Socialtext

A recent conversation with Brook Manville reminded me of a question that has been puzzling me for a while: Why don't philanthropic foundations think more about networks?

The traditional philanthropic model revolves around money. Foundations have it, and nonprofits need it. So the foundations give it to the nonprofits in the form of a grant. There's a lot more to it, of course, but that's the basic idea.

Money is important, but it's not everything. When I talk to friends and colleagues in the nonprofit sector, what I hear again and again is a desire for knowledge. A charter school in Oakland wants to know whether a particular after-school program is a good use of their limited funding. A clinic in Tanzania wants to know how to increase compliance with a malaria treatment regimen. A music school in Philadelphia wants to know whether it should invest in commercial software to manage its box office.

There are a lot of reasons why nonprofit executives are hungry for knowledge. They work on particularly stubborn problems. The sector is highly fragmented and specialized. The absence of a strong market mechanism and regulating institutions allow bad management practices to endure. But in the end, nonprofit executives are doing what executives in every industry do: trying to learn from the experiences of others to improve their own performance.

If there is one thing that we've learned from the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it's that interpersonal networks are extremely effective in addressing these kinds of knowledge needs. Nonprofit practitioners benefit enormously when they connect with other nonprofit practitioners doing the same type of work. If I'm trying to increase compliance with a particular drug regimen in Tanzania, it is incredibly useful for me to connect with other practitioners who have done (or at least tried to do) the same thing in other parts of Tanzania, sub-Saharan Africa, or the South Side of Chicago. I can learn from their successes and their mistakes, and dramatically accelerate my own learning.

This knowledge transfer is already happening, but not effectively. Face-to-face conferences are expensive and often logistically impossible. In the absence of good public sources of knowledge, personal networks are even more important than in the for-profit sector. But like all personal networks, they don't scale efficiently.

It's not hard to imagine a better way. I'm envisioning an online knowledge networking tool for nonprofits. Nonprofit executives could go there to join discussions, share and access documents, describe case studies, find experts, create affinity groups, etc. Think of it as a standing online industry conference for nonprofit executives. And you don't even have to get on a plane.

Somebody needs to host this party, and philanthropic foundations are the natural hosts. In the near-term, each foundation would create a site exclusive to its funded organizations. Being supported by a particular foundation would not simply be a matter of receiving funding. It would also include an invitation (and a corresponding obligation) to become an active participant in a network of practitioners. The more wisely a foundation invests, the more powerful its proprietary network would become. I could even imagine a time when grant renewal decisions were determined by the quality of a fundee's participation in the network, and when inclusion in a foundation's proprietary network became more important to nonprofits than the accompanying financial support.

Bill and Melinda, are you listening?

I love Geek and Poke and saw this recently: Geek and Poke

I think the concept of attention is a key way to think differently about social networking inside the enterprise.  As I already talked about in a previous blog post Will you be my friend yes or no? the explicit network ties between people who work for the same organization is nowhere near as useful or valuable as the implicit ones - it's not "who knows whom" (and the vanity rolodexes that people put together) but rather "who knows what" and "who knows who knows what" that helps people leverage the company's social network to personal and group productivity.  This implict network is primarily based on who works with whom - independent (but not exclusive) of official org charts. 

In addition to "who works with whom", we're enabling a different type of social capital and connections to emerge - "who pays attention to whom".  Given that the most precious asset that we all have is time, work effectiveness is often a result of how well can can find the most efficient paths to information, knowledge, assistance, experience, and context.  Socialtext People and Dashboard allow you to "follow" a colleague - which includes their work activity updates (not just status "tweets" but actual work - blog posts, wiki entries, people tagging, group/workspace membership changes, etc.).  This is subtly but powerfully different from how patterns emerge in Twitter.  People follow Twitterers because they find what they "tweet" about interesting or fun; Socialtext users follow colleagues because they find what they are working on useful, informative, and relevant.

Back when I was hired into Cisco Systems (September 1997) I remember being overwhelmed by its size, scale, complexity, and pace.  My wonderful boss (Howard Charney - one of the best executives I've ever had the privilege of working with) gave me some great onboarding assistance and told me that the best way to learn the business and the company and how to get things done was to first meet the right people.  He set me up with about 5 different peer VP mentors from different parts of the company.  I'll never forget the advice I got from one of them about the huge amount of information and trying to figure out what's relevant.  He told me to just subscribe to all the same email lists he did, and then unsubscribe from the ones that weren't useful or relevant to my part of the business.  I did that - which was enormously helpful - but I also did the same with 2 of the key direct reports I was now managing who were obviously savvy and effective.  This probably improved my onboarding by over 100% as "breathing their information smog" was a really focused way of figuring out which information firehose to drink from.  I've used that technique at almost every new job since then (although with more modern tools; Ross Mayfield happily donated his ginormous RSS OPML file to me, for example).  We think that "following" in Socialtext People will be even more useful, since you'll get alert feeds based on "in the flow work" from your social network.

