Next week, as posted previously, we'll be hosting (along with Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute) a workshop on Collective Intelligence in Synthetic Environments.
There are a number of game-changers when you talk about people using Networked Virtual Environments, and avatar-mediated-communications, to perform their daily work. The paradigms of having multiple communications tools (instant messenger, email, voice calls, video calls) seem outdated if you can collapse those into a single tool with a contextually-aware set of rules on the best way to communicate with you. The concept of competing communications modalities, each operating independently, has always seemed rather silly anyway. Why do you need to tell someone on the phone to wait while you finish an instant message or video conference, or both? Why aren't these systems connected, with you at the center of the equation determining how/when/where you want to be communicated with?
The concept of explicit work areas becomes quaint as well, as you can have 'meeting places' that can serve multiple functions. Instead of replicating an office space in a virtual environment, you may have 'zone 1, zone 2, zone x' that you agree to meet at, and the room configures itself based on the nature of the engagement (couches or business conference tables?). If you want to think bigger, why do you have to, apriori, designate a meeting location at all? Why doesn't the system place you in proximity of other people working on similar things. How many people at your company are working on the same areas as yourself that you are blissfully unaware of?
Remember also, when you are magically teleported to the 'I'm thinking about Roman History' room around other history buffs, that (unlike meatspace) you can be in other rooms simultaneously. So, think of yourself in the middle of a large Venn diagram, with virtual instantiations in areas that you are working on. A close analog of this is being in the center of a large cocktail party that has three different clusters, each discussing a different subject: religion, politics, and sex. You can context shift on-demand to be a participant in each of those conversations.
If you take this a step further, you can begin to 'log' the conversations that are occurring, as well as any meetings, documents created, socially-bookmarked websites, and so forth. If you plotted these on a timeline, you'd see a continuum of ideas developing over time. The fun part about this, from a knowledge worker perspective, is that you can walk into your project room and check to see how up-to-date you are in the project based on all the different exchanges. Are you just coming back from vacation? Want to get caught up on what you missed? No problem, just fast-forward through all the pertinent debate and progress that occurred while you were on the beach.
These concepts, things like social bookmarking, tagging, time and placeshifting, capturing real-time communications like meetings, emails and instant messages, all exist today. What no one has done is correlate all this information into a repository (or distributed repositories) to be played back when relevant. Think of a TiVo for your work, that you can time/place shift meetings and other conversations centered around a topic, and not around the tool (email, IM, etc.) itself. Finding the right UI for all of this contextually relevant information will be non-trivial, certainly.
Where this could get interesting, and we'll touch on next week at the workshop, is when you can take this same foundation of tagging, bookmarking and collaboration suites and use the metadata for collective intelligence exercises. You could create an economy of ideas, as Seriosity is attempting to do with email, as Tom Malone touched on in 'The Future of Work' and Davenport and Beck discussed in "Attention Economy".
You could also develop an internal decision-market (or futures market), based on the metadata, that could determine the fitness of any given project based on the communication patterns and activities of a given team, without the need for explicit data entry on the part of any of the team members. With this data, team leads and executives could 'take the pulse' of a project to see how it was progressing without having to hold review meetings or asking for explicit input from project members.
There have been some excellent forays into the latter idea, albeit using conventional explicit data-entry by each team member to develop a compound fitness metric for a project, such as the one implemented by Alph Bingham at E.Lilly. In my opinion, this data-entry 'checkpoint' opens up the process to opportunities for showmanship, grandstanding, and gaming the system, whereas a background process that developed a fitness metric implicitly from existing communications would be constantly updating based on real progress and communications.
To wrap up this ramble, if you could aggregate the social networks, the social bookmarks and other tags and metadata, correlate project-specific communications and documents, and capture real-time interactions (conference calls, meetings, presentations) 'in flight' for later playback, you could then feed those inputs into a TiVo or Amazon-esque engine that you could train over time to provide you with relevant data to completing your job. That accomplished, you could take the metadata itself, and infer a great deal from just looking at the patterns and types of communication, deliverables, and so on.
Obviously, this is all still in warm-jello stage in my brain. By the end of next week, it should be more coherent.
Comments