report: While High-Speed Internet and
Phone revenues have increased (though cable advertising remains flat)
Video delivery still comprises the overwhelming amount of Comcast’s revenue mix.

As we each deal with ever larger digital files like our own photos stored online, videos we post or operating systems updates or obtaining software we’ve purchased (e.g., when was the last time you bought software in a store vs. downloading it after purchase?), believe me you’ll care about bandwidth caps. If not today, within a year or so I’ll wager.

Internet Innovation
The internet is at the core of much of the innovation I write about and see all around me. It concerns me deeply that any one company (or even a handful, for that matter) can place restrictions on a fundamental infrastructure we all use and which are innovating on.

As I’ve been introduced to dozens of local entrepreneurs in Minnesota and been hearing their stories for my other publication, Minnov8, what’s become clear is that the open, unfettered, unrestricted access to the internet — and the promise of those on the receiving end having the same — is what is at risk with this move by Comcast and the very real possibility that it, as an obstacle and barrier to innovation, will become true.

In a time when energy prices are accelerating, threats from terrorism and epidemics (e.g., avian flu) are driving companies and individuals to better anticipate and manage risk, and the people with whom collaboration is critical might be in the next town or half a world away, the timing for an easy to use, fast and intuitive collaboration suite seems perfect.

A successful entrepreneur and chief technologist (he was formerly CTO of HighJump Software), CEO Steve Kickert‘s Riverock Technologies is soon to launch OnePlace, an online collaboration (and personal organizational) tool that has a good shot at being a hub positioned directly in the sweet spot of what’s needed.

I had a chance to grab coffee with Steve last week, and what is usually a one to one-and-a-half hour discussion turned into three hours! We hit it off and delved deeply into collaboration, the participation culture that’s emerged on the Web making hosted Web applications strongly desired by increasingly always-on and always-connected people, and went off on lots of tangents about technologies, Minnesota and what’s needed to make OnePlace the gold-standard of collaborative apps.

Collaboration as a “Web 2.0” category is a fairly crowded space and competing within it isn’t for the faint-of-heart. The directory site GO2WEB20.net shows many types of collaborative applications — Basecamp, Central Desktop and others are well established — but there are apps shoved into this category such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Twine, Skrbl and many others that don’t fit most people’s idea of what a collaborative application is or should be since they’re myopically focused on one, specific type of collaboration.

Mindmapping app MindJet, web conference offering (and Minnesota company) Yugma, or the movie editing site SeeToo, are a bit of a stretch positioned as organizational project, task management or, like OnePlace has within it, Getting Things Done-like contexts that any of us could use to manage all we need to accomplish.

If one moves up the collaboration value chain to what’s used in the enterprise, then the competition for Web collaborative applications gets broader (as well as complicated and expensive) and includes software from IBM, Microsoft, Google and many others. These vendors offer massively scalable platforms for collaboration that include unified messaging, web conferencing, document management and a host of other integrated software that is perfect for a huge enterprise, but would be a bazooka-to-kill-an-ant for a team, small to midsize organization, those working on an initiative together or even a family to use that needs to coordinate and orchestrate activities.

So what is the OnePlace target market?

In our time together I grew to appreciate that Kickert is a guy that understands supply chains (the focus of High Jump’s business where he spent 16 years as CTO) and that he also appreciates and understands the value chain of collaboration and what’s needed to empower people to do so in today’s net-connected world.

Accessible systems to manage chaos (like what OnePlace offers) and monolithic systems (from big vendors that are enterprise-only focused) are miles apart in ease-of-use, accessiblity and learning curves. With OnePlace, he’s more interested in enabling and empowering individuals, teams, and businesses, without necessarily focusing (for now) on the precise size of the business.

This is a smart strategy in a day of rapidly introduced Web applications — meaning it’s harder than ever to get above the marketing noise, stand out and get noticed — and when the enterprise is trying to learn from the Web 2.0 phenomena and its success.

Since developing and modifying Web applications is at the core of the evolution of them, the enterprise is trying to learn how to emulate their key success factors. As this Computerworld article states, “Quick, incremental updates, along with heavy user involvement, are key characteristics of an emerging software development paradigm championed by a new generation of Web 2.0 start-ups.”

What did I like about OnePlace?

It’s easy to use and within 15 minutes I’d used most of the key features that enabled project/task management; time tracking; reporting; calendar; discussions; file sharing; notes; lists and more.

I loved the iPhone interface. Connecting what we do on our desktop computers or laptops to internet/web server functionality “in the cloud,” isn’t enough when we carry around devices like an iPhone (or the rumored touch tablet) and other small devices growing in penetration.

