Teblog

A virtual sustainability summit, or three

Now here's an idea that makes sense: a follow up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. Or, to be more accurate, a series of follow ups, none of which requires much travel. A company called G2Events is putting on a series of three online conferences which include exhibit booths, presentations (from organisations small and large), telepresence-basd panel discussions, meeting rooms and downloadable materials. Called Sustainability Virtual Summits, it is entirely digital - totally in keeping with its name.

Each event has specific focus areas in order to maximise the chance of a meaningful exchange of views. The first, in February, will concentrate on virtualisation and dematerialisation and how ICT can get its own act together (my words, not the organiser's). The second, in May, concentrates on smart motor systems and smart logistics. The third, in August, looks at smart buildings, smart grids and water and sanitation. Each event concentrates on the role of ICT in delivering sustainability benefits.

Why should we have mini-summits following the big one in Copenhagen? Well, to be blunt, you can only achieve so much at these big events. If the delegates agree on a post-Kyoto protocol and all get their pictures taken looking pleased with themselves, (preferably while standing next to Barack Obama) then that's about it. The real work takes place in all the organisations that are obliged to live up to the greenhouse gas promises that eventually get made.

The truth, though, is that we're in disarray. For example, last week I looked at ten different carbon calculators. They gave ten different results. (Choose one and stick with it if you want to monitor your progress.) But wouldn't it be better if we could all agree on some standards? This is one of the reasons these follow up events have been brought into existence. Participants get a chance to review and discuss these and many other sustainability-related issues.

Each 'conference' will be a day long, covering three time zones. After the initial three days, the live debate will continue for 30 days. After that, all the material from the whole event will be left online for a further 90 days. In theory, this could become a substantial resource for anyone seeking a genuine understanding of the issues around ICT and sustainability. It would be nice to think that some global understanding will emerge. If positions polarise, at least everyone can see what's going on and know where further effort needs to be applied. Hopefully a lot of bonding will take place among movers and shakers around the world.

The trick will be to get the right people to attend. As anyone who's visited Second Life will attest, that experience can be quite unpleasant. The virtual summits promise to be very different. They are photo-realistic for a start. A little bit of downloading takes place before you get into the conference so, presumably, a lot of  the rendering is done inside your own computer. A company called Design Reactor takes care of the technical aspects and, looking at some event work it did for Hewlett Packard, the omens are good. You can also see a dummy of the Sustainability Summit site here.

Although this is a commercial activity, its heart seems to be in the right place. It is independent. It has some good sponsoring organisations. Exhibitor booths don't cost very much. It's going for a smallish audience - around 5,000 quality visitors drawn from CSR/sustainability execs, c-level, data centre managers, supply chain, product development, finance and marketing. It seems like a good event to drop in on during the 30 day 'discussion period'. I'm guessing that this where the fun will begin. It's also where people with implementation experience will be able to contribute their insights.

Rumours of KM's death exaggerated

Say 'knowledge management' to most people in our business and watch the curl of their lips. It seems to be a 'given' that KM is dead. The usual reason given is that knowledge sits between our ears, so how the heck can it be managed? Even those who are prepared to stretch the definition a little bit into 'information' are still inclined to question the value of the stored information. I mean, what information is readily given up and what's its half-life anyway?
A few months ago, I stumbled across a US/Indian IT services company called MindTree. It has a Chief Knowledge Officer called Raj Datta. Expecting the worst, I spoke to him and was somewhat astonished to learn that he has taken a lifecycle approach to knowledge management. He recognises that it does live between people's ears. But he also recognises that it can be shared through social tools. The result is an organisation which spends a lot of time, energy and money on the most important bit of knowledge management, its creation in the first place.
Staff are introduced to many thinking and idea generation tools - from De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to mind-mapping. Through workshops and discussion groups, they can learn about many thinking concepts, developing their minds and their ability to innovate. Without creation, knowledge/information capture is merely ossifying the past.
Staff, called 'Minds' incidentally, are then given a wide choice of social and collaboration tools, from blogs through wikis to discussion groups, and more. They are also given a physical workplace which encourages planned and serendipitous encounters.
The astonishing thing about this company is that it was implementing these ideas and blending them with its traditional KM/content management systems while most companies were still trying to figure out the relevance of social networking. MindTree turns out to have been something of a pioneer.
By joining the dots and ensuring that the complete knowledge lifecycle is supported: from inception, to storage, to sharing, to reuse, it provides the KM world an intelligent and holistic way forward.

