Virtual Collaboration in the Workplace

Last one out, turn off the virtual light

Given that I made a fuss in class last night about Second Life being worthless, I figured I'd post this Techdirt blog item from yesterday:

Remember a couple years ago, when you could hardly go a day without hearing some press story hyping up how the virtual world Second Life was the biggest thing since the internet itself? Those days went away pretty quickly once people noticed that the numbers Second Life was claiming weren't really representative of how many people were there, and all the brands that bought into the hype and jumped on the Second Life bandwagon started realizing that it didn't do much for them, as most of the folks in Second Life were there for the virtual sex and gambling, which the company has cracked down on.

However, apparently, there are still some folks using Second Life, and the company wants to let you know that as the financial crisis spreads around the world, the fundamentals of the economy in Second Life remain strong. Over the past few weeks, I've seen press announcements from plenty of tech companies trying to spin the financial crisis as a reason to write about their company, but this one might be the most ridiculous. It's not as if people are going to start moving money into Lindens any time soon as an investment vehicle.

They know where you are!

In my IT201 class two weeks ago, we spoke briefly about how it is possible to find the location of a computer with reasonable accuracy knowing only the IP address.  And every packet your computer sends out on to the Internet includes your IP address.

There are some Social Networking sites that use this fact to geolocate their participants.  Further, you can look up anyone's location at a number of services if you know their IP address (which is easy to find out from email or by grabbing their IP packet.)  [If you do this from a DePaul CDM computer it places you in the west loop as that is where DePaul's gateway is located.]

Today Firefox has announced their version 3.1 beta.  The big new feature in version 3.1 is built in geo-location.  Firefox will report (I presume you can turn this off) your location to websites and permit them to provide you with location specific data without you having to type in a zipcode or other identifying information.  So, by this time next year, it will become common for Internet sites to know where you are.

This has both ethical implications (lots of them) and virtual collaboration implications.

Note that there are some nice IP address resources here for those of you wishing to manage your IP information.

How to Successfully Moderate a Conference Panel, A Comprehensive Guide

This blog entry is only slightly on topic for the class, but it is a great cookbook for anyone who finds themselves in the position of moderating a panel discussion.

Social CMS Buzz

I just found this blog: Social CMS Buzz.  It may be a reasonable resource for some of the project teams.  Simply go there and do a search on your topic.  For example, there was a post the other day titled: The Social Media Classroom.

Y!OS

Read/Write Web has a short post on Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS).  This (and the pointers within) is a decent read as it lays out Yahoo's sorta web2.1 strategy for building collaborative and social applications on a cloud platform.   The question R/WW asks is: does this strategy make Yahoo a viable Google competitor?

I am not sure that is the right question, or an important question.  The questions that come to my mind are:  Might this be, in part, why Microsoft is interested in Yahoo?   Is there something in this platform of value.  If so, which part(s) of it?  If this is Y!OS 1.0, what is likely being planned for 2.0?   Can enterprises build anything of value to them on this platform?   What does this initiative say about computing five years down the road?

On the Road: Virtual organization of a political campaign

The best political blog (in my opinion - and I read a lot of them) this campaign season is FiveThirtyEight.  Today there is a story on FiveThirtyEight about Obama's field operation in Ohio.  I am pointing you to this, not as a partisan political post (it isn't), but to give you the chance to read about how Obama's field directors are managing a virtual (and partially volunteer) organization.  And within the post there is reference to Zach Exley's writing on the same subject.

Surviving the tech manager's global squeeze

Perfect timing with last night's class...  InfoWorld published an article today about the issues and constraints of being on a global IT team.  It begins...

It's the new reality of IT: working as part of a global team, with coworker and outsourcers all over the world, coordinated by a project manager at headquarters. But that reality can be ugly, as managers are stretched across time zones, with no such thing as being off the clock. Work quality, commitment, and communications vary considerably, putting the burden on the manager caught in the middle to make it all work -- from thousands of miles away.

A nifty software product and anther product: a.nnotate and swarmsketch

Lets start with the not so nifty.   Swarmsketch is described by Kolabora as an "ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses."  Go ahead and try it and tell me if you can think of a real world use case for this chaos.

On the other hand a.nnotate has potential use cases.  It is a shared document markup tool.  Take a look to see if it has value for you. 

Mother of all SharePoint Blogs

Matt Sorin asked me..

"I am working with a colleague to start up a team to examine how we can better utilize the collaboration abilities of SharePoint which the organization currently has installed and basically only uses as a file server.  Are there some articles or literature that you know about that I can read which will help give me some ideas and get the brain storming going?  I am interested in learning more about how to actually use the functionality and what are the tangible benefits of using it."

I responded...

How do you measure the ROI for your social media programs?

Francois Gossieaux more asks the question than answers it (and he points his readers to an ongoing discussion).   I am recasting his question here as it is an important one - very relevant to our course.

So you deploy (or want to deploy) social networking - or any collaboration - software in your firm.  How do you know it is paying off?  How do you prove this to management?

The question is not as simple as "count the number of plane flights saved, subtract the cost of your software, and the difference is profit."   There are both hidden costs and, more difficult to measure, hidden non-quantifiable benefits.   This is the $64,000 business case question (and don't ask me how I know it is exactly $64,000)  :-)

So, what are your thoughts?