Business

Is information a competitive differentiater?

I started thinking about the value of information here in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held May 21-22. It's the first day of a two-day conference, and some of the leading experts in open source are here presenting, learning, networking and more. During the opening remarks by John Amato, Vice President & Publisher, Computerworld, and Matt Asay, Vice President Business Development, Nodeable, we discovered that about half the attendees are new to the conference, which is great for open source.

The first keynote speaker was Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO, Red Hat. Whitehurst focused his talk on » Read more

3 CommentsPosted 22 May 2012 by Jason Hibbets (Red Hat)

Deliberative cooperation

The Deliberative Corporation is a technology-supported process for sustainable decision-making. It allows any organization or governing group to consult its population. The process builds trust and knowledge so that the implementers can find out what the people would think if they were thinking. It builds political capital and informed consent so leaders can make the right decision even when this involves significant complexity and difficult tradeoffs.

This process integrates a proven methodology for obtaining representative, informed opinions from a scientific sample with a patented technology that empowers an entire population to offer their views. We call this combination of techniques the Deliberative Corporation process.

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3 CommentsPosted 21 May 2012 by James Fishkin

Civil servants cut through the red tape and share government forward

‘Why not?!’ is the motto of Open Government Places.

The Open Government Places project allows civil servants to cut through the red tape, join forces, and share government forward. This project is called Deelstoel in Dutch (‘share chair’) and invites civil servants to ‘hack’ the government and share their workplaces. Government offices are invited to reserve a part of their buildings to be made available to colleagues from other public administrative organizations. » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 18 May 2012 by Kim Spinder

Need a resume boost? Get involved with an open source project

There are a lot of excellent reasons to get involved with an open source project. You can learn a new language, improve your existing skills, be challenged by a community that is at the top of their field or even get better at managing complex distributed projects. There are also dozens of ways to participate. Open up a project's bug tracker and find an issue that needs to be fixed. Write a useful new extension or plugin. Even if you don't code, just about every open source project out there could use more testing, more documentation and tutorials and help handling the load on their support forums and mailing lists. If you are a heavy user of open source software it feels great to give something back to the community that has contributed so much. » Read more

4 CommentsPosted 17 May 2012 by Nathan McMinn

It's the culture, stupid! How Atlassian maintains an open information culture

All modern businesses run on information, so business management is also about Information Management. However, software alone cannot transform an organization. Information Management mastery doesn't come from technology, it comes from the people! More specifically, it comes down to the CEO instilling an Information Culture for staff to follow. It's leadership not by force, but by example. » Read more

3 CommentsPosted 11 May 2012 by John Rotenstein

The Tube: IDEO builds a collaboration system that inspires through passion

To be successful and truly collaborative, knowledge-sharing systems require intuitive tools that connect people, reward participation, and align well with existing work and communication patterns. After IDEO's two-year internal development effort to create and implement "the Tube," their enterprise-wide intranet system, we gained new understanding and experience in balancing technology possibilities with behavior realities. The unique success of the Tube comes from the insight that effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that is enabled by technology, rather than a technological solution bolted onto an existing work culture. Now IDEO's Knowledge Sharing Team shares a set of design principles for building online collaboration systems that really work. » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 7 May 2012 by Doug Solomon

Roche: From oversight to insight

Can a company bust bureaucracy by liberating people to manage themselves? A team of managers from Roche Pharmaceuticals set out to prove this point through a management experiment—and reaped big dividends in the process. » Read more

1 CommentPosted 2 May 2012 by Paul Lambert

Delivering innovation overnight--What it takes to do new things fast

What leader today doesn't want more innovation? Yet, producing more (of anything) inside an organization generally leads to more process, which smothers individual creativity and all-too-often kills organizational innovation.

Innovation isn't about structuring a process to lead to an outcome so much as it's about creating space--both elbow room, the space to roam free of bureaucratic rules and red tape, and head room, the freedom to see differently, think wildly, and aim higher. The leaders who generate more creative energy and innovation are always wrestling with the question: How do we design in more slack? Or, how do we cultivate an environment and support work that enlists people as drivers of their own destiny and inventors of the company's future? » Read more

3 CommentsPosted 1 May 2012 by Polly LaBarre

Open source companies create shared value

The free-market capitalistic definition of companies' goals was, for a long time, very simple: to make as much profit as possible. With that in mind, the only difference between a success and a failure was the investor's return on investment. Short-term profit became priority number one. However, this classic definition of capitalism hastransformed the way companies are perceived in the population over time. » Read more

2 CommentsPosted 23 Apr 2012 by Hervé Marcy (Red Hat)

Forges and foundations: Chalk and cheese

Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners, working with 451 Research, are conducting the sixth annual Future of Open Source Survey. I took the survey, but one question caused me concern, considering what I do for a living. Question 11 states, "OSS [Open source software] forges and foundations have played an important role in the past few years. How will OSS forges and foundations evolve over the next 2-3 years?" Answers range from growing or decreasing equally in terms of adoption, one growing at the expense of the other, or staying the same. I’m troubled because forges and foundations serve open source project communities in radically different ways. » Read more

2 CommentsPosted 18 Apr 2012 by Stephen R. Walli