Lotusphere mop-up; then I'll shut up

Rather than write a series of blog posts of ever-diminishing interest (for me and for you), I thought a final Lotusphere round up would make sense.

First up, Doug Heintzman. He's the director of Lotus Strategy. We talked about the market for collaboration software, top to bottom. I mentioned the bottom  last week. But, at the top, he talked about the Enterprise Adaptability practice: something that materialised after the last Lotusphere. The most interesting bit, for me, was the toolkit that it provides its practitioners for studying the social networking patterns in enterprise and using it to help build an ROI case. I asked him what parameters were measured, hoping to get a checklist for you, and was rewarded with a verbal finger wag. Something to do with the huge intellectual property value in the patterns that emerge. Drat and double drat. If you're interested in learning more, start here.

Okay. I've given up trying to find the next thing online. It was a brilliant use of the 'Crocodile Dundee in New York' scene where Dundee has headed for the subway to get out of Sue's life. She's dumped her fiancé and wants Dundee. The scene is the one in the subway where she wants to get a message to Dundee that she wants him back. Verbal messages are transmitted up and down the crowded platform until he clambers over the heads of the passengers for a reunion. Aaaah. You can see the clip on YouTube, but it hasn't got the IBM punchline. I tell you, if that's a real ad', aimed at real people, IBM/Lotus has hit a hole in one. Sean Poulley, the host of the session claimed that the nine collaborative tools being offered will be "competitively priced with meeting-only services". Interesting.

I'd wager that Casey Dugan was the most enthusiastic person at the event. She was showing off Beehive - a social networking site where people can reveal stuff about their personal lives as well as maintain professional connections. It has 50,000 users inside IBM so it is clearly of value to this substantial minority. It lives behind the firewall, which is less risky than public services. It's still a research project at the moment but you can grab more details here.

I think that's enough for one year about Lotusphere, except to say that some things made me unhappy. My Linux/Firefox  netbook wouldn't render my agenda properly. And I'd have liked a single sign on to the three different IBM services I was trying to use: the analyst site, the LotusLive site and the Lotusphere site. And, as for responsiveness, getting hundreds, maybe thousands of people trying to hit the access points and networks at the same time was a recipe for disaster. I gave up early and took to wandering round carrying bits of paper and having face-to-face conversations with real live people. Much more fun.

Now I'm taking a break. See you in a few weeks.

What if the lights go out?

We humans have a talent for getting other people and other things to do stuff for us. If we didn't, we'd all be out there scratching a living from the forests and fields and we'd have a pretty rudimentary existence. Would you care to forage or kill for the food on your table?

"A strange way to start an IT-focused blog," you might be thinking, but all will become clear. Yesterday I was listening to Clay Shirky talking about the wonders wrought by the advent of the internet. In particular, he was talking about the tremendous communication leap which has taken place in terms of how we communicate, cooperate, collaborate and act in concert as a result.

Previous communication systems have been predominantly one on one - telegraph, telephone, fax and so on - or they've been one to many, where 'one' has usually been a business: books, radio, television. Even the web started off that way. What's changed over the past few years is our willingness and ability to convene online. We don't need to be gathered together by an organisation - a company, a fan club, or whatever. We do it ourselves. And we're most likely to do it by coalescing around a topic of common interest.

Shirky mentioned the case of HSBC stopping its interest-free overdraft facility for graduates last year. It thought it had the power to do this. (One to many.) But it didn't account for a graduate starting a Facebook group delicately called "Stop The Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off". Okay, I was kidding about the 'delicate'. Despite it being the summer holiday period, students and graduates joined the group in their thousands to discuss the issue and decide on actions that might need to be taken. Not least sharing information about how to move their accounts to other banks. Newspapers picked up on it. Physical demonstrations were planned in Facebook and HSBC backed off.

A piece of information about HSBC became a gathering point, a cooperation point and a collaborative action point. This sort of thing just couldn't have happened before. People were put together by bosses. Or they joined clubs organised by other people. They didn't self select and self organise, certainly not as quickly and as effectively and in such numbers.

