As promised this post will cover my reading of the 10th anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. What a great book and I feel a bit embarrassed that I didn’t read this book 10 years ago. This book is entertaining, insightfull and still ahead of it’s time. A lot of things the authors talk about is taking place in some organizations but is still a long way for most organizations.  

Obviously the first lessons is that “markets are conversations” and as Jake McGee outlines it is very hard to fully understand this thesis and truthfully apply it. How can you have real conversations? What is your voice, what is your opinion? How can I start a conversation? With whom?

The second lesson for me is a construct of the following theses:

8 In both a internetworked markets and amoung intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way

53 There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

56 These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking in the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.

57 Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.   

For me the lesson is about the conversations between comployees is equally important than conversations in the market and the conversation between employees and the market is even more important. If you understand that there are more smart people working outside your company than inside, the only smart think to do is to enable conversations between employees and the markt. This lesson is also about the changing role of the organization, embodied mostly by the communications department. Your role has to change to get out of the way and help the inevitable happen sooner. That is you need to facilitate conversations and not be the one that talks to the customer and the employee. Your work needs to move up one level and you need to think about ways to improve conversations that you cannot  manage.

The third important lesson is quoted from Dan Gilmore “The ultimate [journalistic] tool is the human brain: our ability to learn, absorb and adapt. In a conversational mode, we do all of the more effectively. And what is the first rule or a conversation? To listen” Listening is also the most difficult part, that we all have forgotten how to do. Being generally interested in one and other and taking the time to focus on the other. This means to forget about your iPhone or blackberry for 10 minutes! Stop all these interruptions and focus! For a nice article on interruptions and attention look at this post form Nick Carr (thanks to @driessen).

For a great explanation of listening, watch the TEDtalk by Evelyn Glennie!

What were your important lessons from the Cluetrain?

At the end of my last post, I mentioned there are fundamental ingredients that constitute a game beyond just adding points. In his excellent exposé on game design (that I mentioned before), Sebastian Deterling identifies seven game design principles that form a good round-up of these ingredients:

• Games set S.M.A.R.T. goals
• Games present clear, bite-sized actions and choices
• The relations between the actions/choices and the goals are clear
• Your current status is absolutely clear
• Games give instant and unambiguous feedback
• The challenges games present get increasingly difficult
• Games create social comparison

In essence, these principles are another way to phrase what Salen & Zimmerman have called meaningful play. Perhaps the principle of recoverable loss could be added to the list, because it is an essential ingredient of the informed trial-and-error behavior that characterizes a lot of game play.

When applying game design to organizations, these principles form a good checklist. However, many of the principles are hard to apply directly outside a computer game context. But when crafting a rule set that triggers action and lets desired behavior emerge, principles such as the ones mentioned here are a good way to achieve the desired dynamic.

June 30 this year was the release date of the revised edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. This book was written by four gentlemen: Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. Here I must admit the I have only read the start of this book on it’s first release 10 years ago. So I am going to make it up to myself actually and I am going to read it now. Bonus for not having read the first edition that in this edition some commentary is added by Jake McGee, J.P. Rangaswami and Dan Gilmor. I have added their blogs to the digital workspace blogroll on the left side. With one exception: the blog of Rick, Seth Ellis Chocolatier (sorry), the blog tells the story of founding a small chocolate manufacturer!

Later on this year I will blog about the revised edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto!

When you look at a definition of social media I came across in a research paper that was made for Kennisnet by Mark Schoondorp of Winkwaves. The definition Mark used is “Social Media facilitates organized forms to act together”. I interpret acting together as to add value together in a work setting.  When you think of social media as channels or platforms that can be used to facilitate adding value together, you might come up with the following three types of channels: digital channels, physical channels and organizational channels.

Digital channels are the usual suspect. Tools like twitter, blogs and wikis can be used to add value together at work. These tools get a lot of attention at the moment. But physical channels or platforms can be a great accelerator for adding value. A office design that is inspiring will add value. A layout can enable the right social connections. Even the organization itself can be a channel. Can organizing get-togethers to tell stories or a off-site teambuilding session be social media?

