Cathexis

Virtual World Conference: The Intel User Community Case Study

A small gem at the Virtual World Conference last week was Paul Steinberg’s presentation of the genesis and launch of the Intel user community in Second Life. Humorous and helpful, Paul, of Intel's Software Solutions Group, readily shared the peaks and valleys of getting an online user community going in a virtual world.

Like all good online user communities it starts with a good vision, and as Paul articulated “What Intel should be doing is convincing the public that they are the real artists of society by going into details of what actually is involved in creating a new microprosscor, ….”

With executive blessing and a committed resource, the Intel project went through a couple of learning curves. The first was getting the right “look and feel” of the Second Life location. Initial design points from external designers ranged from something out of a 1950s Sci Fi flick, to a large confectionary concoction run amok.  But the once the clean and open space was designed, then the project was launched last spring, (two launches to ensure global time zone coverage).

Here’s some observations from Paul.

On the virtual locale: Focus on interaction and community, not cluttered look and feel.

Keep cool: Initial skepticism from some participants, voiced in the blogosphere, should be acknowledged but not over-reacted to. The community settles in pretty quickly. Especially if the mission of the community is clear and above board. 

Not just outreach, but in-reach: Once the project started, all sorts of internal Intel connections also emerged, creating a whole new network of people with new connections not formerly apparent through the usual forms of corporate communications. Internal participants were truly cross-functional not just engineers, but marketers, many of whom were already on Second Life or other virtual worlds that the Paul didn’t know existed.

Virtual Worlds are optimum for interaction and engagement. Don’t over develop content for a venue like Second Life.  Websites are good for that. The Intel venue is now hosting a calendar of regular events for the next quarter; at least 2-3 month. He also described a coding contest for customized bots that was very successful and turned into an all-day event.

Stay true to your community: In Intel's case it means reaching out to technical people on technical terms and not do marketing.  Some of the presentations Intel organizes are by noted technologists external to the company.

Keep the corporate PR people (politely) at bay. Dialogues in a user community will range from positive to negative, but it should be able to play out within the community without too much intervention.

In short, the Intel community Second Life presence has a clear mission, keeps its focus on a technical community, emphasizes interaction and engagement, and with Paul’s willingness to experiment and evaluate, evolves with the needs of the community, both internal and external to Intel. Cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting to Collaboration – Virtually and in 3D

3D applications and virtual worlds are moving dramatically into the enterprise and not just in the realm of e-learning.  Virtual worlds can enhance collaborative work inside the enterprise and deliver value to customers in the marketplace.

This week, I attended the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, and  Wednesday’s  enterprise panel on “Applications That Work” , moderated by Linda Ban of IBM’s 3D Internet and Digital Convergence group, assured the audience that the enterprise virtual world was not synonymous with Second Life.  Business needs for virtual private worlds with security and access control were acknowledged.

There’s a tendency to use the terms virtual worlds and 3D applications interchangeably. 3D applications are often employed to do group exercises and practice (i.e., disaster and emergency responder scenarios, visually rich training experience on complex tools and instruments).

Virtual worlds are 3D, visually immersive collaborative environments, with strong elements of online social networks to foster interactivity and informal learning, and often in a way that is persistent and sustained beyond a vocational training session.

Virtual world communities of interest and interaction can be part of a spectrum of tools to enable distributed project management. Teams in a virtual world, meeting in a 3D project or situation room,  readily access  unified communications mechanisms (IM, VoiP, Chat), or and can integrate document and application sharing functions into the 3D experience.   

Proton Media’s initial core competency in e-learning has evolved to include, ProtoSphere, a 3D environment for project collaboration and informal learning.  A hosted or on-premise offering, depending on the customer’s preference, Protosphere’s live, virtual 3D world, also has social networking and collaborative tools such as blogs and wikis, simulation capabilities, VoIP and text chat.

VT&T’s capability wasn’t 3D, per se, but a 2D representation of a meeting room, with whiteboards and screens for application and document sharing, a “file cabinet” in the corner, that contained all the team’s project artifacts (documents, project plans). VT&T’s strength was in its robust integration with typical corporate communications and applications environments, making the  project room an easy extension of existing infrastructure

While Multiverse’ platform play is primarily focused on the online game and 3D Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) it’s capability is readily used for non-game virtual worlds. Their customer, Accelerate was demonstrating a virtual employee “on-boarding” application where a new employee receives their initial orientation.

IBM had a strong presence at this conference, with a large booth, and presenting or moderating several panels.   According to Wayne Smith, a consulting specialist with the 3D group, IBM is very active in helping customers identify the right virtual world technology for use internally and for customer engagement.