Lately I’ve been discovering that I, and others with whom I interact, expect a native interface or easier accessibility to functionality while mobile. OnePlace already delivers core
functionality you’d need on the road.

While in the application, I wanted to change colors, add a logo and tweak other personalization settings, but Kickert is adamant that they’re going to keep key workflow aspects locked down while still striving to be flexible.

While I always want to personalize the heck out of anything I use online, Kickert pointed out that doing so makes it VERY challenging to perform support, train others on how to use it, and so forth. Having led small to large teams in the past online, I can tell you from personal experience how challenging it is to get some less-than-tech-savvy folks using a Web app because they just don’t get how it works. For this reason alone, I applaud this choice but do hope for a ‘pro’ account that lets me go wild with modifications (and yes, I’d train my own users!).

I’d encourage you to go to OnePlace and sign up for the free trial. You’ll undoubtedly see that it already has hit the sweet spot of what’s needed to collaborate with others. If you’re waiting until risk-becomes-reality and you or your company can’t go into the office and you need to collaborate virtually — or even if you figure you’ll just keep emailing around .doc’s and spreadsheets to those with whom you’re collaborating — OnePlace is an offering that is perfect for today’s increasingly mobile and always-on, always-connected workforce
collaborating with one another online.

This post originally published on my other blog, Minnov8.

In a recent presentation and ideation with a client, one of the company functional area leaders leapt in with this question: "Twitter is getting so much buzz in BusinessWeek and on blogs, is this something we should make key to our social media strategy?"

I did a bit of a humma-humma and ultimately advised them to have an account, begin to participate, watch it (especially for their brand mentions), but make it very peripheral to the rest of their strategies since the service simply isn’t reliable. Many people I know are slowly moving off of it as the ongoing service interruptions are maddening and not worth the effort.

The more time you and I invest online means we’ll actually experience periodic and lengthy outages that heretofore only the hardcore users would. With Amazon’s S3 storage outage taking down Web 2.0 sites that relied upon them, Apple’s botched launch of MobileMe (which now is running perfectly, I might add), Gmail‘s periodic (but quickly repaired) outages, to my own experiences with MediaTemple whom I rely upon to serve a dozen sites, relying upon applications in the cloud that fail is making many of us skittish.

Once per quarter for the last 11 quarters I’ve invested some time each day to look at every one of the "Web 2.0" applications in the cloud off of lists like this one.  I’ve learned that many with an appearance of a strong value proposition, solid and scalable technology, are in the deadpool or been acquired.

Will this cause you or I to eschew apps running over the internet? Nah. I know that I’ll continue to invest more and more of my participation and functionality on the ‘net since it’s just simply too useful…especially with my mobility demanding constant access to my data. You’re probably like that as well, especially if you’re a member of the smartphone club.

Choose wisely though. Don’t overinvest or map mission-critical processes to applications in the cloud that you’re not certain will function, scale or be acquired in the near term. I know that’s hard to do, but it’s also why the big-get-bigger since they have the resources to keep our fear at bay and ensure apps will run.

As a former content management systems (CMS) guy (was with Vignette during the dotcom heyday), I’m in an interesting spot between grassroots social media use by individuals, non-profits and small business and my enterprise clients trying to determine how to play in this shifting landscape. These clients are trying to figure out how to engage all of us connecting and communicating, and just finding more efficient ways of publishing content with a CMS or portal isn’t cutting it.

Social publishing systems are needed.

This morning I read Jeremiah Owyang (Sr Analyst at Forrester Research: Social Computing) who had this post entitled, “Social Software: Here Come The CMS Vendors.” He begins by discussing his oft-repeated theme of the volume of white label social networking providers, and ends with a premise about the major CMS vendors, “I’ve started to notice more of the ‘traditional’ CMS and Portal players that already have deep footprints into the corporate web teams that are inching into this space.“

What are the trends, what are CMS vendors likely to do and what should be offered?

The CMS brought us more efficient management of content and significantly more control to the enterprise — and those people within it that had defined roles and workflows. The big “Aha!” with a CMS was the separation of content from its presentation, so that a person could enter content, it would fire off a workflow and approval process, and eventually published live without that original person knowing or caring where it ended up.

CMS’es also provided granular level control over when the content would go live, personalization around pieces of content (based on permissions set for users or the groups they were in), and made the entire adventure with a website or portal application scalable.

