Defrag 2009 News & Articles

The afternoon session entitled, “Topic 4: Leveraging the Open Web” at the Defrag 2009 Conference compared neo-industrialization to practical application of content creation.

Following their separate presentations, moderator Mr. Ben Kepes asked the speakers, “How do we rebuild without making mistakes?” (a timely question for this particular event whose attendees have pondered continuously the challenge of productivity and automation in a jobless recovery).

Panel member Peter Sweeney of Primal Fusion responded, “The truth is, if you’re doing something formulaic, computer science will model it and explore automation. This should not be feared. It’s a far more participatory, far more transparent thing.”

Mr. Kepes commended the next speaker, Mr. Svein-Magnus Sorensen of ObjectWare for his use of GoldCorp as an example of crowd sourcing but asked, “isn’t this more an example of outsourcing?”

“Yes,” Mr. Sorensen replied. “But it’s also an early example where the possibility of truly open data works in the commercial environment.”

Mr. Paul Miller of Cloud of Data expanded upon his premise of research improved by open data, adding that this is most often discussed in the public sector for the public good.

When the questions were opened up to the floor, Mr. Rob Reich of OneRiot asked, ‘Is there confusion between openness and standardizing? Which is more important?”

Although the panel acknowledged that seemingly the smallest issues can become huge ones, openness is more important.

Kim Cameron, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of AD at Microsoft as well as author of the Seven Laws of Identity impressed the crowd today at the Defrag 2009 Conference.

His session, “Identity as a Collaborative Foundation” began with the preface, “How are we recognized in different contexts?”

1. Foundation for personalization
2. The social mouse/keyboard
3. Foundation for collaboration and social phenomena
4. I can’t collaboration over time if I can’t recognize and refer to you

Mr. Cameron recognized a need to traverse silos and contextual separation because each person has a mosaic of identities. The architectural problem? The Internet is not designed with any way to know who you’re connected to and really, it’s “a patchwork quilt of kludges”.

Ideally, an identity metasystem would be created, with no vendorship, based on choices, where the user could see aspects of her digital life in a holistic way in order to promote user understanding, control and privacy.

So what would a claims-based model look like? It would include an abstraction layer for authentication, authorizing obtaining information about users devices and services. The balance would be the fine line between too much administration effort and not enough.

Mr. Cameron declared the pieces needed to implement this model could be reduced to three: framework, server, and information card selector. He added an AD federation service should work in the cloud.

Mr. Cameron closed his session with comments on the consumer space. Big and small service providers can support it with minimal disclosure tokens.

The Defrag 2009 Conference concludes today in Denver, Colorado.

Jeff Dachis of Dachis Group addressed the Defrag 2009 Conference today with his presentation on social business design.

Industrial economy has evolved, but we live in a network economy. We require a new business model. It’s time to move towards social business. A new distributed, collaborative and agile organization is able to surpass current barriers to growth in order to create new value.

Because of two major influences, first, Generation Virtual is entering the workforce and second, businesses are increasingly global, the Dachis Group re-imagined social business design as the intentional creation of socially calibrated and dynamic business systems, process, and culture.

This is achieved via four archetypes, which are changes in building blocks and jargon:

1. Ecosystem: from disparate silos to connected nodes
2. Hivemind: from hoarding to collaborating
3. From static to dynamic: communication as work, not for work
4. Metafilter: filtering, measuring

How to apply? Enhance business partner optimization, customer participation, workforce collaboration.

Why social business design? Improved emerging outcomes -- because a hiveminded, dynamically signaling, metafiltered ecosystem will perform exponentially better.

The Defrag 2009 Conference concludes today in Denver, Colorado.

Khris Loux, CEO of of JS-Kit Echo shone today at the Defrag 2009 Conference with his talk “Fragment: The Synaptic Web” which highlighted the connections between neurons in the brain and the web of the future.

Emphasizing that intelligence is flexibility and the synaptic web presupposes the connections between objects are more important than the objects themselves, he posed the question: if webpages are equivalent to neurons, how are connections changing to produce new experiences?