 

*Second Life Brand Map

Wayne demonstrated the Deutsche Bank presence on Second Life, where DB engages their customers in visualizing some of their real-world goals and then develop a financial plan to realize those goals.  Deutsche Bank, according to Smith, has kiosks in their brick-and-mortar settings for customers to access the Second Life-delivered services.

It was a fascinating two days.  More observations and summary on the way.

 

 

Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose

And Now for Something Completely Virtually Different

 

This week I will be attending the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose, reporting on the event and exhibits. Readers of my blog will know that I’ve been keenly interested the collaborative enterprise, which indeed, is the title of an important new book by Charles Heckscher of the Rutgers University,  Center for Workplace Transformation   (The Collaborative Enterprise: Managing Speed and Complexity in Knowledge-Based Businesses, Yale UP).  The collaborative enterprise, according to Heckscher, is an emerging organizational form, in an evolutionary line from the days of the guild and crafts association, through simple bureaucracy of the 19th century to 20th century paternalistic decentralized bureaucracy to the era of the emerging collaborative enterprise.

While my attention will be focused at conference on the Virtual Worlds for the Enterprise track, there's sessions on technology, business and strategy, community, and of course, entertainment and marketing. 

As Susan Wu has noted in a Worlds in Motion interview, “all social interaction online will be driven by game mechanics.”   Until recently the worlds of gaming and online collaboration have been moving relatively separate spheres. Susan’s work at Charles Rivers Ventures  focuses on finding the companies who are at the nexus of social networking and gaming.

Virtual World conference sessions focusing on the enterprise will explore the kinds of applications that work best for the enterprise, and platforms that are appropriate for enterprise use, evaluated along the BEST guidelines (Business, Economic Value, Social Interaction and Technology).

See you there.

Creative Coffee Club Launch - Palo Alto

In September, a UK colleague, Toby Moores, launched the Creative Coffee Club in two venues, one in London and one in Leicester (Toby is a visiting professors a DeMontfort University there: see prior blog post).

Toby and I have been having virtual discussions about innovation and creativity for the last year, since the first Office 2.0 conference, over Skype in the intervening months into this year's conference.  I've been blogging and musing on the topic, but Toby recently waxed eloquent on the topc, so here's some comments from him.

At Office 2.0 I proposed CCC as an example of a new breed of infrastructure (in the roads, rail and web sense of the word). The creative tragedy of the commons is that it is easier NOT to create within enterprise, and NOT to share between enterprises. For me this club has a business purpose for its members (including academia) in that it is a creative and conversational sandbox away from the constraints of measurement and results. It is also a regular, osmotic exposure to the wider creative process. This supports, but is far more powerful than, a conference, off-site or 3 day workshop.

Creativity needs to be a habit.

 

As we have discussed before, flipchart tearsheets go to die in handbag hell and most of the learnings die with them. Creativity needs to be part of the rhythm of our lives. CCC wouldn't exist without social software to drive it but we have demonstrated a great deal of pent up demand for this meetup in just five days. I'd like to push this thinking out to the Irregulars and similar groups. I am pleased to see that many of them have joined up already but I'd like to capitalise on their curiosity. This will work because the word is spread by respected, connected individuals. I'd like to start moving from awareness to advocacy across our networks."

The first Palo Alto CCC will meet at the Coupa Cafe at 538 Ramona St. (Wireless access included with your cup of java) from 10 am - noon.  At 11 am, we will connect to the Wiki Wednesday group in London since many of those participants are also in the London CCC.  The idea is to convene these sessions bi-weekly and as Toby says, support the notion of "creativity as habit."

This creativity notion is not confined to high tech, but we hope to get creative arts, academics, government, into the conversation. 

So what makes you creative?  How do you innovate?

Creative Coffee Club on Facebook

Creative Coffee Club Blogtronix Site

Catching Up with Quechup

This week's Internet irritant:  Quechup.  Several of my friends and colleagues have recently sent me a request their social network called Quechup  It turns out that Quechup is a spam engine posing as a new social network (SNAM anyone?).

Here's how it works. 

An individual receives an email from someone they trust, and an invitation to sign up and check out the offering.  In a couple of days, Quechup sends out SPAM to the users entire address book.   I've received a number of humbly apologetic emails from colleagues who express regret that they and perhaps I, have been duped.

It's the effect of having one's Internet pocket picked, and having unwitttingly made available the location of all your friends' pockets as well.

