Kimind delivered at the end of summer the first version of a Web 2.0 site on behalf of one of our customers which specializes in car parts equipment. A project we have supported from requirements definition to delivery passing by its executions.

The context

The technical documentation center wanted to launch a platform enabling them to provide their customers with the documentation associated with their products, that is so far stored in inaccessible places, not really available and in different formats: text documents, presentations, videos … Moreover, their partners needed to easily add content themselves, and that customers can efficiently navigate in it. It should also facilitate interactions (comments, rating system …) to eventually create a community around the catalog and make it a reference, without falling into the complexities of many online catalogs.

Obviously we had to share the draft central contribution of Web 2.0 to this project: social networking, user-generated-content, assessment by users.

The first version should be ready for a trade show scheduled less than 8 weeks later…

The first major phase of the project was to define the project in itself and to choose the best solution to achieve:

We first had to identify needs and to establish general functional specifications.

From an original vague idea, requiring a collaborative and participatory vision of the problem, a Kimind’s consultant conducted a brainstorming session to clarify the project, generate ideas by the participants, define the participatory dimension and define all needs associated. He then formalized it and he generated in few days functional general specifications that gave the outline of the project with its Web 2.0 their dimension.

We could then choose the best solution for the project in terms of cost, time and sustainability.

Following this, Kimind quickly moved on Practice (technical recommendation): choice of a collaborative CMS and/or a programming language, advised infrastructure… all this being based on defined needs carried out. Our thorough knowledge of collaborative tools, through our everyday experience (for our customers but also internally), gives us fortunately a complete picture of opportunities, beyond the single dimension of technology.

Because of the short delay, it became necessary to start with a CMS that have a similar architecture to the expected results, and on which it was possible to graft complex modules. We naturally led to XWiki, a second powerful wiki generation, customizable and suitable for specific developments. In addition, XWiki is a French and open-source product!

In a forthcoming note, we will explain how we have successfully completed this project with short delays and very competitive costs…

Stay tuned!

The following : here

New version of XWiki is very impressive indeed. XWiki moved increasingly in the best worldwide position in the enterprise wiki market, while preserving its open source dimension. The roadmap presented is also very motivating, the direction taken by XWiki is certainly good, because it is outside the framework of pure traditional wiki rather reserved to collaborative writing, to actually go to the real area of collaborative working environments with a new social dimension arriving at high speed.

Examgeneral.com is dedicated to the creation of tests or exams online, whatever their field of activity. You can be a teacher, a school, a university, a business, an administration, in short any structure which needs to create tests or exams online and have taken by students, colleagues, employees , etc … examgeneral.com offers a platform dedicated to the creation and taken of these tests.

By default a easy mode allows you to do everything in one step: creating the exam, retrieving the URL and giving it to who will take the exam. You can also create public exams, which will feed the public database of examgeneral and will enable everyone to take public tests in english, mathematics, and any other idea that you will wish to make it public.

But there is also an expert mode, to be activated in the preferences of the “teacher”, which lets you manage classes, assign examinations for these classes, manage courses themselves divided into various examinations, etc… In short examgeneral.com provides a comprehensive management environment for online test and exam craation, where students and teachers will benefit from sophisticated dashboards to monitor their respective progress.

What’s the difference from the numerous already existing online test websites? First it is an open and free website, professional, and hence the mere creation of online testing, we come to the management of classes, students, statistics, deadlines taken examinations, comparison between results, friends social network, etc … All this for free in its public consumer version, without limits. Will only pay the organizations that manage large-scale multiple classes, professors, students, courses, etc … with specific management tools which will be dedicated to them. But it will be for the next version.

Feel free to visit the site and make it known around you. And if you have any feedback, you can share it with the community of users (it is emerging …).

From the original idea to the launch of the website

We obviously put our web 2.0 expertise in designing and implementing examgeneral.com. In the beginning, a simple idea from the founders. We worked together to brainstorm, formalize, evaluate the implications and how to make participatory the original idea. We have also worked together on the business model to make the project monetizable in the long term.

Then we set up a dedicated development team, led by one of our project managers and build from our high performance development center in China. The achievement has been based on our agile methodology that emphasizes the interactive relationship with the customer and the delivery of iterative versions (very short cycles between 1 and 3 weeks max) to promote the dynamic design and guarante a common vision from the beginning to the end of the project.

It is important also to note that hosting is made on the Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. It is a know-how we have developed very early at Kimind and that we make available to our customers. The scalability is guaranteed at all times and costs are 100% proportional to the actual consumption of CPU and bandwidth.

First, a private alpha was built, a necessary step because the original idea had no functional specifications and we had everything to build and demonstrate. Then the following versions, like this first beta version, can be realised like packages, now that the functional perimeter is fully well defined. This is one of the forces key points of Kimind to be able to engage in this way on projects from start to finish.

Feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions or needs similar achievements that you would like us to cover.

The answer is NO! The most used collaborative tool is still the electronic messaging system. Why? Because e-mail is an unstructured way to send and share information; an immediate and effortless system. When you enable people and teams to work with powerful collaborative tools, you notice that it takes time for them to consider these tools as part of their daily work.