Inside the business, the same thing's happening. People often find each other because of common interest and quite regardless of the hierarchy. If two people in two labs in two parts of the world are coincidentally researching the same materials, there's a good chance that they'll discover each other if there's a topic online around that material. Relationships will form which couldn't have come about through central direction.

As Shirky says, "Every URL is a latent community."

You see it a lot with environmental groups at the moment. A lot of coalescing is going on around different green topics. I see that fellow analyst Tom Raftery has started talking about the 'Tom' instead of the Tonne as a CO2 measure. In fact Gavin Starks has started a ning social network called megatom. It has 15 members as I write and it may be madly successful, or it may die. It cost very little to start. It's not like a conventional media title. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't. This kind of exercise is being repeated thousands of times a day, all over the world. Some might say the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, but that's not true. Good ideas will gain traction, bad ones won't. Good contributors will gain influence, bad ones will be ignored.

With several UK power stations heading for the knacker's yard courtesy of EU rulings and with our excessive dependence on foreign energy supplies, we face the real prospect of power shortages. But this new world relies, more than anything else, on us each having a supply of electricity. Without it, the doorways to this parallel social universe will be slammed shut.

Am I being paranoid? Does it matter? I happen to think "no" and "yes" respectively. What about you?

Collaboration: the old way. Why not?

Just lately I've been wondering a lot about stimulating innovation inside companies. It was sparked off by a visit to the Imaginatik user conference in London. I was treated to a number of case studies in which customers saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by adopting Imaginatik's IdeaCentral approach to collaborative problem solving.

The companies were large - Walmart, Whirlpool and Pfizer, to name a few - who were saving tens of millions of dollars as a result. Imaginatik likes to promote a ten times ROI at every opportunity, which suggests that the cost of the software and services are probably beyond the reach of smaller businesses anyway.

So this got me wondering. Given that a lot of IdeaCentral is similar (on the surface at least) to social software, could cheaper and more generally available tools be used to similar effect? It is web-based. It has places to post your ideas, comment on other people's, add your profile, make contact, get notifications of updates, voting mechanisms, tagging, search and automatic discovery of similar ideas. Behind the scenes, the set-up and management software and a bunch of add-on modules contribute to this powerful software suite.

Could the bulk of this be done easily using social tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and suchlike? I'm not sure. While I like these tools and am an active participant in the social computing world, I'm not sure that most people would be ready for an unstructured collection of tools. It would be simply too complicated for the average user to start blogging, commenting, tagging, voting and the like. The management tools are the other side of the coin. It would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to put together some kind system to keep track of everything that's going on.

I'm now going to suggest something retrograde which might have my social software pals throwing their hands up in horror. What about using a forum? It's simple to set up, simple to use and you can easily control membership. (I ran a public forum and the spam levels were absolutely ridiculous.) You can also keep the captured knowledge on your own system, usually in a MySQL database which makes for ready integration with other systems.

Users can start new topics, others can comment. They can search. They can be notified of comments. A good clue about value is whether a suggestion has comments. Because it's being implemented in a business context, so there's no personal or business advantage in flaming or being silly. Once an idea has collected a few comments, perhaps the management could move it up the list to give it more prominence. (Or maybe some forum software exists to do this automatically, I don't know.)

For smaller organisations, I would have thought that this would be an simple way to collaborate and it would be a pity if it were to be sidelined by the more shiny toys of recent years.

Of course, I could be talking through my hat. What do you think?

Piggy-backing on social software

While our attention has been diverted by the razzle dazzle of the social software startups, traditional software companies have been quietly getting on with updating their own products. In the past month or so, I've been to four briefings with established organisations, each of which has presented me with demonstrations of their updated legacy software which, on the face of it, look just like the work of the startups.

All the jargon is there too - network effects, long tail, social networking, wisdom of crowds, comments, tags, rankings - you name it, they're saying it. And, to be frank, I found it quite offensive at first. As someone who spent several years participating in the emergence of social computing, I thought that they were cloaking themselves in the regalia of this new world in order to pretend that they are still in the game. I was wrong about their motivations, of course.

It took a while for the penny to drop. It wasn't until the fourth presentation that I realised that the imitation was not simple flattery, or even a desperation to appear relevant. They really had twigged that this new stuff had a viable place in their world. They had found ways of making the old stuff easier to use on the one hand and more powerful on the other. Two of the announcements are still under the radar, so forgive me for not naming names. Suffice it to say that in all cases the benefits derive from social things like collaboration, collective insights and sharing. And not-so-social things such as monitoring the activities of individuals.

