Jun 10
The open source platforms I admire the most, and are most useful for business, are the ones with the largest communities behind them. For open business platforms, it’s not just the contributions to the core software that matter. It’s the number of extensions (or modules) and the number of themes (or styles) that’s critical. Having many extensions and themes to choose from give business users the best of both worlds: a standard software package, and lots of easy customization possibilities.
I presented some preliminary research on open source communities for business platforms at OSCOMM 2009, the first international workshop on open source communities, held after OSS 2009 in Skövde, Sweden. Our data shows that the best supported platform with the highest number of community-contributed extensions is WordPress, followed by Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki, and Drupal. Moodle, SugarCRM, Elgg, Magento, and Gallery are the next five, with not much in the way of community contributions after that. Only award-winning open source software that a business user would directly interact with were included.
The paper and slides are available at the OSCOMM program website. The paper is called “Community Building for Open Source Business Applications: The Core-Extensions-Theme Pattern”.
May 20
The second installment of our new Freshman Seminar class, “Social Networking and Online Community”, wrapped up this week. Check out these great projects from our first-year business majors:
San FREEcisco
A user-generated collection of free things to do in the city, targeting primarily San Francisco’s 72,000 students at 23 colleges and universities. Users will be able to express interest in events, invite others, and comment on events, while friends can subscribe to events and pictures flagged by their social network. Advertising and merchandise are the main revenue sources for this low-cost business idea.
Resume 2.0
A facebook application for uploading resumes and finding internships for college students. Despite facebook being the hub for college student interaction, there is no serious competition for this application yet. Resume 2.0 will offer templates and automatic upload of existing resumes, along with a possibility for instant video interviews. Revenue will come from premium services and advertising.
San Francisco Volunteer Network
An online community focused on volunteer opportunities for San Francisco high school students required to perform community service. No other destination is focused on making high school community service opportunities easy to find, and helping students and organizations track volunteer hours. Users will be able to see which volunteer opportunities their friends are participating in.
YouMix
Like at popular Asian sites such as SongTaste and K8, users will be able to make their own karaoke mixes, upload vocals from their computers, and comment on other users’ mixes. Revenue will come from ads, and a paid iPhone application.
Congrats to Peggy Takahashi and the entire Freshman Launch Program team for creating an outstanding first year business major experience from scratch. Given the quality of work we’ve seen from the students, we now know we can do a lot more with them during their entire four years at the McLaren College of Business.
The Syllabus and Readings for the Social Networking and Online Communities seminar are available under open content licenses, so take a look and grab anything that might be useful. Again, the idea was to provide an introduction to business that examined both ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ business. Last semester’s experience was written up in this previous post.
Apr 16
The sabbatical year plans are coming along nicely. You can follow the latest updates on our Allen World Tour 2009-10 Itinerary page.
So far, I have four official university visits lined up:
- Swedish Business School, Örebro University, Sweden (6/09)
- Center for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (11/09)
- Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Chile, Santiago (3/10)
- Department of Economics and Business, University of Azores, Ponta Delgada, Portugal (4-6/10)
I’m hoping to visit other Universities for seminars, long lunches, walks on the beach, etc. If you’re interested in having me visit, or give a talk, check out my slightly cheesy looking brochure with a list of research interests and potential seminar topics.
Apr 14
It’s official. I’ve been named a Fulbright scholar during my 2009-10 sabbatical year. The host country will be Portugal, specifically the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
At the University of the Azores, I will be a visiting lecturer in Innovation and Technology Management. I’ll be teaching an MBA class during their third term (April-June 2010), meeting with students, and consulting on curriculum.
The Fulbright scholars program is the “flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government”, sending about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals abroad each year. To fulfill my mission of “increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries”, I am prepared to eat do whatever it takes to promote international harmony.
Mar 04
In our review of 10 leading Web 2.0 sites (Craigslist, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, PlentyOfFish, Prosper, TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Yelp), we found the most commonly reported challenge they faced was coping with deceptive and destructive user behavior.
How do Web 2.0 sites deal with ‘bad’ behavior from the very users that make their sites possible? We divided their strategies into two buckets: content moderation, and alternative strategies. Content moderation strategies come in different flavors, varying from site-driven, where sites perform their own moderation and policy enforcement (think Yelp or Facebook), to community-driven (with Wikipedia as the classic example). In between is a community-assisted model, where community members help flag inappropriate content (as seen on Craigslist and PlentyOfFish).
What are the alternatives to content moderation? One of the most fascinating is the secret algorithm strategy, where an automatic but secretive method is used to promote the most suitable content. Google PageRank is the granddaddy of secret algorithms, but the secret sauce at the heart of sites like Digg, Yelp, and TripAdvisor has attracted juicy controversy. The flip side of dark secrets at the heart of Web 2.0 is a total transparency strategy, as used by the open source WordPress to deal with security threats. Prosper has used a strategy of adding additional outside data to their user-generated content to help lenders make better loan decisions. Strategies can be combined too.
I’m so intrigued by the secret algorithm strategy that I was thinking of making it the topic of my next Web 2.0 paper. In the meantime, this study is under review at IEEE Technology & Society. Details and paper to be posted later.
Feb 25
I gave two Instructional Technology talks recently, one formal and one spontaneous.
The formal one was a presentation to our USF Wikis and Blogs group on “Pro Blogging for Dorks Academics”. I talked about the main tradeoffs I see for academic blogging:
- The personal vs. professional balance
- The person vs. topic focus
I also talked about why academic blogging has been valuable for me:
- Self-expression - the usual reason to blog, but looking back over a year’s worth of posts, categories, topics and tags gives you a new perspective on your interests. Writing practice doesn’t hurt either.
- Republishing - I’ve had at least one example of a conference paper that was translated and published in a journal, after it was found on the blog.
- Connections - I’ve met people with similar interests, both academic and professional, that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. My biggest success was finding the designer of a web site I had used in a teaching case, with zero additional work on my part. I posted my case, and within 24 hours the designer, who I had never met before, left a comment with great behind-the-scenes information about the site.
- Media - I’ve had reporters find me through my blog, which can be good or annoying. I showed a recent example where my analytics data told me a reporter had spent almost half an hour on my blog before contacting me for an interview. That information gave me confidence this person was serious, and worth giving some time to.
- Explaining publications - hey, academic publications don’t make sense to a lot of people basically everyone, including people who might be able to use your findings. Blog posts give me the chance to explain publications and presentations in somewhat normal language.
- The living CV - I’m not sure if this is good or not, but I seem to do many things that wouldn’t make it to my academic CV. The academic blog is a place to capture those. It’s great for those end-of-year reviews, promotion cases, and to quickly introduce others to my work and interests.
Two days later, I gave a spontaneous show-and-tell on my Moodle site (university.jpedia.org) that I use instead of our official Blackboard product. USF is considering Moodle as an alternative, but it will be another classic example of selling the unfamiliar benefits of open source to an institution that has spent serious time and energy on the proprietary path. In industry, open source can sneak in the back door on new projects, and gradually take over from within. Ripping out the existing system is a tougher sell, without some vision of the long-term innovation benefits.
Feb 08
Everyone with a computer science degree gets hit up for free tech support. Now, thanks to a column in the Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times, my knowledge of tech help for neophytes is finally given its due.
The key observation here: Consumer Reports did a survey of how often people’s PC tech support questions were answered to their satisfaction.
- Free tech support from the PC manufacturer: 53% of the time.
- Paid support, like the Geek Squad at Best Buy: 84% of the time.
- Tech support by a local paid expert: 93% of the time.
Caring support from your local professor? One hundred and ten percent!
Jan 26
After the first run of the new Social Networking/Online Community seminar for 1st year business students at USF, we’re ready to do it again in the spring. Curious minds can find the updated syllabus and detailed reading list for the course here.
The student project for the seminar was to propose a new business use of Social Networking/Online Community technology. Here are the concepts they came up with:
RateMyCaf.com
A site for college students to rate cafeteria food items, and provide food suggestions. Proposed pilot at USF (Bon Appetit), but with an eye towards a nationwide rollout. Revenue from ads targeted to a college age demographic, and subscription fees from cafeteria food providers. 72 of 75 USF students surveyed said they would want to use this site.
Gimme-a-ride.com
A ridesharing site that would interface nicely with couchsurfing.com, a popular service for finding free places to stay. Unlike the rideshare forum on Craigslist, gimme-a-ride.com would use profiles and user feedback to give potential ridesharers more confidence in who they’re catching a ride with. Gimme-a-ride.com would also allow searches based on when and where a ride is desired. Revenue from ads focused on discount travel services. Longer term, the proposal is to develop forums with travel advice focused on the bargain domestic traveler.
iConnect
A proposal to add voice-driven messages, status updates, and ratings to the existing BMW iDrive car computer. Provide social networking focused on location-based topics of interest to drivers, but within an exclusive community of BMW drivers. Software would be added to all BMWs equipped with iDrive, but activation would require a subscription.
RecruitMe.com
A site focused on recruiting underappreciated ‘non-star’ high school players for NCAA competition. The site would combine stats from MaxPreps.com, video hosting from YouTube, and Skype video chats with a social networking layer to create an easy-to-use site for athletes to specify their playing preferences, and for coaches to quickly search for talent they wouldn’t ordinarily be exposed to. A premium service model based on how much material student-athletes load onto their profiles.
Jan 04
The Acer Aspire One netbook is out to prove that Linux is something even Grandma can use (as long as she has little fingers and superb eyesight). It has a very simple application launcher, with all the basics. But as soon as you want to add new software, it often requires a trip to the command line. Sorry, Grandma.
Here’s my quick guide to setting up a new Linux-based Aspire One.
First, download and install Skype and Firefox 3 from the Acer support site. Once the download is complete, select the file and click the ‘Extract’ button. If you use the default directory (/tmp) for extracting, you need to launch the file viewer (’My Files’ on the home screen), and type /tmp in the address bar. You will then see the directory that has your installation file. Double click on the .sh file in the directory, and let it churn away. (Um, Acer, it can’t be that hard to make your installs automatic. How is Grandma supposed to know where the /tmp directory is?)
Next, I used some of the tips from The Register article: “Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One“. Specific tips I used:
If you want to add other software that isn’t available at the Acer support site, the macles* blog has great instructions. I installed Thunderbird, but didn’t bother with a better media player (VLC), or version 3 of OpenOffice. Most people agree it isn’t worth installing a different flavor of Linux, such as Ubuntu, because of the usual hardware device issues. Now I’ve got my Aspire One the way I like it. I’m happy using it for travel, coffee shops, around the house…anywhere I don’t feel like dragging my heavy and expensive (but wonderful) MacBook Pro.
I’m considering the tweaks that make the fan run less often, but so far I’ve been too chicken to turn up the heat on my Aspire One for the sake of a little peace and quiet.
Could this finally be the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop? The good news is that everything works out of the box. That’s no small accomplishment. But to keep people from running back into the arms of Redmond, Grandma has to be able to install new software without touching a freakin’ command line.
Nov 30
Our teaching case, using WordPress as a simple content management system for small business, has been nominated for the Best Teaching Case Award at the 2008 WITS Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition. Nice!
The teaching module, “Instant Websites: Using WordPress as a Content Management System”, is now available:
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