Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Social Physics and the Eclipse Trust Framework

The Social Physics project, which I have been honored to have some promixity to (network tie-wise) has reached a significant milestone. It is now being proposed as the Eclipse Trust Framework (announced just yesterday).

Eclipse is an open source framework and toolkit for software applicatoin developers. Being a part of the Eclipse framework means that the concepts of social physics, specifically the abilty to collect user context information and interactions with "the right set" of privacy controls may become standard. One vision for what this means is that I can control how much software applications that I use collect information about the communities I participate in, the identities that I have in those communities, and who can access the information.

As a practitioner and teacher of social network analysis, I am constantly looking for responses to the question of individual privacy. This trust framework, when fully implemented, will provide the technology response. The human, personal, ethical response will always be just that: human, personal and individual.

posted by Patti | permalink (click to comment)
(0) comments

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Doug Engelbart Beyond the Mouse

Business Week's A Man, A Mouse, A Mission has an interview with Doug Engelbart. It's always great to see him get the acknowledgment for his great work, but not just on the mouse.

I had the privilege to attend one of his Bootstrap Seminars in the early 1990s. These were intimate two-day sessions at Stanford that Doug hosted to build a network of people engaged in "C" activities. To quote from the Bootstrap Institute:

"Referring to an organization's principal work as an A-activity and to ordinary efforts at process improvement as a B-activity, he denotes bootstrapping as a C-activity, which is an improving of the improvement process. His paper Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware argues that highest payoff comes from engaging in that C-activity."

I was reminded of this framework last Saturday while working with the Cynefin team for North America. (Web site in progress.) We are working to expose Dave Snowden's cynefin methodology to a wider audience and build the network. This includes a training course that could lead to certification (February 15-17; please email me if you are interested). As we reviewed the content for the training and discussed among ourselves the distinctions in the cynefin framework of complex, hidden order, and visible order, I was reminded of the Bootstrap Institute. C-level activities come from the complex web of relationships and ideas among the innovators and those who work to bring new ideas into practice. Early adopters in the practitioner space develop methodologies by working with real-world clients, share and develop the learnings, and over time transfer these to the operational business processes in an organization.

Models are wonderful, especially when they recur in new forms in new times.

Doug, as always and in most things that he has tackled, was ahead of his time as well.

posted by Patti | permalink (click to comment)
(0) comments

Thursday, December 09, 2004

Lotus Notes is 20

Ray Ozzie and others are celebrating and musing on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the development of Lotus Notes. He acknowledges his co-leaders on the software project, Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell. Tim and Len had joined him from Digital Equipment Corporation, where they had worked on VAX NOTES, a discussion-forum software platform that was the conversational life of Digital Equipment (known to some as DEC).

Elsewhere in today's email, the Fred Nikols asks the com-prac community for examples of "true" communities of practice. Their numbers at Digital were legion. VAX NOTES was a perfect example of a collaboration tool that satisfied the needs of the users, was integrated with email, and provided "easynet" access to colleagues (actual and potential) worldwide. In particular, the software services organization in Digital -- providing support to customers by interfacing with the software development groups, helping customers install and customize programs, and so on -- could not have been effective without VAX NOTES. I titled an article that I wrote about Notes, "The Camelot of Collaboration," because in later years, as the world wide web doomed the proprietary NOTES, collaboration suffered because there was no replacement as easy to use and ready to hand.

Meanwhile, I always thought I was missing something because none of the companies I've worked in for the last 15 years used Lotus Notes. I am currently working with a client who uses it and I've learned it to communicate and set up meetings. The interface confuses me, and I've been very unsuccessful (a hard admission for an old techie like me). Fifteen years? And the interface is still this hard to use?

posted by Patti | permalink (click to comment)
(0) comments

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Blogging officially enters the language

My friend Karl Hakkarainen scooped the news on Merriam Webster's acknowledgment that "blog" is the word of the year, as reported in BBC news, in his blog last Wednesday. A Traveler in the World of Work is a thoughtful personal diary, full of reflections on daily life. I like hearing from Karl every day.

Karl, I should also say, is the first person to point me at Google, in its earliest days, many years ago. He keeps up on things.

Blogging is really quite a story, isn't it? Writing about blogging in a blog is a kind of out-of-body experience. As is talking about it. Bill Ives interviewed me recently for his upcoming book on blogs, which was a good opportunity to think about what blogging has offered me. It has certainly brought me new acquaintances as it has given me a space to let people know what I think about as well as what I do.

I'm not a daily poster, that's for sure. It's like I am in meetings or large groups. I am pretty quiet and don't speak up a lot, but I do (I am told) make a contribution when I do.

posted by Patti | permalink (click to comment)
(0) comments

patti anklam. How to make networks work.

Find me person-to-person !

KMWorld 2008 September 23-25, San Jose, CA. I'll be doing a session on Net Work and moderating a day with KM thought leaders.

links: network analysis

My ONA Page

Rob Cross
Bruce Hoppe
Valdis Krebs
INSNA
ONA-prac. The online community for learners and practitioners in the emerging field of Organizational Network Analysis.

links: blogroll

21st Century Organization
Anecdote
Bill Ives
Dave Snowden
David Gurteen
Denham Grey
Jack Vinson
Patrick Lambe
Ross Dawson