very Fantastic

Fantastic presentation. I am working on all of this thru my venture VRWorkplace. I'm a US atty, HR consultant, former IT outsourcing exec and believe VW to be a substantial bridge between cultures and a way to replicate what I call the 'spontaneous hallway meeting' (i.e. the real way work gets done) in the context of a global workplace. I am now following you on twitter. Best regards, Dave@vrworkplace.com

Hey Roo! This is fantastic for global frog-jumping of developing country talent as they could be virtually linked to world through conferencing formats suggested. Any idea to link up 'Antibody Commercialisation Companies' in the globe or 'Veterinarians Without Borders'!

Jag Rawat

Roo - I'm preparing for a client presentation and I was looking to del.icio.us for inspiration, and your presentation had just been bookmarked. Wonderful! You've given me more things to think about. Jen

Thats fantastic....well chosen Pics....good metaphors....efficient transfer of information....well done!

Roo.. This is a great deck... will listen to it in detail this weekend...

Thanks! Audio track added.

Great talk, Roo - Will you be adding podcast of audio (if you managed to record it)?

http://flickr.com/photos/aho_1987/832177575/

Depending on what is being filed, it could become quite intimidating.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/298897083/

Perhaps a tree is just as good a metaphor. Leaves could change colour and gently tumble down to the ground as you approach, based on your interests.

Want more?

I maintain a blog at rooreynolds.com
A group of us in IBM co-author a group blog at eightbar.co.uk. For the past couple of years we’ve posted whatever has been interesting to us. For 18 months it’s been mainly about virtual worlds.

http://flickr.com/photos/ednothing/142393509/

The fact we’re still designing and developing makes this an especially interesting area in which to work.

When using virtual worlds, it’s important to think of the metaphors.

Just this week, I had a long conversation with someone about a virtual filing cabinet in which to store and retrieve documents. We understand filing cabinet. We’ve all used, or at least seen one. This doesn’t look like a very nice filing cabinet, but what would a virtual one look like?

IBM Metaverse (beta)

That’s something I’m currently working on. Our internal virtual world is currently based on the Torque game engine. Any IBMer is welcome to join us in experimenting with that, but it’s still very much in progress.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/37316121/

Some thoughts on Engines vs Worlds. Don’t confuse them.

For example: OLIVE vs There.com, Second Life Grid vs Second Life

http://flickr.com/photos/zhent/574472488/

Why do we need intranet virtual worlds?

We use Second Life for a lot of public-facing stuff, and we’re (still) a popular attraction in SL. But not everything can be done in public, on someone else’s servers.

The problem isn’t (usually) the corporate firewall, it’s the confidential data which you can't share outside that firewall. There’s a place for public worlds in virtual worlds, engaging with the community, but also to be using private virtual worlds inside the intranet to allow confidential discussions.

…but that’s just a building. Here’s a crowd of people, informally chatting and taking in the educational material at their own pace.

Education is an exciting area. The ‘SOA hub’ in Second Life. IBMers, clients and business partners can come to learn about Service Oriented Architecture without being lectured at.

and of course, Second Life. Second Life is heavy on the collaboration, not so hot on the rendering.

Here you see some meetings. Everything from ad-hoc discussions to formal meetings with an agenda and guest speakers.

http://flickr.com/photos/toniblay/52445415/

IBM tends to understand virtual worlds based on their fidelity of model, collaboration, and rendering. Different worlds score differently against those dimensions (if you’ll excuse the pun) and are therefore suitable for different clients.

Sony PlayStation Home

A virtual world in which to meet people with whom you’ll play games.

EVE Online

Oops. We’re back to games again. Pretty though, isn’t it? I meet with friends and 'work' together here.

Qwaq

Collaboration. Document sharing.

Cyworld

A fairly basic virtual world.

http://flickr.com/photos/ian_d/30859899/
http://flickr.com/photos/earlg/304373180/
http://flickr.com/photos/dailysnap/360147199/

How do games fit in to this? Here are some excellent computer games. Note the grandmother playing the Wii..

I described them all as games, but that’s perhaps too much of a generalisation. World of WarCraft is a game, but perhaps Second Life and There.com are actually “virtual worlds”.

Many of them are games created by professionals, but others invite their users to share content. What’s a virtual world if it’s not a great example of social networking and user generated content? It’s just social software.

http://flickr.com/photos/shawdm/820926627/

The people in this photo are displaying some interesting traits. Some are grouped in clumps, their own social groups in a public space. Some are taking photos of each other. Perhaps they’ll be showing them to their family in a few weeks time, printed out in glossy detail on bits of dead tree. Then again, perhaps they’re uploading them to Flickr before they even leave the museum.

Two of the key themes of “Web 2.0”, social networking and user generated content. People want to feel connected, and they want to share content. All those Web 2.0 examples I showed you earlier (plus all the others you can think of, del.icio.us, YouTube,…)

http://flickr.com/photos/generated/416810/

Don’t forget Dunbar talks about social groups in which the individual is not just connected to n people, but in which one also knows how all those people are interconnected. Perhaps some people (like Scoble) are not treating social networking contacts as “friends” or a “social group”, but just as contacts. He certainly doesn’t know about how I inter-relate with some of his other friends.

