The story of Common Craft - in Plain English No comments yet

ReadWriteWeb have re-posted a very interesting account of the Common Craft story. The following is an abstract:

Five years ago Lee LeFever was an online community manager for a B2B healthcare company called Solucient. Today, his voice has been heard by millions of people around the world, making strange new applications feel easy to use and offering some of the clearest explanations of how the Internet is changing.

LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one.

He’s gone from social media consulting to co-producing the wildly popular “…In Plain English” video series. Common Craft’s videos have been translated into scores of other languages and landed the company big jobs making custom videos for companies like Google, LinkedIn and MeetUp. Now Lee and his wife Sachi LeFever are making another major work transition. They’ve stopped producing custom videos for clients and have found an interesting new business model.

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they’ve been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There’s certainly no DRM involved. “People want to do the right thing if they know the rules,” Lee LeFever says. “Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We’re lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible.”

It’s great to hear that Common Craft have turned what was once an interesting hobby into a  successful business model and I’m sure their back catalogue of ‘PLain English’ videos will continue to help and inspire all of those grappling with the complexities of social computing.

The Twitter 100 1 comment

I came across this potentially useful compilation of the 100 most popular sites mashing up and remixing Twitter, as measured by the number of bookmarks at Del.icio.us. Thanks to the Museum of Modern Betas Labs for this list.

• twitter (13092)

1. twittervision (4194 overall)
2. twitterfeed (3557 overall)
3. twhirl (3149 overall)
4. twistori (2589 overall)
5. tweetscan (2567 overall)
6. twitter-search (2198 overall)
7. tweetdeck (1977 overall)
8. twitpic (1967 overall)
9. hellotxt (1895 overall)
10. twitterrific (1692 overall)
11. twitterholic (1421 overall)
12. tweetstats (1356 overall)
13. quotably (1337 overall)
14. twellow (1265 overall)
15. twitscoop (1261 overall)
16. twitturly (1253 overall)
17. twitterlocal (1249 overall)
18. twubble (1192 overall)
19. twittearth (1155 overall)
20. monitter (1142 overall)
21. grouptweet (1133 overall)
22. twitter-grader (1115 overall)
23. twitbin (1082 overall)
24. hashtags (1073 overall)
25. tweetburner (1066 overall)
26. terraminds-twitter-search (969 overall)
27. tweetvolume (907 overall)
28. twittercounter (890 overall)
29. twist (880 overall)
30. twitthis (861 overall)
31. qwitter (849 overall)
32. tweetlater (815 overall)
33. twitter-karma (786 overall)
34. xpenser (777 overall)
35. twemes (772 overall)
36. twittermail (767 overall)
37. twitdir (763 overall)
38. tweetbeep (755 overall)
39. twitxr (751 overall)
40. twitterfox (745 overall)
41. friendorfollow (696 overall)
42. hahlo (664 overall)
43. botanicalls-twitter-diy (632 overall)
44. tweetmeme (631 overall)
45. tweetwheel (618 overall)
46. twittersnooze (602 overall)
47. snitter (593 overall)
48. twittercal (583 overall)
49. remember-the-milk-for-twitter (577 overall)
50. twuffer (566 overall)
51. strawpollnow (555 overall)
52. twitterpatterns (552 overall)
53. twinfluence (552 overall)
54. twitterfone (538 overall)
55. tweetr (517 overall)
56. election.twitter (508 overall)
57. whoshouldifollow (496 overall)
58. tweetclouds (493 overall)
59. pockettweets (490 overall)
60. favrd (490 overall)
61. twitterverse (467 overall)
62. twittermap (456 overall)
63. twitterposter (452 overall)
64. twistory (448 overall)
65. peoplebrowsr (442 overall)
66. cursebird (441 overall)
67. loudtwitter (421 overall)
68. mrtweet (418 overall)
69. colorwar2008 (408 overall)
70. twitteroo (405 overall)
71. twitter100 (403 overall)
72. spaz (399 overall)
73. tweetag (389 overall)
74. twitbacks (387 overall)
75. twilert (383 overall)
76. fuelfrog (383 overall)
77. twitter-blocks (380 overall)
78. tweetake (378 overall)
79. tweeterboard (376 overall)
80. be-a-magpie (369 overall)
81. twerpscan (367 overall)
82. twittergram (366 overall)
83. matt (365 overall)
84. twitternotes (359 overall)
85. twitter-friends-network-browser (359 overall)
86. twitlinks (359 overall)
87. tweetrush (355 overall)
88. twitterblacklist (350 overall)
89. twitku (348 overall)
90. foodfeed (330 overall)
91. tweetgrid (325 overall)
92. mytweeple (321 overall)
93. twitter-charts (316 overall)
94. spy (314 overall)
95. trackthis (313 overall)
96. twittersearch (308 overall)
97. politweets (306 overall)
98. tweet-cube (301 overall)
99. phweet (301 overall)
100. tweetwasters (297 overall)

