As a Community Guy I am of course fascinated by all that. I got invited for a neighborhood party to do some phone volunteering. You bring a computer and your cell phone, a short introduction and off you phone. I thought it would be at 4pm, but the party started without me already at 1pm It was after three when I realized my error and Nina had just fallen asleep.

I thought I missed out, but if the Obama folks are so clever, I should be able to do it on my own. I went to Obama’s website and there was the phone, a little sign up no more than you do for your typical web 2.0 site and you can select which swing state you want to put your full weight behind.

New Mexico didn’t have any phone numbers at the moment, so I selected the battleground (talking about framing) state Ohio. They assigned me 25 numbers and with one click I had a popup with name, number and a little script of what to say in front of me and off I went. From selecting Obama’s website to calling the first number in less than 5 minutes without any human involvement. Smooth and super scalable.

From the neighbor I know that the main goal is to find undecided voters. You don’t try to change their minds, that is much more effectively done via a face to face visit of volunteers on the ground in Ohio. My slightly British accent is similar to the Dean volunteers with the orange hats four years ago, just not convincing

Oh the experiances of a Telemarketer: Hi … this is Mark Finnern a volunteer from the Obama Campaign <click>

O.K. next one. All you have is Name, Age and City they live in. So I get Ruth (not her real name) on the phone. The call was apparently for her husband:

Ruth: He is not here and he is a Republican. I am a Democrat. But I am not going to vote democrat this election.

Me: May I ask why?

Ruth: Well, I didn’t vote for him in the primaries and I am white and I am not voting for a black man this time around.

> I was stunned, quickly checked my calendar, yes it is 2008 not 1958. Arrg.

Me: (almost mumbling) So you want another 4 years of failed politics, same old … > I realized that it is a lost cause. Thanked her and hung up.

Wow, I guess I am living a sheltered life here in the Bay Area. It was my first experiance of open racism. I was saved by Nina waking up and we took off to the community pool. It left me feeling really sad.

Thank God I saw the picture of the 100.000 at the Obama rally in Missouri. I will call more when I find the time. The whole process seems to be implemented flawless. The potential is there to tab into all of these volunteers once Obama has won, to really make a change. Let’s work towards that.

Update: Today I got an email from the campaign with a little video of Joe Biden’s wife Jill Biden talking about the importance of phone volunteering and how easy it is. She comes across as very likable. I didn’t know her before and it is a great way to introduce her.

So go out and - no wait, stay at home and make some phone calls.

With InnoCentive we at he SAP Community Network have introduced a new way to innovate. At the same time and place SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, ESME was introduced that is built on a different innovation model.

This blog is trying to look at the two models and what the consequences are if you choose one over the other.

Just to be clear, both innovation models have their advantages. Therefore depending on the problem at hand one should be selected over the other.

What I want to work out in this post is the nature of the collaboration that is derived from the two models. With that knowledge we then are able to make better decisions which way to go when we tackle our next problem.

The InnoCentive model is straight forward. There is a task that needs to be done or problem to be solved by a certain time. The task and it’s goal is described and a prize is set for the first one to reach it, or if more than one solves a problem, there is a selection process to determine the best solution.

This kind of innovation in my opinion works best, when there is a very specific goal with a clear definition when it is reached, as it was for the original X-Prize:

US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.

Big upside potential of getting $10M and very clear criteria for everyone to see when the goal is reached.

Competition is an excellent motivating factor. Most games, for example the whole Olympics are based on that motivation. It is a winner takes world, I like to call it Gladiator Innovation.

Picture from Wikipedia:Pollice Verso (”With a Turned Thumb”), an 1872 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, is a well known historical painter’s researched conception of a gladiatorial combat.

No matter how many people worked on solutions and may have gotten very similar results, one is selected and the rest gets a rock like Charlie Brown at Halloween.

Let’s take for example the InnoCentive Video Challenge 2008. The one for 2009 just came out:

For this Challenge, InnoCentive seeks a marketing video to be used for the recruitment of new InnoCentive Seekers. This is the second annual InnoCentive marketing video Challenge with the goal of communicating InnoCentive’s mission, business model, and benefits. This video is targeted specifically toward the InnoCentive Seeker community. There will be two winning videos: one chosen by InnoCentive and the other selected by the InnoCentive Solver community. Both winning videos will be used in future marketing campaigns.

It looks like, but is not explicitly stated, whether the two winning videos have to share the $5000.