A social software startup is unlikely to get anywhere close to developing the sort of enterprise software that drives our businesses. Some will survive and mature and maybe even merge their way to prominence. Others may simply have their moment in the sun, then fade away. But their legacies are there for us all to benefit from. They're a sort of living research laboratory for the IT industry.

Companies which have spent years building and evolving substantial software products that deliver real value are right not to be too disturbed by these new developments. But they are absolutely right to consider what's good about their own offerings, what's good about the new stuff and then graft one to the other, as appropriate. Just because something is labelled 'legacy' doesn't render it irrelevant. Quite the reverse in fact.

Just semantics? Or is it here?

The semantic web is one of those things that has been much talked about, especially in propellor-head circles, for several years. It leaves most outsiders a bit cold. They actually don't care about triples, RDF or SPARQL. They care about whether it will make a difference to their businesses.

Well, after a circuitous journey which took in two reports (here and here*), two related podcasts (here and here) and a series of instant messages with, my semantic everything guru, Dr Paul Miller, I decided that one of the reports was fairly grounded and quite useful. It's the (asterisked) one by David Provost, an analyst whose mid-life MIT SM thesis was called 'Hurdles in the Business Case for Semantic Web'.

Since then, he's sustained his interest in the subject and recently produced the report (free to download) called On The Cusp: A Global Review Of The Semantic Web Industry. It starts with a plain English run down of the semantic web world and finishes with a look at 17 semantic technology vendors and, in many cases, their clients. He started out by inviting 25 companies that he figured were doing real stuff, but eight either refused or didn't respond to his invite.

The resulting document verges on the gushing but, if you ignore that, it contains much of interest. It is strictly business-focused and it tries to steer clear of all but the most essential jargon.

A lot of the software described has been around for donkey's years but it is finding its vocation in the semantic web world. Natural Language Recognition, for example, is a core requirement for 'reading' and interpreting documents and turning the findings into the metadata which is at the heart of the computer's ability to understand content and context.

Databases with extensible schemas are another key element. This is necessary because the world is always changing, we can't predefine everything in advance.

The vendors vary in what they offer, from the narrowness of USA database company Franz, to the breadth of German company ontoprise GmbH. I quite like the sound of thought-sharing company Primal Fusion - but that's still in alpha so I couldn't check it out. I did look at Thomson Reuters' Calais however, but wasn't totally gripped by the results. It reminded me of speech recognition: no matter how good, it takes a while to get used to you. I rarely add Ltd or Inc to company names, so when I pushed some of my work through for automatic creation of metadata, some key elements, like company names, were not spotted.

It is, as the author points out, early days but enough is going on to suggest that we're going to see increasing use of semantic activity to improve performance for the benefit of organisations and their customers.

If this is unfamiliar territory to you, then the report will start you off, regardless of whether you're a business person or a propellor-head.

I would also recommend keeping a close eye on what Dr Paul Miller is up to. He seems to know everyone and everything that's going on in the semantic space, web or otherwise.

Social software and a troubled bank

Wachovia Bank is in the process of being largely gobbled up by Citigroup (Update 6 Oct: or completely consumed by Wells Fargo). It was losing money hand over fist already this year and the more recent firestorm in the financial world brought it to its knees. It will take a while to sort things out and, then, who knows what will happen in terms of consolidation and job losses?

Earlier this month, I was listening to the company's eBusiness Director extolling the virtues of its internal collaborative software suite, called Pulse. At the time, I wanted to write about it but, having checked the bank's financials, decided it could have disappeared within hours or days of the story being published. Slightly bad news for me, terrible news for the company. Anyway, here we are at a new beginning, and here's the tale...

Pete Fields is a grey-haired, smart (in both senses), business professional, the last sort of person you'd expect to see presenting at the Office 2.0 conference. He talked enthusiastically of the underpinning reasons for Pulse and surprised many at the conference by explaining that it was built atop Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Like GE, mentioned in a recent post, Wachovia had decided on a DIY approach.

