[Image credit: TechLuver.com]

Shawn Dahlen and Christopher Keohan talked at length about what they’d learned over the course of eighteen months developing the platform, kicking off their presentation by noting that there was a compelling need in government sector to collaborate through social media. Chris noted that embracing social computing at Lockheed Martin a major component of recruiting talented Generation Y IT workers, the so-called “millenials,” as showing the company’s prowess in the adoption of cutting edge tools was a key differentiator.

Before Unity was implemented, the state of collaboration at their enterprise should be quite familiar to most corporate workers : email, meetings and office docs like Powerpoint presentations emailed around as attachments. “Project Unity” was conceived as a way of applying Web2.0 technologies for “mission success.” To that end, the team resolved to provide a user experience employees would love, address “what was in it for them” and balance the need to share vs the need to know — crucial in a defense contractor. Unity’s designers wanted to foster a social computing ecosystem around a standardized platform, integrating blogs, wikis and other documents into their current platform. Over time, they added discussion forums, a social bookmarking tool called “uBookmark” and weekly activity reporting to capture usage and adoption patterns. They included a suggestion tool to solicit community insights on the project as it rolled out and created an internal homepage to aggregate popular content. Unity’s internal team of developers also made a priority of maintaining a cohesive user experience and to ensuring that all information could be both feed-enabled and integrated.

How did they pull it off? By integrating Google enterprise search appliance (GSA) , Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Newsgator’s Enterprise Server. Take a look at this demonstration of Social Sites 2.0 to get a feel for what this looks like. They Unity development team took a close look at how to use social computing tools in an everyday business context and took the time to understand how they would integrate and evolve from the existing email/Powerpoint/meeting model.

The crucial question, asked over and over again this week, was addressed head-on by Unity’s designers: “What is the value of social networking in the enterprise?”

Their answer was, in the end, simple: Being able to watch what other people are doing, easily, and then being able to search it and ask questions raises productivity and leads to improved collaboration and knowledge exchange. Instead of tracking what your friends are doing on, say, Facebook with a “friend feed,” an enterprise derives value from tracking an activity stream of interconnected colleagues. At any point, a worker can see what others are working on, access shared documents and ask questions on shared virtual workspaces or directly to the relevant decision maker or technologist.

Lockheed-Martin built the basic Unity platform in 07 and then ran a beta pilot of it over the course of the year with 40 engineers building, testing and experimenting with the release. After the initial release, it took just six months for a second iteration that addressed both information security and legal issues.

A crucial question that they were asked to account for again and again will be familiar to CIOs: How did they quantify the return on investment (ROI) for the dedication of internal resources and purchase of software? Each time, the traditional productivity savings of a user finding information was a factor. What really sold them, however, was the soft case of customers interested in their social computing initiative. Unity helped in Lockheed-Martin’s bidding process, especially proposals that involved knowledge managememt.

As the project rolled out, a crucial component was the in development and distribution of a “collaboration playbook.” New standards for playbook and best practices were laid out in its pages. For instance, as a team member, you should ask questions on a group page, not wander over to ask or send a broadcast email; this helps to capture questions and answers for everyone. Adding to documentation whenever possible was crucial, along with teaching people the power of linking and understanding which communication type made sense for different business cases: blog posts, wikis, email, virtual conferences or in-person meetings. In the end, the Unity team created the playbook as much for themselves as they worked as for the company as a whole, “eating their own dogfood.” They used a project management office (PMO) blog to keep colleagues up to date about what the dev team was doing.

One of their other key discoveries was that pervasive enterprise search is key to keeping documents both relevant and accessible.

What’s next for the team? Adding filters to content that depend upon the clearance of those accessing it. In highly classified work, user-assignable taxonomies are crucial for opening up content for collaboration while maintaining information security. Also in the works are adding recommended content, similar to the Digg-model of social news, employee profiles, export control filters and network-based search.

If you’re looking for a great case study for enterprise 2.0 adoption, look up Unity.

Ivy has blogged about Intellipedia before, nearly a year ago. Since then, the agencies have been making steady progress in exploring the potential for wikis and blogs internally and using them for information sharing, discussion, surfacing subject matter experts and deciphering the intelligence puzzle embedded in the massive amount of monitored noise. The question of adoption or barriers around older generations turned out not to be at issue. It’s not an age problem at all — the number one contributor at the CIA is 69 with 40 years of exp. Young people conform to a given culture quickly; it’s really about how the tools are presented and valued. Getting the first couple of edits made is the most important thing to novice users, given the need for a low barrier to adoption. One of the first projects at Intellipedia was an acronym list, in fact, which was a perfect fit for those “novices” and an invaluable tool for new employees that needed to decipher internal jargon.

