How we in the Lotus world make fragmented islands, not communities (evolving document)
Tags :Lotusphere Rant
One of the things currently wrong in how we handle discussions in the Lotus community is the tiny islands we seem to create on a regular basis. Before we go further, I am not saying any implementation is bad, wrong or whatever. It is how it all fits together. I have learned a lot the past year from some of the top social media people out there, and fragmentation is a key issue we face.
Lotusphere has brought that out even more with the beginning of support from IBM on the Twitter account I created last year (that was brushed aside as a communication channel) a new LinkedIn group and another blog for Lotusphere itself. Yet none of the blogs (myself temporarily included) uses some of the commenting systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus (that then integrates with things like FriendFeed and Plaxo and Seesmic for video comments). Your RSS feeds can even utilize flares inside of Feedburner to show numbers of comments dynamically and aggregated.
Just today there were new conversations started on LinkedIn that are good Lotusphere information. But if you have not joined that group or go back and watch it, you would never know. Even the LotusUserGroup site has weekly forums that fragment the discussions on Notes.Net. Not to mention the ones that take place inside isolated business partner and company forums. So where do you go to keep up?
Then we get into the multiple Lotus Connections sites popping up. From Greenhouse to Paxos (for partners) to BleedYellow, yet more links, blogs and other information is fragmented once again. Of course, none of these interact with each other and RSS is not a fully acceptable answer since we would have to still log in and out everywhere to actually participate and not just read.
We won't even get into how all of us bookmark. With LinkJam, Dogear, Diigo (my favorite), Delicious, Magnolia and the 250 other ones. How to we all get aligned? We start be trimming down the sites we utilize. From bookmarks, to shared RSS feeds, to communication channels to comments and conversations. We begin to include and mix technologies instead of isolating. We ask what people think of sites and items and if no one has an idea, we go test. From there we might begin to bring a lot of this together. I run into Lotus people all over the world that have no clue about the blogs, PlanetLotus or anything else but Notes.Net (LDD). How do we start including these people in the conversations?
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On Thursday, December 18th, 2008 by Chris Miller
