Putting a price on your social network

Edward Castronova is an inspiration to many of us interested in virtual worlds and MMORPGs. He set the tone for much of the research in this field with his classic 2001 paper on the economy of Everquest and his book Synthetic Worlds. I'm not such a fan of his later work, but that's beside the point. Ted decided about a week ago to put his theory on virtual economies to work by announcing that he would start using Serios. The Serio is a virtual currency that can be attached to e-mail messages. It’s a product of Seriosity, Byron Reeves’ company. The economic principle behind it is that Serios are scarce (as is attention), so the more Serios I attach to a message, the more important it is to me. The receiver - who is assumed to attach value to this virtual currency as well - will read the messages with the most Serios attached first and may even ignore the ones without Serios. Ted announced that he "will not be responding to emails that have no Serios attached." See his complete announcement and the reasoning behind it on Terra Nova.

The principle seems elegant enough at first glance, but Castronova's announcement drew massive criticism. There were two main points made by the detractors, one practical and one more fundamental. The practical problem was that Serios only work with the Microsoft Outlook client. So Mac and Linux users complained that they were now automatically cut off. The fundamental problem was best described by Randy Farmer (himself a virtual world pioneer as the co-designer of Habitat in the 1980s) in comments to Castronova's post on Terra Nova. What his point boils down to is this: I have invested time and energy in building a social relationship with you and now you are going to throw that out the window and are making me pay for your attention. I don't think so. Quote: "You can view this as success (you'll now get less email) or failure (you've burned pile of professional reputation), your choice."

After trying to argue his case - using an ill-founded metaphor involving the role of gifts in social relations, which was adequately refuted by Thomas Malaby - Castronova caved with his announcement on Terra Nova yesterday that he would go back to trying to read all e-mails, not just the ones with Serios attached.

This post may come across like a case of schadenfreude, but that is not what I am trying to express here. I honestly applaud Edward Castronova for initiating this public experiment. And especially for sharing his rationale and the outrage it created and for admitting it didn't work. A seemingly sympathetic idea turned out to have many pitfalls. Trial-and-error, this is how we learn.

Ted’s apologies were accepted by Randy, by the way.

Het Nieuwe jaar, uw nieuwe werken

Het Nieuwe Werken is dé trend in Nederland op dit moment. YNNO nodigt u uit om met de start van het nieuwe jaar met elkaar uit te vinden hoe het nieuwe werken voor uw organisatie eruit kan zien.


Uw nieuwe werken dus!


Wilt u geïnformeerd worden of meedenken over uw nieuwe werken of gewoon vakgenoten ontmoeten die zich bezig houden met nieuwe manieren van werken binnen organisaties? Kom dan op 22 januari naar onze netwerkmeeting "uw nieuwe werken"


Tijdens deze netwerkmeeting duiken wij met u in de praktijkwereld van uw nieuwe werken. We bespreken:

• hoe de digitale en fysieke werkomgevingen afgestemd worden op het werk dat in de organisatie uitgevoerd wordt
• hoe in deze werkomgeving voor uw medewerkers tijd uitgespaard wordt op allerlei administratieve en informatiezoekende handelingen zodat zij meer tijd kunnen spenderen aan hun echte werk.
• hoe een organisatie zich qua cultuur en management stijl kan voorbereiden om uw nieuwe werken goed te laten renderen

Als startpunt zetten wij een aantal trends neer, geven wij een voorzet voor de impact op organisaties. Vervolgens is het doel om gezamenlijk discussie te voeren, ideeën uit te wisselen, beelden te delen en ambities te bespreken. Hierbij is er volop ruimte om uw eigen onderwerpen aan te dragen. Het seminar is van en voor iedereen die betrokken is bij dit spannende thema.


Wat betekent het nieuwe werken concreet voor uw organisatie in het jaar 2009?


Uw Oude Werken

Studytrip 2008

We are leaving for our bi-annual company studytrip! On our companion blog www.ynnostudytrip.com we will keep you up to date on our programme and key findings! Of course the biggest trends will be blogged about over here!