For the most part, the CMS empowered the entire organization to be involved in the content creation and delivery process instead of sending stuff to some webmaster(s) who’d publish it when they could get around to it.

Then social publishing hit with wiki’s, blogs, social networks, forums, and other participative applications online. Now instead of an enterprise taking managed content and massaging it, scrubbing it, controlling it, and publishing it, there was an immediacy and democratization of content publishing with an entirely new class of users empowered with easy to use tools that were cheap or free.

But now there is an unintended consequence of easy, cheap and free social publishing: participation fatigue and an increased awareness of the intentions of vendors offering us enticements to participate in their offerings.

With all the Web 2.0 offerings we can join, dozens of social networks (and 80+ white label vendors of social networking software allowing anyone to create their own network), there is a dizzying array of places for us to participate today and an acceleration in the requests for more and more personal information. As a consequence, almost everyone I know and interact with is dramatically lowering the number of networks in which they participate and are growing reluctant to divulge info about themselves, and this doesn’t bode well for major CMS vendors expanding in to this space.

CMS VENDORS
In my view, commercial CMS vendors are likely to do what they’ve always done: decide on an approach, create their software, and sell it to the enterprise. Will they embrace OpenSocial? OpenID? Will a focused, open source Drupal vendor like Acquia emerge as a social publishing system of choice? Will enterprise CMS vendors remain targeted at control…or will they enable a new level of transparency and openness increasingly demanded by we, the new participants?

If I look at the possibilities, there’s no question that shifting the thinking and perspectives of those in the enterprise is going to be the biggest challenge. Will the enterprise view their web assets — built with social publishing systems — as empowering participants or controlling us? Harvesting our collective intelligence or providing us with value that lets us harvest what the enterprise offers?

I think about one area, training, that I’d love to see enterprise organizations embrace and extend to the social web. Imagine a Best Buy creating and delivering online learning so that customers could be exposed to new uses for their computers, HDTV’s, music systems and digital cameras? Yes this would be an investment, but I could envision this being as valuable as the product and the transaction itself.

Or why not have a Geek Squad online where users can help users? I know why — they make money by providing answers and solutions themselves — but what if a Geek Squad online destination became the place for anyone to go for help with consumer electronics? Heck…even I’d go there and I have no use for a Geek Squad since I’m enough of a geek myself.

I saw firsthand what Apple did when pre-Jobs (the second coming) they had free, 800# support and went wild with hiring customer support reps. When Jobs came back to Apple (and I joined about a year later), he’d laid off everyone and replaced it with the current Apple Discussion forum where, much to my surprise and delight, my staff or I can find 90% of the answers to questions we wrestle with since someone undoubtedly has had the same issue.

So if enterprise CMS vendors focus on aspects of what they do that will empower us and provide we, the participants, enhanced value, then they’ll be successful. If enterprise CMS software is instead focused on ways to entice participation, analyze it and harvest it for their own purposes solely (vs. a win-win of value exchange), it will fail.

I’ll be watching Jeremiah Owyang who said in that post I reference earlier, “I’ve started conversations with several of the big CMS players to gauge where they are headed. Of course, the conversations don’t end up on this blog (unless they give me permission, or publish first) but it’s quite obvious where things are headed. In fact, see my predictions I made to Techcrunch.“

Six of us were bugged that there was so much going on in Internet and Web technology innovation right here in Minnesota, that when I suggested we start our own blog to showcase that innovation, there were nods of agreement and a willingness to dive in and make it real.

The biggest reason we were all interested in this blog is that these showcases and interviews are what we wanted to read and there wasn’t anything like it out there.

The result is Minnov8: Minnesota Innovation in Internet & Web Technology. This past weekend was the biggest Barcamp yet, Minnebar, and over 400 people showed up to present, learn and participate. Rather than recreate everything on this blog, why not take a peek at Minnov8? This and this post are ones that will recap what took place.

Wherever you live and whatever space you care about (e.g., technology, education, greentech, etc.) and where there are a critical mass of people willing to leap in and work together as multiple authors, I’d encourage you to start one of these…it’s pretty simple to do and fun to boot.

Works every time.

Now take a technology we’ve used for a long time — conference calling on the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) — and realize that people calling in on a variety of devices (headsets, cell phones, office phones) add noise and the telephone system (and conference bridge) sample at only a measly 8khz. The result? Tension builds, our muscles tighten and we actually shift our attention (you know who you are….you surfin’ the web folks when you’re supposed to be listening to us on the call!) and the quality of the conference and what we’re trying to communicate to one another suffers.

