About a month ago I posed a question on LinkedIn about how effective social software systems including LinkeIn are at supporting learning. This provoked much useful (to me anyway) discussion, which I summarized earlier. But one comment in particular stuck with me. Jon Husband, originator of the organizational design theory of wirearchy, pointed out that you get out of a learning network what you put in. So for the past month I have been working hard at using LinkedIn (and to a lesser extent FaceBook) as a learning network. It has been working.
I have done this primarily by seeding questions I am interested in into my network and provoking discussion. This has been successful in a number of ways, with success seeming to depend on the nature of the question and who I was able to draw in to the discussion.
I began with a somewhat technical question.
Is there a standard semantic model for business strategy frameworks?
"My new company LeveragePoint is built on a semantic platform (SMW+, triple store, etc.). Our business is to support the activation, embedding and evolution of strategies at organizations, at this point we focus on marketing strategies. The platform integrates the implementation and communication of strategies with learning and collaboration. We try to be as standards based as possible. We use DC and FOAF and are implementing SKOS and SIOC. Is there something similar for business strategies? If not is there anyone interested in developing one with us? This would need to cover the following types of strategies: Economic Value Estimation, Value Footprint, Segmentation (various approaches), Buying Process, Customer Portrait, Scenario Planning, Sustainable Business Strategies (Green to Gold, Cradle to Cradle)."
This is a more important question than it may appear at first glance. Public vocabularies are the key to the semantic web and if the semantic web is going to be useful for business the vocabularies need to address business needs. Existing vocabularies such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and Dublin Core (DC) are powerful in their own domains, but they don’t address business issues. Google’s recent announcement of RDFa support is an example of how not to go about building such a vocabulary. Google’s vocabulary at Data-Vocabulary.org manages to add little to the public domain while ignoring the already existing power of FOAF and DC. Hopefully Google will open up and realize that what they need to be doing is to providing an open index of semantic vocabularies, leveraging the work of other in the same way they use the effort people make to link websites as a way to improve search!
Anyway, on the surface this question had a poor response, only two public answers, but there were also a number of private responses that pointed me in the right direction. Especially useful were comments from my friends at Vulcan that pointed me towards the work that Tom Malone and his group at MIT are doing on vocabularies for organizing business information.
I followed up my business model question with one on RDFa.
How are (will) search engines leveraging RDFa?
"My company LeveragePoint is developing a simple model of how a company's offers (services and products) provide value to its clients and solve business problems. This is a subset of the semantics behind our applications. We may also provide a simple form driven tool to generate this information as RDFa for inclusion on a website. We would like to know if and how search engines would index this information and how they would use it. We are interested in meeting with semantic search companies at SemTech in San Jose this June to discuss."
This provided some very useful exchanges, although again most of these were private. The question drew answers from people at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google that were very encouraging. I think there will be a role for RDFa in the public web and the response to this LinkedIn question encouraged me to begin to develop a business vocabulary to map needs, offers and value to one and other. This is based on Tom Nagle and John Hogan’s work on Economic Value Estimation and links to emerging work on value networks and the economic and value exchanges that flow across these networks. I will share more about this approach in the future, which is being developed under the name NOVO (for Needs Offer Value Ontology).
Enough semantic web geekiness, I thought, let’s explore some ideas around virtual and mobile technologies, provoked by recent experiences with iPhones and Android.
Will mobile and virtual blend?
"I have been thinking a lot about how people use and will use mobile devices. A couple of days ago I began to read Edward Castronova's book Exodus to the Virtual World. Let's assume he is right and living in virtual worlds will become a large part of the economy. Will the mobile and virtual trends continue in parallel or at some point do they blend? If so how? One possibility is sketched in the new novel Daemon by Daniel Suarez where game style overlays give players a critical advantage in the 'real' world."
This question seemed to strike a chord. There were seventeen public answers and another twelve direct responses. The answers caused me to think more deeply about the question and identified some developments I was not aware of. Chuck Hamilton, who is involved in virtual world projects at IBM was especially helpful, pointing me to Bobba. Richard Smith pointed me to a great TEDs talk on the subject. There were many thought provoking responses, I encourage those who are inrested to read through clicking on the links. Thank you to all who contributed. I’ll give Jesse Wang at Vulcan the last word though “So, the real issue is that the virtual and real world will blend, and mobile will be a key medium to accelerate it..” Wow. I just finished reading Brian Rotman’s excellent book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being and I think Jesse is right, the real and the virtual are blending, and changing our identities, our math and how we share and intermingle our ideas.
Experimenting with LinkedIn has been disappointing in one regard. So far most of the questions have resulted in answers to me rather than in conversations with and between my friends. Things went a bit better on my most recent question, which has resulted in more dialog.
Is there such a thing as "design thinking" that applies across disciplines?
"Many people refer to themselves as architects. There are product architects, software architects, network architects, social architects ... And many people refer to themselves as designers. Is there a common set of ideas, heuristics, algorithms and codes that apply across the different design disciplines? Can there be? Should there be?"
This question resulted in eighteen public answers and a number of e-mail conversations between people. It also drew answers from everyone from prominent software engineering savants like Philippe Kructhen (the articles he points to are well worth reading for anyone interested in design), to practicing architects, interface designers and information architects. The only things missing was an old relational database bear (I am still looking to provoke one). There is a consensus that there is such a thing as design thinking and that it needs to be better researched. I am looking forward to doing some design thinking on how to represent design thinking, and I hope to attend and if necessary to host some conferences in this area over the next few years.
So, is LinkedIn a good tool for supporting learning conversations? Maybe. My network is certainly a good place to have these conversations, and by using LinkedIn as a vehicle I have been able to learn from people that were not my direct contacts. This is very good. But, so far anyway, I have not been able to get the kinds of deep multi-directional exchanges I am hoping for (even if the Design Thinking question and answer was a step in the right direction). Is this because of LinkedIn and how it is organized? Or perhaps it is the nature of my friends (we are an opinionated bunch, and not always as good at listening as we could be). Maybe I just need to learn to phrase the questions better and to guide the conversation. All things to think about, and maybe to ask on LinkedIn!