The primary drivers for Pulse were: 1) to enable staff to work more effectively across time and distance; 2) to better connect and engage employees; 3) to mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce; and, 4) to engage the generation Y worker. I bet there's a lot of 2) going on at the moment. And, I'd also guess that thoughts are currently quite far away from 4).

But, regardless of the current state of the company, Fields' insights are still interesting, not least the graph that showed the consequences of an ageing work population over the years 2000 to 2010. It showed clearly how the working population is increasing from the age of 45 and decreasing in the 35-44 bracket. The 55-64 age group is rising over 50 percent. And these people, plus the over 65s, will be leaving and taking their knowledge with them. (Assuming they can afford to.)

The diminuation of collective knowledge is one of the reasons so-called knowledge management (KM) became so popular, before people realised that the two words contradicted each other. Organisations thought they could use software to systematically squeeze knowledge out of people and file it away for future use. After many false starts, no-one would claim success. Lots of success with information but the stuff between people's ears was altogether more difficult. However, the advent of social computing (choose your own term) has brought the KM dream closer than it ever was when the knowledge managers were strutting their stuff.

Nowadays, if your organisation supports them, you can tap into wikis, blogs, bulletin boards, Q&A databases and the like. And if you're not happy, you can dive into the people pages and ping an expert. Within a short time you can get authoritative answers, in context and, because it's done electronically, the trail is saved for others. We all know there's a lot of nonsense 'out there' in the wider web but, in a corporate context, people don't file anonymously and they generally avoid posting inaccurate stuff that would reflect badly on them.

So, given the demographics, what did Wachovia do to capture knowledge without making people feel they were being exploited? It created an internal Wikipedia. Called Wachovia Wisdom and subtitled 'the encyclopedia by employees for employees', it struck the right note. It started, innocuously enough, as an acronym wiki. This wasn't the corporation squeezing you, it was you sharing what you knew with your colleagues. Smart move.

The project as a whole was never a skunk works. It was driven by business requirements and implemented in three phases. The first was establishing the platform, the second was about supporting team working and social capital and the third was about individuals.

To give a flavour of what's going on: the system supports 6000 web conferences a month, each one saving the company an estimated $214; several executives gave up five percent of their travel budget to the project; and, around 100,000 instant messaging sessions take place daily.

Of course, there's much more to the Wachovia implementation than this. You can watch Fields' Office 2.0 presentation online and you can download a slide deck (from an earlier conference)  that shows quite a bit of the system in action. You can even follow his personal progress on Twitter where he's, not surprisingly, petefields.

Home-grown Enterprise 2.0 at GE

The recent Office 2.0 conference appeared a well-organised and serene affair, totally hiding the furious hidden paddlings of organiser Ismael Chang Ghalimi and his team. He put the event together in two months, again, which makes it nightmarish for people like me who like to plan their time. Do you trust Ghalimi and book tickets and hotels? Or do you wait until the agenda crystallises, usually two or three weeks before the event? I did the latter, but I'm delighted to hear that he's going to be making the event organisation a year-round affair in future.

So what tipped me into going this year? (Apart from other people picking up large chunks of the tab.) It was the promise of some pretty large companies talking about their Web 2.0/collaboration experiences and the unconference that I wrote about in this blog while I was there. Add to that a high degree of networking with knowledgeable people and meeting up with a new US-based member of our team (Hi IdaRose) and I was all set.

The event did not disappoint. The highlight for me was hearing Dr Sukh Grewal from GE (General Electric, as was) and chatting to him afterwards. In 1999 he was invited to move from engineering to bring a user perspective to IT developments. He guided the creation of SupportCentral, GE's internal collaboration system.

Like another large user, Wachovia Bank, which was also speaking at the event, neither was using any of the 'usual suspects' for its in-house collaboration activities. Wachovia built its system on MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) while GE built atop an Oracle database running on a Sun midrange server.

This was a bit of a wake-up for people like me who went into the sessions expecting to hear about the triumphant penetration of the enterprise by a Web 2.0-style company such as Socialtext, Jive, Atlassian or WordFrame.

Sticking with GE for this blog post, its SupportCentral was backed by the CIO for its first eighteen months. The aim was to bring together individuals, communities, knowledge and processes. Bear in mind that this was in 2000 and the 'social networking' phenomenon was yet to hit the mainstream.

