General, Non-Profits, Science, Web 2.0

Tending a garden

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garden independentman
Getting Conversation Ready:

[Via Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

Holly Ross wrote a good reflection piece about public conversations on blogs and how to get your audience ready for that conversation. She makes the point:

What I am saying is that your audience may not be ready to have the conversation that social media enables. That’s because social media does not just enable conversations.It enables PUBLIC conversations.

I think we have to remember that it takes time build the community to have the conversation and that it doesn’t happen right away. You have to be ready as conversation facilitator. Alexandra Samuel did a workshop called “Bringing Your Community to Life” at Netsquared and offered some terrific practical advice about you get the conversation started.

Some key points:

Key points to encourage participation:

Focus on promoting conversation

Make it happen, don’t wait for it

Connect like-minded participants

Connect complimentary threads

Plan pro-actively, implement reactively

A community is not built rapidly and a conversation does not always easily begin. It requires nurturing and time, just like a garden. It has to be curated by active,enthusiastic members. They have to reach out to others, to begin the dialogs that will enhance the entire network.

Just as an outstanding garden does not spontaneously come into being, an online community requires active management. A lot of work, somettimes. But like a well-tended garden if given the right care, it can pay off handsomely.

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Web 2.0

I love the title

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VIDEO: If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can you:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Having trouble trying to sell in Web 2.0-style collaboration to the higher ups in your enterprise organization? Are there VPs and CXOs that are shying away from wiki-style knowledge management because they don’t get it or they fear confidential information will be passed carelessly among employees and partners? Do they feel that the information is
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Intellipedia is a greta example of how well a wiki can work, even in organizations where access control is most important. The embedded video give some nice details on how to sell this technology and how their greatest detractors became their biggest fans,

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Web 2.0

Fun inside the firewall

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monument valley by Wolfgang Staudt
IBM Builds LOTS of Social Apps:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

My friend Luke sent me this BusinessWeek article about enterprise social network tools. There’s lots here.

First, take away from this that the social network technologies you know about in the consumer space are being rebuilt inside the firewall for business. Why? Those apps are perfect for business, because they do a better job of communicating information the way humans figure it out.

Second, understand that there are people looking for more from their social applications than food fight and super fun wall. If you’re developing, consider what might make for good business applications.

Third, bear in mind that what you might be doing for fun and leisure right now on the social networks might give you an edge on using collaborative technologies in upcoming months. It might just be the thing you’re doing at work, and not just the thing you’re doing at home.

What do you think about all this?

Welcome to the new world. Entertainment is driving the leading wedge of Web 2.0 but the rocket it lights under social media is not escaping the notice of business. Being able to not only capture tacit information but also to help create new knowledge are two of the most useful aspects of Web 2.0

When applied to science, these social tools will help get the right information to the right places. By making it useful to the end user, these tools will help workflow and increase productivity.

In this new world, weirdly, IBM may be leading the way, a distinct difference from how it dealt with the personal computer revolution.

Perhaps even the largest of companies can learn from past errors.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Irony abounds

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thesis by cowlet
Case study of the IR at Robert Gordon U:
[Via Open Access News]

Ian M. Johnson and Susan M. Copeland, OpenAIR: The Development of the Institutional Repository at the Robert Gordon University, Library Hi Tech News, 25, 4 (2008 ) pp. 1-4. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of OpenAIR, the institutional repository at the Robert Gordon University.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines the principles that underpinned the development of the repository (visibility, sustainability, quality, and findability) and some of the technical and financial implications that were considered.

Findings – OpenAIR@RGU evolved from a desire to make available an electronic collection of PhD theses, but was developed to become a means of storing and providing access to a range of research output produced by staff and research students: book chapters, journal articles, reports, conference publications, theses, artworks, and datasets.

Originality/value -The paper describes the repository’s contribution to collection development.

And it only costs £13.00. So an article describing an open archive is not itself open. What a shame because open archives will be the way to go. Learning how an organization put one together, especially one that contains more than just journal articles, would be useful.