So while the Geek and Poke carton is funny, I think the concept is sort of spot on if applied to the enterprise - following and paying attention to the right people can really make you more effective.

There are some fascinating common questions that we get from customers who are excited by the potential of Enterprise 2.0 but who express some trepidation about what the path ahead looks like and means for their organizations.  I say fascinating because while on the one hand many people are hip to what is fundamentally different now - lightweight tools that don't get in people's way, a groundswell familiarity with Web 2.0 tools that have created a prevalent degree of comfort and facility with sharing (through user-contributed content tools such as Flickr), social networking (LinkedIn and Facebook), and "doing things in public" (activity feeds in social networking sites, blogging, and wikis) - many of the questions customers ask reveal the influence of what I think of as a "1.0 amygdala".  Old patterns that trigger fear lie deep despite agile learning in the higher levels of the brain.

Here are some of the more common questions I've heard:

How do I make sure people don't misbehave in public?

Both Ross Mayfield and Michael Idinopulos have written great posts commenting on the New York Times article about the U. S. State Department's Diplopedia wiki.  While I agree with everything they've said, I think there are also some more fundamental things to think about.  What keeps people from misbehaving in general?  Is it explicit rules with explicit penalities?  In broader civic society yes - but what about in the corporate environment?  Aren't general social norms and specific corporate culture stronger guidelines for behavior - and isn't the "enforcement" of that behavior much stronger culturally?  I've always been intrigued by walking into different corporate environments and seeing how quickly you can get a sense of the culture by just watching how people dress, how they speak in meetings, and how they talk to one another.  These are almost never prescribed through  "dress codes" or "communications policies" - they're much more environmental, learned through watching, transmitted through story telling, and "enforced" through typical social norms.

I would submit that Enterprise social software enables and strengthens this sort of cultural transmission and reinforcement, rather than dissipate it.  In our products we've worked hard to make sure that the identity of every activity is associated with that activity - which dampens the temptation to "misbehave".  And just as the group can edit typos and grammatical mistakes in a wiki, so can they collectively enforce social norms in the broader collaborative spaces.

How do I make sure it's not "Shelfware 2.0"?

With traditional collaboration software, adoption has always been tough.  Why?  Because 1. Unless the software provides value to the individual before or while it is creating value for the group at large, the return on investment at the individual task level is too low to motivate enough individuals to do anything, and 2. Unless the use cases for the collaborative environment are directly relevant to helping people get their jobs done, it will always be a special corner case that people feel they are doing "after hours" or as a "special project" or because "my boss told me I had to".

That's why we have singularly focused on identifying true business problems which can be solved through Enterprise social software solutions with specific use cases that are "in the flow" of people's daily work as opposed to "above the flow" of getting work done.  (See Michael's excellent post on this: http://michaeli.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/in-the-flow-and.html)  When collaborative use cases are truly in the flow of daily work, the ROI for each individual is higher, which drives participation, which fills the value balloon for the group as a result.

How do I stay safe and keep our IP secure?

This is a big deal, which is why we have extra security and privacy capabilities implemented in our hosted ASP service, and why we also have a unique SaaS appliance that gets deployed on premise with our larger customers but which provides the same continual software upgrade features that our hosted customers enjoy.

How much infrastructure do we have to build and customize before we can get started?  Do I have to do a big enterprise-wide "big bang" to truly get results?

We have a strong philosophical belief at Socialtext (validated through years of helping customers achieve success with enterprise social software) that there is a delicate balance between small, focused initial deployments and building "collaboration as infrastructure" and turning the whole company loose on it.  Our most successful customers have done a little bit of both - a highly focused set of initial projects with clearly defined business objectives and identified teams - with a parallel set of more lightweight projects that are deployed and relevant to a much larger population.  We often start with a template workspace to solve, say, a sales and marketing content problem (RFPs, collateral creation and review, competitive intelligence) while at the same time spinning up a "Wikipedia inside" to help with cross-departmental knowledge sharing, M&A integration, or preparing for a retiring workforce.

What's different about all of this is that the 2.0 generation of technology is so much more social than collaborative, by which I mean software that can provide value to the organization without the first prerequisites of explicit group creation and mandated cultural change, combined with the fact that people in general are much more comfortable sharing and "doing work in public".

So I encourage people to suppress the instinctive fear that is driven from past experience and reframe your questions in the context of a new generation of software and people's comfort with the software- while at the same time recognizing that culture, social norms, and how individuals fit in are still the same.