InfoCompanions » Collaboration

Friends of Friends – Thread.com

Himanshu Sharma — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:03:30 +0000

Great, so now you have a Facebook profile. And even one step further and made a few “friends”. What now? Expand your network even further by connecting with friends of friends? It opens up a whole new set of questions about the “What” and “Why”… but at least, the ability is here. Check out the video below.

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Malcolm Gladwell: Human potential

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:51:59 +0000

Pop sociologist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has honed in on a profound new question: what separates extraordinary and average people? Discussing findings from his much-anticipated book “Outliers,” Gladwell details how we’re squandering human potential everywhere from the football field to the classroom – and what we can do to change it.

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Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:27:36 +0000

Twitter, Facebook and other forms of Social Media are continuing to change our world in ways we never imagined. Who imagined that Twitter and TXT messaging can facilitate the early waves of democracy in one of the world’s most authoritarian regime, Iran? And who imagined that in May 2008, BBC would first come to know about the devastating earthquake in China through Twitter (last time the quake happened, it took China 3 months just to admit that an earthquake had hit China!)

In this impressive talk, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

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Google Wave – another masterpiece from Google

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:03:34 +0000

Which one of the following communication mediums do you use the most? Email? Video Conference? Instant Messaging? Blogging? Bulletin Boards? Social Network? And if you said yes to at least 2 of the mediums above, am sure you have wished for a product that helps blur the boundaries between these products.

Wait no more, Google unveils Google Wave, an open source, personal communication and collaboration tool – all within a browser, using HTML 5 (dubbed as the Microsoft killer). Simply defined, Google Wave combines the best of worlds from plain vanilla email, hosted conversations, bulletin boards, combined with the power of instant messaging and social network applications like Orkut. Connect the concept with the possibilities at workplace – shared meeting minutes, with REAL TIME view as content is created (yup, real time – meaning text shows up in your browser as your colleague types), real time deliverables and content creation etc.

Lisa Hoover from “Computer World” defines Google Wave as:

“Wave is an elaborate mashup of collaboration, documentation, and real-time messaging that Google hopes will make people finally sever ties with AOL, Microsoft, and other online services. Its function is similar to what would happen if you linked your team’s computer desktops together, then put a giant virtual whiteboard in front of everyone.
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I think it’s a safe bet Wave will fly in enterprise. If nothing else, the magic words “improved workflow” will entice companies to at least try it. There’s no question that freelancers, telecommuters, and anyone who relies on remote collaboration will jump on Wave the day it’s available, and stick with it if it helps save time and money.”

What’s more – Google Wave comes with a cool set of APIs, opening up a world of possibilities and opportunities to develop extensions. Drooling.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out Ben’s latest blog post on Mashable.com for a deep dive

Way-New Collaboration

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

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About Howard Rheingold:
As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.

Geniuses, Collaboration & Stubbornness

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell talks about the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving, and how long it takes to master any challenge. He observes, ‘Modern problems require persistence more than genius, and we ought to value quantity over quality when it comes to intelligence… When you’re dealing with something as complex and as difficult as Fermat’s last theorem, you’re better off with a large number of smart guys than a small number of geniuses.’.

He advocates taking problems slowly – noting that expertise comes with approx. 10,000 hours of training. He thereby identifies the ‘mismatch problem’, which is simply the idea that standards used to judge/predict success in a given field don’t match what it takes to be successful in that field.

For example, when diagnosing colonoscopies, it’s how much time the doctor spends on each colonoscopy, not how smart they are, how much training they have, where s/he went to school etc. that determines success. If you spend more than 10 minutes on each colonoscopy rather than one, you’ll find the cancers. However, we select and train doctors for their cognitive facility, for, amongst other things, the speed at which they acquire information and the efficiency with which they go about their tasks.

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About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.

Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.

Wikipedia’s Growth Secrets

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Jimmy Wales assembled “a ragtag band of volunteers,” gave them tools for collaborating, and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished encyclopedia of the future. Here, he explains how the collaborative approach works, and why it succeeds. Along the way, he debunks some controversies, explains the “neutral point-of-view policy” and why it is non-debatable; and details the Wikipedia governance model: a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Jimmy Wales:
Jimmy Wales went from betting on interest rates and foreign-currency fluctuations (as an option trader) to betting on the willingness of people to share their knowledge. That’s how Wikipedia, imagined in 2001, became one of the most-referenced, most-used repositories of knowledge on the planet, with more than one million articles in English (compared with the Britannica’s 80,000) and hundreds of thousands in dozens of other languages, all freely available.

The “wiki” in the name refers to software that allows anyone with Internet access to add, delete or edit entries. This has led to controversies about the reliability of the information, prompting the Wikimedia Foundation to set tighter rules for editors, while still keeping Wikipedia open-source. One thing is certain: Wikipedia will never be finished. In the meantime Wales has started working on Wikiasari, a wiki-style search engine.

Blogging Means Business

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

IBM executives Harriet Pearson and Willy Chiu discuss the power of building communities in the marketplace.

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Friends of Friends – Thread.com

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