It only lasted 60 hours, but that was enough.  "It" was New York City’s transit strike, which City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. estimated to cost the city’s economy ca. $1 billion.

Retail businesses were perhaps hardest hit, losing perhaps half a billion dollars right before the Christmas holiday.  Businesses which relied on perishable goods or prompt deliveries also suffered.  

But many knowledge workers stayed home and, to the extent possible, used e-mail and other collaboration tools to conduct business.  But if companies believe such an impromptu approach will work for them in the event of a longer crisis, such as a pandemic influenza, they are wrong.  The transit strike should serve as a wake-up call, not only for New Yorkers but for everyone.  Managers need to ask themselves if they could continue operating in this fashion (i.e. transit strike mode) for three months or longer.

When Basex analysts informally polled executives in the New York area, the answer was a resounding "NO!"

As our holiday gift to you, we are making our report, Strengthening Corporate Pandemic Preparedness and Response, available at no charge. Simply go to the Basex Web site  to download your complimentary copy.

I’m writing this column from my home office.  Today is day three of the New York City transit strike.  As regular readers know, I am quite comfortable working from almost any venue; all I need is my laptop.  Connectivity is nice but given our infrastructure, it’s also optional as I have local replicas of all of our research databases and authoring tools on the laptop.

As a result of the strike, millions of commuters who regularly travel into Manhattan have had to find either alternate means of transportation or an alternate workplace.  For me it was a no brainer.  As is the case with most of my colleagues at Basex, I work at home regularly.  Anyone at Basex can do so and there is no impact on operations.  In fact, telework has become the norm, not the alternative.

This week we released a report showing that 80% of businesses worldwide have failed to prepare for the type of business continuity emergency steps that a global pandemic influenza might occasion.  In such circumstances, absenteeism could rise to 25% above normal rates and, unlike a transit strike, this would continue for months.  Companies need to ensure that they can keep business moving.  An Emergency Collaborative Response, a crisis where a company’s IT infrastructure — including collaboration and knowledge sharing tools — ensure business continuity is beyond the capabilities of most companies.In the event of a significant incident, companies need to be able to comply with local governmental recommendations such as requesting that employees stay home.  One company I spoke with about their preparations is IBM.  "At IBM, we already have an online environment that manages almost every aspect of an IBMer’s work, regardless of physical venue," said Mike Wing, vice president of strategic communications at IBM.

But few companies are as far along in their preparedness as IBM and Basex.  In fact, most corporate managers have not begun to even contemplate what scenarios would play out in the event of a pandemic influenza.

We are making the report, Strengthening Corporate Pandemic Preparedness and Response, available from the Basex Web site at no charge at the Basex Web site. It outlines the issues companies face and provides clear, concise information that companies can use to begin formulating their own contingency plans.

I spent time discussing the situation with Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, deputy commissioner of disease control at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.  His comment: "the middle of the pandemic is not the time to start making arrangements."

Recent news reports have told us that Wikipedia would be tightening its editorial practices. This is a prime example of a collaborative mechanism whose business rules, while altruistic and well-intentioned, are too free-form for its own good.

Yes, I know I spoke fondly of Wikipedia right in my own blog here on Collaboration Loop, and can still speak favorably of it on the basis of many experiences. However, with its impending libel lawsuits and other struggles, now may be a good opportunity to look a the concept of business rules in collaborative environments.

This is the first in a series of blog entries centered on business rules.

Rule 1. Establish a leader

Taking a page from the book of Wikipedia, I’d like to point out that collaborative editing/working environments can and do function productively without a “leader.” However, in the professional setting, I strongly suggest electing or appointing a subject matter expert or a leader who will be responsible for ensuring the accuracy and the quality of the collaborative experience.

From practical experience, I can tell you that very few subject matter experts whom you would wish to have leading your collaborative environments actually have the time to do it. It takes dedication, time and effort to scroll through many pages of content (depending on how much material ends up in the collaborative space). Furthermore, the research and production of the meaty content that users look for in their collaborative experience eats up even more time.

