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Showing posts from June, 2008

3 Pillars Of Collaboration

Collaboration [ defined ] isn't hard … well, it’s not a hard concept to understand but can be a bugger to actually do right. Playing rugby isn't hard but to win a World Cup seems to be too hard for some. Base collaboration comprises of 3 pillars upon which collaboration sits: Good Information Clear Communication Active Connections If you don’t have the information then WHAT are you going to collaborate about? If you struggle communicating then HOW are you going to collaborate? And if you can’t connect the players (be that people, resources or ideas) then you’re going to struggle collaborating. That’s it. Easy eh, get the pillars right and you’re well on your way - all you need for collaboration to occur is to have, in one “place”, information, communication and connections. Done deal! Yeah right! How many times have you thought you were going to collaborate with someone but the following occurs? Someone “forgot” to copy you in on the agenda email (no informat

Twitter for Nonprofits

Marshall Kirkpatrick is a well known technology blogger that recently participated as a guide in an online event where they discussed how nonprofit organizations can rock Twitte r . The event was held by the great nonprofit technology assistance project TechSoup . Pop over and see what they came up with for your organisation! Marshall also lists a few Twitter links on his posting that you may find useful. And, we give you a few more: Twitter in Plain English Twitter for Health How Twitter is gaining ground Twitter’s role in relationship building [This is a cross posting from Groupings — the blog of Webguide: an inspiration and toolkit for community groups]

What To Say When You Are Told You Can't Access Webmail

Gmail ... banned. Hotmail ... access denied. A colleague asked me what to say to their "IT Department" when they get the dreaded, "Can't get to - denied - bad person" message when trying to get to any web mail services. I said - "I can argue your point but it's my business to do so (food in the mouths of Jack and Meg ... is that emotional black mail enough ;-) - however, in a nutshell, my point is: People work for a company/Ministry People will talk/gossip/arrange lunch/see what's on the cinema/get together and every other facet of being a human no matter what you think/dictate to "other people" People have an (e)life outside of "work" - most generally expressed through a mobile or email address People don't turn up (any more) as virgin workers awaiting to be given computers to work on/with ( proof :-) '4 with ('2' + '3') is reality! IT Departments of companies/Ministry's spend many MANY $$$ because t

US election already seeing the "Internet effect" - are you?

As I predicted the Internet (predominantly the Web) will have a major effect on this years US elections ... and it already is according to Pew / Internet " Th e Internet and the 2008 Election" report - highlights below followed by how this affects businesses here in New Zealand: ... 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. ... 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos--a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race. ... 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of internet users under the age of 30 have a social networking profile , and half of these use social networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns. ... 39% of online Americans have used t

Speaking at ... Wellington SharePoint User Group

This should be interesting as I reprise my Webstock 08 8x5 talk for a much smaller audience in a far more intimate environment in front of, what I think will be ostensibly, IT people ... Held at Microsoft's Wellington office starting 6pm on Wednesday 25th June . There's me followed by Brendon Ford, CTO of Provoke Solutions. My details from the Wellington Sharepoint Users Group site : First session: With a reprise his now legend Webstock 8x5 talk Mike will take you through the fear factor most IT Departments experience when confronted by THAT number ... "2.0" Presented by: Mike Riversdale Mike is an advocate and catalyst for organisational change with experience and a passion in "knowledge management" from an on-line perspective. He is also a leading NZ industry speaker, educator and commentator on "sharing information, growing communities and connecting via collaboration". Mike has over twenty years experience in various organisational secto

Blog for your future boss / client / relationship

Blogging is deceptively easy with Blogger telling the truth that within 3 easy steps you too can have a blog. Twitter is even easier - sign-up and start typing. Adding yourself to the Web is, in my opinion, a good thing because you take control of your persona before someone else does for nefarious reasons. These are, of course, early days and not uppermost in the minds of the great unwashed but believe me the days of "not being on the Web" are fast disappearing for those living in connected countries. However ... being on the Web does NOT mean splurging every stream of conscious on to it. It does not mean letting everyone know your drug problems. And for those seeking employment it probably means not disclosing how you edited a production database to remove your own details. You need to be your own editor, copyright lawyer and legal counsel! A piece of fiction to ellucidate You're at a party where you know a handful of people out of the hunderd or so attendees. The rest

Webstock 2009 (16-20th February) - book it in your diary

According to Tash and Mike the planning is well on track for Webstock 2009 and: ... We’ve booked the Town Hall venue in Wellington again for the week of 16th - 20th February 2009. Leave them a comment on who you'd like to see, what you'd want out of the event and anything else that will make it a far finer event for all of us. Official launch will be August sometime ...