Work and Mobile

Yesterday I was at momo#7 and although it was very interesting afterwards I figured out that this was beyond my borders of enterprise 2.0. At this moment in time mobility is more a consumer oriented movement and less a work related issue. Yuri van Geest hit this issue on the spot, although I suspect this was unintended. He mentioned that mobile has to be about fun and games and not about work. Implying that work is no fun. But I guess reading his twitter stream that he had lots of fun at work ;-) And all of us would agree that work had to be (more) fun!

I see two applications of mobile in the work area. The first is the use of consumer apps in a business setting. Booking a train on a mobile app (I did this on my way to momo), making a hotel reservation, using google maps on the iPhone to get to an appointment, etc. There are tuns of stuff people do in a business setting aswell as in a private setting.

The second application I see is the mobile access to the enterprise information systems. The most obvious is email, which is already used by lots of businesspeople. I already saw a salesforce.com iPhone app to use this piece of business software on a mobile device. I can access our sharepoint portal through my mobile, using a specific mobile URL. One of the design principles for web 2.0 is about the multidevice aspect. Webapps should be made for multiple apps including mobile to make more use of your app. I think that the same principle applies for enterprise 2.0, and that there is a great future for this principle!

So you see I am in discussion with myself on this topic! On the one hand moblie is more about consumer market than the business market but the chances are there! The topic of value in mobile is even harder in the business market. How can a company make a business case for using mobile devices and apps in a business context? Productivity and responstimes are likely to be better but to what extend? I am using an iPhone and I got the feeling I am more productive on the road, but find it hard to quantify this. On the other hand budgets on ICT are a lot bigger in the business world, so that will make a difference.

I am guessing we will see more and more mobile apps in a business context and people will love them! For my point of view of enterprise 2.0, I will just see it as a channel and leave the further development of this interesting movement to others, like the terrific momo crew! But I feel this subject will be continued even in this blog...

The changing role of the corporate intranet

The intranet used to be a way to communicate to your workforce about your company. This role is changing fast. The '2.0' movement on the internet is forcing companies to add more interaction to the intranet. Another factor is the move of allmost every enterprise information system to browser based clients. This blurs the line between the intranet and information systems.

The interaction component makes it possible to actually do work on the intranet. Most companies are moving to more knowledge intensive and collaborative work. And companies are using people from outside the company to add knowledge. This requires a environment that is accessible from all over the world and from multiple places inside and outside the office. An enterprise 2.0 environment is excellent to replace the current static intranet. A good enterprise 2.0 environment delevers capablilities to share knowledge and collaborate outside the company, inside and accross organizational borders.

The move to more browser based clients made by allmost every enterprise class information system (like SAP, Peoplesoft or Filenet) is blurring the borders between the intranet and makes it possible to have more integration. This integration is about adding links between pieces of content or forms or wathever. These links can be very valueble and timesaving. By linking every part of IT together it makes a true web of services and content inside the organization (i.e. an intanet!). This makes it possible to execute business processes on the corporate intranet.

Seminar videos

The videos of all the presentations at the Play Element of Learning Leadership seminar that I blogged about earlier are now available here.

Learning Leadership Online?

It was an interesting experience to be part of the seminar on The Play Element of Learning Leadership in Amsterdam last Tuesday. It was a seamless combination of speakers and audiences in several locations: there were speakers and an audience in Amsterdam, speakers participating from North America with a video link and we had an audience in Second Life watching a video feed of the whole thing and asking questions. My congratulations to Eduverse for putting it all together.

Tony O'Driscoll came to us by video link to highlight the main points from the Seriosity/IBM reports that were central to this seminar. I followed up with a short keynote on the managerial relevance of games and especially game design. The most important part of the seminar was formed by the presentations of Utrecht University graduate students who had elaborated on the Seriosity/IBM reports. One of the main points of their research papers was that it is difficult to transfer elements of online games to organizations because the two domains are so different. This was further emphasized by David Williamson Shaffer, who pretty much took apart the Seriosity/IBM research by re-interpreting some of the figures in the report (after Tony O'Driscoll had virtually left the room, for which David apologized). His main point matched that of the students: isolated skills do not transfer well at all between different contexts. So no, you cannot learn to be a corporate leader from playing World of Warcraft because the two contexts (what David calls epistemic frames) don't match.

I tend to agree. My answer to that problem is to take one step back. To look at the game design instead of the game. And to see how you can apply game design to improve the design of organizations.