As I was strongly involved in the creation of Communote I enjoy still being connected to the team. However, after finishing my studies I am PhD student, research assistant and lecturer at Chemnitz University of Technology now. The job at the university is highly communicative and full of multi-tasking activities. Naturally my answer to this was: “Let’s use Communote.” Communote is in productive use for several weeks now. Here is how we use it:

Research Group Information Sharing

As in every team context there are several colleagues with similar interests. The field of research is characterised by lots of new stuff every day. Without Communote there was the problem of information sharing. I discovered a great piece of information or have an idea: whom should I send it? The microblogging approach is great to spread the information to all colleagues. And everyone can pick the information she likes and needs. Although our central research microblog only has 6 members I am glad to have tagging and the extended filtering functionality. As we use microblogging not so much for real-time communication like instant messaging but for quick and easy information publishing it is very important to find the knowledge pieces afterwards.

Student Supervision

Microblogging is an outstanding technique for supervision. Communote allows you to create as much microblogs with different participants as you like. So every thesis or student project gets its own microblog with the student and the supervisor as members. In this way the student cannot see the other microblogs (there could be confidential information).

I encourage my students to track their activities in the microblog. I suggest them to write down what they are reading, what chapters they are working on and what new ideas they have. In this way I can help them much faster as in the traditional meetings after several weeks. In addition to this it helps me to participate in the student’s work and understand her working process. Finally, such dissertation microblog is a great help to create a history of the student’s work and your own activities. Or do you know exactly whether you told the student about your citation guidelines three months ago or not?

Special Interests and Projects

Of course you can create microblogs for everything. Writing a new research proposal – microblog. Working out a new website project for the research group – microblog. Documenting the weekly Scrum meetings – microblog. The big advantage of these separated microblogs is the noise reduction due to the topic-centric approach. And in case the research proposal does not work: just end the special microblog. But it is still only one click away if we want to recycle the idea half a year later – and not on page 152 of my Twitter history.

If you have a look at the current sales rank of video game consoles you find a product named “Wii” on the top. This is quite amazing because the Wii is slower as its competitors, it has much less features and the graphic is years behind. The little secret of the Wii is literally little: a ½ foot long controller whose position and angle is detected by the Wii and allows unprecedented ways to navigate in computer games. And that is fun!

Some people designing Terabyte data stores or programming high-end enterprise software will probably tell us that they have nothing in common with this nice after work fun. But maybe they are wrong.
Traditionally the market for video game consoles was focused on power users. Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox competed each other with high-level gaming machines brimming over with power. Nintendo’s Wii just left them behind in doing exactly what is challenging enterprise software today: they broad it to the masses. Nintendo followed the Blue Ocean Strategy. This means that they focused on people who were not the classical target groups of game consoles. This required a design which allowed people to play Wii games without having years of experience in using consoles. And this seems to work.

Though it is even possible to use SAP Systems via your Wii controller it will sure not be the solution for enterprise software redesign. It is the general idea behind the Wii which could be a model for enterprise software: Make it easy. Beyond that it is not a full redesign what has to be done: enterprise software is not easy. But it is the user interface which could get simplified and has to be renewed. Fortunately there is some other innovation that we could use in our domain to enrich the front-end. We are talking about Social Software.

It has been written much about what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and Social Software is. You could fill books with definitions. But the key factor is very simple. Flickr, del.ico.us, Wikipedia & Co. made the user develop from a passive consumer role to an active engagement as co-author of the World Wide Web. This key factor’s name is participation. The rule is easy: Success has who gives power in the hand of his users - power to produce content but also to structure and explore existing content in new, own ways and share them afterwards. Tim O’Reilly says „a platform beats an application every time”.