But it did lead me to this which describes two organizations that will serve as open archives for any paper for which the authors has retained copyright. What it also makes clear is that most researchers still maintain the rights for any preprint versions of the work.

That is, the only copyright that is usually transferred is the one that was peer-reviewed and approved, Any previous version can be archived, At least for most journals. If the work was Federally funded, most journals permit archiving the approved version after a limited embargo time, such as 6 months.

There is a database that details the publication policies of many journals. Ironically, there is no copyright information for Library Hi Tech news, the publication containing the OpenAIR article.

Let’s look at some others.

For instance, Nature Medicine permits archiving of the pre-print at any time and the final copy after 6 months. They require linking to the published version and their PDF can not be used. So just make your own.

On the other hand, Biochemistry restricts the posting of either the pre- or post-print print versions. A 12 month embargo is imposed only for Federally funded research. Others apparently can never open archive. The only thing that can be published at the author’s website is the title, the abstract and figures.

Let’s see one journal allows reasonable use of the author’s copyright to permit open archiving and the other only permits what is Federally mandated. I’m going to investigate this database further because my choice for journals to publish in will depend on such things as being able to use open archiving.

If my work is behind a wall, it will be useless in a Web 2.0 world. Few will know about it and others will bypass it. Just as the work on OpenAIR is not as useful as it should be.

More irony. Susan Copeland, one of the OpenAIR authors, has done a lot of work on online storage and access to PhD theses. She is the project manager for Electronic Theses at Robert Gordon University and received funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Program(FAIR). She just received the 2008 EDT Leadership award for her work on electronic theses.

She has done a lot of really fine work making it easier to find the actual work of PhD students, something of real importance to the furtherance of science. Yet her article detailing some of her own work is not openly available to researchers.

And finally, ironically, the organization that funded some of her work, JISC, also funds SHERPA, the same database that I used to examine the publication issues of many journals.

In a well connected world, irony is everywhere.

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Open Access, Web 2.0

Helping people change

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I was discussing with one of our execs the progress we’d been making on social media proficiency internally.

And he asked a great question that made me think:

“So, has anyone fundamentally changed their work processes because of the platform?”

And I realized this is the next frontier on what’s turning out to be a large-scale social engineering project.

Getting Business Value Out Of Our Social Software

As we make progress in this journey, I’ve got my eye out for different catagories of business value we’re seeing.  I suppose, at the same time, I should also be keeping my eye out for business value we’re NOT seeing yet.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re seeing business value — in many forms — across the board:

People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests
Rather than searching big content repositories, people are asking other people for help and answers
A pan-organizational “social fabric” has been created that wasn’t really there before
Folks who spend time on the platform are better educated — and more engaged — in EMC’ business

And more And, just to be clear, there’s no shortage of business benefits — I still stand behind the broad assertion that this has been one of the most ROI-positive IT projects I’ve seen in my career.

Interesting “value nugget” of the week: 

EMC runs a healthy program to bring a large number of interns and co-op students into the company.  They started introducing themselves to each other on the platform.

What started with “name, rank, serial number” blossomed into a wonderfully diverse set of conversations about careers, favorite hangouts, what it means to work at EMC, what is everybody doing, and so on.

I would argue that — whatever millions that EMC spends on this intern/coop program — we’ve now made it 10-20% more valuable, simply because we connected people to each other, and connected them all to the broader company. 

At zero incremental cost.

But we want more. Much more.
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Right up front EMC can demonstrate easily how new technologies save money and create new opportunities. The problem comes from actually getting people to use the technologies.

Many companies are process-driven. If the process is working, why change? Of course, buggy whip manufacturers probably had a great process also. But if they did not change, they disappeared.

What is driving the world more and more is the rate at which innovations diffuse through an organization. This is a fascinating subject because there are also some hard data behind it, some of it generated over 70 years ago.

Using the rate of adoption of hybrid corn by farmers in the early 1930s, Ryan and Gross were to derive some very important insights. These two researchers interviewed 345 farmers in Iowa about their use of hybrid corn, when the farmers first heard about it and when they started using it.