Further reading:

• Twitter Blog
• Twitter Fan Wiki
• twtooltrack

Personalising your social web should be a personal choice. 6 comments

I’ve just picked up on (yet) another Twitter app called TwitchBoard. Twitchboard watches your Twitter-stream and notices anytime you post a url, and automatically sends the link to your Del.icio.us account. It represents the emerging class of cloud agents that are supposed to help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly.  Others in this genre include Friendfeed, Stumble! and Digg (to name just a few).

I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble!  These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness (though happy for other to use my Friendfeed if this is what they want to do!)

I accept that our social networking connections are getting ever more dense and the data we’re working with is growing too big for ordinary mortals to handle manually. We need help in organising our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations and any applications or agents that can do some of the heavy data lifting for us while allowing us to focus on the meanings and relevance of content are to be welcomed. But ultimate control of our own personalised social web must - in my opinion - be juts that - a personal choice.

Communities of Practice in the Public Sector 1 comment

Online Information 2008

The slides from my presentation at the Online Information Conference have been posted to the conference website.

The presentation covered the following key points:

1. How social media tools (wikis, blogs etc.) and Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate more effective networking and collaboration across the public sector.
2. How virtual CoPs are delivering innovation and improvement to local government services.
3. What does a successful CoP look like and how is success measured?
4. Lesson learnt from the project.

I’m happy to answer any queries about this project or the slides.

Bookmarks for December 9th through December 14th 1 comment

These are my links for December 9th through December 14th:

• Community Toolbox - Bringing Solutions to Light - The Community Tool Box is the world's largest resource for free information on essential skills for building healthy communities. It offers more than 7,000 pages of practical guidance in creating change and improvement, and is growing as a global resource for this work.
• 19 Handy Twitter Mashups and Tools | Design And Marketing Blog - Houston Web Design - Search & Social Media Marketing - Twitter mashups and tools put a unique spin on the way we use Twitter. By “mashing” information from Twitter with other applications, you get an unmatchable user experience that can be both fun and useful. Enjoy these top 19 Twitter mashups.
• Is social media becoming a social mess? - Lately this is how social media has felt like. From both as a blogger and as a consumer. Services that are suppose to make things easier only seem to be muddying the waters. Distractions become almost the norm as we flit from one service to another and then try and pull them altogether with some sort of aggregator.

  There is this underlying pressure to be a part of conversations, to create new conversations. It wasn’t so hard when all we had to do was remember what blogs we might have left comments on. Now though our blog comments are being spread all over with services like Disqus or IntenseDebate; which are then pulled in - or not pulled into - aggregrators like FriendFeed or Strands

• Anecdote - Whitepapers - Building a collaborative workplace - Today we face an entirely new environment for innovation and getting things done. The days of the lone genius quietly toiling away in pursuit of that Eureka moment to revolutionise an industry are all but over. We are now in the days of asking and listening to our customers and working with them in our innovation cycles. Innovation demands collaboration. So does production. In the past we could focus on a single task in an assembly-line fashion, handing our completed activity to the next person who would in turn do the same, until the job was finished. Now the jobs change fast, requiring learning new skills rather than merely repeating the old. We have to seek out people who have other pieces of the puzzle and work with them to tackle increasingly complex issues at a much faster pace.
• Net Gen Nonsense - Two British researchers have just completed a study of undergraduate students that found "many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially-networked technologically-fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning." Instead, the study found that students use a limited range of technologies for both formal and informal learning and that there is a "very low level of use and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools such as wikis, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies."

Bookmarks for December 7th through December 8th No comments yet

These are my links for December 7th through December 8th:

• What's going on here then? | StreetWire (beta) - Welcome to StreetWire (beta) where you can find out what’s going on near you. From gigs and blog posts, to planning applications and missing kittens.
• Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious? - ReadWriteWeb - Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as "Facebook on sites all around the web," enters general availability today and we've got one big question - should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to authenticate and learn about their users? Will Facebook become a dominant identifier online? Will the OpenID community lose out to the company's proprietary system or will this challenge breathe new life into the movement for open source, standards based, federated user identity?
• Ten leading platforms for creating online communities | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com - Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.
• Twitter Groups - Who said that Twitter needs to have Groups?
  Now you can create your own Group tag and invite your friends on Twitter to join you. Expand your Twitter experience by sharing links and allowing other to follow you and join your group.