I may be able to get an video with the two later, though given some concerns about too much exposure from their press office, we’ll see. When I met with both men in person this afternoon, along with a project manager from the NSA, each offered more insight into the cultural barriers inherent in opening up intelligence sharing through wikis at the agency. Given that national security, highly classified information, sources and methods could all be exposed, there are plenty of relevant concerns. That being said, Intellipedia was created in the aftermath of 9/11, when the relationships, structure, connections and methodology employed by the nation’s intelligence agencies were being reexamined at a fundamental level. The inspiration for the project sprung from seeing the style of information sharing and collaboration engendered and enabled by wikis, particularly in the history and discussion pages. Now, facts and analysis may be shared, vetted, sourced and debated internally, with a focus on discovery instead of control. Notably, the suite of social computing tools that are being used are distributed throughout the sixteen different intelligence agencies. Where analysts once might have used email and slides to share knowledge, now they can move their insights ont othe platform. Agents in Iraq can (and do) edit and collaborate in real-time with great effect with the distributed global intelligence community, posting videos, documents and commentary. Simply replacing Powerpoint with a wiki turns out to an incredibly powerful tool.

There are some crucial differences between Intellipedia and Wikipedia, the world’s most famous wiki. At Intellipedia, contributors must always be identified and operate from an attributable point of view, vs. Wikipedia’s famous neutral point of view (NPOV). At Wikipedia, the bulks of the edits tend to be made by a core group of editors, vs contributions by many from the intelligence community. And, obviously, the discussions and facts cited are highly classified and secure.

Sean and Don also presented 3 core principles of social software for enterprise users that everyone would do well to consider:

1. Work at broadest audience possible
2. Think topically, not organizationally
3. Replace existing business processes

I should note that there have been some rumors flying around the conference that the famous CIA World Factbook might be made into a wiki; unfortunately, this speculation was dashed as just that. Just goes to show — it’s hard to get good intelligence unless you go right to the source.

How can you work with structured data in an unstructured way?

He noted that the killer app of the PC generation that came of age in the 1980s was the spreadsheet, pioneered by Dan Bricklin in the form of VisiCalc. That app was what led many early adopters to buy an Apple and tap into the productivity gains brokered by the IT revolution.

Spreadsheets are now used for communication, lists, tables and two-dimensional layout. Mayfield asserted that they’re the most common database on the planet.

Workers collaborated originally by using sneakernet and floppy disks to share spreadsheets.

Now, we play “email volleyball with attachments” — a descriptive and all too accurate summation of how files ping pong around a network, introducing version control issues, 90% error rates. As Ross sees it, reverse engineering a spreadsheet on a web page misses the potential.

For the past two years, Socialtext has been working with Dan Bricklin to combine the usability and collaborative power of a wiki with the organization and flexibility of a spreadsheet. Meet the social spreadsheet, a “multi-user wiki-based spreadsheet program that simplifies version control, reduces errors and increases productivity.”

The software is able to cross organizational, structural, geographical and temporal boundaries. In the short video below, (available on Viddler for sharing or on YouTube), Dan Bricklin explains what a social spreadsheet is, how it works, how he was involved in the project and what users can expect from the software.

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The social spreadsheet is open sourced and will be used in XOs for the One Laptop Per Child project worldwide, providing access to a quintessential IT tool for farmers, village merchants, businessmen, teachers and thousands of other individuals in the developing world.

Thanks again to Dan Bricklin for taking the time to talk to WhatIs.com.

[Download a special report on 10 years at Berkman (PDF)]

Berkman at 10 combined conference with celebration, as Harvard professors, staff, alumni and guests convened for sessions that included presentations from distinguished professors, a discussion with the co-founder of Wikipedia, a panel featuring Viacom’s general counsel, a former FCC chairman and venture capitalist Ester Dyson — all within the course of the first day. Dinners, sessions in the style of an unconference, a talk about the future of journalism from TalkingPointMemo‘s Joshua Micah Marshall and seminars that addressed net neutrality, netizenship and much more continued the second day, followed by a gala that honored the achievements of those who have made outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society over the past decade. Winners included the founders of MideastYouth.com, Connexions, FreeRice.com, PublicResource.org, Worldspace.com. Highest honor went to Jeffrey Cunard and Bruce Keller for their pro bono work.