Here is a figure from their classic paper ‘The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities’. Even though the hybrid corn had many important advantages it took almost 13 years for this innovation to diffuse throughout the entire community. The actual adoption curve (from their 1943 paper) is compared with a normal distribution curve (in black).

corn curve

If the data are plotted as the cumulative adoption of the innovation, it looked like this:

cumulative

Both of these types of curves have been seen again and again when the diffusion of innovation is examined. They seem to be derived from basic forces present in human social networks.

Ryan and Gross made several key contributions besides the identification of the S-shaped curve. One was the process by which the innovation diffused. The other was the type of farmer who used the innovation.

They found that there were five stages in the adoption of an innovation by an individual: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. And there were at least 4 different types of farmers, of which the early adopters were the most important.

Early adopters heard about the corn from traveling salesmen and tried small plots to see how well it worked. Later adopters relied on the personal experience of other farmers, usually the early adopters. When there were enough positive reactions from the early adopters, when there were more stories of personal experience, the adoption rate took off.

It was the human social network that was critical for the rate at which the innovation was adopted. The more social connections an early adopter had, the more cosmopolitan they were, the more likely it would be that others would adopt use of the innovation.

Everett Rogers was instrumental in codifying many of the principles of innovation diffusion. Here is his famous rendition of the distribution:

Diffusionofinnovation

Only 16% of a population is usually made up of the early adopters, the ones that are critical for spreading the innovation to the early majority. The key to the adoption of any innovation is the rate at which early adopters can transmit the knowledge of the benefits to the early majority. In the case of the farmers, it would often take 4 or more years for this to be converted form awareness to adoption.

In many areas of our world today, this is much too slow. Technology is disruptive, meaning that the people who adopt this technology actually deal with the world in entirely different ways than those who do not. It is similar to a paradigm shift, in that those on either side of the shift have a hard time communicating with each other. It is almost as if they inhabit separate worlds.

Leap1-1

This can cause some problems because the early adopters are required to communicate with the early majority if an innovation is to diffuse throughout an organization. If they can not, it creates a chasm, which has been described by Geoffrey Moore in his book.

The organization has to take strong action to recognize that this chasm is present and to span it, either with training or, more effectively, with people who have been specially designated as chasm spanners. In many cases using Web 2.0 technologies, they are called online community managers.

Disruptive innovations seem to arrive almost yearly. Without a directed and defined process to increase the rate of diffusion in an organization, if just standard channels of communication are used, innovation will diffuse at too slow a rate for many organizations to remain competitive.


Innovationlifecycle


Because there is usually not just one innovation disrupting an organization at a time. Life is not that clean. There can be multiple innovations coursing through different departments, moving early adopters even further away from the rest of the group and expanding the chasm. This only makes communication harder.

So, a key aspect of being able to increase the rate of diffusion is to create a process where early adopters are identified and strong communication channels are created to permit them to pass information to the early majority.

It can no longer be possible to simply let the early adopters go through their 5 stages of adoption and then tell others about it at the water cooler. Designated online community managers, with the training needed to enhance communication channels, will be critical in getting this information dispersed throughout an organization.

Organizations need to take pro-active approaches to span the chasm. Otherwise they will lose out to the organizations that do take such approaches.

Identifying and nurturing the 16% of the organization that are early adopters will be critical for this process. Having community managers who are well embedded in the social structure of the organizations will also be needed to help increase the rates of innovation diffusion.

