Why we need a ‘Work Networking’ Metaphor

One of the profound joys of talking to experts is that they can ask that one question that bursts your bubble. I just had that experience with Tony Karrer – master of the eLearning Technology blog. I sent him some links to our CoSolvent Community Server, along with the blithe statement:

“We are trying to get traction for it as a service for what I believe to be a very badly underserved userspace: the no-man’s-land between people inside a corporate firewall and a closed community of stakeholders.”

Tony’s response, quite rightly, was to question my sanity. Of course, he was very polite about it:

“On the community side of things – I guess I’m surprised you say it’s underserved. My impression is there are lots of solutions, e.g., Ning.”

Umm. Yes.  Tony’s right. There are lots of solutions. I’ve had active accounts on Ning for at least 18 months and I went through the feature checklist. Technically, Ning will do most of the things that our CoSolvent Community Server can do, plus quite a few more. Other social networking tools are similar. Does that mean we’ve wasted two years on CoSolvent’s evolution? After a short recovery period, I realized that we developed CoSolvent around a set of assumptions and design concepts that we have not fully articulated – possibly even to ourselves. Now seems as good a time as any to set the record straight.

We designed CoSolvent Community Server (CCS) for business-oriented networking and video-sharing:

• We adopted a Windows folder operating metaphor that was as simple as possible so busy professionals could learn to use it.
• We designed CCS to operate with minimal hardware and software support because business networks need to reach all of the relevant stakeholders.
• We installed a rich underpinning of access controls, permissions and utilities so CCS can be molded to make workflows fluid and easy.

In many ways, CCS is like a box of Lego. The building blocks are individually simple, but they can be re-arranged to support a variety of practical business workflows.

What sort of ‘work’ network are we talking about?

We developed CoSolvent because we couldn’t find a reliable way move rich media (typically video) to and from the individual subject matter experts (SMEs) and managers among our various corporate training clients. Many of our corporate counterparts are not high-skill IT managers or experienced media folks. They are department managers, plant engineers, technicians and HR managers in big, security-conscious companies. They don’t have super-duper IT administrator privileges. They sometimes can’t even view YouTube. Yet, they’re the subject matter experts that we needed to share stuff with.

Our network collaborators are not really friends or social acquaintances. They are buyers and we are the vendor. It’s not about being social, its about the work. The work is the center of our network universe.

We needed a pragmatic tool for ‘work’ networking, not an engaging site for a ‘social’ networking.

Of course, if an existing social networking tool could double as a reasonable ‘work networking’ platform, we could avoid reinventing the wheel. If we could make Facebook or Ning, etc. do the job, that would be good enough. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues that gave us pause:

• The companies that employ our target audience strongly discourage employees from putting company assets on ‘public’ sites. If we wanted to use a Ning, we would have to convince their employer that it was safe. If we don’t control it and our client doesn’t control it, that’s a really tough sell to corporate IT.
• Workers often didn’t want their co-workers to see their materials until they had a chance to approve them. Can you put a video in Ning and ensure that only chosen co-workers (out of the larger community) can see it? Probably. Can you teach an IT-challenged manager how to do it and be sure that they won’t make a mistake? Can you make them feel confident that they won’t make a mistake? Not so easy.
• People often work with collections of related, but dissimilar materials. Most projects involve some video, some supporting text documents, possibly some audio files, some spreadsheets, etc. How could we keep those together and manage them in an orderly fashion in Ning or Facebook? We might do OK with Google Docs, but what about commenting and video handling?
• We wanted to accommodate all types of video as input. For example, there are scenarios where it is really convenient if our correspondents can upload and view SWF files. For security reasons, Ning, Facebook and Youtube will never let that happen because Flash animations can contain actionscript.
• It is hard to guarantee 100% access to a public social networking site – especially with IT-challenged users. The sponsors of Facebook or Ning don’t need 100% individual access for their sites to be successful. They engineer their software to make it as easy as possible, but ultimately they won’t care if a specific individual has an archaic browser or a vicious spam filter. However, if you want to network real work, 100% access is critical. If an individual can’t use the system, you must still do business. You will have to set up costly workarounds that can wipe out all of the productivity gains that the networking tool might offer.

If I try to frame our view of the contrasting demands in a diagrammatic form, it would look something like this:

A Social Network User participation is voluntary. People join because they gain something on an individual level – possibly for their career, but ultimately for their personal benefit. If, for any reason, a given individual user cannot fully participate, the server’s Sponsor may care – but not too much.	A Work Network A commercial Sponsor wants a safe, virtual space where all business stakeholders can participate – to do their job. A  ‘stakeholder community’ (e.g., a supply chain, an association, or a school) can span many individuals and organizations across the public Internet.

But the biggest problem:

A lot of real-world business ‘workflow’ isn’t person-centric.

Social networking tools are designed around the individual user. A user typically logs into ‘My Page’. From there, the user can engage other individuals, join groups of other individuals and share media with other individuals. They can form new clubs and groups with other individuals. However, at the end of the day, the individual is still the center of the universe.

