Weeknotes #208

Admin on 24/07/2020

This week I did;

The internet is open 24/7

Every website on the internet is available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. One of the measures of success for a website is its up time. But what do you do when you want your website to have opening hours and not be available at certain times. It’s not an easy thing to achieve, especially with limited time and no budget. But we did it. Our tech guys came up with a single sign-on solution that only authenticates users between certain hours using API calls and cron jobs. I was impressed. Being able to control access at certains is part of our journey in understanding how to ensure the safety, security and privacy of young people in online environments. I guess most people think we’re just building another bit of tech to solve a particular problem but I spend a lot of time thinking about how it all fits together and what we can learn to achieve our vision.

Charity Service Model Canvas

I started experimenting with ideas for a Charity Service Model Canvas. Canvases are useful tools for seeing the big chunks of things all in one place, and done well they help ensure that balance decisions about whatever is being designed are made. So, for the Charity Service Model Canvas, the Needs connect to the Outcomes (are the outcomes of the service going to meet the needs), the Activities connect to the Resources (what resources are you going to need to provide those activities), in fact all of the boxes connect to each other. I thought about creating a Miro template for it so that people could use it when designing a service. Why haven’t I? Because I don’t know how.

The role of charities in the Democratic Society system

I wrote about some of my ideas about how the three domains of a democratic society system interplay and how the charity sector can choose to fit in to have an impact on society. I see our democratic society system as being made up of the three domains of state, market and civic, and look from a systems-thinking point-of-view at how they have mechanisms that are constantly interplaying with each other as checks and balances in the system. Each domain has particular organising modes which are used to empower and disempower members of society, and charities are one particular type in the civic domain that is useful where people want to organise around a particular issue or cause but need a means of centralising certain processes. 

How the cause-agnostic charities of the future will be innovators for the state and the vanguards of social change for good

I also wrote about an idea of a vision of charities in the future where they play a very different role in society to now. Rather than being focused around a particular issue or cause charities in this future would act as innovators-for-the-state and utilise their civic domain skills of organising people, fundraising, understanding social problems and developing solutions to solve social problems before handing over those validated solutions to the state to run, driving forward social improvements over time. 

Digital Trustees

I joined the Tech For Good Live event about Digital Trustees. I couldn’t stay for all of it but what I did hear was really interesting. I particularly liked the description of a digital trustee as someone who thinks in user-centred, data-driven ways, rather than being knowledgeable about technology. It’s almost like ‘digital’ is shorthand for modern ways of thinking, which I absolutely think it should be (that’s why I don’t always agree with the ‘don’t use the D word’ school of thought).

Got style

I started stiles.style. It’s either an ode to the nostalgia of the British countryside, a critique of the inaccessibility of the British countryside for less able people, or just something to amuse me on my walks. I can’t quite decide.

Some stuff I thought about this week:

Power in the civic domain

I think it’s right to challenge the established way of doing things. But the more established something is the harder it is to challenge without falling into the same traps as the thing you’re challenging.

In the civic domain power should flow to the people. That’s a value some hold dear, and an assumption that is hard to validate. Why should power flow to the people? Which people, all people, even those that disagree that power should flow to the people and have advantage over those suffering inequalities? Do we assume that if the people have the power society will be more equal? If so, what makes us assume that, is it based on any evidence or is it an ideal? 

The criticism that charities hoard power when they should be distributing it to the people is another opinion held by some. And the obvious conclusion that follows is that to solve this kind of problem the opposite situation should be created.

Charities are the way they are as a byproduct of the system they are in. They have whatever power others perceive them to have (because of course power is in the hands of the beholder and/or non-beholder) because of the structures of civic society. It’s not as if lots of charity CEOs got together one morning and said “let’s take the power from the people”. Charities are the way they are because that’s how the funding system works, and that’s how government regulations work, and that’s how the economy works. We can’t change charity and expect it to still work in those systems.

If we want to change how power flows in the civic space then telling communities that they should have the power because we jumped to the solution without really understanding the problem, just replicates the same power imbalance. It’s Pirsig’s rationality factory. So how deep do you go to understand power structures, and then how on earth do you approach building something different?

