In response to my article in Forbes on Email Hell, my friend Richard Titus made a spot on comment:This is great. I also employ several email tools (ClearContext, x1) to try and reduce the "occupational spam" that's a critical part of the BBC culture [..]

Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better.  Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can calculate your own cost of meetings. The issue isn't just where you spend your team's time, but how you spend it [..]

This morning Socialtext launched Socialtext 3.0, a trio of applications for connected collaboration with context: Socialtext People - Social networking for the enterprise         Socialtext Workspace - Group-editable wiki for easy, flexible, enterprise-wide collaboration           Socialtext Dashboard - Customizable home pages that let each person           decide where to focus their attention. Socialtext 3.0 delivers connected collaboration with context, both internally within the organization and externally with customers and partners in extranet communities. It is built on a modular and integrated architecture that enables rapid integration with other enterprise systems and makes other enterprise applications social [..]

Monica Hesse of the Washington Post has one of the most interesting and enjoyable reads of the year, Bytes of Life.  Its on the subject of Lifetracking.  Unlike Lifestreaming, its not sharing information, but data.  Using services to collect and capture data about the otherwise mundane, share it, compare it and make sense of it [..]

Michael Idinopolus has a good post exploring the differences and complements of wikis and document management systems....The two activities get confused because document management, like collaboration, involves creation of content by multiple people. For many companies, the DMS is the first tool they implemented that enabled more than one person to touch a single, centrally stored piece of content. And the document management vendors began to capitalize on the opportunity by introducing document-centric team rooms (like Documentum's eRooms, for example.) As a result, many companies began to use the DMS as a collaboration tool. The DMS wasn't very good at it. It required every piece of collaborative content to be saved as a document. Search was cludgy or non-existent, and everything had to be filed in a nested folder structure. But it was better than nothing, or email. Last week I saw first-hand a good example of this phenomenon recently at a major executive search firm. They wanted a way to collaboratively publish questions, comments, slides, bios, etc., and engineered an entire intranet around eRooms. It was cludgy, and adopted primarily by power users who took the time to create a Byzantine taxonomy of folders and sub-folders. All of which brings me back to my meeting with the retail bank. When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials...He goes on to discuss integration and conclude by saying "Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate." Which is obvious unless you are stuck between systems as most people are these days. But something else occurred to me when reading this passage:Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.I've written a lot about how we bend email into everything, and Michael says things need less bending with emails than documents.  But I don't think I've emphasized enough the transition from document-centric to message-centric to people-centric [..]

Last week I was on a panel at Office 2.0 discussing "who owns community?"  Organizational Development was just one topic we explored, and ZDnet has a brief video except.  In this post, let me clarify my comments. Leadership in Distributed Organizations My CEO Eugene Lee was recently an executive at Adobe and Cisco.  The transition over the past year wasn't just from Bigco to Startup.  Half of Socialtext's employees are distributed across four continents.  Eugene recently observed that "in a distributed organization, leadership matters more than management [..]

There is no doubt there are tight times for tech entrepreneurs in the US & UK right now, but there are substantive differences between the current climate and the big bust.  Richard Waters of the Financial Times explores this in his piece Back to Bust?  I'm quoted briefly on how things have changed [..]

Ramon Padilla from Tech Republic picked up on a quote of mine from a Christopher Lynch interview:“(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.â€�In Ramon's article he explores how did we get here and why has it happened.  Here are the headlines of the five points he explores. Making it up as we go along. Not enforcing business processes. Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs. Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms. Lack of communication alternative besides e-mail. If you would like to learn more about this issue, please help me by voting on Fast Company's The Killer Pitch for this story: Most people don't dispute that they suffer from email overload. A recent report from Basex in the NYTimes revealed that people spend 28% of their day interrupted by things like unnecessary email. However, what we do about our overload is a source of much debate. Socialtext has connected the dots between a few reports to discover that a great deal of our email comes from handling exceptions. Because business processes don't have a system to translate them into practice, we spend more than a quarter of our day emailing about the exceptions to the business process rules. Worse than the volume of email is the amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker, to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650 billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions. And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010. Socialtext has been building out business practice support using their customizable Enterprise 2.0 platform to return email back to its rightful place in the communication stratigraphy,  which is not as the catch-all for exception handling. Their business social software makes the process more productive, reducing email by 30%. With the growth in the remote workforce, global coverage, proliferation of mobile devices, and social technologies; collaboration is the solution to improve the effectiveness of communication and address these forces.Personally, I think we should win because our pitch uses the word stratigraphy.

The New York Times has an article about the U.S. State Department's Diplopedia.  Eric M. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy shared his learnings during the Wikimania conference in Egypt (video accessible if you use Internet Explorer, sigh) [..]

J’ai publié un article sur les 4 ans d’XPertNet sur le blog d’XWiki. L’organisation de l’augmentation de capital, de l’équipe et le business m’ont beaucoup occupé ces temps ci, ce qui ne me fait blogger qu’occasionnelement. Mais je ...

Eh oui, aujourd’hui l’entreprise Coopératique fête son anniversaire. Trois ans, et même 4 si l’on compte à partir de la création du blog ! L’occasion de revenir sur ce qui a changé durant cette période. En 2004, ma motivation pour créer le blog était de comprendre mon sujet d’investigation, les wikis, en pratiquant les usages participatifs [...]

Larry Irons digs ups some old research to show that distributed collaboration isn't just about getting your team on the same page.  But figuring out who the team is in the first place.Those advocating Enterprise 2.0, especially wikis, may consider the benefits described back in 2002 by Mortensen and Hinds obvious [..]

Evan Prodromou, one of the better citizens of the wiki community and founder of WikiTravel, launched Identi.ca today.  Its a Twitter clone that is also distributed as Open Source licensed software.  I've been playing with it in semi-private beta. Its made Dave Winer's day and Jevon is Canadian [..]

Alexander Wolfe of Wolfe's Den on Information Week posted a video on Socialtext Turns Wiki into a Killer Web Platform, including footage of me demoing the latest stuff on the tradeshow floor of Enterprise 2.0:

Yesterday at Supernova's Liquid Conversations panel I asked what people were doing to make a better and more usable user experience across tools.  There wasn't much of an answer.  Today, UniversalEditButton.org was launched.  Pete Kaminksi, my co-founder and CTO blogged about it: [..]

I'm at my favorite conference today, Supernova.  At the first one we were inspired to found Socialtext.  Instead of going to the VC or consumer web panels, I thought I'd learn a bit about a Berkman project.  Here's an impressionary transcript [..]