Saturday, August 16, 2003

SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND THE ISSUE OF TRUST: A lot is being written about "social software". Clay, Ross, and Ray have been big thought leaders in this space and it is awesome to be in the field and witness many of the core tenets, in action, that have been put forth by these folks. While largely considered "software that supports group communication", there is a time and place dimension above and beyond the pure movement of messages amongst people and organizations. Recently, we were able to observe very specific social phenomenon that has added a new twist to the use of space-based social software like Groove. It is the idea of the shared space as a neutral and virtual place for shared goals. The Virtual Negotiation Table in Southern Asia/New York/Helsinki: Groove was used less than eight weeks ago to broker peace in a nation in southern Asia. During the mid-80's, tension between the majority and the separatists on this island nation erupted into full blown ethnic war, with 10's of thousands of people losing their lives. Leveraged by some very bright folks from the Nobel Peace Laureate, and with the wisdom and guidance of James A. at Groove, a set of "Peace Tools" was developed and deployed to assist in a new round of peace negotiations. Peace negotiation is intricate business. Bringing warring factions to a physical table is often tense, and can result in people getting shot. It was envisaged that Groove could bring this nation's leadership to the same "virtual" table as the separatists. It worked. Groove was embraced by both constituencies because of the virtual nature of the shared space. While one shared space served as the meeting place for the factions, each had separate spaces to discuss their positions and provide context for the negotiators. The shared space became the trusted and neutral enclave for all parties involved to lay out their positions, and to jointly work through the options. And no one gets shot. Centricity and Ownership: My blog post of August 13, "The Power of Event Swarms", begins to tell the story of Groove usage for humanitarian efforts during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). What it doesn't tell is the political aspect of the collection and sharing of Rapid Assessment data amongst coalition government entities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This use case demonstrates the core business drivers that Ray and the other founders envisioned when they designed and built Groove: People, spanning multiple organizations and geos (some in hostile data communications environments), working synchronously and asynchronously, online and offline, rapidly coming together to solve a problem. What wasn't anticipated was having NGO's willing to join the same virtual spaces as government entities. This just doesn't happen in the physical world for a host of reasons. NGO's need to maintain a sense of neutrality in order to build trust amongst the people that they are trying to serve. Being physically observed with a member of a government can destroy this trust, and in some cases, present real danger to NGO personnel. The shared space, once again, was viewed as a neutral place to share and consume information. Even more interesting was the fact that Groove provided an architecture where no one agency, government, of NGO "owned" the data. Because Groove is a distributed architecture, the workgroup/community as a whole owned the data which broke down massive walls and fostered unprecedented virtual collaboration amongst these groups. Indeed, providing a platform for core communication is vital to the whole notion of "social software". But a distributed, secure, virtual workspace adds a dimension that breaks down cultural and societal issues and fosters sharing amongst diverse constituencies. 10:25:29 PM