The idea of Enterprise 2.0 is now a couple of years old, well into the trough of disillusionment as far as hype cycle position goes, and broad outlines are starting to become clear. So it is not surprising that two books have appeared in the last year that treat the subject broadly, systematically, and without the Kool-Aid that characterized books like Wikinomics, which appeared much earlier in the hype cycle. The first is one by the most usual of suspects, Andrew McAfee, titled, like his original article that coined the term, Enterprise 2.0 (the subtitle though, has changed appropriately, from “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” to “New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.”)  The second is “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” by Matt Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.  The two books are ideal foils to each other. They tackle the left and right brains of the Enterprise 2.0 idea respectively. To a certain extent, they are also evil twins to each other. Which one is better for you?

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I’ve been looking back at some of the video footage from our Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past June in Boston and reminded of our opening keynote address from Jascha Franklin-Hodge called my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut . What a great speaker and great way to kick off the conference.

I’m just as excited to hear from Tammy Erickson, our opening keynote speaker for the E2 Conference in San Francisco next week. Tammy was recently added to the global “Thinkers 50” list along with the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and she focuses on building strategies that will help business succeed.  Enterprise 2.0 is often driven from the ground up, through grass roots efforts that start small and take root across the enterprise.  But the Enterprise 2.0 message and the mandate for business managers is equally important and one that Tammy will deliver loud and clear next week.

See you at the conference next week and in the meantime, please enjoy this past talk from our video archives.

It’s difficult to miss Dries Buytaert in a crowd.

Standing at least 6′ 3″ tall, his spiky head of blond hair is easily recognizable. Known in the open source world as the founder of Drupal, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and instrumental player in Drupalcon, it’s obvious that Dries is a very clever and busy guy.  I caught up with Dries at the recent OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about how he manages to be so successful.

1) You are the founder of the Drupal content management system and CTO/Co-founder of Acquia. How did a Belgian like yourself get involved in CMS?

I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and Server-Side Includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.

After I relaunched my internal message to the public internet as drop.org in 2000, I continued to build on it for a year or so and added a lot of features. More than anything, it was an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds, blogging and content and user rating.

As my experiments evolved, they drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start their own experimenting and applying their own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to open source, and also how the community started.

So it was mostly by accident, and it quickly got out of hand.

2) Why did you feel the need to form Acquia and what does Acquia contribute to the Drupal community?

Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of Drupal, and by offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.

As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.

3) There were over 1,400 at Drupalcon in Washington DC, 2009. What is driving this community’s significant growth year over year?

A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including more than 4,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength.

4) There are a lot of open source projects out there today. What makes Drupal unique?

Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development.  But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.

This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do.

Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users.  If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster.  This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.

My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer.  Eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming.  In other words, one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.

5) Can you name some of the biggest sites that run on the Drupal platform?

A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more.  I believe there are two primary reasons people have chosen Drupal.  The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project.  Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.

6) What are the most common barriers to open source software adoption in the enterprise?

The biggest barrier is education - people are afraid of things that are unfamiliar.  The good news is that “open source” as a category of technologies is pretty mature in the enterprise - particularly in the data center.  Technologies like Linux, Apache, Eclipse and others are now standard tools in any data center infrastructure.  The next step in this evolution is for business buyers, outside the data center, to adopt solutions built on open source applications, like Drupal.

7) How do you overcome these objections?

This is where Acquia comes in – Acquia gives organizations the confidence they need to adopt Drupal based solutions.  They can access the same level of customer service support and guidance that they have come to expect from proprietary software products – in many cases, better customer service – while taking advantage of the innovation and value of open source Drupal.

8) What’s next for Drupal? Can you share any future plans with us?

We are currently working on Drupal 7.  We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding lots of new features in core (e.g. a new database backend, better file and image handling, improved access control, theme system improvements) but also improving usability and scalability.

Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search.  For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal’s database and doesn’t surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can’t pick it up as a product, and they’d fail to include it in their world-wide product database.

Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.

9) Is it true that the genesis of the name Drupal was actually a typo? What’s the story there?

Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.

Thanks again for your time Dries!

[This post was cross-posted from ITSinsider.]

Interest in the 2.0 Adoption Council has been fantastic. Over forty members have filled our ranks. Each of our members has an extremely demanding day job. Educating, motivating, cajoling, rationalizing, bargaining, organizing, tracking, recruiting, and learning are all part of the job skill requirements. The “Internal Evangelist” (IE) has to carefully balance the needs of the business with an incredible responsibility to drive change in the organization with tools and practices that are outside of the comfort zone of most large enterprise employees, not to mention the pockets of organizational resistance predisposed to preserving Enterprise 1.0.

For this reason, I have decided to award an “Internal Evangelist of the Year.” One member of the 2.0 Adoption Council will be selected to exemplify the tenacity, courage, and sheer energy it takes to inspire a large enterprise to embrace the principles and practices of Enterprise 2.0. The award will be announced at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

“…the job of the internal evangelist is far, far more difficult. These folks toggle between fighting the good fight every day and then slipping uneasily into a sort of DMZ where they can peek out into the broader community for support and the rejuvenation they need to go on fighting another day. It’s often a thankless job with no clear roadmap for advancement, yet the majority of them do it because they believe in the principles of the 2.0 movement. I celebrate them!”