I my opinion these three types of social media need to be aligned for the best results. If you interact with someone on twitter you only enter a new level of trust if you have met offline. Storytelling events in the company restaurant will have a bigger impact if they are continued online. Standalone will work and facilitate your efforts but a new level of performance will more likely be reached when all social media types are aligned.

Sebastian Deterding is a user experience designer and researcher from Hamburg who recently gave a very comprehensive and insightful overview of the ways game elements have been entering the work sphere. He warns us about the just-add-points paradigm: the notion that if you just add points (and perhaps a leaderboard and rewards) to a mundane task, it becomes a game. The warning is a timely one, because this misconception is becoming more and more widespread.

Adding points will in most cases create a sense of competition but that is just a superficial characteristic of games and one that will not stay interesting in the long term. An example of a fairly simple implementation of the just-add-points paradigm is Foursquare, mostly based on what psychologists call introjected regulation: I compete with my friends and get recognized for my achievements. A very sympathetic initiative such as The Fun Theory also focuses mostly on the principle of providing rewards for actions that people normally wouldn’t do: I am entered into a lottery if I stick to the speed limit, I can make music by taking the stairs or wiping my feet. Don’t get me wrong, I love the site and these are some very creative rewards. But I keep hearing it mentioned in the context of games, which causes confusion.

Fundamentally, games are about something completely different than points and rewards. Among other things, they are about players that develop strategies based on clear goals and meaningful choices. When looking at the matter from an organizational perspective (as I do), there is a use for the just-add-points paradigm in limited contexts such as workshops. It can be useful to create emotion and energy in these settings. When I try to apply gaming principles more broadly to the design of organizations, I need to work with the fundamental ingredients of what constitutes a game. More about this later.

Before my holidays I had a session on the new world of learning. During my preparation I spent a lot of time surfing the web, checking out examples on new and innovative school buildings. There is a lot of great stuff out there! Great examples of complete new buildings like a college in Kopenhagen and some great classroomsetups from the US.

In The Netherlands the New World of Work has hit mainstream and a lot of companies are thinking about new ways of working that integrates IT, Buildings and the way work is organized. More and more organizations are grasping the fact that a new way of working has to facilitated in a number of ways and that a integrated approach will ensure a better result in the end. Education has also been looking for new ways of learning stimulated by new legislation. For schools and universities in the Netherlands an institute that is called ‘Kennisnet’ is making a great effort to stimulate the use of innovative technologies.

What struck me is that a great institution like ‘Kennisnet‘ could be of great help to other sectors like healthcare but also general business. But also education could be helped a great deal by a institution that is stimulating the use of innovative building and teaching facilities. There is a lot happening in The Netherlands as well on innovative new building concepts for schools. Examples are the Niekee School in Roemond and ROC Leiden. A institute specialized on innovative school buildings would be able to gather and spread important lessons learned and be a collector of knowledge on this subject!

In a previous post, I briefly touched upon a difference in perception between ‘hardcore’ games such as World of Warcraft and social games such as Farmville: the latter can be reconciled with being productive, the former can’t (the idea was coined by Timothy Burke in this blog post). It is interesting to talk a bit more about this work vs. play or real-life vs. game-life dynamic. This is probably the most important challenge I face in my research, working to apply game design to the design of organizations.

My early struggles with the subject focused on the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But ultimately, that is not where the biggest divide is: there is a lot of extrinsic motivation in games as well as in work.

More fundamental seems to be the playful attitude and the magic circle that games induce. My research has shown that this can also be created in work settings, albeit in a very specific and sometimes fragile manner. Getting back to the difference in perception between Farmville and World of Warcraft, it may come down to just this. There is no doubt that most players take leave of their “real lives” when they enter the magic circle of Azeroth, sometimes perhaps to a worrying extent. I don’t think the same is true for Farmville. It seems to be an instrument for killing time in between your day-to-day activities, while staying very much inside your real-life social circles. There is probably not much of a magic circle to speak of with Farmville, or at least it is one that is extremely permeable.