Let’s say I create a video that is compelling, is in the round of last 8 that are selected and shown on YouTube for people to vote on, but just doesn’t make the first place.

I would be a bit miffed, that after all my effort I got close, but didn’t get anything. My work is used to promote InnoCentive, as the video got watched over 1000 times during the competition run and continues to be on YouTube for everyone to enjoy. A fairer mechanism would be to give out smaller prizes already for the ones that make it to the final round.

Now let’s look at the approach for the ESME innovation. It’s the 21^st century the elevator pitch is too long. Here is their Twitter pitch:

ESME in 140 characters

ESME is a secure and highly scalable microsharing platform that allows people to meet and discover one another in a business process context.

The ESME’s origin are described by Elizabeth Millard for the Baseline Magazine:

A few months ago, a handful of SAP Mentors were enjoying a casual conversation about application development on Plurk, a social networking site. The Mentors are in the company’s Community Network and are usually people who are prolific contributors to technical topics, but also have special expertise in defined areas, according to one Mentor, Dennis Howlett.

The chat turned into an idea that soon became a full-blown social networking project, called ESME (short for Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment), with an alpha release about 3 months later.

The collaboration practice is one of inclusion. People that like a idea and want it to happen join in, find out what is needed right now and do their part. I was involved in finding a NetWeaver hosting solution for them. I wish I had more time to be involved, but am following the emails closely and join a scrum call here and there.

This kind of collaborative innovation where everyone chips in to his or her own ability and time availability is similar to the old tradition of barn raising.

Barn raising image: Ian Adams (c)

As there is no money involved and usually no direct competition, it is relatively easy to call on others when the expertise in the group is not enough and they are happy to help out.

If I am not mistaken, for the Demo Jam at TechEd in Las Vegas, the connection to the event messenger within SAP NetWeaver was programmed the morning of the Jam with the help of Thomas Jung who isn’t in the core ESME team.

How different would the collaboration have been, if ESME was started as an InnoCentive Challenge? There is actually one out there at the moment that is looking into the space from SAP:

Social Networking for Enterprise Applications
SAP is seeking ideas for novel uses of Social Networking to enhance business applications in corporate computing environments. Read more.

If you read the description of the challenge, it is about ideas and how to implement these in an enterprise environment. ESME team is actually developing the solution. The early stage of the project when ESME was starting and use-cases were written, it would have worked.

If I am innovating with the goal to win a competition, I am reluctant to reach out to anyone else, as they all could be competition, or want to get a slice from the pie.

You want me to help you win this competition? What’s in it for me? That means, that it is unlikely, that an optimal solution is found for a complex problem. It was really amazing to experience how quickly solutions were found for obstacales in the way to the ESME solution: “I know someone who can help us out here”, and often the next day it was solved. z

The problem with an Barn Raising innovation is, that it has to be compelling enough for people to collaborate, for them to part with their precious free time. ESME is clearly riding the Twitter craze. If you are working on a problem like the municipal tax code in the US, you better have some chocolate or an InnoCentive challenge to motivate people to create a solution.

With the Gladiator Innovation you also get a clearer timeline, a better planning horizon. You set the deadline date for when the solutions have to be in. Over time we will know how likely solutions for a given problem are produced and you can plan accordingly.

You can focus with your core team on the top 20% of customers and problems. If you have budget, the next problems that you otherwise wouldn’t get to, you can create challenges for and expand your throughput, or if interesting for a broader audience, ignite a community project.

Crossposted at SAP Community Network

My favorite quote from They Might Be Giants is:  Music self-played is Happiness self-made.

I recently heard a neuro scientist say that we probably developed singing in parallel to speaking and that you can’t destinguish a scientist’s brain from an average brain, but you can tell the difference of a musician’s brain because certain areas in the brain are further developed.

Now these little Wee Sing series of Children books is ideal to play the songs from the CD in the car and sing along on trips, but that is not all, there is also sheet music including chords. I use them to play our favorite songs on the piano and we sing along. -  Lots of fun.

The melodies are easy enough, so that Nina practice these once she is old enough to play her own instrument. (If she wants to.)

I think I have never done that before encouraged consumerism. At Costco right now they have a package of these with three CDs for 10 bucks. It will give you hours and hours of big smile fun. Try it out or give it away to your friends that have little kids.

I even twittered one of the songs I really like and didn’t know before:

Boom-de-ah-da … I love the mountains, I love the rolling hills, I love the flowers, I love the daffodils. I love the fireside F Dm Gm C7 03:59 PM September 28, 2008 from web

If you know how to play chords and the rest of the lyrics, you can play this song. Sweet.

When we started SDN and I joined the team, there was Harry Max consulting for O’Reilly. He helped me tremendously to grow into the community guy that I became. Tonight I had the chance to be part of en event where his new stomping ground Rubicon Consulting was introducing research they did around Online Communities.

Here are my running notes:

Harry Max, Michael Mace and Nilofer Merchant at interesting Spark event around communities organized by Rubicon Consulting.

Concept of community comes up in business strategy conversations more and more.

Criteria for Rubicon to select a theme

1. Strategic for technology companies
2. Theme that nobody knows what the hell is going on
3. [I forgot ]

Update: Nilofer Merchant from Rubicon send me their three criteria for selecting a topic to tackle: critical to winning markets in future, not well understood, something we could add meaning/value on…

Michael Mace introduced first set of slides.

Community definitions

* Pier to pier
o Snowboarding
o Threadless
* Developers to Company
score SDN singled out as well known example in the valley
* ???

For their study 3000 US Web users were questioned.

* 10% of users create 80% of total “community” activity
o 90% of uploaded video
o 90% of reviews
o 80% of comments
o 60% of total visits
* 25% of users create 98%

Structure of the community

* Intense contributors 10%
* Occasional contributors 50%
* Silent lurkers 23%
* Abstainers 17%

For a company, online community is theater. 10% performers and 90% watchers.

[That was the perspective shift of the evening for me]

Profile of the 10%

* About 50% more likely to live in the south
[Speculation from the room: More talkative culture, nothing else to do ;-), same with blogging in Europe mainly happening in the southern countries. I counter with most active wiki users are German language. Anonymous contributions preferred. ]
* Younger
* Voracious users

Points to ponder:

* When you get feedback online, who are you hearing from?
[We should reread our survey feedback from that perspective too.]
* To drive a web community, who do you need to take care of?
* Are these people influencers or fanatics?
o Is there a difference?
o [it doesn't really matter]

Q: How do I ???

Now Harry Max:

Community sites can be differentiated by the purposes they serve:

- Proximities -> Craigslist

- Practice -> Work, business-related, SCN J

- Providence -> Business related LinkedIn

- Purpose -> eBay, amazon

- Passion -> dogster

Providence sites get the most daily repeats, but only 65% of all users visit them.

Purpose sites get the most visitors over time 95%

Questions to ponder:

What community type do you need for your business goals?

Are these different users similar to the Tipping point: Active users are Connectors?

Is there a way to touch the most active group of people?

From make it easy to contribute starting with things like Yes/No Was that review interesting? Roping people into becoming more active.

Gender issue? How will the behavior change?

Compare non-online to online community

Laura Baldwin from O’Reilly: Usual cost to get a book to market 100K. O’Reilly has 4 books out written by the community. Cost was mainly setting up the site.

Really interesting study, many of the points enforcing what we are seeing here at SCN. They had gathered a really good crowed with interesting insights.

They will come out with the white paper within two weeks.

Cross-posted at SAP Community Network.
Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern: Harry Max, Michael Mace and Nilofer Merchant at Spark event around communities organized by Rubicon Consulting at the nice San Jose Museum of Art.

Add more information into your follow notifications.

Example:

Subject: daddymoomy is now following you on Twitter!

Hi, Mark Finnern.

daddymoomy (daddymoomy) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out daddymoomy’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/daddymoomy

You may follow daddymoomy as well by clicking on the “follow” button.

Best,
Twitter

–
Turn off these emails at: http://twitter.com/account/notifications

Let’s look at the message. The only information that Twitter gives us about our new follower is the Twitter ID: daddymoomy

In this case it is actually something I can work with. I am a dad, therefore first part of the Twitter ID is interesting, but then moomy? Was daddymummy already taken or was it to morbid as in mummified daddy?

But that is all the information I can derive from your letter. To really get to know more about daddymummy I have to click on the link: http://twitter.com/daddymoomy

In the beginning of Twitter, there was the tweet. At that time you wanted and needed to lure us back to your site and once there let us explore or may be even post. But Twitter, you pointed the tip, you sharked the jump, we are hooked. We spent too much time on your site already, and even though you let us down again and again, we are coming back. With just a small adjustment the Twitter experience will be a little smoother. Put more information into your follower notification, like this:

Subject: daddymoomy is now following you on Twitter!

