I’m happy and honored to be joining the editorial board of the Journal of Information Technology, starting this month. Not only is JIT one of the top journals in Information Systems, according to the AIS “senior scholars basket” and ISI impact ratings, it’s one of the most consistently interesting and useful.
There are opportunities for special issues, and publishing teaching cases. So don’t be shy with those ideas.
I’ll be presenting my short paper on “Three Strategies for Open Source Deployment: Substitution, Innovation, and Knowledge Reuse” at the Open Source Systems 2010 conference this May.
I wrote the paper because I see a number of organizations (including my own dear University) using what I call a substitution strategy for open source: rip out existing proprietary software, and replace it with a ‘free’ open source equivalent. That strategy has advantages, but it ignores many of the unique benefits of open source use. I classify these unique advantages into two types: an increased rate of innovation inside organizations (innovation), and an increased rate of innovation sharing between organizations (knowledge reuse).
In certain situations, such as my San Francisco local government study, I’d argue that the smarter open source strategy would be innovation, not substitution. Focus your open source efforts on new deployments for unmet organizational needs, and let them grow. Don’t spend all your time trying to replace existing proprietary software that ‘works’.
My paper on how Web 2.0 sites deal with ‘bad’ behavior will be published in the Spring 2010 issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. (Fear not, accreditation freaks! Despite the ‘magazine’ name, it’s a peer-reviewed article.)
The editors gave it a new title: “Knowledge-Sharing Successes in Web 2.0 Communities”. The updated title better reflects my argument that the field of ‘Knowledge Management’ can, and should, learn from Web 2.0 communities how to get people to share more knowledge.
So put away those knowledge lifecycle diagrams and action plans, and start copying shamelessly from the masters at Craigslist, Wikipedia, Yelp, PlentyOfFish, Digg, and, heaven forbid, Facebook.
[Update: article published in the Spring 2010 edition.]
Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher did a nice writeup on our Kraków, Poland presentation. Hopefully, the momentum will continue to build for Kraków as a technology hub in Central and Eastern Europe.
As always, the Kraków slides are freely available online.
In other news, the online directory of Kraków IT companies started by Ramon Tancinco and myself is now available to the public. Incomplete as it is, it gives you a feel for how much is going on in Kraków.
Robin Teigland at the Stockholm School of Economics and Anders Lundkvist were kind enough to organize a meeting of local social media experts at the offices of Springtime, a Swedish PR and communications firm. I gave a short presentation on what I saw as the ‘conventional wisdom’ on Web 2.0 and social media back home in Calfornia, and asked if it was any different in Scandinavia. It was difficult for me to get a word in–my favorite kind of group!
The reluctance of large corporations to embrace social media tools, because of security and control concerns, was a consistent theme. One takeaway for me was the idea that, in some respects, not-for-profits, government, and small start-ups could take the lead because they can embrace the latest, most efficient tools (e.g., Skype, Google Wave) without being blocked by corporate IT. What interesting times we live in, when openness is not an additional burden, but actually the most efficient and effective way to do things.
In partnership with the Department of Technology at the City and County of San Francisco, I’ve been studying the deployment of new applications using open source. We looked at three projects (including the recoverysf.org site), and found the people involved reporting results that seemed almost too good to be true: working systems developed and deployed in record time, at very little cost, that increase the skills and importance of locally-employed IT talent. It seems like an ‘IS miracle’, especially in these tough times.
While cost-cutting is often seen as the big selling point for open source, faster ‘time-to-market’ for new applications is the focus of our results. To quote one of our respondents:
“Now, you can stand up that site in 8 hours, four hours, have it done by the
end of the day. It flips the customer out. Really? I thought it would take 2
months. Being responsive is huge. Technology changes fast, but business
requirements change faster.”
For example, there’s no way the recoverysf.org site would have been built in less than three weeks without using an open source platform (WordPress), and without a new technology mindset. It’s a mindset where the IT department sees itself as offering great new products for its diverse customers, rather than trying to control and constrain them all the time.
The paper with our preliminary research results is currently under review. Please contact me if you’d like a draft. Special thanks to the City’s CTO Blair Adams, USF MBA Dave Geller, and all of the study participants.
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 packages 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”.
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.
The October issue of the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce has published our research on “The State of Risk Assessment Practices in Information Security“. It’s not easy to get data on information security practices (it’s secret, after all), but our survey was able to find associations between doing the things that security experts say we should be doing–more frequent risk assessment, use of quantitative loss estimates, more complete asset inventories–and higher levels of user satisfaction and perceived usefulness. Check it out.
This work was done with research wonder Jackie Rees at Purdue University.
Slides from my talk on “Web 2.0, Open Source, and the Mass Production of Knowledge: Why Collective Platforms Might Hold the Key to Understanding a Knowledge-Based Economy” are now available.
Thanks to the USF Faculty Development Committee for supporting my research this summer.
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