So, what does a good leader do? Delegate. Most leaders in the academic space make judicious use of their graduate students to run their collaborative spaces and ensure quality content. Others will pass the responsibility on down the chain of command. However, in either scenario, I suggest that the leader spend the time mentoring the new person during their learning curve.

The mentoring process should include the review of a set of standards for acceptable content in the collaborative space. I’ll cover standards in a future blog entry, but if a group already has an established set of standards, they should be posted in the collaborative space and named appropriately.

Finally, the leader should be the technology evangelist of the collaborative space. Without his or her efforts to publicize it to the desired participants, the space will not be used effectively.

The impact of a good leader will be seen in the use of the collaborative environment by its participants. I’ve witnessed many successful collaborative efforts, and about twice as many failed ones. The life of the effort flows through the heart of its leader.

OpenText under the strategic leadership of Tom Jenkins has evolved from a document and archive management firm to a serious player in the collaboration space. With their new strategy we at Collaborative Strategies believe that they are a good vertical counterpoint to Microsoft’s horizontal play in this space.

I recently attended an “analyst day” at the OpenText LiveLinkup conference in Orlando in mid-November. Most of the management team from the Chairman (Tom Jenkins) to the head of sales spoke to a good sized group of analysts.  Based on what I heard and saw, I believe that OpenText is moving in the right direction given the current trends in the collaboration market.

Ease of Use

One of the big messages from John Shakelton the OpenText CEO was that he wanted to make it easy to buy, deploy, and use OpenText.  This fits with feedback we have had from a number of user organizations that we have interviewed over the last year. Most organizations prefer “easy” over “feature rich” (and not so easy). We have seen other vendors like SiteScape (who I talked about last month) also moving rapidly in this direction.

Dancing with Elephants

There are a number of “elephants” in the collaboration space, and Microsoft is one of them.  Rather then being on the dance floor with these behemoths, OpenText has wisley decided to work with Microsoft and add on to what they are currently offering. Microsoft is seen as a “horizontal” collaboration play. As it turns out, OpenText found that about 60% of their 20 million users also use Microsoft desktop applications and SAP. So OpenText did deals with both of these “elephants.”  To the features found in Microsoft desktop applications and SharePoint, OpenText offers a search engine, archiving engine, portlets and case management. Partnering with Microsoft gives OpenText access to the 800 million users of Microsoft desktop applications.

Go Vertical

OpenText’s real strength, and where we believe that they will not only survive, but thrive, is going after vertical markets and specific processes.  At OpenText they call that the focus on business applications, and industry solutions. They have created a 10 x10 matrix of the top verticals and top applications, and will select a number of these to partner on or implement.

OpenText has done an excellent job of “going vertical” over the last few years and have partnered for such applications as: Community of practice for Government, or partnering with FrontRange Systems for Oil and Gas Exploration applications.

In our recently released RTC 2006 report (www.reports.collaborate.com) we believe that by 2008 there will only be a few major colloboration players (elephants) left and all the other vendors in this space will either: be acquired, go out of business, or move into specific vertical and process niches that they can defend.

For OpenText what this means is that they are building applications on top of both Microsoft and SAP (Levels 2 and 3) for specific verticals and processes.

This change has been so pervasive at OpenText that they have re-organized the compay to reflect this new strategy.  They have put sales support and professional services (all revenue generating areas) under one person (yet to be named).  The other two groups are: Product development, and product marketing.

One of the areas they have focused the most attention on with partners like Deloite is SOX compliance.  Working with Deloite they found that 80% of customers use the same compliance process, with 20 % customization for that particular organization. OpenText which is about $400 M in revenues this year will be looking for some small acquistions this year to add specific SOX expertise to the team.

John Kirkham (based in the UK) is currently running the sales team. For the last year about 55% of sales are in Europe. OpenText is also trying to consolidate its executive team into its Chicago and Waterloo (Canada) offices. This seems very contrary for a company that sells collaborative tools, currently they have executives spread over almost 50 different offices.

SOX it too me!

Nothing, not even sex, seems to sell as well as fear! Although it has taken much longer for the market for SOX solutions to appear, it seems to be on track and growing rapidly according to both Deloite and OpenText. These partners have generated more revenue this quarter for this application then they did all of last year, and expect revenues to be 3X what they were over last year.