[Watch the archived webcasts of Berkman at 10]

The men and women considering the future of the Internet used the medium itself to meet, greet, intermingle and collectively think about the topic at hand. As you might expect at a conference packed with cyberluminaries, computer scientists, engineers, journalists and assorted digerati, the two days were an exercise in hyperconnectivity. Conferees listened in the audience, watched live video feeds from overflow rooms or participated remotely using uncommonly robust social media tools.

“The question is not freedom of speech, the question is freedom *after* speech.”
- Esther Dyson, quoting an unnamed Russian

The Berkman Center created a Berkman at 10 wiki where you can find much more information about the conference, its agenda, attendees, the sessions and the Center itself. Projects founded, funded or organized by Berkman and its Fellows have been far-reaching in their influence and are frequently grounded in the entrepreneurial focus and intellectual rigor of its founders. They include:

• Open Net, which investigates and analyzes the various filtering and surveillance practices around the world.
• The Publius Project, which features essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net.
• Global Voices Online (GVO), which focuses on highlighting global conversations in blogs that exist outside the world of TechMeme, the “A-list” and Silicon Valley.
• A new project of GVO is Voices Without Votes, which covers what is being discussed about the US elections throughout the world’s blogs.
• StopBadware.org, which identifies Websites infected with spyware or malware and, with Google’s help, interjects warnings when users try to access them.

The conference was kicked off by the Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, who announced that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society now a university-wide research center at Harvard. She also urged the crowd to lobby Jonathan Zittrain to come back to Harvard and led an impromptu chant to urge him to consider the invitation. Professor Nesson, cofounder of the Berkman Center, then introduced Professor Jonathan Zittrain, aka “JZ,” to the conference.

Professor Zittrain’s thesis is that the “generative Internet,” the combination of a programmable computer and an open, “writable” Internet, is in danger from tethered appliances like the iPhone and TiVo or walled gardens of non-portable data like Facebook. Doc Searls posted the following graphic within his “Understanding Infrastructure” article for Linux Journal:

In the PC and the network, the narrow point in the hourglass is where the generative power rests, in the Internet Protocol and the operating system. During the session, Zittrain repeatedly referred to this power as the “dark energy” of the Internet and raised concerns that the means to contribute could gradually be abridged or blocked in the future by corporations or governments through changes in the network or locking down the OS. The iPhone and other appliances like the Chumby or XBox are examples of the latter.

Further thoughts and analysis of the session can be found from Ethan Zuckerman, David Weinberger, Patrick Philippe Meier, Andy Sellars, Daithí Mac Sithigh, Dan Farber and Jim Rapoza. Zittrain’s book, “The Future of the Internet,” is available at futureoftheinternet.org.

Professor John Palfrey, the executive director of the Berkman Center, followed with a session on the impact of the Internet on politics and democracy. The presentation reached much further than the U.S. Presidential election, though the impact of YouTube, socially networked fundraising and the netroots has been far reaching domestically. He also presented three crucial arguments, each of which may be viewed and commented upon related ideas at the wiki at Berkman and is quoted below:

1. The Internet allows more free speech from more people than ever before, but states are finding ways to filter and limit that speech.
2. There is greater autonomy of the individual because of the Internet.
3. The formation of online groups will alter the form and function of existing organizations and institutions with unknown impacts on democracy and governance.

Palfrey’s talk reflected many of Zittrain’s concerns: the very openness and disruptive change that a generative Internet presents for free speech may be dangerous enough to repressive regimes that technological steps, like the Great Firewall of China, may be taken to limit access or the ability to publish freely.

Palfrey presented a map of the Farsi blogosphere (above) and noted, however, that the Iranian blogosphere is the fourth largest in the world, including a range of conservative, religious, secular and liberal views. The map was produced by John Kelly and Bruce Etling for their paper, “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere.”

One of the more intriguing notions that came out of the session was the concept of “flashdrive democracy,” where Palfrey used the example of Cuban dissidents who smuggled contraband video of student protests out of Cuba using a sneakernet and published them to YouTube.

Session notes are available from Professor Palfrey. More analysis and notes from David Weinberger’s post, Micah Sifry’s post and Daithí Mac Sithigh’s post.

In the third session of the day, Yochai Benkler, professor and author of the Wealth of Networks, interviewed Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia. The two men deconstructed the sprawling online encyclopedia and discussed different models of peer production.

Dan Farber reported on the session and posted a transcript of Wales’ remarks on his blog. Adam Oran also wrote at length about this session at Radar.OReilly.

“The threat is not the money, the threat is the authority over knowledge.”
- Yochai Benkler

The links above are far from the only reactions to the sessions, of course. See the Center’s collection of online coverage of Berkman at 10 for more information about the unconference, panels and seminars.

