The key to understanding what’s going on

The 50,000 foot view of what’s going on in social networks and informal learning has changed very little In the last five years. From up here in the clouds, it’s just the latest episode in the eternal trade-off of central control and individual choice.

Cycles. To everything there is a season.

The focus of our culture seems to swing from technology to people and back. From institutions to individuals. From central authority to decentralization. From top-down control to bottom-up.

Extreme swings toward technology and institutions were Taylor’s Scientific Management, robber barons, Business Process Reengineering, and narrowly-defined eLearning (removing all the people to make it work.) The pendulum had swung far in the opposite direction when we had flower children, itinerant hippies, anti-war protests, and, more recently, the Open Source movement and the proliferation of blogs.

I recognize the main current crashes into a lot of rocks. Eddies go the opposite direction. We can have guards with machine guns rooting through everyone’s suitcases at the airport at the same time the power of the ‘net gives a louder and louder voice to the people.

In yesterday’s presentation for Collaborative Learning 04, we asked “In business culture, where’s the pendulum this year?”

And the group replied:

Emphasis on institutions 0

In the middle 60%

Emphasis on individuals 40%

That observation is from 2004. It wasn’t a new concept then. From 2003:

As the pendulum of culture chic swings from the institution to the individual, it’s natural that empowering the common participant is back in vogue. Not to trivialize it; this is important, and I’m glad to see it.

Here’s a mid-2003 article from an internal newsletter from Deloitte:

Social Software: Get Affiliated

Jon Warshawsky

If you wake up in the middle of the night thinking that your company code and employee number aren’t helping you, it’s because they weren’t supposed to. But the rise of online communities based on self-affiliation may be putting technology on your side. Knowledge management and corporate learning may never be the same. So rest easy. Your editor gets affiliated with some experts to bring you the real story.

Social Software: Get Affiliated

by Jon Warshawsky

Hi, what’s your company code?

Want to understand the emerging world of social software? Step one: forget everything you know about “business areas,” “company codes” and all of those System-defined clusters of people designed by System engineers for the benefit of the System.

Forget top down. Think bottom up. While you may be part of sales organization 60 and training district 12, that turns out to have not much to do with how you learn or affiliate.

“Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their personal goals,” Stowe Boyd wrote in a recent article (Darwin magazine, May 2003). “Contrast that with the groupware approach to things where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or functionally.”

When it comes to knowledge management and learning, “we may be witnessing the death throes of the command and control organization,” according to Berkeley, California-based author and researcher Jay Cross. “The pendulum seems to be swinging from an institutional, top-down model to an individual, or bottom-up, model,” he said.

While the technology is nothing spectacular, social software is one of the catalysts of the change. For those interested in how companies learn and share their smarts, it has begun already.

What is social software?

You’ve already determined that everyone who’s proficient with software is a socially inept recluse who spends Friday nights at Frye’s or Circuit City playing with fourth generation PDAs and cell phone cameras, so how did these words come together? While your conclusion has lost currency in the past decade – even arch-geek Bill Gates is married, and he’s lost billions in the past few years – it’s a fair question. The focus is on how software is used.

The cc: line in email, according to Boyd, could be considered the lowest form of using software for social networking. By definition, you’ve created a small community of recipients who are part of the communication stream. This is a basic level of affiliation. Significant? Consider whether you read the cc: line in email messages you received. Odds are that you do. While we tend to cc: more people than we ought to, this is a conscious decision to define a group of people for whom the topic is relevant.

Boyd defines social software more broadly as the sum of these categories:

Support for conversation online: Instant messaging, e-room, etc.
Support for social feedback: Think eBay, where buyers rate sellers for honesty, helpfulness and service level.
Support for social networks: Friendster is a recent example, but to some degree Amazon.com (for books and music, and probably doilies and leaf blowers) and Edmunds.com (for auto enthusiasts) are popular examples within this category.

None of these are startling or expensive technical achievements, but they connect and enroll users remarkably well. In many cases, it is easier to keep in communication with relevant business or other special interest contacts in these virtual communities than it is in real life.

The potential effect on learning and knowledge management is huge. If you accept that CD-ROMs and classrooms are poor substitutes for mentoring and real-time advice, social software starts to look more impressive. It’s a way to gather all of the “go-to” people in one place, and to contact them fast. It’s your network.

Learning, according to Cross, can be defined as optimizing the performance of your social network. You want to find information faster and cut out the less useful, or under-performing parts of your network. Social software makes this happen.

“Reputation has to factor into it,” he added. The eBay model for feedback may be relevant beyond the online auction business.

A new attitude, or lack thereof

The technical bits of social software have been around for years, although new functions have made it more satisfactory for the average Web user. But the grim business climate of the past few years may have removed some of the obstacles to the bottom-up community-building process.

According to Cross, much of the “cowboy” attitude of the technology world has waned in the past few years. A happy side effect is that tech people may be more likely to value these communities now that they’re not so keen on being millionaires next week through their own start-up.

Jay’s first eLearning Talk
At Elliott Masie’s TechLearn in late 1998, I gave my first live presentation predicting the future of networked learning. It was the product of a scenario analysis that looked ahead all the way to 2004!