The Future of Collaboration

The Future of Collaboration hackathon was held intercontinentally in Silicon Valley and India on July 12 and 13, 2013. While demos necessarily focused on technical solutions (using communication-based APIs from WebRTC, Media Network Services, vLine, and Twilio (most of which do not yet work on most au courant wearbles computing platforms)), several other interesting qualitative considerations arose.

E-labor Marketplaces for Teams or Groups 
One team proposed the idea of elabor marketplaces for teams or groups. This could engender a new conceptualization of ratings regarding qualitative factors (for dating, friends, employer recruiting) – to develop a more specific understanding of how teams work well together. New dimensions and metrics could be articulated to provide detail about team forming, storming, and norming steps, group dynamics, how people develop affinity and respect for each other, and intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems.

Live Interaction MOOCs (massive open online course platforms) 
Another team suggested the next wave of functionality for online elearning environments: live interaction with two-way video for group discussions. Similar to elabor marketplaces for groups, the concept of the new functionality brings the underlying activity into sharper relief. Here the underlying activity shifts to ‘what it is to be a good discussant’ - the different qualities and roles that discussion participants may exhibit, become explicitly aware of, and improve. Some examples of good discussant skills are restating the issue, extending the topic in useful ways, bringing in resources and examples, empathizing, engaging in active listening, encouraging others to state their views, peer acknowledgement, and topic closure. One can imagine the ‘Top 10 Discussant Qualities’ certificate that could be peer-evaluated and useful to list on a resume or sought by employment recruiters.

Friendship 2.0

The new mindfulness extends to every area of life. Communication and romantic relationships often exist now on much improved ground compared to even a few years ago. Now friendship is under the spotlight.

The new idea is becoming more active instead of passive with regard to friendships: learning and acknowledging that friendships are a dynamic process that needs deliberate focus and ongoing tending. At least two new genre-pioneering books are on the scene: Friendships Don’t Just Happen! and The Friendship Fix. The books are aimed at women, but have broadly applicable themes. The attendant friendship development meetup groups, workshops, and conferences are already popping up to help hone the new skillset.

Some obvious Friendship 2.0 things to examine and sync with friends and potential friends are your and their friendship rules. These are your potentially unconscious rules for how you think a friend should behave. Just like with unexamined relationship rules, friendship rules are likely to differ and could cause conflict. Stating expectations is one way to communicate intent and boundaries. The books suggest determining what is most important to you in a friendship – for example, sharing values, experiences, or interests. The more kinds of points of overlap (if possible), the better; but one cannot be overly perfectionist about the criteria list either. There are different steps to follow in identifying and cultivating friendships. Overall, Friendship 2.0 has an exciting esprit of empowerment and possibility for experiencing more fun and life fulfillment through friendships.

An obvious critique might be ‘Is Friendship 2.0 YASFSM (Yet another San Francisco Social Movement)?’ San Francisco is not just the home of technology innovation, but also social innovation. Numerous social movements, if not spawned in San Francisco have been taken up, popularized, and made more acceptable in the Bay Area. A few of these include: co-working, co-housing, hackathons, biohacking, DIY science, unconferences, polyamory, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, transgenderism, queer theory, happiness, calming tech, persuasive tech, spiritual intelligence, and mindfulness. Shifting models in romantic relationships, longevity, and the mobile fungible lives of the modern individual suggest that Friendship 2.0 could just be starting as a deeply relevant social concept.

Polyamory – an Anti-Scarcity Relationship Model for the Future

The first International Academic Polyamory Conference was held in Berkeley CA February 15-17, 2013 with approximately 100 attendees. Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. It is not new or revolutionary that individuals may be involved with more than one other party; what is new is the openness, acknowledgement, and support and encouragement of the situation.

A number of academic studies were presented by researchers from around the world regarding the practice of polyamory. Polyamory is a niche, but increasingly becoming a defined field of sociology research. Theory papers and discussion drew on social movement theory, queer theory, intimacy theory, performance theory, and other aspects of philosophy and sociology. Other conference tracks discussed public education, experiential aspects, and legal and political issues. Some common themes were the notion of plurality and choice in relationship models and a superior level of communications mastery and emotional intelligence.

Plurality of Relationship Models 
There may be many relationship models aside from traditional normative monogamy. One only has to look at the fluidity and nuance in the reality of lived existence to see different kinds of relationships. There is the notion of bringing other relationship models into the light for greater legitimacy under the umbrella that would include monogamies and non-monagamies. Any individual may have an almost endless stream of potential demographic self-identifications to make in the categories of Race, Ethnicity, Religion, Gender, Sexuality, Relationship Model, and other categories. Each category has a plurality and range of possible answers and it would be considered discriminatory and inappropriately normative to privilege any specific identification.

