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”.
Cem Basman organises Europe’s first Microblogging Conference mbc09. It takes place on 23/24 January in Hamburg. I am looking forward to meet many of my virtual contacts from Twitter there for real for the first time
I will be there in my function as team member of Communote. We are going to hold a presentation about our enterprise microblogging tool.
Well, „What is microblogging?“. I heard it several times over the last days and always do people expect an answer as simple as their question. I did not have this answer. Of course I know what microblogging is. I wrote my thesis on this topic. But how could I make them understand it without experiencing themselves? I tried “SMS in the web” or “Public emailing” but I always looked into faces formed to questionnaires. Afterwards I tried telling larger stories. Did not work. And I even demonstrated Twitter to show what it is and Communote to point out what it could do for a company. But even this did not help. I guess that you have to try microblogging by yourself a longer time to feel its benefits.
A few days ago I had the chance to talk to Prof Martin Gaedke, pioneer of Web Engineering research. He told me something very interesting: What is the difference between subscribing to a newspaper but not reading it (who has time for this today?) or not having a newspaper in your letter-box at all? The saved money on your cash account? No! The loss of information.
Prof Gaedke told me that even if you take the newspaper out of the letter-box, carry it to your house and place it on the kitchen table just to throw it away 2 days later keeps you informed. Even if you do not read it you will at least see some of the headlines or pictures or just single words affecting you. And you always have the possibility to have a look inside if you want to read more.
So this is (enterprise) microblogging! It is a company’s newspaper written without editors. It is a newspaper in realtime. It updates itself after every single new posting in one of its categories. And it even extends the idea of categories towards the idea of tagging. In using this an “article” can be part of multiple categories which helps you to get exactly what you are looking for. And finally, microblogging is a newspaper in a format readable by digital agents (i.e. RSS reader). Imagine you could have your personal robot searching the 1000 pages of your daily newspaper for exactly the information you need. Imagine this information could tell you about your company, its projects and the feelings of your employees. Imagine you could drill down from the general overview to the single information. Imagine you could even write the newspaper’s content yourself. This is microblogging.
Yesterday was the last day of my studies. I presented my diploma thesis to the examination board and passed this final exam. Due to many requests I am going to publish my thesis here. The bad thing is for all of you outside Germany: it is written in German. The good thing is: there are many many screenshots i.e. of Twitter with English content and even my own graphics have a high degree of English words. So maybe you will be able to get the message The title “Social Software im Projektmanagement: Einsatzpotenziale und fachliche Konzeption eines Enterprise Microblogs für die wissensbasierte Projektkommunikation” can be translated with “Social Software for Project Management: Potential Uses and Conceptual Design of an Enterprise Microblog for knowledge-based Project Communication”. The essence of this is: A Concept of an Enterprise Microblog. This concept was the basis for the Enterprise Microblogging tool Communote which launched its public beta two weeks ago.
The structure of the thesis is as follows: After introductory text chapter 2 starts with basics from project management, knowledge management and so on. Chapter 3 introduces basic concepts of social software. It starts to get interesting in chapter 4 “Microblogging” where I explain the issue and give an overview about existing tools. 4.4 is a great case study about a company using microblogging since 1998. Yes, 1998! This story is worth writing an own paper about it and this is exactly what I will do after Christmas. So just wait a bit and you will have it in English.
Chapter 5 deals with possible usage scenarios. For this I have a look at Twitter and give some examples for plain communication, coordination and cooperation and discuss possible uses in an enterprise context. Chapter 6 shows the conceptualisation of Communote and 7 evaluates this process. Chapter 8 shows my visions for the future development of the microblogging technology before I finally give a sum up and lessons learned.
I am going to pick out some highlights of the thesis during the next weeks and publish it here at my blog in English.
I want to say a great Thank You to the brilliant team of Communardo, the company behind Communote, and espacially to its CEO and Communote project manager Dirk Röhrborn. During my thesis there were many people out there in the web who helped me with input. I want to thank all these guys from Twitter and the Blogosphere.
From time to time I am involved in discussions about the best reference management programme. Personally I use BibSonomy and I am very happy with it. BibSonomy is a Web 2.0-like online tool with a powerful tagging functionality and an open API (see BibSonomy content at the sidebar here or the tag cloud on the my research page).
However, good friends of mine use other tools like Citavi. They say that Citavi has nice features for knowledge organisation. For example you can create the structure of a research paper in Citavi and add references to the sections. Finally it takes seconds to export the reference list for this paper.
As I know BibSonomy has only rudimental support for such use cases. You can “pick” references from your existing lists and collect them in a basket. The basket’s entries can be exported for a reference list. Unfortunately there is no support for paper creation.