Products and services

What’s the difference between a product and a service? A product exists whether you use it or not. A service only exists when you are using it. A washing machine is a product, it still exists whether you are washing your clothes or not. AA breakdown cover is a service, when you aren’t using it it’s just a lot of men driving around in yellow vans. Let’s see how long that distinction lasts in my long running (actually, not that long) saga of trying to figure out the difference between products and services.

And some people tweeted this week:

Creating social change

Natasha Adams tweeted about creating a radical vision for the social change sector that is actually accountable to the communities it claims to serve. This is the tweet that started me thinking about some of the things above about power. When I see things like this I always have two thoughts; that action towards solution without understanding the problem can cause more problems than solutions, and aren’t we lucky that there are people in the world who are ‘do-something-now-ers’ to contrast those of us who are ‘think-about-it-and-probably-never-do-anything-ers’.

Acceleration

Lesley Pinder tweeted about charities who have set up accelerators outside of their normal structures. This is really interesting to me (I’m thinking it might be the topic of my dissertation) because more and more I think the best way to build new organisations (which is what most organisations really need when they talk about digital transformation) is to create a small splinter organisation that works to solve the same problems as the old organisation but in new ways and then transition people so that the new organisation grows as the old one shrinks and is replaced.

Charity sector facing financial catastrophe

Emily Burt tweeted about the financial catastrophe facing the charity sector. Seeing what was going on for charities at the time in a thread like that makes for shocking reading, but often, even seeing the writing on the wall doesn’t instigate action, especially if you’re not used to reacting quickly. Yes, the current financial situation almost every charity faces is going to result in a massive shock to the sector and society, but if charities don’t get better at acting faster, or can’t because of the system they are in, then that is a much greater and more far reaching catastrophe.

Strategy for change

Jason Yip tweeted “Strategy is non-iterative only if you assume a static environment and/or non-thinking adversaries”. Yes.

Weeknotes #207

Admin on 18/07/2020

Some things I did this week:

Platform thinking for safeguarding 

I wrote a discussion paper on how to approach achieving a high degree of safeguarding on a digital platform. As a platform (rather than a pipeline) it requires some different thinking (and maths) so, if two people have one connection, then 825 people 339,900 possible connections at any one moment (n * n-1 / 2 just so you know). When planning how to approach monitoring and moderating the platform it’s important to think about the right thing (the number of connections, not the number of people).

Variety pack

I had some user research discussions about how teachers might work with our educational content in a variety of circumstances, from selecting a re-arranged package that they use repeatedly to being able to build up a number of custom packages. Achieving the right amount of variety without providing an overwhelming number of choices (there are thousands of variations) is an interesting problem.

Becoming a cyborg

I watched Maggie Appleton’s talk about “How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg” and thoughts about the ‘Building a second brain’. It helped me clarify some of my thinking about what an idea ‘is’. I think it is a distinct piece of information; codified knowledge expressed in a transmittable way. Ideas, in this framing rather than ideas as aha moments, are the building blocks of creating other things. 

And some things I learned:

Simplifying the complex

When communicating, and by that I mean providing information with the purpose of convincing someone of something (communication isn’t neutral), simplifying that communication makes it more likely they’ll agree with you. Now, we could call that simplification ‘withholding all the facts’, but it’s a question of degrees. Knowing the boundaries of acceptable presentation gets the job done and keeps you out of trouble.

Fewest moving parts

Efficiency in machines comes from having the fewest moving parts. Where one moving part touches another moving part there is always friction and so energy lost through heat. A perfectly friction-free system would achieve maximum efficiency. So, when we talk about efficiency in working processes or reducing friction in a website sign-up process, we should look at the number of moving parts in the system first rather than thinking we can achieve those things with some surface-level changes.

Learning about learning

We we’re talking about behaviour change and pedagogical models at work, which are fascinating in their own right, but even more so when applying the thinking to creating a blended online education offer that allows people to self-serve some of their learning, receive specialised support, etc., and using those models to think coherently about how the subject is taught, what from the subject is taught, and how is the learning measured.

6G is coming

I didn’t even know 6G existed but apparently we’re expecting it to be rolled out in 2028. In fact doesn’t exist yet and is still in the research phases but the experts are predicting that it will provide internet connection speeds of 1 terabyte per second (the equivalent of 142 hours of movies in one second). 6G will also have a decentralised approach meaning devices can connect to each other without going through a central provider, which opens up lots of possibilities in real time sensor processing for augmented humans and artificial intelligence.