The partners also found the sales cycle to be longer then expected, about 6 months, and it is a strategic solutions sale rather then a software sale, which means that typically there is a 2-1 services to software cost in the sale.

Eric Slaghuis from SASOL petrochemicals did implement a SOX application with OpenText that supported collaborate in controlled environment, focused on standard operating processes and looked at faciliting effective risk assessment and document controls.  They were able to put the application on one page, which spaned 18 levels of hierchy in the SASOL organization. The application took 36,000 man hours to build, most of it using internal SASOL people, and this project had a 10-1 services to software ratio.

SASOL is not unusal for the SOX market, as they are in a highly regulated vertical and they found out that their initial use of paper-based or Excel spreadsheet was too difficult to replicate for the next year. 90% of customers did it manually, and did not automate. This year, the second time around, about 40% are doing the automation. 

The Customer is Right

One thing I heard a lot at the OpenText conference was about the people at OpenText and how responsive they were to their customers.  Having attended other “elephant” events for Oracle and Microsoft, that is not typically the comment you hear at those conferences. We at CS believe that this is a significant differentiator that OpenText is taking advantage of. If looking at their Communities of Practice offering, it is bundled with instructions on how to be successful with an online community, as well as several templates and examples to get you started.  Rebecca Phillips of General Dynamics, who runs a secure Community of practice, talked a lot about the level of support and response they go from OpenText. Where we see OpenText differentiating it’s self from some of the elephant vendors is that they are invested in their customer’s success rather then just selling software. This might seem like a subtle philisophical difference, but it really is a much bigger change, and one we see as a smart strategy. 

Another trend we have seen, and that has been written about in the RTC 2006 report, is the shift in those who are buying collaborative solutions.  More and more these are business people with a specific problem, who are adverse to risk, and are not sure how to apply the technology except in a very specific way. 

OpenText’s philosophy of of both verticalization and investing in their customer’s success is sure to make them one of the survivors in this dance with elephants, but if you read between the lines at OpenText, you can see they are moving away from collaboration and focusing more on the vertical applications like SOX and compliance, and letting Microsoft deal with the collaboration aspects at a lower layer. The question then becomes is OpenText a collaboration player? CS expects to see more vertical solutions from OpenText this year, and less collaborative ones. We saw demo’s of their community of practice products, and of TouchPoint (their RTC technology) but there were no real plans to make TouchPoint commercial that we heard from OpenText management at the conference. Does this mean collaboration is in limbo at OpenText?

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies (CS). He is the author of two books on groupware. He can be reached at davidc@collaborate.com or 415-282-9197.

It will come as no surprise that more and more enterprises are becoming increasingly “virtual” every day. Chances are, if you work for a company with more than a few dozen employees, you work for a company that has remote workers, whether they’re located in a satellite office or a home office, or spend almost all their time on the road.

But the “virtual workplace” is about more than having a distributed workforce. It’s about having employees regularly work in a location that’s separate from that of their managers, direct reports and/or immediate co-workers. In other words, it’s about having employees who regularly work with people without actually seeing them live. And often, it’s about having employees who interact across regions, countries, and time zones.

Based on that definition, 58% of IT executives who participated in Nemertes’ most recent benchmark on the issue say theirs is a “virtual workplace” today; another 9% say they’re “almost there.” What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it’s harder for employees to collaborate with each other, never mind with partners, suppliers and even customers. Planned meetings are more difficult to orchestrate; ad-hoc sessions, harder still. Since employees can’t see whether their co-workers are available (or even in the office), they spend more time playing phone and e-mail tag, and less time actually engaging. This increases the amount of time it takes to get work done, and decreases the sense of teamwork that can bring a workforce together, boost productivity, and increase the bottom line.

