1.) What is your name?

Martin Lindner

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I am a consulting researcher, or a researching consultant for “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Learning 2.0″. My field of expertise is microcontent/microinformation, and how it affects the workplace, the enterprise, and indeed the knowledge workers themselves. I’m working out concepts how new clouds, flows and feeds can be designed that help people to swim in the sea of (micro-)information?

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

I come from academic Media Studies, was a digital Web-immigrant after buying an iMac in 1999, becamea e-learning professional fundamentally frustrated with “e-learning” from the start, soon got heavily involved in the “Web 2.0″ before it got that name, then I worked four years as Principal Researcher for a small “Research Studio” that tried to develop “microlearning” and “microinformation solutions”, acting like a research-driven start-up. I did a “microcontent widget” development project there, and some Information Management consulting

From 2005 to 2008 I’ve been program chair of the “Microlearning” conference, which was all about “learning and knowing in microcontent environments” (a.k.a. “Web 2.0″, “the cloud”). We had brillant international experts in the field which came to be “enterprise 2.0″ right from the start. So I became a node and a a catalyst in an emerging international network of experts, entrepreneurs and practitioners from established organisations and enterprises.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

E 2.0 is the effect of Web-technologies and Web-practices within the “walled garden” of the enterprise. Like the tagline of Lomdon’s brilliant E 2.0 pioneer Headshift says: “Smarter, Simpler, Social.” One may add also: smaller, cheaper, more flat, more human, network effects by default …

Right now, I see three natural starting points, from where one may end up with an E 2.0 concept: (1) needing more dynamic and effective forms of knowledge circulation; (2) needing more direct, spontaneous, authentic forms of internal and external communication; (3) needing to create more simple, intuitive and self-organizing workflows for modern knowledge/information workers. Historically, (1) and (2) were represented by “wikis and blogs”, but then, with the new wave of feed-based meta-applications, we came to learn that the whole Web 2.0 and E 2.0 thing is all about easy creation and circulation of microinformation.

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Every enterprise, even if it is just consisting of one person, is existing on three levels: (1) on the level of management (the abstract structure of functions, roles and budgets); (2) on the level of teams/projects (the “we”-perspective); (3) on the level of the single worker (the person staring at a PC/laptop screen and wielding a mobile phone). In traditional enterprises, the connections between these three levels had been hardwired. The building was the hardware, the hardwired organisation itself was the Operating System. This has changed with PCs, with e-mail, and now, even more dramatically, with the impact of the Web. “Enterprise 2.0″ is the name for finding ways for organisations, teams and sigle workers to adapt to the resulting “Digital Climate Change”.

6.) What are the main challenges and threats of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Today, most enterprises are made of structures and ideas from quite different stages of evolution. There are elements from the 1950s (the bureaucracy of “line organisations”), from the management theories of the 1980s (like project management, the fantasy of controlling everything with numbers and charts, etc.), and now, increasingly, also from the business and work philosophy of software-driven start-ups.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

pragmatist, ethnologist, analyst

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

  1. Lee Bryant (CEO, headshift.com), because he is the walking impersonation of E 2.0 as it should be
  2. Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloud Solutions), because of his both practical and visionary work on Info Clouds and Folksonomies
  3. Teemu Arina (Dicole Oy), another E 2.0 impersonator, also a pragmatist and avant-gardist at the same time
  4. and (bonus!) and Chris Langreiter (langreiter.com), because he is a brilliant exponent of the kind of humanities-informed software development that is the real driving force of Web 2.0 innovation, and will have to drive E 2.0 innovation too: “E 2.0 is not made of people. It is made of people who make software apps that make communications that make people getting sucked in.”

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