  Create a new Group or Join an existing group. Follow people with the same interests as you. Find new people to follow. Let people follow you. Share your favorite website links.

• Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope - research results - Social Computing Lab, HP Labs - Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Twitter under the microscope 1 comment

An interesting study by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu over at HP on the social interactions within Twitter. To quote from the preamble:

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Key points from the report:

1. A ‘friend’ is loosley defined as anyone the user has directed at least two posts (tweets) to.
2. They conjecture that users who receive attention from many people will post more often than users who receive little attention.
3. Users with more followers and friends will be more active than those with a small number of followers and friends.
4. There are two different networks: a dense one made up followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of friends.
5. The number of friends is the actual driver of the user’s activity and not the number of followers.
6. Users with many followers post updates less frequently than those with few followers.

The full report is available at the HP website link above, or can be downloaded here.

Bookmarks for November 27th through December 4th No comments yet

These are my links for November 27th through December 4th:

• 100+ More Ways to Organize Your Life - Last year we featured over 100 web applications to organize every aspect of your life, from your belongings to your social calendar, and more. Since then, many have been significantly improved and lots of new apps have been released.

  From basic to do lists to event planning, fitness, educational organizers, and more, here are 100 new applications to get you even more organized.

• 30 Alternative Tools To Twitter Search And Tracking Memes On Twitter | Smart Advi$e.info - 30 Alternative Tools To Twitter Search And Tracking Memes On Twitter. If you are as disappointed (annoyed) about twitter search as me, here are 30 alternatives to twitter search and to track memes on twitter
• Wikipatterns - Wiki Patterns - Want to grow from 10 users to 100, or 1000? Applying patterns that help coordinate people's efforts and guide the growth of content, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give your wiki the greatest chance of success.

  Wikipatterns.com is a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption. It's also a wiki, which means you can help build the information based on your experiences!

• White Label Social Networking Software - A list of white label social networking software. Software available for you to launch your own social network today.
• Imaginatik - Idea Management, Innovation Management software, open innovation and collaborative innovation - Imaginatik is the leading vendor of Innovation and Idea Management technology and services. With over ten years experience, spanning over 300 clients, we offer our customers unrivalled insights and technology expertise to support their innovation initiatives.

  The old adage 'a fool with a tool is still a fool' applies for Innovation Management software as for any people-driven technology solution. Our ongoing research commitment allows us to incorporate leading-edge insights into our approach, and our large client base gives us a real-life testing ground for new features and business methods. We have the resources and expertise to help clients design and successfully implement their programs, from simplistic systems to advanced Ideas-to-Cash environments.

Clay Shirky - learn from stories and not lists of best practices 1 comment

David Wilcox over at Socialreporter has managed to grab a few minutes of air time from Clay Shirky - author of Here Comes Everybody - at the Online Information 2008 event.  David asked Clay what would be the best way to investigate how Web 2.0 technologies bring real change? Clay suggested that the best way to find what works might be to look at what hasn’t … and go for stories rather than lists of “best practices”.

There’s an interesting paradigm here that needs to be applied to traditional knowledge management techniques. A storytelling approach is a far more engaging way of learning than trawling through the standard knowledge repositories of best practice, good practice and case studies. Whenever I encounter a website with a ‘knowledge library’, I know what to expect - ranks of similar looking text-filled templates with enumerated lists of do’s and don’ts. How much better to have a rich multimedia narrative, and is it not true that we tend to remember the things that didn’t work better then the things that did? Hearing about the mistakes that others have made is a powerful learning process.  Reading volumes of success stories is tedium personified.

It’s about time the millions of knowledge repositories hauled themselves into the 21st century and started to think about how to keep knowledge fresh and dynamic and not just a catalogue of increasingly irrelevant case studies. The traditional ‘knowledge repository’, managed, maintained and protected by Librarians, is a place where knowledge goes to die and is becoming increasingly irrelevant in a fast changing world. We have the (Web 2.0) tools to keep knowledge fresh, relevant and engaging. Let’s use them to redesign and rethink what a ‘knowledge repository’ or ‘knowledge library’ should look like.