The reason is the length of the adoption curve, because it takes time to change working habits to work in a more structured and disciplined way. If the company is well organized and its processes well defined, documented and managed, the adoption of the collaboration tools will be easier and faster because they will drive and support the processes.

But, this is not the most common case. A majority of corporations and SMEs are not that well organized and a huge number of employees are still working with a lot of informal knowledge. To force those employees to structure this informal knowledge through a collaborative tool is a difficult challenge.

This problem doesn’t exist with synchronous collaborative tools, because they are based on a real-time communication and there is no need to structure anything. But even those tools are not widely spread in corporations. This lack of usage of synchronous tools will be solved with a pragmatic approach by the hierarchy when it will be obvious that security issues can be managed and that productivity is really higher using these tools.

However solving the asynchronous tool adoption problem will be much more difficult, and what follows shows why it is so important to change our way of thinking about collaboration, because this topic could be one of the next most important corporate organisational changes in the coming years.

Do Collaboration Tools Have Improved Corporate Organizations?

An established fact now is that even in most of the companies using collaborative tools the organization has not changed. It should be obvious that introducing such tools in companies should result in major organisational changes. Why? Because those tools allow people to be more interconnected, to capitalize information, to work transversally instead of vertically, to need less hierarchy in their management, in other words to be more efficient, more productive and more creative. But it is not the case.

As research shows us, the major issue is that these collaboration tools have been matching the rules of the existing organizations, not the reverse. In fact, collaborative tools are used as suppliers, facilitators in some cases, but not as disruptive tools changing radically the behaviour of people. They are just enablers.

On the opposite, the most unique recent experience is the emergence of the Web 2.0 paradigm with the birth of a generation of new participative tools and the creation of huge social communities and user-generated contents. The blogosphere has grown from nothing in 2001 to more than 70 million of blogs in 2006, doubling each six months up to now. Social networks like mySpace have reached the 100 million users in 3 years, and user-generated content web sites like YouTube reached 100 million videos streamed daily in less than 2 years! It is not possible to stay quiet in front of this phenomenon. Is it a pure consumer change or will it affect also the companies? Why these participative tools have such a great impact and not the collaborative ones?

It seems that the Web 2.0 wave has woken up a “deep human longing for individuals to participate and make their voices heard” (Thomas Friedman, The world is Flat, 2006). People want to participate, to be involved, and to take part of. It is the reason why blogs, wikis, and all user-generated content web sites are so successful.

Participation versus Collaboration

What is the real difference between participation and collaboration? Collaborate is “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort; to work together toward a common end” (Webster); Participate is “to take part” (Webster) or “to join in, to take part, to involve oneself” (Wiktionary); What it means is that participation action doesn’t need a “work together” action, only a personal involvement in a global action. It is easier for most people. “Working together” can be done without reflecting upon the nature of work, while participating induces involvement, and it is what people want, to be involved in the decision, to take part of them, even if they are not fully collaborating to achieve the work.

Blogs are the best example of this new participation era. The origin of blog is egocentric: it is the ability for a human being to publish his own thoughts to be read by his family, his friends, and perhaps some other unknown internet users. Thanks to the possibility of commenting and “trackbacking” on the other bloggers’ posts, a huge network of links has been created day after day: the most important ones are not the URL links but the human links created between all bloggers thanks to these two trivial mechanisms. Step by step, a collective intelligence has emerged from this pile of blogs, without any real collaboration, just through a self-organization of active participation! Consequence is that world is changing, not thanks to the collaborative technologies, but thanks to the participative ones that have unleashed the human will to be actively involved in his environment.

Consequences for institutions and hierarchies are huge. For institutions, it is the emergence of the “democracy 2.0″ concept, a participative democracy, where the citizen will be involved in the political decisions at a level never reached until now. For hierarchies, it is the end of hierarchical management in companies, because nobody will suffer anymore not to use in their own company the tools that everybody is using so efficiently in their private life. Even if the company’s managers don’t want to introduce these participative technologies inside their companies, the pressure from their employees will be so strong that no one will hold this wave.

Participation, a Disruptive Change for the Organization

The situation is critical for the organization, because for the first time, the consumer world is ahead in terms of new usages. Participative tools, even collaborative ones are used daily by millions of people in their private life, changing their habits and their way to see the world and interact. The new generations, still in college or universities, have grown up with these tools, which is not the case for their parents who are today the companies’ employees.

It is a disruptive change for the companies. Collaboration tools haven’t succeeded in changing organizations and mindsets, because these tools are only facilitating current work and matching current organizations, even if a small percentage of advanced users take profit from these new tools to change their way of working (e-working, e-organizations). If it is impossible for most users to be fully involved in all the company’s collaborative processes, participative tools give the technical infrastructure to allow all company’s employees to be really involved, each of them at their own level, in the small or big decisions where they can have something to say. Like in the blogosphere, if the company is able to manage this new organization, a collective intelligence will be self-generated, increasing the efficiency, the productivity and the creativity of each individual, team and finally the whole company.