In a sense, we’re the victims of our own progress. Twenty years ago—even, for most companies, as little as five or 10 years ago—it was relatively easy to collaborate with co-workers. Chances are, the people you worked with day in and day out worked right next you, or just down the hall, and even the people you worked with infrequently were probably nearby when needed. You knew when they were in the office, you knew when they were not; if you called and got a busy signal, it was a simple matter to get up, stretch your legs, and walk by their desk to catch them when they got off the phone. Spontaneous meetings around the water cooler were a regular occurrence—and some of your best ideas came from those unplanned encounters. Sales calls were made in person, as were internal and external business meetings.

In the past several years, technology has changed all that. Now, companies report that between 10% and 40% of employees are working at headquarters, depending on the size and nature of the company. More and more, employees are working at locations different from their managers and/or co-workers—regardless of whether they or their managers or co-workers are themselves located in a headquarters, remote or home-office. On average about one third of employees work in a different location from their managers and/or their immediate co-workers (that is, the people they work most closely with on a day-to-day basis). Water-cooler meetings aren’t possible anymore; nor is it a simple matter to “see” whether the people you need to reach are around and, more importantly, available for an impromptu discussion.

But virtual workplaces take a variety of forms. For some companies, virtual workers are those who work in truly remote offices, across the country or the globe. For others, virtual workers spend most of their time on the road. And at still others, virtual workers are physically separated from their managers, co-workers and/or immediate reports, but may themselves work at a headquarters or large satellite corporate office.

In fact, it’s that last definition that we think truly describes the virtual workplace. Although a significant number of companies report a significant number of employees working away from headquarters that doesn’t mean those employees are necessarily “virtual.” Employees who work together with their team members and managers in a location separate from headquarters may require a unique network architecture, but as far as collaboration goes, there may be nothing virtual about it. More relevant are those employees who regularly interact with other employees who are located in different buildings, cities, or even countries; who span a variety of time zones; and who may or may not share the same documents and applications.

One multi-billion dollar company has 80% of its employees stationed in remote offices, and 15% in home offices full time. Why? “Cost savings. Business-expansion requirements. And people like the idea of more flexibility,” says the firm’s director of communications and networking.

Business growth accounts for a lot of the change Nemertes sees in the number of virtual workers. What’s more, companies are becoming increasingly global—and that makes real-time communications tools all the more valuable. And except in very discrete cases, most employees need to work with others outside their immediate team or peer group at some time or another, and often they need to do so on a regular basis. That’s where the virtual workplace gets interesting—and that’s where real-time communications technologies come in.

Disparately located workers can clearly benefit from real-time communications, because the people they need to speak with most, and most often, are by the nature of their situation difficult to see and reach.

Many of the IT executives Nemertes speaks with cite an increasing interest in enabling an “agile enterprise.” An agile enterprise reacts quickly and efficiently to changes, such as market opportunities or mergers and acquisitions. The ability to react quickly can translate to top-line revenue, and the ability to adjust efficiently can also lead to lower costs.

Elements that enable an agile enterprise include quick communications, increased productivity, and getting closer to customers. Not surprisingly, these are the business drivers most often cited by IT executives when asked about their motives for using real-time communications tools. This is especially important in a virtual workplace environment; among companies that define themselves as being a virtual organization, more than a third cite “quick communication” as the most important business driver.

Not surprisingly, 92% of those IT executives say real-time communications technology helps them manage remote workers, an increasingly important goal. Real-time communications tools let employees collaborate, no matter where they are or what time it is while they’re there. Real-time communications technologies are “not the reason we’re able to [have a virtual workplace], but it does make it easier to communicate with remote workers,” says the CTO of a professional services firm with 50% of knowledge workers in home offices.

For companies with lots of virtual workers, it can be critical to bring employees together, virtually, and make them feel as though they really are part of the larger team. Other companies are truly committed to helping employees balance work and life. This is often cited as a reason for letting employees work one or two days at home, for instance, and many IT executives say real-time communications tools make it easier to support that type of work.

We’ve found there are certain best practices that IT managers can employ to ensure success as they support the virtual workplace by rolling out real-time and collaborative technologies. They include:

• Recognize that the virtual workplace—remote and home-based workers—can have a real impact on the bottom line. Test drive this in the IT department, where real-time communications tools allow workers to support users from far-flung locations; then deploy it throughout the organization.

