This week, several german journalists released the Internet Manifesto, seventeen Statements on modern journalism.

The Manifesto is well known on the german blogosphere, but I can’t tell if it made it’s way out to the international audience.
So I’ll go ahead and have a look, if those declarations go along with Enterprise 2.0.

1. The Internet is different.

It produces different public spheres, different terms of trade and different cultural skills. The media must adapt their work methods to today’s technological reality instead of ignoring or challenging it. It is their duty to develop the best possible form of journalism based on the available technology. This includes new journalistic products and methods.

This affects the communication with customers as well as the collaboration of employees, but it’s one of the fundamentals of E2.0.

2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.

The web rearranges existing media structures by transcending their former boundaries and oligopolies. The publication and dissemination of media contents are no longer tied to heavy investments. Journalism’s self-conception is—fortunately—being cured of its gatekeeping function. All that remains is the journalistic quality through which journalism distinguishes itself from mere publication.

I wouldn’t speak of an empire within a company, but several gatekeepers will vanish.

3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.

Web-based platforms like social networks, Wikipedia or YouTube have become a part of everyday life for the majority of people in the western world. They are as accessible as the telephone or television. If media companies want to continue to exist, they must understand the lifeworld of today’s users and embrace their forms of communication. This includes basic forms of social communication: listening and responding, also known as dialog.

Any consultant would like to see E2.0 a part of everyday work, but in most environments we’re far away from that.

4. The freedom of the Internet is inviolable.

The Internet’s open architecture constitutes the basic IT law of a society which communicates digitally and, consequently, of journalism. It may not be modified for the sake of protecting the special commercial or political interests often hidden behind the pretense of public interest. Regardless of how it is done, blocking access to the Internet endangers the free flow of information and corrupts our fundamental right to a self-determined level of information.

Ask your local IT on that point. But as soon as you get out to your customers or partners, keep it in mind.

5. The Internet is the victory of information.

Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centers, public institutions and other organizations compiled and classified the world’s information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into wealths of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.

Yes, free the information within your company. But to be honest, there’ll always be some figures you don’t want to expose to all.

6. The Internet changes improves journalism.

Through the Internet, journalism can fulfill its social-educational role in a new way. This includes presenting information as an ever-changing, continual process; the forfeiture of print media’s inalterability is a benefit. Those who want to survive in this new world of information need a new idealism, new journalistic ideas and a sense of pleasure in exploiting this new potential.

Although I wouldn’t name it journalism, Enterprise 2.0 might change the way you deal with agendas, protocols and reports. And as far as I have seen, in a very positive way.

7. The net requires networking.

Links are connections. We know each other through links. Those who do not use them exclude themselves from social discourse. This also holds for the websites of traditional media companies.

Collaboration requires networking. So great we have the net.

8. Links reward, citations adorn.

Search engines and aggregators facilitate quality journalism: they boost the findability of outstanding content over a long-term basis and are thus an integral part of the new, networked public sphere. References through links and citations—especially including those made without any consent or even remuneration of the originator—make the very culture of networked social discourse possible in the first place. They are by all means worthy of protection.

And they build up your professional reputation.

9. The Internet is the new venue for political discourse.

Democracy thrives on participation and freedom of information. Transferring the political discussion from traditional media to the Internet and expanding on this discussion by involving the active participation of the public is one of journalism’s new tasks.

That one misses out. At least in Germany, a political discourse isn’t something you want in your company.

10. Today’s freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.

Article 5 of the German Constitution does not comprise protective rights for professions or technically traditional business models. The Internet overrides the technological boundaries between the amateur and professional. This is why the privilege of freedom of the press must hold for anyone who can contribute to the fulfillment of journalistic duties. Qualitatively speaking, no differentiation should be made between paid and unpaid journalism, but rather, between good and poor journalism.

At least the customer service will open up, but imho press releases will stay for a long time.

11. More is more – there is no such thing as too much information.

Once upon a time, institutions such as the church prioritized power over personal awareness and warned of an unsifted flood of information when the letterpress was invented. On the other hand were the pamphleteers, encyclopaedists and journalists who proved that more information leads to more freedom, both for the individual as well as society as a whole. To this day, nothing has changed in this respect.