Participative technologies are for everybody: each employee can use them, publish, comment, interact, share, exchange, validate, interrogate, freely, without any constraint, just following the good usage rules and conventions decided by the company. It is the reason why today the most important thing to do for a company is to implement immediately participative technologies, at least blogs and wikis, in all their departments, with all their teams, allowing people to express themselves, to interact through comments, to start building participative interactions and create step by step a participative ecosystem. This way, it is not only an improved information system that the company will earn; it will be a deep involvement of all the company’s actors to reach a common goal and to improve their collective results and intelligence, and finally their mutual collaboration.

Participation is the key;
Collaboration will be the natural consequence

(I published this article for the first time in January, 2007 within the eSangathan newsletter #2)

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Speaker: Tim O’Reilly

OUTLINE

Miguel Membrado

Founder & CEO
membrado@kimind.com

23 août 2007

Miguel Membrado

Serial entrepreneur & Consultant
ErgoSum in 1989 (Paris)

Search Engine & Document Image Processing Software

Mayetic in 1996 (Paris)

Collaborative Workspaces, #2 worldwide on the Internet
250,000 users, 45,000 workspaces, 100 countries, 14,000 organizations

Netcipia in 2006 (Palo Alto)

Participative Business Ecosystem (free wiki-blogs)
Online Content Monetization

Kimind Consulting in 2007 (Paris/London)

Web 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0 Consulting & Services

Kimind Consulting

Entreprise 2.0

Consulting & Services to large companies
Enterprise blogging, participative project management, radical transparency, new participative customers relations, unleashing innovation and competitivity, agile management, …

Web 2.0

Consulting, Services & Coaching to startups
Online identity & reputation, blogosphere influence, participative strategies, Web 2.0 business plans & business models, start-up management, …

3 revolutions since 2000

Globalization 3.0
Web 2.0
Radical Transparency

Globalization 3.0

Empowers individuals
The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman)
Empowers individuals
10 forces inTowards Enterprise 2.0cluding :

Connectivity
Workflow
Uploading & communities
Offshoring
In-forming
The Steroïds (Digital, Personal, Mobile, Virtual)

…
Web 2.0

Unleash People Interaction
3 dimensions of Web 2.0

Social

People centric
User Generated Content
Participation

Business

the web as a platform
For working and exchanging

Technological

Ajax, Web Services, Widgets, Mashups, …

The long tail

The long tail – derivatives
A political long tail? 

Blogging

Blogging
Blogging – figures

User Generated Content

YouTube
FlickR
Del.icio.us
Wikipedia
Oh My News

Social Networking

LinkedIn

THE professional network

MySpace

100 million users in 2 years

FaceBook

THE phenomenon
100,000 new users/day
50% daily active users!!
Viral marketing engine

NING

To create its own social network

+ 746 other startups…

And…

3D collaborative worlds
Recommandation websites
Participative e-commerce websites
Customizable home pages
Job 2.0
P2P banking
Etc…

Web 2.0 has induced new usages

Information production
Participation, interaction, communication
Mass collaboration
Private life sharing
Seeking the truth
Relationship
Content aggregation
Collective intelligence emerges by links and knowledge accumulation

Web 2.0 has induced new rules

Continuous experimentation
Direct discussion with the market
Global business with small teams
Not so much capital
New management style
…

Radical Transparency

The naked company
Before = Secret as a value
After = Transparency as a value

Reverse the relation to the information

« Ideas don’t have worth, execution is everything »

Strong examples

GoldCorps Inc.

Gold maps publicy published

SAP

Partner Business Ecosystem fully transparent

Microsoft

4,000 public blogs

Redfin

Management difficulties publicly revealed

Secret is dead

Everything will be known one day
Faster and faster
Global memory
Google is no more a search engine, it is a reputation engine
Online identity & reputation
Crisis management
Truth

Impacts

Professional Life
Private life
Political life (democracy 2.0)
Associative life
…

Towards the Entreprise 2.0

From Collaboration to Participation?
4 steps

The end of files/e-mails era
Participation vs Collaboration
Forget the control
Integrate clients, partners and subcontractors

The end of files/e-mails era

Replace files by
Online content production (Google Apps, Wikis, Blogs, etc…)
Acting online
Collaborating online
Replace e-mail collaboration by
One « container » by project (a wiki)
Capitalize ALL the information
E-mail retrieve it alert or input mechanism status
Persistant Instant Messaging

Participation vs Collaboration

Collaboration is to difficult!
Participation is easy 
Enterprise blogging
Inside or outside communication
Project blogging
Communities of practice
1 project = (at least) 1 wiki
Participative watching and bookmarking
80% participation – 20% collaboration
Self-service audios and videos repositories

Forget the control

Knowledge emerges by itself
Information sharing
Flat hierarchies
Non-structured information
Awareness
Autonomy
Open discussions
Mobility
Mindshift
…

Integrate customers, partners and subcontractors

Radical transparency
Documentations
Wikis
Blogging
Communities
Open discussions

…

Benefits

Innovation
Competitivity
Collective Intelligence
Collective efficiency
Employee loyalty
Customer loyalty
Talent magnet

Conclusion

A new era thanks to techno / social / business convergence
Mandatory usage to understand
We are in the momentum
Transparency / Participation / Collaboration
Continuous experimentation