A colleague of mine, Martin Cleaver of Toronto, posted this on his blog this morning from San Francisco on his way out of town from the Office 2.0 conference.  He  has thoughtfully tracked down the parent company of the Quechup foil via the domain registry and here is his post on the background of the company he managed to turn up.

On Martin's blog, you will also find the name of the company , Idate Corporation, and the various email addresses where you can inquire about the names of the company's management team, their so-called privacy policy and the like.

I seem to recall that in Colonial times in the U.S., miscreants were obliged to spend the day in the stocks in the public square.  I'm sure given the blogosphere, the public outcry will stifle this behavior quickly.

Office 2.0 - Mind Mapping Panel

Tomorrow is the kickoff for the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco at the St. Regis Hotel. Ideas and live projects will abound on the future of work, the impact of Web 2.0 in education (Classroom 2.0) mobility and productivity, and how to unleash and foster creativity.

I’m pleased to be moderating a panel on Mind Mapping and Collaboration, with guest panelists Lisa Arthur of MindJet, Michael Hollauf of Mindmeister, Jonathan Sapir of SnapXT, Keith Patterson of Itensil, and Martin Cleaver of Blended Perspectives.

I’ve used mind mapping as a planning and collaboration tool for several years now. In my work in high technology, I tend to work with people whose stock in trade is either the written word or program coding. When one gets a room full of people together in a room to work on a project with those skill sets making up the predominant tool kit, the model of thinking tends to get fairly focused and linear fairly quickly.

The Mind Mapping panel will take up perspectives on the impact of visual tools such as mapping to aid a group towards collaborative efforts and promoting relational and big picture thinking as part of “thinking through” a problem rather than “diving in” quickly.

My colleagues and I will discuss mind mapping, Web 2.0 and mapping, and mapping as an element in a spectrum of collaborative work processes. As I mentioned in a recent blog post about my conversations with Toby Moores, collaborative efforts need a variety of mechanisms to get from the “initial first thought to the final finished product”.

I’m excited about bringing this topic of mapping to the subject of collaboration and the enterprise. This year’s conference is sure to surpass last year’s in high energy, latest thought, and live lab experiments.

iPhone: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Actually

As I posted on the Office 2.0 Conference community the other day, it took me 45 minutes to set up and activate my new iPhone. Thirty minutes of that set up time was spent trying to pry the darn thing from my two teenage daughters’  hands.

One of the major themes of this year’s splendiferous Office 2.0 conference is Mobility and Productivity, and Mr. Jobs obliged by having the iPhone manufactured and released by late June. Our peripatetic conference producer and wunderkind Ismael Ghalimi said “aha” and so everyone at the conference, if they don’t already have the device will get one: It’s their conference packet. No more paper please, no more conference totes to hold your chotchka’s. 

Calling it an iPhone is the marketing ploy to fix all other cell phone providers in the cross-hairs. It’s THE portable internet device. My contacts were synched in 30 seconds, my phone account established in a matter of minutes. Here, after 48 hours is my short list of benefits. No, I didn’t pry it apart to see how I could hack it. I have been waiting for years for something to help me get through my very complicated day.   Pay attention Apple marketing focus groups. This is a high tech, working mom version.

1. Family Calm: Keeps my fidgety, teenage daughter quiet while we’re in a traffic jam. I hand her my iPhone “Chill out and watch You Tube.”

2. Fashion Advice: Check the 10-day weather outlook. What’s the temp going to be like in SF during the conf? Sweater Advisory.

3. Calendar: Client appts. Dentist appts., you name it;  no paper, and no spinning up the laptop.

4. Book tickets: A quick trip to SoCal over the weekend. Safari, Orbitz, I’m done.

Next week, at Office 2.0, the iPhone will be put to a great collective experiment. All of us will have the phone, a Etelos-built conference application will keep us together, video feeds of conf. activities will be available. How do we work? Interactively, connected to the net at all times, and therefore connected to one another.  They call it an iPhone. The Important letter in that concept is “I” .

Office 2.0 and Creativity - Meet Toby Moore

Toby Moore is one of those people who can sustain a conversation across time and distance, not-withstanding the Web, and can get into “collaborative” mode at the drop of a hat. Last week we talked at the Left Bank during an interim moment for him between flights from the U.K., to L.A., to San Francisco, onto Canada and home again.

Despite a hectic travel schedule, we picked up where we had left off in person about 8 months ago (with plenty of Skype conversations in between). The topic, as usual was the process of nurturing a collaborative process from initial first thought (IFT) to final finished product (FFP). (We Love Acronyms!)

