Good post. I see you mentioned Jeanette Borzo in this post. There is a good post there you ought to check titled “Interview with Economist Intelligence UnitÂ’s Jeannette Borzo”. Check out the video there.

Thanks. Keep driving this theme. The complexity properties (emergence, self-organization, etc.) are particularly important. You’re close, but are missing an essential element – value networks. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_network

Also, please beware of the tool-centric and application-obsessed arguments. It’s a slippery slope.

Another great discussion as usual, I look forward to the rest of your posts on this subject.

I’m curious about how the above definitions work given the current barriers to adoption many enterprises face when trying to deploy Enterprise 2.0 applications. Mainly, what are the pain points that professionals feel now when using channels, and how can certain freeform and optional technologies be presented to elucidate their advantages. If a technology is truly freeform, will users understand the potential, but need to form some sort of structure on their own (and if so, so will the structure be formed properly and efficiently)? Or if they don’t need structure, will it truly be emergent?

In other words, can a technology be truly freeform, but also benefit from collective intelligence, especially in larger groups?

Thanks!

I enjoyed reading this post, and I look forward to more entries on this topic. With respect to Enterprise 2.0; how many companies do you really find that are implementing these social networking tools? Here at Honeywell we have blogs and wikis, and I just gained approval to to install an internal tagging tool. However, when I try to benchmark with my peers, I find very few companies (at least large ones) are working in this domain.

On another item, will you be attending Wikimania 2007 in Taiwan? If not, where would you recommend a corporate “knowledge management type” get a similar experience closer to home (i.e. free form, collaborative, live in a dorm experience … like at Harvard for Wikimania 2006)

Thanks.

One piece that really struck a cord with me was the “rule for success”: the use of technology platforms that are initially freeform (meaning that they don’t specify up front roles, identities, workflows, or interdependencies) and eventually emergent (meaning that they come over time to contain patterns and structure that can be exploited by their members).

I agree that this is a key element in Web / Enterprise 2.0 success. A couple of key players I see employing this are:

Google with Google Notebook and Googlebase. These tools are not completely defined, but with slick Web 2.0 interfaces and API for users to get control I think we’ll see huge innovation with these applications in the next couple of years.

Yahoo Pipes: This has Enterprise 2.0 success written all over it. Give a simple GUI / Web 2.0 tool that is very powerful to the masses and see what they do. Let the members define the patterns, structures, and defintion.

Thanks for this great read.