New perspectives on crowdsourcing at Creative Sydney

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On Saturday I spoke at Creative Sydney’s Crowds + Collaboration event. I had just been invited to on Thursday to fill in for a speaker who couldn’t make it, but it was pretty easy to do given last week we launched our Crowdsourcing Landscape and I gave two keynotes largely about crowdsourcing (to Cisco and at a regional futures conference in WA). As such I addressed the topic The Future is Crowdsourcing, largely supported by the Crowdsourcing Landscape, as you can see at the bottom of this post.

The other speakers were excellent. In particular the story of Detours and Destinations was extremely inspiring. Highly disadvanted youth were given the opportunity to spend time at the Sydney Opera House creating their own performance. One of their many creations is below.

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The Creative Sydney 10×10 Project – uncovering the best of Sydney talent

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10x10.jpgCreative Sydney is one of the best things going on in Sydney – this annual festival really does bring out and support the best of what’s happening here. Particularly as the creative and technology spaces merge, I am very excited about what I see happening in Sydney, far more than at any other time in the 14 years I’ve been back here.

Creative Sydney has just launched its 10×10 Project. The website says:

Personal recommendation speaks volumes: so who do Sydney’s creative leaders turn to for inspiration?

10 creative leaders each nominate 10 creative businesses or practitioners, introducing us to the local creatives who inspire them.

I am honored to be one of the 10 creative catalysts selected. Our task was to nominate who we think is doing fantastic work in Sydney. It’s a very special group – you can see their profiles on the front page of the 10×10 Project website. There is also a brief review of the 10 creative leaders by Campaign Brief.

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How to raise money from crowds: 11 crowdfunding platforms and examples

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Crowdfunding is one of the more interesting (and important) neologisms of the last few years. It takes the idea of crowdsourcing (getting services delivered by crowds) and applies it to raising money.

In a later post I will write about the implications of the rise of crowdfunding for venture capital and other early stage funding sources. Here I will just cover some examples of crowdfunding, many of them in creative domains.

Kickstarter.jpg

Kickstarter is a well developed creative crowdfunding platform, covering films, music, games, theatre, technology and far more. It uses the common all-or-nothing model, so projects are only funded if they raise their target funds in a defined period. It does not offer equity in the ventures, but project creators can provide specific rewards for funders. Kickstarter gained attention when the new open source competitor to Facebook, Diaspora*, sought $10,000 and has already raised over $180,000 before the funding period is over.

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Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life

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When I started writing my book Living Networks in early 2002 I thought that it was important to demonstrate that the concept of ‘living networks’ was not just a metaphor, but a reality: we, together with the networks that connect us, are literally a new life form.

To show this I drew on the literature on autopoiesis, which was proposed as a new way of understanding the nature of life, and wrote a lengthy introduction to the book. My editor, very rightly, thought it was the wrong way to begin the book, and the introduction never saw the light of day.

This morning when someone mentioned living networks to me I remembered that this was a literal phrase that I had never explained, so here is the introduction, seen for the first time. We are indeed part of an emerging higher-order life form, and that is a wonderful thing…

Introduction: How Connectivity is Bringing Our World to Life:

We who are privileged to be alive today are participating in the birth of a new lifeform: the global networks. All the talk of the “new economy” in the late 1990s reflected many of the changes at play in our world. In truth they may well have underestimated the importance of the juncture we are at, which represents a complete change in the nature of society and business. Since the dawn of humanity people have been the dominant force on our planet, for better and—sometimes—for worse. Now people as individuals are being transcended by a higher-order lifeform, which is connecting and merging most of the people and all the digital devices on the planet into a single entity.

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California Management Review: Network perspectives on improving team performance in sales, innovation, and execution

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The summer issue of California Management Review a couple of years ago contains an article co-authored by myself together with Rob Cross of the University of Virginia, Kate Ehrlich of IBM, and John Helferich of Northeastern University, titled Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective. The article can be purchased from the California Management Review website (the journal is published by the Haas School of Business at University of California – Berkeley).

I’ve provided the synopsis of the paper and a more detailed description below. Writing the paper was an interesting process, bringing together specific domain expertise and insights from projects that each of the four of us have run over the last few years. The result is a framework and detailed prescriptions on how a network perspective can take the lessons on teams learned over the last decades to the next level, applied in a number of specific areas. Here is the article title and abstract.

Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective

Rob Cross, Kate Ehrlich, Ross Dawson, and John Helferich

50/4 (Summer 2008): 74-98

Whether selling products or services, making strategic decisions, delivering solutions, or driving innovation, most work of any substance today is accomplished by teams. However, since the early 1990s, teams have evolved from more stable groups-where members were co-located, dedicated to a common mission, and directed by a single leader-to more matrixed entities with colleagues located around the world, juggling time between several projects, and accountable to multiple leaders. As teams have become more fluid, substantial challenges have been posed to traditional advice on team formation, leadership, roles, and process. This article describes how leaders at all levels within an organization can obtain innovation and performance benefits by shifting focus from forming teams to developing networks at key points of execution.