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Open Access, Science

This is more like it

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Copy number by dbking
Copy Number Variation Detection:
[Via Bench Marks]

With the sequencing of the human genome came the startling revelation that the number of copies of a given gene can vary widely between individuals. This Copy Number Variation (or CNV), contributes to our species’ genetic diversity but it has also been linked to genetic diseases. This month’s issue of Cold Spring Harbor Protocols features a new method for detecting copy number variation. Like all of our monthly featured protocols, it’s freely accessible for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Copy Number Variation Detection Via High-Density SNP Genotyping describes the use of PennCNV, a new computational tool for CNV detection in data from genomic arrays. Developed in the laboratory of Maja Bucan at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is freely available for download. Analysis with PennCNV will provide a more comprehensive understanding of genome variation and will aid in studies seeking the causes of genetic diseases. More information on PennCNV can be found in this Genome Research article, PennCNV: An integrated hidden Markov model designed for high-resolution copy number variation detection in whole-genome SNP genotyping data.

I took the liberty of showing the entire post from David’s blog because, in contrast to my story below, this demonstrates a very good approach for publishing scientific work online.

It highlights a useful new protocol that can be downloaded for free. It also links to a Genome Research article that I can also download for free. Nice. I can quickly get up to speed on a novel protocol.

Protocols, particularly new ones are very useful to have. Making a small number available for free is a nice way to get people to check out the journal. I have it in my newsfeed. I like CSHP and enjoy David’s blog tremendously. Now I just need to find a way to become an adjunct professor at some research organization with an institutional license so I can read all the articles.

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Open Access, Science

Some science journals are messed up

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I posted this at my personal blog but thought it might be of interest here since it demonstrates just how current online tools have changed the way scientific research is published, presented and read.

flying snake by Beige Alert
Why snakes don’t have legs:
[Via 2collab public bookmarks]

Tags: Hox gene, Homeobox gene, Limb
Authors: Cunliffe, Vincent
Source: Trends in Genetics; 15, 8, Page 306; 1 August 1999
Sharing: Public

I’m providing a detailed examination of an online journey I took this morning that demonstrates how the Internet has altered the landscape for publishing of articles in scientific journals. Online access certainly changes how we search for and how we read articles. It is also changing where we chose to publish.

So I see this interesting name for an article – Why snakes don’t have legs – in my newsfeed. I click on thru (why it is on 2collab I do not know?) and get this page. Great. ScienceDirect which usually charges for journal access. But this is an article from 1999. Surely it will be open by now?

Nope. They want $31.50 for a nine year old article. With no abstract or any other way to determine whether this article is worth the price. $31.50! First off, few articles in science today that are nine years old are worth $5, much less $31.50. Secondly, with no abstract how am I to even figure out if it is worth the price?

This greatly limits access to the article and encourages other routes for getting the information than reading it. Why would a scientist want to publish an article that no one will read? We want as many people as possible to see our wonderful work. This is not like literature or art where older is better.

Seems to me that this is a losing business model. I can see paying a premium for up-to-date work. I understand someone has to get paid and can easily pay a reasonable price. But $31.50?! For an article that is almost a decade old!? That makes no sense in an online world.

Very few articles in biology that are ten years old retain much value. Just a few years ago, I would have been stuck but now I have other tools.

I went to PubMed, the database of journal articles, and did a search for “snakes AND legs”. Got 48 articles. The critical one appears to be by Cohn and Tickle “Developmental basis of limblessness and axial patterning in snakes” in Nature from June 1999. Great. Now I have a subscription to Nature so this article is available to me but if you wanted to read it without a subscription it would cost $35! Wow! But at least now it has an abstract.

The evolution of snakes involved major changes in vertebrate body plan organization, but the developmental basis of those changes is unknown. The python axial skeleton consists of hundreds of similar vertebrae, forelimbs are absent and hindlimbs are severely reduced. Combined limb loss and trunk elongation is found in many vertebrate taxa1, suggesting that these changes may be linked by a common developmental mechanism. Here we show that Hox gene expression domains are expanded along the body axis in python embryos, and that this can account for both the absence of forelimbs and the expansion of thoracic identity in the axial skeleton. Hindlimb buds are initiated, but apical-ridge and polarizing-region signalling pathways that are normally required for limb development are not activated. Leg bud outgrowth and signalling by Sonic hedgehog in pythons can be rescued by application of fibroblast growth factor or by recombination with chick apical ridge. The failure to activate these signalling pathways during normal python development may also stem from changes in Hox gene expression that occurred early in snake evolution.

