Entries by Ross Dawson

Personal reputation systems are about to take off… but the next start-up won’t last

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch writes that this week a start-up will launch that is “effectively Yelp for people,” and promises detailed coverage in the next few days. This is of great interest, not least because our own start-up Repyoot will be launching in public beta in the next couple of weeks, starting as an influence […]

New ventures in political crowdsourcing

User-contributed content is often far more up-to-date than other sources. I just stumbled across some interesting current news while browsing through Wikipedia’s List of crowdsourcing projects. The UK Conservative Party has launched Your Budget Response 2010, a website that is intended to allow anyone to identify problems, oversights and issues in the government’s budget, to […]

3 steps to creating participative strategy processes in organizations

Some of my most interesting work in in helping clients create effective processes for participative strategy. The traditional approach to strategy is that it is generated in the executive suite or by highly-paid consultants, then it is communicated to staff, usually rather ineffectively. There is an increasing recognition that many people across the organization have […]

New research: Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace

I just got off the phone with Kate Ehrlich of IBM Research, who I’ve known for many years and was one my co-authors for our California Management Review article Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective. We had a great discussion about a variety of common interests, including where things are going in […]

Essential capabilities: Aligning cultures and processes across blurred organizational boundaries

On my earlier post on Social CRM Larry Irons asked a great question about how organizations can engage effectively with their customers and partners when much of their customer support is outsourced. While there are no easy answers, there are two organizational capabilities that are increasingly critical for success. The first is developing clear strategies […]

5 ways to add value to information

As I prepare a presentation to the senior staff at one of Australia’s more innovative universities later this week I just had a glance at the slides to a keynote I did back in 2002 to the Australian Library and Information Association. I used the image below showing five ways to add value to information. […]