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Workstreamer Blog

Thank You Steve! 10:55pm

You may not have realized it, but the majority of posts on the Workstreamer blog this summer have been penned by our awesome intern: Steve Preefer. Steve is going into his sophomore year at Dartmouth College where he plays on the squash team and is fascinated by the impact of social media on his generation. In fact, Steve’s high-school senior thesis was written about the opportunity for social tools to impact politics and political marketing. Really cool stuff!

Steve has been an exceptional addition to the Workstreamer team this summer and we greatly appreciate the time and energy he brings to the office each day. I hope you will drop Steve a comment and wish him well as he begins to prepare to head back up to Hanover. We’ll miss him and hope to see him again next summer!

Thanks Steve!

This also puts real pressure on Steve to make some uber good final posts

How the State Department Uses Collaborative Technology 9:24am

In 2006, the Department of State launched a project called Diplopedia (wiki-based software) with a goal of creating a better way to share unclassified information on diplomacy, international relations and political figures internally. Last week we saw a ton of press coverage following Eric Johnson’s speech at Wikimania in Egypt.

Johnson said that part of the success of wiki effort comes from prosecuting anyone who posts invalid information (you have to register to post on the site) and a lack of arguments of phrasing in articles. Interestingly the New York Times’ coverage of this story discusses the burgeoning collaborative nature of the government agencies:

There certainly is a culture of collaborative writing at the State Department, Mr. Johnson acknowledged: memos are drafted, massaged, passed up the chain for comments and then approved. But this form of collaboration is based on the notion that the more people who read something, the less chance it will be candid. Wikis, by contrast, are collaborative only in retrospect — someone has to be prepared to be the first to write something, and deal with having those words changed by a complete stranger.

Mr. Johnson said his office occasionally gets calls from new contributors: “People will say, ‘I have something I want to post; I want to check before I do it.’ And we say, no, no, put it up.”

The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture,” said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. “This is a technological manifestation of a policy difference,” he said, a change he dated to when Colin L. Powell was secretary of state.

Government adoption of new technologies tends to greatly lag consumers and the enterprise. If the government believes it can leverage web 2.0 tools to improve efficiency and accuracy in the workplace, than it’s great validation for the future of collaborative tools.

Google’s Whale 9:44am

Michael Arrington wrote up a nice post on gmail’s outage yesterday so I won’t summarize that again, but I loved his play on the twitter whale that we all know so well. I just wanted to pass it on. Enjoy!

Kauffman Report Suggests Distance Leaning Pays Major Dividends 1:55pm

The Kaufman Foundation just published a report on the forces that have helped transform India into a global force in R&D. One of the driving forces is that Indian firms have adopted best practices from top U.S. and European firms while also implementing their own unique scaling strategies to increase efficiency of talent evaluation and training. Two techniques Indian firms have vastly improved upon are a) skills forecasting and b) distance learning. According to Wikipedia, distance learning is

is a field of education that focuses on instructional systems design that aim to deliver education to students who are not physically “on site”. Rather than attending courses in person, teachers and students may communicate at times of their own choosing by exchanging printed or electronic media, or through technology that allows them to communicate in real time and through other chatting ways.”

In other words, distance learning is the concept of the virtual classroom, made possible in large part by the web and collaborative tools. The U.S. has lagging in R&D, especially in the private sector, for quite sometime. If there is a better way to find talent and offer them more intensive skills training at lower costs, it should be imperative for our major corporations to implement it, right? I think so. Distance learning can also make a huge difference at larger companies like Microsoft, Google or Yahoo!.

If US companies cannot find a better way to complete globally in the R&D wars, what does that mean for both economies and the world?

Marketing Mess from Go Big Always 10:31am

Saw this on the Go Big Always Blog today and wanted to pass it along to our loyal Workstreamer readers. Enjoy!