• There’s a difference between working in a remote office, working alone at home, and working remotely from your manager or teammates. If an entire business unit operates out of a single remote office, they may not operate in a virtual environment, at least not often. On the other hand, if one team member works at a different location—even if it’s the company’s headquarters location, he or she becomes a virtual worker—as does the rest of the team.

• Real-time communications can support and even enable the virtual workplace, but they work best when accompanied by business-process change. Before deploying the tools enterprise-wide, make a point of evaluating your current communications processes, then look at how they can be improved with the help of real-time technologies.

• Speaking of business processes, it’s critical to involve line-of-business managers and end users when you decide to deploy new communications technologies. These tools get to the heart of how people work—and making changes without their buy-in simply won’t succeed.

• Along those lines, consider the corporate culture in place at your organization. Are employees open to using new technologies? Are they inclined to share information? Are they stubbornly independent? And what about the managers? Executive- and management-level buy in is critical to a successful transformation.

My previous post focused on some historical challenges, highlighting several causes of communication/collaboration complexity and chaos. With this and my next couple posts, I’ll explain market trends that are helping to usher in a new, simpler, and more effective framework that includes channels for communication, workspaces for collaboration, and more contextual communication/collaboration.

The first trend, depicted in the diagram below, is increasing convergence among tools used for communication, collaboration, and content management.

In the past, it was routine for organizations to have specialized tools and support teams for different communication, collaboration, and content management needs.  It also wasn’t unusual for the people focused on the different specialized areas to not spend much time communicating and collaborating with one another.  This was exceptionally counterproductive, as work activities often cycle through many communication/collaboration/content phases.

If we receive a communication update (via email, RSS, or some other type of communication channel) about a competitive acquisition, for example, it’d be natural to gather the people responsible for determining a response in a workspace, brainstorm (collaborate) on next steps, and publish (communicate) the results via assorted communication channels.  As part of the collaborative work, we’re also likely to produce content designed to help sales people and others articulate the response. 

If participants are required to switch among different tools for different facets of the communication/collaboration/content work, they’re more likely to disregard or misuse one or more of the tools, reverting to the tools they’re most comfortable with even if those tools aren’t ideal for the tasks at hand.  If instead the tools are well integrated, facilitating in-context interaction, participants are more likely to be productive and responsive.

A second key trend is a shift to database management system (DBMS) foundations.  In the past, products focused on facets of communication/collaboration/content management have generally relied on proprietary storage engines.  This was done in part because DBMSs were traditionally focused on highly structured data and simple data types, an approach that was effective for data processing but not as useful for semi-structured or unstructured information management.

DBMSs are now much more useful for communication/collaboration/content domains, however, as recent releases of leading DBMSs offer strong support for document-structured information using XML, XML Schema, and XQuery.  XQuery, now a W3C Candidate Recommendation, is especially powerful, representing a data manipulation language that accommodates more of the richness of the XML data model than earlier approaches focused on supporting a subset of XML data manipulation operations using SQL.

Several vendors are now exploiting DBMSs for communication/collaboration/content-focused products.  IBM’s Workplace, for example, builds on IBM’s Cloudscape and DB2 DBMSs for client and server storage needs.  Similarly, Microsoft has moved to a DBMS (SQL Server) foundation for many of its communication/collaboration products, including Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server, and (some of the data managed by) Live Communications Server.

Oracle, unsurprisingly, has gone much further with Oracle Collaboration Suite, using its Oracle Database for nearly all facets of its communication/collaboration/content management storage needs.  Oracle’s broader DBMS foundation is a leading indicator of what’s likely to follow from IBM, Microsoft, and other vendors, and it can be a key criterion for organizations that face stringent regulatory compliance requirements.

While these trends are producing new opportunities for organizations, they also have profound implications for vendors focused on communication/collaboration/content product categories.  My next couple posts will address some related issues including the emergence of superplatform competitors and the advent of low- and no-cost alternatives such as blogs and wikis.

Collaboration means to work together and working together often means sharing information.  Collaboration goes hand in hand with knowledge sharing, which implies relating information and experiences to others.