Emotional Mastery 
There may be a belief that polyamorous individuals have a silver bullet and do not experience jealousy and other challenging emotions often occur in relationships. This is not at all the case. The polyamory community has not mastered jealousy, but it is often true that individuals are in trying on an ongoing basis to master communication with the self and others. Individuals in polyamorous relationships may have more experience, permission, and tools at their disposal for recognizing, acknowledging, and managing jealousy and other emotions that arise in human relationships - poly people may be more skilled at dealing with the situation.

Newtech: enterprise social networks

Like email, instant messaging, and wikis, the latest newtech spreading into businesses is social networks, essentially serving as a private internal version of Facebook and Twitter. Enterprise social networks are used for a number of purposes, first and foremost, status updates to work teams, but also for real-time messaging with colleagues including document transfer, broadcast announcements, and opinion capture via polls. There are several companies in the enterprise social software sector (Gartner chart). Among the most vibrant are Yammer and Chatter (affiliated with salesforce) each of which has over 100,000 corporate customers in a wide range of industries from finance to entertainment to professional sports; Jive is a third large company in the space. The standard pricing model appears to be freemium-based, free for light-users and $5/seat/month for power users. Enterprise social networks are typically externally-hosted.

Two of the key challenges that come to mind with enterprise social software are: consolidation with other internal communications platforms and data mining. As with enterprise instant messaging, archival and retrieval is important, both at the personal level (for productivity) and organization level (for information systems backup and compliance). There need to be effective ways to consolidate and mine multi-platform internal communications. Formalizing the explosion of casual interaction as it naturally occurs could be abstracted into value-added tools such as a codification of internal knowledge and expertise in the internal wiki for training purposes. It might also be possible to integrate communication flows unobtrusively and automatically into prediction markets or other sentiment analysis algorithms to capture opinion about key upcoming events like product launches and quarterly sales results.

Information broadcast with group messaging

Group messaging services allow groups to communicate in real time, through mobile apps or on the web. Multiple parties can interact, receive updates simultaneously, and possibly see the location of others and transmit their own.

Some of the big names in the space are beluga (acquired by Facebook in Nov 2010), convore, textPlus / GOGII ($15 million financing raised in February 2011), and groupme.

Group messaging is like many examples of NewTech - it was initially created to solve a problem, but through use, novel functionality becomes more obvious and new classes of applications are developed. In fact, it is starting to look like group messaging is not about communication, but rather multi-channel information broadcast.

One new class of functionality that is enabled is large-scale operations. Going beyond work groups and activity coordinating with friends, there is no reason that groups could not be arbitrarily large. An obvious recent use case is crisis management. Group messaging could be used for crisis alerts (for example, to issue the 80-second advance warning in the Japanese earthquake), and search and rescue. Another large-scale application is voting, or any kind of opinion-measurement. Presumably, group messaging could be a better version of the current real-time pulse of the web, Twitter. Twitter is operating at scale, recently reporting 36 million tweets during the 2011 Oscars, and more during the Grammys and Superbowl, but could benefit from the additional aggregation, stratification, and interaction functionality of group messaging.

Questions uplevel the web

A new internet trend has popped up – asking questions to friends and strangers. Questions are a light-weight means of bringing structure and context to social interaction.

Many people start off with a low level of engagement (e.g.; what is the best pizza place in your neighborhood?). Things can start scaling up (e.g.; how much does it cost for a family to live in London on average?) and become quite detailed (e.g.; can a publisher see the average CPC or eCPM of a particular ad or advertiser on AdSense?). More importantly, more complex thoughts, opinion, philosophy, and value systems are being elicited (e.g.; what is a good real-world example of the "prisoner's dilemma" in recent history?).

The question-asking trend began with Hunch asking users questions to draw a taste profile map for users. The current generation of the concept features sites like Quora and formspring where users ask each other questions. Users have profiles and friending/following capability, with their questions and answer activity appearing in a status feed. It is like a friend network with topic precision.

Metrics would be interesting, such as the level of semantic complexity of questions, the number of repeated questions (an indicator of what is on the collective mind), and the ratio of asked to answered questions.

Question networks could be the real start of the semantic web, the natural automated approach (akin to Google’s automated machine learning) for creating the next higher level of information density.