Connections and visualisations

With the opening up of information ("data") on the Internet there are now many more ways to viewing information over and above text and a pie chart. The wonderful blog information aesthetics is where I would start if you're looking for creative ways to display that mass of information you have collected. Two examples: (Flickr) Tag Galaxy - "a space galaxy like representation of the relationships between tags on flickr." NNDB Mapper - "a sophisticated visual aggregator that tracks the activities of about 32,000 noteworthy people, both living & dead."

Most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail

Euan sums it up : And it will be for these reasons in no particular order: 1. They think it is about technology. 2. They aren't prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect generates. 3. They will assimilate it into business as usual. 4. They will try to do it in a way that " maximizes business effectiveness " without realizing that it calls for a radical shift in what is seen as effective. 5. They will grind down their early adopters until they give up. 6. They will get fleeced by the IT industry for over engineered, under delivering solutions , think that Enterprise 2.0 failed to live up to its promise and move on to the next fad. 7. Lack of patience 8. It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals.

Agile, if it can work for millions of users why can't YOU do it?

[Updated] Join in with the conversation about this posting and Ben's view over at Diversity Agile software development is all about delivering working software that delivers the highest value outcome as fast as possible. Anything that gets in the way of that is to be spurned as you would spurn a rabid dog. No-one, but no-one, will argue with that. They may argue with "how" it is performed. And when they come back with any number of excuses don't let that be the end of it. If they say anything along the lines of, "Agile only works on small developments with small teams" retort with this from Google's Introducing GMail Labs : The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break. (There's an escape hatch .) GMail, small,

Speaking at ... 8th Annual Strategic Intranet Summit (Wellington, New Zealand)

(stealing the self promotion approach from a fellow Michael :-) BrightStar is hosting the 8th Annual Strategic Intranet Summit at the Duxton Hotel here in Wellington on Thursday 21st and Friday 22nd of August (Google Calendar of speakers at the bottom of this posting) I'm speaking! They have this to say about the conference: " Now in its eighth year, this event has built a reputation as New Zealand’s premier intranet summit, highly valuable in terms of both the knowledge you gain and the people you meet. This year features a great line up of case studies illustrating successful intranet management initiatives and prominent speakers covering the biggest issues that challenge intranet managers. " I'm on Day 2, Friday 22nd August at 1.50pm The Advantages that the New Web 2.0 Applications can offer your Intranet Web 2.0 has become something of a buzz word, but behind the hype lays an ever increasing amount and variety of tools and applications that enable some very in

Semantic Web ... what's that all abaht then guv'nor?

The Semantic Web has, for quite some time now, been touted as then next generation Internet and more specifically the "Web" - your email runs on the Internet but I'm not sure that's what they're talk---- well, maybe ... But what does 'sematic web' mean? Wikipedia has a great ' semantic web ' explanation : Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “cat”, reserving a library book, and searching for a low price on a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.” This ties into two things that are fundamental to the approach I take when working with clients: Openess Information is your product NOT your websi

Plain English - making information available and usable

Here at MiramarMike.co.nz we believe the information MUST be available, findable and usable - read the full article . A lot of people will take those three tenants of good information and then apply technology to solve issues they may have - publish in many file formats to make the information available , install search to make it findable and attach workflow to try and make it usable . Technology is part of the answer but not all of the answer. Another part is to review and reframe the information itself. An exercise for you to do right now. Find a policy on your intranet ... got it, excellent. Now, ask yourself these questions: What words are jargon and how overwhelming is it? Does the layout enable skim reading? Are there indicators of who should read each part? What assumptions are made? Does it indicate (and even link to) supporting information? Are there real people referenced for questions not answered? Is this using the language of the reader? Are there different versions aim