Web 2.0 Expo :: Day 2 Session 1
I started out this morning at People Powered Products … but it wasn’t what I thought it was about. A quick permanent redirect across the hall landed me in Knowledge Sharing at Ideo presented by Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood. Much more interesting for me. This talk outlined a year long project at Ideo to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the company. Knowledge workers face ambiguous and dynamic problems on a daily basis and must adapt and be innovative in real time. The goals of the project were to empower teams to learn from one another, connect geographically seperated offices and enable global collaboration. They came up with 7 lessons that are transferrable to other organizations:
- Build pointers to people
- Help people help themselves (wikis, portals)
- Keep it simple and intuitive (wysiwyg, LDAP, auto-navigation)
- Go where people already are (leverage existing blogs, email distros)
- Reward individual participation
- Aggregate the myriad of voices (self organizing streams of information)
- Iterate early and often (Fail early and often to succeed quickly)
So how did they enable collaboration? By leveraging blogs, wikis, portals and internal social networking tools. Adoption has been rapid and participation is very high.