Result: an enormous increase in density. Whereas

webpages used to have content and links, a webpage itself is now hundreds/thousands of links and there are feeds to embedded applications. Email used to require our full attention. Today with streams we only give our partial attention.

Mr. Loux cited a great example: Microsoft’s Photosynth product collated hundreds of images by hundreds of authors and composited the 3D crowd sourced experience of the swearing-in of President Obama.

In other words, organic connections prune selections via use. This is the equivalent of synaptic firings creating patterns which create meaning. Mr. Loux concluded his session with three questions:

1. If we presuppose a maturing synaptic web, if everything about you/that object is already there: how would this affect search?
2. If your communications patterns are known, is there any need for a friend button?
3. When everything about you is organically created, how would this affect transparency? (In other words: is there such a thing as a secret and does it matter?)

The Defrag 2009 Conference concludes today in Denver, Colorado.

Defrag 2009  Day 2 opened with strong support from its attendees. With a fierce, outlaw motorcycle club-inspired “Sons of Defrag, Colorado” logo flashing before them, the crowd settled with their laptops and caffeine of choice (exchanging jokes like, “Will you friend me?” “I don’t know -- how many followers do you have?”) in anticipation of sharing the day’s activities.

Webcams appeared and went live. Eric Norlin continued the levity of the previous day, holding up the doorknob hanger in the tchotchke bag that says, “Go Away. I’m having an Ah-Ha moment.”

The conference turned serious quickly during John Winsor’s “Shake & Bake: Creating Products & Businesses That Market Themselves” which emphasized 6 of his 28 recipes for mashups between product and marketing.

The Open Sets portion of the Defrag 2009 agenda concluded this morning. Open Sets are just that: opportunities to pose the burning questions that keep attendees up at night and discuss potential, successful solutions in group think format.

Topics posed included:

• Early adopter program for the enterprise -- how do we ensure success?
• Convergence in social markets
• How do events close the loop for speakers to provide real-time feedback?
• Trust, Terms of Service and building social networks
• Turning good ideas into useful ones
• Encouraging users of social media to turn away from narcissism and embrace the true, social side
• Ensuring corporate social transparency
• Deploying successful social media adoption for non-profits
• If data is the ultimate goal: getting the data

For the corporate social transparency breakout, the following thoughts were provided:

1. Incorporate SaaS solutions
2. Determine how data is moved and improve the processes when necessary
3. Debate offering Facebook as an option at work
4. Discuss the merits of a corporate LinkedIn page
5. Commit the appropriate managers to programs
6. Standard desktops and lock down—what are the merits to obtaining more administrative rights for the end user?
7. Attend the Defrag Conference to understand how to moderate think tank discussions at work
8. How does a leader ensure social media success? At this time, by being more rebellious than usual
9. Don’t fire the rebels
10. Encourage the composition of more product/marketing blogs from inside the company for an external audience
11. Determine when decision-making is appropriate for the group versus the individual level from a social media perspective
12. Try pilot programs and commit organization resources to success
13. Re-establish a sense of commitment to social media projects that three years ago seemed ludicrous
14. Clearly define the social media strategy
15. Sponsor cool conferences like Defrag 2009

The group concluded that while it is important for social media project team members and their products to listen, that’s the easy part -- listening is negligible in comparison to engaging other colleagues in social media projects. Engagement is the next crucial step for corporate transparency.

Defrag 2009 opened today in downtown Denver, Colorado. Defrag’s own Eric Norlin stormed the blue-lit stage to the applause of an enthusiastic audience.

Mr. Norlin introduced the two keynote speakers with Defrag’s subliminal mission statement: “We build technology to amplify our intelligence with individual and groups to achieve greater productivity…not only person-to-person but also enterprise wide". Defrag 2009 is really about this intersection, with reference to the economic state of jobless recovery. Defrag 2009 is about exchanging ideas to increase productivity.