It is said (perhaps more often than not by Kodak) that a picture is worth a thousand words.  One way to share information and experiences is through photography.  Think of how many words are conveyed by each photo!

After my recent trip to Germany, where I picked up a new BMW at the factory and drove 2426 km in 5 days, hitting Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy, I wanted to share some of my favorite photographs from the trip with friends and colleagues.  But how?  No one (but the photographer) wants to look through hundreds of photos.  A far more reasonable number to share with people is a dozen or so.

The somewhat unconventional answer: a calendar.  And given that it’s mid December, wouldn’t a calendar be a useful present as well?

To create my calendar, I turned to Lulu.com.  Lulu is a leader in the print-on-demand book world, with over 40,000 titles in print.  The company was founded by Bob Young, who had previously co-founded Red Hat.  Lulu made publishing my calendar (in full color) simpler than creating an Excel spreadsheet.  

In fact, creating the calendar itself was the easy part; the hard part was going through 700+ photographs and choosing not only my favorites but ones which matched the season.  

Now for the shameless plug - you can see, and purchase if you deem it worthy, the Road Warrior 2006 calendar (click on "Preview this calendar") at http://www.lulu.com/content/198660.

First, I wanted to mention how delighted I am to be a new member of the Collaboration Loop blogging community, joining many other respected industry experts as well as my Burton Group co-worker, Peter O’Kelly. My focus for many years has been in the areas of collaboration, knowledge management, learning and social computing.

I am at the Interop event this week and sat in on the keynote address by Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice-president in the Real-Time Collaboration group at Microsoft. One of the key points made by Gurdeep in his presentation is that the vision for unified communications needs to expand beyond simply voice + data. We need to consider people, roles, relationships and the need for strong identity. I have to agree. Today, our communication and collaboration world is very fragmented. We are faced with constant disjoints as we move across devices and across work and life boundaries. Tools we use today simply do not handle the transitions and transformations between communication and collaboration modalities very well. It ends up being a frustrating experience for users as they manually triage a very fragmented environment. Meta data becomes strikingly important as users (and developers building communication-enabled applications) struggle to preserve context as people collaborate back-and-forth in real-time and asynchronously (perhaps using a virtual workspace technology). To make matters more challenging, these interactions increasingly span devices (mobile phones, PDAs, business laptops and home computers) as well as opportunistic connection points (e.g., P2P, public Wi-Fi spots) making identity and security of critical importance.

As part of Gurdeep’s keynote presentation, he announced that Office Communicator Web Access is now available. That’s good news for users and IT groups deploying Microsoft’s Live Communicator Server. Communicator Web Access (CWA) is an Ajax-based technology enabling the UI to mimic what users experience in its desktop counterpart, Office Communicator 2005. Users simply point their browser to the correct URL and sign-in. This opens the door to more rapid and broader deployment of an LCS solution by IT groups. CWA also extends Microsoft’s real-time collaboration client footprint to support non-Microsoft browsers and non-Windows platforms. I met with Gurdeep afterwards and followed up with several questions. My paraphrased notes are below:

Q: How similar are the capabilities of Office Communicator and CWA?
A: Except for audio and video, the features and functions between the two products are virtually the same. Users will notice few differences.

Q: What does the Ajax programming mode for CWA allow you to do?
A: If you have a portal or other type of application, you can start embedding Communicator Web Access within the application itself. You can imagine small Ajax fragments that fit within the application context rather than just Communicator Web Access filling up an entire browser window. For instance, you should be able to create a Web Part container for Communicator Web Access.

Q: Will Microsoft deliver dedicated client versions of Office Communicator for other platforms or does CWA fulfill that need?
A: Righ now, Communicator Web Access will be the solution for non-Microsoft browsers and non-Windows platforms but we remain open-minded to supporting other scenarios in the future.

Q: Does CWA support policy management?
A: Communicator Web Access honors all LCS server policies.

Q: What about support for Communicator Presence Controls?
A: There is no bridge right now. CWA will not work out-of-the-box with Communicator Presence Controls but developers can take advantage of the Ajax programming model.
 
