Infovark

As long as I’m picking on Microsoft for releasing developer tools before they’re fully baked — a cornerstone of Microsoft strategy, according to Joel Spolsky — I might as well take a swipe at their laughable not-quite-a-wiki.

At the bottom of most pages on MSDN is a section called “Community Content”. It’s the Microsoft’s way of encouraging participation from the developer community. Ever since Steve Ballmer skipped onstage chanting developers, developers, developers, developers, Microsoft has tried to recapture the attention — and most importantly, the talent — of the independent developer community. Most of those developers have long since fled to other platforms. Most of these alternatives are open source, meaning that they’ll accept contributions from any programmer with a good suggestion.

This is important, because before most good programmers get their first job, they’ll begin contributing to open source projects. It’s a way to gain experience and confidence, while helping to build their resume. Once they enter the working world, they’re likely to stick with the open source technologies they know. Microsoft is painfully aware of this, and not quite sure what to do about it.

Hence the Community Contribution section on MSDN and Microsoft’s recent open source initiatives. It’s their attempt to bring back the magic and infuse their technologies with teh awsum. While they’ve done a great job with CodePlex, and there’s a healthy Microsoft blogging community of consultants, partners, and independent developers, Microsoft suffers many of the same difficulties switching to an Enterprise 2.0 mindset as other large corporations.

So, you’re a developer, and you’ve found an oddity — possibly a bug, definitely a surprise — in one of the .NET framework’s gazillion objects. Naturally, after exhausting all other avenues for help, you found yourself (shudder) actually reading the documentation on MSDN. Unsurprisingly, it makes no mention of the quirk. You think to yourself, hey, maybe I’ll leave a note using this Community Content thingy. So you click the “Add new content” link and see the following screen.

How many problems did you spot? OK, the image is a little small. I’ll enlarge and highlight a few things.

First, if you’re trying to encourage participation, never, ever, say that this is “not the right place”. If someone wants to make your website better by adding detail, let them. If it turns out that the contribution is not relevant, you can always edit, move or moderate it later. And if you must point out that another forum or communications channel is more appropriate, at least be so good as to provide a hyperlink to it. This is the web, after all.

Second, don’t scare your users with legal threats. They won’t work. The nice users won’t contribute to your site out of fear, and the obnoxious jerks will post whatever they want anyway. It’s self-defeating.

And did you spot the third, final problem? This one’s tricky.

There it is: I’m already signed in to MSDN. They know who I am. I’ve agreed to their terms and conditions once already. They can ban me from the site if I don’t behave. Or they can leave my inappropriate post right where it is, so that everyone will know what an obnoxious jerk I can be. This entire page is nothing but a waste of time.

I could have said something incredibly useful. But hey, I’ve got important things to do. I don’t have time to read through another Microsoft EULA, thanks. Instead I’ll just get back to work.

If you’re following the world of Enterprise 2.0 closely, you might want to take a close look at the results of this new study on office productivity

“According to a groundbreaking new study by the Department of Labor, working—the physical act of engaging in a productive job-related activity—may greatly increase the amount of work accomplished during the workday, especially when compared with the more common practices of wasting time and not working.”

I think there’s something in that for all of us…

I’ve been seeing this video, by Michael Wesch, crop up in quite a few of the feeds I’ve been reading, but I hadn’t yet bothered to watch it. If you’ve been doing the same, here’s another chance:

Like Michael’s previous “Web 2.0″ video, it’s very well done - it extends and expounds on the notion that “ontology is overrated” - the title of a defining piece of “2.0″ thinking from Clay Shirky. Clay’s original article can be found here - if you’re trying to understand where all this Enterprise 2.0 thinking is coming from, It’s another great place to start.

Late in 1995, I paid seventy-five bucks to a guy who lived down my street for a Zoltrix 14.4 K PC internal modulator/demodulator card. Its purpose was to connect my new 486 DX-100 to ‘the Internet’ - this newfangled collective of computers talking to each other. I then proceeded to spend an entire weekend with cables, and drivers, and Windows, while I tried to figure it out. Eventually, my Mom got so fed up with not being able to ring my house (because the only phone line was always engaged) that she came over.

When I explained that I was trying to connect my computer to the Internet, she asked me what that was. I thought for a while.

“Well, it’s all the computers in the world connecting to each other.”

My Mom was used to my crazy schemes, and used to humoring me, so she smiled and nodded. Then she said:

“Why would you want to do that?”

At the time, I probably just smiled and said something patronising like “never you mind”and got back to trying to convince Windows 95 to auto-detect the new modem.

But here we are now at Web 2.0, and I think that the question is worth revisiting.

The tools we call “Web 2.0″ have been designed to promote connectivity, and sharing, and communication, which is why they are so interesting to people watching Enterprise 2.0. But what are we actually doing with them right now?

Facebook is the poster child for Web 2.0, so let’s take a look at what people are doing on Facebook. Here’s my personal Facebook “Requests” section - things that people want me to “do” on Facebook:

Hmmm. None of this stuff is earth-crashingly important. Surely we didn’t plug all the worlds’ computers together so that we could pretend to be vampires and pirates and then pretend to bite each other?

Or maybe we did… These kinds of technologies have a viral appeal because they’re just fun. They’re not important. They’re silly.

The Internet doesn’t have a point. We’re all just ‘Hanging Out’ .

An enterprise, on the other hand, is completely different. The reason that information enterprises connect their computers to each other is to focus on a single goal. Real estate agents want to sell houses. Software companies want to sell software. Government workers want to have lunch and play Solitaire. That’s what motivates these organizations to create their own intranets, little protected networks that exist outside of the Internet. They have a point.

Despite the whole SAAS fuss, I think that the utility of Enterprise 2.0 lies behind the firewall and not in the Internet cloud. SAAS is an appealing business model for companies because it means that they can charge customers forever, but the real power of Enterprise 2.0 will come from bringing those lessons learned into the organization.

The real benefits will come when we take the technologies of Web 2.0 and give them something meaningful to do.