You’ll need intelligent filters, but every bit of information is worth something.

12. Tradition is not a business model.

Money can be made on the Internet with journalistic content. There are many examples of this today already. Yet because the Internet is fiercely competitive, business models have to be adapted to the structure of the net. No one should try to abscond from this essential adaptation through policy-making geared to preserving the status quo. Journalism needs open competition for the best refinancing solutions on the net, along with the courage to invest in the multifaceted implementation of these solutions.

I think, this depends on your environment. Even in Social Media you can keep traditions up, if your culture is ok with it.

13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the Internet.

Copyright is a cornerstone of information organization on the Internet. Originators’ rights to decide on the type and scope of dissemination of their contents are also valid on the net. At the same time, copyright may not be abused as a lever to safeguard obsolete supply mechanisms and shut out new distribution models or license schemes. Ownership entails obligations.

This is a tricky one, I’ll pass out.

14. The Internet has many currencies.

Journalistic online services financed through adverts offer content in exchange for a pull effect. A reader’s, viewer’s or listener’s time is valuable. In the industry of journalism, this correlation has always been one of the fundamental tenets of financing. Other forms of refinancing which are journalistically justifiable need to be forged and tested.

The Internet is lifting journalism to a new qualitative level. Online, text, sound and images no longer have to be transient. They remain retrievable, thus building an archive of contemporary history. Journalism must take the development of information, its interpretation and errors into account, i.e., it must admit its mistakes and correct them in a transparent manner.

When it comes to Social Software in the Enterprise the full suite solutions are on their way. See the last Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software for details and vendors.
As the pure products vanish and build up on functionality, it might be worth a look to some general categorizations of social software. So we won’t have to talk about “kind of a blog with wiki functionality” or something similar.
Gartner uses the dimensions “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” in the Magic Quadrant which are great for vendors or products, but not for functionality in general.

A common approach in germany builds upon a classification system for CSCW-Systems. (Teufel, 1995)
The first adoption for Social Software by Schmidt focused on the three funtions Informationmanagement, Identitymanagement and Connectionmanagement.

In an improved version by Koch and Richter (Cooperation Systems Center Munich (german), Bundeswehr University Munich) changed the connection part to communication and added the loose connections to the identitymanagement. You might think of all your quiet facebook friends here.

Niall Cook has a totally different Matrix, the 4C’s as in his book Enterprise 2.0 book.

I merged two diagrams to get this one, so some software examples aren’t in here. I’m not confident with this classification as there are some well known apps split up across the matrix, i.e. Tagging and Social Bookmarking. In the original book you’ll find more examples.
Cook mentions cooperation and collaboration, two points which misses out on both triangles.

Another idea is a draft by Joachim Niemeier in a german slideshare presentation.

Personally I like the quadrant best, but I would add some modifications to it. As long as my ideas on this are not fully set, I prefer even more inspiration.

So did I miss out some well known ideas?

• Tinkering to the future

  In Vodafone’s receiver magazine (did I tell you that I’m a happy Vodafone customer they have this piece on how the diy ethos can help build the future …

  Let’s think a bit about the connection to Enterprise 2.0 - ie. user-driven and continuous improvement, mass-involvement of employees in refining usage arenas and approaches, perpetual-beta mode of social software implementation projects, …

  tags: adaptivity, emergence, inspiration, implementation, enterprise2.0

  • In its improvisational, experimental quality, tinkering is a bit like jazz. The comparison with music can be pushed further: both are forms of human expression shaped by both specific historical forces, and deep human needs. The counterculture is one important influence on tinkering; so is computer hacking, with its casual contempt for established authority, deep respect for arcane technical skills, and refined love of imaginative jokes. The open source movement showed that hackers could create extraordinary things by co-operating on a large scale.

• McKinsey: What Matters: Internet

  some light weekend reading from McKinsey - overall I really like this site “What Matters”, tackling the real and big problems.