Communities of Practice in Local Government No comments yet

I was interviewed recently by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) about the work I’ve been doing for them in developing Communities of Practice (CoPs) to support efficiency improvements and knowledge sharing in the local government sector in the UK. The original article was published on the IDeA’s Knowledge website, and is reproduced here.  The technology platform for suppoting these virtual communities was launched in December 2007, and currently supports over 20,000 registered users and over 580 CoPs, dealing with issues from ‘Healthy Communities’ to ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (and much much more).

Steve Dale is the Associate Consultant for the Improvement and Development Agency’s community of practice (CoP) platform. He talks to Juno Baker about the work he is doing to promote knowledge management and CoPs in local government.

“Life is an opportunity to learn from the moment you’re born right until, well hopefully, the moment you die.”

Steve Dale is talking about knowledge management (KM) and the work he is doing to promote KM tools and techniques in local government.

Dale started his career in anti-submarine warfare for the Royal Navy, which he describes as “not a very friendly way of learning about technology”. But after 17 years at Reuters looking after stock-exchange feeds, he set up his own company. He was still focusing on how to organise data but then discovered a fascination for how people use and look for information and knowledge.

“I found I was far more interested in the softer side of things - the people and the issues that they were facing - than I was in the process-driven side.”

In 2005 Dale came to the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) to develop a three-year KM strategy for local government.

CoPs and websites

The agency already had the Knowledge website publishing case studies for councils to share good practice. But, as Dale explains, communities of practice (CoPs) perform a different function.

“You’ve got a reputational risk behind [a website] so you make sure that everything that you’re publishing for public consumption has been properly vetted, [and is] accurate, in the right format and accessible.”

He describes a CoP as a “semi-informal network of people having conversations”. He says they encourage information sharing and communication and are part of a more rigorous process to discover knowledge.

“All of that is unofficial and the community itself believes it’s unofficial… CoPs are unofficial, unvalidated - there might be a whole host of lies going on in there!”

He is of course being facetious. Users of the many CoPs on the IDeA’s platform cite countless benefits of membership, including saving time and money, help and support, and learning from others’ experience.

Dale also wants to clear up any confusion about the part CoPs play in knowledge management.

“They’re all the same thing, the same continuum. Things like peer assists, and after-action reviews and a whole host of other tools and facilities can be used by CoPs to encourage information flow and knowledge sharing.”

In the same way, he says, CoPs can be part of any knowledge management strategy, adding that he doesn’t like the term, ‘knowledge management’.

“To me knowledge management is nothing secret, it’s not smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, all it is is a process for learning and sharing”

Technology in our time

Dale compares the technological changes of the last 20 years with the invention of printing. He believes that the internet - and particularly web 2.0 - are affecting the way we work as dramatically as Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type. He talks about opportunities for people to self-publish, to write blogs - he himself writes two. He says the changes are developing so rapidly that there is confusion about how to manage it all.

“On one end of the spectrum you’ve got people who are still into the control processes. ‘Staff can only see this, we can’t trust them to go out and look at these other websites. They’re going to be wasting their time if they do all this.’ At the other end of the spectrum we’ve got more enlightened managers who see the opportunities.”

Dale worries that the first type of manager might put off young talent from joining the local government workforce.

“People who have just left university are used to working with all of these tools. You’re trying to attract the best of these graduates. If you say to them, ‘You can’t do any of that, you’ve got a locked-down pc. You can only access these sites and this is your work’, then they’ll leave and go somewhere else that does have an open environment.”

Working with the sector

Dale says that councils’ feedback on the CoPs has been “generally very positive”. But he would like more engagement from the sector.

“If there isn’t a community out there of any interest to the people then we’ve made it very simple for them to create one.”

He also talks about the IDeA’s role, saying there are two things the agency needs to do. First, make sure people understand the benefits of working this way, and secondly provide all of the necessary support to make the CoPs work

“There are about two million people working in local government and I’d like to see a good hundred thousand being fully represented.”

So what does he say to people who say they haven’t got time to be in a community of practice? Dale recalls a recent conversation with someone else about this.

“She was the leader or facilitator of this CoP and she hadn’t got time to be in it. Her job was directly related to this community so my response was: ‘If it’s something to do with your job, what you’re doing in there is actually part of your job. And when you’re not in there you’re potentially doing something frivolous. As a facilitator you need to keep in touch with your community and not an occasional observer.’”

Article published in November 2008.