While I came with the communication egg model to talk about things missing in distributed teams I feel that it could be useful in more contexts. In particularly to talk about the differences between different types of social constructions in the knowledge management context.

[At this point it makes sense to go and read Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication ]

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

Team communication is heavily shaped by the shared goals and agreed communication formats/processes. It’s very much about getting things done together and strong ties that needed for it.

Communication in communities is a bit further from actual work, but still has lots of connection with it (e.g. Q&A mode, where one uses an opportunity of being together with other experts to ask for solutions for a problem). It’s usually a mix of stronger and weaker ties that help to open up and share local practices. There is enough commonality and trust to hold people together and enough diversity to support learning.

Network communication is more opportunity-based and informal. There is not much in terms of shared goals and recurrent conversations, the ties are weak or latent. However, there is enough connectivity and opportunities to communicate that result in cross-fertilisation and emergent ideas and practices.

I guess the things on the diagonal could be also about the types of communication that is supported by specific managerial practices (performance – knowledge management/professional development – informal learning/innovation) or social tools (groupware – community tools – social media).

You can also use this framework to think on what is needed in terms of moving between different types of social constructions: e.g. moving from network to community by picking shared interests and adding a bit of structure (rhyhm, roles) or community-born projects, where shared goals and even more structures (e.g. deadlines appear to make sure that things get done. In the opposite direction you might think of “usual” KM practice of spotting overlaps between teams and establishing semi-structured community spaces and processes to make sure that practices are shared across and going to networking events or sharing one’s traces online to create opportunities for informal interaction that brings new contacts and new ideas.

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Does it make any sense? I’m actually more happy with the picture than we the text around it, but anyway all of this stuff is thinking in progress, so hopefully will eventually evolve into something more understandable.

The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.

Group Decision Making in Second Life

Participants in the experiment were 240 students of Business Administration, randomly assigned to teams of 3 persons. Participants were unaware of who their team mates were as they were placed in different rooms.

Based on information they were given beforehand, teams were asked to decide what to do with the vacant piece of land. After reaching their decision, they were asked to fill out a survey in which a number of relevant variables concerning their interaction and decision making were measured. The results provide a number of interesting insights into the added value of virtual worlds for distributed group decision making, in terms of both interaction and decision quality. As the experiment will be continued in 2009 with people working in organizations, we cannot provide any more information on the results here – unfortunately…

Conducting this experiment has been a very valuable experience, providing interesting conclusions as to how people may collaborate through virtual environments. It has also provided us with interesting insights in terms of how to conduct such an experiment – insights which will be incorporated into the follow-up experiment to be conducted in 2009!

The researchers: Frans Feldberg, Alexander Schouten & Bart van den Hooff,
VU University Amsterdam,
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration,
Section Knowledge, Information & Networks

The CES is the place for debuting new products, but a lot of the exhibitors were also showing what the near future will hold. And everybody is here, from all kind of product lineups which have something to do with electronics. If you’re not here as a brand, you do not exist.

What was there to find, considering our focus of the Future of Work? The premises are very huge, so I can’t see it all in one day: today I started at the southern en central halls at the core for the show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. I got there by monorail: again, you had to stand in line to get a cab, but the monorail was very quiet. If it had something to do with status, I was happy to lower mine and get there without waiting in lines…and get free espresso shots arriving at the monorail convention station!

Interaction

What striked me most was the way you can get tactile feedback now on small devices like PDA’s. I already saw in a shop in Europe a BlackBerry having a moving display, but now there were more devices having a “punching”display: when you touch a button, the display shortly trembles: the effect is close to pushing a real button! Immersion (www.immersion.com) is one of the leaders in developing this for PDA’s and so. They also had bigger screens (I guess they were about 19”) with the same effect. The bigger the screen, the harder it is to have it move. Using this with multi-user screens like Microsoft’s Surface table or the interactive wall of Soco (www.socoamsterdam.com) would be great. But it is harder to implement: you don’t want to feel the screen when a teammate is touching it next to you. Maybe a solution might be using thin flexible displays which can partly move?

Talk about punching: there was a demo of an “impactvest” ($139,-) from TNgames (www.tngames.com) which can be used for playing 1^st person shooters and also gives tactile feedback: on your body! The Canadian army used it for simulation purposes and the effect was scaring! Now you really did not want to get hit in such games. Another use could be using it as navigation system for blind people: punch me left to go left!

The, for the individual worker: every time I ask this dumb question to people: what would your future workspace look like? The answers differ, but a lot of times I get “a kind of cocooning system which totally encloses you comfortably with a lot of screen estate so you can work really concentrated”. Well, it is here (again): NovelQuest has this device where you can roll into a kind of giant scorpion which can open and close like your entering a jetfighter. [photo]. They leased it to companies, customized: for example ING ordered orange ones to use in American internet cafés as a marketing instrument. Maybe having one of these at the “werkplaats” at the Rabobank in Utrecht? If you would like to work in it or not, it fills in desires from a lot of people…

One of our concepts in FWS was getting a personal “green fingerprint”: what is your contribution to a better planet (or: to the pollution;-)? Nokia had a prototype which automatically logs the way you travel. It knows how you travel by using data of movement sensors and location information combined. It measures how long and you can get statistics about your contribution to CO2-production. It does not compare it yet to other people or groups which would give it a more “peerpressure”effect to get really green (or abusing it to get yourself on top of the polluting lists;-) but they thought it to be a good idea for a future version. Hmm…

Also they showed the GreenGuide: a holiday guide (“Le guide vert” which tells you about the greenishness of your destination. LonelyPlanet partners with it, you can use it online and on the latest Nokia Mobiles.

Another gimmick: finding back valuable items with your mobile phone or the other way around: sticking a tag to these items can have you retrieve them thourgh use of a radar on your phone. And you can retrieve your phone by touching such a tag which let’s your phone make a noise!

Nokia showed a lot of social tooling, mobile working instruments and entertainment services, putting less effort in promoting their hardware but more in the usage of the devices they make. OVI is the Nokia platform mostly used here (http://ovi.nokia.com/services/).

Hitachi showed a prototype of a TV which can be controlled by gesturing. We are all waiting to see the next thing after the mouse: Gesture interfacing might be a contender. It worked well, and you can never loose your remote again.

But what if you lokked at a sportsgame, your team scored, the crowd (in your room) cheers…and pop, your watching the cooking channel@#&*!

Hitachi (and others) showed youtube-like services, build into your TV. So you don’t need to go to the computer to upload, but can do it from the comfort of your livingroom. Or send grandma a videomessage, which she can easily reply to in video.

Chumby showed prototypes of their future form factor: they partnered with a lot other companies and one of them makes digital photo frames. And that looks a lot better on your wall than the Chumby we know now. Of course this frame has the same functions, so you can interact with it, use your channels and download new widgets.

Well that about wraps it up! As you can imagine, I havent’seen half of it yet. But there is time till Sunday and I’ll keep you posted!

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