My colleague John Mancini has re-awakened my awareness/interest in SlideShare among other, well, slide-sharing services... and somehow in my Enterprise 2.0 research today, I ran across the following presentation by Stephen Collins, called "Liberate Your Control Freaks - driving social computing adoption in business." Embedded below, but should your RSS reader or e-mail mechanics not like the embedded presentation, it is also linked via the title above.
Tricky business to create presentations that still make sense when not delivered at all by a speaker - and this does a nice job, as do the recent ECM Guru presentations (one, two, three - as of this writing) that John Mancini has done.
As for the content - love the title, and clearly it's meant to grab your attention. As a Seth Godin fan, and ex-songwriter, I must say I approve!
However, Social computing, collaboration, collective intelligence, knowledge management, etc. - none of this is new folks, and this "culture of participation" idea that is getting so much attention in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 world isn't new either - it's how humans are wired! To interact, collaborate, *and* also function independently (I hope - but then again, I put much stock in personal responsibility - I fear I'm in the minority there).
I'm not saying I disagree with the basic premise (I actually greatly agree with The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Wisdom of Crowds, and similar books/rants), but personally, I think the message in this presentation is just a little too much of "drinking the Enterprise 2.0 Kool-Aid" - because providing the tools to interact is a separate beast from actually getting people TO interact. It's Knowledge Management all over again - same with Enterprise Portals, Instant Messaging, etc..
Enabling participation is one thing, participating is another - and understanding and leveraging the many levels of participation (completely passive reading, ranking/rating, commenting, trackback-ing [makes for an awkward verb, eh?], discussing, etc..) - and while none of this is new, the level and scale at which the technology underneath this can be rolled out, is in a different game now. Throwing technology has never been the answer, and even if these solutions are "free" (i.e. open source), change doesn't just happen all by itself, it's a slog, and needs significant hand-holding.
More on this as the days and months roll by - but I have to say (again) that the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference here in Boston felt a lot more real/substantive than the last four or so years in actually putting the "enterprise" angle back into the light-weight, low-cost, more-inclusive, models of the solutions coming from a blogging or wiki-oriented approach. It's rapidly becoming a much more interesting discussion on many levels.
Yee haa! Join the discussion - it's about to become a lot more interesting folks!