Hybrid Discussion Forums
I got an email today from Marcel de Ruiter, who writes an interesting blog called Shaping Thoughts. Marcel asked me if I thought that old-school Discussion Forums belonged in the list of technologies that power Enterprise 2.0. Specifically, he asked if discussion forums produced emergent behavior.
Marcel has an interesting post entitled Are discussion forums the ultimate Enterprise 2.0 killer-app?
If Enterprise 2.0 is Emergence software, then individuals within the system have to be self motivated. When I have a technical question on some piece of technology, usually one of the best places to start looking for an answer is on the discussion fourms. That shows self motivation from the perspective of the person asking the questions. What about the people answering the questions? I think people answer questions on forums because they like to help, and because they like to be seen to be helping. That last part is an example of reciprocal alturism.
I think this means that a discussion forum becomes more successful as it works to support better reputation management. Put bluntly, you have to see a photo of the person answering the question, and each entry has to link back to the commentor’s personal blog (or in a business setting to their People Page).
David Berlind has an interesting article on ZD/Net about a new service called su.pport.us. The idea is to create a centralized wiki with quick technical solutions to common problems.
In a way, the su.pport.us model is a wiki that turns into a discussion forum with the attached comments.
I think that su.pport.us will be successful if they integrate with open Internet by giving posters credit and links back to their own blogs. This has the potential for abuse, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to monitor. Do a “human or robot” test on people before they post.
Hybrid Model
There was a lot of talk at the Office 2.0 conference about the hybrid model, meaning both legacy productivity tools and new tools such as blogs and wikis. People generally concluded that you needed both.
To Marcel’s point, I think that companies should not throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to existing web based collaboration tools.
The key successful criteria here, however, is a willingness to be open.
Hi Rod,
Thanks for picking up my post and shedding some light on the the “emergence” topic. For me this is again a very nice learning experience. The content that you, Andrew McAfee, JP Rangaswami, Ross Mayfield and others write about Enterprise 2.0 is very compelling but in my opinion sometimes not really ready to bring into the boardroom (too complex).
Then for the reputation management. True, in a company setting I guess this is important, but couldn’t that be replaced by other structures like the number of posts people make in answering, or more in general some measurement of contribution in their “topic community” as part of their KPI’s? Also, I think many people get motivated by using an open and transparent tool in which their contributions and expertise are visible.
And a link back to a persons blog can in our case, no internal blogs yet, be a link to each persons Userpage on the company wiki.
By the way, is this self motivation / reputational element the only reason for the gap you point out in the graph? And why would that be better handled in a wiki?
Best regards,
Marcel
Rod
I think the answer, in part, is real time group chat. Discussion boards, blogs and wiki’s are point in time (static), group chat is live (real time and persistent).
Organizationally built and managed persistent group chat forums manage themselves and hold all invited members accountable for sharing and answering questions…with the common goal of bettering the firm, no matter the subject. They also allow the organization to link/embed other applications (spreadhseets, RSS feeds, wiki’s, blogs, etc…) so that there is real time transperancy of data, information, ideas, and decisions.
Email is too cluttered and slow. IM is to ephemeral. So a real time hybrid of discussion threads built on an enterprise IM platform, integrated with enterprise applications, enables rich dialogue and information sharing/problem solving, in this highly competitive, fast paced world we live in.
These real time communities of interest really do work.
At Q2Learning, we believe that the real killer app is a platform that integrates discussion forums, blogs, and wikis, and provide the structure, searching, wysiwyg, and subscription of forums with the ability to push new content to the community or the world, and the power of the read-write web where everyone can edit pages and store information.
How about adding the ability to one engine that drives all three forms of collaboration, with a single search and profile, enterprise architecture and permissions management, and even the ability to turn a forum into a wiki or blog (or vice versa) with a few mouse clicks?
We’ve actually built this functionality into our xPERT eCommunity, and believe that this will be the next generation of asynchronous collaboration. Of course, a good platform must also integrate synchronous tools such as chat, IM, and web meetings. Check it out at http://www.q2learning.com/xpert-comm.html (which also provides a link to a sandbox to explore these features…)