The basic principles were that people wanted and needed to be seen and connected, communities needed to communicate more effectively than just through mail lists, knowledge was everywhere, a lot of it inside heads, and repeatable processes were the means by which organisations generate value. This structure was not apparent at the start of the project, but, once realised, it gave it the focus that continues to this day.

SupportCentral became a platform to digitise processes rapidly. The developers had created a user-driven point-and-click workflow and mashup system long before the 'mashup' term was adopted for IT processes. It is also a place where knowledge is shared and expertise discovered, through Q&A and document uploads. About half of the community information lies in the Q&As. It also gives access to about 2,000 internal databases.

The whole thing is web-based, so it's accessible to all and desktop updates are not required. Setting up a community is a matter of minutes and, if it doesn't work out, no problem. About 50,000 communities exist in this company of 400,000 people. To which you can add about 30,000 external users who have been invited to join specific communities. The system watches communities for activity and closes down any that become moribund - about a third of those started.

It's easy to see, with these numbers, why Dr Grewal believes that an internally developed system costs a lot less than paying for per-user software licences or external services. In the interests of keeping costs down, he's also investigating the possibility of switching some users from Microsoft Word to Zoho.

SupportCentral has enabled the right people to get together, with the right documents, creating and serving organisational processes, with a high degree of transparency. The IT department is responsible for building the enabling infrastructure.

A new release of the platform is rolled out every other Thursday - 1500 enhancements per year are made. User requests have to be justified with a thought-out ROI and a preparedness to pay for the development. This has bound IT and the lines of business together in mutual trust. A survey facility, for example, saves the organisation something like four million dollars each year. It's used about 100 times a day.

This has not been a top-down roll out even though the development was centrally directed in the beginning. It's been a case of "if it doesn't help you, don't use it". The growth chart might resemble that of a social networking success story, but it's happened over years rather than months. And people tend not to drop out. It is very much a business environment although Grewal cheerfully admits that some people use outside services. He said, "about 1000 people belong to the GE Facebook group. That's how many people in GE who have diarrhoea every day." Ooer!

You can watch Dr Grewal's presentation if you're interested in the details of SupportCentral. Suffice it to say that, whether by accident or design, it has ended up as a great exemplar of Enterprise 2.0 in action. And, as the man himself says, "this is beginning to represent the heartbeat of our company."

By the way, SupportCentral is supposedly available from Tata Consultancy Services, but it is impossible to find on the website. Here's a link to a pdf brochure.

Office 2.0 unconference

Went to an unconference today. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's based on the assumption that the folks in the audience often know more than those on the platform. So why not invert the normal process and let the audience join in?

As you might expect, it wasn't an unqualified success because the usual mix of humanity was there. Shy people, knowledgeable people, egotistical people, idealists, evangelists and sheep. No names, no pack drill. But, given that the day started with a blank sheet, it ended up providing some useful and relevant insights to the attendees.

It cost next to nothing to attend ($50) but, of course, it did cost people's time. Given that the day included plenty of opportunity for networking and a drinks/nibbles party at the end, you'd have to be really hard-hearted to say it was a waste of time.

The event as a whole is called Office 2.0 and this is the third time it's run. Judging from peoples' interests at the unconference, 'Enterprise' was the highest ranked topic. "Thank goodness," thought I, because that's what I'd come for.

I learnt a bit, maybe a lot. One person was on the verge of buying a collaboration system when she was introduced to WordFrame. In fact, the vendor she was about to sign up with sent a review which happened, in passing, to mention this competitor. She made the necessary call and knew within a very short time that WordFrame far outstripped the alternative. And she knew this because she had prepared a massive specification of her requirements. And this is the point. These social software SaaS tools might appear to be low cost, but that's not a good reason to shirk on specifying what you need.

Another thing that came out of real experiences was that antipathy towards social tools is not a generational or an age thing. It is an attitudinal one. Again, this may seem obvious but, in all the yakking about millennials and generation Y, it's easy to lose sight of this fundamental truth.

When it comes to participation, the Jakob Nielsen rule applies. one percent of participants are heavy contributors, nine percent are intermittent and the remainder are lurkers. A lot of people try to crank up the contribution levels of the lurkers. But that's actually the last thing you want to do. Accept that people lurk. They will usually de-lurk when they have something of value to say.

Next week, I'll give a more complete debrief on the conference as a whole.