This is a BRILLIANT point and quite possibly the most important one in the realm of implementing Enterprise 2.0. McAfee talks about getting requests to evaluate specific products for their 2.0-newness...he rejects that as an empty exercise and instead checks the deployment environment for how it maps to measures of "freeform, frictionless and emergent."He is spot on target when he argues that not ALL enterprise systems have to be or should be freeform but there should be SOME system "in which employees and other constituencies could come together as equals to decide what topics were important for the company, and how to attack them." This also rings too true; "Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one." Oh yeah. Why do we keep spending money on these systems, deploy them and the do absolutely NONE of the organizational design and change management  work necessary to have them work successfully in the enterprise. I tell people every time I talk about this that these systems are not culturally neutral - they attack hierarchies of information command and control and traditional ideas of 'expertise.' Its always amazing that even when we do bring IT to the table, we never think to bring HR but we'll prattle on about how this will change the way people work but we won't act like we might have to change the way they are rated and assessed. Sheesh.

So I found this piece of work from the North Carolina Office of State Personnel's Grapevine;  which ostensibly has the goal of providing "a vehicle to build community among personnel and to foster a professional environment of sharing and learning." It is a moderated forum and evidently a HEAVILY moderated forum  - I mean Judas H. Priest - put a foot on my neck and squeeze why don't you? Read these rules and then guess at the level of participation in this 'forum.'Don'tsDon’t use any speech that is inaccurate, unlawful, harmful, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, personal attacks,antagonistic, threatening, abusive or harassing to other users or the general public.  **So, you're going to outlaw inaccuracies?Don’t post advertisements, solicitations, chain letters, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other unsolicited commercial communication.  **OK..that's fine...Don’t spam.  **Ooops. I think you guys just violated your own ruleDon’t use UPPERCASE - This is the same as shouting.  **REALLY?! WHO KNEW?!Don’t repeat information already provided.  **Glass houses.....Don’t dole out truism (You get what you pay for.). **That is a favorite. I would've gone with "Don't parse homilies" but this one is still good.Don’t overwhelm with information.  **Seriously? Really? You have the gall to publish a list of Do's and Don'ts with 32 rules on it and then include this? Really? The whole list is here.

I LOVE this. Turns out DISA (at the most simplistic, understated level - this ISP for   DOD) is having a little conference this spring and they've asked Gina Bianchini, the CEO of ning.com to give the keynote. So I love that now as people ask me about accessing things like social networking sites like ning from within DOD, I can say things like "well we may not be 100% of the way there but DISA had so-and-so for a keynote speaker, that must indicate something." ...and yes, you can get to ning.com from within DISA - from what little birds tell me.Keep in mind too that DISA is the agency behind Forge.mil, the DOD's version of SourceForge. So thanks to Bob Brewin and nextgov for the catch...great news.

(link)Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it's imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries.   "We're in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of "combinatorial innovation." So if you look historically, you'll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions. In the 1800s, it was interchangeable parts. In 1920, it was electronics. In the 1970s, it was integrated circuits.   Now what we see is a period where you have Internet components, where you have software, protocols, languages, and capabilities to combine these component parts in ways that create totally new innovations. The great thing about the current period is that component parts are all bits. That means you never run out of them. You can reproduce them, you can duplicate them, you can spread them around the world, and you can have thousands and tens of thousands of innovators combining or recombining the same component parts to create new innovation. So there's no shortage. There are no inventory delays. It's a situation where the components are available for everyone, and so we get this tremendous burst of innovation that we're seeing."

I feel like I have been seriously neglecting this blog but its all Twitter's fault! I mean I've been really active on Twitter and it is soooo easy to pop in and out of that channel. I won't go into all the tools, people to follow, etc right now, except to say that not only is it easy but there is a great deal of "heat" - e.g. great stuff flying back and forth. If you're not in it, you're missing a large and growing part of the discussion. You can jump on here.

  This post by Scott Henderson at Media Sauce, outlines an important new effort to try and fight the problem of hunger in the United States. Launching tomorrow, Thursday March 5, is the Pledge to End Hunger site.  According to Scott, "By simply signing an online pledge to share the website with others, volunteer, and/or give, you will trigger a 35 lb food donation from Tyson. That means every person who joins the movement will help feed 140 children."Now come on. Put in on your calendar. Do it. help end hunger.

This post from Marketing Vox is a great piece for continuing the thread of how we can change conferences. They cite a survey that found that: Conference organizers are now planning more time for Q&A (72% more vs. three years ago), more interactive sessions between speaker and audience (70%), and more panel sessions (64%). At the same time, they plan fewer keynote sessions (30%) than three years ago. Business leadership conferences feature more podcasts (62%), blogging and Twittering during events (58%), as well as live videocasting (56%). Less common, though still noted, are YouTube broadcasts (34%) and "unconferences" (18%). Organizers are expanding or considering expanding their business into emerging markets such as China (32%), the Middle East (24%) and India (24%). So, as you head out and plan your conference activities, look to see if you are providing the appropriate infrastructure to support these functions.

Abstract: "Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers."