Quiet times

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I want to thank all of my clients, friends and blog readers for a great 2009!

Wish you all the best for the festive season and for a prosperous and exciting 2010.

There probably won’t be that many posts over the Christmas and New Year period as I will be enjoying a short break from consulting and writing starting next week …

Five failure predictions for 2010

5. “Expectation gaps” are the 2010 winner

Social software relies on relationship and collaboration among “trading partners.” Successful relationships between an organization and its customers, or between two individuals, depend on the parties coming to tacit or explicit agreement around basic expectations for both process and results.

Disappointment with either process or results drives failure of all kinds. These alignment dynamics are rooted in human nature and therefore form the basis for failure of all types.

Collaboration and expectation mismatches underlie every kind of failure, from traditional IT problems to the new cloud-based variants. Therefore, expectation gaps are the big failure kahuna for 2010.

One man’s failures are the opportunities of another – lots of work to do in 2010 I say. Expectation mismatches aren’t there forever, nor are they natural, inevitable or “just one of those phases the (social business design) industry has to go through” – yes, closing the gaps of understanding is an immense task, yet it can and should be done.

Posted via web from stirring the frogpond

LeWeb posts 24 thru 25

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You know by now I enjoy joking at times (basically when I am leaving my serious consultant habits for good when at cool conferences) – and again there are no posts 24, let alone 25.

Still, I’ve blogged some more neat stuff at my other blog – business model innovation design (I told you about my posterous blog yesterday). Sort of crossposting and interlinking gabfest today:

Gated communities and necessary conversations

leweb logoMymy, I’ve missed Danah Boyd‘s talk because of mingling with some fellow bloggers in the lounge area – that’s both a shame and a peek into the social effects and the nature of great conferences.

Luckily Stephanie jotted down some live notes, check them out – I earmarked Danah’s take on the Internet as “bringing diverse people together mechanism”, by enhancing visibility overall. Indeed platforms like Twitter are potentially “demasking mechanisms” – exposing prejudices, narrow-mindedness and :

People move to gated communities to get away from different people and not have to deal with them but the internet is bringing all these people together. We might not want to be in such a mixed space.

[…]

We’re making all sorts of parts of society visible, parts we like and others we don’t.

Yes, there’s a number of necessary conversations that we need to have: from questions of online privacy and security, to how we deal with the visibility of hurtful and harmful things on social networks. Lots of real web issues indeed …

Le Web Bright Spots

He highlighted that community is not a tool (saying that you are a tool for approaching it like that) and that you need to leave your ego at the door to make it happen. I also love that he stressed the importance of letting go of control and letting leadership emerge naturally.

via Tara at horsepigcow.com

Nice perspective on day 1 of LeWeb – interpreting LeWeb as a community and not as a conference is fitting in here too. One can’t manage and control a community, but one can provide the infrastructure that allows for emergence (freeform conversations flourish here, even when it’s sometime hard to find individual people) – but that’s a minor disadvantage of any huge conference.

Curating networks at conferences is probably an open task – Techweb and O’Reilly did a little bit this with crowdvine at the Web 2.0 Expos – but leveraging the content and interest networks like Pearltrees is trying might be another lever.