Latest on twitter:
"With Don Quixote, Cervantes has accomplished an enduring act of literary alchemy: just as Quixote is combined with Sancho, so is fantasy combined with reality, the eternal with the everyday, and like the combination of matter and anti-matter, the explosion of aesthetic power is, in magnitude, infinite, propelling readers from the earth—at first facing inward at what was left behind on the page, then, forgetting the earth, outward into meaning—farther and farther toward the dream-like stars."
From a review of Don Quixote.
Business Verbs in Social Software
What if we can provide activity triggers and updates which use the natural language of everyday business in social software suites? Forget liking, disliking, bookmarking and all these foreign sounding words. Imagine an activity feed which uses business verbs, gathered implicitly or explicitly from pointing, clicking and typing. I came up with this concept a while ago, and I believe it’s one of the best ways for social software to relate to everyday work.
For each of these verbs - picture the use case for an employee in their day-to-day role. They can trigger, move between and do more with verbs, such as string verbs together in a workflow. For example - a blog post/wiki pages leads to someone “facilitating it” and then subsequent “commenting” and possible “reviewing” leading to a “conclusion” by the original facilitator. All from just a wiki page (or any URL) which had no states or wasn’t geared up for being the subject of a business-like discussion.
* edited
Standard functionality in most suites.
* commented
Standard functionality in most suites.
* responded
Responding needs a target i.e. someone was the target for a response. Hence a way to create this situation is to elicit a response from someone by “sending them content X for response”. Done through a toolbar gizmo - “send to colleague and ask for response”.
* acknowledged
This is achieved as a formal delivery receipt. The sharing process could additionally specify a click needed for acknowledgment.
* supported
This is interesting. Essentially, it is a “thumbs up” in a business sense, nicely done for content which requires consensus. A button on the toolbar, like a thumbs up would create an activity item “John supported X” to your network or to everyone.
* facilitated
A nice way for an individual to host a discussion. We could take a piece of content, such as a wiki page or blog post (the discussion surface) - and allow someone to say “I’m facilitating this”. The next step in this workflow is to invite comments and discussion using another verb - sharing that piece of content with colleagues. Through all cases, that piece of content would have a marker that notes that an individual is facilitating that specific discussion. A quasi-authoritative discussion format online is therefore created - the basics of business use.
* concluded
A verb available if you are facilitating a piece of content. You may post a conclusion to participants that you originally invited and mark any content (wherever it is) as concluded with a result. The toolbar gives you the button if you can do this and injects into your feed and the feeds of discussion members - individual scope since your network doesn’t need to know.
* reviewed
A button similar to acknowledgement, with the added benefit of a text box or more that supplies review details to your network feed. Reviews can be made public, in which case any person arriving at that piece of content sees a marker stating that “a review exists for this page”
* mark for approval
A directed verb which is triggered from the toolbar - you direct this action at someone else. Only your individual feeds are involved.
* approved
Follows “mark for approval” above.
* mark for action
Mark a piece of content for action by someone else or by yourself. A private, directed verb. A text box states what the action is on that piece of content.
* delegated
Usually the result of an action. If a piece of content results in a “mark of action” - you may press another button which appears in that context to delegate the action.
The next part is putting the implicit data together into a scope, where that will be most useful. Scopes are:
* user-only (personal)
* group (possibly for a team)
* network (for my connections)
* global (everyone)
* executive (possible some highly aggregated CxO focused data)
For each verb, we must decide the scope of activity injection.
“A picture of a face just using numbers” by Amit:
And The most-random-post-it-given-to-Emily-Webber-today award goes to…
"Provider Service,
Brokerage Service,
Assurance Service,
Exchange Service,
Market Service,
Insurance Service,
Support Service"
Noted this definition of pretty much any commoditized services business from this excellent talk by Simon Wardley at OSCON 2010