One possible way would be to use BibSonomy for collaborative reference sharing/tagging and export/import all the references to Citavi once I want to create a paper. Ok, this is not the most elegant way but it would work. But imagine you would have a Citavi-like functionality for BibSonomy. You would not only be able to share your references but even your paper structures and drafts. This mashup would be able to suggest a further reference D for a paper’s section just because there is another author who used A, B, C and D in the same paragraph while you only use A, B and C.
Another lack of function of BibSonomy is the missing support of knowledge extraction from the sources. When saving a HTML page or a PDF document I probably have one or two sentences I am interested in. Maybe there are even different parts of the document and I want to give them different tags. It would be great to mark interesting parts of a reference and write comments/give tags.
Both extensions - support of paper creation and extended knowledge management - would perfectly fit together. Ingredients for the mashup would be the BibSonomy API, a powerful JavaScript-library (paper creation would be good with drag and drop) and maybe an online editor like Google Docs to finally write the paper. It would take much time to build a ready application. I do not have this time. But maybe I try to build a little prototype of the paper-creation-functionality and than we will see. Maybe someone wants to participate?
I was strongly involved in the development of the enterprise microblogging service communote. Therefore it is very exciting to see the launch of the public beta today. The German launch was successful earlier this day (see the recorded session here). Today at 5pm GMT | 12am EST | 9am PST will be the English launch. You can follow it on mogulus.
Communote has some great features. I would love to see the powerful tagging and filtering functionality in other social software tools. For example you can combine filtering by author, tags, full text search and time period. You can drill down through the tags. In every view you will see an updated version of the tag cloud and the remaining filter options. Every combination can be saved (it is like a strongly extended following-functionality from Twitter) and has its own RSS feed.
I did a little analysis of our survey participants. The following picture shows the social network between the people who answered our questions. Red nodes are users who retweeted my announcement. The big node in the middle is me (I did not take part in the survey but added me for the network analysis). There is a little bit wrong influence in this analysis because I added some of the participants to my network after the survey because their updates were protected and we needed access or just because they were interesting. You can clearly see that all but two nodes are connected to each other. The survey was promoted 99% via Twitter so this is a logical consequence. The two lonely nodes may come from this posting on the Microblogging Conference blog.
I used a great piece of software called Network Workbench (nwb) for the visualisation. The connection data was retrieved via the Twitter API and imported into nwb as CSV file (one row of the file looks like “usera, userb, true” that means that “usera” is following “userb”).
A few weeks ago I run a survey in and about Twitter (together with Stuart). Now it is time to present a summary of the results. We are going to contribute the results in detail combined with a PLS analysis to one of the major IS conferences in 2009. We want to thank all our participants!
The survey lasted 13 days and had nearly 140 participants. After clearing up the data (i.e. spelling errors in the Twitter user names) we had 131 data sets. The following figure shows the origins of the participants (information from the QuestionPro logs, data visualization using Swivel):
The majority of participants has a very good opinion on Twitter (1..”Strongly Disagree” till 7..”Strongly Agree”):
The answers to all the other questions concerning confirmation, perceived usefullness and satisfaction were very similar to the figure above. Questions about the intention to use Twitter in future showed a slightly shift. This might be a result of downtime and reliability issues (i.e. archive accessibility) as well as of powerfull competitors (not only other microblogging tools but status updates in Facebook as well as activity streams like Friendfeed).
The most interesting results were indeed the answers to the critical mass questions. There is no clear average opionion as the participants split into two halfs: one group says they have many friends on Twitter while the other group says they have not. There is a clear correlation between a person’s network size (friends as well as followers) and her/his attitude to the critical mass questions. You can see the result for “Many people I communicate with use Twitter” here:
The implication of this finding is that although people say there are not many people on Twitter they communicate with it still can be usefull and they want continue using it. This means that there must be other valueable usages beside communication: networking or just reading updates of others (maybe strangers).
It will be announced here once the full survey paper is available. I look forward hearing your comments and thoughts.
In a time when it seems to be old-fashioned to run a blog I proudly present mine: thingthatthinks.com. In fact a blog would have been useful during my thesis work over the last months but better late than never. I am going to write from time to time about my research on topics like web 2.0, enterprise social software and business intelligence. Read more about me and the blog name or my research interests.
I thought a lot about what language I should write in. My native language is German and my English is far from perfect. But finally I decided to write in English. The reason is: the community out there (you!) is much greater. So I apologise for every language issue and encourage you to correct me if necessary. By the way: this is my first major Wordpress project. So if you find a technology issue please contact me.
The first “real” posting is scheduled for sunday. It will present the results of the Twitter survey we run a few weeks before. So just use the RSS feed to stay connected.