Perhaps social networking not only allows us to maintain social links with a genuinely social group, but also allows us to stay peripherally in touch with people we barely know. Good thing too. A scaleable way of going beyond Dunbar’s number seems quite important, unless we are to be doomed to only “know” 150 +- 50 people.

http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/312255421/

So what about this guy? Robert Scoble, “a-list blogger” and ex of Microsoft.

Some people, like Robert Scoble, seem to break Dunbar’s rule. He has thousands of “Facebook friends”. Is he just an outlier in Dunbar’s maximum social group size, or is something else going on?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Dunbar predicts that human have a maximum social group size of 150 (more accurately, a mean of 147.8 with a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).

Here’s the number of friends I currently have on Facebook. 164, today.

Which raises the question: what’s the maximum number of people with whom one can maintain a social relationship?

My current social friendship group on Facebook is interestingly close to Dunbar’s number of 150.

http://www.accmanpro.com/2007/09/11/facebook-cant-be-cost...
http://www.elsua.net/2007/09/11/facebook-costs-businesses...

Increasingly people today are “knowledge workers”, and being connected to people is valuable. Whether it’s at work over the watercooler, after work at the pub, online on Facebook or Twitter, the more people we know, and can be connected to know, the more we know and the better our decisions can be.

On the left, Dennis questions the maths. On the right, Luis questions the logic: what about doing a study which would calculate the number of hours spent by knowledge workers trying to find the right expert to help them do their job?

See also http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/09/kent-newsome-on....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6969791.stm

…other than to point out social software for corporations has become especially controversial in the past few days. Kent County Council has removed access to Facebook for its employees. The TUC has suggested that employees should be given guidance, and perhaps given access to sites such as Facebook during lunch breaks.

I’d ask you to consider how you would have voted in this BBC poll, and whether you are surprised by the public response.

See also http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/6967801.stm
and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6989100.stm

http://facebook.com

In the social software space, Facebook is probably the most talked about app at the moment. It’s Interesting, but I’m not going to dwell on it.

http://twitter.com

Twitter is a cross between microblogging, IM and broadcast SMS. It’s often misunderstood. People assume that you’re talking to everyone in the world, but you’re really talking to your friends list. It’s a world with its conventions. In fact, there are lots of different conventions, but the ones I’m used to are the ones in my social group, my own semi-private Twitter universe.

http://ibmrocks.mytoycode.com/

And where real-time listening gets really interesting is when you start aggregating. Here are some of the IBMs who have volunteered their last.fm user IDs for the “ibm rocks” mashup. It doesn’t show individual usernames; just locations. Having this running in the background gives me a nice view of my American colleagues waking up and turning on iTunes as they get into work.

http://last.fm

last.fm lets me share what I’m listening to, as I listen to it. An ongoing personal soundtrack of my life. You can probably get quite a sense of “Roo” from this list. Again, it has a friends list, and lets me compare my musical tastes with those of my friends. Here, we have the context of music.

http://flickr.com

Flickr is a photo-sharing website. Another virtual world, of a sort. Here, the context is photo-sharing. I don’t use it because it contains lovely (creative commons licensed) photos, but because it acts as a venue for keeping in touch with friends and family (and contacts, but more on them later). Each photo has a comment thread, and the discussions I have with my friends on their photos are more social credits. We keep in touch, and get to know each other better.

http://flickr.com/photos/larskflem/95757299/

So much for the real world! I’m supposed to be talking about virtual worlds. What about online?

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/509145604/

At yet another conference, during an evening social event. Coffee and heavy mingling. With the exception of time at the bar, I think we’ve found the reason people find value from conferences. They are an excuse, and a context, for networking.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/493792832/

This was the Eduserv Symposium in London earlier this year. Anyone you recognise? This was captured in one of those lovely lulls between speakers. People are networking, catching up, exchanging ideas and comparing notes. Isn’t this why people travel to conferences?

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/509166117/

Here’s one of those conferences. This was an IBM internal one in Paris. Lots of people with dutifully laptops closed, paying attention. Except for me of course, taking yet more photographs.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/274134949/

Actually, my team is pretty well global these days (and I also go to far too many conferences) so I spend quite a while each year hanging around one of these. I hope to do less of that in the future.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/379700483/

Or, since much of my team is based around New York, I'm sometimes even on one of these.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/246842039/

These days I’m just as often working on one of these.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/147602309/

This was my desk last year. I don’t have a photo of my current workspace, but it’s pretty similar. Lego, books, computers. Telephone. Even table football.

http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/298898524/

I’m fortunate enough to be based in IBM Hursley, which is a big old country estate. Here it is last Autumn. I don’t work in the house itself, but in the more modern (but still attractive red-brick) buildings behind it.

http://flickr.com/photos/ilmungo/59025272/ - 'the workplace with no cheer'

What are your hallways like? Are they cold and imposing - silent places? Or do you have impromptu discussions in the halls? I don’t see a watercooler in this corridor, but does “watercooler moment” mean anything to you? Do you, like me, go into an office primarily to meet people?

http://flickr.com/photos/mattwright/1787856/

Or maybe something more like this? A Walmart distribution center.

http://flickr.com/photos/eam/278447782/

Where do you work? Is it somewhere like this? Cubicles? Small offices?

Roo Reynolds, IBM metaverse evangelist, on 'virtual worlds for corporate collaboration' at the Serious Virtual Worlds Conference, 2007, Coventry.