Please feel free to nominate someone who you believe is deserving of this award. If they’re not a member of the Council already, I will be happy to extend an invite. Refer the individual to me on my LinkedIn profile. We’re still screening candidates via LinkedIn.

So, I am in San Francisco for a few days, and met up with Steve Wylie and Paige Finkelman. That’s the “Us” in the title.

We had a great conversation, where we figured out world hunger and other such small issues, inspired by some great coffee from the Blue Bottle Cafe in the SoMA part of downtown.

And we touched upon a few Enterprise 2.0 related questions that even our combined brilliance couldn’t seriously illuminate. Care to weigh in? Here they are:

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I had a big insight today: the word “social” in the term “social media” represents the ultimate in misleading advertising, and is responsible for many failures and a lot of disenchantment, especially within the enterprise. The adjective attracts exactly the sort of people most likely to fail at doing anything valuable with the technology. The sort of extroverted, harmony-seeking, consensus-driven collectivists who think it is all about the group, cutting big-ego prima donnas down to size, and building Brave New Egalitarian Communities that enshrine social justice values. It also explains why thoroughly introverted, unsociable, egoistic and ornery individualists (I am one; among my nicknames in college was “hermit”) take to the medium like ducks to water. This conflation of social with sociable, collectivist and communitarian is extraordinarily tempting. Yes, the medium fosters communication and collaboration, but remember, wolf packs communicate and collaborate rather better than sheep. And they compete viciously for the carcass right after. The true nature of social media, the “message” of this medium, is one of radical, uncompromising individualism, within a brutally competitive, bubblegum-flavored Darwinian virtual environment. The “social” adjective is about something else entirely, not collectivist utopia. Allow me to elaborate. The implications are extraordinarily counter-intuitive, and if you don’t learn to appreciate them, you will be eaten by the wolves.

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Today is short notes day, here are three interesting bits and pieces for you to ponder. First, there’s a quick look at the GTD Global Summit, an opportunity to drink the Kool-Aid of productivity, 2.0 style (I am a panelist and have 3 golden tickets — 50% off registrations — to offer, read on to find out how to get one). Second, a thumbnail review of what might be the first “2.0″ business parable, Where in the World is my Team? And finally, a pointer to a rather unique dashboard, since we’ve been on that topic, thanks to Irwin Lazar.

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Since my ongoing series on a social media capability maturity model looks like it is going to be quite a trek, I thought I’d throw in some variety. Don Tapscott (@dtapscott, he of Wikinomics fame) has a nearly-new book out called Grown Up Digital (McGraw Hill, October 2008). It is sort of a sequel to one of his earlier books, Growing Up Digital, (June 1999). In a sense, the new book bookends a decade-long longitudinal study of Millenial digital natives (the term Millenial seems to be the most common, followed by Gen Y, and Tapscott’s own neologism, “Net Generation”). So what happened in the decade during which Tapscott’s own Millenial kids, Nikki and Alex (they feature prominently on the anecdote track), grew up, and why should you, Enterprise 2.0 enthusiast, care?

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Two quotes immediately flashed across my mind as I started reading Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus, a key soothsayer at Microsoft, and Rob Salkowitz, a free ranger in the Microsoft ecosystem who occasionally wanders further afield. The first is a Kant quote: we see not what is, but who we are. The second is due to Alan Kay, a big name in the hoary past of my employer, Xerox: the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. Looking out and ahead at the future is as much a synthetic and introspective act as it is a predictive act, even if you don’t explicitly set out to introspect or synthesize. Microsoft’s visions of the future merit some belief simply because the vast energies of that 600 lb gorilla, channeled by those visions, might be sufficient to bring them about. Goliaths win more often than we suspect, because Goliath beating David doesn’t make the news. For you and me, this book is vastly more interesting for what it reveals about the strategic culture at Microsoft than for what it reveals about the future (which is interesting enough in its own right though). If Rasmus’ views are representative, and I believe they are, here’s the radar with which Microsoft is operating (this is a rough copy of a figure in the book):

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About 8 months ago, in April, I posted an article on my blog titled “A Map of the World 2.0 Canon” that tried to visualize how the emerging popular literature on the impact of 2.0 could be organized. The post went mildly viral. Here’s the visualization I came up with, and links to reviews to most of the books I included back then. Read the full piece if the logic of the diagram doesn’t leap out at you. Probably time to drop/add some books, so any suggestions? For those of you who’ve been lazy about keeping up, this might make for some good Cliff Notes level material to help you fake it.

The Reviews and One-Line Abstracts

I am linking to my reviews where I have them, and to Amazon where I don’t. For a book without a review (the starred ones), if you think you have a good one, send me a link.

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