9/11/2006

Office as Community

I'm somewhat buried in a deadline through this week, but want to get folks' creative juices flowing. My model for Office 2.0 is "the office as a community". What would it mean for productivity if the same kinds of social-networking software that allow individuals to find each other and trade goods, ideas, and services, were available within an organization? Many companies of under 500 people are organized such that it can be difficult to find expertise within your own organization, or access to resources considered spare or scrap, etc. These solutions could scale across an individual office location, a department, a campus, or even the whole company's virtual presence. What would a Craigslist for your company do/have? What if it were integrated into your document-building tools? What if those tools allowed you to categorize a document as you were writing it, showing similar documents in your knowledge base and assigning a proposed taxonomy location within your enterprise tag cloud, document repository, or other classification structure? The real future of Office 2.0, in my opinion, is to integrate document creation tools with document management tools within the context of a classification system. Ideally, a reputation-building system would be part of the mix, but doing that too soon could create some serious volatility wrt office politics. Interestingly, in 20+ years of working with cutting-edge Internet collaboration systems, from early mailing lists and Usenet through gopher, archie, the web, and now wiki's and social aggregation sites, I've seem some ideas repeated and repeated but never quite integrated so they 'stick'. Let's do it so it sticks this time! Please discuss. :-)

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