William F. Garrity

If you're not paying attention to TED, I think you really should be.  It's one of the most provocative, inspiring, and informative "channels" I know about.  Be sure to browse the library of recorded talks and presentations.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. 

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you're an important part of it. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.

The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend -- indeed, the event sells out a year in advance -- and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn't work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

A colleague at Dartmouth-Hitchcock (Kevin McFarland) brought to my attention this four-part post in Rex Lee's blog (Rex's Thought Spot: Personal Reflections on Innovation & Collaboration in a 2.0 World).  This is worthy to ponder if your organization has hopes (like Dartmouth) to use Web 2.0ish tools to foster work-place collaboration. 

Four Enterprise 2.0 Success Drivers: Desire (Part 1 of 4)
 
This is part 1 of a 4 part blog on the Success Drivers for Enterprise 2.0.
Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

One of the pet peeves I have is the notion that electronic collaboration tools could replace face-to-face facilitated sessions. This is absolutely untrue. the tools are exactly that... tools... Yes, the self-organizing communities is an important piece to web 2.0 but when we talk about enterprise 2.0, we have an opportunity to go beyond this.

The motives of the individual in web 2.0 are their own motives. I blog on a topic because I want to blog on a topic. I join an organization because I want to join an organization. In the enterprise however, the tasks we need to accomplish aren't always things I want to do. I may not have any desire to collaborate.

In fact, in most profit driven organizations, not only are there tasks I don't want to do but I may actually be penalized for "collaborating" with others if it doesn't align with my department objectives. For example a help-desk call-centre may have a goal on delighting each customer in the shortest time possible but the sales department may want to maximize sales revenue through the call centre. Both valid goals, but one has an impact on the other. These 2 departments are not incented to help one another.

In the firm, even if people are not self-motivated, we still need them to collaborate. This talks to the first aspect of the drivers for collaboration (Desire). Try as you may, you can't really force people to collaborate and expect great results. There are things however that should be looked at to make sure people want to collaborate. I'll discuss 4 of these areas:

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The May 2, 2008, BusinessWeek has a special CEO guide to virtual worlds. 

CEO Guide to Virtual Worlds May 2, 2008, 2:20PM EST 

The (Virtual) Global Office 

Moving beyond Second Life marketing, many companies are infiltrating virtual worlds for employee meetings, mixers, and recruiting

by Rachael King

It's not always easy to get new employees to mix well with co-workers—especially when they're scattered across the globe or speak different languages. Few companies know this as well as IBM (IBM), the computer services provider that last year alone added 20,000 new staff members, many from Brazil, China, India, and Russia.

But IBM may have found a way to overcome new employees' geographic and cultural barriers. When the Armonk (N.Y.) company can't get recent hires to mingle in person, it has them interact virtually, using the same kind of 3D technology that runs virtual worlds such as Linden Lab's Second Life. "It makes you want to start relationships," says Chuck Hamilton, manager of new media and learning at IBM@Play, a division that uses social media to foster collaboration. "People who are farther away—this is especially true of people who are not American-centric—get the feeling that they're not isolated."

Using software from Activeworlds, IBM builds virtual work spaces that let workers in far-flung regions use avatars, or graphic representations of themselves, to handle such tasks as rehearsing presentations or learning about employee benefits. The experimentation puts IBM in the vanguard of companies that, having tested the limits of marketing in such online environments as Second Life, are now infiltrating virtual worlds to tackle a range of other activities, from meetings to collaboration, from training to employee recruiting.

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Catherine Holahan in the May 22, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/,  writes about the sorry state of broadband deployment in the U.S. 

Although the Internet was started here, the U.S. can't seem to catch up with other developed nations when it comes to giving citizens access to high-speed connections.

For the second year running, the U.S. ranked 15th among the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development in terms of broadband availability. Denmark ranked first again in the annual OECD survey, followed by a host of European and Asian nations. Indeed, while the number of Americans with access to broadband service rose 20% last year, to nearly 70 million people, the most in the OECD, that amounted to just 23 of every 100 residents. By contrast, the top five countries in the OECD ranking all sport per-capita penetration rates of better than 30%.

Why isn't the U.S. up to speed online? The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is quick to point out differences in population and geography that have made it more difficult for the nation to catch up with smaller countries. It is easier, after all, to deliver broadband in densely populated areas where the same cables can serve hundreds, if not thousands, of subscribers, giving phone and cable TV companies the financial incentive to upgrade their networks. The U.S. has rural areas where the revenue to be made from laying down fiber-optic cables to reach scattered households hasn't proven alluring to many providers. "It's easier to achieve a high penetration in Manhattan than Mississippi," said FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate in an Apr. 30 speech at the Broadband Properties Summit in Dallas.

Adam L. Penenberg writes in the May 2008 Fast Company about "viral expansion loops" (see the Wikipedia). 

There are three categories of viral expansion loops -- let's call them "viral loops," "viral networks," and "double viral loops," the last a hybrid of the first two. To create a simple viral loop is relatively straightforward. In 1996, Hotmail placed a link in the body of every message, offering the recipient the ability to set up his own Webmail account, and within 30 months went from zero to 30 million members. YouTube deployed a viral mechanism by allowing anyone to embed a video link in his blog or MySpace page: The more who saw it, the more links were embedded, and soon, millions of users were funneled directly to YouTube. Also in this category are scads of widget makers creating the digital bling disseminated on Facebook, MySpace, and elsewhere -- the infamous "hatching egg," glitzy slide-show creation tools distributed by Slide and RockYou, the online Scrabble game Scrabulous, horoscopes, calendars, and so forth. These widgets are so contagious that Slide alone was able to raise $50 million in venture capital from Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price, giving it a $500 million valuation.

But it's on a viral network that scale and power really snowball. A destination such as Facebook grows via invitations, with each "friend" reaching out to her own set of contacts, which in turn do the same. More than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard joined within a month of Facebook's 2004 launch; four years later, it has 67 million active users. And at its current 3% weekly expansion rate, it will have 200 million users by the end of the year, equal to the population of the fifth-largest nation on earth.

Significantly, viral-loop networks don't create content -- they organize it. They provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, and then rely on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content, the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines. "The viral adoption model" is the "cheapest way to grow an audience," says Union Square Ventures' Wilson. At no time in history has it been possible to market to so many by starting with so little.