Peer Pressure

I’m beginning to think that the enterprise 2.0 concept of moving activity and information sharing styles like Twitter and Facebook into the workplace is based on a flawed concept or assemblage of concepts.

We’re all familiar with the idea that knowledge workers do their work around the water cooler: Picking up what they need to know via their network of friends and connections.

And we’re all familiar with the notion that Twitter and Facebook (and tools like them) can act like a virtual water cooler.

But there are a few problems here:

• Some organizations go ahead and use Twitter and Facebook as the water cooler. No thanks, I don’t want to mix my work and other lives that much.
• Some people don’t drink “water” and these people may be exactly the people that either need or have the information that needs to shared.
• Social networks are cliquey and exclusionary and operate on the pride of knowing, sharing and being in on the latest thing. Sounds a great deal like the old boy network of back scratching, graft and secret handshakes that makes the business world such a cesspool.

Being in on the latest thing is a competitive advantage. If an individual knows the latest thing it is a competitive advantage for them versus their coworkers. If an organization at large is in on the latest thing it is a competitive advantage for the entire organization. If an organization thinks everyone is in on it, but only some are, then there is a greater risk of the ball being dropped than if nobody was in on it.

So: There has to be more than the water cooler. There have to be artifacts that are curated and effectively shared.

I’ve long had a problem with Twitter and Facebook. They clearly do awesome things, allowing people to communicate in many great ways, but they get in my craw: They end up being a disturbing combination of TV and High School; a race to the bottom where lie the spammers, the advertisers, the popular wit, the need to consume and the need to capitalize and control. The glorious potential of a deeply and diversely linked web of hypertext lost to a bland linear experience.

There’s nothing too horrible about any of that, but I just don’t like it. It’s not good enough.

Further, especially with Facebook, once you stick your content in there, it’s obscured behind an interface that limits access, reuse, sharing and improvement.

So in addition to this blog I’m going to do some social networking experiments on TiddlySpace, the thing I’ve been working on for the past few months.

TiddlySpace is an extension to TiddlyWeb and TiddlyWiki, joining them together with code and UI that provides a multiuser platform for creating and sharing information that is a first class member of the open web.

It’s not really all there yet for doing social networking, but experimenting with will help reveal some of the holes. Some that already exist but will likely be solved eventually:

• No support for OpenAuth.
• Atom feeds from the service are not well exposed and when discovered the content is not fully useful.
• The HTML presentation of individual entities (outside of a TiddlyWiki) is tepid.
• There is no easy support for commenting or otherwise annotating existing content on the content.
• http://tiddlyspace.com/ is yet another new silo.

These last two are perhaps the most interesting. The long term plan for TiddlySpace has solutions.

TiddlySpace already supports a concept of following: users on the system can follow one another. When people who follow one another create a tiddler with the same title they are notified of the existence of the other tiddler and can easily view it. With this awareness they can asynchronously communicate about the topical domain of the tiddler, evolving each others’ views. As following evolves the hope is that it will allow a spam free way to enable synthesis.

There are at least five running tiddlyspace servers, but at the moment they are all independent silos. My content on tiddlyspace.com is currently at the mercy of the administrators of that server. At that moment that is me, so not a big deal, but for other people I think it is. My content, for example, can presumably be subpoenaed without me being able to dispute it.

Long term TiddlyWeb (and thus TiddlySpace) will support a type of federation that allows disparate server to share content. In the Chris Dent perfect internet, everyone would have their own server (or an IBOC). For TiddlyWeb this means being able to read remote bags when processing recipes. For TiddlySpace it means having a federated database of username and space maps.

If you want to join me in this little experiment you can do any of the following:

• Visit http://chris-dent.tiddlyspace.com/ to see my “space”.
• Visit http://tiddlyspace.com/ to create your own.
• Subscribe to my tweet feed or look at the html list
• Subscribe to my journal feed or look at the html list

You’ll find a fair few rough edges but it will get more smooth with time, especially if people let me know.

Some time ago I called myself an information theologist.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what motivates people to do work. In the BlueOxen days we discussed that collaboration required SharedLanguage that led to SharedUnderstandings that led to SharedGoals which result in stuff happening.

This all remains true but I think there’s a step at the end which deserves more attention. When presented with the opportunity to do something, why do we actually do it? What is the process that drives us to choose between “yeah” and “meh”?

I think it’s belief. Faith. Allegiance to something that orients the moral compass. For some that’s just as simple as “it’s my job and I’ve got a work ethic, let’s get on with it” but for most that’s not really enough. There’s usually something more like “my paycheck feeds my kids” or “if we make this thing we are making the world a better place”.

In the abstract world of developers, things get a bit fuzzy (because many of the “normal” motivations don’t seem to apply) and I reckon that developers come up with methodologies to provide themselves with the structure, no, dogma with which to motivate themselves.

All methodology things like XP, Agile, scrum and even waterfall are is religions. A moral compass. A basket of constraints. A third party authority to get you off the hook and moving.

Similarly, all the standard religions are is methodologies: Ways of structuring your daily and otherwise life so it is functional, palatable and in motion.