Sounds really interesting to me but still not sure it is worth $35. But right above that link from PubMed is another one – from Current Biology with pictures. “How the snake lost its legs”. It is a ScienceDirect link also but this one is available for free. And it has nice pictures while discussing the Cohn and Tickle article.

So partial success. Now I have a better idea of the article’s content. All the other links from PubMed dealing with snakes and THEIR legs, as opposed to snakes and the legs they bite, have costs to access, up to $39.

Except for this nifty one from the Journal of Experimental Biology – “Becoming airborne without legs: the kinematics of take-off in a flying snake, Chrysopelea paradisi” (The picture above is of a flying snake.) Open access and more recently published. Not exactly on topic but it comes with movies! These were just not possible to see without online access. And the movies are really cool and help explain what the author of the paper was describing. You can actually see the difference between a J-loop takeoff and other modes. Plus, flying snakes sound like something from a B-movie.

Back to the topic. I went to Google and searched “Cohn Tickle snake”. The top response is from a USA Today article about why snakes do not have legs. In the article there are links to Martin J. Cohn and Cheryll Tickle. Clicking the Cohn link takes me to his page at the University of Florida. Not a lot here but there is a link to his personal site.

Now we get the Cohn lab page. I could just email him and ask for a copy of the paper (a slightly updated approach to the old method of sending reprint requests by snail mail). But there is a link to Publications.

And here we find the PDF to the paper I was looking for. A quick runthrough reveals that it is a paper I will find interesting (I love Hox stuff). But I would not have paid over $30 for it.

I certainly believe that downloading a paper from an open archive presented by the author of a paper is an ethical way to obtain the paper (It is just the online version of the reprint request, remember). So, it took me less than 10 minutes to find a copy of the article online. (And it turns out that if I had looked at my Google results just a little more, I would have found a direct link to the publications page, saving myself some time.)

I think that, except for the most highly paid of us, 10 minutes time would be less than $10. This seems about right. A paper for $5 I would buy immediately while much over $10 and I will go searching. I may not succeed but I can usually find an email link and request a copy from the author.

Online archives by the authors are becoming more common and are a basic aspect of many Open Access initiatives. Paying a small premium for access to a current article is a reasonable price, especially if it is convenient. But any business plan that wants to charge a huge premium for decade old work needs serious rethinking.

So, for a few minutes of my time I got the article for free and also got to see some nice movies of snakes flying. Not a bad way to travel in an online world.

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Web 2.0

Corporate IT insanity

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fern by Randy Son Of Robert
8 Things We Hate About IT:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

You may think that hate is too strong of a word for feelings toward a corporate department. I don’t. Yesterday, I was interviewing an executive on his perceptions of IT and he couldn’t spit his frustration out fast enough. He said, “In the quest of getting things organized, they are introducing a bunch of bureaucracy and, in the process, they’re abdicating their responsibility for making sure the right things get done.” This is completely typical of management’s frustration – no, management’s hatred – of IT.

It’s hard to remember the time when criticizing IT was controversial. Now, it’s ceased to be even interesting. The now-classic HBR article “IT Doesn’t Matter” resonated so clearly because it underscored the pervasive belief that IT mediocrity is the norm. And how bad is an industry’s reputation when a major outsourcer, Keane, can get away with insulting its target market with the slogan, “We Do IT Right”?

It’s not personal – nobody hates the people in IT – it’s the system that’s broken. And here’s the rub: IT doesn’t like it either. One global Fortune 200 CIO describes leading IT as “a sucking vortex.”
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Harvard Business is never shy about stoking controversy. Let’s take a look at some of these items.

  • IT Limits Managers’ Authority
  • They’re Missing Adult Supervision
  • They’re Financial Extortionists
  • Their Projects Never End
  • The Help Desk is Helpless
  • They Let Outsourcers Run Amok
  • IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks
  • IT Never Has Good News

The eight things almost all deal with an unwieldy section of a large company having to deal with rapidly changing circumstances. I believe that most of the eight things mentioned above derive from the two opposing aspects of IT in many companies.

