From the April 2010 Scientific American Magazine

Problem Solved, LOL

Blog comments point to a new, faster approach in math
By Davide Castelvecchi
In the mid-20th century the encyclopedic works of French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki traced every mathematical concept back to the subject’s foundations in the theory of sets—the stuff of Venn diagrams—and changed the face of his field. Like many of his notions, Bourbaki existed only in the abstract: he was the pseudonym for a tight-knit group of young Parisian researchers. The Internet-age version could be D.H.J. Polymath, another collective pseudonym who could define a new style of mathematics.

This is another example of an expertise network in action. Also, an excellent example of why collaboration matters. If this works for mathematicians, why not for others? Why is this just a ‘faster approach for math’?

Reaching back in my memory, I remembered having a similar discussion about ‘virtual organizations‘ when I was doing a workshop for the Association for Creative Change in Organizational Renewal and Development (ACCORD) a number of years ago.  My observation at the time was that the participants attending the workshop came in two groups — small organizations wanting to understand how to use virtual organization structures to look big and big organizations wanting to understand how to use virtual organization frameworks to look small. An interesting contrast.

With this in mind, I thought about the same kind of contrast we see in expertise networking. Large organizations embrace some of the concepts associated with expertise networks and expertise management primarily from an internal point of view. But small / medium organizations (like ours) use expertise networks to expand their reach and to embrace expertise that may be external and to assemble capabilities on a project basis to help when needed. We use our expertise network to allow us to reach out to many different associates to assemble project teams for client work.

In sum, any organization can use these concepts effectively.

I have posted the slides on SlideShare (if you have not explored SlideShare, I would encourage you to do so. A great place to find and share slides on almost any topic. Some of the slides are shared with a Creative Commons license – as I have done with this slide deck. Have fun exploring!)

[By the way, it took several tries to get this right on SlideShare. Seems that in reformatting slides for their website, they change fonts and alignment. Thanks Blaise for proofreading those slides and pointing that out.]

In this column I try to keep the language and terms distinct – social networks, social (knowledge) media, social networking.  This is also one of my areas of research as I try to understand the role of social networks in expertise management / location. If you come across any references in this area; I would be glad to hear from you.

I found this post recently on Business Week that referred me to a survey done by Barracuda Networks (who sells tools for email and web security). In the survey, they asked customers (those with their security tools .. and not a random sample of businesses) whether they blocked social networking sites. Of 2400 customers surveyed, 50% said they block access to Facebook or MySpace.

Contrast that with  Serena Software in San Mateo, California. This company now promotes social networking Fridays for staff to keep their pages up to date.  It is also using Facebook as an alternative to a corporate intranet – a place for their staff to collaborate.

Seems to me that many companies are missing out opportunities to use these tools to their advantage.