(2007-01-24) Boyd Ibm Connections

Stowe Boyd thinks the Team Is The Focus model is broken, in terms of IBM's Lotus Connections product family. Web 2.0 social tools (Social Media) - largely - work around a different model. Social Networking sites - explicit ones like MySpace and FaceBook, or implicit ones in Social Media - are really organized around individuals and their networked self-expression.

• see earlier 2006-01-21-BoydSoloWare

Donna Bogatin thinks he sounds egocentric: The enterprise, and society, profits from a "we" world, as in we're in this together world, not a "me" world, as in what's in it for me world.

Boyd clarifies In the classical Enterprise collaboration model people are, first and foremost, members of groups, and these groups define people: what their rights are, what their purpose and goals are, and so on. But the social take on this is that people are individuals, first and foremost, with their own desires, interests, skills, and goals. But in the social, me-first model (contrasting it with group-first models) people's relationships are potentially asymmetric: for example, I may be on your Buddy List, but you aren't on mine. And in the me-first model, I possess what I make and I opt to share it with specific individuals (or not). I think to some extent he's talking about Group Forming Networks, which split one's attention/focus across multiple groups. But I also think he is advocating a Lone Wolf/Free Agent mentality at the expense of Shared Vision. I recall reading something a couple years back about having to treat NGO networks as loose federations of individuals with differing but tactically-overlapping interests, but I don't believe such organizations have as much Leverage.

March10 update: his presentation covers some of his background thinking.

July update: he gives more details/examples.