  Contributions by people like Clay Shirky, Craig Newmark or Yochai Benkler (who writes about peer production)

  tags: innovation, internet, collaboration

  • “Peer production”—large-scale distributed action by many individuals—is transitioning from a curiosity to a general phenomenon.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I had a very nice surprise today when I returned to the home office, two free mags waiting in the inbox:

Yes, both are german language titles, to the left it’s t3n, published by yeebase media- a magazine that runs the tagline “Open Source & Web” (did I say that these are german language publications …), and that deals a lot with content management, web development and Web 2.0 overall. Reason for me getting an issue for free is an article Björn and me are having in this issue, on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 myths.

To the right it’s DOK. - published by good source publishing. This is a bit more heavy and (E 2.0-)industry related (tagline is “technologies, strategies & services for digital documents”) stuff, a mix of best practices reports, smart articles (like when in the current issue my friend and co-Skype-Chatter Siegfried Hirsch is writing about Enterprise RSS or when Willms Buhse is explaining Enterprise 2.0 in easy answers to tricky questions), technology stuff and even research-minded pieces. And if you wonder what entitles me to a free copy - well I guess it has to do with me meeting DOK. editor Uwe Hentschel at this year’s CeBIT, ie. specifically the E20SUMMIT dinner meetup KongressMedia organized. Social capital …

Now onto the more to come, as I am collecting and refining a lot of bookmarks in the space of Enterprise 2.0 I think it’s a good idea to share some of the better ones with you. Besides filling my regular delicious-account (things tagged Enterprise 2.0 get spliced into the enterprise2open feed already) and the regular diigo-frogpond account I installed an additional diigo account called e20summitenterprise2open, whose bookmarks will get automagically posted into this blog from now on.

Diigo is cute (yes, I learned a lot from Bertrand Duperrin in using Diigo) and offers a bit more than delicious, namely the opportunity to annotate and to expand bookmarks in a community. That said, the bookmarks posted will have some kind of short analysis (and probably highlighting and/or comments), and can also be further annotated and refined by you. And last thing to note, while certainly the topic of collaborative performance will seem to be prevalent (after all it’s the tagline for the SUMMIT), all things enterprise 2.0 might show up in the links. I guess this is no real problem, after all the bookmarks get tagged and are thus easy to digest anyway (I wonder if all my comments will be like that …).

Besides my german language summary at frogpond I suppose it’s important to compile some impressions for the non-german speaking Enterprise 2.0 community. And when one of your keynote speakers travelled all the way from London to Cologne it’s even more timely. I already did my best in twitter-translating the german-language talks for him (neat if you have companies like Vodafone among the best practices that present in German but sport english slides). Yes, David Terrar triggered off the conference day with a well-received talk on community building in the Enterprise. See the embedded slideshow below on “How to build vibrant communities”.

While I knew David before (we first met at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Varese, but didn’t find any time then), I enjoyed it a lot to have time for discussions this time - and we’ve had great conversations both at the pre-conference dinner and on conference day itself. He and Thomas Koch of Kongressmedia made me miss a good part of the afternoon starting session.

And here’s the Harvard video of John Chambers David mentions (seen also at Oliver Marks):

YouTube Direkt

I have read at Mike Gotta about his research in the field of social networking within the enterprise. As we have some cases on this at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 FORUM I wondered whether there are some more people out there that are interested in bringing together some case studies about this? Martin Koser (frogpond) just started a case study research on all wiki cases that have been presented at our conferences this year. We are looking forward to publish this in a wiki at this site soon (http://wiki.enterprise2open.com) - and therefore I thought it would also be a great idea in adding some more social networking cases.

If you’re interested, just let me know.

Two days ago Simon Wardley published a short list of people you want to know for answers to questions within the field of emerging enterprise technologies - while being very pleased that he mentioned this “very young” information ressource I would like to add some more people to his list:

Enterprise 2.0: Sören Stamer of Coremedia (though he is the CEO of a software company - he really changed his company by means of Enterprise 2.0 - he is also the co-editor of the very nice book “Die Kunst, loszulassen!” - see the video with his speach of the Enterprise 2 Open @ Cebit below ) same with Frank Roebers of Synaxon ( a big German based electronics reseller - German video interview)

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