Some things I thought about:

All the problems

I look around and see so many problems, problems facing people right now, and I sometimes feel bad that I’m not doing enough to help solve those problems. I was thinking about this on one of my late night walks and it occurred to me that if everyone was working on solving the problems of today then no one would be imagining and investigating the solutions of the future. The work I do, and want to do more of, is around contributing to an understanding of what the solutions of the future might look like. The things I think and write about like cause-agnostic charities, the digital charity, platform business models for charities, and what the charity of the future might look like, is worthwhile work to be doing. It doesn’t contribute to solving the problems we face today, but I hope it contributes to solving the problems we’ll face in the future. 

Changing charity boards 

NonprofitAF wrote an article about boards of trustees being “archaic and toxic”. Apart from being a really interesting topic, one of the things I like about the article is that it presents a balanced view of the problem; that not all boards are bad, and that there are some ways in which organisations are trying out new governance models. I like this. I’m not keen on the spate of articles that seem to be written to attack particular aspects of the charity sector without offering any solutions to the problems they raise. I think reasoned critique that generates discussion and thinking is helpful, whereas ranting about a problem isn’t.  

Anyway, models of governance is something I want to explore with future.charity but my initial thoughts are that there needs to be some clarifying as to what charities need, governance, stewardship, or something else, not assuming that one type of governance fits all types of charities, and designing governance into the business model of the charity rather than as external to it.

Process models for knowledge management

I was looking at process models and how they have certain characteristics in common. So, for example: 

  • Design sprint: map, sketch, decide, prototype, test. 
  • Design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test.
  • Double Diamond: discover, define, develop, deliver. 

They all have two characteristics in common; they are linear, and they are conceptual islands. The linear nature of them makes sense if a) you view the world and the work you do as non-complex, production-oriented work that can follow a simple step-by-step process, or b) you want to sell your model and you need to make it easily digestible by people who don’t have time to learn in-depth about how lots of process models should be used. These models are also always fixed (you can’t add another step, for example), unable to respond to change, and isolated, so not connected to other models. The more we recognise work as creative knowledge work that cannot follow the fixed process steps that these models suggest, the less useful these tools and models become. In fact, I think they become contraining of good work.

We need smart networked process models. Models that are capable of sensing and responding to change, that are interoperable, connected and able to communicate with other models, and are continuously improving. These models, built on the principles of the internet-era, need to reflect and utilise the complexity of the world and knowledge work, and be part of an ecosystem of models that support good knowledge work.

And perhaps organisations need Knowledge Managers whose job is about teaching people how to use tools and models effectively. Just as organisations have project managers who are responsible for the ‘when’, the flow of the work, knowledge managers would be responsible for ‘how’, the ways the work is done. They would be part of the shift organisations need to take away from the industrial production-oriented mindset of work and towards the modern creation-oriented knowledge work. 

I’ve seen organisations use the term ‘knowledge manager’ before when they mean ‘information manager’, and usually put that person in the IT department. Instead, I wonder if knowledge management, or to put it another way, intellectual asset management, sits better with HR/Learning and Development as it implies a different approach, that helping people know how to use the right conceptual tools is an important part of their work.

Some tweets I liked:

#CharityDigiReport

Zoe Amar tweeted about the Charity Digital Skills Report. Apart from the slight irony of the report being a pdf and accessed from a non-responsive website, the report has some really interesting but not surprising information about the state of digital in the charity sector. It says that “80% [of charities] are fair to poor at developing digital products”. That’s definitely a challenge with lots of causes, including the assumption that charity services should be delivered by people because this is essential to qualities of the service. I also found and started listening to the Starting At The Top podcast by Zoe and Paul Thomas.

Streaming apps

Paul Downey tweeted: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a PDF downloading on a mobile phone — forever.” I’m not sure what he meant but lots of people seemed to take it as a bad thing. ‘Dystopian nightmare’ was mentioned. I’m not sure that it is a negative vision of the future for mobile. It’s a bit too centralised for my liking, but it’s conceivable that the mobile phones of the future don’t download an app and then connect to a web service in order to make the app do stuff and instead effectively stream apps and services to the phone in the same way we watch movies.