Let’s look at Skype and how using it decreases tension and increases the quality. Sampling at 16khz means the quality is substantially higher than POTS and is so good that you can hear people breathe, move something on their desk or even click their mouse. The "resolution" of the audio is much higher and thus the call quality is better. The result? Lower tension (or none at all), the callers are relaxed and the communication is higher. Thankfully there are emerging conference bridges that can handle call-ins via Skype and sample at 16khz to maintain call quality (e.g., HighSpeedConferencing).

Let’s take this one step further to other forms of social media: Imagine you hosted a party and when your guests arrived, no one greeted them at the door, clusters of people were broken up into little cliques ignoring them, and as you glanced over at them in the doorway thought, "They’re on their own and are just going to have to figure out how to participate."

Unfortunately, that’s the current state of most social networks and forums (and I hope not your parties and if so, please don’t invite me!). Even if you’re invited in or can easily join one, you’re on your own. There have been modest attempts at shepherding people through a network (Zaadz, now Gaia, is a good example. If you join, there is someone ‘assigned’ to you and makes attempts to connect via email and in-network messaging) but 99% of companies offering social networks or forums just set up the network and it’s up to you to participate or not (or there is an expectation your friends will show you around).

How could this be done better? By ensuring that your network or forum has hosts who can walk people around the party network and get them engaged. By having systems in place to analyze the frequency of logging in, the level of active vs. passive participation, and have ways in which those people who are in-network guides can ensure that care is taken with newbies or wallflowers and that they’re taken care of and made to feel welcome.

Gaia is doing something right as evidenced by the nice increase in members since last December:

LEARNING NEW PROTOCOLS
Lastly, I’ve been highly interested in protocols as I’ve been engaging with others over various social media. As more of this media becomes intertwined with our daily lives, our attention and our social circle, the more possibility there is that it can do damage, be interruptive or so "noisy" that we just turn it off.

One great example is that savvy Skype users instant-message the person whom they’re calling before launching the call. This matters since many of us wear headsets and might be jolted or startled, we could be on a mobile phone, landline or in a meeting, or simply deep in thought or a project and even a quick chat would derail us significantly.

Another is a lesson learned from my friends at Heartland Circle and their Art of Convening. What they teach is how to convene meetings and gatherings that respect each and every individual while providing a process for authentic discussion and attention; create a level playing field of intellect, emotion, and power; and use methods to dampen or lower the insertion of ego into the mix.

The result surprises many who embrace what Heartland offers. They experience and quickly learn that any meeting or connection between human beings — whether in person or virtual –  can be set up almost as a group of friends sitting around a campfire, relaxing and letting pure and authentic thoughts and ideas flow. How’d you like your virtual interactions (or meatspace ones) to work like that?

IT TAKES TIME
We all know it takes time for new technologies to be adopted and assimilated in a culture. It’s becoming sort of a running joke on Twitter and in blogs that people giving a talk will ask an audience, "So who here is on Twitter?" and often no hands go up.

Once early adopters have internalized a technologies use, evangelized it to others, began to build use-cases on how others might use a Twitter and told others about them, then it is adopted by others. How fast is that adoption?

A partially finished Wikipedia article on the diffusion of innovation helps us understand that time is necessary for adoption:

The study of the diffusion of innovation is the study of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. It applies, for example, to the acceptance of new technological products like the wristwatch and the personal computer, foods like tomato sauce and sushi, music styles like opera and bossa nova, dressing styles like the top hat and blue jeans, ideals like democracy or feminism, and so on.

Everett M. Rogers in his 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations, theorized that innovations would spread through society in an S curve, as the early adopters select the technology first, followed by the majority, until a technology or innovation is common. According to Rogers, diffusion research centers on the conditions which increase or decrease the likelihood that a new idea, product, or practice will be adopted by members of a given culture. According to Rogers people’s attitude toward a new technology is a key element in its diffusion. Roger’s Innovation Decision Process theory states that innovation diffusion is a process that occurs over time through five stages: Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation and Confirmation.

The problem with analysis of "S curves" to try and get a handle on adoption of technology TODAY is that all bets are off in a day when cultural memes move at the speed of electrons and early adopters — and those who read their blogs or follow them on Twitter — can influence instantly.

Just remember as you drive the adoption of some new technology in your company, family, social circle or create a new communications offering of your own, there are real humans out in the world that need help, guidance, insight, coaching and to be taught how to use all this stuff and how to use it in a social way.

If you’ve read this far, YOU are just that sort of leader and can make a difference in how social media is adopted and, once adopted, used in the real world.