Throughout the conference, participants near and far chatted over IRC, Twittered about memorable moments or useful links and used a dynamic online question tool as a live discussion board during each presentation. Hallmark technologies of “Web 1.0″ like IP, IRC, HTTP, WWW and HTML were enhanced by social media from the Web 2.0 world, like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, microblogging and live videoblogging. Conference participants chatted live there on the IRC channel or in the virtual 3D hall on the Berkman Center’s island in Second Life. Some participants, however, still passed notes.

Berkman at 10 was chronicled using what Professor David Weinberger might term a folksonomy, a user-defined taxonomy for classifying digital content. Participants assigned digital content to the Berkman folksonomy on whatever platform they were publishing to using a #Berkman hashtag or “Berkmanat10″ tag or category.

Here are the different aggregations.

• Images tagged with Berkmanat10 on Flickr.
• Blog posts tagged with Berkman on Technorati.
• Berkman-related tweets on Twitter, aggregated on Twemes.com.
• Berkman conferees and fellows on YouTube
• Boston’s own Steve Garfield was the official videographer for the event. Watch all of his Berkman videos at Qik.com. Steve uses a handheld Nokia95 to stream live over a broadband wireless connection.
• For those interested in seeing how Yahoo! Pipes can be put to good use, check out the full feed of the Berkman at 10 proceedings.

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It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Google is rejecting claims of patent infringement made in a lawsuit brought by the Jarg Corporation, a Massachusetts-based technology company.

I am not one of them.

If you, too, need to occasionally convert binary to ASCII text or, alternately, amuse yourself by converting especially colorful jokes into safe-for-works form… well, you too might just find this binary to text translation tool useful.

Now you, too, can tell ask your friends to
01110011011101000110111101110000001000
00011100110110010101101110011001000110
10010110111001100111001000000110110101
10010100100000011100110110100101101100
01101100011110010010000001000110011000
010110001101100101011000100110111101101
111011010110010000001110001011101010110
10010111101001111010011001010111001100101110.

[Image source: ThinkGeek]

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Today’s Word of the Day, government Trojan, describes efforts by various governments to covertly survail traffic of all kinds to and from suspect hard drives, including VoIP, cellphones and email.

These kinds of measures are only likely to increase as groups of all stripes turn to the Web to organize and communicate about activity the government wants to monitor. I find the “analog hacks” used here intriguing. VoIP or cellphone conversations and email messages may be encrypted during transmission but if an agency can record a target on the microphone or by using a keylogger, even quantum encryptography could be sidestepped.

Without atomic clocks, GPS navigation would be impossible, the Internet would not synchronize, and the position of the planets would not be known with enough accuracy for space probes and landers to be launched and monitored.

All that precision makes me fantasize about simpler times when (I fondly imagine) humans weren’t as time-driven. I tend to think that, for example, noonish would be a perfectly valid time to set an appointment if we were going by the position of the sun. (All appointments automatically cancelled on cloudy days!)

And yet… NIST’s A Walk Through Time seems to suggest that my fantasy is … just a dream. According to their section on ancient calendars, humans have been doing their darndest to track time for so long that if I want to go back to a simpler time where time’s less of an issue I’d have go go back to a time that was probably too simple for my liking. Before books and coffee, for example. I’m no technology addict (I’d be happy to read by firelight, steaming latte in hand) but there are limits to how rough I’m willing to go.

Here’s a bit from Ancient Calendars:

We know little about the details of timekeeping in prehistoric eras, but wherever we turn up records and artifacts, we usually discover that in every culture, some people were preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time. Ice-age hunters in Europe over 20,000 years ago scratched lines and gouged holes in sticks and bones, possibly counting the days between phases of the moon.

Ice age? No thanks! I can hardly wait till Spring as it is. The days get shorter, nights get longer and I start to fantasize about hibernating until, oh, Aprilish.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Tech fans may find gems like “SIMS 141 – Search, Google, and Life,” with Google’s Sergey Brin, to be of particular interest:
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If that doesn’t meet your bar for online video goodness, you might try BoingBoing TV, a new IPTV feature hosted by cybergoddess Xeni Jardin and BoingBoing’s co-creator, Mark Frauenfelder.
The 3-5 minute segments will also feature cyberpunk author and digital copyright maven Cory Doctorow and gadgets editor Joel Johnson. The debut episodes featurethe usual mix of pop ephemera and geeky art, including a piece on Listography.com, an remix of an industrial movie from the 1960s and a robot covering Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

All Things Weird and Wonderful, here I come.

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