Business interactions are often not about the individual. They may be more naturally expressed as company-to-company, department-to-company, project-to-consultant, or buyer-to-seller interactions. In fact, there can be any number of different central actors, some human and some organizational, in a working business network. Sure, you could start everything from the individual and build the structures for the other entities, but that is just the long way round. Why not establish a Lego-like structure that can be reconfigured to support the workflow directly?

There are lots of other issues and considerations, but we decided that we were looking at a problem that wasn’t really social. It was more pragmatic and utilitarian and commercial. We looked at a lot of possible solutions and finally decided to roll our own. We developed CoSolvent Community Server. There is a thorough technical description elsewhere on our website. However, Tony’s question reveals that our market positioning explanations are still not clear or adequate. So, until we can remedy the main site, let me try to summarize and clarify the concept of CCS:

• CCS is a web-based file sharing tool with a suite of extra features. Folders can be labeled anything the user wants. Any ‘social’ tools are slaved to the folder metaphor. For example, groups are formed by giving them defined permissions and their own folder structure.
• The Windows folder metaphor is easily customized to fit a wide variety of access schemes and workflows. The goal is flexibility and simplicity. We want to fully streamline the average worker’s collaborative experience – without adding extra navigation and structural complexity.
• It is designed to be maximally accessible by a wide range of users.  CCS works with minimal client-side requirements: low to modest bandwidth, web browser, and Flash. It has proven adept at reaching behind firewalls, to users  with Macs, to workers in other countries, etc. While CCS makes it easier, achieving 100% access will ultimately depend on the willingness of stakeholders, technical people, iPOV and community developers to work together.
• It is optimized for the exchange of video materials. The potential of video as a day-to-day business communication tool has barely been tapped. In the wild, video clips exist in a dizzying array of types and it is hard to share them without performing conversions and extra processing steps that most people don’t want to learn. CCS directly supports a wide variety of video types.
• It is designed to be quickly set up and hosted on a vanilla installations. Currently, all of our working installations are in Amazon’s EC2 electronic cloud. We can set up a new, totally dedicated, site in minutes, while piggy-backing on Amazon’s security infrastructure.

Another way to grasp the difference between CSS and a  typical social network is to look at some practical application scenarios.

Target Applications – Camera Based

Small, inexpensive, easy-to-use solid-state cameras burst on the scene 3 or 4 years ago. Examples include the Flip camera, the RCA SmallWonder, the Sanyo Xacti series and the Kodak Zi series, along with many, many, many others. That doesn’t even count the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone camera.  Surely there ought to be a way to apply these new tools in day-to-day business operations.

Scenario 1 – Confidential Quality Review

A corporate quality manager (CQM) uses CCS to get video reports of defects and problems from far-flung plants. Security is crucial. The CQM doesn’t want anyone (not even his VP) to see the videos before he has a chance to review and assess them. At the plant level, only the plant quality manager (PQM) is allowed to record and upload this type of video. We  can set up a folder arrangement in CCS as shown in the following diagram:

1. The PQM for Plant #5  makes a video (or possibly a still photo) of the problem. The PQM places the media in a special ‘defect report’ folder  that is visible only to the PQM
2. The ‘defect report’ folder is actually just a link to a real folder for Plant #5 that resides within the corporate quality area. That folder is visible only to the PQM and the CQM.
3. When the file arrives in the CQM’s Plant #5 folder, the CQM receives an automatic email notification that a defect report has arrived from Plant #5.

The CQM can take several actions. He/she can phone the Plant #5 PQM and discuss the problem. Having the video as a common talking point will likely speed discussion and resolution. The CQM can move the video file out of the hidden folder to the general area – possibly into a folder of known issues. If the CQM adds a comment with suggested remedies (or records and uploads a video), there is now a permanent record of the problem and the fix.

Scenario 2 – Getting Action from a Supplier

The receiving manager gets a shipment that is badly packaged. If he spends the next few days on the phone, he might get the supplier’s attention. CCS may be able to elicit a better response – if we set up folders so he can easily send a video to the supplier. One possible structure is illustrated in the following diagram:

1. The receiving manager spots a problem with the way a shipment is packaged. He/she records a short video to demonstrate and document the problem and uploads it to Supplier A’s ‘public folder’ on the CCS. The public folder is a special type of folder (designated with a yellow icon) that doesn’t require a login for any of the items that it contains.
2. The supervisor at Supplier A receives an email with a link to the video in the public folder. The supervisor just clicks the link to view the video.
3. The receiving manager follows up with a phone call to discuss the problem. Since both parties have viewed the video of the problem shipment, the issue is resolved quickly and decisively.

The ‘public’ folder is the key to this scenario. It allows the receiving manager to send the video safely without requiring that the supplier be registered in the system. The CCS public folder system is smart enough to only allow the viewer to see a) the item at the link they were given, or b) if they were given a link to a folder, they can see any items and subfolders that the linked folder contains. By giving the folder a distinctive (yellow) label, CCS makes it easy for occasional users to know where files are public and where they are private.