In a sense, I guess that the Farmville model more closely resembles the way we can apply games to work settings. But there is much to be improved there, such as getting beyond the just-add-points paradigm, creating a little game, big game dynamic (extending the things that happen during the playful moments to the broader context) and crafting an elegant set of rules that allow for emergent behavior.

More on this later.

Blizzard (publisher of World of Warcraft) has caused a huge uproar within their community by announcing that users will need to start using the Real ID system for posts on their forums. This means they will have to use their real-life first and last name. The idea behind this move (in Blizzard’s words) is to get rid of flame wars, trolling and other unpleasantness in the forums (see the original announcement here, followed by one of the longest comment threads in history). Some (mostly outside the WoW community) have welcomed the change and at first glance it seems to be in line with a move away from pseudonyms that I posted about earlier. But there is a fundamental difference, that Randy Farmer is quick to point out: World of Warcraft is a game! A game which very much extends to these forums. As Randy puts it: people will get pissed at each other for stolen kills, breaking alliances, and the price of components – and they want to – no, they need to – have a safe place to express this, to play.

This controversy is also shedding some light upon a fundamental difference between WoW and Facebook games like Farmville, as pointed out by Timothy Burke on Terra Nova: the latter are seen as compatible with productive work and with mainstream sociality, so we don’t mind having our real-life identities connected to them.

It will be interesting to see if Blizzard will go through with this, but at least we can thank them for having sparked a fascinating debate.

In this post I will compare five free apps for the Iphone to use SharePoint on the road. I am going to review iShare, iSharePhone, mDMS, Moshare and iSharePlusLite. These five apps are available form the appstore for free.

iShare did not log onto my SharePoint site so a test run was impossible. iSharePhone is also free but requires some server side stuff which is not an option and a viable model in my opinion. mDMS requires some server side stuff as well. This leaves only Moshare by Moprise and iSharePlusLite by Southlabs.

Moshare is easy to set up. My account is recognized immediately and I can browse through our portal at once. Navigation is nice but our announcements are sorted with the latest item on top and no way to change the sorting. Display of an announcement is nice and even lets you edit or delete the item! Documents can be views in both office 2003 and office 2007 formats. When viewing a document there are two options. The first is to copy a link to the clipboard and the second is an option to email a copy of a document. The latter option is somewhat unnecessary for the hardcore SharePoint users. Navigating you site structure is easy, showing subsites on every level and with the back option you can move easy. Moshare does not offer a breadcrumb so it is not easy to see where you are. Blogs and Wiki’s cannot be opened so there is a big flaw there. The app does not let you change settings so if green is not your color then you will not like the interface… Search enables you to search inside SharePoint and retrieves some great results.

SharePlusLite is a free app that has a pro version as well. Setting your portal up is straightforward. URL’s need http or https. SPL shows your subsites and content directly. Your announcements are sorted the right way, so the newest announcement is on top! The view of an announcement is not that great trying to show everything in an item, I only want the title and body that cannot be viewed directly. The icons of the announcement indicate if an attachment is present. Documents are not opened right away but PDF, office 2003 and 2007 formats are recognized.  An option is presented to email the document but not to copy the link. Icons for the different content are the same as in SharePoint. Blogs do not work in SPL (although they claim they work) but wiki pages can be viewed! Search is only filtering the items shown, no real SharePoint search here.

Actually I cannot choose… The interface of SharePlusLite is much more complete and better. But the functionality in Moshare is much better with better item viewing, editing and real search capabilities. Conclusion is that there are some apps around but quality needs some improvements, but then again what can you expect for free!

One other consideration is: is this any better than the mobile interface, standard since SharePoint 2007. Well actually the interface is quite nice but lacks the ability to browse site structure and is really simple (and loads a lot faster than the apps!).

Question remains how does this work on an iPhone 4 with SharePoint 2010?