Who to follow?

Sonja Blignaut tweeted a quote saying “We follow those that reflect our most cherished ideals, not those who reflect the most accurate picture of reality.” Does the inverse work? Can we know our most cherished ideals by looking at those we follow? Or is it more complex than that?

Those who do not blog

Stephen Gill tweeted: “Those who do not blog about their mistakes doom other people in the organisation to repeat them” Well, yes. Not much more to be said about that, is there.

During the coronavirus lockdown in the United Kingdom (2020), 45% of workers reported to be working from home (fully online). Using the theories discussed in the module Digital Business, explain the phenomenon from the enterprise digitalisation perspective. Critically discuss the potential outcomes of this experiment

Admin on 08/07/2020

Introduction

When a large percentage of the workforce adopts an enforced new way of working, the organisations that have the technology in place, are quick to adapt their methods of communication, and understand the impact of such a drastic change on their workforce are better placed to weather the external disruption to their business by minimising the internal disruption. 

Technologies that enable working online

Working from home would not be possible without internet-connected digital tools and platforms that allow workers to connect, communicate and collaborate. These Enterprise 2.0 technologies are networked through internet connections and contain ‘social’ or collaborative layer functionality such as sharing documents with other workers, communicating in faster, less formal ways through instant messaging, and finding information across a wider pool of sources.

Types of Enterprise 2.0 technology

Enterprise 2.0 technologies are defined by their characteristic collaborative layer that increases workers productivity through fostering connected, collaborative ways of working.

The technologies include:

  • Shared documents
  • Wikis
  • Social networks
  • Blogs
  • Video sharing
  • Video conferencing
  • Instant messaging
  • Podcasts
  • RSS
  • Microblogging
  • Tagging
  • Rating
  • Mash-ups
  • Prediction markets

Video conferencing, social networking and collaborative document editing are the most adopted of the various types of technologies. These are all internal working tools, perhaps suggesting that companies haven’t yet fully realised the benefits of using these technologies to create more permeable boundaries between the organisation and its customers, suppliers, other organisations, etc., in order to increase openness and drive innovation.

Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 technology

During a time of global crisis organisations might consider the ability to continue to operate to be a sufficient benefit from having implemented Enterprise 2.0 technologies, but there are also additional longer term benefits. Andrew McAffe says that Enterprise 2.0 “offers significant improvements, not just incremental ones, in areas such as generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge” (McAfee, 2009). 

The top five measurable benefits from technology adoption are (McKinsey, 2013):

  • Increasing speed to access knowledge
  • Reducing communication costs
  • Reducing travel costs
  • Increasing speed to access internal experts
  • Reducing operational costs

Enterprise 2.0 technologies grew rapidly between 2006 and 2013 (McKinsey, 2013) with 61% of companies reporting using video conferencing in 2013. The growth of these collaborative tools had plateaued (McKinsey 2015) but it is not inconceivable to assume that during the lockdown far more companies are utilising the benefits of technology to undertake almost every business task. The lockdown may serve as an accelerator for better utilisation of collaborative working technologies and achieve greater and previously unrealised benefits than if organisations had not been forced to adopt them.

Communication methods that support distributed workforces

The emergence of Enterprise 2.0 as a new form of interaction (rather than purely a technological phenomenon) between workers has enabled those who had to work from home during the lockdown to continue to communicate effectively with colleagues. The new communication methods required acceptance of the reconceptualisation of how information flows in Enterprise 2.0.

Communication networks 

Traditional enterprise communication followed the lines of organisational hierarchy whereas Enterprise 2.0 communication follows the paths of a network and so flows more quickly and efficiently. 

Steven Johnson (2010) suggests that individuals perform better when they belong to more networks as they can benefit from information shared by other people. The more nurturing a network, the more information openly shared, the more innovative ideas that can emerge. 

Collaborative communities

Enterprise 2.0 enables the creation and growth of collaborative communities; groups of people that leverage technology and communication networks to organise themselves around different principles to the traditional hierarchical organisation, in order to have a collective means to participate and collaborate. This means of organising, foregoing the authority of traditional means, would have enabled employees to quickly mobilise to figure out new ways of responding to the challenges they faced during the lockdown.