Toby and his team at Sleepydog in the U.K. produce game software for Sony. But he is also, along with Howard Rheingold, a visiting professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies DeMontfort University in Leicester, facilitating cross-disciplinary creative projects among academic specialists. DeMontfort is an institution that has specialties in the creative professions.  The Web, he says, and new modes of production are changing the classic design-to-final-finished product process to design for “hackability” or “mixability.”

In our conversation at the Left Bank, we expanded our “back of the napkin” architecture for collaboration, this version incorporating more visualization and social networking elements than our last hand-drawing.   We bemoaned the continuing issues around "HITL" or "human-intervention-transport-layer." which means we need some sort of flow and context-switching services between the conversational and visualization process to definition via wiki tools to full fledged project/production tools.  If only I could scan that napkin onto the web, we'd be zillionaires.

Last year, Toby was an attendee at the first Office 2.0 conference. He and I kibbitzed on the sidelines during the 2006 conference. We were excited about all the new technology we saw, but we agreed:  there needed to be more about the human experience of collaboration at future conferences. Well this year, Toby gets his wish. At Office 2.0 in San Francisco, he’ll be on a panel, moderated by Jevon McDonald, discussing ‘one year later’ experiences with his work with DeMontfort University.

Toby is a consummate creative catalyzer. After his participation at Office 2.0, he’s back in the U.K., launching a creative “open coffee club” for people in the creative professions, and in October, the first European Machinima conference in the U.K. 

 

 

 

 

Money and Mouth: Now in Same Location

I’ve been working on large, complex, high technology projects in Silicon Valley for a couple of decades. To me, there’s nothing worse than watching a room full of bright, deeply educated and professional people fumble through a project as they struggle with paltry mechanisms to capture their insight, experience, world views, and personal networks and leverage all those “intangibles” into tangible productivity for the marketplace.

Sometimes those teams are hamstrung by form-fitting to yesterday’s technology. Sometimes form-fitting to command and control models rather than collaborative forms of interaction.

How we transition the nature of productive work is both about changing the modes and models of work as well as the tools .  

To making those transitions we need to experiment, meet, exchange, foster, promote, explore, review follies, celebrate achievements, mark milestones, send specifications back to development, journal our discoveries.

It’s perhaps no accident that the Office 2.0 Conference and Silicon Valley are situated along both geographic and mental fault-lines of tectonic movement;  disruption and exploration happens along lines where worlds collide. Office 2.0 is a live-lab, showcase, cross-roads, expose of what’s happening and what’s possible with pointers to what’s next.

I’m most excited about how the technology and tools get into peoples hands and expand their value and footprint.  So, I decided to put my money where my mouth, or blogs posts, reside, and have jumped on board with the Office 2.0 team to craft the Enterprise and Collaboration track of the Office 2.0 conference.

The good news; I get to collaborate with Susan Scrupski     Jevon Mcdonald,  and the ceaselessly energetic Ismael Ghalimi. Our goal; to put together a set of “user" (a word I dislike) or Web practitioner and implementor panels to tell real stories of what happens when you have the right tools and environment to collaborate.  Panel we intend will encompass technology and culture changes.

So we’ll be bringing together pundits and curmudgeons, early explorers with their tales of penetrating old models and exploring the right value points with new models. It’s about, collaboration within the enterprise, collaboration without, collaboration on-the-go, collaboration and visualization.  So…come and see for yourself…and pick up your iPhone when you do.

 

Office 2.0 Conference - The iPhone and You!*

*Or – “Aren’t you glad you didn’t stand in line all night in June?”

Last year at the inaugural Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, attendees received an iPod as their virtual conference brochure…All speaker bios and conference schedule were pre-loaded on the iPods.

Now, this year’s Office 2.0 conference is coming out of the gate with the iPhone for this year’s attendees. Yes, you read it right. If you’re an attendee the iPhone will be your conference badge, your business card exchange, your window on demos,….you get the picture.

Ismael Ghalimi, conference producer and CEO of Intalio, just announced it today in his blog, IT|Redux. 

Office 2.0 is a conference cum live lab and experiment, and this year’s event will focus on bringing users and implementers to the panels, with two forum tracks on Collaboration in the Enterprise and Mobility and  Productivity, as well as  two demo tracks. And yes, while it’s great to exemplify virtual collaboration, there are moments when face to face interaction is warranted….Mark your calendars for September 3-5 in San Francisco, and whether you have an iPhone already or not…Be There.