Coups de coeur dans les nuages

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• Collaborative Consumption: How it will disrupt "traditional" Business Models (customerthink.com)

35 years working with personal computer and what has be done to rethink the way we live with this appendice of our brain?

How have you arranged your table to keep your hands, your shoulders, your back, your neck, your eyes (I will not add your legs but think about them too) in a relax, confortable position during all day long?

This is my husband's new solution. He is really happy with his "flat desktop", so I share it with you. Please tell me YOUR home made solution!

Back from Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt (Germany),  Thanks to Bjorn Negelmann and Cathrin Gill for this opportunity.

1. The format of the summit was a real good surprise: 10 minutes pitch followed by discussions, open-space workshop, networking space during the day and after dinner of day one. Great opportunity to meet and discuss with companies' evangelist and consultants. I was happy enough to talk with @sagenet (Jenny), @elsua (Luis), @frogpond (Martin), @aponcier (Antony), Joachim Linder from http://komblog.de, Wendelin Auer from http://www.kkundk.de/, Felix Schröder and his CEO from http://justsofwareag.com, Juliet from Bausch, @JeanYves, @andgenth, Juliette Girard from Renault, Richard Collin, Rolf Schmidt-Holz...All embracing persons, very enthusiatics about the summit and the subject, Enterprise 2.0, but very realistic too. Companies with a long lasting internal communication are even working hard to turn upside down their habits. They are still looking for transversal, fluent, agile conversations all over the company (nobody talked about connecting companies communities with customers or providers).

2. As an entrepreneur I know that business is just about customers. Processes inside the company are aimed to deliver the product or service customers are waiting for. According to cases studied during the summit, big companies (Renault, BASF, T-System, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, IBM, Bayer) are experimenting social platforms, community buildings behind their "firewall". 

starting from the inside (internal initiatives aimed at employees) to gain proficiency in order to move to the outside (externally connecting and engaging in communities with customers and other partners) seems to be the norm. (source:http://artlifework.wordpress.com/) 

What these companies are fearing? Is the "firewall" protecting them 100% from critics, leaking, legal issues? Where are their best allied: inside the company or outside? They are doing a great job, their products are fantastic, so they can meet the "public" with confidence, nothing to hide. Do they know that the most creative and profitable industry sector, fashion, is NOT protected with copyright. (see: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.... ). Remember what Rolf Schmidt-Holz pointed out opening the summit, about people inside companies : "...You find out that you have fantastic people, mostly not at level one....Excellent people need to be treated excellently and it means giving them space, freedom". He was speaking by hart, from his experience on the ground.

3. One workshop was dedicated to "Network analysis". Information, knowledge, pull/push information, network design, bottom-up, ...companies as Lee Bryant showed up are delighted with designing processes aimed to put limits to employees' responsabilities. 

But what if the network is a rhizome, each employee a knot (maybe a crux) and the flow between two knots completely free? Forget about tree and graph, listen the noise, see what "knots" are growing, what piece of information become re-used and is integrated as a knowledge...[1]

Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon like many others current movements (open gouvernement, open foodies, commons...) are disruptive in essence. Are we on the verge to embrace "The perfect society" as described by Socrates?: 

"...The perfect society relies on laborers, slaves and tradesmen. The guardian class is to protect the city. The question is put to Socrates, "Who will guard the guardians?" or, "Who will protect us against the protectors?" Plato's answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a "noble lie". The noble lie will assure them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it." (source:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F)

[1] A simple wiki is able to give all these informations: 
- listen the noise with "Recent Changes", "watchlist", "New Pages" delivered by email or RSS
- see what knots are growing with Users tracking on each collaborative article
- see what information becomes a knowledge thanks to "search" or "semantic tools"
You can also plug-in all "apps" (like IPhone apps) to test whatever type of collaboration or integration (ex: mobile inputs, twitter or facebook integration). This is agile, versatile and low cost.

* great post which sum-up the Summit with quotes:
http://artlifework.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/lessons-learned-at-the-enterprise-2-0-summit/

Two conferences about Enterprise 2.0 in one month, one in San Francisco (US), one in Frankfurt (Germany, Europe), is the business world looking for a magical remedy to the recession?

Obviously the 2.0 "revolution" is boiling for longer time ago than the financial crisis. In the companies the recession had give a push to what could be the end of mass-consumption, mass-production...maybe end of capitalism, version. 19th century.

This video is setting the stage to give you the Best of the two conferences and invite you to comment on:
* http://diwiki.com/index.php/Best_of_Enterprise2.0_Summit

What large companies understand about Enterprise 2.0
What about the workforce
Measuring collaboration benefits: Wiki-experiment in the German Armed Forces

Kutiman says : "ThruYou was born out of the belief that giving is a social activity - an activity that creates and strengthens communities". He mashes pieces of  music and voices recorded on YouTube by you and me, and the result is a true, genuine composition, a master piece of creativity.

Larry Lessig, the author of "Remix," the bible of the free-culture generation, wrote: "Watch this, and you'll understand everything and more than what I try to explain in my book." 

* More about the implications of this phenomenon in : The Future begins Thru You
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Twitter : http://twitter.com/nanouk
 

Reading post "Blockage" in Cause Global Blog, I was impress by the  replies gave by Clay Shirky about the management of organizations and whole society.
To the question :
"Is there someone or some new organization doing this well?

Boing Boing, one of the well-trafficked Web blogs, has a brilliant community manager named Theresa Nielsen Hayden, whose principal MO is to sit back and watch"

answers Clay Shirky.
Absolutely disruptive of course as our traditionnal image of a true leader - manager is a busy person, pushing and pulling persons and projects.
Maybe the "sit and watch" attitude is the drastic posture  of the "new" leader but in the challenge to find efficient and flexible organization that deserves the society of information, it could be a necessary first step.

Do you agree with:
" how to change the organizational structure enough to accommodate Web-enabled, ground-up, collective action—self-organized groups of members or supporters or constituents that, because they're using new technology tools, are demanding interaction at far higher levels than before. This is something that really is unprecedented. Those organizations which fail to exert new leadership will risk losing support."
 

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)
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Twitter : http://twitter.com/nanouk

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