Hi, Mark Finnern.

daddymoomy (daddymoomy) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Location: Cleveland
Web: http://www.godzil…
Bio: My own great blog
Following 1,953
Followers 77
Favorites 5
Updates 2 Last 3 tweets:

 

I am new..can’t u tell

 

1 day ago from web

All new people should get together..i have no idea what i am doing.. 10:10 AM August 11, 2008 from web Check out daddymoomy’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/daddymoomy

You may follow, block or mark daddymoomy as a spam user.
Follow: http://twitter.com/daddymoomy/follow
Block: http://twitter.com/daddymoomy/block
Spam user: http://twitter.com/daddymoomy/spam

Best,
Twitter

–
Turn off these emails at: http://twitter.com/account/notifications

Immediately I would see that this Twitter shark is fishing for followers and not offering any content. It would give me just a little satisfaction to help out my fellow Twitteraties by marking that user as a spammer. It would be up to you what to do with this information besides blocking of course.

On the other hand, if daddymoomy would be a daddy with nuggets of child raising tips: How to best handle the temper tantrum of a strong willed 2 year old.  I would be so happy to follow back. Please give me the information to do that right in your follow notification.

First SAP TechEd of the year in Las Vegas just about a month away. Still so much to do. Come to Community Day for some cool stuff.Nice little countdown widget written by Abesh inspired by Marcelo Ramos‘ Countdown Widgets

75% of that price hike is directly related to biofuel. Turns out that over a third of the US corn is used for Ethanol production. Is the military using Ethanol to run their planes with? I am really wondering where all that is going.

The other thing that should be done is cut farm subsidies, with these prices the farmers should not need any more support. (Deducted from my home office chair )

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian. It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

This was a try out post with clipmarks, but I don’t really like the result. To intrusive and self-promoting for my taste.

Three days ago I get the following email regarding our Wildfire Haze picture. The text reads interesting, NowPublic looks like a citizen journalism site :

:: Your California wildfire photo Hi Mark & Marie Finnern, Here’s a personal note from <name withheld>: _____________________________________ We’re running a news story about the wildfires in Northern California, and your photo would be a great addition. Would you be interested in sharing it? In case you haven’t heard of us, NowPublic is a participatory news website. The requested photo(s) will appear as thumbnails when you follow the link. Please let me know if you have any questions. Take care, Rob please click on this link - where you can approve or reject its use:

____________________________________________________________

NowPublic is a news sharing community that uses stories, photos, & videos from sources like you.If you would like to learn more about this request, and the context in which your photo might be used, click on this link: http://www.nowpublic.com/import/4868164c2addb7.62822270

If you do give your permission, your photo will always remain your property, and whatever license you have specified will follow its use on NowPublic.com If you have any concerns about this, please contact our Quality Assurance Coordinator at quality@nowpublic.com ———————————————————— Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.

Now our licensing is a Creative Commons one: Attribution & share alike aka link back to our picture on Flickr when you use it.

Of course I felt flattered, so I clicked on the link. First frustration instead of just a link to agree that the requester can use the picture, you get a sign up sheet. Grudgingly I filled it out, having been around the internet block for a while I should have stopped right there, but I was curious, wanted to know how the whole process works.

NowPublic used my information to create a Mark & Marie Finnern account on their site. If you look at the profile it shows the two pictures that were requested as uploaded by us. That is of course not true, someone from the NowPublic network has requested to use the picture in a story, that is different than me going around uploading my pictures to different sites.

Second problem is, that there is no link back to our flickr page, at least that I could find. If you click on the picture you get a run around and get back to our NowPublic account. A clear violation of our original creative commons copyright.

Third there is no mention of the copyright settings of our pictures, the big claim:

If you do give your permission, your photo will always remain your property, and whatever license you have specified will follow its use on NowPublic.com

Is a hollow promise, as no copyrights are shown.

All that left me frustrated. I think the concept Citizen Journalism is an interesting one and NowPublic has most of the elements in place: Rating, voting, top contributors, rookie separation, … But the way they suck you into their site and their not so clean UI will keep me away, especially far away from contributing anything.

P.S. One thing they did good: They asked whether it is O.K. to post a comment that links back to their story on the pictures that they have choosen:

NowPublic says: Thank you for sharing your photo!This photograph appears in a NowPublic news story:Firefighters in stalemate against Calif. fires.
Posted 4 days ago. ( permalink | delete )

Yesterday morning we looked out of our window and the sun was already high up, but we were able to look straight into it without straining our eyes. We think the California Wildfire smoke is creating the haze.

Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.