IT has to fundamentally provide a stable working environment. Things just can not break or go down. Otherwise, employees do not get paid, vendors do not get paid and lawsuits proliferate. So IT is under a lot of pressure to just make sure that the status quo remains. They want to get thinks working and then never change them again.

However, business concerns require continual tweaking of almost all IT processes, the addition of new innovations. This is driven by competition. Other organizations are adding new tweaks, ones that can provide substantial competitive advantages. A company that can not keep up will eventually disappear.

Stability versus Innovation. How a company deals with this dichotomy in IT often determines success or failure.

So, many IT departments are driven by diametrically opposed needs. No wonder they do such a poor job of satisfying everyone. Stability necessitates limiting what the rest of the company can do. But innovation often needs large amounts of money to complete a project right now in order for the company to remain competitive.

The help desk is not helpful because stability should mean things work and no help should be required. But then outsourcers provide expertise and processes IT can not because things change and real help is needed.

Their projects never end because there is always something else to add in order to remain competitive. The geeks are out-of-date because the innovators in IT often get frustrated (they threaten stability), see that the best route to getting new technologies adopted is to be a consultant and leave.

There is never good news because it is almost impossible to provide stability and innovation simultaneously.

I agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The people in IT usually possess first-rate intelligences but the requirements that are often put on them make it very hard to function effectively.

There will have to be changes in how IT is actually managed, how it is integrated into the corporation, in order for many of these problems to be attacked.

Perhaps splitting the two responsibilities or creating an independent IT group whose only mandate is to devise processes that can incorporate new technologies and innovative tools into the organization without disturbing stability.

But maintaining these two opposing needs is the very definition of insanity.

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Web 2.0

Collaborative Adobe

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adobe by longhorndave
Adobe Adds Features to Boost Collaboration:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Adobe has introduced two new products, Acobat 9 and Acrobat.com. The goal is to transform the way people collaborate—Adobe’s new Acrobat 9 PDF tool now uses Flash to let you embed video, audio, animation and all manner of files, which is very cool. Another new capability lets you leverage web conferencing from Adobe to mark up documents on the fly, in real time, without launching a full-blown conference. Both people can take turns walking through the document, there’s no need to pass the baton, making it very ad hoc. If you decide you need to, you can launch a full-blown web conference (via Acrobat Connect) with a single click.
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Adobe is now making a wide variety of collaborative tools available online with the launch of Acrobat.com. Buzzword allows people to create collaborative documents. It looks like it has version history, access control and real-time controls. Nice.

ConnectNow permits online conferences for up to three people. Video can be used as well as IM. There are whiteboard options as well as display of computer screens. There is even an option for remote control.

Up to 5 GB of documents can be stored for free and they can be made available to all or to just a limited number. They can then be accessed from any web connection.

These tools offer some pretty compelling ideas. I will be examining them to determine just how useful they really are. There is more information at the Adobe site.

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Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

Online Water Coolers

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gerbera by aussiegall
What’s Your Internal Social Networking Strategy?:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

Nemertes recently noted that eighty-three percent of organizations are now “virtual” meaning that members of workgroups reside in physically separate locations. The emergence of the virtual workplace has radically changed not only how we communicate and collaborate, but how we build social bonds among employees.
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Informal interactions are very important in any social network. They provide secondary routes for information to bypass chokepoints, they permit radically different viewpoints to influence the creation of knowledge and they are just plain fun.

If the only way any of us ever got to interact with someone was in a meeting with a defined agenda, there would be a greatly weakened social network.

Yet, our online interactions are often just like that: directed, well-scripted, little humanity. One reason blogs exist is to provide an outlet for some of our need to interact randomly, to gossip just a little, to ask ‘Did you hear about…’

It will be important for any defined internal online social network to provide this outlet. Because, frankly, if it is not provided, people will either ignore the network or find ways, perhaps inappropriately, to create such an outlet.

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