Enterprise Social Networking: History, Current Practices, and Research Challenges
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Presenter: Julia Grace (IBM Research) & Christine Robson (University of California, Berkeley)
As social networks increase in popularity, we see a rise in corporate adoption of enterprise social networking tools. We examine social networks in the enterprise, beginning with the role of social tools within corporations and the motivations and concerns corporations have regarding social networks. We provide an overview of enterprise social networks, new trends including microblogging, and the research surrounding such tools, concluding with a discussion of open problems.
Juli James, GHC 2009 Live Notetaker
Ms. Grace introduction and agenda: Why would we want to use social software at work? Asks how many attendees use Facebook and Twitter.
A day in the life of Ms. Grace at work: Works with people all over the globe (Bejing, Boston, Israel) Live in the age of the globally distributed enterprise. How do we communicate and collaborate? A brief history of community and collaboration - Knocked on a cubical or used a phone > Email, IM, Web 1.0 (beginning of asynchronous communication) > Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking Sites (shifted from private to public communication)
- This is relevant to enterprise because connections can be make across land boundaries, and have begun to post interests/information in a public setting to broaden the capacity for connection.
Information transparency - putting things in public space that used to be private.
Social translucence - allowing anyone interested to participate in information/connection/collaboration, jumping from our personal lives to our professional lives
Paper by @jgruden on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/chwnhl (GROUP 2009 paper on enterprise uses of social networking sites)
Sites IBM Research plays with: Fringe (autogenerates profiles from blogs, bookmarks, patents, papers) Beehive (social networking site within IBM, user generated content, watching using behavior on enterprise vs. external sites like MySpace or Facebook) Twitter (microblogging, allows users to do short, quick updates about what is happening nearly at the moment) BlueTwit (internal Twitter for IBM) Yammer (provides microblogging for networks for organizations)
How do you quantify the benefits of social software? (because gains are "soft") "Twitter is nothing until you use it."
Challenge: Social information overload Possible solution: constrain and filter your information. Limit but don't hide your information - give people intuition about what's going but don't want to lead them in the wrong direction.
jhgrace@us.ibm.com twitter.com/jewelia facebook.com/juliagrace
Questions:
What about security? Answer: Conducts research/exploration on Intranet What about privacy? Answer: People worry about putting information out there but in practice people behave themselves (internally) especially because there is no anonymity.
Links:
Blog post from attendee: http://brendal-blog.blogspot.com/2009/09/ghc09-privacy-and-social-software.html