A collaborative community could include the following characteristics (Savalle et al, 2010):

  • Organic
  • Decentralised
  • Self-organising
  • Autonomous
  • Asynchronous
  • Self-regulating
  • Varied in size

Collaborative communities emerge bottom up when people see the value of their contribution. In this there are network effects occurring as the more people contribute to the community, more people experience a benefit and so contribute more.

Companies benefit from providing the technologies and allowing this type of organisation to prosper as information sharing and crowd thinking can solve problems that traditional siloed team structures cannot, it supports new ideas to emerge, and strengthens social ties.

Ways of collaborating

Different types of organisational structure require different ways of collaborating, especially in a crisis situation such as lockdown. Allowing collaborative ways of working to emerge through communities takes more time than companies may have to enable effective working from home, and so considering the ways in which collaboration can be initiated and supported can speed up adoption among a distributed workforce.

Pisano and Verganti (2008) proposed a model of governance and participation that whilst describing how companies can approach innovation with partners could also be a valid model for describing how innovative ways of collaborative working could be understood. This model provides some understanding of how bottom up communities and top down hierarchies may interact in collaborative ways to develop innovative solutions to problems, such as the pressing problem facing companies at the start of the lockdown of how to begin working collaboratively.

Impacts on employees

Introducing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and ways of working to an organisation carries with it a considerable impact for its employees, especially if undertaken during a crisis such as lockdown. Understanding the social ties between individuals, how they develop social capital, and what motivates them to adopt the new technologies and ways of working can provide some insight into how the shift to Enterprise 2.0 can be more successful.

Social ties

McAfee (2009) described four types of ties people have with others. The ties can be weak, strong, potential or none. Strong ties exist between people who know each other and work together, but it is weak ties that are important for connecting people who don’t know each other very well in order to spread information (Gravonetter, 1973). Enterprise 2.0 enables more weak ties to form across an organisation and so encourage information to flow that might have otherwise if it was reliant on the hierarchical structure.

Social capital

Social capital exists in the relations between individuals in a group. Faraj and Wasko (2001) refer to it as a “collective orientation”, a social system that develops because of “closure, shared history, goal interdependence, and frequent interactions”. When those interactions happen online whilst using Enterprise 2.0 technologies the norms of acceptable behaviour become even more paramount, and the opportunities for sharing information and resources are increased. 

Motivation

Achieving adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and ways of working requires an appreciation of the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of the employees, even more so at a time of crisis where they may have additional pressures outside of the workplace. If workers are intrinsically motivated to be successful in the roles, and they understand how new technologies can help with this, they would seem to be more likely to adopt and adapt to the change.

Conclusion

For some businesses the coronavirus lockdown will serve as an accelerator for the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, new ways of working, and new ways of unlocking value within the organisation. This enforced innovation that is making the organisational boundaries more permeable, spreading knowledge and new ways of collaborating, and enabling employees to make the most of the shift to Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to support businesses to be more innovative and successful.

Digital Economics

Admin on 05/07/2020

Digital technology is the representation of information in bits. This technology has reduced the cost of storage, computation, and transmission of data. Research on digital economics examines whether and how digital technology changes economic activity. In this review, we emphasize the reduction in five distinct economic costs associated with digital economic activity: search costs, replication costs, transportation costs, tracking costs, and verification costs.

Digital Goods and the New Economy

Admin on 05/07/2020

Digital goods are bitstrings, sequences of 0s and 1s, which have economic value. They are distinguished from other goods by five characteristics: digital goods are nonrival, infinitely expansible, discrete, aspatial, and recombinant. The New Economy is one where the economics of digital goods importantly influence aggregate economic performance. This Article considers such influences not by hypothesizing ad hoc inefficiencies that the New Economy can purport to resolve, but instead by beginning from an Arrow -Debreu perspective and asking how digital goods affect outcomes. This approach sheds light on why property rights on digital goods differ from property rights in general, guaranteeing neither appropriate incentives nor social efficiency; provides further insight into why Open Source Software is a successful model of innovation and development in digital goods industries; and helps explain how geographical clustering matters.