Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Photo: the brunch at Doonies, mmm.

The Toronto restaurant Doonies doesn’t have “a blog”. Sometimes it just hits you in the face that we technologists often talk about “this stuff” all wrong. The purpose of new media, of new technology isn’t for the sake of itself it’s because of what it enables. Like at Dooney’s. Besides a fantastic eggs Benedict, go see the immensely interesting political discourse they are creating online.

My friend Joshua is a smart individual, he phrased it this way over IM today

Joshua: more than a blog. It is a protectorate.

Me: i was at an office2.0 conference in SF last week and there was much self absorbed obsession over the medium and mechanics of social media and yet no one was talking about the message. the point. [what it enables]

Joshua: marshaling, stewarding, jockeying. Blogs are conversations it is true. But they are far short of being true dialogue. No truth has so far arisen, save for the salience of hierarchy and control of flow. Other aggregators and filters have promise though.

me: yes and blogs wikis and all that are still sub-perfect (esp wikis) but they’re creating conversations that weren’t happening before
I’m working on some new filters, new conversation mediums these days that grow out of this. [this is Firestoker]

I have more on this later, I may have spoken too soon about any real value seen at Office2.0Conference, but nonetheless, between this trip, conversations with Joshua and a 5 five-car mashup of connected ideas over eggs earlier this morning, my head is aswim with ideas and optimism. If I can get it all down. I may not be making any sense just yet, but Jevon was off to a good start though back when he wrote this. More to come.

The quick moral here though is that these new media may on the one hand seem like just simple-to-use communication tools but on the other hand while running a busy restaurant, the folks at dooney’s have still had the time to built a touchpoint for local civil society (defn). Powerful stuff these new media.

It was good to see that town again, it’s been 2 or 3 years. The aircanada gate is still always the same. Ended up having a fantastic time though I still had the slightest feeling of dread upon landing landing there.

Song of the day. Come Back From San Francisco – Magnetic Fields.

click to play:

(nifty flash widget inspired from upcoming.org which I hope is ok. update: which i tracked down to here if you’d like to add this wordpress mp3 player to your site.)

Rather than (only) being a vendor pitchfest, I am genuinely surprised by the content quality of the office 2.0 conference so far. And that’s not just the free iPod talking. Over the next two days I’ll be posting on some of the insights coming out of the conference.

# Esther Dyson, memorable quotes

– “[the future isn’t just] taking MS Office and sticking it up in the sky”
– it’s got to be about activity management, work process innovation and collaboration
– the key questions are not just working on a document together but to track status, where are things in the process? Who has seen it? “collaboration needs to be about verbs” not static nouns of documents
– on wiki’s: are like an empty room for collaboration, it does not give enough guidance. What we’ll see in successful tools are chairs already placed in the room: this one for the devils advocate, this one for the guy who’s writing the report..

#Andrew McAfee
– We’re only at the beginning of the beginning of office/enterprise 2.0
– Most tools provide only the suggestion of workflow (we need chairs)
– Web/office 2.0 takes conversations that were once stuck in channels (voice email) and lets those channels stay open and build to something

Users :
– Are social (something that we underestimated and surprised us with web2.0
– Busy (self explanatory)
– Biased (endowment effect, people overweight by 3x what they already have and underweight the value of new things by 3x. The 9x problem: when rolling out a new product, it needs to be perceptively 10x better than what it replaces to have any guarantee of adoption)
– Varied (uses are not all built the same)
– Willing to “speak in public” (a big one) conversations are visible and persistent overtime, will people be willing to speak out in an office environment in these circumstances ? we’re still learning)

What is the key pain office 2.0 is solving for managers?
“I don’t have a good way to tap in to the knowledge capital of this company. What projects are going on? Who knows what in my company? Who is looked at by their peers as a leader in this organization?”

# Other notes,

– it *is* almost entirely vendors, Chris (poor bastard) even got special mention for being a notable office2.0 customer that actually had temerity to come show up

– first 4 rows: 53 attendees, only 5 women (sigh)

# At the moment, weak wifi embarrassing demoers

The organizers only gave demoers a wifi connection to do live demos on stage and it’s choking with 300 other distracted attendees surfing on the same connection. Screens keep going down and 20 min demos of mostly hourglasses. Ouch. Not a good way to showcase for office2.0.