• You can view a ‘made-up’ example in this folder on our demo CCS.

Target Applications – Screencasting Based

CCS can be used with free software tools to rapidly generate document and media reviews. The tools we use most often are the following:

• BB Flashback Express – a free screencast recording program
• DemoHelper – a free program that draws on top of everything on the computer desktop (except that it automatically pauses running movies when you try to draw or write)

The basic idea behind the following examples is to make a screencast movie as you view and comment on documents or media in the CCS – then upload the movie of your commentary to CCS as a permanent record. With a little practice, this is much faster than trying to craft written comments – and typically much clearer.

Scenario 3 – Near-painless Media Review

We needed to get clients’ reviews of our work-in-process eLearning media. Client staff are busy and too-often unavailable. Plus they reside in a different city, so meetings are a chore. We can set up a folder structure with ‘Drop off’, ‘Review’, and ‘PickUp’ subfolders and show our clients how to use a free tool, BB Flashback Express, to record their comments. Now the review process goes like this:

1. We place the material for review in the client’s folder in the CCS.
2. We email the SME a link to the material that is up for review (or they get an automatic email notification if they have subscribed to the folder).
3. The SME starts BB Flashback Express to make a screencast of their review.
   • The reviewer opens the link to the viewable media and starts to watch.
   • Whenever they see something of note, they can pause the media, use their mouse to point out the feature and add a verbal commentary.
   • When they have finished their review, they can add any general comments, or cycle back through the media to add second thoughts.
4. The SME saves their screencast as a Flash file and upload it to CCS beside the media that was reviewed. They don’t even have to export their comments as Flash. They can just upload the raw BB Flashback file and we will replay it on our end. If there are any written materials (e.g., supplementary documents or comments), they can upload them or write them in the same folder as the reviewed material.

That’s it. We are finding that our clients can often review a 20 minute eLearning lesson in about half an hour. It takes us a bit longer to listen to their review, but there is seldom any confusion about their request. That means that our overall time investment is reduced. Win-Win.

Scenario 4 – Lightning Fast Essay Grading

I and several of my staff are currently teaching or have recently taught university-level courses where we had to grade student papers. Oh boy is that fun. However, we are trying a new approach. CCS can be configured so each registered user (aka student) gets their own private folder – just like any social networking tool:

1. We ask students to submit their papers as PDFs so we can view them directly online in CCS.
2. We automatically get an email when each file arrives.
3. We use BB Flashback and Demohelper to mark up the paper and record our verbal comments.
4. When we finish, we save the movie as an SWF and upload it into the student’s private folder beside their essay.

If the student followed our advice and ‘subscribed’ to their folder, they will receive an automatic email as soon as our comment video file has finished uploading. We can even log in with different browsers and upload a video in the background while we record the next video in the foreground. If we want to add text, say to suggest a rephrasing, we can cut, paste and edit text from the PDF to the CCS commenting utility. Bottom line, we can read, comment and grade an essay in just slightly longer than it would normally take to simply read the paper version. With 30, 50 or 60 students in a class, we like that idea. It gives a much better audit trail and, considering my atrocious chicken-scratch handwriting, the students probably learn more.

Scenario 5 – Commissioning Graphics at a Distance

We get our graphics done by a variety of designers. Some are local. Some work half a world away. However, iPOV often needs graphics done the same day or overnight. How can we do that with a designer in, say, Russia? An iPOV staff member typically records a short video to explain what they need. The camera arrangement is simple and cheap (under $250):

With this crude rig, we can record a 5-7 minute video to explain what we want. Even though we may be abysmal artists, we can make stick-figure drawings and explain our intent and requirements as we go. In a video, we can give far more context and rationale than we would ever have the patience  to put in a written specification. After the artist uploads a draft, we can comment in CCS. Sometimes we use BB Flashback Express and/or Demohelper to make a short screencast movie of our verbal comments – using the mouse as a pointer. That way the artist knows exactly which feature we are talking about. We can go back and forth several times in a day, although usually one or two cycles with the video comments are sufficient.

• You can view the sequence of a typical design process laid out in this folder on our CCS Demo site.

Summary

We designed CoSolvent Community Server for business-oriented networking and video-sharing. We adopted a Windows folder operating metaphor to make it as familiar as possible to the busy professionals that must learn to use it. We designed CCS to operate with minimal hardware and software support because business networks need to reach all of the relevant stakeholders. Finally, we added a rich underpinning of access controls, permissions and utilities so that we can mold CCS to make the workflows fluid and easy – especially for the tasks that make or save money for the sponsoring organization. In some ways, CCS is similar to a box of Lego. The building blocks are individually simple, but they can be re-arranged to support a variety of practical business workflows.

It’s possible that someone could customize Ning, or HiveLive, or SharePoint, or Google Docs, or … to work like CCS. However, we don’t think these tools were conceived for that purpose and it seems like it would be a force fit. I’m sure that others will pick up on the CCS idea and address this application space. Until then, we believe that our target market is still a bit ‘underserved’.