Q: What about support for Role Agent and other LCS SDK/APIs?
A: Communicator Web Access supports all the back-end functions of LCS.

With that, I thanked Gurdeep for his time and went back to the show.

As you may have read in my last entry, last week I spent several hours jamming.  Specifically, I was participating in Habitat Jam, a Massively Parallel Conference, or MPC, in the tradition of IBM’s WorldJam. 

When I first logged in, individuals from over 90 countries were actively participating.  7,000 people had already participated in the New Delhi Jam-related event.  At the end of 72 hours, there had been 459,402 page views, over 20,000 posts from ca. 30,000 participants, and numerous connections and associations made.

Jammers discussed six topics of global importance, ranging from "Improving the lives of slum dwellers", to "Finance and Governance in our cities", to "Humanity: The future of cities". 

I started a thread in Forum 5, "Finance and governance in our cities".  My thread concerned eGovernment: "I’ve seen very little discussion [in Habitat Jam] about the use of eGovernment (which can assume many different meanings) and its direct bearing on making a city successful.  Technology can play an important part for all citizens.  ‘Low tech’ solutions (in terms of the citizen user interface, such as New York City’s ‘311′ system, have proven successful beyond what its planners had imagined.  Other governments are placing more and more action items on line - having learned that static information is of little value.  I would be interested in comments on this and seeing a discussion."

Over the next two days, a lively discussion ensued, including different examples of addressing eGovernment as well as 311 type systems.  More poignant was the forum on slums, and the fact that slum residents lined up for hours in order to post messages and tell unfiltered and often painful stories of their existence.  

Habitat Jam was a joint project produced by the Government of Canada, UN-HABITAT, and IBM to make the process of collective thinking inclusive.  It brought together experts, world leaders, and thousands of individuals who care about the future of our cities. 

In terms of collaboration and knowledge sharing, it was a milestone event.  Bringing together 30,000 people, most of whom did not know other jammers, to discuss something as important as the future of the world, is one of the best examples of an innovative use of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools I have seen — and perhaps one of the most innovative uses ever.

It’s over but you can still see it as a coda site.

I’m back home for a while after a whirlwind traveling schedule. My goal was to visit groups interested in learning more about collaborative technologies and teach them how the technology we are currently using can help them to achieve their goals. While I may have been the instructor, I learned some valuable lessons as well.

The most useful method of teaching people how to use a collaborative technology is to first introduce the concept of collaboration and what it means communicate and collaborate with others electronically (both asynchronously and synchronously). Then, it is absolutely key to show how others are doing it using the same technology. Give plenty of examples.

In nearly exhausting my resources, I learned that the more examples I gave, the more wheels started to turn in my students’ heads. They wanted to see how people posted questions, and how people replied to the topics. They wanted to see how files were posted and how the version control feature worked. They wanted to see all the really nifty things they could do with the databases. They wanted to see how the calendar reminders worked and how often people could receive notifications of new content. But, most importantly, they wanted to see all of this (and more) in context. My students did not want to explore new ways of reinventing the wheel. They wanted templates for improving communication, project management, and collaboration within their organizations.

If learning a particular technology, or set of technologies within a platform, requires training, make sure that you have exercises for your students to do. More importantly, make sure that the facility has workstations and laptops available for them to try the technology. In two of the facilities I visited, the majority of the students did not have laptops, nor were there computers available for them to use to try out the system while I taught the classes. If you find yourself in the same position, try to tailor the class to show the different ways the technology may be applied within the context of your students’ work.

For example, a group of participants dealt with external vendors and other constituents that were not on staff. First, I showed them how another group was using the platform to perform very similar tasks. I confirmed with the students that they wished to use it in a similar way, then I demonstrated the steps for performing those tasks if they had their own setup. Less than a week later, a request for a new site for this group was in my inbox.

While that may be the desired outcome, not everyone will be convinced that it is worth their while to change the way they work with others. As I (and many others in this field) have said before, it will take a massive cultural shift for adoption of collaboration technologies to take place on the larger scale. However, if we look at the pattern of adoption of the now ubiquitous email, we can predict that within a few years, use of collaborative technology platforms will be the norm, and not the exception.