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) (social network analysis applied to organizations) provides deep and specific insights into how to enhance the performance of organizations.

In the article we ask six questions to determine team effectiveness:

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There will be two types of people: content creators and non-content creators

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In the future there will be two types of people.

Either you will create content to share with the world, or you will not.

Many of us have already made the choice to share content with the world at large. We will be joined by many more.

The advantages of having a visible presence in a world awash with information will create a substantial economic and social difference between content creators and the rest.

Yet some people will not to want to share. Some won’t want to share anything about themselves beyond family and close friends. Others will be concerned about the privacy implications. They will not share of themselves to the world.

However if you choose to be a content-creator, it’s a slippery slope. Once you are sharing your voice online, be it through blogging, Twitter, social networks, videos, or other channels, the demands are intense just to keep it going. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, but it’s a commitment.

When your reputation and personal potential are driven by sharing, you do more. So as I just wrote, there can be spiralling demands from content creation.

If you choose to create content, content creation will be your life.

Creating competitive differentiation with Enterprise 2.0

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 effectively is extremely challenging, as many organizations have discovered. However that is precisely why succeeding can create real and lasting competitive differentiation. In fact I believe that the ability to use collaborative technologies to enhance organizational performance will be one of the most critical competences for companies in years to come. This is not least because this ability reflects on the culture and implicit organizational structure far more than it does on technology.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0, providing some of the basic arguments as to why Enterprise 2.0 is a key management issue.

CREATING DIFFERENTIATION

Nicholas Carr’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter created massive controversy and debate by affirming that information technology was now a commodity and no longer provided competitive advantage to companies.

IT Doesn’t Matter, Nicholas Carr, Harvard Business Review, May 2003

Does IT Matter? An IT Debate – Letters to the Editor, Harvard Business Review, June 2003

Since then, numerous articles and research studies have shown that the degree and effectiveness of investment in information technology does drive competitive differentiation within industries.

Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2008

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The Evolution and Key Success Factors of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

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This morning I did the opening keynote at IBM’s Collective Intelligence BusinessSphere conference in Melbourne. It was designed as a brief and punchy opener to provide a big-picture context to what collective intelligence means for organizations and the key success factors.

Below are the slides. As always the slides are intended to provide visual support to my presentation, not to be useful by themselves. However there are a few visuals there that may be of interest even to those who didn’t attend.

Keynote: The Evolution and Key Success Factors of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

View more presentations from rossdawson.

The future IS gaming

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I recently finished reading the techno-thriller Daemon by Daniel Suarez. It is certainly not literature, but it is a fast-paced thriller that I found hard to put down. It posits a world in which a genius who creates online games builds a systems that makes the entire world into what is effectively a game, with an augmented reality interface, and in which individuals earn points for tasks that give them higher ranking.

I have long thought it is inevitable that much of our work and play will take place in what are effectively game environments.

In Jesse Schell‘s presentation at DICE (hattip: Kevin Kelly/The Technium) he gives an array of fantastic ideas about the intersection of reality and gaming. After covering how many games such as Wii, Guitar Hero and Webkinz are bring the real world into games, he goes off (from around 18:00) on a rapid-fire string of suggestions about how every aspect of the world can be made into a game.

It is intriguing that mobile social networking, which I have written about since its early days in 2002, has only taken off when Foursquare made it into a game. As people become more familiar with gaming environments and concepts, it seems natural to bring in gaming aspects to more parts of our life. Dangerous things that way lie, but it is inevitable that games and what we think of as reality will be merged to an extraordinary degree.

[UPDATE:] Tom Foremski says why he thinks this is a scary future.

Keynote on Web 2.0 in the enterprise at IBM Collective Intelligence

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IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference is held each January, bringing together customers of IBM’s enterprise collaboration suite. While many associate Lotus with its long-established product Notes, since the launch of Lotus Connections in 2007 Lotus is centered on Web 2.0 tools such as social networks, mash-ups and micro-blogging. After Lotussphere local events are run in countries around the world, usually dubbed Lotusphere Comes To You.

This year IBM Australia is calling its enterprise collaboration conference Collective Intelligence, running this in 9 cities around the country. In Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra they are dividing the program into technology and business streams. I will be doing the opening keynote for the BusinessSphere stream as below in Sydney and Melbourne, though I will be in Asia at the time of the Canberra event next week.

The event is free to attend for “IBM customers and prospects” – you can register at the website. Maybe see you there!

The evolution and future of Social Networking and Web 2.0 technologies

Web and social technologies, having already had a massive social impact, are now being applied extensively in business and government. Many of the most successful organisations globally are implementing social software and web tools to increase productivity, tap expertise, improve staff engagement and streamline processes.

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